/STG/ Star Trek General

id rather it crush the guy who killed the idea of having a star trek themed casino in vegas

it would've been inside a model of the enterprise

It sounds like empathy covers interpersonal skills that aren't covered by Presence. Guessing other people's motives, providing effective psychotherapy, negotiating with an eye for what the other person is likely to actually accept, etc. It doesn't dictate what a character feels. You could say that it technically isn't empathy but more like theory of mind.

What seems like a problem to me is how fiddly the momentum/threat system is. You can get extra dice both by spending momentum (which you can rack up very quickly by rolling dice for relatively inconsequential tasks) or by adding threat (which is kind of weak as far as the range and strength of things it can do.) And you can do these things after you see the results of your initial roll, so you never happen to do it when it turned out you didn't need it. Seems like a system where it's nigh-impossible for the PCs to fail at anything.

>Seems like a system where it's nigh-impossible for the PCs to fail at anything.
>I think that's kind of the point of Trek right?
If you are Fed pc's you are supposed to win.

Emergency power to forward BUMPers!

All the same, a game needs to be challenging, otherwise it's dull. Most people I know, that /ttrpg/, would say that their best experiences in the genre were when they failed catastrophically, because it made for a good story to tell, after the fact.

That reminds me, if anybody wants a ship from STO done up in this art style then just get a screenshot of it, post it here and I'll do the rest.

So what's your opinion on Star Fleet using fighters in large battle or in the federation in general?
youtube.com/watch?v=MB04p5TgZX8
I like fighter battles in general in sci-fi but does it feel wrong for the Feds to use piloted fighters knowing they will have a high death rate in battle? I mean in something like Battle fleet Gothic it is kind of the norm and you expect losses in your fighter and bombers crews since that's the tone of the setting. So does being a fighter pilot in Star Fleet that's going to die soon work in a UFP ideal utopia? I mean I could buy 'banzai' minded pilots for other space empires but the UFP people seem too candied assed to really be that gung-ho for the idea.

I figure they really only came about as a result of high-attrition wars like the Dominion war. You look at the battles we're shown, where every second starship is torn apart, with all hands. Maybe those fighters were a cynical roll of the dice. By concentrating enemy weapons fire on single-ships, they increase the survivability of Miranda Class ships, with crews of 200, or Galaxy class ships, 800-1000. Maybe Starfleet command made the call that a few dozen dead pilots is still better than losing a starship.

Just a thought.

Could you touch up this one?

>a ship from STO done up in this art style
Well, since you offered user I hope you can do something with this pic. Thanks :D

Sure thing. Just give me about 30 minutes.

Thanks user, once you have made that one and this one could you also add this to your backlog?

Fighter craft like what we normally think of feel horribly outclassed in Star Trek when you have the equivalent of full warships that can dogfight at warp speeds with full scale weapons. There is the Defiant class on the fed side, Birds of Prey on the romulan and klingon sides, the standard Jem Hadar Bug, the closest thing to a fighter is the Peregrine and that's a full starship modified to be a gunship that can still have a full crew if you pack up and go long range and do maintenance on the way.

And here's one more.
Sorry for over working you.

Working on the lot of them right now

With regard to this one, would you prefer to keep the detail of the planet in? Or would you prefer a closer profile shot of the Archon?

Id prefer a more detailed Archon, it wont matter too much if the planet is just a blob on the background.

Also, in regards to the pics i took, would you prefer if i tried taking pics where hull is lit up instead of being mostly in shadow?

I can work with either, if you want high colouration detail then you'll need a shot of it in sunlight like pic related

K, i try to remember it in the future, but if wont be absolutely detrimental to your work then i wont take new pics to replace those older ones.

There's the first, hope it's to your liking.

And there's the second.

Cheers user, looking great!

Will put this one up first, as it was the much quicker job.

Thanks user, nice job!

And there's "d'udder one"

Thanks again user, you are doing great work.

maybe later on i'll give ya a KDF picture cause this fed love has to end

I'd appreciate that, actually. My KDF portfolio is heavily lacking. I have a few screen grabs from the shows and films, like pic related but I've never really played a Klingon character in STO so I have few images to work off.

