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Federation of Hold My Beer [Now with Narration!]
(startrek.website)
Too long, don't wanna read? I got bored. Feel free to listen instead.
Survival Bias
What all those comments and discussions gloss over is that the majority of all Star Trek adventures are probably only survivor stories.
No one would ever talk about the starship that went into Klingon territory to attempt some weird science experiment, tried to eject a warp core as a last Hail Mary save but instead met with three Klingon war ships and got blasted into oblivion never to be heard from again.
For every one amazing adventurous Star Trek story, there are probably 20 of star ship captains, entire ships or whole crews just either vapourized, blasted, frozen in space, exploded, imploded, teleported, phased, recombined, trapped in an alternate universe or just plain disappeared without explanation.
Alien species are probably in awe of us not because of how lucky we are but rather how persistent we are in the face of how unlucky we are. They would probably see us as gluttons for punishment.
They absolutely talk about the ships that just got totally owned by whatever science mystery they were working on. Like 30% of the Next Generation is: The crew of the Enterprise stumbles across an empty Star ship, or an abandoned outpost, and have to figure out what happened (and stop it from happening to them!)
We also gotta remember, Star Trek is almost always focuses on the big ships. Enterprise, Voyager, Cerritos, they are all important, but I highly doubt the federation needs to deal with a major galactic event every other Tuesday. I doubt the USS Luna had as much adventure as the TItan. Most are standard surveying ships, like a Steamrunner with a crew of 24.
If they did, the Federation does a shockingly good job.
Isn't the entire concept behind Lower Decks is that the Cerritos isn't a big, important ship? The California class only has 13 decks, which is the third smallest ship in the entire series--the only ships smaller than the Cerritos were the Defiant (which was an "escort ship" not intended for long missions) and the NX-01 Enterprise. It's also slower than everything else in the 24th century--while most other ships can handle warp 9 without problems, the Cerritos flies itself apart if it goes above warp 8 for too long. It's not all that strong either, practically every time it gets in a fight it gets its ass kicked.
It's becoming the "Enterprise of the California class" and becoming slightly more important each season.