/STG/ - Star Trek General

Galor Edition

Previous thread A thread for discussing the Star Trek franchise and its various tabletop iterations.

Possible topics include Star Trek Adventures - the new rpg being produced by Modiphius - and WizKids’ Star Trek: Attack Wing miniatures game, as well as the previous rpgs produced by FASA, Last Unicorn Games and Decipher, the Starfleet Battles Universe, and Star Trek in general.


Game Resources

Star Trek Adventures, Modiphius’ 2d20 RPG
-Official Modiphius Page
>modiphius.com/star-trek.html
Playtest Materials (via Biff Tannen)
>mediafire.com/folder/36m6c22co6y5m/Modiphius Star Trek Adventures
Reverse Engineered Character Creation.
>docs.google.com/document/d/1g2ofDX0-7tgHojjk7sKcp7uVFSK3M52eVP45gKNJhgY/edit?usp=sharing

Older Licensed RPGs (FASA, Last Unicorn Games and Decipher)
>pastebin.com/ndCz650p

Other (Unlicensed) RPGS (Far Trek + Lasers and Feelings)
>pastebin.com/uzW5tPwS

WizKids’ Star Trek: Attack Wing Miniatures Game
-Official WizKids Page (Rules and Player Resources)
>wizkids.com/attackwing/star-trek-attack-wing/


Lore Resources

Memory Alpha - Canon wiki
>en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Portal:Main

Memory Beta - Noncanon wiki for licensed Star Trek works
>memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Fan Sites - Analysis of episodes, information on ships, technobabble and more
>pastebin.com/mxLWAPXF

Star Trek Maps - Based on the Star Trek Star Charts, updated and corrected
>startrekmap.com/index.html


/stg/ Homebrew Content
>pastebin.com/H1FL1UyP

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=DYE3nm9voUk
youtube.com/watch?v=U4WiyxXpyZc
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

When did the Federation and Cardassians make First Contact? I presume it was before the war.

There's no definitive date, but I would assume that the Federation and the Union were aware of one another for some time before the war. Even if there were no formal diplomatic ties between the 2 states, you'd have to imagine that they came across each other during exploration/expansion.

An episode of Enterprise implies that the Cardassians traveled into deep into what would one day be Federation territory, as the Enterprise encountered a world where the Cardassians had been before. Whether by direct interaction or by word of mouth, they would have heard of each other.

Soft canon has contradictory explanations, one book says 2321 while another says prior to 2318.

Hard canon has the Cardassians mentioned in one episode of Enterprise, a Cardassian body seen in another episode. There's also a reference in DS9 to a Cardassian poet being exiled on Vulcan in the early 23rd century, some time between 2226 and 2240. So the question is whether you mean First Contact with a Cardassian individual, or First Contact with the Cardassians as a political entity.

>a Cardassian body seen in another episode

When was that?

The one with the automated repair facility. It's hooked into its "brain." At least, if memory doesn't fail me.

Man that place was quite fucked if you think about it.

So that means Cardassian exxplorers made it almost as for as the Romulan Empire

There's a Vulcan in there that T'Pol walks straight past.

Yep. If I recall correctly, in the post-Romulan War ENT novels, they end up discovering that they're like a proto-Borg Collective and have been spreading across a bit of space for a while. I think it's mostly centered around Reed in command of the Intrepid and Section 31 Trip working to destroy them before they invade Federation space.

To be fair, if I recall, they were pretty explicit in that they could only get Generic Cast Member back because he hadn't been plugged in too long, everyone else was essentially dead wetware by then. I can't really fault her for not reacting to a Vulcan left in such a state.

I think he was Romulan. At the time, they were planning to reveal that T'Pol was half Romulan so I could see why she'd explicitly avoid him.

Since no-one called it shit last thread, I am going to repost this to give everyone another opportunity to do so:

What I would do to carry on the setting if not following STO's story:
Focus on space-politics, with room for a bit of action.

Following the events of Star Trek 2009's destruction of Romulus (as the last on-screen canon events of the prime timeline), the biggest crises would be the massive power shift following that. The theme for the Romulans right from the start was if they were not driven to be enemies of the Federation, it's possible they could be friends. However they're not good at making friends even with continuing improvements in relations seen before that and following the Dominion War.

