/STG/ - Star Trek General

Yeah, as much as people bitch about our periodic plunges into STO, I do think we cover a lot of general lore and come up with our own fixes for a lot of trek's inconsistencies.

That, reminds me, I'm gonna compile the ship selection tables from the last 2 threads and pastebin em for future reference.

Neat.

I didn't mind the actual crew composition. The dino-surgeon was fucking awesome, and the giant spiders with vertical quarters were A+ neato. I will definitely have some non-humanoid crew and probably a rescued Borg drone on my Luna. I just minded the HEY GUYS WOW AREN'T WE SO TOLERANT ALSO HALF OF THE HUMANOID BRIDGE OFFICERS ARE TNG CASTOFFS AND THE OTHER HALF ARE GAY :^)))))) virtue signaling masturbation by the author.

Miranda is to Connie refit, as Nebula is to Galaxy, as Luna is to Sovereign. It's got the rollbar and swappable mission module and everything. It also happens to be bad-ass enough at science, exploration, and patrol duties to completely outclass the Intrepid at everything but landing on planetary surfaces. Amusingly enough this would make the Intrepid the Starfleet equivalent of a USMC MEU in one starframe, where its mission profile is getting ground assets in theater while providing plenty of naval firepower and carrying supplementary craft. I view the Akiras as more of a purpose built fast torpedo-spam platform, for intermediate range firepower between the berserker melee range of the Defiant and the theater-scale dakka delivery of the sovereign.

t. tre/k/kie

Picture unrelated but I think the Ambassador doesn't get enough love.

>HEY GUYS WOW AREN'T WE SO TOLERANT ALSO HALF OF THE HUMANOID BRIDGE OFFICERS ARE TNG CASTOFFS AND THE OTHER HALF ARE GAY :^)))))) virtue signaling masturbation by the author.
Yeah, back in the SJW-overrun time period of 2005.

Not to mention Star Trek has always been "hey guys wow aren't we so tolerant" virtue signalling if that's the standard you're going to use.

>Are any of the Trek novels worth it? People have mentioned Destiny and Typhon Pact here before and I was just wondering if any of them would be worth paying money for?
Star Trek Vanguard is pretty good, though it's not really Trek in a couple of places. It does make it clear that everybody wore the miniskirt in TOS, even the JAG office and SFI, though. Its follow up Seekers is also good. Classic TOS Trek without trying to fit it into the Enterprise's timeline.
The Cold Equations trilogy is another good one, though a little bit of knowledge of the Typhon Pact and what happened to Data can make it better. In fact, bits and pieces of the Relaunch series are pretty good in general. Terok Nor is nice and brutal, befitting being a prequel to DS9. Finally, if you like Time Travel stories that include a minimum of it, the Department of Temporal Investigations books are pretty fun.

You know what,I WAS PLAYING STELLARIS AS THE KLINGONS FOR STAR TREK NEW HORIZONS.

What's Dark Mirror like? It piqued my interest because it's a Mirror Universe story and that shit is my jam.

Unfortunately, totally and irrevocably non canon according to what the Mirror Universe turned out to be. Essentially, Diane Duane wrote it as an expansion to the old "Mirror, Mirror" episode. In it, Troi is a mind raping dominatrix, Picard killed Jack Crusher for Beverly Crusher's hand, Riker is a boorish sex hound, Worf is a beaten slave, Reg Barclay is a bodyguard, and Starfleet employ space dolphins to map deep space.

Oh and the Mirror Enterprise-D has 10x the power and weapons as its prime counterpart, because it dumps all the civilian portions for power and an array of planetbusters. Also, imagine the second TNG uniforms with no sleeves, and a verrry short miniskirt for women and you've got the mirror uniform.

I liked it.

Have you read any of the older novels at all? If not, I recommend the Rihannsu stuff, despite it being Rommie fan wank, and the two John Ford books.

Oh sorry I'm not the same person you were talking to before. I was just wonder what the book was like.

Sounds like an intensified version of Yesterdays Enterprise.

>I think the Ambassador doesn't get enough love.
The early 24th century doesn't seem to get enough love in general.
Even in ship designs, which tend to be one of the more popular areas of what-if and expanded universe content, we only really know of the Ambassador class. Every other old ship we see in TNG and beyond are just late 23rd century leftovers.
Unless I missed a databook or something somewhere that filled in the gaps around that time?

