/STG/ - Star Trek General

>Berman
>Vice Admiral
all of a sudden I'm starting to miss those neural parasites.

The few shots of the Klingon ships were not good.

Strogg vs Borg, who wins?

My money would be on Strogg.

They'd probably just merge and fuck everybody else over double-hard. Then the Queen would come along and let them get wiped out to try and fulfill one of her revenge/sexual fantasies, thus rendering to situation moot.

The funny thing is that I'm not sure who's outgunned in that picture.

New Discovery trailer

youtu.be/oWnYtyNKPsA

Looks much better than the first one

>geoip banned for Americans
Working link to KANGZtrek trailer:
youtube.com/watch?v=JsYu9jsmlHc

It looks massively worse, now that we can see the plot. "10 years before Kirk and Spock" is 2254, which would be Pike's command with Spock. The Klingon Empire wasn't really in disarray at the time, and ever new plot point revealed in the trailer is almost amusingly retarded. And the goddamn uniforms trigger me.

>And the goddamn uniforms trigger me.
Silver, bronze and gold are terrible for spotting things from a distance
Pips way before they should be being used
Fucking shoulder pads for captains?
Combadges before there were combadges
Personally it is the Klingons that are pissing me off the most.

Even worse, the commbadges are the Enterprise arrowhead, when every ship, station and outpost had their own emblem.

>Personally it is the Klingons that are pissing me off the most.
If I listed everything that pissed me off about these Klingons, we'd be here a while.

I said it once, I will say it again - this will get two seasons and collapse harder than Enterprise did.

>akira
>overrated
you are fake news

>"10 years before Kirk and Spock" is 2254, which would be Pike's command with Spock. The Klingon Empire wasn't really in disarray at the time
That means it's yet another alternate timeline. Fuck everything.

Remember everyone - every Star Trek series since TOS has taken two seasons to hit its stride. TNG and DS9 only really got great in their fourth seasons.

Gotta give Discovery a while. Imagine the shitposting and grognardery if Veeky Forums had been around for season 1 of TNG

>Imagine the shitposting and grognardery if Veeky Forums had been around for season 1 of TNG
There are probably Usenet threads from back then that are about the same level of mad.

They aren't combadges; we've seen the TOS style communicators already.
And different ships and stations having different emblems was a production error to begin with.

No, it's the same alternate timeline from the recent movies.

The visuals I would be ok with (other than the Discovery's design if this was not supposed to be Star Trek. The problem is, it's apparently supposed to be Star Trek. Those uniforms look like they're trying to be the Earth Force ones from Babylon 5 but with less class and more indistinct metallics, which really isn't fitting at all.
The Klingons with fat heads and spike suits look terrible, a really superhero comic-book kind of design. Which might be neat, if they were fighting the Fantastic 4 or something.

And I still have no idea what kind of character the main character is supposed to be. They seem to be just there. They do some moving about or standing there whilst people talk at them, and about the only notable thing is apparently they're pushing to open fire first? Character beyond visual design is really fucking important, especially in Star Trek. Just look at Voyager for examples of non-characters and how much they're hated for being complete wastes of space compared to the ones with personality.

What it boils down to is I really wish this show would give me SOMETHING to indicate that it's not just gonna be a forgettable mess of a plot and maybe a neat looking, if soul-less from lack of interesting context, space battle.

Untrue. They've explicitly said it's TOS timeline. For legal reasons they can't use JJ Timeline

Well, it has the same vfx style with the phasers being like Star Wars blasters rather than laser beams.

Oh no, it's explicitly set in the Prime universe. I could take another alternate timeline, or even the far future, because at least they were trying something (sort of) new with the setting. With this though, they're trying to wedge an 18 wheeler into a parallel parking space.

Except Trek has a (semi) established history for this period of time, and the show is blowing it off rather than trying something new. They want the TOS nostalgia without doing any of the fucking work for it. That's why I'm mad. I'll give it a chance, but it will have to be damn good.

