/STG/ - Star Trek General

Had to back track a bit into the archived Archive Threads.
Here is These Are The Voyages
sendspace.com/file/r10f90

And the Core rulebook
sendspace.com/file/l9jlya

Noice, thanks based user.

I'm not sure how to feel about the starbase models coming for Ascendancy. I'd like to have 3d faction specific starbases. But it would be $60 to get all five, and that seems like an offal lot for a purely aesthetic upgrade.

The game is barely worth what you pay for base, spoonies, and lobies, the mats and the bases and the ships are a scam.
It's odd, GF9 usually doesn't gouge people like this, but I guess you gotta pay for the license somehow.

Also
>$4 for a model
At that rate I'd rather buy KD:M.

>got caught by a doctor cosplaying as James Bond

Other than fashion sense, getting caught an not thinking about the immediate reaction to the plague I'm inclined to agree with you.

>inb4
B-bu founder wus gud boys dey dindu nuffun

Honestly if Starfleet went full on evil they could wipe out so many species with biological weapons alone.

Trekfags, I never watched the series, but I remember watching one episode on television like 13 or so years ago.
The ship was stuck in some sort of groundhog day, the day kept repeating and they kept getting destroyed by an enemy ship.
In the end they finally managed to send a message trough time or something and escape their destruction.

I fucking loved that episode, can anyone direct me to it? I'd love to watch it again. Ever since I catched that I have a thing for time travel stuff in films/series.

memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Cause_and_Effect_(episode)
Here you go user

>The ship was stuck in some sort of groundhog day

Bit of trivia for you - amusingly, this episode actually came out like two or so years before the movie Groundhog Day.

If Star Fleet went full evil "Fuck the Galaxy, let's be gods" everything would be on fire. Their only problem would be running into a Q or something like that considers one of the lesser races it's pets like at least one Q does with humans.

For one thing if they really stopped giving a fuck they could take all their knowledge. Put it into a portable storage device. Send a dude holding it back in time a few hundred years and hand it over to 22c Earth.

Earth doesn't need to form the federation. Earth doesn't need anybody now. Now is the era of the Pax Terra.

ie. they go full Xeelee on the universe, on a smaller scale though.
Yeah, lets not.

They'd still have problems with the Voth unless they can get Macross scale transphasic torpedo spam working.

Why would they?

Lets assume that they do it in 300 year cycles.

As of early 25c Voth are in the Δ Quadrant. You take the 25c knowledge back in time to Archer's era. At this time the Voth are in the Δ Quadrant. You spend 50 years upgrading Earth and the rest advancing your 25c knowledge. You arrive at 25c with 27.5c technology and knowledge. Voth are still in the Δ Quadrant. You take your shit back for another loop. Now you are at 25c with 30c toys. Voth are still in the Δ Quadrant.

Keep doing this. There is no limit to how many times you can cycle. Stop once godhood is reached.

Also Voth are pretty fucking pathetic. ~65,000,000 years head start on humanity and what have they made? Bigger ships, slightly better cloaking devices and a faster warp engine now made obsolete with QSD devices.

desu the whole "If Starfleet went evil they could crush everything" thing is dumb because the ST paradigm is that Starfleet is strong because they are as they are. They are not held back by it, it is the root cause of their superiority. Within the logic of the setting, if Starfleet went evil, they'd lose their edge.

Sisko is a war criminal, and he should be subject to court martial and a neutral war crimes tribunal.

The Mirror Universe got a hundred year head start and promptly sat on it for a century.

The main question remais: If it's such a good idea, why is there no civilisation in existence that did it?

The answer could be that doing a 20k y leap in tech will destroy your civilisation more certainly than handing an armed nuke to a neanderthal. Or it could just as well be that this kind of fuckery with reality causes one of the greater species to destroy you (the Qs, or whoever really - people who don't get involved with you otherwise).

In any case the answer I'd suggest is: Because it looks like a good idea, but really isn't.

In setting, we also see what happens with the augments when you try to "cheat nature" and give yourself better tech or stats.

I have a feeling I've seen this post before.
And before that too.

Wait a minute...

The Voth have their stupid "The Doctrine" holding them back. Any advancement takes generations of hammering away, often at great cost of life and status, until someone blinks.

In retrospect the entire episode was a joke about American evangelicals.
>HAW HAW HAW RELIGIOUS PEOPLE ARE -LITERALLY- DINOSAURS WHO DON'T BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION

They've had 325,000 Romes to work with and Doctrine is self imposed.

I like to think he only ever wears that black leather outfit for secret meetings with Bashir. It's not a Section 31 uniform at all. It's just what he thought would appeal to Julian's sense of dramatic spycraft.

>"Boss, do we have to wear this stupid thing."
>"Trust me, he'll love it."
>"The pants are riding up my ass."

