/STG/ - Star Trek General

I really want to get it. Do you have any comments on the game? Stuff you thought was good? Bad?

Emergency Bump.

Of all the various competing empires around the Federation, which would it be the least terrible to get conquered by?

None of them would be that great really, they're all prone to taking slaves for hard manual labor. It's been said that the Federation has been desperate for a slave race they can use without feeling bad and hence why they go after robots and holograms. The neighboring empires such as the Klingons, Romulans and so on don't give a shit about feeling morally superior and will just take you as a slave. They have other ways of feeling good about themselves.

after being established as a separate race theyd do all they can to distinguish themselves from vulcans though right so similar designs would be considered a no-go

Soyuz parts when? Thomas made the Saratoga "sensor" parts fire beam weapons so I can't wait for the "sensor pods" on the Soyuz be my new megaphaser turrets.

In the long term, yes, however their technology stems from the same root. Meaning the earliest Romulan vessels must have used warp-ring assemblies.

I think they're out already, but only for the T6 version.

Romulans, maybe? They seem to be cool with allowing colonies of other species live out their lives in Romulan space under supervision. Not to mention allowing humans to join their military. Wouldn't be ideal but it's better than living on a Klingon game reserve or in a Cardassian labour camp.

T6 fleet variant ship has them.
Good luck grinding that thing open.

The Dominion. So long as you don't start getting ideas the Dominion would leave you alone, albeit in the ruins of your civilisation.

Why do I desperately want a series about Elim Garak, a spy series. Or maybe some series relating to Section 31.

Section 31 will never not be portrayed as hands wringingly evil, despite their job not being all that different from Starfleet Intelligence.

If you're attending GenCon, I'd grab it there. The Ferengi and Cardassian expansions will also be at the con, as well as possibly the Borg expansion.

So, there's a few balance issues. The Romulans are way too good at sneak attacks due to their cloak (combat is normally simultaneous, but if Romulans initiate, they get a special surprise round where the other guy doesn't get to return fire). Klingons are a little underpowered feeling though it is hard to pin down exactly why. The Feds seem basically balanced.

The gameplay is generally really good though, lots of variance and flavor to be had. They've crammed flavor into every nook and crannie of the game which is pretty sweet. The command system (to give orders) works smoothly and easily, as does movement and exploration. It's a well put together game with a lot of good ideas. If you're a Star Trek fan (and you're in this thread so I assume you are) and a board game fan then it's well worth a pick up.

Automation gets rid of the need for slaves though. I can buy Klingons using slaves as a cultural thing though

They aren't spies. They are a private conspiracy answerable to know one that commit crimes to advance their political agenda...

So basically terrorists.

Considering how absolutely terrible the Starfleet Admiralty is on its best day, not answering to anyone actually in the chain of command may be for the best. Or should we talk about how half the flag officers in San Francisco had brain parasites and that never came up in screenings?

Have you tried Cardassians or Ferengi? I've been reading up on their rules and it seems like the Cardassians can counter the Romulans pretty well by negating their cloaking bonus.

>Or should we talk about how half the flag officers in San Francisco had brain parasites and that never came up in screenings?
Or the fucking military coup the admiralty tried in DS9.

Plus, you know, if not for Section 31, the Dominion wouldn't have had the rushed sense of urgency it felt to win the war (because they wouldn't have needed to find a cure for the Founders), and it's likely they wouldn't have made so many mistakes and could well have actually won the war.

So, you know, Section 31 basically single-handedly swung the war in the Federation's favour, while doing nothing significantly more morally wrong than, say, Sisko murdering a Romulan senator to get them to join the war (or using chemical weapons against a planet because he was really, really pissed at a Canadian).

Yes, fucking hell. I just really want to see a darker show. Or maybe a star trek show from the point of an alien ship.

I have been marathoning DS9 for the first time while I'm sick.

I got all the way to season 7, episode 15.

I am not continuing this show.

I am sick to death of Vic Fontaine. This joke character inserted into every fucking episode. Becoming a major character for no reason. Time spent on him instead of characters I've grown attached to since season 1. What the fuck happened? Can anyone explain how this happened?

My friend told me the finale happens at Vic's.

I can not finish this show.

Am I wrong?

Is there any fucking way around the glitch in Dragon's Deceit? I've restarted it five times now.

