What do you do with a fleet that's too small?

[Patrick Degan]

Because the agrarian siciety is whats considered "paradise" in the Federation. There were at least half a dozen TOS episodes that stated exactly that--that farming the land was "the good life". Another brain bug in the series.

The only episodes I recall coming even close to that sentiment were "This Side Of Paradise" and "The Way To Eden", and both featured cult-like groups spewing that line and both were found severely wanting. Capt. Kirk sets out to destroy the one in order to get back his crew, and the other group nearly came to a bad end when "paradise" turned out to be anything but. If anything, TOS preached the gospel of Progress as the model of the superior way of life, and Kirk smashes two other stagnant/primitive societies to put them on "the proper human track".

[Trogdor]

I find it interesting that no one in Star Trek ever seems to be busy constructing heavy industry on a colony world. As others have said, this may be some sort of brainbug first laid in TOS.

Here's an idea for an in universe explaination: perhaps all the industry is out in space. How often in TNG did we hear someone (usually Dr. Crusher) ranting about how radiation/greenhouse gases/whatever fucked up Earth in the 21st century? Hell, sometimes we even heard how such things fucked up an alien planet. Maybe the Feddies are too paranoid about fucking up every planet in their grasp to put heavy industry there, favoring factories on space stations.

Of course, this leaves the question of what the hell the Feds actually do with all this industrial might if they have it. Replicate all the crap that the lazy people in their communist utopia need to survive, perhaps?

[Patrick Degan]

I find it interesting that no one in Star Trek ever seems to be busy constructing heavy industry on a colony world. As others have said, this may be some sort of brainbug first laid in TOS.

No, I think that's a TNG brainbug. Finding worlds with exploitable mineral resources featured in three episodes of TOS, and three other episodes showed active mining operations in place —with "Devil In The Dark" taking place in the middle of a large-scale underground industrial facility from the charts and views from Chief Engineer Vandenberg's office.

[Junghalli]

Here's an idea for an in universe explaination: perhaps all the industry is out in space.

Or maybe, as I suggested earlier, the reason we never see any industry on Federation colonies is that they like to keep the industrial facilities away from populated areas.
Say you have a planet with a hundred thousand people and a giant, hideously unsightly and polluting open-pit mine. With Federation technology it would be easy to put the main settlement hundreds of miles away from the mine itself and have the workers commute by transporter. Same goes for factories, shipyards, or any other serious industrial effort. The main problem is that in event of an attack it would be ludicrously easy to cut the colony in two by jamming transporters-heck the colonists would probably do that anyway just by raising the theatre shields over the colony and the mine. I wonder if it might be possible to build the transporter equivalent of a telephone line? Instead of an open transport you move the person's transporter pattern through an underground wire, preferably a deeply buried heavily shielded underground wire. That way you could get around this problem, and it'd probably be a lot more reliable and safer than an open transporter anyway.
Also I remember in DS9 The Jem Hadar Quark was talking about how he would have wanted to cut down all the forests on that planet and develop it, and Sisko got pissy about ruining its ecosystem.

[Uraniun235]

I find it interesting that no one in Star Trek ever seems to be busy constructing heavy industry on a colony world. As others have said, this may be some sort of brainbug first laid in TOS.

No, I think that's a TNG brainbug. Finding worlds with exploitable mineral resources featured in three episodes of TOS, and three other episodes showed active mining operations in place —with "Devil In The Dark" taking place in the middle of a large-scale underground industrial facility from the charts and views from Chief Engineer Vandenberg's office.

It manifested in TNG, yes, but I think the seeds for it may have been planted in TOS. Recall Darth Wong's page on brain bugs: he lists the Jeffries tubes and the Klingon "Viking" mentality as bugs that probably originated from TNG writers taking something from TOS and blowing it way out of proportion. So too might the tendency towards do-nothing colonies have been taken from a writer who saw "This Side of Paradise" at some point, remembered it vaguely later on, but forgot about the part at the end where everybody wakes up and realizes "Shit, we haven't gotten anything done here; let's go get some work done."

