Enlistment?

[Emberchyld]

Well... to add to the mess... if we all think that there are a lot of people who would be angry about T'Pol being XO, imagine the number of people in Starfleet who must have been furious about Archer, son of Henry Archer, becoming captain of Enterprise.

*clears throat* Nepotism *ahem* *cough*

Would explain a LOT about him and his actions.

(and on logic... I stopped trying to expect that out of Trek the first time I saw Picard, a supposed Frenchman, speak English to a French holodeck character in a British accent... and then have the holofrenchie respond in heavily french-accented English. Yeeeah.)

[pookha]

we dont know the name of the ship but archer was a captain with erica as his first officer.
he also was on a vulcan ship for a while.

[CX]

Where do you get that from?

Anywho...

[Rigil Kent]

As to the Erika thing, I believe that's inaccurate. All Archer said in Home was that he was her superior officer, not that he was a captain and she was his XO.

The serving on a Vulcan ship comes from Breaking the Ice
ARCHER: A few years back I was a guest aboard a Maymora class ship, the Yarahla. Captain Tok. Do you know him?
VANIK: Not personally.
ARCHER: Oh. We made a run to a dark matter nebula. I helped set up the graviton telescope. Most fun I've ever had on a space walk. Those Vulcan EV suits are something else, like you're flying around inside your own little starship.

[Elessar]

Yeah, I got the feeling they were on some kind of ground assignment.

Although, now that I think about it... See I was going to say that it would be kind of dramatically anti-climatic if Archer had been a starship captain before... Like, assuming the NX was his first assignment added more to his whole enthusiasm for doing it. Then I realized it would make a LOT more sense from Starfleet's perspective to have drawn a CO for the new warp 5 ship from a pool of already-experienced Captains of other starships... those little Iceland class things. First Flight pretty much cements that they took a class of their best-and-brightest (or were supposed to be anyway, cut me some slack on your opinions of Archer and how he reflects on just how best and bright that class was ) of Commanders and trained them specifically for the NX program and waited to see who would come out on top.

Any opinions on which would have been a better way of finding "the best" Captain for the job? And forget that Archer came out of it -- Archer came out of it because that's who was made the captain a year before First Flight came about -- but divorced of that, which would have been a better way to find a good captain... Best-and-brightest young new comers, or seasoned and experienced veteran captain of a smaller ship?

[JadziaKathryn]

It depends on what the smaller ships were doing. If all they did was patrol around the Sol system, go to Vulcan and back, and maybe check on the occasional colony, I guess those captains wouldn't neccesarily be better for the job. But if they were out there exploring too, then the veterans would be a better pick.

[Elessar]

Well, the "little" starship captains may've faced those hard decisions that are going to be increasingly frequent for an NX vessel's captain though... Say for example that you encounter a cargo ship losing warp containment, communication is down and sensors can't penetrate the ambient radiation due to the core leak so you have no idea how much of the crew may be alive.... Core breach is imminent and if you send a shuttle pod for a rescue mission, you put your own people at risk... Do you send the rescue mission or back off because it's likely that the cargo ship's crew are all dead? Something like that isn't in a Starfleet leadership manual, it's just about judgement, and that's one of many similar situations where a seasoned captain, even one of a ship that's only done runs around Sol and/or Vulcan and/or Alpha Centauri, would still be likely to have encountered at least once or twice. Even if he hasn't, the idea of having the well being of an entire starship crew compliment as your responsibility is a heavy burden, even when nothing's going wrong, and in the modern military, officers still crack under the pressure even when they're trained not to. So, I'm just saying I think there'd be some value to knowing for sure that whoever you put in that NX chair has at least sat in "a chair" before.

[JadziaKathryn]

Hmm, good point.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Another starship commander is always better than a test pilot. A starship commander, even if only of a smaller patrol ship, has command experience in a way a test pilot cannot have.

[Navigator]

Another starship commander is always better than a test pilot. A starship commander, even if only of a smaller patrol ship, has command experience in a way a test pilot cannot have.

You're dead on. This should have been at least a second command tour. He would have both been an XO and commanded a smaller ship. There is too much money involved to waste it in having him screw this up through inexperience.

[Emberchyld]

And even if he was a stellar commander and XO with yeeeears under his belt, there must have been a lot of REALLY peeved people in Starfleet who believed that he only got it (and everything else) 'cause of his daddy.

Not like Archer tried to keep it secret or anything.

[Elessar]

Well I got the feeling that the "design" of how they were going to pick a Commander was like I mentioned a few posts ago, put together a program of your best hot-shot Commanders bucking for a command of their own, put them through a rigorous program while testing the NX engine, etc. It doesn't make a lotta sense, but from the way that they were talking about the Archer/Robinson competition for Command, I thought it was clear this was the way it was setup and everybody knew it: Whoever came out on top of the NX evaluation program would end up commanding the NX-01.

People may've still said that Archer only got it because of who is dad was, but I think we were at least meant to think that his dad died young enough that he earned his own keep and that the NX-program was designed to pick from the best-and-brightest.

Someone could still contend that he only got his spot on the NX team, and only got his SHOT to begin with, because of his father, but we never saw that period of his life.

I've always thought that the character of Archer (and this has nothing to do with Scott Bakula) should have been a little rougher, edgier, among the leadership faults that everyone attributes the character -- and his "smileyness" is of course just a product of Star Trek's utopian ideal... but it would seem to me (had I been in the writing room) from the beginning that we were seeing an era BEFORE they were all utopian, or at least while they were BECOMING utopian.

I always thought Archer should've been played by Kiefer Sutherland, and for some reason that would have just made me think more of his "cowboy diplomacy"

I mean if KIRK was a "space cowboy" because space travel was still early and starship captains had complete autonomy over decision making and exploration was still rather dangerous and sometimes cut-throat... sure as hell should have been that way 150 years earlier too.

[Linda]

Speaking of diplomacy, does the government (ANY current earth government) even have a 'first contact protocal' now? Star Trek did by TNG, but I don't remember a hard and fast established policy in TOS. Was there one? Captains of spacecraft must have SOME orders or directive on that - even the astronauts from our first flights, right? But maybe not, as our first astronauts did not even carry national passports like they do now.

[CX]

The US government has one, but they don't talk about it at all beyond acknowledging its existance.

[Linda]

Well, if they have one and have not made it public, I would be concerned about its content.