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In the penultimate mission of the Star Trek: Judgment Rites game, the Enterprise must stop a ship populated by mentally-challenged humanoids from landing on a Federation colony. This interacts with the overall story arc of the game in that,

It is revealed that the crew is being tested by the Brassica in how they deal with the situation on board the Compassion.

However, the humanoids on board the ship are clearly not Brassicans themselves, as the Brassicans resemble "giant beanstalks" (according to Scotty). So my question is Was "the Compassion" simply detected and then used by the Brassica or did they construct the entire ship and populate it themselves?

In other words, what is the relationship between the Brassica, The Builders, The Phays, and the residents of the Compassion?

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  • As an aside, I wasn't sure about how to tag this one. It's Star Trek related, but the game is not considered canon, so it is more like a general science fiction video game question. Please retag if there is a consensus on how to handle this.
    – Frank Pierce
    Commented Dec 20, 2012 at 21:21
  • It's kind of an obscure (and old) game. I think you'd be lucky to get an answer.
    – Brian Ortiz
    Commented Dec 21, 2012 at 7:07
  • @BrianOrtiz You're probably right, but this unanswered question in an otherwise very well-written game has always bothered me. Maybe someone will stumble upon this that encountered a piece of dialog or something in the game to explain this. Or maybe I'll play it again and try to answer myself :)
    – Frank Pierce
    Commented Dec 21, 2012 at 20:46

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From what I can tell, the ship and the population are real;

1) In the following episode, Captain Kirk and his crew are transported to a virtual world populated by "solid cubic shapes floating in a void". Despite the evident attempt of the Brassica to present this as reality, a simple tricorder scan reveals this to be an easily detected illusion. By comparison, the Compassion is repeatedly scanned from within (by Spock) and although the Enterprise' main scanners appear to be "malfunctioning" there's no reason to think that the ship isn't real.

2) At the end of the episode, Captain Kirk and Klarr use a dimensional portal to move from the Compassion to the Brassicans. Once they've stepped through, the ship seems to persist. Again, if it was merely an illusion there's no reason why it wouldn't simply disappear.

3) McCoy detects that the ship is populated by humanoid aliens but also by "semi-intelligent plant life" from the Algol System. Given that the Brassicans are also plant-based, my guess would be that the ship itself was constructed by the Brassicans but is filled with the 'cast-off' population from another society that they tested.

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