Jenny Kaye asked:

Isn't social rank in the Federation (Alpha, Beta etc.) exam-determined?

I don't think canon gives a very clear explanation of this, but I think exam-determination is common fanon. Personally I think that rank is primarily hereditary, with limited opportunities for promotion through exams (and much greater potential for demotion!)

And the crew of the London sounded dead posh.

Actually there's a lot of Received Pronunciation going on-- Travis II is about the only person who sounds really downmarket. Soolin sounds like they had a branch of Cheltenham Ladies College on GP.

-(Y)

Good day all,

On Tue, 24 Apr 2001 19:49:48 -0000, Jenny wrote:

Jacqui wrote:

...

Harriet Monkhouse hflysator@jarriere.demon.co.uk wrote:

...

Jacqui wrote:

...

When Vila says he bought his 'grade four ignorant' status (and

elsewhere

<snip>

Isn't social rank in the Federation (Alpha, Beta etc.) exam-determined? So why would his accent be a barrier to being a space captain? And the crew of the London sounded dead posh.

<he is more likely to end up being captain of the London (and who would want to have a load of bolshy revolting (probably in both senses) prisoners to look after - it would be a perfectly sensible decision to avoid going down that path.>

Vila says that all the space captains got killed in the war. So what would a civilian ship like the London be doing attacking Alien battle fleets? In that scene Vila was obviously comparing himself to Tarrant.

And IMO he was lying anyway, why would he have to buy a grade when all he'd have to do is fail the exams? Much more cost effective.

Since we don't actually know how the grading testing was done, it is possible that the testing science had advanced so much that either the testing process itself was so reliable as to be accurate despite the willingness or otherwise of the subject, or that trying to deliberately fail the test was also taken into account.

It sometimes seems to me that many people on this list think that the Federation is the be all and end all of evil, corrupt governments, down to the lowliest trooper and civil worker as greedy and blood thirsty, though we do see many sympathetic Federation characters, and even military officers. I have speculated on the Lyst in past that for the Federation to survive on its own (corrupt and evil though major elements of it are), without collapsing in complete anarchy, a major portion, and possibly the majority of the whole Federation system has to be run under some sort of "Rule of Law". So large portions of the Federation would operate under a kind of default option system of genuine standards and responsibilities, even if most of the time, the sufficiently rich, and the sufficiently powerful, could ignore them if they wanted to, though even that had limits.

Hence the young Vila, faced with the choice of testing into a group from which the military automatically took all the candidates for training as Space Captains, or failing the exam deliberately ( and who knows what the punishment for that would have been, sold as a slave to an outer world maybe ), did the only thing he could do, bribed the tester to change his result independant of the testing process so that he could remain safe on Earth.

The other point about Vila not wanting to be a Space Captain, is that the Federation training for Space Captains would likely as not have been fatal to anyone like Vila with an enhanced perception of the value of his own skin and no military useful redeeming features or friends in high places. Either the trainers would arrange a fatal "accident" as an incentive to the other recruits, or the other recruits would themselves tear him to pieces for stuffing up a unit excercise one too many times.

Young Vila would have wanted to avoid a near fatal career path any way he coud, and bribery was probably the only option.

Catch you later,

Walter Minne