Lacking the kind of beat-down Cardassia had, the Romulan people still have a lot of pride despite having to go so far as to call for Federation aid through Spock (who was seen as very dangerous by his supporters and detractors for his reform efforts). The destruction of the core of their empire's population and fleet yards has a massive effect. The leadership and most of the fleet could easily have escaped the destruction but their legitimacy and ability to hold on to power is greatly in question, the core facilities are gone and the empire is thrown into chaos.

The Federation is attempting to deal with a continuing mess that extends far beyond their boarders and the Romulans. Having lead the coalition to victory they're stuck in a role of mediators and peacekeepers amongst the victors, the shadow of the Dominion War is decades long. Star Fleet whilst not engaged in full scale war, is still stretched thin attempting to deal with the ongoing situation, including an influx of those wanting UFP protection/membership, including those that are technically in rebellion against powers the UFP is on ok terms with, which is more than a bit politically inconvenient.

This is a war-hardened, somewhat more inward-looking UFP, but still keeping to the ideals. Yet having to be restrained since they're having trouble with what they have, even without external pressures. It's the Superman dilemma; they have massive power but quite simply cannot be everywhere they're needed any more, and they still need to look after themselves. The Star Fleet is massive, yet still not enough to do everything. And perhaps it can't ever be enough on it's own. Unconventional methods clash hard with traditional idealists and proponents of military strength and expansion. Outright war is not on the horizon, but that doesn't make it peaceful by any means.

The Klingons would be fucking loving the Romulan's situation. However with Martok's chancellorship they're likely to be somewhat restrained from all-out invasion. Elements of internal conflict there as the classic, gradually self-destructive, greedy empire struggles against the attempts of Martok to restructure in a way to limit the individual power of the houses to make war, similar to the Tokugawa Shogunate.

And with the long-standing resentment between Klingons and Romulans, the Chancellor is very hard pressed to restrain those great houses that have not yet been brought under central control from constantly making trouble (read: they've gone off viking) for the Romulans and for his regime.

The Cardassians are in extended rebuilding, still not too UFP-friendly (they did fight and lose a major war, but many think they deserved it at this point) but are not antagonistic. They're equivalent to post-WW2 Germany if there were no Soviets on the doorstep. There are a lot of smaller powers are always ready to nibble at the fringes of their space, leading to UFP intervention to try and prevent dozens of brushfire wars, not at all always successfully.

The Breen retreated in fear of reprisals that never came following the war, and suffer much internal upheaval despite the lack of invading armies on the doorstep. What comes out of the end of it could easily be a major plot development if they chose to assert their position.

The Ferengi... remain the Ferengi, though have moved into a slightly different model than their unrestrained free-agent capitalism. There's more central state control through incentives, greed is tempered with a bit more responsibility towards those that provide (in the name of increased productivity through healthier, happier workers). They're not going socialist, but after Rom's short-lived tenure as Grand Nagus lead to outright uprisings and violence from all angles, things have calmed down with a shift in the status-quo mediating things back to a workable norm.

The Borg are a non-threat for now. They're the kind of villain that needs to be saved for OH SHIT factor, which they lost pretty much all of with Voyager.

The Dominion are dealing with their own mess. Actually outright losing a war yet not getting exterminated as they fully expected (their enemy even preventing their demise) has lead to a lot of self-reflection amongst the Changelings. But suffice to say: they will adapt. One big upset isn't going to radically change the course for them, but it will cause a change in approach.
Their future may not lay in wholesale violent conquest, certainly not in the Alpha Quadrant anyway given the massive strategic weak-point the Wormhole was and the capabilities of their opposition. Contact will certainly be maintained though.

But with the advent of the Quantum Slipstream drive, they won't be sufficiently isolated forever.

Speaking of STO, updating is over and new featured episode is here.

Incidently, those novels - the Rise of the Federation - are fantastic, and should all be read.

This fills me with nothing but dread

Wait, is Sela psychic? That's exactly from my captain and I would say.

