/STG/ - Star Trek General

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Remember when the Federation discovered the most amazing scientific wonder ever beyond the bounds of all known species, then forgot about it because Scotty showed up and it was never mentioned again?

Speaking of those guys, how is it that the literally only lifeform in their universe ever evolved past unicellular life? Much less evolved to the point of "ehh, let's just tack some more superpowers on them just because."

Wasn't the interior of the dyson sphere kinda inhospitable? Been awhile since I watched that episode.

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

The exterior was a hard shell and the interior was unexplorable due to solar flares and radiation. Which is why STO was retarded for bringing it back. Best they could've done is sending in probes at regular intervals to gather whatever limited data they could.

Still sounds like the most miraculous technology in the galaxy considering it must out-mass the entire Federation's inhabited stellar bodies.
Something the Borg should have been interested in.

Sure but it's at the state where it's both completely fucked inside and so advanced where they can't safely explore it at the moment. Doesn't mean the Federation isn't keeping tabs on it.

Well STO didn't just bring it back, they brought out a second one too! Two massive dyson spheres for double the trouble!

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Constantly farming that cyborg t-rex boss is funny as fuck. I didn't expect Jurassic Park in my Star Trek.

Quark was right that the federation is insidious.

I remember they said the Dyson Sphere was made of Neutronium. Which makes it even more insane.

Pretty sure that would collapse under it's own gravitational pull.

Reminder that the best Star Trek video game is a fucking flash game from the early 2000s

Klingon Academy wasn't Flash based though

Pic reminded me of something. I could have sworn there was a scene with Weyoun talking to either Damar or Dukat about how Federation ships tend to be overgunned and undershielded. I can't seem to find the line (and I might be misremembering exactly how it goes), does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Not if it's uniform. The force of it's own collapse will strengthen it, a hollow sphere is just an arch rotated around two axes.

They're universe hopping weirdos with no clear goal beyond "this is ours now". Trek has space wizards who regularly interact with alternate universes, one of which is literally one where an exact copy of you exists, except that he or she is a mustache twirling Saturday morning cartoon version.

I think the Federation would be fine, though it would like be a very strange war involving vastly different teleportation technology. Reminder that the Combine cannot teleport to different places within the same universe, and would need to steal a Federation device to achieve that. The Feddies have no such restriction (since going to the Mirror universe was a transporter accident in the first place).

Yes. However, it was clearly dangerous, and not a good candidate for TNG to just put the brakes on and spend the rest of the show exploring. It would have been somewhat neat for a spinoff show though.

That's not Starfleet Command or 25th Anniversary/Judgement Rites or Elite Force.

An arch is anchored into some other, usually enormously more massive structure, which it is "leaning" against. There's a reason you don't find hollow spheroid asteroids or planets.

Fan theories about the Feds upgunning crappy old ships build for a war against the Klingons that never came in hope of defeating the Borg through overwhelming fire power and then throwing them into the meat grinder against the Dominion?

Sounds like the fanon thing in pic related.

>Hating on Armada I/II

To be fair, nobody's actually drilled down into the core of an asteroid yet.

Yes, only less words because I'm too drunk and tired to care.

I think you misspelled Deep Space Nine: Harbinger

>Both goatee and hair
Da fuck were they thinking?

>There's a reason you don't find hollow spheroid asteroids or planets.
And the reason is that accretion doesn't work that way. An arch doesn't need to be anchored against anything.

He had both for most of season 3 IIRC

The last 5 episodes of season 3 to be exact.

Really seals my stembolts

Because asteroids and planets are not artificial structures trying to have the best structural strength with the least resources possible. One of the cool things about arches is they can "lean against" themselves, forever, in a sphere.
A fun way to demonstrate this is to try to break an egg by squeezing it in your hand without cracking it first.

In TNG's defense, it's designed to be an episodic show, and potentially big developments need to be largely overlooked in future episodes to preserve this. I don't remember what they said at the end of the episode, but if nothing else, they probably should have made at least a passing reference to having a research project devoted to it, where top men would be working on it. ...Top ...men. youtu.be/Fdjf4lMmiiI

>want to play STA with an online group
>nothing in gamefinder
>nothing on Veeky Forums discord lfg
>nothing on roll20
my life is pain

Wellp, almost all my excitement for the new Clix set is 100% gone. Despite advertising new sculpts it's the exact same shit.

I'm doing mine through Discord as the GM and dumping in pics into a private FB group. I'd LOVE for some roll20 support so I can play in games as a PC and show my players doing stuff in real time.

You missed the guy who got a group together for STA on Roll20. He advertised here, reddit, and Roll20.
Roll20 has support for the STA sheets if thats what you meant.

nah, not the sheets. Pre-gen tile patterns in keeping with Star Trek design. I have a REALLY hard time justifying their move mechanics when I have no online sheets I can use. Also fuck their 'GM picks the initiative' my players and I roll for it because "ROLL FOR INITIATIVE" is the best thing to shout when Borg transport into the hallway.