Romulans welcome, too.

will have to wait after work, see ya in like 10 hours!

I'm flipping through the doc now; personally, I'd houserule it that you either can't roll or don't get Momentum on a DC 0 check, unless said check happens to be plot-important.

Fair enough. I'll do some digging on my own, as well.

I think i got one or two images, posting them now.

...

I think that's all i got.

Interesting, I thought the Solanae sphere background might have screwed with the lighting and details but it seems to work out just fine.

Of the 3, this is the one that feels most Klingon to me.

So this is the same ship but I'm guessing it's got a different skin?

Yeah, this is the T5 version of Bortasqu, while the one above it is the newer T6 version.

I think that's it for the moment. They have a couple of images of the character models you can buy with the game but they look fairly threadbare so far.

*Balance of Terror
*Without visual communication with the Romulans, as they were able to close enough for Lt Stiles to recount that the ship would be recognisable by the bird painted on it.
/pedant

Enterprise was definitely building toward the Romulan war but yeah, they'd screwed the pooch with failing to actually define ENT as a more primitive tech era fully and failing to take advantage of that given they were still running the same old fight scenes counting off not-shield percents and so on. And having a transporter that worked on people. And driving to Qo'noS in a few days rather than months, and quickly relegating their translator character to pointless.

Basically it's all Rick Bermans's fault for being a play-it-safe cunt. And just being a cunt in general as well.

UPN were apparently nightmarish to work with though.

They had all sorts of insane notions like having a live band in the mess-hall each week.

Berman was no saint, but things could have been much, much worse.

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...

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And, this is it for playtest materials so far.

It also seems important to houserule that every player at the table can't make the same check independently (like every player walking into a room and rolling Perception, or everyone rolling some kind of knowledge skill to see who knows a thing.) That would result in a permanently maxed-out momentum gauge. Instead, you have to either designate a single player to make the check or use the rules for combining efforts on a single check if that makes more sense.

Man, I really don't like the look of the STO klingon designs. There's something off about them. They're too bulbous.

A lot of their designs don't really get the design ethos from the faction it's for. The Federation designs have a problem with nacelles and saucers being shaped terribly, the Romulan ships dispense with the bird motif except in the blandest sense, and the Klingon ships trade clean lines for blocks or bulges.

When STO started out most of the new Klingon ships were unused designs from the show and everyone was looking forward to a continuation of that.

...then they started using exclusively original designs and even dumped some of the fed designs.

A fair few of the early designs had been in other video games too

>A lot of their designs don't really get the design ethos from the faction it's for.
What? The only faction that has a canon design "ethos" would be Starfleet, and that's basically "saucer" + long-ish nacelles. All else is optional. Klingons were head+neck+body+wings off body+something on end of wings (nacelles, or guns with bops). That's it. And even then there are only six original examples to work from (D7 (TOS), BoP (movies), Vor'cha (TNG), Negh'var (TNG), Raptor (ENT), and D-5 (ENT)), and a few derivative variants.
Now, you can argue about the aesthetics of any individual ship all you want. That's subjective taste. But as far as STO is concerned, they fit.
>the Romulan ships dispense with the bird motif except in the blandest sense
u wot? If anything, the STO Rom ships go full-hog on the bird thing, to the point of almost being silly. The ones least like birds are the ones that are clearly design derivatives of canon ships (mostly the D'D).
> the Klingon ships trade clean lines for blocks or bulges
Like all the non-D7 ships in canon?

So after a cursory read-through, it looks like they're aiming for a point somewhere between Fate and FFG for storytelling, but without the proprietary dice.

No one tell them about the proprietary dice. CBS will demand it for a few more pennies and manage to fuck things up.

It's all based off of Modiphius' pre existing d20 system, no?

...

The distance/speed scale in ENT is irreprably fucked. I think they could have made the conflict into a submarine war, as described in Balance of Terror, with a little creative thinking.