IT'S TEMPORAL SHIT BUBBLES TIME!
No Daniels no!

I'm not sure why, but I found the whole mission oddly sentimental.

Yeah, it wasn't bad. An actually...good note for her to end up on. She even apologized for instinctually barking orders at one point.

>Enterprise being canon for anything

The older I get, the less I'm willing to be "fair" about this.

>The Breen retreated in fear of reprisals that never came following the war, and suffer much internal upheaval despite the lack of invading armies on the doorstep

Why? The Breen are portrayed as hard, cold, and disciplined motherfuckers. They wouldn't lose their heads or fumble about. Also, the Klingons would at least consider raiding Breen space where they could, especially without the empire to stop them.

Yeah, the Breen would probably realize that the Federation is in no shape to launch a punitive expedition, especially not against a faction that entered the war so late and is probably still in decent shape.
They'd probably set up a show of force at their borders and wait for the Feddies to make some diplomatic overtures.
Who knows, after the dust has settled and Starfleet is stretched thin, they might even test out how many liberties they can take with the Federation without causing serious opposition.

I'd say it's more political upheavals rather than violent, they were on the losing side of a war and did directly piss off the UFP by attacking Earth directly, when previously they'd merely been somewhat hostile but withdrawn. Then they had their one tech advantage countered within a few months, which means a big upheaval in their ship design as their wonder-weapon was simply worked around. A series of choices which seemed logical at the time turned out to be very bad given the results, and that's going to inevitably cause them concern and a lot of reflection on the lessons of the entire affair, all the successes and failures. Changes of leadership in many core positions could change their character if not radically, at least noticeably.

Fear of reprisals is only sensible, as the smart thing to do would have been to neuter their warmaking capacity. But with the UFP war-weary, the political will to drive it isn't there. But. I do think Klingons absolutely would be raiding them (and probably more than a few very angry Cardassians and the Romulans too, up to a point), however with Martok at the helm I think he'd be against an all-out war following the losses incurred previously. He'd use it to wear down the more rebellious houses by giving them a decent target that can fight back, but since the Breen did lose a lot of ships in the war, and their major advantages of strategic surprise and the ship-disabling weaponry, are not in a position to go to war, which would in turn force Martok to commit the forces he would be attempting to marshal to institute a more centralised control, taking the Empire back to it's TOS/TMP era form in many ways, but with the honour culture still present.

Narratively, the Breen are there to provide a bit of a wildcard for the future. Once things have calmed down for them, they could be in a very interesting position to exploit power vacuums and join in continued opposition to the UFP and others.

It's that or space dildoes.

OY VEY!

I don't even know how to respond to that to be honest.

Image if the Breen started making Jem'Hadar.

>A series of choices which seemed logical at the time turned out to be very bad given the results, and that's going to inevitably cause them concern and a lot of reflection on the lessons of the entire affair, all the successes and failures.

They sided with the guy they thought was going to win, but they ended up not winning. Of the six main powers of the war, the Breen probably suffered the least by far. Furthermore, they seem like a pretty intractable and The only "lesson" they would have learned is to fear the Federation, and that only takes about a generation to forget.

Thankyou to whichever one of you recommended the Garak novel to me a couple threads back. I just finished it and I must say I'm surprised with how engaging it was.

Fearing the Federation is a good lesson to last for just a generation, gives them opportunity to come back in a big way later.

Being on the losing side of a war, even though they didn't lose any territory that we know of, they did get promised a hell of a lot, and the Dominion used them. That's going to end some careers of high-ups no matter how they spin it, and cause change. Even if that change is just same old shit, but never that one thing again. For long enough for people to forget that one thing was supposed to change.

In story terms that lets there be a bit of an exploration of them as a people, since the Breen are if going by on-screen appearances only, really fucking mysterious. It also lets them remain mysterious until they reappear, just a few mentions here and there and some bits of action with skirmishing against Klingons, Romulans, and a few other rogues. There's plenty of potential in having them as a minor villain that could still be incredibly dangerous just due to their not losing much from the war.