The brain parasites were stopped.

The military coup consisted of like one admiral and the officers personally loyal to him. And he wasn't even able to actually attempt the coup - if he had, he probably would have been turned on by every other Starfleet officer in the Fleet.

Christ, you people just do not get Star Trek. These people are specifically meant to be aberrations, unusual situations. And both required outside manipulation and alien interference regardless.

>Section 31

I will never get over the fact that Babylon 5's Shadow War had a more Star Trek-esque ending than DS9's Dominion War.

Finish it. Vic doesn't play too big a role after "Badda Bing Badda Bang". He appears in scenes but I don't recall him getting as much screen time. You're on the cusp of a bunch of really good Damar/Garak heavy episodes.

You're a massive faggot.
>I'm going to quit at the end because of one character
>even though I made it through the much worse S1
Yes, the ENTIRE FINALE takes place at Vic's, and all they do is sing and dance. Every arc throughout the show is forgotten you wish. Just ten episodes of Vic's.

>The brain parasites were stopped.
Not before a number of captains, ships and crews were lost, and if the Borg hadn't replaced the parasites, the Federation would have been invaded by them. Which was TNG's weakness. Events like the one in Conspiracy should be major deals, but nope, they're never followed up on.

>Christ, you people just do not get Star Trek. These people are specifically meant to be aberrations, unusual situations. And both required outside manipulation and alien interference regardless.
Aside from their mandate and their shtick, Section 31 does pretty much everything the SIC should be doing, because the former seems to actually know shit about the Dominion that's important. Yes they're an aberration, but intelligence work isn't just tuning your Excelsior's sensors into Praxis FM and picking up all you need to know.

For the record, Baddabing Baddabang has no bearing on the rest of the series. If it really depolarises your neutrinos that much, just skip it, you'll really not miss anything.

It's a weakness of the Star Trek writers that Starfleet Intelligence were shit at their jobs. It's part of the same lazy writing that means that protagonists are the only competent members of Starfleet and Admirals are usually evil.

My tabletop Starfleet Intelligence will actually be seen to be doing their jobs (usually by sending the crew classified updates and occasionally recruiting them for missions)

I agree, which is a shame when the setting is ripe for all of the concepts a SIC game entails. Aside from a section of space where the show could be like the Triangle.

The brain parasites didn't go over well with audiences, so they were dropped as antagonists. And remember we only had the brain parasites at all because the Ferengi didn't go over well as villains.

> Section 31 does pretty much everything the SIC should be doing

But they do it without government organization or oversight, which makes it super-illegal. Like, monumentally so, to the point of them basically being a terrorist organization.

Like, an organization like that, with the mindset that it has, should FUCK UP a lot. I can easily see the like three members of Section 31's Shadow Council somehow reaching the conclusion that the Klingons are up to something and so they need to weaken the Klingons and so try and do something, and instead end up making the situation worse. Not to mention that without the resources of a government at their hands, they should be shit at their jobs and played like fiddles by actual intelligence organizations or even just high-ranking regular government envoys.

Actually, exactly that happened in Enterprise, and it was the most realistic depiction of Section 31 ever.

>HARRIS: You agreed that both our governments would benefit if the two of us worked together!
>KRELL: And you believed me.

>but intelligence work isn't just tuning your Excelsior's sensors into Praxis FM and picking up all you need to know.

I agree that Starfleet Intelligence puts too much effort into SIGINT and not enough into HUMINT. That is a failing of SI. It's not a reason to have Section 31.

Sooner or later Section 31 is going to do something "in the interests of the Federation" that ends up getting the Federation dragged into a war that could have been avoided if someone had just been around to tell the Section "no".

Responsibility and oversight. That's what Section 31 lacks, and the reason why I hate it. That, and the fact that its claims, if true, make all of Star Trek a fundamental lie.

>That, and the fact that its claims, if true, make all of Star Trek a fundamental lie.
How so? Because it violates GENE'S VISION, that all humanity has left its demons in the past, and that all conflict is because of outside forces? That somehow human nature was overcome?
Do you somehow believe that the hopeful future depicted in all of Trek somehow is invalidated, because of one organization, known only to a very few, that doesn't seem to be very big, or do very much? That the leaky utopia somehow doesn't have people to maintain that utopia?
Do you think that somehow S31 wasn't portrayed as the villain? Even if that portrayal was incredibly ham-handed, and shown in contrast to the naiive goody-two-shoes idealism of Bashir and Archer?