So the Romulans used those "droneships" as a test run for a holographic shadow fleet. What if this was their first attempt at mass-disseminated stealth tech. Nothing as fancy as a proper cloaking device, mind you.

>but nebbie, we already saw 2 cloaked warbirds in that minefield episode
Yes we did. And it was a dumb move on the producers part. However, in the spirit of patching plot holes with duct tape, my theory encompasses this instance too.

They were using a primitive "visual cloak". Essentially an early version of the hollow emitters used on the drone ships that creates a bubble of ambient starfield effects around the ship. As we see in the episode, even the inadvanced Terran crew were able to easily detect the ships using a probe. So, unlike the proper cloaking device seen in BoT, this is a simple visual trick, good for an ambush but not much else. At warp or impulse, the ship would be easily detectable.

So the Imperial Navy tried a new tactic. If they can't hide the ship, maybe they can make it look like something it's not. Hence their prototype holo-tech gets rigged up to a few older ships and they try to spook the nascent interplanetary alliance between Earth, Andoria, Vulcan and Tellar.

Cont...

Things go poorly, and the imitation strategy is dropped in place of a new, more aggressive plan. The Imperial Navy decided to go after the Humans directly, attacking their ships in lightning strikes. They throw overwhelming force at the Human fleets, striking directly for Earth

At first, the disorganised United Earth Government is slow to respond. Starfleet bears the brunt of this assault, using their Intrepid and Columbia class vessels to slow down the Romulan advance. The Terran Military has ships, but not with the same sort of firepower that Starfleet can amass. Most of their vessels, like the Franklin are hand-me-downs from the NX, NC and NV programs, armed primarily with nuclear spatial torpedoes. Some of their older ships are still sporting lasers. They outfit these vessels with phase cannons asap and start throwing them at the enemy.

Only a few months into the war, the Romulans are at the edge of Sol, preparing an attack into the system itself. The decisive confrontation occurs near Pluto's orbit. The Romulans have the technical advantage but they've expanded too quickly, putting stress on their supply lines and maintenance crew. In the end, Human numbers win the day and the Imperial spear-thrust is shattered.

Once again, the IN changes leadership. The failed holo-tech is revived and repurposed. With the fleet depleted and Earth fully mobilised for war, they need to adopt a more evasive approach. Ships are outfitted with the newer holo emitters, however they will not be emulating other ships. The humans have already figured that trick out. Instead, they will use the "visual cloak" technique.

By keeping energy emissions low, and by sticking to low warp (1-3) they can generally stay off Starfleet sensors. The Imperial Navy operate a cat and mouse war, slowly giving ground to their enemy. Most human ships still can't manage anything above warp 3, so the entire conflict is a slow, quiet war.

Hence the submarine vibe. I think this is the closest compromise I can manage whilst keeping both TOS and ENT intact as parts of the canon. The problem is that, an essentially throwaway line in BoT regarding the technical level of both species at the time of the war, hugely limits how the war was meant to play out. Star Trek is riddled with these types of statement, meant to move the story along, but then suddenly becoming an integral piece of canon, years down the road.

And as always, I'm sure there's a novel out there that shits all over my theory, but I haven't read it... so make of that what you will

See you get the idea, this should have been major arc in ENT. Not the Xindi shit that like took up 2 seasons to resolve. It was stupid to make them such a major thing in ENT since they seem brand new to the trek setting. And they were 5 races in one I think someone their weird aliens numbers higher in ENT and didn't like having it done in a more measured way. The makers of ENT should have went for a more fleshing out of the old known races in Trek more. I like that they tried to do with the Vulcans and Andorians but no in the way they did it most of the time. And the conflicts with the Klingons and Romulans should have become much more major issues as the show progressed because of the humans expanding toward both their domains. It should have been much more cold war than hot war than it was.

Seems like a Star Trek RPG would rely more on the storytelling aspect than the combat or mechanics, no?

Well, if you have ever watched a Trek series, it was always more about the moral or lesson in the episode than how they went about doing it. So as long as you had fun as a pc then it's all good, right? I mean since deus ex solutions are so numerous it makes stats somewhat meaningless at times.

