Best Timeline Edition

I always assumed they were taking the parts from layed down but cancelled ships for prototypes and stopgaps. Like a good portion of the ww2 aircraft carriers.

So do ST Fighters fulfill a stand off strike role, or are they supposed to be actual fighters in the current popular role?

Seems likely. I mean, at that point they didn't have the need to build whole new classes for anything, so they just reused the patterns of ships they did have or updated the older models.

Updating the multitude of old ships they had (like the Excelsior and the Miranda) worked out well in the long run (gave them lots of ships to get onto level footing with the Dominion with), but the reusing ship parts bit didn't work so well.

>or are they supposed to be actual fighters in the current popular role?
They seem to act more like PT boats during the fleet battles we see.

Building on what said, the original intention for the Akira was to be a mixed Torpedo boat (With an absurd 6 torps in that pod in the roll bar), and shuttle carrier. Presumably the Shuttles or Fighters would serve as bombers and harassers.

I always thought it was a side effect of the Galaxy class development cycle. Utopia Planitia began work on the Galaxy class 2343, not launching the first ship of the class until 2357.

Perhaps a couple of years after development began, some other teams around the federation were allowed access to the project files and began altering the design to fit their own requirements. Hence we ended up with the Nebula class (also first commissioned in 2357), the New Orleans and Springfield classes (which look strikingly similar to the Galaxy class) and the rest of the designs (which seem to have been designed to replace pre-existing TOS-TMP designs).

oof, that one is definitely one of the worst best of both worlds kitbashes.

The nacelles don't match the hull/saucer at all, but even if it did have ones in the style of the Ambassador, the placement is just not fitting. Making the nacelles equidistant from each other would help a lot.

I think the proto-Nebula is the nastiest pre-Wolf ship. The tiny ventral nacelles put me in mind of a vestigial limb hanging off.

>New Orleans
Always liked the look of that one. Seemed much more professionally built than the other Wolf 359 kitbashes.

if they were just pods like on I'd be more happy with the design.

It doesn't help that the Nebula is a great looking variant all on its own. The New Orleans is one of the few to make the Kitbash look good.

Yeah, the New Orleans makes the most sense because it actually seems to have been build by someone with an understanding of the importance of symmetry in engineering and not just someone who goes "ooh, there's a big space there, we should probably bolt on another nacelle or two or the ship won't look right."

Does anyone konw of somewhere that does the same kind of thing as the Starfleet museum in terms of documenting ship designs with a bit of fluff extrapolated from known events and tries to fill in the gaps but covering the Enterprise B-C era?

Cos that would be bloody marvellous. Especially some actual history on the war with the Cardassians.

How's this?

ditl.org/

Unfortunately sparse in details by the look of it.

Sarry. Can't help you then.

So did you know that in the original cannon zefram cochrane was from Alpha Centauri, and that first contact was not with the Vulcans but Alpha Centauri.

Humans made contact with them via sleeper ships traveling a near light speed.

Turns out that the Alpha Centaurins were descendants of transplanted humans from Ancient Greece.

They had terraformed many of the planets in their Star System, and eventually used that technology to help earth recover from the after effects of WW3

The whole Vulcan First contact thing,
That is all an invention of the TNG Movie.

Yet another reason that the TNG Movies are shit.

Motherfucker, are you talking shit about Magic Carpet Ride heralding mankind's entry into FTL? Get the fuck out.
youtube.com/watch?v=U4WiyxXpyZc
Steppenwolf will precede us into the stars and there is nothing you can do about it.

>that """"""canon"""""""

TOS, as I remember, mentioned several times Cochrane was from Alpha Centauri. But then again, he has a Biblical first name, and an Irish last name, so I'm not sure "transported by aliens from Ancient Greece" actually cuts it.

To boldly bump what no man has bumped before...

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What's the ship in the foreground? I don't recognize that.

Archer class, from the Seekers/Vanguard novel series. Basically an ultralight scout.

Alpha Centauri independently developed Judeo-Irish culture.

>old Zephy gets tired of the semi hero-worship
>expedition to AC for Earth's first major colony
>sign me up
>now is Zefram Cochrane of AC
No need for ANCIENT ALIENS or "Zefram Cochrane invented warp drive first in the federation" or any of that business

It was mentioned in Enterprise on the episode where they find the time ship that Zefram disappeared in mysterious circumstances.

>Yet another reason that the TNG Movies are shit.
Could, you know, you bring it down notch man? I'm all for alternate takes on it but you don't gotta come off all crazy.

>No need for ANCIENT ALIENS
There is ALWAYS need for ancient aliens. One of the best parts about TOS was the sense of strangeness from them constantly finding the next way that some ancient aliens fucked about with humanity. Gave everything a feel of history before humans.

Are we ever given any information on how the Borg started?

Yes, but all of the explanations are really dumb.