The Breen are one of very few races that are portrayed as irredeemable pricks. Even mainstay villains, like the Cardassians, are shown to be humanisable. The Breen never show even a modicum of remorse or pity.

I suppose their design lends itself towards dehumanisation. Masked, uniformed creatures with a language so different that even the universal translator struggles to render it intelligible.

>irredeemable pricks

Which is great, good to have a couple of those around for contrast even in Star Trek. They do present problems though in including them in setting development. Remove any of the mystery, make them understandable in motives beyond being pure assholes... and they have lost everything they had and what comes in its place better be fucking great. This keeps them fairly incidental. Their inclusion in the Dominion war as latecomer allies in it to capitalise on another's victory is about as good as I think they can be done without quite easily spoiling everything. Not good for a main villain, really handy for odd incidents and supporting roles.

A Stitch in Time? Not the guy who recomended it, but yeah, Robinson did a pretty fantastic job with it. Definitely meshes well with everything we see of Garak in the series.

Fortuitously, it isn't up to you.

The Corps of Engineers books are pretty tongue-in-cheek. Not quite parody, but very much taking inspiration from episodes like "The Trouble With Tribbles" or "A Piece of the Action" more than anything. Or Star Trek IV, I suppose.

The sillier (and generally better, in my opinion) part of Star Trek.

I actually bought that book in because of the description (used book store, not new, hell no), along with one of the earlier anthologies. Takes place well before the Destiny garbage, so that's nice. Short stories and novellas too, so there isn't the hemming, hawing, and overdrawn issues you get in the proper novels. A bit of libtardation, but nothing distracting so far. Also, a grumpy tellarite, and a blue spider-thing that sounds like she'd be pretty moe.

...

Remind me a lot of TAS, desu. Silly in a totally serious way. Usually.

I'm not a fan of them because it irritates me that the Corps of Engineers has them running around using a Saber, rather than literally any other class of ship.

Apparently Robinson wrote a lot of it as a journal to assist in his characterisation of Garak. Pretty great, all in all.

Why not a Sabre? she's a perfectly serviceable ship.

Not that guy but the Sabre is a small patrol vessel, doesn't seem like it has the appropriate tonnage for hauling all the cargo and stuff that an Engineering focused team would need. Something more on the order of an Excelsior or larger, tricked out with better engines, hauling a giant replicator, maybe even an entire extra reactor for serious power output, Galaxy-class tier tractor beams, deflector and ton of cargo space seems more appropriate.
They're basically disaster management so it comes off like they got stuck in a small van when really they'd need a full fire engine.

Actually a slightly modified Galaxy-class engineering hull, no saucer section would basically be perfect in my eyes. All the useful bits, none of the excess.

You could easily turn a Sabre into an engineering support ship. All she is is a hull with an unusual shuttlebay, her interior is entirely at the discretion of her build team and Starfleet command. Given that she's more or less the same size as a Miranda, I don't see why she couldn't be repurposed as deemed necessary.

Could be worse. Could be a Norway class.

I always imagined them as the type to tool around in a Nebbie, or more likely an old Excelsior or Ambassador mad max'd up to the eyeballs in improvised repairs and """improvements"""

You could. However, it's like the weirdness of when the Defiant was being used for science stuff. Technically capable but other than for production reasons... why?

Thematically it makes more sense to have a vessel that appears more fitting. Ships are characters after all. Sabre is small and fighty looking, an engineering ship should be more chunky and irregular. Like Scotty once he got fat.

...You have a point.

This basically. Plus they've got a crew of like 30 people on board, which, even with the fact that Starfleet's engineers are miracle workers, is not enough manpower.

The model is closer to a corvette/light destroyer in size, rather than the Miranda's pocket cruiser.

>Destroyer
>Diplomacy Enhanced

That does seem to fall back to being Starfleet's negotiating tactic of choice, as seen in Insurrection with the Enterprise-E being send on diplomacy missions in the middle of the Dominion War...with one of the most advanced warships in the fleet.