>Borg have energy shields which make energy weapons useless after few shots
>Nobody has considered arming navy men with melee weapons and training them in anti borg warfare

Well yes, because if the Borg touch you at all, you're fucked. Nanoprobes son.

Were you planning on fighting them with daggers?

I have 2 words for you. Harpoon Guns.

>LC-01 Zumwalt

>Nobody has considered arming navy men with melee weapons and training them in anti borg warfare
what about just using mass-drivers instead of energy weapons?

>or been more old school like what TOS says that time was like?

Because according to TOS the era didn't even have viewscreen technology, this despite the fact that we've had viewscreen technology since the 1940s.

Science marched on, basically. We were much more advanced in 2001 then TOS had thought we were going to be. Showing the 2100s as being behind us in many areas would have simply been jarring to the average viewer.

As well, the point of Star Trek is exploration, not submarine warfare.

>he distance/speed scale in ENT is irreprably fucked

Eh, actually outside of the pilot episode ENT does a better job sticking to the stated warp scale than any other Trek series. They were using the TOS scale and stuck pretty close to it throughout.

>And it was a dumb move on the producers part.

It just told me that Future Guy was probably a Romulan. I was looking forward to that.

>Not the Xindi shit that like took up 2 seasons to resolve

It took 1 season. Well, and the last episode of the previous season.

>since they seem brand new to the trek setting

...okay, I'm going to call this one out now.

Tell me everything that is canonically known about Alpha Centauri and Tellar, two founding members of the Federation whom you would think would be incredibly important to it. Now, note I said "canonically", so this means "things that were stated in the show or movies". For our purposes you can include The Animated Series if you like.

$5 says that whatever you can write up will come up to 2,000 words or less. Despite, again, Alpha Centauri and Tellar being founding members of the Federation, and Alpha Centauri furthermore being an Earth colony world founded by pre-warp/early warp sleeper vessels in canon, something that would be great to know more about.

The fact that the Xindi don't come up much in TOS or later series never bothered me despite how important they were in ENT. Because TOS takes place a hundred years later and a lot of stuff has happened in the meantime.

Sci-fi fans have no sense of time.

>It should have been much more cold war than hot war than it was.

Wel maybe if it hadn't been cancelled in its friggin' 4th season, it would have been. The Romulan War was obviously going to be the major thing for later seasons, but the fans fucked it up by not supporting the show.

THERE WAS GOING TO BE A SEASON 5 KZINTI EPISODE FOR FUCK'S SAKE. AS WELL AS THE ORIGIN STORY FOR THE KOBAYASHI MARU.

...

...damnit, I'm STILL mad at Trekkies. Christ, I am a real life version of Krall from Star Trek Beyond.

>It just told me that Future Guy was probably a Romulan. I was looking forward to that.

Ooh that would have been good actually.

>It just told me that Future Guy was probably a Romulan. I was looking forward to that.
Time traveling part Romulan, Suliban and Tandaran. He did recruit extensively from the Romulan people though. Personally, the coolest thing that character ever did happened only when he managed to completely erase someone from history without actually altering the timeline bar that character.

The Romulans had cloaking tech 100 years early, Future Guy explicitly gave cloaking technology to the Suliban, the Romulans would have a vested interest in altering the events of the Earth-Romulan War, and Future Guy always looked like he had fairly robust shoulders.

I thought it was obvious.

Ugh Futureguy, just seeing the image triggers some sorta DEYTURKAJERBS style rage for me.

Romulans weren't properly explored till a season after they dropped futureguy and the majority of the temporal Cold War bullshit. As far as I know, Berman and Braga never discussed what his intended identity was going to be. And I don't have enough faith in either of them to think that the Romulan cloaking screw up was anything other than lazy writing.

Anything to do with the suliban has that effect on me desu

What do you consider to be the best space combat system for a a Star Trek game? Doesn't have to be from one of the official systems, or even an RPG, just which game do you think captures combat in star trek between ships best?

