RTR Blog: Andrew's Away Mission to Starfleet Academy

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    Whenever I travel, I love to visit filming locations, studio tours and places that are seen in movies! Usually I pick a place based on interest and then if something was filmed there it's an added bonus to go and check out the filming locations! Back in the spring of 2016, I read that the Starfleet Academy Experience was coming to the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, Ontario. Seeing as it was only a five hour drive, I picked a weekend, loaded my family up in a van and headed for the nations capital! I didn't really know what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that not only was it a Star Trek "training" program, but also included tonnes of props from the shows and movies, and concluded by taking the Kobayashi Maru test on the bridge of the Enterprise -D! At the academy you were put through a variety of training exercises and your progress documented on a watch like device. At the end of your training, they would tell you if you were best suited for Command, Medical, Tactical, Communication, Science, Navigation or Engineering. Despite being way back in 2016, I took lots of pictures and remember all of the stations well enough, to describe them for you here:

A mock up of TOS Enterprise at the entrance!

   In the first training section, you had to treat a recently injured Lt. Commander Worf using a tricorder as well as the sick bay biobed. Essentially you could use the tethered tricorder to scan various sections of the dummy Worf body and the biobed computer would tell you the extents of his injuries. If memory serves, he had several broken bones and a bad burn on the torso from a phaser blast. After checking over the body, you then went to the sickbay computer and decided on a diagnosis; I thought that it was relatively straight forward and was doing my best to save Worf, but at the end of the training, I only scored a 40 in the medical evaluation area!

In addition to the medical training area, they had Gates McFadden's costume from the Next Generation as well as tricorders from all of the series and lots of information comparing all of the Dr's that we know and love from all of the Star Trek shows and movies!

    The next station, was the Tactical Training Simulator! It wasn't much more than a tethered phaser rail shooter that had a very similar visual look as  the MACO training simulator in the Enterprise episode "Harbinger", just on a two dimensional screen. 

In my memory, I remember being really good at this, it started with very simple targets that any body (including children) could get, and steadily got more difficult in increasingly more challenging rounds (I think there were five). I played a lot of duck hunt and rail shooters as a kid, so I scored pretty well in this section, scoring a 85% in shooting accuracy.

Throughout the training programs they had trivia from the show along with screen used costumes and props which were amazing to see up close! Knowing Star Trek history was an important part of the Academy experience, and you were given lots of opportunities to choose how you would react to different scenarios! Again each section had questions that related to that specific field and small games/challenges that you could try in addition to the show trivia. I scored really well on the Communications area (90%), where you had to translate Klingon and decode an incoming message that had been scrambled due to an ion storm or some other technobabbly reason.

For the navigational component, you sat at a com station and chose a path for your ship to take as different readings came across your screen. Stuff like asteroids and space debris was really easy to avoid, but as you got further and further into the simulation, things like mines and phaser fire made it very difficult to avoid. I still did fairly well (85%), again because of playing lots of video games!

Considering I have a Bachelor of Science, I didn't do nearly as well in the science section (75%) as I hoped, which was mostly just trivia questions from the show as well as some real world science trivia. Again they did a really good job of having lots of props, costumes and information from the shows.

Finally, the final test was just like in Wrath of Kahn, the Kobayashi Maru no win scenario test on the bridge of the USS Enterprise-D! I obviously knew what the test was going to entail, and made a plan to save as many people as possible, hoping to capitalize on the humanitarian points or something. It had the same set up as you saw in STII, your ship gets a hail from the Kobayashi Maru, which is a drift just inside the Klingon boarder. If left alone, the warp core will explode, killing everyone on board; if you attempt to rescue them, the Klingons may see it as interference in their space and attack! I chose to enter Klingon space and immediately start transporting survivors over to my ship. Unfortunately in order to transport people from the damaged ship, I needed to lower my shields. Eventually the Klingons arrived, started firing and forced me to raise my shields. It is a frustrating test to take, because the Klingons are more powerful, faster, and they out number you which makes everything you try seem so fruitless; it really makes you feel like you can't win! As is the expected, the Klingons blew up my ship as well as the Kobayashi Maru, for what I guess you could argue was the worst possible scenario. In hind sight I wish I had abandoned the damaged ship in lieu of saving the crew members that were under my command. Ironically enough, when I finally went before the admiral (it was a quasi hologram), to get the final verdict he suggested the Starfeet Command Program. Just call me Ensign Tilly!

For more great Star Trek content, have a listen to RTR's most recent review of the TOS episode "Miri" at https://bit.ly/2v0z3SR

Thanks for listening!!