Yes, because it violates Gene's vision, in a rather more fundamental way than anything else (which I can usually take - Trek VI violated Gene's vision and he absolutely hated it and wanted it decanonized (thankfully he died before he could attempt it), but it's my favorite Trek film and I think it fits in fine). Rather more specifically, the entire point of Star Trek is that people are just fundamentally better by its time period. That's its main draw that sets it apart from any other sci-fi show; not the technology, but the attitude and tone.

Section 31 claims that it's the main reason why the Federation can be a paradise, and we're not really given a reason to doubt that claim. The whole thing, the idea that people are just better, falls apart if the only reason why they're better isn't because we have chosen to become better, but rather because a terrorist organization is working from the shadows to eliminate the threats.

It's not really any different from the Federation achieving "peace" by just mass-producing genesis torpedoes and wiping out the Klingons. It's just more subtle. It still either way makes the whole thing a damn lie.

So, in conclusion, fuck Section 31, and fuck anyone who argues in support of their existence in Trek and thinks that the result of keeping them around is still Star Trek, instead of "Generic Military Space Opera #47"

I think their existence is justifiable, as long as they're clearly presented as bad guys in the same vein that Jackass Admiral Of The Week is presented as a bad guy (Pressman, Cartwright, Leyton, and so on). What DS9 flubbed on is that, while they were always presented as doing Bad Things, those Bad Things were never presented as being unnecessary to protecting the Federation until the very last episode, and even that easily went over the heads of most people. Especially when this is the same show that had Sisko trilithium-bomb planets until they were uninhabitable and pulled the Romulans into the war under a false flag operation.

>The military coup consisted of like one admiral and the officers personally loyal to him
You're also forgetting Star Trek 6. Where there was a Starfleet conspiracy to undermine a peace accord because they'd honestly just rather keep on fighting.

And who knows what else they've been up to when we weren't looking.

I'll bet that the conspiracy in ST6 was retconned into being Section 31 at some point.

Pretty sure every stupid-ass conspiracy was retconned to being S31 in the novels at some point, even shit like Kirk stealing the Romulan cloaking device. But those are the novels, which are mostly garbage.

>Not to mention that without the resources of a government at their hands
How the fuck were they able to manipulate Starfleet Medical to ensure data on the Founders was super mega top secret if they couldn't pull government (or at least military) strings? Not to mention Ross took Sloane to Romulus and actively helped his plot to fuck with the Romulan government succeed (even title-dropping "in times of war, the law falls silent" in defence of Section 31's actions). The top levels of Starfleet are clearly complicit with Section 31.

>the entire point of Star Trek is that people are just fundamentally better by its time period.

By TNG it looked very much like UFP society was the society from Demolition Man IN SPAAAACE! but for some reason gets a free pass.

Also they put children on frontier ships. There were 18(?) Constitution class ships. 5 were outright killed all hands lost, a number were decommissioned after severe damage that must have resulted in considerable casualties. If the other ships endured even half of what the Enterprise and it's crew endured then they over their years of service would have had fatalities numerous and exotic.

And then a desk jockey in Star Fleet HQ decides that this is a good place to raise children. The only explanation that could possibly be is that it was to motivate the crew because their fuck ups potentially kill their children. It's a horrible conclusion to reach but it's the only one that makes any sense.

Also Crystalline Entity and Star Fleets shitty handling of it.

I was right. Googled it and according to the novels it was Section 31 behind it all.

But the novels are generally terrible and I don't consider them canon

Sadly, you're correct. One of the novels made it an S31 plot that Cartwright was dragged into while the actual shooter (Commander Odo) was an S31 agent.

Not every stupid-ass conspiracy was S31. The Department of Temporal Investigations (plus an overzealous Admiral who actually bothered to read Kirk's reports) allocated the material to upgrade and refit the Enterprise because the ship's warp core and engines could reliably time travel.

That's just because the fucking idiot writing for Bashir wants to write spy novels, so that's ALL Bashir does now. Well did. After this most recent one, Bashir is catatonic and living with Garak on Cardassia Prime

>spoiler

And they expect us to believe they aren't gay lovers.