[Darth Servo]

Because the agrarian siciety is whats considered "paradise" in the Federation. There were at least half a dozen TOS episodes that stated exactly that--that farming the land was "the good life". Another brain bug in the series.

The only episodes I recall coming even close to that sentiment were "This Side Of Paradise" and "The Way To Eden", and both featured cult-like groups spewing that line and both were found severely wanting. Capt. Kirk sets out to destroy the one in order to get back his crew, and the other group nearly came to a bad end when "paradise" turned out to be anything but. If anything, TOS preached the gospel of Progress as the model of the superior way of life, and Kirk smashes two other stagnant/primitive societies to put them on "the proper human track".

Oh, lets see. What about "Shore Leave", "Erand of Mercy", "The Apple", "The Paradise Syndrom"?

"This Side of Paradise" still had the E-nil crew envious of the lifestyle even before they were intoxicated by the plants. Kirk was still calling it paradise after they had all gone through detox. And Spock himself admits that for the first time in his life, he was happy.

[Sea Skimmer]

It would seem, then, that if you need to have starships guarding your starships, you have far fewer units with which to do things. And if that's the case, why even bother building big starships that need to be protected when you could just build smaller ships and have more units to be doing things around the Federation. Or, you assume the big ships can take care of themselves and send them on their merry way.

Your forgetting a little thing called endurance. A bigger ship will have longer range, better habitability, better onboard repair capabilities, and no doubt better sensors (if nothing else, you've got more area to space out the antennas, which should improve performance even with the exact same equipment). If the Federation has to cover a large volume of space with a small number of ships, then investing in really small ships is not a smart idea. In all likeliness they just won't be able to perform their multirole missions, and will be highly vulnerable to lone enemy raiders.

[Skylon]

Oh, lets see. What about "Shore Leave", "Erand of Mercy", "The Apple", "The Paradise Syndrom"?

In "The Apple" didn't the Enterprise destroy the machine that the natives worshiped as god and made them a paradise?

"Errand of Mercy" was a case of a race basically playing the low-tech agrarian society to hide their true identity. Kirk also tries to entice that race with UFP technology that would basically modernize them.

[Patrick Degan]

Because the agrarian siciety is whats considered "paradise" in the Federation. There were at least half a dozen TOS episodes that stated exactly that--that farming the land was "the good life". Another brain bug in the series.

The only episodes I recall coming even close to that sentiment were "This Side Of Paradise" and "The Way To Eden", and both featured cult-like groups spewing that line and both were found severely wanting. Capt. Kirk sets out to destroy the one in order to get back his crew, and the other group nearly came to a bad end when "paradise" turned out to be anything but. If anything, TOS preached the gospel of Progress as the model of the superior way of life, and Kirk smashes two other stagnant/primitive societies to put them on "the proper human track".

Oh, lets see. What about "Shore Leave", "Erand of Mercy", "The Apple", "The Paradise Syndrom"?

"Shore Leave" was the uninhabited theme-park planet and not an agrarian society. "Errand Of Mercy" featured a culture which both Spock and Kirk regarded as stagnant and offered massive Federation aid to bring them up to modern standards before the Organians took their masks off. In "The Apple", Kirk and McCoy both regarded the culture of the Vaal-worshippers as stagnant and Kirk showed no hesitation towards smashing it (particularly as his ship was under threat). Kirk's sentiments about the indian culture in "The Paradise Syndrome" sprung from his high-pressure existence and not a desire to exchange his lifestyle for theirs.

"This Side of Paradise" still had the E-nil crew envious of the lifestyle even before they were intoxicated by the plants. Kirk was still calling it paradise after they had all gone through detox. And Spock himself admits that for the first time in his life, he was happy.

You're taking things wholly out of context. At no point did the crew regard the Omicron colonists' lifestyle as ideal. The episode's coda has Kirk saying quite clearly that man wasn't meant to simply idle away in "paradise" but to march the road of progress. Whereas Spock was simply making an observation of his own experience on Omicron Ceti III; in the transporter room scene with Leila, he made it clear that he couldn't eschew his duties and responsibilities for life on sporeworld. The Omicron colony was not seen as an ideal way of life but a waste, as made very clear by Elias Sandoval's "we've done nothing" statement.