You have sixty seconds to justify the following:

You have sixty seconds to justify the following:
>Why the Romulan standard ship is three times as large as the Federation's flagship and devotes all of its space to war, stealth, and engines while the Federation devotes most of its space to luxury and science and yet they are at best on par with the Federation
>Why the Klingons, who prize honor and strength, prefer tiny ships that need to use stealth instead of building gigantic warships
>Why the Ferengi were able to build ships that rivaled the Federation's best

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>this thread again

It's not three times the size. It has roughly the same mass, 75% of its shape is empty space.

>>Why the Ferengi were able to build ships that rivaled the Federation's best

Richest faction builds best stuff? I'm surprised Ferengi couldn't buy their way to superior ships compared to starfleet.

The Federation is more technologically advanced than the other factions. They the luxury of only needing to expend minimal effort to produce weapons and defensive measures that are on par with the best gear that their enemies can make.
The Klingons are a piratical/raiding culture, similar in some respects to groups like the Vikings, Mongols or Comanche. While they consider physical courage important, victory is key to them, therefore they understand that swift, stealthy attacks are the best way for their empire to expand.
The Ferengi are extremely wealthy, and are perceived as less hostile than groups like the Klingon and Romulan. Therefore, they trade and buy from everyone, and are able to pick-and-choose the best tech, putting them on par with the feds.

>Why the Romulan standard ship is three times as large as the Federation's flagship and devotes all of its space to war, stealth, and engines while the Federation devotes most of its space to luxury and science and yet they are at best on par with the Federation
The Federation is the most advanced of the major Alpha Quadrant factions. There's plenty of evidence for that. For instance, the Romulans were struggling to develop phasing cloak during TNG. While a single Federation science vessel working in secret was able to build a working model years ago.

>Why the Klingons, who prize honor and strength, prefer tiny ships that need to use stealth instead of building gigantic warships
Being able to move your fleet around invisibly is a huge strategic advantage, and in war nothing is more honorable than victory. The Klingons are actually a lot more practical than their rhetoric indicates.

>Why the Ferengi were able to build ships that rivaled the Federation's best
Why shouldn't they be able to? Like the Klingons and Romulans, the Ferengi have tech that's close enough to the Federation's to be competitive.

*other major Alpha Quadrant factions

Better question:
>Why do phasers get used like semi-automatic rifles in battle, when they have wide-beam settings and can vaporize solid rock.

Well, ferengi also had to cheat, lie, and steal the stuff in their ships, so, Y'know. Not quite perfect.

Phasers get used on how the plot demands them. I remember an episode of the Original Series where the Enterprise used its its ship phasers on stun on an entire city, and it never gets used again.

Because when mankind achieved FTL and the Vulcans noticed them and first contact happened the Vulcans gave them access to their tech.

Vulcan tech is re-fucking-tardedly advanced compared to pretty much ever other alpha / beta quadrant races in startrek.

You could also ask why they use living ground troops at all.

In the EU the feds are all about massed hologram troops.

There is a reason the Vulcans are all about emotional control and being chill and peaceful.

They could have easily cub stomped everyone else had they wished it.

>Penis.
>Art of War.
>Jews.

That's just socialist propaganda. Their free market economy encouraged revolutionary entrepreneurs to bring new technologies to the market place, where free market competition brought costs down and efficiency up.

Notice that the only way to slow their rise was to infect their culture with marxist and feminist notions... right down to slipping agents into the household of the Grand Nagis.

I'm not the biggest trek person, but weren't the Vulcans full on barbarian for a super long time before they turned into space monks?

they call those romulans, and vulcans don't discuss the relationship in polite company

>tfw the only chance for a properly funded star trek rpg will probably focus on the new films

>Because when mankind achieved FTL and the Vulcans noticed them and first contact happened the Vulcans gave them access to their tech.

What this user saidIts the classic high/dark elf relationship where they had big nasty civil wars with insane tech and super strong kung-fu elf brawls everywhere.