Alright, /stg/, since we've been bouncing ideas back and forth about how we'd do the novels and/or STO, here's a challenge for you all: how would you """fix""" one of the infamously atrocious Trek episodes? The tough part is, you can't just tear it down and start from the top - you have to keep what made it awful, but pull off an episode that's at least mildly amusing through the execution.

BEGINNER
TNG: Shades of Grey
>Clip show: compulsory
>Shitty excuses about Riker's infection: optional

EASY
>ENT: These Are The Voyages
>Sudden fast-forward to late pre-UFP/early UFP era: compulsory
>"it's a hologram": compulsory
>Shitty "moral dilemma" and insertion into an "ehhhh" TNG episode: optional

MEDIUM
DS9: Profit and Lace
>Crossdressing Ferengi: compulsory
>Ferengeminists: compulsory
>Everything else: optional

HARD
TOS: Spock's Brain
>The line "Brain! And brain! What is brain?!" : compulsory
>The initial premise: compulsory
>Everything else: optional

GODMODE
VOY: Threshold
>Warp 10 barrier "attempt": compulsory
>Shitty shuttle: compulsory
>Shitty engineering explanation: compulsory
>Paris and Janeway have an "incident": compulsory
>Bullshit psuedoscience magic that means it doesn't work properly: compulsory
>Bullshit explanation that means they can't get home with it: compulsory

RICK BERMAN MODE
>SPESS LIZARDS: compulsory

If anyone wants to have a go or tweak the conditions, go ahead.

>Warp 10 barrier "attempt": compulsory
Is "warp 10 = infinite speed" compulsory or can we redefine that? Because all you need to do is redefine warp 10, then handwave everything else.

>Not that guy but the Sabre is a small patrol vessel, doesn't seem like it has the appropriate tonnage for hauling all the cargo and stuff that an Engineering focused team would need.
1st: The Saber is not a patrol vessel, at least not any more or less than any other starship we've seen. Besides the Defiant and the Galaxy, we know of no specific "roles" for TNG+ ships. Everything, including the Nebula being a sciency-ship, is fannon. Just because the only time we've seen it is fighting (First Contact, and maybe in the Dominion War scenes) doesn't mean that's its job.
2nd: The SCE team in the novels are mechanics, not construction workers, just like the rest of the engineers we've seen in Trek. They need a tricorder and a tool kit to do their job most of the time, and much of the rest of the time it's a small generator, a set of pattern enhancers, and so on. This is a (small) team of problem-solvers and consultants, and if there's a big construction project or whatever, they contract it out or make the locals do it. It's a small team (not even the whole crew of the ship) so they don't need a big ship, just something big enough to carry their stuff and fast enough in case of emergencies.
The whole point of Warp 10 is that it is infinite speed. And that is literally the whole point of the episode, even if it was treated in a full-retard manner.

>Shades of Grey
Since I'm not bound by being a TV show that's run out of the season's budget, I include 'clips' of Riker's life before the Enterprise into the mix, alleviating the biggest problem and turning it into an interesting character piece exploring Riker's earlier life, more of his relationship with Troi, his dad, the loss of his mother, some time he spent on his previous assignments (I think he worked with both Geordie and Pulaski at some point before being on the Enterprise?).

>These are the Voyages
Remove TNG episode, pull a Babylon 5 season 4 ending in that it's documentation by future historians. Just do everything better, don't kill characters, happy endings for all (more or less) and HAVE THE DAMN SPEECH ARCHER WAS GOING TO GIVE AND MAKE IT FUCKING GREAT.

>Profit and Lace
Remove farce. Make the horrific levels of sexism actually intimidating. Go through it with consultants to cover angles I probably won't get because I'm not a woman or transgender. Have Dax/Kira as serious influences on Quark not fucking Rom and Lyta (he's always liked very strong women despite his professed traditional Ferengi values) because damn it, he's a proven to know what he is doing, and is not an amateur. This is a big deal that could make him a hell of a lot of money if he plays it right. The episode should be Quark the cunning with no other option, not Quark the moron surrounded by morons playing for comedy.
It's a preachy episode, there's no way to remove that from the basic premise, might as well try and get it 'right'. And fuck that 'some people are ok with sexual harassment' ending..

