Jawawithagun wrote:Basically it's probably the idea that you have the ships on their exploration missions for years at a time without returning to their home port. (Just remember how slow they are)
And as Starfleet is semi-"civilian" on paper and to provide their employees with a happy family life they put their spouses on the ship too.
Imagine how messy a divorce onboard the Enterprise could get...
But what about the TOS era, where you didn't have families aboard the front-line ships? Starfleet's mandate back then was also to explore the unknown portions of the galaxy -- which was a lot larger in Kirk's era. In fact, we even see Kirk perform a marriage on board the ship... but unlike Keiko and O'Brien's marriage, it was between 2 crewmembers, not a civilian to a Starfleet crewmember.
So, what was different about the TNG era that was different then the TOS era?
1. Klingons were allies.
Major change right there. The Klingons had the most appearances of any regular bad guys TOS. In fact, the Feds and Klingons nearly go to war over the planet Organia... and even after the Organians enforce a peace treaty on the Klingons and Federation, the situation is fairly similar to the 50's and 60's Cold War between the Soviet Union and NATO.
Fast forward to TNG, though, and the Klingons have now become allied with the Federation. Taking away your #1 rival of long standing can make things a little safer; making your former arch-enemy your close friend makes the danger level drop drastically.
2. Romulans were unseen.
Not quite as powerful or as spotlighted as the Klingons, the Romulans were just as dangerous to the Feds, if not more so. The last major war Earth had fought was against the Romulans, which left them as the boogeyman to scare children with as well as a strategic threat for the Admiralty to worry about. Throw in their cloaking device technology, their shared racial heritage with Vulcans, and their apparant capacity to be even more devious and calculating in combat than Klingons, and they were a major worry for the Federation and Starfleet.
Fast forward to TNG again. The Romulans haven't been seen or heard from for a few decades -- IIRC, not since they attacked the Klingon colony on Khitomer. Apparantly, either the civilians controlling Starfleet or the Admiralty itself had decided that the Romulans weren't that big of a threat anymore, particularly with the Klingons on our side. Of course, the Romulans chose to announce to Picard and Co. that "they're baaaaack", thus giving Starfleet another headache to worry about.
3. Complacency.
In TOS, the galaxy was a very scary place. Very little of it was actually known or charted, let alone explored very well. Heck, how many times do we find Kirk and Co. stopping by a previously charted world, only to find some nasty surprise waiting there for them? Not to mention all the worlds that had never been visited before, or the alien races never before encountered. In fact, despite the few aliens in the Federation that we see, you get the impression from TOS that "First Contact" situations and meeting new alien species is still something that's uncommon in Starfleet's experience.
In TNG, though, that's no longer true. Sure, they meet a lot of new alien species. But Picard and Co. are very blase about it: "Oh, look, we found another alien species we haven't met before. Guess we'd better ask them to join the Federation, huh?" Perhaps because so many species have joined the Federation, meeting new species has lost its luster, and become just another part of the daily routine of being in Starfleet. More importantly, it seems like they expect these new species to fall into one of 3 categories:
a) friendly, and want to join the Federation
b) have no interest in joining the Federation
c) aren't advanced enough to qualify for joining the Federation
Apparantly, they've forgotten the 4th category:
d) unfriendly, and will either attack the Federation or tell them to get lost and not come back ever.
The whole point of the unknown is that you don't know what to expect. So it doesn't matter if the Alpha Quadrant is mostly explored already; that doesn't mean the rest of the Quadrant, or that the other 3 quadrants, are necessarily going to be safe to explore. It doesn't mean that the species living in the unknown areas will be just as friendly as those races that have been in the Federation for years. Heck, you can't count on the people in the next city over being as nice as the city you live in, let alone the people on the next planet you discover.
4. Lack of common sense.
TOS didn't really show us too many missions where they investigated strange spacial or scientific phenomena. They were normally too busy finding new species or fighting their enemies.
In TNG, though, we see them doing a lot of scientific missions: studying stellar phenomena, investigating gas clouds and star clusters, etc. Sometimes they even bump into these phenomena accidentally, like that cosmic superstring.
Apparantly, though, the Admiralty and the Federation thinks that engaging in scientific exploration and study of stellar phenomena is like performing high school and college chemistry experiments -- i.e. perfectly safe, bring the family along. Nothing could be further from the truth. The scientific studies we see the E-D and other ships perform are more akin to vulcanologists exploring active volcanoes, or deep sea explorers diving down in DSV's. Sure, precautions are taken to ensure that the explorers and scientists are as safe as humanly possible... but they can't guarantee they'll be 100% safe. Things can go wrong, equipment can break down, unforeseen events can occur, mistakes can be made, injuries can occur, a whole host of situations can happen that will endanger the lives of those highly trained individuals. Imagine what it would be like, though, if those explorers and scientists had to worry about spouses and children not merely being at the base camp or on board the ship, but actually walking the volcano rim or being in that DSV 3 miles underwater. Should something go wrong, those civilians won't know what to do. At best, they'll have to be shepherded and watched over, thus risking everyone's lives. At worst, the civvies will panic and create a bunch of chaos, not only requiring extra work on the explorers' parts but also interfering with their efforts to resolve the situation.
In summation, Starfleet has to listen to its civilian government -- which almost certainly will not only control what regulations are to be used, but also who the bigwigs in the Admiralty will be. And apparantly, by the time TNG's first episode aired, the Federation government has forgotten that, despite the part of our galaxy they've explored, exploration of the unknown is still a dangerous occupation, whether it's traveling to never-before-visited worlds or investigating that strange quasar that's been in the neighborhood for millenia. That, and apparantly the average Federation citizen has become more selfish, because they apparantly can't be separated from their Starfleet spouse for a few months or even a year, even though most had to probably go up to 5 years before even seeing them.