During the course of the novel, Bashir kills his waifu Sarina Douglas, and he was already in deep shit overall with the Federation anyway due to his role in curing the Andorian infertility issue. Though Garak was the top choice of guardian if Bashir couldn't take care of himself, so maybe he's gay for Garak too. Depressingly, Bashir roped Data and Lal into the plot too, so no doubt the quiet domestic shenanigans of the recent Data books are over.

>trek novels stopped being one-off adventures of various crews that don't affect anything else
>now they're all connected
>even the MU stuff

>and he was already in deep shit overall with the Federation anyway due to his role in curing the Andorian infertility issue

So Federation doesn't do humanitarian work any more? Because curing people and offering medical assistance sounds like the thing that the UFP is supposed to do.

Could someone please point out the salient differences between the Steamrunner, Akira, and Norway? They all seem like they could fulfill similar roles as late 24th century Mirandas.

The Myriad Universe short stories are pretty good. There's a continuation of Yesteryear, one where the Federation really does make a bunch of Soong-type slaves, leading to a schism between Data, Lore, the Federation and the Iconians. The weakest one is the one where Terra never joins the Federation because of Terra First from ENT.

He was using banned research related to the Genesis Project and protomatter to do so, and the Andorians were unaware of his efforts. It was SFC who were pissed off, though Bashir resigned his commission to give the Andorians the cure.

The Steamrunner was used in Armada as a torpedo platform that could launch the torps into Warp, but that's probably changed. The Akira was part of a new breed of Borg killer ships with either a shitload of Torpedo launchers, fighter bays, or both. The Norway never really got a shtick, though Starfleet Command 3 made it a heavy destroyer meant to hunt down the lighter Borg ships.

>beta canon
>anything other than cancer
I mean, in fairness, MU being connected would be more reasonable than everything else, but still...

I think he stole an ancient bioweapon to do it

Isn't there at least one TNG episode that establishes a precedent that Klingons basically just install a new planetary governor and then fuck off and leave things more or less alone? "The Mind's Eye"

Akira: Death by torpedo and/or fighter spam.
Steamrunner: Death by surgical long-range tricobolt torpedo strikes.
Norway: Death by short-range phase cannon bombardments.

There's also an episode of TOS where they stamp out disobedience with mass executions. So it's a mixed bag.

>The brain parasites didn't go over well with audiences, so they were dropped as antagonists.

It was a budget thing. Brain parasites were supposed to be the vanguard for big insect monsters, think like Zerg or Starship Troopers, or Species 8472. But they didn't have anywhere near the budget to do that with early 90s technology, so we got the Borg instead.

>Sooner or later Section 31 is going to do something "in the interests of the Federation" that ends up getting the Federation dragged into a war that could have been avoided if someone had just been around to tell the Section "no".

This was the basic premise of Into Darkness, wasn't it?

Guess it depends what time period we're being conquered by Klingons then. If it's TNG era and before "Way of the Warrior" they probably wouldn't even execute the current government, since Worf refers to that as "the old ways" when they do so on Cardassia.

Nope.

Section 31 was not the instigators or the ones holding the augments.

That was just Crazy Admiral Robocop.

Section 31 just happened to be a good target to get all the Admirals to meet in one place. Because a super secret organization like Section 31 would definitely have FUCK HUGE facility of no real purpose right underneath London.

Fuck that movie was flawed.

Crazy Admiral Robocop was part of Section 31.

Didn't Section 31 build the Vengeance, too? As a first-strike weapon against the Klingons?

>I will never get over the fact that Babylon 5's Shadow War had a more Star Trek-esque ending than DS9's Dominion War.
You mean leading a mixed battle fleet to Earth to force a coup from a facist government? The fuck are you talking about?

I think it's fair to assume that an Empire that was invading the federation would have rreverted to the old ways.

The Ferengi aren't out to try and weren't at Origins. The Cardies were at Origins but it was an expensive ticket-only event and I didn't get a chance to buy into it. It sounds like they can counter Romulans, but it doesn't do much for the balance of the game since the Cardies have fleet issues (due to only getting production with ships in orbit) and the counter-tech being a researched tech (like a 4 research one too), not a starting tech. I'm not impressed by their attempts at balancing the Romulans. Possible that the Ferengi and Cardassians actually add something serious to counter them though, which would be the hope.