Misspelled Elite Force II, the best Trek game of all time.

For real though, Armada I-III are amazing, you savage.

Like most games, if you want pre-generated tiles you're going to have to scour google until you find something that will fit your needs. A general rule of thumb I've been going with is that anything within 10 ft is close range, up to 30 ft is medium, and anything beyond that is long. That makes adapting non-Trek maps to the combat system very easy.

>take a "war crimes and genocide" class for college
>struggle every day not to say "how can there be any war crimes if there was no war"

Have you asked about the Bajoran Occupation yet? You should do that.

I haven't actually watched voyager. Who's this Berman and how did he ruin it?

Star Trek has the Tholians which is basically the Combine without the body horror and they are only mentioned in a few episodes as being grumpy about not being able to take over this particular universe.

Then you have to consider that every engineering department is full of actual physicists with actual military training.

Rick Berman was the showrunner for Voyager (and DS9 technically, though he was waaaay less involved with DS9) and he set the artistic direction and tone for the show. He was highly involved and decided on a lot of stuff that made Voyager pretty terrible. He also approved a lot of really awful scripts since he liked Braga and Jeri Taylor (or Ryan, can't remember which Jeri is which; the writer one) and they were *by far* the worst writers on Voyager. Berman ruled with an ironfist and was generally just awful as a showrunner and Voyager suffered for it. See: that quote about Braga wanting to make the Year of Hell a full year for an example, Berman shot that down (Braga was lucky to get an episode).

Not even that, aren't the Tholians just established as not liking cold life and that's basically it?
haven't seen tholian web yet, just finished spock's brain which imo isn't that bad

Jeri Taylor was the writer. She's responsible for every episode where they dress in period costume, and that stupid fucking holonovels Janeway likes where she has to put up with rich snotty kids and their bitch maid.
And Braga's not a that bad a writer, he just really needs someone to work with who'll reign his shit in. If you're into comics a good comparison would be Ennis when not writing a WWII story.

I think there's some beta canon shit where they run an interdimensional empire based of their shenanigans with the Mirror Universe stuff.

Yeah the problem is that Braga had no one to rein him in on Voyager. He just had free run of the writing room and it was awful. Every "the science is fucking incomprehensible" episode of Voyager is 99% to be his direct fault. In fact, he and Taylor (thanks for that clarification, btw) co-wrote some of the worst scripts, like that one with time travel and Amelia Earhart.

It really was. Me and my friend used to spend hours exploring and looking for random infinite trading glitch ships.

What's the best way to get Star Trek video games especially Elite Force?

Torrenting
Most stuff from way back then has really shitty DRM and the cracks are attached to the tracker.

They’re inter dimensional time-traveling assholes that are best left well away from the main storyline because “autistic lava crab” doesn’t make for a good recurring antagonist.

Remember when Picard discovered that most aliens in the universe had a common genetic ancestor?
Aw, that's a real shame.
Well, quite a few are available on Steam, but that's only if you want the voice-acted versions of 25th Anniversary/Judgement Rites

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Miri and which one?

Requiem For Methueselah. Flint shows up halfway through, because some Onlies escaped from their planet on a tiny ship that happened to have a cloaking device that Flint invented, and he's brought in to find a flaw in his invention. Fortunately for him, Spock put Kirk in a mind-meld that made him forget the events of that episode because Spock thought the strain of meeting Rayna 17's creator again would be too much for him, especially after Jim had learnt that Miri had died from a stray phaser shot in a fight between Starfleet staff and Onlies.

Make way for the best crew.

Ah the "we're not allowed cloaking" version of the Defiant, with ship scale holo-disguises instead.
Was a fun tactical game though.

USS Incursion has a pretty neat design.

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This game would actually make for a great tabletop iteration.

Reminds me of one of theses.

I'd play it.

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>best Star Trek video game
It couldn't possibly have been made in Flash. It came out in 1995, and Flash 1.0 was released in 1996.

Picard mentions in his log that they're sending science vessels to study it. It just isn't Enterprise's job to sit in one play doing a detailed research for years.

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How common is it around here to hate the Federation? I've always found the Prime Directive, especially when it dictates allowing intelligent species to go extinct because that's their "destiny", to be monstrous.

Certainly pretty common in every Star Trek thread.

It's essentially an equivalent to pseudoscience fedoraisms. I swear 80% of the Federation is Nefarious posters have barely watched any Star Trek.

You'll get few people defending a strict interpretation of the Prime Directive around here, although there is this one user who makes the rounds around here sometimes and claims that Picard in "Homeward" made the right choice when he sat by and watched Boraal die.