I've been pondering the Earth-Romulan war, am wondering if there's a decent way to make fighting it be interesting when it's supposedly mostly missile spam across vast distances, but there's also room for the kinda up-close lasers-to-the-face fighting.

Yes, let's train everyone in sword-fighting (something that took people years of dedicated study to learn) for that very rare chance of having the Borg show up.
>but we'll just have a special anti-borg swordsman unit
The Borg show up whenever and generally btfo of anyone that isn't a hero ship immediately. By the time your unit got to the Borg it was already too late.
It would be a good defense, in the sense of convincing the Borg your civilization wasn't worth assimilating. If it ever became a serious issue, I'm sure the Borg could change their shields to also exclude matter. A bog-standard forcefield would put an end to any melee monkey business.

>Yes, let's train everyone in sword-fighting

Honestly, given the amount of time redshirts have to fill, and the amount of times we've seen things reduced to brawling or sword fights, it's not a bad idea.

They could do it for the xenoantropologists. They might have to fight primitives while on missions. We could just put them in the anti-borg units.

They're called Klingons.

>the fans fucked it up by not supporting the show

>implying it's the fans' fault for not liking a shitty TV show
>damn those fans and their not liking things they don't like, they should like what I tell them to like because reasons damnit

>why didn't fans support ENT? It was going to get better!

Well, maybe it should have been good initially, rather than being the blandest take on Trek yet. They could have written likable or least interesting characters. Instead we got:

>genocidal doctor with alternative medicine who is quirky and walks around naked
>bimbo vulcan
>"I've been in SPACE!" Mayweather
>Non-entity asian chick
>The Idiotic Adventures of Catfish and Banjos
>Lt. "Kill them all and let the Queen sort them out" Reed
>Captain "The vulcans are behind this!" Fuckface

Don't get me wrong, I like certain things about ENT, like Shran and even Reed, and the occasional episode, but ENT was wishy washy on all of its moral points, trying to tread the line of "there needs to be some order out here!" and "Archer is always right".

It doesn't help that they just threw out the inconveniences of the pre-TOS setting, damn consistency or themes.

More egregious though is that ENT was intellectually insulting in more than one episode, where Archer can condemn the scavenging piratical nature of a species one week, and then turn around and do the exact same thing to another species a few weeks down the line without ever acknowledging that he might have been wrong about the previous encounter, or even that he is wrong, but sometimes one has to make wrong, unethical decisions to pursue one's duty.

Or how about the episode where he protests the torture and murder of a captured nausicaan pirate in a situation where there are no authorities to speak of to intervene against said pirates or guarantee the rights of prisoners after they have intervened. It's just "Archer is right because he said so!" and the spacers are wrong.

Seriously, fuck ENT. Fuck the writers. Fuck the producers. It was heading in the right direction by the end, but it was all the bad choices in the beginning and the road there that turned away the audience.

I've heard a theory which says that ENT, and by extension Abrams Trek, take place in an alternate timeline created by the assorted dicking around with time travel.

Yep, I posted that here. I can repost it if you want.

Please do, user.

Some of it's headcanon, like the disappearance of the Alpha Centauran people and the Augment Virus, as well as things like Khan working for Section 31 because reasons.

>Enterprise Timeline Creation
The Enterprise timeline is formed due to the distinct involvement of the crew of the USS Enterprise-E, albeit intentionally. Their assistance with Zefram Cochrane's warp engine results in a drive that is somewhat more advanced than the original design, reaching a top speed of Warp 1.5. The refinements in warp field theory from this event, as well as the inadvertent recovery of a partially dissassembled phaser pistol and tricorder result in a United Earth jumping forward decades in virtually all facets of technology. Later examination by the Department of Temporal Investigations results in 3 engineers from the Enterprise-E receiving official reprimands from the agency for irreparably harming the timeline in the "main" timeline.
(TCW Note: Originally a native of Alpha Centauri, Temporal combat removes the AlphaCent people from this timeline, but Cochrane still exists. This immediate divergence renders a lot of history as the crew know it defunct, in a direct tie to the old canon of an Alpha Centauri people and a Zefram Cochrane of that planet.)