...

As a furry myself, let me say, that is fucking terrible. The trend of inserting one's OC into existing franchises is just terrible and needs to stop, especially fetish characters like that one. Just... just fucking don't.

I think that's from the MMO. You can play a beastman (Ferasan) officer in the Klingon Empire. The MMO changes things up so conquered species occasionally become officers in the Klingon Empire's forces (but with the exception of player characters they tend not to advance very far since the Great Houses pretty much control who gets promoted and they promote Klingon nobles)

That explanation would hold weight if that was an actual Ferasan and not a generic furfag fat fetish blob.

>obvious catman
>obvious klink ship
>artist is nyzCAIT as in Caitian, as in the fed counterpart of Ferasans in STO
This is Veeky Forums, not /tv/ or /v/; please use your brain.

Wow, except those look absolutely nothing like how Caitians and Ferasans look in game.

>catman is also an obvious fat fetish blob in both available pictures
Seriously fool, it's a fetish pic. Maybe it was meant to be a Caitian or Ferasan, but it doesn't look right (and not for lack of material to base it on dammit) and is CLEARLY a fat fetish character. Also, I know this because:
>This is Veeky Forums, not /tv/ or /v/; please use your brain.
I did, moron. Learn to use yours yourself.

If I wanted to use my brain I wouldn't have dropped out of highschool now speak plainly you shitlord

I'm pretty sure he means NOW GET THE HELL OUT OF OUR GALAXY rather than roflstomping the Clark administration.

But user, that wasn't the end of B5, did you forget about Byron? How could you forget about everyones favorite lovable psychic that can do no wrong?

I choose to remember that arc as Lyta having a sex dream while she was in a medical coma recovering from the Shadow War.

>Seriously fool, it's a fetish pic. Maybe it was meant to be a Caitian or Ferasan, but it doesn't look right (and not for lack of material to base it on dammit) and is CLEARLY a fat fetish character.
Well, fanfic and fanart garbage often doesn't look like what it's supposed to be, but that doesn't change what it's supposed to be.
And I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a fat fetish. More like a fatass self-inserting.

Makes as much sense as anything else in that season.

The conspiracy in Trek VI was a spur-of-the-moment thing that didn't exist until the Praxis explosion and was the reaction of only a few members of the Admiralty to the situation. It hardly suggests any deep-seated problems with the Federation, just a few people not accepting what was, to them, a malign paradigm shift. Valeris even names all the conspirators, and it's seriously like six guys.

No, the worst part about Section 31 was that they claimed that they were integral to the Federation existing at all, and we're never given a reason to doubt that.

They probably have a few guys in the top levels, but as for example the situation with Krell and Section 31 in Enterprise shows (vis-a-vis Harris having no way to order the NX-01 back to Earth space), they don't have the kind of sweeping control necessary to really pull off their Conspiracy but try anyway.

>Also they put children on frontier ships.

The enitre point of "Q Who?" was that Starfleet had grown arrogant and complacent (or whichever one introduced the Borg, pretty sure it was "Q Who?"). Notice they stopped building cruise liners in space after Wolf 359. Their next iteration of deep space explorers, the Intrepid-class, didn't have non-Starfleet crew that we know of. This coincided with Starfleet's increasing militarization.

>It's a horrible conclusion to reach but it's the only one that makes any sense.

Remember that Starfleet is not intended to be a military force, but rather an exploratory one that simply does military work when necessary. After Khitomer, it's pretty obvious that Starfleet gradually phased back into being a purely exploratory division - and it's fine to take your families on those. The "desk jockey" was just thinking "man, these guys are going to get lonely charting gaseous anomalies. No reason why they can't bring their families along."

Section 31 built the Vengeance and was probably behind the finding of the Botany Bay (given that they did end up with Khan to build the Vengeance and design the long-range torpedoes). Section 31 was then blown up by Khan, which prompted a meeting of the Starfleet admiralty and gathering them together in one place, which he could attack. He then fled to Qo'noS, presumably knowing that Crazy Admiral Robocop would launch a strike against Qo'noS to kill him, which he would either a) die in but would result in a Federation-Klingon War, or b) he'd survive and thereby be in a good position to manipulate the Klingons, who are implied to be the militarily stronger power.

