My love of Star Trek: Voyager should be well-known if you're a fan of our site. Every 11 PM ET I turn on Heroes and Icons to watch Voyager. I usually hang around for Enterprise as well. I rewatch my favorite episodes almost yearly either on Paramount+ or by any means necessary. I adore this show. I defend this show. I just can't always give the show the same types of praise that others give it.
Sometimes, we gotta be more critical. Voyager, like all Star Trek, is great, but it has its flaws. Some episodes are all-time worst material, while other episodes fail to live up to the lofty bar that the franchise demands of it. Yet, sometimes, being critical just means pointing out the obvious.
In a recent write-up from another website, there was a bold claim made. It was that Voyager was the first show to have a "significant" portion of its vessells' crew not Star Trek. This is in regard to the fact that at least a third of the crew ended up being former Maquis members. This includes the first officer, Chakotay, the head of engineering B'Elanna Torres, among others.
It was a cool concept, but in the end, not a completely true statement. After all, each of the prior two series had large members of their crew not be members of Starfleet.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the USS Enterprise-D, the vessel is said to have anywhere from 1,000 to 6,000 Starfleet members at any time. However, many agree the usual contingent of Starfleet representatives is around 1,000. Though one YouTuber, EC Henry theorizes that the ship roughly contains just over 600 crew members, with the rest being made up of civilians and crew member's families. While it'd be fair to say that just living on the ship doesn't make you a crew member, the Enterprise had bartenders, barbers, and even school teachers. They all contribute to the ship. Aren't they, at least unofficially, members of the crew?
Let's say you reject the notion that private citizens count on the overall health and growth of a Federation ship. What about a non-federation vessel? Remember, Voyager, is being credited with having the most non-Federation crew members in the series' history (up to that point). Well, that's still not true because look at Deep Space Nine. The show not only had members of the Bajoran military serving on staff, but they also relied heavily on locals. Odo was the head of security, normally a Federation role for any show. Quark worked at the bar, while his brother Rom became an engineer.
Not a Federation engineer, either. Just a DS9-trained engineer. He worked directly under Miles O'Brien, the chief engineer of the station, but Rom was not a Federation officer. Considering how necessary those members of the staff were to the health and safety of the station, Deep Space Nine clearly has a rightful claim to this title, assuming we discount The Next Generation.
Even more so, Voyager really can't make that claim anyway. Very early into the series, as early as the 16th episode of, the ranking members of the Voyager crew put the Maquis through Starfleet training. While they may not have gone through an approval process, nor were they trained formally in San Francisco at the Starfleet Academy, they were still given more training and more education to serve aboard the Voyager than any civilian on The Enterprise-D or any of the members of the non-Federation crew aboard Deep Space Nine.