Until a bunch of them realized this shits not gunna work long term and left to be super tech space monks while the rest regressed some from the brutal wars and stayed assholes.

Slow their rise? What makes you think they were rising? They're so compulsively greedy that they wreck their own reputation (and long term profits) for any chance at a bit of extra latinum now. That's why they were excited about the Gamma Quadrant. It was a chance to exploit some fresh rubes who didn't know better yet.

Yes. They went full logic when they realized they wouldn't survive another nuclear war.

It annoys me that ST loves to forget monumental shit they discover.

Pic related. Whatever the fuck happened to the Dyson Sphere?

Not necessarily. Most of the current Star Trek games (both Veeky Forums and /v/) are still based on the original timeline. There's a hell of a lot more content to work with.

>Until a bunch of them realized this shits not gunna work long term and left to be super tech space monks while the rest regressed some from the brutal wars and stayed assholes.

Other way around. The Vulcans stayed on their homeworld, and the Romulans left. Also at the time they weren't super advanced: the Surak-era Vulcans were only slightly more advanced than 20th century Earth, and when the Romulans left Vulcan they were only somewhere in the 21st century in terms of technology. The 20 Romulan ships and 80,000 Romulans that left Vulcan (around the 4th century AD by Earth reckoning) were capable of Warp-2 at most. It took them 70 years of traveling to find Romulus and Remus, only a handful of the ships made it, and on reaching Romulus and Remus the Romulans had to devote everything to colonizing the worlds and lost the great majority of their knowledge.

It's brought up in a few Trek novels, and features prominently in Star Trek Online.

But the short version is that the Sphere, while impressive, has an inner surface area of unfathomable size. Exploring it would take centuries and could be the focus of an entire TV series in and of itself, which isn't something that Trek wants for obvious reasons.

Presumably generations of Federation scientists spent their entire lives studying it.

>Being able to move your fleet around invisibly is a huge strategic advantage, and in war nothing is more honorable than victory. The Klingons are actually a lot more practical than their rhetoric indicates.

Remember what Ezra was saying to Worf when they were discussing Klingon politics and how she doesn't romanticize it like Curzon or Jadzia. The Klingons are a lot more concerned with winning than they are with honor.

This was only ever a problem in DS9. TOS and TNG were episodic, and most episodes dealt with a single issue or problem. It didn't matter that they didn't go back to the Dyson Sphere because that wasn't their job. Some other science ship (or a fleet of science ships) presumably followed up, and made a lot of discoveries, but the Enterprise had already gone on to do other things.

DS9, though - at least the later parts - was a show with continuity, about a war that the Federation couldn't easily win. So all the things that occurred once in a while in TOS and TNG but didn't hurt the story (like wide-beam phasers, for example) started to become issues. You could look back through the previous series (and previous seasons of DS9) and point out all the stuff that would have made a given episode about the war a non-issue, but just got ignored/forgotten.

I'm partly convinced that's one of the reasons Voyager was what it was. Since their ship was stranded, they didn't have access to all the infrastructure the Federation had that would have made their problems easy to solve. It was also a mixture of episodic and continuity-heavy episodes, so there's that too. Possibly also why Enterprise was a prequel, and the current movies happen in an alternate universe/timeline.

It just really annoys me that its not mentioned ever again I think. The Romulans flip their shit over a Phase Cloak system yet no mention of the Feds gaining hat amounts to 250 million planets + untold tech.

Even in STO it's just a transport gate and combat zones.

because writers don't understand the implications of megastructures.

In the DS9 episode with the Starfleet projectile rifle prototype, they said it was being developed as a weapon that would work in dampening fields. It was abandoned when they went with "regenerative phasers" for that purpose.

What if regenerative phasers have trade-offs compared to normal phasers? Such as being incapable of wide-beam? Perhaps only when set in a "regenerative mode" necessarily to overcome a dampening field.

It could have been standard procedure during the Dominion War for one or both sides to utilize dampening fields to reduce the effectiveness of enemy weapons.