>And different ships and stations having different emblems was a production error to begin with.
Incorrect, they had the costume designer make separate patches for the ships to hew closer to the USN.

>And I still have no idea what kind of character the main character is supposed to be.
A Vulcan raised Human that would the same age Spock is, while Sarek berates her for being human.

Please look into things instead of making snap judgements on visuals and then presenting them as fact.

This goes for everyone really.

>Oh no, it's explicitly set in the Prime universe.
So it's a straight retcon then? Do they have any idea how many trekkies this is going to piss off?

Trekkies will get pissed off no matter what they do though.

If it was actually being pushed as an alternate timeline to either the movies or old star trek, I'd be a hell of a lot more forgiving.

But they're not doing that.

And they'd be right to be at least a bit mad given what TNG season 1 did... though I'd be a hell of a lot more forgiving knowing how many veterans of the original series and films were involved in creating it.

>A Vulcan raised Human

Gives me nothing but that maybe they're a follower of the Vulcan's take on logic? The villain from Star Trek V gave more to go on in a few seconds of screen time at the start of the film. And that was Star Trek V ffs.

Damn right we will!

So there's no reason to try to avoid it?

>Gives me nothing but that maybe they're a follower of the Vulcan's take on logic?
Her arc seems to be Daddy Sarek didn't love her, so she's going to be antithetical to everything he taught her. The character is extremely flat though, I'll give you.

>Trekkies will get pissed off no matter what they do though.
If they did a proper TNG/DS9/VOY sequel with the Enteprise F off exploring the ass end of the Beta Quadrant it would have been great.

Trekkies would just whine because they're doing the same shit instead of trying something different.

>TMP
>Klingons are given a brand new look since production now has a bigger budget, it's a retcon and should just imagine that the Klingons in TOS always looked like this
>oh wow that looks great thanks Gene Roddenberry

>STD
>Klingons are given a brand new look since production now has a bigger budget it's a retcon and should just imagine that the Klingons in the franchise always looked like this
>REEEEEEEEEEEEEE

The TMP-STVI Klingons looked cool though. The STD Klingons look like angry dog turds in spiked clothing.

They'd bitch because now that it's like 20 years after all those series ended none of those actors would probably ever come back for guest spots, not to mention some are dead. And they'd still find things they don't like about the cast or ship design or costumes or stories or whatever other minute detail they decide to dislike.

Trekkies are the core audience they need to help float their series though. Nothing about the adds sets this Trek iteration abort from the dozen other gritty sci-fi series currently making the rounds on various channels so external uptake will initially be low. Joe/Josephine Blogs is going to look at this and see Dark Matter/Killjoys/Continuum(is this one still around?) but with an old IP attached. If the show is to survive, the pre-established fan base need to be at least somewhat on board.

I think they're going to do a DC-CU on it and pin way too much of their hopes on draining people in with a grimderp aesthetic and uninteresting protagonist. At this point our best bet is that some of the supporting cast knock it out of the park and make their own arcs interesting enough to stay invested.

The fact is, it shares the same visual style and design elements of the reboot films so for it to take place in the original universe isn't a logical assumption to make. If It's not, then that means the original universe is getting the same action oriented treatment and design, thus overwriting the old shows and movies entirely.

I've just bought a 50 pack of blank dice to turn into Challenge Dice from Star Trek Adventures. I'm currently looking at just using acrylic paint sealed with clear coat. Anyone got some better recommendations?

>>TMP
>>Klingons are given a brand new look since production now has a bigger budget, it's a retcon and should just imagine that the Klingons in TOS always looked like this
>>oh wow that looks great thanks Gene Roddenberry
But they didn't always look like that, there was an augment virus that fucked dudes up.

That explanation didn't exist until 30 years after the change.

But when it did exist it had always existed. The old timeline is gone, user. Accept it.