>wanna play star trek games
>none of my friends like star trek
this is bullshit.

Play a sci-fi game in a setting that's Star Trek with the numbers filed off.

>its a cromular wareagle, captain.

>want to play Star Trek ascendancy at board game day
>one too many players show up so we have to play Arkham Horror instead
>I hate Arkham Horror
Fucking kill me.

>It is a Clingoth Carnivore, Kapitän.

>I'm detecting an embiggening of energy levels in their engine. They're gonna blow!

Section 31 shouldn't even have a uniform, even as something to wear around their secret spy base. Ugly future civilian clothes or Starfleet uniforms will let them blend easier. They may as well show up in illunimati robes.

>Wardassian message sent to your private quarters, capitano. Its from Crow doocat
>Theres a problem with the 3D picture emitters Comrade

fucks arkham horror

>Dammit R, humanity is not your plaything!

>Also Voth are pretty fucking pathetic.
The Voth were able to just snatch Voyager out of space and shut down all tech on the ship. No fight. No chance to evade. The Borg couldn't do that. Species 8472 probably couldn't do that. The Voth may be the most advanced corporal species still active in the galaxy.

My guess would be they stopped significantly advancing long ago because they felt they had reached the peak of civilization. So far beyond everyone else that there was no pressure to keep pushing themselves. Doctrine developing from that smug complacency.

>No, Dorf, I cannot allow you to interfere with Clingoth politics as a Star armada Officer.

this is fucking stupid. I love it.

>It's a Dorf Fortress episode
He's making pillow forts in his quarters with his daughter Alexis

>John-Luke?
>Yes, Beverage?
>I'm worred about Leslie.

...

Genocide isn't difficult for anyone in Star Trek. A single Klingon ship burned off the atmosphere of a planet in a TNG episode.

When the Romulans and Cardassians went after the Founder homeworld, they brought a fleet because glassing the surface wasn't good enough for them. They planned to completely remove the crust of the planet.

As for bioweapons, the founders were probably a uniquely suitable target. Every individual mingles in the great link. So the virus would get to all of them. Even more important, their biology is completely different from humanoids. So there would be virtually no danger of it jumping species to a Federation member.

But the guy who showed up in Enterprise wore the same outfit.

I know how you feel. All of my friends think Star Trek is too unrealistic. They'd rather play something Warhammer 40k instead.

Probably the best indication of that was in Mirror, Mirror. The Terran Empire was the Federation but evil, and Mirror Spock predicted it's collapse within the next few centuries was inevitable.

The Enterprise Mirror Universe episode takes that even further by showing the early Terran Empire only managing to survive rebellion because an advanced future ship was dropped in their laps.

Same. at least its not 'realism' but that they just prefer the races.

>Star Trek is too unrealistic
>They'd rather play something Warhammer 40k instead
I can not roll my eyes hard enough to express my feelings about this.

That's retarded. I'm not being hyperbolic here. Seeking realism in 40K is just straight up retarded.

>Calling Star Trek unrealistic, while referencing 40k, a setting designed to be over-the-top and unrealistic...
Your friends need to get educated.
Sure you can find Star Trek too optimistic, but 40k is nowhere close to realistic.
It is however gritty and grim.

It's even worse. The Empire is not just fascist or something, it's fundamentally rotten in the ENT episode, to the point where no individual captain seems to have any loyalty worth a crock of shit, and the ship just increases their infighting instead of giving them an edge. The first thing they use it for, is to turn it on themselves.

pottery

There are a great many sci-fi settings that are more realistic than Star Trek. 40k is not one of them.

That's one of the things Enterprise did that I like to just pretend never happened. Like 22nd century Romulan cloaking devices, and deliberately letting a sentient species die out because it was supposedly the right thing to do.

Section 31 and the mirror universe have a lot in common;
The surface elements can be pretty attractive for storytelling but you get too much into them and it's just dumb and takes away from the rest of the setting.

>letting a sentient species die out because it was supposedly the right thing to do.
In all fairness it was exactly in keeping with what Star Fleet would be doing centuries later.

The prime directive as a whole is problematic.

Yeah, that's terrible too. But at least in the TNG examples they always end up finding an excuse to save them anyway. Including one case where a cry from help from a little girl who didn't know she was talking to aliens was sufficient to let them get involved. In the Enterprise episode these poor people sent sublight ships out in a desperate attempt to find alien help.

>TMP era LCARS

hnggg

Nah, the Mirror Universe, with tweaks, is a good foil to the main universe. A setting where Humanity went to the stars and had its dreams of cooperation crushed and just reverted to type, then went on a HFY phase. Rather than conquering or getting conquered by the Romulans and Klingons, it's just a centuries long, incredibly bitter cold war.
Follow that up with having a bitter, jaded Kirk by the time of ST:VI who just wants to create a lasting peace with the Klingons so that humanity could get out of the shadow of war they're under and the "Khan was right, let's use the Genesis Device on the Ridgeheads!" jetting off to try and set up the Khitomer Accords, and you could have a great Nobledark series.