They clearly did though, especially since they had a lot of science advisors on the show. That's why it was an uninhabited (and uninhabitable) sphere, due to the star being unstable.

What, honestly, would you want the Federation to do with the sphere, anyway? They can't use the land, disassembling it would be pointless, and studying it (which they would certainly do) would take a very, very long time. Especially since going inside was dangerous for the Enterprise D, let alone any lesser ship.

The Trekkie in me says it'd probably come down to science ships launching specialized probes for data gathering, and the occasional Fed species science agency or civilian group sending their own expeditions as well.

>Especially since going inside was dangerous for the Enterprise D, let alone any lesser ship.

Build a ship specifically to study it, of course.

Equip it with metaphasic shields.

>hologram troops
The holographic miners bugged me, and this is no better. If you just need your shaped force fields to manipulate tools (or weapons) why bother with the illusion of a person? It makes sense with the EMH, because his job involved dealing with people. Floating surgical instruments and a disembodied voice asking where it hurts would probably be unnerving.

All things being equal, a D'deridex can beat a Galaxy in a fight regularly. Not as easily as their size would imply, but they can still do it.

The only thing the Romulan ships have going to them is Cloaking
The Fed Flagship is first a science Vessel But that doesn't mean it can't fuck shit up if it has too

The D'deridex-A or the D'deridex-B?
Because when Tomalok showed up with 3 D'deridex-A's against the Enterprise, wasn't it implied that 3 were needed in order to actually win?

>More technologically advanced
>durr wat is light bendin? uga buga 1,000 planets can't come up with stealth

Starfleet CAN come up with stealth.
In fact, they can make better cloaking systems than the Romulans or Klingons combined together could do in the past 100 years.

But they've been limited by the Treaty of Algernon to not develop any cloaking technology in exchange for the Romulans not starting shit that Starfleet will have to come kick their asses over.

The Federation had a treaty obligation against the use of cloaking technology. As we learn in the same episode where we find out about the phasing cloak. A technology superior to any Romulan cloaking device, illegally developed by a small group within Starfleet.

>A technology superior to any Romulan cloaking device, illegally developed by a small group within Starfleet.
A technology that Starfleet developed a working prototype for in a few years what the Romulans have been trying and failing to do for decades.

>metaphasic shields
>Voyager's future tech & Borg tech
>Phase cloak
>Transwarp beaming and Transwarp
>Picard Maneuver
>Red Matter

They may have the ability to fix the star or swap it out in another generation.

Does anyone remember a scene from during the Dominion War, where a Klingon and a Romulan are talking about the war?
The Romulan says that the Federation are getting pushed back by the Dominion, and the Klingon brushes it off that they have not yet seen the Federation fight for real yet, and reveal their true strength, then they both nervously look over at the human Starfleet officers.

Then there was the time early in DS9 when that Romulan liaison officer first boarded the Defiant, and realized that Starfleet had built a ship that had more power, more weapons, stronger shields, faster warp drive, more accurate sensors, in a package that's less than a quarter the size and mass of a D'deridex battleship?

>Why the Ferengi were able to build ships that rivaled the Federation's best

Capitalistic markets are godly when it comes to making new shit like better tech and the Ferengi are pretty much a totally uncontrolled capitalistic market race

because fuck star trek

Wasn't that Marauder more of an exception rather than the rule, because of how Ferengi captains have almost complete freedom to customize their ships, and that one Ferengi happened to pour his profits into outfitting his ships with the best weapons available on the black market?

That one captain did do that but as a whole the Ferengi are not a race you mess with

Starfleet was barred from having or developing stealth when they made peace with the Klingons.

As a whole, no. They have access to the best weapons, strongest shields, and most horrific WMD's that latinum can buy when their collective profit-making interests are threatened.

Individual Ferengi, however, are a different matter.

Ah, slight correction, user.
It was the Treaty of Algeron with the Romulans that prohibited the Federation and Starfleet from developing cloaks.

>w-we t-totally can into stealth w-w-ie j-just signed a t-t-treaty
Then you get cucked with your only combat specialized spaceship's stealth system being designed by Romulans and guarded by a Romulan officer so none of you monkeys try to learn how that magic tech works.

