In a message dated 7/14/01 10:14:49 PM Eastern Daylight Time, dshilling@worldnet.att.net writes:

<< If, for instance, there were only a dozen habitable planets, it would be less surprising that they all have quarries and only one building (an underground bunker) per planet, and it would be possible to follow the political currents of their relationship with the Federation.

If the Liberator were an astonishingly advanced--but tiny--ship (as if Scorpio weren't an interstellar Yugo, for example) then it would make perfect sense that Blake couldn't accommodate a larger crew and had to be critically understaffed all the time. >>

Ah, so you're simply stating the truism that the nature of media Sci-Fi universes are directly related to the budget allotted to the programme. Yes, that's always been the case (which you the viewer are presumably supposed to ignore or not question). TREK and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and any number of other SF standards had the same issue; almost every planet they encountered in that wide, wide universe had bipedal aliens with an astonishing resemblence to humans. I understand that in the case of Trek, Roddenberry insisted on it for some reason. Even now, STARGATE SG-1, with its amazing writing and opportinuty to go virtually anywhere in the universe, still finds transplanted colonies of homo sapiens on almost every destination they explore.

I often think that one reason why STAR WARS was so explosively popular when it came out was that it had the budget and the moxie to show a universe populated by many sentient, non-human alien species of all sorts.

Leah