I totally have detailed files on this, because in addition to my "Starfleet mothballed all these Mirandas and uncrated them to fight the Borg" stuff, I really want to run an MU game like this.

The general idea that they shouldn't mess with less advanced civilizations makes sense. It just shouldn't pretend them from preventing sentient extinctions. And in TOS it didn't.

>Captain, informing these people they are on a ship may be a violation of the prime directive of Starfleet Command.
>Well the people of Yonada may be changed by the knowledge, but it's better than exterminating them.

This has some potential for a one-shot along the lines of "Year of Hell" where an alien civilisation steals scientific data to send it back to their past, the characters follow them until they "close the loop", and a second later they stand in the middle of a field where the great hall of the loop once stood, and they see one of the aliens that's clearly a farmer or something, who explains upon being asked: "Galaxy domination? The loop? No, we gave that up after we got this transmission of high tech 500 years ago, and we used it barely understanding it, and it cost us our empire."

>When the Romulans and Cardassians went after the Founder homeworld, they brought a fleet because glassing the surface wasn't good enough for them. They planned to completely remove the crust of the planet.
Considering how tough Founders are, this isn't overkill. We've seen them survive long-term in space sans any form of environmental suit.

Sure. But I think you could have a good debate about interacting with pre-warp civilizations even. Though that might be best done through an aliens eyes. What are Klingon/Romulan/Cardassian standards for First Contact? How do those encounters turn out? How might they have turned out if the Federation had been the one conducting the encounter?

They had a very silly conversation in TNG on how to deal with the people about to get wiped out by volcanic activity on their world. Someone, either Picard or Geordi, went full in on this idea that 'The galaxy has a plan, who are we to disrupt the galaxy's plans,' which just left me with a really icky feeling about how the Federation in the 24th century was implementing the Prime Directive.

If it wasn't for Homeward being retarded, we could say the same thing about TNG, and even then Homeward just needed one line of dialogue justifying it.

I think I might have actually shit myself in pure rage at this sentence.

>Someone, either Picard or Geordi, went full in on this idea that 'The galaxy has a plan, who are we to disrupt the galaxy's plans,'
Riker spitballed that idea, Laforge and Troi immediately proved it wrong, and Riker immediately retracted it.

>What are Klingon/Romulan/Cardassian standards for First Contact?
Klingons? Invade, subjugate the target populace, install military governors and controls. Romulans? See above, but also install Tal Shiar operatives to keep an eye on the rest. Cardassians? Same as the Romulans, but with the Obsidian Order in place of the Tal Shiar, and also having the governors get knee deep in target populace pussy, while insisting they did nothing wrong.

>They had a very silly conversation in TNG on how to deal with the people about to get wiped out by volcanic activity on their world. Someone, either Picard or Geordi, went full in on this idea that 'The galaxy has a plan, who are we to disrupt the galaxy's plans,' which just left me with a really icky feeling about how the Federation in the 24th century was implementing the Prime Directive.
Riker, and in context, the quote is clearly "It's probably bullshit, but who knows?" It's also possible that having been a Q, he may be on to something, or just being Riker's gigantic troll self.

You got me, I hadn't watched the episode in a while. Though I don't think Riker's suggestion was posited as straight bullshit, and the defense that 'maybe we're part of that fate!' doesn't sit well with me (unless it's supposed to be calling fate complete and total bullshit, in which case it's fine). Even after this Picard is still content to let these people die until Data activates his manipulation subroutine.

Also Picard is full of shit in this conversation when he conflates a non self inflicted harm with a self inflicted one like war or oppression. It's like if a modern day nation refused to provide disaster assistance after a hurricane because they felt it would violate the same principles that prevent them from getting involved in civil wars.

You also have to remember that the situation is also in one of the lower regarded episodes of the series. And that TNG is generally fucking terrible about the Prime Directive. TOS's clear and concise "don't get involved unless it's unavoidable or the species has already been contaminated by an alien culture" Prime Directive was for the better.

I haven't seen very many episodes of TOS pls no bully to the point where I don't remember any of them featuring the prime directive. All I know is that the Berman/Braga era shows were terrible with it.

A lot of the goofy "Earth culture on an alien planet" episodes were Prime Directive violations, like "A Piece of the Action" where some dickass spacers left a book on gangs in Chicago in the 20s on a planet, so their species went full Bugsy Malone. Essentially, Kirk got involved to minimize the effects previous people had on their culture. Surprisingly, the one with Modern Day Romans isn't one of those.

>All I know is that the Berman/Braga era shows were terrible with it.
It's a mixture of not really getting what noninterference means while simultaneously realizing how much fun the goofy episodes of TOS were, backed up by not recognizing a subtle morality tale without it beating you over the head.