Tell me Quark, if you're so clever, why isn't there a good Star Trek video game?

Didn't they work on a spaceship game where you can forward power to shields or phasers and such?

That'd be FTL: Faster Than Light.

>so none of you monkeys try to learn how that magic tech works.
Did you miss the part where Starfleet already made a cloaking device that was better, used less energy, and let ships pass through physical objects?

Starfleet Intelligence made the phase cloaking device in 47 years (assuming they started right when the treaty was signed) while the Romulans have been trying, and failing, for over a 100 years.

Starfleet proved they didn't need to go to the Romulans for a cloaking device (fuck, they could have just gotten one from the Klingons if they wanted).
Getting a Romulan one was intended to try to get the Romulans on board with a united Alpha Quadrant superpowers against the Dominion.

i wish FTL had a multiplayer. or a coop.

i want my idiot party to manage a ship.

Maybe with mods, but it's still not as satisfying. I wish it had co op where you can control 1-2 team members as necessary.

There are bound to be engineering difficulties in designing a cloaking device. Problems that are solvable if the Federation spends a few years developing cloaks. Problems that the Romulans would have already solved.

Any resources put into developing cloaks would have to come from other important projects. Getting the Romulans to provide a cloak doesn't require those resources.

Developing a cloak would take time the Federation didn't know if it had. A Romulan cloak was much quicker to acquire.

Then there is the matter of the treaty. Developing a cloak would annoy the Romulans. Getting them to provide the cloak keeps them happy.

I wish there was a good Star Trek pnp RPG. Holy shit it would be fun. You got tons of material to work with, endless exploring, infinite game modules, my god.

Imagine being Kirk and asking Spock for advice on how to contact the new species that only communicates in obscure logic problems.

Imagine being Sisco trying to figure out how to deal with the latest Cardassian issue.

Imagine paling around with Geordie and Data.

Now imagine doing this with your friends. It could be the most beautiful clusterfuck ever. Being the GM for it would be a shoggy esque nightmare but so glorious for them they would merrily run it.

Veeky Forums would love the game for the same reason they love playing all stupidly hard games and completing incredible challenges-- we like seeing how far we can get on hard mode, and often enough seeing how much further we can get than intended.

Star Trek Online?

Star Fleet Command is pretty good, if not for broken AI. Move power between systems, targeting specific functions with weapons and boarding parties, different shield angles, a variety of ships across multiple races, methodical combat.

There's literally an episode of TNG where a pissy little Federation research ship is outfitted with A phase cloak by a rogue Captain. The cloak is superior to that of the Romulans/Klingons but isn't adopted because the Federation isn't really a fan of war.

Bridge Commander was a good start. I only wish they had made a sequel with more depth.

Because you're an ignorant who's never played Klingon Academy.

>for obvious reasons
What are they? Because I'd watch the fuck out of Star Trek: Sphere

Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator.

Actually, I'm surprised that game hasn't been brought up already, it's basically a Veeky Forums with some computer-y aids.

There are a THOUSAND Star trek pnp systems, both official and fan made, e.g: PDF attached
Lurk moar.

>Problems that are solvable if the Federation spends a few years developing cloaks. Problems that the Romulans would have already solved.
Problems that the Federation solved with the Pegasus experiment.
Problems that the Romulans had spent decades on and couldn't solve.

Isn't there a thing where the Romulans have been fighting a war against some unknown foe since the Treaty of Algeron? Some pricks on the opoosite side of the empire?

>This was only ever a problem in DS9
Going to have to disagree with you on that one.

That Atlantis in SPAAAAACE hidden planet with the planetary cloaking device that Piccard and friends discover. It abduct Wesley and some other kids and regrettably returns them. It had awesome tech and they sent science teams there after Enterprise left. Never mentioned again.

Kirk and co. find an uninhabited planet with some hidden machinery that makes their thoughts come true. They use it for a holiday resort. Direct thought-to-hologram technology never mentioned again.