He didn't know that the other augments were still alive at the time and everything from getting Sulu's transmission onward is him improvising.

That is not the end of the Shadow War, numnuts, that's the end of the Earth Alliance Civil War.

The end of the Shadow War involved getting the Vorlons and the Shadows to actually engage each other in direct combat for once rather than attacking each other's proxies; than manipulating them into revealing their true intentions to all the younger races and revealing that the younger races would no longer fight in the Vorlon-Shadow conflict just so that the Vorlons or the Shadows could prove who's way was better, THEN getting the Vorlons and Shadows to both realize and admit that they've completely lost their way as teachers and guides to the younger races and that all that's going to happen if they keep acting the way they do is the elimination of all the younger races, rendering the entire question of who's way is better moot. Then, finally, getting the Vorlons and Shadows to willingly leave the Galaxy, admitting to themselves and others that the younger races have come as far as they need to and they don't need the First Ones anymore.

In other words - guile, diplomacy, and reasoning. The hallmarks of Star Trek.

Thanks for the B5 spoilers, asshole.

>The conspiracy in Trek VI was a spur-of-the-moment thing that didn't exist until the Praxis explosion and was the reaction of only a few members of the Admiralty to the situation. It hardly suggests any deep-seated problems with the Federation, just a few people not accepting what was, to them, a malign paradigm shift.
It's part of an overall pattern we see where there are far too many members of the "evil admiral" category for it to be mere coincidence. And I'm actually NOT counting Dougherty in this since forcibly relocating the excessively selfish "lol this is our planet, piss off" Ba'ku in order to save billions of lives in a wartime situation is actually defensible.

Seriously, between the conspiracy in ST6, the numerous admirals all willing to violate treaties at the drop of the hat (the Pegasus being most notable here), and the whole declaring martial law on Earth thing, Starfleet has a few too many "isolated incidents" for it NOT to be a systemic problem.

>Valeris even names all the conspirators, and it's seriously like six guys.
If those six guys are all at the top levels of the military and/or government, then that's a pretty fucking major problem.

I do not spoiler block a show that is around 20 years old, user. 2 years is my absolute limit.

>Starfleet has a few too many "isolated incidents"

That would depend a bit on the size of Starfleet, wouldn't it? I crunched some numbers a few weeks back and determined that the Federation encompasses an area of about 50.3 billion cubic lightyears and has over 200 million stars within it, and about 1,500 M-class planets, the majority of which are NOT Federation members. Starfleet is going to have more admirals than all the flag officers on Earth right now combined just to administer that space.

If you're curious - Picard in the movie First Contact says that the Federation is 8,000 light years across. Let's assume that's the diameter of a circle when viewed from "above" the Galaxy. The Galaxy is about 1,000 light years thick on average so that gives us a rough cylinder of 50.3 billion ly since I can't see why the Federation wouldn't expand "up and down" as much as possible. Assuming a stellar density like that of the Solar neighborhood (.004 stars per cubic light year), that gives us about 201.2 million stars. In TOS "Balance of Terror" McCoy offhand states that there's a mathematical probability of there being 3 million Earth-like planets (what the show later calls M-class) in the Galaxy. In a DS9 episode, I forget which one, Bashir offhand remarks that there's 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, which is the high real-world estimate. So that means that .00075% of all stars have M-class planets, which means that of the 201.2 million in the Federation, 1,500 or so are M-class.

But in the same First Contact scene where Picard remarks that the Federation is 8000 ly across, he also says that it has "over 150 planets" in it, meaning that most of the Federation's M-class planets are not actually part of the Federation. This also doesn't take into account that the Federation has member species not from M-class planets, such as the Horta

Ran out of characters.

>If those six guys are all at the top levels of the military

They're not. In fact, there were only five Starfleet members of the conspiracy: Valeris herself, Admiral Cartwright (the black admiral who was worried about Klingons refugees flooding the Federation), Colonel West (the mustached guy who was disguised as a Klingon and tried to snipe the President - his actor played Odo, as well), and Yeomen Burke and Samno (the two who beamed about Kronos One and assassinated Gorkon, and were later themselves killed by Valeris).

