A squinting survey of American Antarctic workers turns up several prominent character types and reveals some of what brings people here:
Outdoorsies like to hike and witness profound natural beauty. They want to see the truly immense and baffling wonders of Antarctica. When they get there they find out they have to work most of the time in dirty buildings or outside in the cold surrounded by dirty buildings. Nearly everything they want to do is prohibited. They have to check out with the Firehouse before they go anywhere. They stay only one season, because they can do all the things they love elsewhere. It makes more sense for them to leave than to stay.
Crazy Outdoorsies are the same as Outdoorsies, but they keep coming back. They find that glimpses of the immense and profound natural beauty of Antarctica are worth the toil and mindless drudgery, and they are often savvy enough to do what they like regardless of prohibitions. Some of these people are legendary. One guy silently borrowed a skidoo on a long weekend and climbed Mount Erebus and made it back into town by Monday with no one the wiser. Another waited until the last Winfly flight left in August and quit his job, thereby freeing himself from the control of local authorities. Though he probably lost over five thousand dollars in pay and bonus, he spent the next six weeks going wherever he liked, camping out at Castle Rock, and skiing and hiking all over before he was kicked out on the first plane at Mainbody. One worker at Pole, who may or may not fit in this category, hoarded food, got his hands on a sledge, and set out skiing to McMurdo, over 800 miles away. A team of people on skidoos went after him and brought him back.
Stamp Collectors derive their pleasure in Antarctica almost exclusively from historic associations. They want to walk where Robert Scott walked, they try to see the mountains as if Shackleton were peeking over their shoulder, and they get all worked up about IGY. Antarctica is not a work-in-progress, but a museum. They like to show slide shows and videos of the great explorers in the Coffeehouse. Nothing is valid until it is historic. Stamp Collectors, if given a ride to the moon, would run around looking for Neil Armstrong’s footprints.
Mercenaries have no interest in Antarctica itself, as a place, as an idea, or as an experience. Like migrating herds of marine mammals, they follow the warm waters of cash flow. Antarctic pay is substandard for foreign contract wages. Food and rent are covered, however, so all money goes in the bank. It’s a good deal if certain conditions are unimportant. These people, if they think about him at all, think Ernest Shackleton probably had a set of balls, but what of it? They do not attend the lectures put on by the Stamp Collectors. They are not interested in local affairs unless they interfere with the television programming or their paychecks. They are quick to roll their eyes about the way things are run in their department, but also quick to defend rules and order even if they run contrary to their interests, because they are protective of the hand that feeds them.
Mercenaries’ Foremen are like Mercenaries, but interested in titles and positions rather than paychecks. Also, they are more likely than Mercenaries to have streaks of the Stamp Collector or the Penguin Hunter.
Penguin Hunters want excitement and adventure, so they buy a lot of souvenirs at the store. They came to Antarctica to see penguins. Antarctica is rough for them. They bemoan the absence of their favorite shampoo, diet soda, and hand lotion. They send down ten boxes of stuff for their four-month stay. Their walls are full of photographs of family. They hang Christmas cards and wreaths on their door during the holidays. They buy phone cards more than one at a time, and they check email ceaselessly. They try to bring their friends down the next season, but their friends hate it and leave, and so do they eventually, unless they’re one of a married couple.
Quicksanders also appear in all the other categories. The more time you have spent on the ice, the less time you have spent elsewhere; your orbit can shift before you know it, and it seems you have nowhere to go but back to the ice. All your things are in a storage unit, or at a friend’s or a parent’s. Better to go back to the ice than deal with all that shit just now. Just one more season. Maybe another winter. Then that’s it. You’ll live in a town or a city where you don’t know who founded it or when, and where every day there are more people you’ve never seen or heard of than all the people you’ve ever known in your life. Where you’ll wait at traffic lights with all those people. Maybe just one more season. Then that’s it.
More ultra-deep lore hidden away in modern Trek, in Lower Decks S02E02 we see models of previous Titans in the USS Titan conference lounge. They include…
a Titan missile (the basis for Zefram Cochrane’s Phoenix warp testbed)
The first known concept art for what eventually became the USS Enterprise, by W. Matt Jeffries
A Loknar-class starship from the FASA RPG Sourcebooks
More on the Loknar-class USS Titan NCC-2752, from the FASA Federation Ship Recognition Manual, versions one and two:
This is the second time modern Trek has mined FASA for details, the first being the co-ordinates for Talos IV in Discovery season two which were taken directly from the FASA sourcebook The Federation.
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