>Sounds like an intensified version of Yesterdays Enterprise.
Kind of? Essentially, the Mirror Universe invades the Prime universe because they've conquered pretty much everything in their galaxy, and the stated reason for the Galaxy class in the Mirror is that their plan was to go extra galactic, but the higher ups realized that that shit wasn't going to cut it for actual control. This book predates the Borg episodes by a good half season, I think, so there's that.

There isn't no. The early 24th century has functionally no new ship designs, even in the novels. At best, you have the Excelsior, Ambassador and Constellation classes.

Guy who was trying to run it here:
Died after two rounds because only one person actually 'got' it, there was no discussion of each other's lists and approaches, one dude thought that just using torpedoes as a solution was apparently funny, and the rest of what little there was was bare minimum listing of ships and commentary. And everyone else was chatting STO. I did try and get some more out of people via questioning their responses but to no avail. YTA doesn't work without discussion because it's not like a quest thread so just continuing to post up stuff wouldn't have done anything.

Basically, you're not the kind of people to run it with here.

Besides the various proto-Galaxy/Nebula designs (New Orleans, Springfield, Cheyenne, Freedom, Challenger), theres the Apollo heavy cruiser, the Niagara Cruiser, the Rigel cruiser, the Excelsior and her variants (Centaur, Currie) as well as the Constellation class.

A fair few of them aren't really canon, but they're decent designs all in all.

The early 24th century was to the Federation what 1991 to about now is to the US. The torrent of ship design money died at Khitomer/fall of the USSR and other than a few projects that never really scaled up (Zumwalt, LCS, Ambassador) and the super big super delayed flagship class (Galaxy, Ford) there was fuck all for new designs because the old ones were still good enough for kicking the shit out of the assorted scrubs that served as enemies. Hopefully we don't need a major incursion like Wolf 359 or the Dominion to give us a kick in the ass and start building new ships again IRL.

My one problem with all these Nebula-styled ships is where's the trade-off? Why are these not the standard? They have everything the base class has and more.
The Miranda at least removes the engineering hull so is clearly lacking in additional facilities that the Constitution/Enterprise might. Same with the Centaur to the Excelsior. But Nebula/Apollo/Luna have all the stuff a Galaxy/Ambassador/Sovereign has and the extra equipment module to boot. and yet somehow they're supposed to be the lesser vessel according to most interpretations, with the conventional layout being at the forefront of the fleet in terms of capability?

They're smaller, a bit slower at warp, less powerful, much less efficient at warp (Connie/Excelsior layout is still the gold standard for Cochrane style warp efficiency, this is discussed in reference to the Defiant and Intrepid designs), and generally have less space for shit, whether that shit is crew, sensors, torpedoes, shuttlecraft, or cargo bays. The equipment module is a tradeoff - the flagship carries the equivalent of ALL the options at once. That's why the flagships are used as standalone exploration cruisers or the backbone of a fleet wing, and the smaller ones have more narrowly focused missions.

Hell, that's another parallel to the US Navy. The Arleigh Burke class destroyers are our big do-everything class, but the Littoral Combat Ship has a funky hull layout, swappable mission modules, smaller crew, less ability to take enemy fire, and shorter length of deployments.

>Luna
Not comparable to the Sovie. It's much smaller, more like an Intrepid 2.0.
>Apollo
Fanwank, not canon. Actually, there is an Apollo-class ship in the show, but it looks nothing like that: memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Apollo_class
>Nebula
Loses everything in the neck (which is actually a decent amount of space), including two shuttle bays and the main impulse engine (the Nebula model actually doesn't have ANY impulse engines, but I think it's safe to say that that's just a mistake). I would imagine that it also doesn't have the same saucer separation capabilities. Oh, and, at the very least, the Phoenix was commissioned before the Enterprise (509 stardates before), so it may very well be that the Nebula was the original,the Galaxy was a redesign, and both were felt to have their purpose justifying doing both.

How are they smaller and have less space? If anything their mass is much greater than the main craft because of the equipment pods. The saucer and engineering hulls are the same or nearly the same size as the parent ship, the only bit they lack is the neck, and that's more than compensated for via the pod. The Nebula especially is a massive vessel compared even to most of the heavier ships of the fleet, mounting a full sized Galaxy class saucer section. Only the Miranda/Centaur types with no engineering hull could really be considered smaller and less capable.

