The Arrow may be a military warship, but that doesn’t mean the story of the Arrow is militaristic. In fact, my story is quite the opposite.
But to understand what I mean, we need to take a closer look at one of my inspirations, Star Trek.
Throughout the Star Trek television series, starship captains from Kirk, to Picard, to Janeway have fancied themselves as peaceful galactic explorers. They have stated time-and-again that their primary mission is one of peaceful exploration and scientific discovery. However, Starfleet ships have tons of weapons (yet few non-lethal or precision munitions outside of hand phasers), the Enterprise has a battle bridge, the crew follows a strong military hierarchy, and many episodes ended with an enemy ship being destroyed (with all hands presumably lost).
And that’s before we even include the Star Trek movies, with the latest ones racking up civilian body counts that are higher than the gritty Superman reboot.
But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if the future followed modern military trends toward surgical strikes, non-lethal warfare, and military operations that were (at least on paper…) designed to mitigate civilian casualties?
What if, as society evolved with technology, the power of that technology was tuned to align with the morality of the society? What if warfare among advanced civilizations had evolved beyond the civilian-stomping brutality of total warfare into civilian-oriented police actions? What if future starship conflicts were devastatingly surgical, with the goal of crippling the enemy while eliminating all casualties on both sides? What if I gave you a powerful military dreadnaught, captained by a tactical genius, that had a far lower body count than any of the “exploration” ships of Star Trek?
What does it say about modern sci-fi when one can easily envision a military that protects and safeguards far more lives (with far fewer casualties) than the “peaceful” explorers of popular science fiction?