That long cylindrical planet killer that kirk disables. Never mentioned again.

Sub-space transporters. Can beam across light years. They modify their own transporters to do it once then forget about it.

Extra dimensional, unblockable transporters. Gives you cancer with repeated use. Never mentioned again.

Cloaking device that makes you impossible to touch so you could ghost through any problem. Never used or mentioned again.

That episode of TNG where they have a colony of humans that start aging rapidly. The colonists created a race of genetically modified humans that were physically better than humans in every measurable way, grew up quicker and had telepathy and telekinesis. And unlike Khan and the other old augments they seemed nice and stable. Nothing ever comes of this.

The Federation has access to Data's mother, Data's fathers notes and Data's uncle's downloaded memory as well as Data's disassembled brother to study. No new prosthetics, cybernetic enhancements or Datas.

Those are just the ones that instantly spring to mind.

>Capitalistic markets are godly when it comes to making new shit like better tech

Not really. It usually took long-term service contracts combined with free training to actually incite people into buying your newfangled shit.

I mean IRL.

Because most federation officers have no idea what they're doing when it comes to guns. The fourth amendment has long since been abandoned, and the federation trains its officers in engineering plot science rather than using weapons.

SS13.

Star Trek: Judgment Rites
Star Trek TNG: A Final Unity
Star Trek: Armada
Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force

In addition to these and it would be pretty easy to do it yourself in a generic system like GURPS or Savage Worlds.

Obviously the things that are obvious tech upgrades, especially the ones they adapt to their uses even temporarily, should have been added into their repertoire and them not is kinda weird.

But the various planets and things that would take time to dissect and reverse engineer its understandable why theyre never mentioned again. Both in universe time and it wouldnt be very interesting to hear about soil analysis and atmospheric data.

The things that could be used may never be brought on board because the advantage they provide is niche or specialized for what, in the end, amounts to a research and exploration vessel. Or maybe they found some danger of the tech that needs to be fixed before becoming standard issue.

Thats the other thing, the time it takes to get the tech, reverse engineer it, get it approved, pass it through the chain to be evaluated for issuing, and then the actual process of issuing it can take some serious time.

Does it always make sense? No, not at all. Things like the sub space transporter would have been something that governments would have jumped all over and they wouldve installed them everywhere asap. But some things can have some slack cut for them. Like the thought to hologram thing. Realistically, that would just replace the holo deck (assuming they were able to mass produce it) but it probably just became a consumer product/luxury and not distributed through the military.

Becuase the central premise of Star Trek is, in fact, a trek to the stars. Deep Space Nine was a fun diversion for awhile, but overall the show is supposed to be about the exploration of the galaxy, not the exploration of a single part of it, even one as impressive as the Sphere.

Besides which, let's be honest, there's only a very limited number of stories you could do there, and a lot of them basically just end up being Land of the Lost but in the Star Trek universe, and without anyone actually being lost.

Nope.

>Why the Romulan standard ship is three times as large as the Federation's flagship and devotes all of its space to war, stealth, and engines while the Federation devotes most of its space to luxury and science and yet they are at best on par with the Federation

Because they're more PRIMITIVE than the Federation. They can get the same specs but not the same economy.

>Why the Klingons, who prize honor and strength, prefer tiny ships that need to use stealth instead of building gigantic warships

Because they're practical and are comfortable about their dick size, so they don't have to build large ships for the sake of it. Also, as warriors, they are practical. Ambushes are not considered dishonorable in war, nor is stealth. Tactics are perfectly acceptable. Think of it this way, you can sink a ship via ambush during wartime, but you won't be trialled for war crimes once the war is over. But if you gas and rape helpless civilians, then yes, you can stand trial.

>Why the Ferengi were able to build ships that rivaled the Federation's best

They're willing to spend the money and resources for it.

The aging rapidly humans had accelerated aging BECAUSE the augments immune systems were killing all the normal people around them.