The jump from 60s shoestring to 70s loadsamoney is proportionally larger than this jump. The TOS Movie Klingons actually look good, rather than these abominations, even at their cheapest and/or laziest.

It's a horseshit excuse, but blame DS9 for not just having Michael Dorn show up as a TOS Klingon.

>t's a horseshit excuse, but blame DS9 for not just having Michael Dorn show up as a TOS Klingon.
That would be like that time where Spock lost his emotional control because they had time traveled to a point before the Vulcans had developed it.

Except they've now made both types of pre-established Klingons canon. So that argument holds about as much water as the saucer section of the Discovery.

In all honesty though, the Klingon redesign doesn't bother me all that much. I'm not keen on the weird overelaborate costumes and ships, but I'm willing to pass it off as just another design aesthetic. After all, the whole 1 race, 1 culture thing is a bit frustrating.

What bothers me is that we're still in the past (you know what I mean) so we know roughly how things pan out, especially this close to the beginning of TOS. Similarly, I don't like that we're back to the Klingons again. We've done the Klingons in nearly every series. What's the point of new Star Trek if we can't explore (oh yeah, I'm doing it) new worlds, new life and new civilisations?

I'll give the show a chance, but I've not seen much to fill me with confidence as of yet.

I'm more bothered that the klingon actors cant seem to talk with the new prosthetics.

Positives:
>muh budget
>muh effects
>remembering that people don't instantly die in space without good reason
>Garth
>useful forcefields
Bad:
>WE WAS KLANGS
>not even trying with the uniforms
>grimderp mood
>yet another Spock backstory rehash
>GIANT THREATENING BAD GUY SPACESHIPS OF DOOM

Things I can live with if the following are true:
>MC is a diplomat's daughter, which explains all the Sarek stuff
>UI design aesthetic of the show ships are explained to be Earth-based, while the traditional Connie UI stuff is some ayy lmao aesthetic I think it would be funny if Our Heroes visit some Connie, see how everything is different, and the host crew just shrugs their shoulders with a "you get used to it" look.

There's a difference between pissing and moaning because of nitpicks, and then watching every episode anyways, which is part of what defines a trekie, and getting angry and stop watching the show after the second episode without giving the show a real chance, like what happened with ENT.

What? No, you moron. Rather than having him in the TNG makeup in Trials and Tribbulations, he appears in the TOS makeup, shutting the door on the Y U NO LOOK LIKE MOVIE KLINK whining by tacitly stating the Klingons look like they did because the technology wasn't there, rather than any retarded Augment virus explanation.

>MC is a diplomat's daughter, which explains all the Sarek stuff
Judging by the material they released earlier, the MC is an orphaned human raised on Vulcan who was discriminated against for being an emotional being. It sounds so much like Yesteryear, I wonder if they're gonna have Spock as a kid.

Riffing on that spoilertext:
There were Andorians, Vulcans, and Tellarites on the design board for the TOS tech revamp. The only reason everything is so low-tech and gay is that the humans put it out there as a "surely they'll agree we can do better than this" baseline but nobody could ever get the sand out of their vaginas long enough to do so. The rapid tech-up from the 2270s to 2290s was because Starfleet Command handed the reins to a room full of humans and said "make it look cool for once."

>for legal reasons they can't use their own IP
???

I blame these fags.

JJTrek is owned by Paramount. Mainline Trek is owned by CBS.

The real problem is that the design choice of the Klingons not having hair makes it very obvious all of them are wearing a bald cap. The excess bulk of underlying hair is fine when everything is smoothed out, but the ridges of the Klingon makeup make them look lumpy and uneven due to that excess bulk. They needed to get actors with shaved heads or cropped hair. The costumes are designed to add bulk as well, so combined with the headpiece they make the facial structure look small. Basically they need to give their actors a haircut or add facial prostheses to even everything out.