Nothing official. I remember reading pretty terrible novel where the Romulans clone Kirk and then Kirk and Picard take a black Defiant class and find the Borg homeworld (which is a giant world spanning computer) and they upload a virus into and kill the Borg or something like that.

I'm probably misremembering a lot of stuff from it, seeing as how it was close to fifteen, maybe twenty years ago now.

What I DO remember clearly is that it was absolute garbage. Stuff like that and Darksaber are what made me swear off novel spinoffs of franchises.

Care to share? I like to laugh at really dumb.

Best ship coming through

youtube.com/watch?v=anMOQ3vTy9k

V'ger is responsible, of course.

There's also this:

>memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Borg_history

Other than the V'Ger one that was nowhere near as stupid as I though it was going to be.

I actually like the way in which all origin stories could be true all at once.

Different incarnations of enslaving machine intelligence arising independently across the breadth of time and merging in to the amorphous blob of all their predecessors.

A "consciousness", albeit a simple one, that goes all the way back to some really dumb experiment run by the Preservers that got out of control.

Is the Collective sapient? Who knows. It seems to be operating on simple "take it if it could improve us, harvest it to feed us, destroy it if it could be a threat to us" instructions. Intelligence created only when it encounters something that can't be covered by the three instructions and then the intelligence disassembled again when the problem is solved.

Either that or time travel.

They could have originated in a now aborted timeline.

Darksaber would be improved if it turned out that the whole thing was actually a fabricated report by Wraith Squadron and a Crix Madine who wanted to retire to the outer rim and not get bothered by jedi kids and their shenanigans.

Not to derail this thread with author hate and Star Wars, but nothing, absolutely nothing can improve anything written by Kevin J. Anderson aside from getting a different, better writer to do it.

To contribute, I present pic related as my candidate for best ship.

Or at least the cutest.

Ugh, I remember that one. It's one of Shatner's 'novels'.

That said, Bashier's one major scene might have been unwitting foreshadowing for him being outed sd an Augment. I wonder just how much bsckground notes they were given to set the book up.

>implying that hasn't been bumped many a time by many a man

>cutest

You seem to have used the wrong image. Let me fix that for you.

Which Starfleet uniforms were the best ones?

>Implying

TOS mirror universe sports bra and miniskirt.

That or Wrath of Khan.

Excuse you

Would be perfect but for those stupid looking fins.

Having all those Mirandas as ablative armor for the Defiant certainly helped win a few key battles.

Enterprise should be ignored any time it tries to introduce some change or "greater depth" to a pre-existing bit of canon.

Hell, Enterprise should be ignored, period.

I liked most of the episodes.

It was far from perfectly done but it was still better than VOY.

It was even worse than that, but you've mostly got the big points right. I seem to recall Kirk actually blew up their home planet with a super-grenade tossed into the equivalent of the thermal vent on the death star, but that could be me misremembering a book I was already rolling my eyes at with almost every new page by 1/4 into it, also at, I think, 16, for me, when it first came out.

He also beat up Worf in bat'leth combat and outsmarted Data and I think he may have even out-trumpeted Riker, too.

Because he's Kirk.

As written by William Shatner.

Talk about damning with faint praise, dude.

As I said it was far from perfect.

On the quality scale I would rank it somewhere between TNG first season and the rest of TNG. Way beneath DS9 but way above VOY.

He also had sex with the Romulan who cloned or something to that effect.

I have a hard time taking beta canon seriously because of stuff like this.

I occasionally have a hard time taking the alpha canon seriously, but it's Trek. Not all of it is gold, much like any property where dozens of hands have stirred the pot.

Well, I was only partially joking about the second statement. I still maintain that virtually all of their attempts at canon contribution or alteration were really stupid.

When the show itself did something reasonably original, it was more tolerable, even occasionally entertaining. ...usually.

Pretty much.

>*cloned HIM, I meant

Oh well. An excuse to post more ships.

>Season 3 Romulans were suddenly in an 'alliance' with Klingons and using Klingon ships

Ah, the wonders of plot developments never mentioned again due to losing props for the Romulan ships before the renewal and not having the money to make new ones.

I really wish they hadn't cut that scene in STIII where Kruge steals the ROMULAN bird of prey. Who knows what future Klingon ships would be like, especially in DS9, where the BOP is behind so much of the Klingon military raider tactics.

I wouldn't be opposed to seeing more Kruge in STIII. Christopher Lloyd was wonderfully over the top.

A lot of people hated him in that role. I'm not sure why, I thought it was great.

YOU! I've been looking for those damn posters for months. You had best provide a source.

Because that was in TOS as well.

Again, that wasn't Enterprise adding "greater depth", it was just Enterprise referencing a TOS episode, namely the one where Kirk and crew meet Cochrane and learn what happened to him after he disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

>Hell, Enterprise should be ignored, period.