Even then, it's getting mechanics down that's more important than the plot. There's enough fan boys out there that any mechanical system will be adapted to any given era pretty quickly.

Star Trek Online is okay.

Then there are
Bridge Commander
Armada
Voyager Elite Force

>Transwarp beaming
>Red Matter
Trek science was always a little out to lunch. Both of these were pants on head retarded. Transwarp beaming was the worst example of nuTrek writers writing themselves into a corner.

>Hey, we need a way to get Kirk and Scotty on the Enterprise
>Oh, she went to warp hours ago
>Hey, I know! Transporters that can cross light years in seconds!
>Hey, not-Khan needs to get off Earth in a hurry! He uses those transporters to beam to Qo'nos!
>Why do we need starships again?
>How is deep space travel dangerous now, since we can beam the injured all the way to Earth for treatment, or evacuate crew via interstellar transporter?
>Hey, we can replenish redshirts at will now, just have Starfleet beam them to us, or a planet we're orbiting.

I'd watch it as a miniseries or webseries or something.

So the Humans V2.0 had one backwards compatibility problem with it. If that was fixed they would have made humanity unstoppable.

Because the Federation,was able to outproduce and out research the Romulans AND the Klingons at the same time, to such a point where they can throw a bunch of wasted space on their ships, not even designing them to full military spec, and still have their ships be fully the equal of other powers' front line warships. When they DO design a dedicated warship... well everyone else can just start lubing up their assholes then and there.

To be fair, cloaking isn't actually as useful as you're making it sound. IIRC you have to drop it anyways to fire, and it takes you a few seconds to raise your shields again, so if the enemy tactical officer is on the ball, thats a shot directly into your hull, probably devastating either your bridge or your engineering space. A cloaking system also isn't really something that fits with the Federation MO either, which is peaceful exploration.

Artemis. Or Pulsar: Lost Colony.

>Why the Klingons, who prize honor and strength, prefer tiny ships that need to use stealth instead of building gigantic warships

Multiple smaller ships offer more strategic flexibility than one big ship. For example, if you have five Birds of Prey, you can send one to attack enemy supply lines, one to scout and have the other three attack an enemy force of equal or lower strength. If you have one Galaxy class ship, you have to choose between these options.
On the other hand, the Federation's main interest is scientific exploration and you basically want the biggest and best ships you can build to deal with strange cosmic phenomena and new species.

Starfleet vessels are so big and full of state of the art tech because they are basically the starship equivalent of large herbivores. They're big and imposing to dissuade the enemy from fighting them in the first place. Klingon ships are pack hunting carnivores.

It can't be overstated how ridiculous Federation tech is. Most regular members of Starfleet are probably better engineers than dedicated Romulans or Klingons. They are a civilization that has dedicated itself to science and the fact that each Federation culture has its own unique approach means that there is always a fresh perspective to draw upon. To most non-Federation cultures, Starfleet engineers are pretty much miracle workers.

Look, engineering major, this is why you have no friends.

>Transwarp beaming was the worst example of nuTrek writers writing themselves into a corner.

The Original Series, Season 2, Episode 26, "Assignment: Earth".

There are other examples in Trek lore, but that one springs immediately to mind. Long story short: it's hardly unprecedented.

youtube.com/watch?v=O_Ft7luIDn8

I'd just like to remind everyone that Jean-Luc Picard is a mass murderer by laziness.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeward_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)

captain, I'm registering bait roughly 200 meters of the starboard bow

Hail them, and scan their cargo.

>Not upholding the prime directive
>Playing god.
You fool.

It's low grade bait captain, not much use for it besides salting food. Hypothetically if they ran a charge through it they could reduce it to weapons grade bait, but it would require a lot more than this to become viable.

>whole planet will die
>do nothing to prevent it
>refuse to even rescue some of them because it will ruin their culture
Spoiler Alert
They won't have a culture anymore. Because they'll all he dead.

Because Star Trek is shit

Ok, in three thousand years you'll have another theocracy starting a jihad because they want to conquer the Galaxy in the name of Pike Hard that will kill millions.