>Fan-Wank

If we confine ourselves to ships that appear in the shows then we have a fairly bare-bones Starfleet. I'd much rather integrate some of the recurring/popular designs in the extended media (mostly video games). After all, debating the merits of one made-up ship vs another is a pretty open field so why not fll gaps as we see them?

No, the Nebula does not have a Galaxy sized saucer. The entire ship is like 70% scale compared to a Galaxy. I expect that's where a lot of the confusion comes from.

Possibly because the model kits scale the two the same. As far as I can see, the Nebula's usually cited as being 500 to 600m long, while the Galaxy is closer to 800m.

What's the source on that? On-screen scaling really means nothing, it's full of inconsistencies. Is it from some credible backstage source like the TNG TM?

Length wouldn't really say anything about the saucer size, since the Galaxy's engineering hull and nacelles are set much farther back relative to the saucer than on the Nebula. Width would however be a relevant comparison.

memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Nebula_class
>442.23m long according to DS9 TM
This also bears out with how tiny the Nebulas looked docked at DS9 compared to the Enterprise-D.

520m for the Galaxy is what I have on this official blueprint, and the only beam length I've for the Nebula is 457m. A little wider than has though.

Okay, so I have a couple of different rationalisations for these types of ship.

First off, lets tackle the Nebula. See, in the Star Trek Starship Spotter book that paramount published, they make a point of mentioning that the Galaxy class has "the rather dubious distinction of having the longest design, development and construction period of any class in Starfleet history." I've always thought of this as an indicator that the Galaxy project was nearly a total failure. She had been too ambitious a design with too many power requirements and Utopia Planitia struggled to make her work.

So Starfleet decided to export the problem to other design teams to see what their solution was. Alot of the Proto-Galaxy designs came from this. But the stand-out winner was the Nebula class. She used a more traditional, conservative power system, as well as offering a multi-mission platform. The Nebbie sacrificed maximum warp speed and several redundancies in favour of an adaptable, combat ready chassis that could be repurposed with the same flexibility of the Miranda class, only on a larger scale.

As for the Luna, she shares a clear design lineage with the Sovereign and the Akira. I would suggest that it was originally intended that the 3 designs would come into servie concurrently, as a way to cover the mission roles of a dozen or so older designs and allow for their gradual decommissioning. However, When the Borg completely fucked Starfleet at Wolf 359, they decided toput their new deep space science vessel on the back-burner and put their emphasis on the Akira, as a combat vessel, and the Sovereign, as an upgunned Galaxy class.

The Enterprise-D took 20 years to iron out and construct, and then the class as a whole suffered massive losses in the Dominion War.

The Intrepid class seems to be another class of limited use. Intrepid, Voyager, and Bellerophon are the only three confirmed to exist per alpha canon. Maybe they really did get relegated to MACO MEU duty?

Post Wolf-359, Starfleet decided not to put their eggs in 1 basket and ramped up their new generation of ships, while building as many galaxy frames as possible, only without any of the creature comforts. They made for good heavy weapons platforms that could take a beating. However their lack of maneuverability meant that only experienced crews could bring one of these Galaxy class starships through a major engagement intact.

I'd say she didn't have the latitude to warrant continued production, with the Nebula, Nova and Luna classes each covering large portions of her mission profile. More than likely she became the diplomatic ship of choice but didn't see a prolonged production period.

The Intrepid always struck me as something that seemed like it was always intended to be a limited run ship for ironing out things like the bio-mimetic gel processing system. It was far too specialized as a science vessel, no matter what bullshit Voyager managed to survive.

>Intrepid class ships for diplomacy
Oh boy I bet that's gonna go over real well in the Delta Quadrant.

True. Voyager herself was clearly a tech demo with those, the EMH, and the tricobalt drvice.

>spoiler
Boi, this is...pretty...well. Where to start.

The comparisons seem to start off pretty valid, especially since the main protag ship types seem to be Exploration Cruiser vs Multimission (Leaning Towards Science) ships.

Miranda : Connie Refit
Miranda : Ambassador, since the shipframe had such versatility and staying power
Nebbie : Galaxy

Seem to fit alright, but then here we get a problem. The Oberth starts reaching the end of its useful life by the tail end of the TNG era, and needs replacement; and in come the Nova and Intrepid classes, for short-ranged local research and long-ranged scientific exploration, respectively.