>Spock's Brain
I ironically enjoy this episode as something of a self-parody that is still way better than the actual genuinely bad episodes of TOS like The Apple.

>Threshold
I... Fuck this one is going to need a while.

*I unironically enjoy that should be.

It's played so straight it's brilliant. to make it more comedy or more serious would ruin it

>Shades of Grey
It's a "Lower Decks" type thing where the redshirts and bridge extras are BSing about stuff that happened on their shifts, trying to one-up each other.
>TATV
It's Tom and Harry doing one of their date nights, and Harry picked the program.
>Profit and Lace
Play it completely straight, like a normal episode. And then have Yakity Sax during the chase scene.
>Spock's Brain
They just cart Spock around on a cart - most of the badness is from walking him around like a remote-controlled toy. And also all the natives are cavemen, not just the males.
>Threshold
It turns out this method has been tried before - it's not original Tommy Stu. Some part of the method causes humans to mutate (not "evolve") into salamanders (other ayys turn into other types of salamanders, or just die), and this is known. Saint Tom, though, thinks he has a way to fix it so that doesn't happen. But, just this once, his hubris bites him in the ass, and he turns into a salamander too. However, because it's Tom, the process is reversible this time because particles or something. The whole time Paris and Janeway are perfectly aware of their actions, but can do nothing to control them, and therefore it's decided that it's too horrifying a method to use to get home. Also for some reason Paris's method can't be scaled up to Voyager, so everyone would be permanently salamanders anyways.

Will post one for threshold in a bit, I posted a short fix last thread but I've since thought it out further. Need to get back to my laptop before I can fully detail it.

Behold my flashlight of doom!

Get a Breen shield on that shit and then screenshot it at high warp.

I don't have that, but im gonna give you the next best thing.

youtube.com/watch?v=DYE3nm9voUk

>The whole point of Warp 10 is that it is infinite speed. And that is literally the whole point of the episode, even if it was treated in a full-retard manner.
Thing is, the episode's main premise would work just as fine if it was any other "threshold." The basics are "Tom does a thing that nobody else does, it fucks him up, he kidnaps Janeway and fucks her up too, the crew discovers them and unfucks them, tech doesn't work because they don't want everyone to get fucked up, everyone laughs at the end." That "threshold" being infinite speed is actually an ultimately irrelevant part of the episode.

- Warp 10 is defined as an arbitrary speed wherein conventional post-Excelsior warp drives have a power drain approaching infinity.
- Voyager encounters a species with more advanced warp tech and tries to adapt that tech to Voyager.
- The process creates weird-ass mutating radiation, turning Tom and Janeway into salamanders.
- Once they're un-salamandered and all the kinks are worked out, it's actually applied to Voyager just fine. It just shave a couple decades off their trip because they can go faster, instead of being able to send them to Earth instantaneously.

Cruising at steady transwarp 12.34.

youtube.com/watch?v=U4WiyxXpyZc

Wonder if i could melt a cruisers hull with these warp trails...

Bet they didn't even notice me zipping past em!

Probably should've made things clearer - addendums to the rule-y stuff:

TNG: SoG
>Still has to be a clip show in the sense the original was, you just have to find a better excuse to be flashing back and forth to old footage

ENT: TATV
>The "muh historical record" has to be viewed from the setting from another series, but not necessarily TNG
>Archer can make his damn speech, though, because I really wanted that too

VOY: Threshold
>Warp 10 is infinite velocity
>There needs to be a deus ex at the end that sets things right but still stops them from using it to get home

Didn't catch (You) when quoting , sorry

And on my way home, i just transwarp tunnel at transwarp factor 29.99

Try passing through a solar system with the sun behind the camera. It gines much better craft detail.

>>TATV
>It's Tom and Harry doing one of their date nights, and Harry picked the program.
Not him, but this is simple and actually works pretty well.
Bonus points if it's another forced-but-heartwarming "Best Girl couldn't care less about humanity but by the credits she wants to be a real girl" episode

Sure, one last pic.

Damn, that was harder than i thought, had to take multiple pictures and pass the sun several times till the glitchy game gave me a shot with the ship and not just a warp trail flying by itself

Well hell, one more for the road.

