How do we know food was free? It never explicably said one way or the other. Which was intentional.
Just because you dont insert a dollar into a vending machine to get your Saurian Brandy doesn’t mean the pay doesn’t come out of your weekly Starfleet allotment.

It’s just that credits are only necessary in any way for niceties. Things like one-of-a-kinds and works of art and real antiques, as well as stuff like power (which is extremely cheap by then after the discovery of dilithium reactions and so on).

Money is largely unnecessary for food and other normal day-to-day stuff because of replicators. It’s unnecessary for entertainment for anyone with a personal holodeck, and cheap for anyone with access to a non-personal one.

Think of stuff like food the way, to be quite frank, the way we think of music recordings nowadays.

If replicators were really invented, there’d be all sorts of organisations trying to ban them because hunger is profitable (well, it IS!) — if they were actually produced anyway, there’d be all sorts of chaos, and eventually Safeway would go out of business the same way Tower Records is doing right now.

Credits didn’t make anything iffy. They just serve a different purpose than our money does and are less important. In the federation, a person can live comfortably being broke his whole life… but you need credits to buy a tribble.

http://www.skyhawk.org/2e/flight_ops.htm

http://science.howstuffworks.com/aircraft-carrier.htm

This article from the same series features a photo of small arms practice on my dad’s old ship, the Indy:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/aircraft-carrier2.htm

Here’s another link with the various MOSs for the airedales:
http://www.daveswarbirds.com/navalwar/deckcrew.htm

Fascinating!

http://www.gallagher.com/ejection_seat/photos_uss_lincoln.htm

You might search under “airdales” for more information on the deck crew. It’s amazing how 5,000 men come together in a floating city. I can’t even imagine the pressure those kids face. I heard somewhere the averge age of a carrier crew is 19 years! Maybe Josh could enlist :-)

Josh, Josh, Josh… you get waaaay too excited about things that do’t really matter. But tell me, please: In your mind, Just what is navy life like? As a one-time Navy brat, I’d be very interested to learn what you think.

Trek didn’t get the sympathy of cinema audiences until it was ‘militarised.’ Trek had to be adapted peoperly for the cinema and Meyer ran with the ‘Hornblower in Space’ take that Roddenberry had conicidentally come up with for Kirk in the 60s

‘Wagon Train to the Stars’ was the ‘The Cage’ concept and The Cage was iffy, to say the least, not to mention looking like it came out of the 1950s!

I don’t think Treks 2-6 were ***that*** militaristic, anyway – they were simply more believeable in the context of a modern-day film franchise. Indeed, I found TMP far more cold, disciplined and militaristic than Meyer’s version – TMP’s vision is very reminiscent of how I imagine a Soviet Federation would have been run! I still wish Meyer and Bennet had been the guys who ran TNG, though, so what do I know?!! ;)

an olde timey fan, very interesting about the aircraft carrier colour coding. You know any websites that have picture material of that? Would be interested to see what they looked like!

That said, I’m speaking in big screen visual terms rather than reality. They’ll have to make adaptations for the present day cinema, without question! I’m intrigued to see how they go about it!

The “context of my assertions” happens to be direct qoutes pertaining to the subject at hand, of which I have no remote desire or interest to copy and paste, if they matter enough you are freely invited to go look them up.
Furthermore, you speak of audacity, then presume to attempt to speak on behalf of Roddenberry and his mindset. This fallacy in logic is not indicative of age, nor inexperience, but rather ignorance, whether deliberate or calculated the end result is the same- Assigning your own perception to a fictitious work of art and blatantly second guessing the motives and creative intentions of the artist while propogating said perception in the name of authority. It’s assinine.

If you are going to use qoutes it helps if you use them properly.
Actually Roddenberry said “It is wagon train to the stars”, and some of Captain Kirk’s personal attributes were INSPIRED by Horatio Hornblower. Yet also Alexander the Great, and John F. Kennedy.
Roddenberry was vehemently opposed to the militarization of his creation by subsequent producers.- primarily Nicholas Myer.
You should try watching some of the DVD commentaries of the films, it assists greatly in having an informed opinion.

You were speaking of knowing one’s limits?
To thine own self be true.

naib, I agree.