>Luna : Sovvy
This is just plain wrong, tbqh - apart from the "generations" of the ships (Sovvy was developed just the year after the Intrepid, whereas the Luna would still be in development for another half-decade), there's the fact that the Sovvy, at the end of the day, is not an exploration ship. It's a battlecruiser, plain and simple.

>Starfleet equivalent of a USMC MEU
Literally what? The planetary landing capability was probably just introduced for emergencies with the ship critically damaged or stranded more than anything else - troop transports needing to land is completely redundant in a setting with high-capacity shuttles/runabouts and transporters.

It involves referencing STO, but yeah, it goes about as well as one would expect. God knows why the Admiralty let them drag Voyager out of mothballs and back to the Delta Quadrant, like that would go over WELL.

>Nebula can do science better than a literal advanced science testbed
>Nebula is a specialised science ship
When will this meme die? Nebbies are galaxies with a smidgeon more science and bullshit space magic, a little less comfy and a lot cheaper.

>Voyager
Given that the Luna was originally designed to take on the GQ with little or no support or armed backup, I feel like while the Intrepids weren't much more than testbeds, Voyager herself (by the end of it at least) was more akin to a Proto-Luna than the version that left Utopia Planita

Voyager was a minmaxed quantum slipstream T7 rape array by the end of the series.

Apparently Tuvok had such an emotional attatchment to the ship where he was briefly merged with a Talaxian, was mind-freaked into committing homicide, was nearly killed dozens of times and was blueballed by a hologram that he decided to abandon logic and command a flying museum.

Alternately he did it just to spite Janeway so he could sit in her precious captains chair. That's entirely understandable.

Oh, no doubt. By the time she reaches Earth, Voyager is less a science vessel and more a pocket battle-cruiser.

After getting home, Endgame Janeway probably just spent every free minute she had bashing Borg STFs desu

>That's entirely understandable.
True. Honestly, of the writing for all of that, Tuvok and most of the Voyager crew aren't the bits I have issue with. They even managed to make Neelix not insufferable, if only by comparison to other Talaxians.

Nebbies are Nu-Mirandas. To that end, they can carry out some of Voyagers missions by their nature. However the Nebula's role is much more general than the Intrepid. For a deep space scientific mission you'd take a Nebbie in a pinch but you'd be much better off getting an Intrepid.

However most of the Interepid's dedicated mission profile was either superseded by the Luna or shared with the Nova. The Nova offered a robust, and evidently interchangeable, pltform for survey missions. But the Luna was what the Intrepid was supposed to be, a deep space research vessel, but with fightan capabilities, courtesy of post-borg/post-dominion Fed sensibilities.

>sperging out this hard
m8 it's just about spaceframe designs.

So other than the Modiphius playtest, what system does /stg/ recommend for running a Trek RPG?

Realistically, how many different ship classes would Starfleet have being built at any one time? Not counting all the old models still chugging along.

I'm not convinced that the Akira isn't just an upside-down NX.

>Star Trek names a ship Columbia
>the irl shuttle Columbia explodes
Nah it's clearly a proto-Miranda.

Depends on the group, honestly. Coming fresh into RPGs? I'd recommend Lasers and Feelings. It's fun and accesible. To a group looking for crazy levels of depth and lore adherence? LUG without a doubt.

I...kinda want them to reveal they made a version that was basically just two NXs welded together.

You mean like this?

Eh, less Constellation, more proto-Prometheus.

There's always the Gemini class.

The NX was literally designed by flipping the Akira upside down. Not even joking. Doug Drexler even confirmed it.

Those two events happened in the opposite order. They named the NX-02 Columbia in honor of the shuttle.

They had the names lined up before the ship exploded. Enterprise followed by Columbia were the first two shuttle orbiters as well.

I'm surprised it needed confirming for people. Seriously it's even happened here.

And of course the Miranda was upside down because a studio executive signed off on the plans that way.

And the Klingon Bird of Prey was designed to be a Romulan ship until they changed the villains to be Klingons instead.

I never knew that. Makes A LOT of sense to be honest.

Kinda sucks that the Klingons stole the Bird of Prey shtick and Romulans went with giganto cruisers. Still worked out though, let the Klingons have all those randomly dicking around BoPs just fucking around being 'modern' Klingons and thus far more individualistic rather than the old Empire first focus.

Been looking around for Prime Directive pdfs. Anyone got em?

>Temporal Investigations takes place after the borg invasion crap
Nope.Too bad, because the writing in the sample was decent enough.