You, sir, are a scoundrel and a knave, and I am glad I don't know you better.

And yet also subtle when he needed to be, like just after his crew is destroyed and we see him just sitting in his captain's chair with his head in his hands, mourning them and the obvious trap he let them fall into.

Indeed. Even though STIII might not be on par with II, IV, and VI... I still think is has some great moments.

When David dies, and Kirk misses the command chair, stumbling to the deck, is (in my opinion) one of Shatner's best moments of acting.

And later, when the Enterprise is burning up over the Genesis Planet:

>youtube.com/watch?v=CzJRx3vaApA

and people have the gall to bitch about the jjverse

DS9>TOS>=ENT>TNG>>>>VOY
While TNG's best eps were far and away above anything ENT ever did, TNG's worst eps were way, way worse than any of ENT's stinkers (besides TAtV, which is a strong contender for "Worst of Trek," but it's pretty much a TNG ep anyways). And there were way more of them, too. I'd say the average quality of TNG was a bit lower than the average for ENT. TOS also had better good eps than ENT, but it also had worse bad eps. The thing that puts TOS over ENT is that the cast of TOS generally has better chemistry (mostly because ENT tried to force TOS-style character interactions when the characters weren't made for that). ENT was also way comfier than TNG, but I didn't consider that in my rating.

Honestly, TrekIII's biggest sin is that it isn't II or IV. But when your immediate competition are arguably the two best Trek films, that's not an easy goal to reach. That's why TrekIII is often styled as the "good bad one".

...

...if you're curious:

- Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of KHAAAAAAAAAN
- Star Trek III: The Good Bad One
- Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales
- Star Trek V: Wherein God Needs a Starship
- Star Trek VI: The One with the Klingon that Quotes Shakespeare
- Star Trek: The One With Both Captains
- Star Trek: The One With the Borg
- Star Trek: The Manual Steering Column
- Galaxy Quest: The Best Star Trek Movie Never Made
- Star Trek: The One that Killed the Franchise
- Star Trek: The One that Rebooted the Franchise
- Star Trek: The One Where Khan is White for Some Reason
- Star Trek: Brings the Beats and the Shouting

The beauty of Galaxy Quest is that it preserves the even/odd pattern.

Still working on a good subtitle for Beyond. It has to be funny without being insulting, 'cause Beyond was honestly one of the better Trek movies we've gotten in the past decade or two.

>stupid big Enterprise
>Revenge! plot
>25 years doing NOTHING
>Blows up Vulcan rather than giving advanced tech and early warning to alt timeline Romulans
>Comic book has to explain plot holes, yet raises even more questions
>Stupid callbacks for no reason, such as the mind-control eels
>Black hole explosion escape when the ship has an engine capable of traveling faster than light and produces a field that negates mass and gravity
>Transwarp beaming that invalidates starships
>KHAAAAN! for no real reason, other than name recognition
>Transwarp torpedoes that invalidate starships
>Which also contain KHAAAN!'s frozen crewmates
>Another Klingon redesign
>Another stupid callback for no reason
>Magic space blood
>Fuckhuge dreadnought because boondoggle and misappropriation of resources are phrases Admiral Robocop has erased from the dictionary

I haven't seen Beyond yet, so I can't really complain about it.

But seriously, no part of Trek is without sin.

Oh god, the music in the run-up to that, when they're typing in the self-destruct codes still gives me chills.
It's just this shrill, anxiety in musical form.

Then there's the bit at the end where Sarek is just completely floored by just how much Kirk has had to sacrifice to bring Spock back.

At the time most people knew Christopher Lloyd as Reverend Jim from Taxi and/or Doc Brown from Back to the Future. They didn't know how to deal with seeing him in an over-the-top dramatic role.

>>Still working on a good subtitle for Beyond. It has to be funny without being insulting, 'cause Beyond was honestly one of the better Trek movies we've gotten in the past decade or two.

I've got two possibles:

Star Trek: The one which feels like an episode of an actual Trek show I might, kinda, sometimes want to watch.

or

Star Trek: How I learned to stop making references to the above films and just do my own thing.

>Fuckhuge dreadnought because boondoggle and misappropriation of resources are phrases Admiral Robocop has erased from the dictionary

see: modern military spending

It's even better when you remember that Sarek has set foot on that sacrificed Enterprise, before she was refit.

And there's also David. Kirk's son dies to bring Spock back to his own father.

Galaxy Quest is awesome. No if, ands, or buts about that.

Beyond...

Okay, when watching it, it's important to remember something. As much as TOS gave us "The Devil in the Dark", "Balance of Terror", "City on the Edge of Forever", and other serious, deep, thought-provoking episodes...

...it ALSO gave us "The Trouble with Tribbles", "A Piece of the Action", and of course, "Spock's Brain".

