You might think it's a long way down to the shops, but that's just peanuts compared to space.

People make fun of 40k for how outlandish some of the scale is, but I think it's the only canon that understands the massive amount of resources a galactic-wide empire would have at their disposal. Doubly so when it's willing to genocide any alien races, strip mine the planet they were on, and ignore even a pretense of caring about human rights. But even a more benign empire should have ridiculous amounts of ships and weapons and people available to it.

Even if you could travel at Lightspeed, it would still take forever to get most places.

You can travel for 8+ billion years at light speed and still not hit the end.

Except for the one at sector 001

the borg is a joke to you? nah fuck this guy, I lost people at wolf 359 !

It's so mind numbingly large that light, which would encircle the equator 7 times in a second, takes 8 fucking minutes to get to us from the sun. And 4 years to get to us from the nearest star.

If we shrunk down the universe so that the sun was about the size of a grain of sand, the nearest star would be 10,000 miles away and there would be nothing but emptiness between us. A few scattered atoms floating about, so rare and distant that hitting one would be less likely than winning the lottery twice in a row while being struck by lightning.

"There's a nearby emergency, but another ship is available and can deal with it to everyone's satisfaction."

That's the very subject of a recent entry:

“There’s a nearby emergency, but another ship is available and can deal with it to everyone’s satisfaction.”

two weeks later....

"we need you to search for the other ship, it never checked in after the emergency!"

shame, could be a fun trope.

To be completely fair, that's a non-event. It's hard to write an episode around "nothing happened."

At the same time, it's a missed opportunity for a "slice-of-life" episode - something the Japanese have down to a science at this point. These give a series breathing room, adds some worldbuilding, develops characters in a more personal way, and can be a ton of fun to watch. So, an episode where everyone screws around on shift, with PADDs just full of news about other ships saving the day would be great.

There was a TNG episode where they had two federation ships watching a .... planet explode? Maybe a stream of asteroids needed to be deflected? They were all like "they can handle it, but if something unexpected happens, we would hate to be caught with our pants down." Then the other ship exploded or something.

They were less concerned about story in TMP and more about showing 5-minute clips of their models moving through space.

How did Starfleet allow Earth to have only one appropriate ready to deploy ship in the neighborhood?

Around that time Starfleet was likely overhauling most of their ships or decommissioning older ones to be replaced. There may have been dozens of ships in the system, and Utopia Planetia or San Francisco Shipyards but they were in worse shape than the refit Enterprise. And even if there were others they likely wanted a Frontline ship with one of the most revered officers onboard than, say some rando under equipped Oberth with a B-team science crew of 70, or an outdated TOS-style last in line for refit.

Gihugic