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ost_uid0="Nic Corelli"]And someone DID mention that only one person in a million could be a starship captain...[/quote
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I believe that that someone was Stone, way back in "Court Martial" in TOS. "Look, Jim, I know it's a stressful job being captain. Only one man in a million can do what you do every day. I've been there, I know that sometimes, stress gets to be too much, mistakes are made," etc., etc. if I'm not mistaken.
By Picard's time, if you count all the equivalents of tugboats and captain's yachts and such that they had, I'm sure the total would be well over a thousand. You have to have explorers (and in different varieties), each planet will want some defenders (except Earth's are never there somehow :suspicious:
), there will be vessels for important people when either the Enterprise isn't around or the important people aren't annoying enough to warrant a story, there are ships especially meant for fighting the Borg and prob'ly others for fighting particular other species, there will be cargo-type ships and ships specially designed to convoy them, there may even be ships designed specifically for high speed in case subspace is out of the question, and others I'm too tired to think of right now. All of these, spread out throughout the Federation, keeping eyes on dozens of different species and planets and negotiations and other stuff. That adds up to a LOT of ships.[/color
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