>Klingon Relations:
This advancement of technology alters the course of events in relation to Klingon/Human First Contact, due to an inter House war over rumors of a technologically advanced species working with the Vulcans. This leads to a Klingon getting lost in transit and crashing on Earth (TCW Note: or the involvement of Temporal Agents). The Klingon Empire begins efforts to infilitrate Terran and Vulcan holdings to steal technological advances.

>cont 2/?

Now, there are two main divergences here from the involvement of the Enterprise E. The first is that the Augment Virus was never deployed to the Klingon Empire, and the Klingons as we knew them in TOS are merely the limitations of 1960s special effects and budgeting. Instead, the Klingon Empire of the 2200s recognizes that the Federation is a foe that cannot be defeated through mere force of arms, and turns to cunning to keep the Federation on the backfoot. This is my headcanon for "our" timeline, with the loss of Praxis and the resulting peace treaty pushing the Klingons into a cultural ennui that they have not recovered from by the 2370s, with the cunning Klingons of decades past tossed aside due to a perceived lack of skill from the aforementioned treaty.

The other divergence in the Enterprise/JJ Trek Timeline sees the Augment Virus deployed, but the technology to resolve the issue (among others) is stolen from the Federation, resulting in an Augment Virus cured by 2215. The other prime technology stolen by the Klingons is a more robust mining system, designed for planets in the 2300s that were difficult to mine. This technology's overuse by the Empire destroys Praxis almost 60 years ahead of the "Prime" timeline, with the moon detonating in 2231.
>cont

>cont 3/4
>Romulan Relations:
The Romulans have an easier time of infiltrating the United Earth/Vulcan societies, gaining the technology for their cloaking devices and other equipment much earlier. Though neither the Klingons or Romulans reveal any sort of history for their people, the Romulans suspect there's more here at work (TCW Note: The Romulans are alerted to the Hobus Supernova in this timeline by a Temporal Agent working to ensure his own RSE headed agency still exists). The Romulan/Earth War proceeds pretty much as written, though the more advanced technology on both sides results in much greater devastation. (Temporal Agents on all sides are bewildered by the fact that even with the better tech, the Romulans' identity still remains a secret until the 2260s)

>Narada Incident:
The Borg drones that were discovered by Jonathan Archer's Enterprise confirmed all of the historical data Starfleet had gleaned from the damaged tricorder, later prompting the Federation to collectively panic upon the appearance of the Narada in 2233. With an unclear motive for the (believed to be) Borg ship's appearance, as well as the near death of James T. Kirk before his birth, the Federation Council near unanimously (Sarek of Vulcan the only abstaining vote) enacted the CASE BLACK protocols developed in case of Borg incursion, releasing swathes of refined technology into Starfleet's hands, as well as historical records to Section 31 and Alexander Marcus, resulting in Khan Noonien Singh's discovery later.

The advanced technology applied by Starfleet took decades to refine and employ properly, pushing the planned deployment of the Constitution class back years, with the USS Constitution launching in 2251. Meanwhile, Section 31 decided to begin gathering shipwrights and resources to build their own vessel, culminating in the launch of the USS Vengeance in 2259.
>cont.

>cont 4/4
Finally, the reappearance of the Narada and the destruction of Vulcan in 2258 have created an existential crisis that has largely crippled any Temporal Cold War efforts in this timeline, as a full third of the belligerents were wiped from existence by that act.

It's not as tidy as I'd like, but that's more because I made it for an RPG, rather than any real headcanon. My players were playing some Department of Temporal Investigations characters, and they discovered all this in the 2390s.

As someone who had trouble watching Voyager, should I even touch ENT with a 10 foot space pole?

ENT's last season had people who had a clue what Star Trek was about, and it gets a lot better. The Mirror Universe 2 part is considered some of the best TV Trek has, and the Romulan episodes are also alright. But overall... no. Not unless you really want to see all of Trek. It's obvious the show runners were burned out on Trek, and were spitballing a generic science fiction show together.