My Mother and a couple of my sisters spent many years playing a Star Trek PBEM game (It was called the FGN I think) and I’m trying to remember what their experience was.
As far as I can remember, there really were only (or mainly) officers. Heads of department and then their 2ic. Like Chief Medical Officer and then Assistant Chief Medical Officer? Might not have been that nomenclature exactly but that was kinda the vibe. Obviously that doesn’t make for particularly large crews, but they had multiple ships and stations and stuff. The game runners basically managed the entire federation I guess and gave ships missions and stuff, and then the players mostly just did things with their crew. They could transfer to another ship or station in the fleet, and if you wanted to play with your friends they’d be as accommodating as they could.
Also like, I’m fairly sure there were people who were just like “I wanna be the wise bartender on the ship” and so they could do that if they wanted. But yeah, basically it handled having a lot of people by having a lot of ships rather than just jamming everyone into one. The ships would sometimes be on missions together or whatever, but also often were just doing their own thing in the galaxy, and one ship that got sassy with the romulans over here might cause problems for another ship who is trying to deal with some romulans over there, like it was a shared galaxy even if you didn’t necessary interact with everyone else in it regularly. In theory you got to have your ‘limited Star Trek ensemble cast on a ship’ adventures, while also being part of a much larger group of people also going on adventures?
Would that work as a MU? Would ‘real Star Trek stories’ be able to be told? Would it even be practical to try place many different ships and stations all doing different things asynchronously into some sort of coherent universal timeline?
I don’t really know. But I do know a ton of Star Trek fans had a ton of fun playing a PBEM game a couple decades ago, and I thought maybe a tiny bit of info on how they did things (even if maybe it’s not exactly the type of thing that we’re talking about wanting here?) might be helpful to someone. Or at least stand as evidence that you can do something with it, somehow.