I love Trek and played Trek MUs, and I would again.
The first one I tried was not playable for me. It had multiple planets and ships and space code. It seemed to be the sort of deal where you’d do a group app as bridge crew of your ship and go around exploring and having ship vs ship battles.
The second one was Anomaly TrekMUX, which was pretty great. It didn’t have a pervasive bridge-crew/redshirt problem like people are predicting. At least, not in the sense of higher-ranking officers doing everything. At one point certain GMs were awfully keen on “this looks like a job for my alt!” plots, but that was Spider, and it did suffer Spidered-game problems of that era of MUdom. Really its major problem was that the really important plot was pre-written to end with the game runner’s PC saving the universe as part of a secret creepy fascist organisation of time-travelling murder hobos, which is kinda lousy game for those who ICly didn’t groove on time-travelling fascist murder hobos, and having them the heroes a betrayal of Star Trek-ness. (And not in a cool, fun, Lower Decks kinda way.)
There was a spin-off one, Gamma One, which was also a bit of alright, especially considering that it too was Spidered.
Those games had space-station settings and meant to be like Deep Space Nine. DS9 didn’t have redshirts and was about the biggest ensemble cast on, outside of afternoon soaps. It’s a pretty good model of alternating and overlapping running plots for different playgroups.
I certainly didn’t get to do all The Things when I had a department head PC. But I did also acted as if it was my role as a department head to assign The Things to my IC subordinates.
There were also a couple of Trek MUs around that time that were each set on a single large ship, Enterprise-D like. This cut out the possibility of civilian characters, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at all.