This time without any of those fancy future technologies strapped on it.

Why the hell is the cockpit glowing like that?

Well in that case, the end of the episode reveals that none of the warp tech shenanigans actually worked, the entire incident was staged by an advanced alien as an experiment to see how humans would react to encountering what they believed to be an impossibility. The rest of the episode is written with that in mind.

I seriously can't think of any other asspull that would make the episode better while still holding onto the core premise. At least with this you can rewrite it into a "charting the unknown possibilities of existence" story.

How are you supposed to fix anything when bound to the core problems without being able to at least alter said problems in a way that makes them better? There's only so much that can be done to polish a turd. If anything making them better written just makes them overall worse through sheer frustration of keeping the fucktarded parts in their entirety.

Threshold is already that. Apart from the premise, it's a solidly mediocre episode where the performances and dialog for the most part work just fine. Change the Warp 10 crap to some bullshit anomaly Paris runs into and gets mutated by, and it's not nearly as bad an episode because the stupidity is at least in line with the expected kind that Voyager had on a regular basis.

Because there is no deflector array on that thing and that light is supposed to come out of that thing.

I've been having a go at Threshold for a bit, and although I'm going to dump the lizard shit, how does this sound:

>The whole "Warp 10 is infinite speed" thing still goes on
>Instead of "we found go-faster dilithium", they made some kinda engineering breakthrough where they've developed a meta-stable warp shell (or some shit like that) that won't tear apart at that kind of speed
>Paris tries it out for a few low-power runs, seems promising
>For the proper test, Janeway insists on being there and shit
>sanic.mp3
>They keep going
>They keep going faster
>They can't stop going faster
>The shell is too stable to shut down, and they just keep accelerating
>They pass through Borg space
>They pass into the AQ
>They pass Earth
>They still keep accelerating
>Eventually, at the limits of their instruments, the shuttle itself is breaking apart at the molecular/atomic/quantum scale
>Just as it's about to undergo critical existence failure, Paris and Janeway wake up on a road in a rather suspiciously familiar-looking desert
>By the standards of the Q Continuum, they just invented the wheel
>getoffmylawn.wav
>They suddenly get bamf'd back onto Voyager possibly as lizards, without the shuttle (and all of Tom's work) nowhere to be seen.
>They don't exactly remember what happened, but figure it's probably not a good idea to try it again.

tl;dr: Tau Zero, but with a De Lancie Ex Machina. How did I do?

>There's only so much that can be done to polish a turd.
>If anything making them better written just makes them overall worse through sheer frustration of keeping the fucktarded parts in their entirety.
I feel like that's the point, user.

...That would actually be a good premise.

>Tau Zero, but with a De Lancie Ex Machina
Huh. Seems to be the perfect Voyager formula of a great premise, disastrous writing and development, and an execution almost good enough to salvage it. I rate Annorax/10

That would have been a good or at least better episode.

I dare say it would actually have been entertaining. It would have given Q a reason to be interested in Voyager beyond "by random chance we ran into a funny looking rock containing one of them".

The Q could have been a lingering and subtle game of spot the Easter Egg after that until they show up properly a few seasons later. Just odd shit in the background like an old family photo in the background that has an extra figure in a red star fleet uniform in it in one scene and not the next as an example. Sort of Christopher Eccleston season Dr Who with the Bad Wolf but first.

>>Shades of Grey
>It's a "Lower Decks" type thing where the redshirts and bridge extras are BSing about stuff that happened on their shifts, trying to one-up each other.

This would be the greatest Trek episode of all time.

Use only redshirts and extras, add the obligatory clips, and mix it all with the thinking behind Something Awful's Blue Stripe Logs.

Start with peons grousing in their tiny crowded berthing compartments. One brings up some famous incident and we see the clip. Another asks if everyone wants to know what REALLY happened and we get a vignette showing the same incident in which the main crew is at their absolute, smug, asinine, insufferable worst and only succeeds through shit blind luck.