There was also the Romulan Ambassador and General Chang. So, sorry, there were a total of seven members in the conspiracy. Although technically I said "six guys", and Valeris isn't a guy, so hey I was right. Unless you include the Klingon bird-of-prey's crew, I guess.

Incidentally, if we go off of the Star Trek Star Charts for rough sizes (if not shapes) of the other nations in Star Trek - the Klingon Empire is about 50% the size of the Federation, the Romulans about 25%, the Cardassians maybe 10%, the Breen and Tholians each maybe 15%. Those comprise the largest polities in Star Trek.

Using the numbers from above, this gives us the sizes in pic.

There was also the warden running the Klingon penal colony, who was apparently in contact with Chang.

It's doubtful he new much more than "Chang wanted Kirk and McCoy killed at Rura Penthe".

Computer game or tokens and hexes?

Starfleet Command 2 does a workable job of SFB on the pc and in short time.

He didn't say end of B5, he said end of the Shadow War.

True, but I doubt that people like Burke and Samno knew much more than "Beam over, kill Gorkon." They were certainly disposed of quickly enough that they probably weren't deemed worthy of knowing anything else.

The point is that it was a very small conspiracy, and more to the point one that had formed over the course of a week or two at most to accomplish one specific goal. It wasn't remotely comparable to Section 31, and it also hardly indicates any major systemic problems with Starfleet given how small it was and the size of the Federation (which, while smaller in Kirk's era, would still have been HUGE - even at 10% of the size it would still comprise over 5 billion cubic ly, over 20 million stars, and over 150 M-class worlds, of which most are not Federation members - we SEE the Federation Council in Star Trek IV and it consists of maybe 40-60 people).

>Admiral Cartwright (the black admiral who was worried about Klingons refugees flooding the Federation), Colonel West (the mustached guy who was disguised as a Klingon and tried to snipe the President - his actor played Odo, as well)
You do realize that Admiral Cartwright was a Fleet Admiral, right? In NATO classification, that's a five-star rank. The dude was literally at the top of Starfleet's chain of command, answerable only to the commander in chief and the Federation council. He didn't need that many people because he could pull whatever strings were necessary to keep the conspiracy as small as possible (and he was almost certainly in bed with Section 31, given his rank and intentions).

Colonel West is just a reference to Oliver North, a FALL GUY during the Iran-Contra scandal, which was ultimately perpetuated by Ronald Reagan. If we take that into account, then, West was similarly going to be a patsy for the Federation's leadership (in the "oh, he was just a rogue agent, we're totally not guilty of anything, wink wink" variety).

>we SEE the Federation Council in Star Trek IV and it consists of maybe 40-60 people

We see the Councilmembers that were on Earth that day, and were in attendance for that session. It's EXTREMELY rare that all members of a parliament or senate will be in the same room at the same time. Not at all unreasonable to assume those 40-60 people are only about half the Council.

>No, the worst part about Section 31 was that they claimed that they were integral to the Federation existing at all, and we're never given a reason to doubt that.
>never given a reason to doubt that.
They are literally the bad guys; that's reason enough to doubt that. Bad guys, especially bad guys that ostensibly work for the good guys, are always able to justify their actions as going for the greater good. This is how TV works, especially Trek, where almost everything is in black-and-white (even if the conclusion is morally reprehensible to some viewers, the show almost always takes the side of the protagonists, particularly the captain, in the end). We aren't given any particular reason to believe Sloan, so why should we, working on TV logic?
>they don't have the kind of sweeping control necessary to really pull off their Conspiracy but try anyway
This. They never actually have any legal authority, that we see. They do everything via persuasion and/or skulldrudgery. Ross helps Sloan not because Sloan has any command over him, but because Ross has been convinced that this particular mission was necessary in the existential conflict everyone is in.

Both Klingons (commando teams, makes target researched tech unusuable) and Federation (Tachyon Array, Cloaking Tech full on cannot be used against their ships. Period ) have techs that hose Romulans. If what you want is for one race to specifically negate that combat advantage from the start, that's a bit unrealistic.

I found Federation to be the runaway winner, so much that we adopted the fresh start rules because they can easily get 2-3 ascendancy from exploring alone with their bonus and it accelerated the game too much.

Personally, I really want to see how the new races fit into the scheme of things, and I think the low player count at release was the primary limiting factor of the game, so that's also going to do wonders for balance.