[CRConrad]

> The Star Trek universe is one where people live in a post-scarcity, post-war, and heavily automated earth and are free to pursue creative or explorative endeavors.

Or, as Stross mentions in the blog post, they're in (some future equivalent of) the military: In stead of on a space ship travelling the universe, they could be on an 18th-century HMS Enterprise, criss-crossing the seven seas, encountering a new population of exotic islanders each episode, in stead of aliens. Bit more scarcity on those, if they stayed out too long and the vats of beef ran out or went too spoiled, but similar otherwise: Everybody wears a uniform, doesn't worry about money (you'll spend your meager coin / automatically-accumulated Credit Units when you get back home to Blighty / Mars), and implicitly cares about the same mission. Heck, replace Klingons and whatever the other ones were called with Frogs and Yanks, and you have the constant enemy that pops in every other episode.

It's basically a Space-Opera-slash-Space-Western.