Another peon says "That's nothing, remember this?" We get a clip and then the real story. You can probably get 3 or 4 vignettes into a standard episode's length.

Think of it as Rashomon meets Star Trek.

Huh, you're right - I forgot how early on Threshold was, but Q easter eggs would've linked into that and set up the later episodes super well.

Okay, I guess Im stupid, And havent followed STO at all in a while, but how did you get a flyable Phoenix?

After, no joke, deleting my entire scenario by accident, here it is:

Paris and Torres sift through a number of new acquisitions from friendly alien traders. Paris becomes fixated with a particular piece of propulsion tech that could seemingly solve one of the longest enduring problems that Starfleet has faced.

Paris presents his case to the senior officers. Within the post-Cochranian model, warp 10 is a functionally infinite speed, allowing for instantaneous travel anywhere in the universe. The issue faced by Starfleet is overcoming the instability of higher warp bands. As the logarithmic warp scale increases, so too do the subspace eddies associated with warp travel.

Eventually, Janeway agrees to allow Paris to test out this new technology in a shuttle. Starfleets present warp speed record is 9.95. If he can breach that, he will be allowed to attempt further test flights.

Paris accelerates through warp factors with ease, breaking the 9.95 limi. However his shuttle continues to accelerates and seems to disappear from realspace for a short period of time before reappearing, adrift. Janeway has Paris transported to sickbay. An inspection of the shuttle shows that the internal sensors clocked an acceleration of infinite magnitude. Warp 10.

Paris seems to have been exposed to a far-beyond-lethal amount of chronoton radiation, seemingly separating him from linear reality. He now experiences all versions of reality simultaneously. The doctor believes he will die very soon but can't develop a cure for him. The captain takes it upon herself to stay with Paris as he approaches death.

Paris becomes increasingly irritable, blaming Janeway for his impending death. The captain accepts blame, but even this enough. With blinding speed, a maddened, multi-corporeal Paris breaches his containment, disables the doctor and accosts Janeway. The captain awakes onboard the shuttle, as Paris accelerates them toward warp 10.

The pair of them materialise within a multiverse of possibilities. Paris shows Janeway the horrifying improbability of her decision. in 99.9999% of all realities, humanity never founds the federation. Within 99.9999% again, the Voyager is never stranded in the delta quadrant. Worse still, in all but a mathematically unchartable number of realities, Voyager never returns home. Paris proclaims Janeway a butcher before their spell within the multiverse comes to an end.

Both of them wake in sickbay, hours later. The doctor and Tuvok have found a way to dissipate the chronoton radiation within their cells. After an awkward confrontation, Paris begins talking about refining the process. Before he can continue, TUvok interrupts. Neither he nor the captain ever truly breached the warp 10 barrier. Rather than reaching a higher band of subspace, the shuttle simply ceased existing within the universe. Seemingly there is some sort of previously unknown barrier between traditional warp and infinite velocity.

Without the capacity to safely accelerate through this new band of "trans-warp", warp 10 will be unattainable. (setting up the discovery of slipstream drive later on.)

Well im just using a hologram generator on my runabout.

The generator was a gift from a first contact day event where you had to build mini-phoenix and then race it against other players.
By doing this you got a holographic bust of Zefram cochrane which you could turn in for some dilithium, marks, deployable phoenix mini rocket (ground only) and the hologram generator which works in combat too and never runs out of charges.

The bad news? The event ended yesterday.

Of course it did...FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Yeah, wouldn't have matteredif you had come around yesterday, or the daybefore or the day before the day before, because you needed 4 of those things to get the thing.
Now i guess your hope is going to rest on a phoenix box, whenever those come around again.

Nice work getting dubs constantly btw.

Well its not like I'm trying to get dubs.

I think it's worn off now.

Yea.

oh hey, Wikipedia's article on Yesterday's Enterprise is the current new featured article.

Pretty metal

...

>walk back tac balance fixes
>nerf torps and science

Huh. Fitting.

Amazing. Torpedoes were already useless.

Remember that time the Klingons wanted to get Worf extradited to them based on nothing more than, "He looks and acts like a Klingon, therefore he should be subject to Klingon law,"?