It really doesn't come up except for the first part, and only as a "This is why we can't time travel willy nilly."

Are runabouts used to their full potential in beta-canon or STO? I know TNG and VOY barely touched them because that was "the DS9 thing" and TV execs didn't want to confuse the audiences. They seem like the perfect ship for a PC party.
>big enough to be independent of a mothership
>small enough that the players can be the entire crew complement
>not enough dakka to just bull your way through alien encounters
Hell, you could probably do an entire campaign based around the PCs taking a runabout from DS9 and having Gamma Quadrant adventures in an alt-timeline where the bid to blow up the Founders actually worked and the Dominion collapsed.

I imagine most private ships are about runabout size, maybe a tad larger - small and simple enough to run on your own, but big enough to make running a bit of cargo worth it, and maybe bring a few of your friends along for the ride. Wouldn't want to take more than a few of your friends though, because it's only the size of a bus. But anything bigger and you'd start needing a proper crew dedicated to just taking care of the ship, and not doing adventures and stuff.
As far as official stories of such a group? Don't know of any. In STO they are just small starships. Trek is mostly about big adventures needing a big ship and/or a big cast, which is too much for a ship of that size to carry (even DS9 only used them for the smaller-scale stuff - the normal Trek stuff happened on the station, or later the Defiant), and the fiction reflects that. Not saying the setting can't have it, just I don't know of anyone doing it (doesn't help that most of the fiction revolves around familiar faces doing familiar things in mostly familiar places).

...

PARTY TIME!

youtube.com/watch?v=L_wdRy7x4Sc

Neat! You get two bad dragons with that.

I was just thinking what i should get with it, a bulwark and the risian corvette or either of those and the Jem hadar attack ship?

Just managed to catch a picture of one of these elusive fuckers!

btw, is there any rpg system that is set in the early federation era, pre-TOS to be exact.

It does come up briefly at the end of another of the novels, resulting in three words that can induce reflexive pants-shitting terror.

Assimilated Tyrannosaurus Rex

...

...

Where can I get my mitts on the Modiphius playtest PDF?

sys.Veeky Forums.org/derefer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediafire.com%2Ffolder%2F36m6c22co6y5m%2FModiphius%2520Star%2520Trek%2520Adventures

It's in the Op, by the way.

Thank you.

Last thread we got into one of our numerous debates about the Prime directive. So I've had an idea. Why don't we posit a scenario and debate what the prime directive solution would be?

That'd require a degree of thought beyond complaining though.

The Prime Directive is whatever the writers need it to be this week. It's a PLOT DEVICE, nothing more.

The main issue with the Prime Directive is whether a given captain follows it 'Rules As Written' (Picard) or 'Rules As Intended' (Kirk).

Or 'Not At All' (Janeway)

What's Sisko's view to it then? Like Kirk's or?

>The main issue with the Prime Directive

No. The main issue with the Prime Directive is that people want it to be real when it manifestly is not.

You're talking about TV shows, movies, and game, not reality or even a model of reality.

I watched TOS when it first aired. bought Zocchi's "This really isn't Trek, it's Alien Space Battle, so don't sue me" game, bought TFG's SFB when it was in ziplocks, have several Trek RPGs, and even watched all of Voyager and Enterprise.

Despite that, even a long time fan like me knows where to draw the line.

You cannot coherently or consistently explain the Prime Directive anymore than you can coherently or consistently explain the transporter. Both are plot devices, both are whatever the writer needs them to be.

Initially closer to Picard's than Kirk's due to the doctrinal state Starfleet was in at the time. By the end of DS9, Sisko had full accepted his role as Emissary of the Prophets, and had thrown the Prime Directive out of the window.

Let's use this interpretation, seeing as somebody went to the bother of making it. Plus it expand it into a set of General orders.

st-minutiae.com/articles/treaties/general_orders.html

t. autist

>t. autist

>acknowledging there is a difference between fiction and reality
>autist

What ever you need to believe, Skippy, whatever you need to believe.

>Let's use this interpretation

No. Instead let's face reality and acknowledge it's a plot device in a work of fiction.

> seeing as somebody went to the bother of making it.

So because someone wasted their time trying to explain a fantasy rather than accepting reality we all should do the same?

I'll nope out on that, thank you very much. I can enjoy the fiction without trying to make it real.

We do actually manage to cover a lot of topics with our own interpretations.

I feel like you're on the wrong board.