God, you Vreenak truthers are the worst.

Well it came up approximately fuck all times over on DS9 at least, and I don't think was ever more than an incidental thing.

Elements of the Prime Directive were implied but only explicitly mentioned a couple times, and it was entirely (IIRC) the "political non-interference" part, not the "contact with pre-warp civilizations" part.

Well, keep in mind, we *are* basically the Mirror Universe, so of course we default to conquering and genocide being the best option.

Starfleet Command tried to hit Sisko over the head with the Prime Directive a few times, because (reasonably), they were uncomfortable with one of their officers being seen as the equivalent of Jesus Christ to the Bajorans. That's some major hoodoo that could have made the entire sector collapse into open war if the Cardassians wanted to assassinate him or attempt a "he's not the real emissary" plot with their own plant.

What I find quite interesting is just how little the emissary thing comes up for the first half of the show. Little bits here and there but for the most part it's just a thing that he's been declared.
Big part of how he got away with it for so long I bet.

Well, arguably we're neither Star Trek nor the mirror universe, there's a ton of shit missing in either direction.

This suddenly raises a question for me, a very casual fan.
What specifically *is* the Prime Directive? Has it ever been stated out loud in full? And if so, has it been changed/retconned across the different series?
Whenever it's discussed, I just assume that it says 'No contact or influence with any sapient species that hasn't developed warp technology', but I get the impression that this doesn't actually cover all of it.

Pretty much, and you could lay a lot of it at the feet of the Prophets, who seemingly never knew of their own ineffable plan until portions of that plan become relevant. Quite frankly, I don't think that the Prophet that was Sisko's mother was actually a Prophet until they needed her to be so, and that they totally ruined Joseph and Sarah Sisko's marriage to save the Bajoran people, and it suddenly only became real until 2375 when Sisko was told.

Specifically spelled out? No. The closest we can infer to its content is that it's "No Starfleet Officer (this distinction is important) should, through action or inaction, allow a primitive (in this case non Warp capable) species to be contaminated with technology or culture from a Warp capable culture." No show has ever actually detailed what it is, and the various writers' bibles don't bother spell it out. Hell, FASA is the only group to actually even lay out the above quote. The rest of the RPG's just take the whole conceit as read.

>And if so, has it been changed/retconned across the different series?
The TOS era limited it to non-interference with pre-warp civilizations, the TNG era expanded it to political non-interference in general, hence why it applied to the Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Bajorans, etc. even though they were all post-warp civilizations. This is why Picard treaded so lightly when it came to the Klingon Civil War (and why Worf had to resign to fight in it), among other examples.

In The Pale Moonlight was in essence a Prime Directive episode, even if it wasn't explicitly mentioned.

Sure . . . If anyone had some proof it might even matter.

In TOS it was "do not interfere with a viable pre-warp civilization". Interpretation made on a case by case basis as you can't drop a blanket rule over the entire universe and expect it to fit every occasion. On one occasion Spock placed the enterprise in the path of an asteroid because the hundreds on the ship were worth sacrificing for the millions on a planet it was drifting towards. On another Klingons were arming a local tribe to take over the planet and enslave the peaceful tribes, the planet once subjugated under one rule would then be scooped up into the Empire. Kirk and crew armed the other tribes to an equivalent degree to maintain the prior balance of power on the planet.

In TNG and onwards it was "do not interfere with a pre-warp civilizations". No exceptions even if it means letting them die.

One thing that should be emphasized is that Starfleet and the Federation in the TNG era do not consider the Prime Directive to be sacrosanct. Not even counting stuff like the Omega Directive, it was brought up in Drumhead that Picard had violated the Prime Directive on numerous occasions, and yet Starfleet was fine with it because in each instance Picard has a justifiable reason that was in keeping with the principles in spirit of the Prime Directive and the Federation as a whole, even if it technically violated the letter of the law.

This is reminding me of this damn thing

Which is fucking hypocrisy at it's finest.

Gonna let this entire sapient species die out because of a natural disaster, can't possibly risk contaminating them. Better dead then impure.

Oh noes Troi has been kidnapped! Can't risk her getting killed, better beam down and tell the bronze age Vulcanoids about spaceships and shit.

Better let this other entire other planet die out. Oops got a feels attack because little girl said she was scared. Better sort this natural disaster out.

So, it became more strict but less important? You were more likely to break it in the TNG era, but you're less likely to get in trouble for it?

>So, it became more strict but less important?
Other way around. The spirit of the Prime Directive is more important but you're not going to get anally fucked if you can show you had a damn good reason for breaking the letter of the law.

Thus allowing all captains to do as much or as little as they want with no accountability for either decision.

And then Warlord Janeway gives WMDs to the Borg.