Silliness is and always has been a fundamental part of Star Trek. You mentioned Star Trek's sins; this was DS9's sin, that it mostly ditches silliness in favor of dark and serious storytelling. Mostly. The Ferengi episodes do come along occasionally to save us from dourness.

But my point is that in Beyond, there's a particular scene in the climax that you will instinctively want to go "seriously?" to. But even as you do, I want you to remember TOS Star Trek. Really think about it. And ask yourself: isn't this totally the sort of thing that they would have done, if they'd only had the budget?

The answer, of course, is yes. Yes they would have.

>ENT>TNG

Have you been huffing Zenite gas, user?

>Still working on a good subtitle for Beyond

Something something Classical Music

>Galaxy Quest is awesome. No if, ands, or buts about that.

More than that, at the 2013 Las Vegas Star Trek convention it was voted the seventh-best Star Trek movie of all time. That's just about as official as you could possibly expect it to be.

For a brief period during the voting it was actually in SECOND PLACE, presumably before people realized they should get serious

YES! That's it.

Star Trek: Classical Music.

That was my favorite part of Beyond. Well, not the choice of music itself. Mostly, it had just always weirded me out that old folk in Star Trek act exactly like old folk today, even though they've got centuries of advancement on them. And of course, Picard is as distant from today as we are from Vivaldi or Beethoven, so it makes sense that the music of our era would be considered "classical" in some way.

I would have killed for a scene in TNG of Picard, pissed off, walking into his ready room looking to unwind and saying "Computer, AC/DC, loud."

Star Trek: Classical Music

Keep it short and simple.

>And ask yourself: isn't this totally the sort of thing that they would have done, if they'd only had the budget?

Absofuckinglutely that is what they would have done. Spock and Bones' reaction to it was also pure TOS Star Trek.

You can tell that Pegg actually liked Star Trek when he co-wrote it and set out to write a Trek script rather than setting out to make money.

No, I get that Into Darkness has something to say about American defense spending, fear, and the attitude that being the aggressor is justified if you're starting shit as a "defensive" act.

The problem is that the other stuff in the movie doesn't really help. Khan's inclusion doesn't make the movie better, and I think if they'd focused on the examination of fear and military expenditure/preemptory, unilateral attacks, it could have been a more interesting movie.

Instead, we Khan being a terrorist because Admiral Robocop wants to scare the Federation into war buildup (but he's already built the Vengeance), shoot up the Klingon homeworld with warp cruise missiles with Khan's people inside for some insane reason, and he's willing to also kill the crew of the Federation flagship, many of whom are heroes of the attack on Vulcan.

His plan doesn't seem well thought out.

When I tell people that I love TOS, I also tell them that TOS contains the very best and very worst of Trek.

So, I'll keep it in mind when I eventually get to Beyond. I just don't want to be as disappointed as I was when 2009 came out. I should have loved that movie, and instead... Well, it wasn't for me, the huge TOS fan who grew up watching re-runs, and learned about TNG via Reading Rainbow.

Not even kidding, one of my clearest and earliest memories is watching the Arena episode of TOS.

>Getting sick of storefronts captcha

ENT has the episode that advocates genocide by inaction.

I can't believe that Beyond managed to take the thing that people hated most about the original trailer for it, and turned it into the best scene of the movie.

>Spock and Bones'

Quinto's grown on me, but Urban IS DeForrest Kelley reborn. I don't know how, he was born before Kelley died. But somehow, he just makes it work.

So does TNG.

That does not necessarily invalidate your point, I just want you to be aware of its full implications: if all of ENT is damned for "Dear Doctor", then all of TNG is damned for "Homeward".

If you merely mean to suggest that ENT had a bad episode entitled "Dear Doctor", then yes. Yes it was a bad episode. But the entire series shouldn't be damned for it.

So does TNG.

Piccard stood by and watched an entire world, complete with bronze/iron age sapient people close enough to human to interbreed with die and did nothing.

All the men and women and children and the biospheres of their worlds gone in an instant because "muh prime directive".

You remember when Piccard guilt tripped Riker into letting a little girl die in 1st season? Times that by a few million.

Sure they couldn't have saved everyone. That's besides the point.

They could have saves some. Cultural contamination could also have been minimized. Fill cargo hold with morphine gas beam them in, beam their unconscious ass to some other part of the ship to await stasis tube.

Dump on some backwater world with a couple of people dressed up as primitives to teach them to survive. 2 generations down the line and the whole ordeal is just some story granddad goes on about.

You do not just stand there and watch when you have weeks/months of warning and then pontificate about the sad and noble necessity of it all.

Yeah...if I was doing a Star Trek series, I'd have an episode specifically dedicated to the serious examination of the Prime Directive. I'd have several episodes.

The original wording in TOS states that they can't interfere in "viable" pre-warp cultures. At some point the Federation just forgot the "viable" part...