If it'd been a Klingon ship tour, it would have totally made sense. Those things are about as OSHA-compliant as the Death Star. But on a Starfleet vessel, it has to be ambassadorial shenanigans.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

Polychrome

Okay, then. I was wondering if I was just perceiving pop culture references that weren't there in randomly-generated names, but this reassures me.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

There's only so much randomness to the duty officer names. I've had several copies of Brian Sisko Anderson (allowing for variant spellings of the first and last name) on my various Starfleet captains (and my Fed-aligned Romulan, I believe) over time. I'm pretty sure there's both franchise mythology and pop-culture shout-outs even in the common-quality duty officers (to say nothing of, say, the entire dramatis personae of Hamlet).

Hell, my Photonic MACO bridge officer got assimilated once. I'm still not sure how that happened.

>There was also a time when the game recommended, on account of them
>both being Resilient, that I send two of my Horta miners to a martial
>arts tournament.

I'm going to be enjoying that mental image for a while.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Of course, then there are the times the random name generator comes up with names that are, shall we say, inappropriate in English.

And finally, there are some of the temporal duty officers like Martha Jones Smith, who happens to be a Doctor. Or Verne Brown. One could say "Great Scott." All of them are in jokes like that.

Pretty boring match, actually. The judges called it after 47 ties. (They both kept choosing "rock".)

"Well, the deflector dish failed to sweep the area properly, and the standard fixes failed, so we went to EVA to check for foreign objects. When we dislodged the metoroid that was interfering with proper operation, it resumed scanning..."

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

snrk. Mental image: Swede in her office (she doesn't call it a "ready room" any more than she calls a shore party an "away team" - too much goddam management-speak in Starfleet these days), puzzling over the report and muttering to herself. "'Cause of accident: fod'? What the f... - Andersson to sickbay. Konnit, is Specialist T'Pral conscious?"

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.