I understood you perfectly. It still ends up looking like bad writing either way, though your suggestion allows viewers to simply laugh it off.

I was providing a previous on screen example of the writers attempting to justify such a shift. They did it badly. Though TOS season 3 didn't exactly have a shortage of bad writing decisions.

>spoiler
kek, I'd actually enjoy this

>Firefly but with the comfy replaced by edgy ebil corporation grimderp
>forgettable???
>Timecop but we can't afford enough VFX to have it set in the future full-time
I might be biased because it's an existing franchise, but I found literally all of those to have a more interesting premise or "sell" than STD did.

Continuum ended with the alternate timeline aesop everyone saw coming a mile away when Keira started to change the future.

>>Garth
Garth Ennis is writing for Discovery? Fuck, I'll give it a shit now!
Do you realize the kind of research he does for all his work? The citations for his War Stories is a Who's Who for WWII fiction, memoir, and documentary.

No, Garth of Izar, a side character from TOS.

Wait, Garth Ennis or Gartj of Izar?

Part of what defines TOS that I thoroughly miss in post-movies Trek is how it works with a low budget by introducing odd technology (was the transporter invented by TOS? I think it mighta been) and adapting assets from whatever was lying around on the lot or out in Trona Pinnacles.

The transporter was invented because they didn't have the budget to have a shuttle landing every episode.

>The few shots of the Klingon ships were not good.
I didn't say good. I said better.

Antimatter containment module made out of a bowling ball.

No, I mean, I think TOS invented the transporter. That in sci-fi it wasn't a thing until Roddenberry invented it.

Best doggo.

One little google search, user

The best part about that episode is that the dog is in nearly every scene and they're just constantly passing it around like it was some inside joke.

>The Fly
>Playboy

Playboy used to have all kinds of great fiction. Asimov, Bradberry, and Vonnegut wrote for it that I knew of.

Early to mid Playboy was actually a legitimately impressive magazine. Hell there used to be editions that just had the articles with no nudity, and they sold almost as well as the regular ones.

Ask yourself: what demographic is most likely to need their fix of naked women from a magazine because they can't score in real life?

Answer: nerds.

Playboy actually stopped including nudity at all a few years back

They quickly reversed that decision.

Yeah but not in the 60s or 70s.

Worked out my campaign intro

>Station Commander’s Log, Stardate 2245.1 - Axanar Construction Station 4-L-3. Lieutenant Commander Henry Standast Commanding.
>Work on the USS Excalibur has been excruciating and weeks behind schedule, but we’re almost done. The first few officers are reporting aboard, and we’ll have her closed up and ready for duty within a week. Can’t come too soon, too - the Klingons are supposed to be moving on Axanar two weeks from now. Excalibur’s captain, Andrew Lo - Chu, is coming to take command this afternoon. My construction crews and Excalibur’s officers are rushing to get the ship presentable as quickly as possible.
>And I have to get back to it. Commander’s log, out.

Just realized something - Sarek appears to have a hologram message. The fuck is up with that? I thought holograms like that weren't really a thing until DS9 (not counting arm-baby making races that effectively date-raped Trip in Enterprise).

It appears to be an image projected onto a medium of some sort, like a real world hologram. Instead of the photonic/replicated "holograms" of the TNG era

They had holograms like that in S1 TNG. They might have used holographic projections in ENT at some point (not Daniels' thing, but some more mundane task), but I can't remember.

I seem to remember holograms being used in the War Room in S3, and in various Xindi tech as well.

Why does Star Trek keep pushing out fucking prequels.

If you want to make the future sexy again FINE, give us the pirate shirts and bright colors back, fashion changes. But why are we having yet another Trek series going backwards?!

Because reasons. I want something set in the 2400s with the crew dealing with shit in areas of the Alpha and Beta quadrants we haven't seen or dealt with with the odd escapade episode to familiar locales and such.

You know it's bad when The Orville feels more Star Trek than this schlock we've seen so far.

With all the episodes of TNG, DS9, and VOY to hand, you basically have solutions for any given problem on hand and the tech is approaching magic. It gets very hard to write that sort of thing, to get dramatic tension from something you haven't done before and can't be solved with an old solution.

So you ratchet the enemies up too. Make the Dominion, Borg, Voth, former one off super aliens, and the new aliens meet or exceed the techmagic level of Starfleet. Focus more on human problems that can't be fixed with technology. The real problem is that this requires a lore-aware coherent set of writers, which CBS seems to be allergic to.

They ran into that problem twice in TNG. "Oh hey the original enterprise had this same problem, we'll just use their solution."
And their answer was, nope that doesn't work anymore.

The Naked Now and I'm having trouble remembering the other one.

>Yawn, ANOTHER big confederation of evil aliens with advanced technology that our plucky heroes handle with guile, skill and teamwork.
Please, that sounds even more boring than prequels.

Enterprise showed us that humans advance rapidly compared to most species. TNG showed the top end of our potential as being Q like. Some point before 2600 AD in the Prime timeline humanity WILL move up to a different playing field. What's wrong with embracing that? Fancy tech or not, they're still pretty much us.

It makes writing a relatable set of characters with reasonable tensions nigh impossible. Even the best sci fi authors in the industry struggle with that and rarely succeed. Do you think that TV writers can pull it off?

Why does that make it impossible? Combat is combat, and there are new peer species to create and old ones to revisit. Most of what we view as resources conflicts were already pretty much moot by Voyager and that worked out fine setting wise. Does the invention of transwarp make someone Barclay less neurotic? Will tamed Borg nanites get widespread adoption in medicine or be shunned like genetic enhancement? Does the Federation start picking fights to avoid its complacent 2350-2366 attitude? There's absolutely no reason a TV writer up to date on the lore couldn't write compelling stories.

Problem is you run out of reasonable Problems of The Week pretty quickly.

Why do you need a Problem of the Week? That formula is part of what killed Trek.

It's also what made Trek work in the first place.

Anyway, idea to throw at my Adventures players at the start of their Five Year Mission

>TOS Era
>Players are assigned to explore a sector on the edge of Federation space. Six decades ago, a Federation merchant ship, the SS Coraline, passed through this region and surveyed the planets, reporting back a surprising lack of useful or inhabited planets by subspace.
>Crew of the USS Excalibur has been assigned to explore the sector in further detail. Eight star systems, all poorly charted and on the edge of explored space
>Immediately on exploring the first star system, they notice it doesn't match the survey files that the merchant ship sent back at all. There are more planets, some with notable mineral reserves, others with life that went entirely unreported.
>The second system they explore is inhabited - a space station orbits the fifth planet, and a small, somewhat primitive, but warp capable ship informs the players that they are violating the space of a Protectorate of the Coraline Alliance
>Up to the players to determine what they do about this fairly obvious breach of the Prime Directive. The Coraline Alliance, on investigation, reveals itself to be a single planet of humanoids who, with the assistance of tech from the SS Coraline and her crew, turned conquerors and established a small empire in this sector. The central planet rules over the other five with an iron fist, but has clearly established its Alliance to be a notable nation that can't be ignored
>If the players contact Starfleet Command, it'll take a few days to get a message by subspace, but the answer will be that they should establish diplomatic contact with this Coraline Alliance and attempt to find out what happened to the SS Coraline's crew and if any of them are alive.
>Players have to deal with what they do when a violation of the Prime Directive has gotten so badly out of control that it's essentially impossible to undo
(cont)

>The contravening argument is likely to become "we have a responsibility to undo the damage" vs "we have no right to interfere" and "this Coraline Alliance is a brutal empire" vs "they're a foreign nation and we can't just topple them for our own principles."

I'm really excited to see what my players do with a problem like this. Should set the tone for the whole game and help me learn what my players want out of it.