Otherwise, it's generally acknowledged that the Federation *is* basically a force for good, it's just that sometimes the writers suck at getting that point across. But it's a 50-year-old franchise with dozens of writers, executives, producers, and actors, each with their own particular idea as to what is good and what isn't. YOU try and maintain quality over that time.

Oh we've debated the Prime Directive ad nausium and come to several different conclusions. The most popular is that the Prime Directive shouldn't be an absolute law, seeing as we see all of the captainss break it in some manner.
My own personal opinion is that the Prime Directive has, over time, become a tool of political expedience for the federation and that the word, not the intent, of the law are prioritised by the Federation Council/Starfleet Command. the Feds don't want to get involved in every bushfire war and civil injustice in the galaxy, so they point to this fairly nebulous rule as an excuse not to. Of course, captains on the ground break it frequently. So long as you have a good reason to do so, Starfleet will let you off with a slap on the wrist. but if you seriously fuck up or otherwise get the federation in trouble you're shit out of luck.
So I think it would be unfair to hate the Federation for that. Are they evil? Of course not. Are they good? They certainly try to be. Do they succeed? most of the time.

I like the Federation. I don't really like the need some have to see it broken because they can't think of anything else to add drama. Or have it actually be really fucking sinister rather than managing to live up to the ideals (this is usually coupled with some desire to see section 31 behind everything).

>The most popular is that the Prime Directive shouldn't be an absolute law, seeing as we see all of the captains break it in some manner

That though. If anything I'd like to see in the future Federation a department of uplifting, since there's gonna be a lot of people who will not exactly be happy to find out that they could have been helped and were not. Especially if they're already trying to do sub-light-speed colonisation of nearby worlds and just running into all sorts of other idiots.

>Picard in "Homeward" made the right choice when he sat by and watched Boraal die.
Because that's the correct opinion. It was impossible with the time and resources they had to save more than a handful of Boralans, which would not be enough to keep the species going. No, some tech manual source is not canon. The most they could do is grab a handful and move them somewhere, in which case all they've done is delayed their inevitable extinction by a few generations at most. It was a completely unsalvagable situation and any attempt at fixing something that couldn't be fixed is an argument made out of desperation and emotion, which was the whole point of the episode that Worf's brother was being a desperate emotional idiot.

Homeward was very badly written but any attempt at going "B-BUT THEY COULD DO SOMETHING!!!!!" is naive.

Jesus user, you couldn't just leave well enough alone? Every time this topic comes up, it's a fucking unholy shitstorm. Why would you open this can of worms again?

What if they took as many as they could, then cloned them, making minimal changes to the DNA of each clone, thus making each clone unique?
That way they could have saved the race.

It's also more than one user who argues that point.

Anyway, I'm liking that Orville doesn't have a prime directive. Word of god in this case straight from MacFarlane is they work on a case-by-case basis (as opposed to star trek's blanket rule they have to keep violating).

Then you run into the Star Trek IV problem with the whales. They may be genetically Boraalan, but aren't culturally so.

The general idea of the Prime Directive is fine. "Don't fuck around with people unless you have to." It's the fact that the writers want to write about it and see general noninterference as something too hard to write about for some reason.

The way I’ve been using it in my game is “noninterference or only subtle interference if they aren’t warp-capable, casual interaction if they are, can’t get involved in cultural disputes unless they officially request Starfleet get involved and the situation warrants it within it’s mandate.”
Means that a lot of it is in a case by case basis (hence why Captaincy is so hard to achieve as it results in people personally interpreting the Directive different ways) and legally Starfleet only really dives in once the new culture is advanced enough and if they they both want and need help as long as said help doesn’t involve Starfleet to start fighting their wars for them.

What if the other Boraalans raise them and teach them to be Boraalans?

Generally in the actual shows the Federation goes sort of out of it’s way to avoid allowing species to go exist, such as when Kirk positioned the Enterprise to destroy an asteroid that would render a world uninhabitable.
What they CAN’T do is end a world’s version of the Cold War due to it’s threat of nuclear extinction beyond offering basic diplomacy largely because they’d need to more or less annex an entire world and take away all their things to stop them from fighting, which is an inherently imperialistic move.

For an easy metaphor, they DON’T want to be the parent that takes away a child’s shit and punishes them “because they said so” and would rather the child make his own mistakes and give advice so he can make less of them.

That's only one small village. That'd be like if you took the population of Wales and cloned humanity from it to save us. We'd be known throughout space as Grade A Sheepshaggers, but no one would know about the rest of our culture.

What a horrible fate to be Welsh and nothing else.

>Doom an entire species because you dont like the particular people who would survive

No that's not the meaning user. That's being deliberately obtuse. My argument is that unless you save more than a few dozen people, the culture you're going to save is going to be a terrible example of the species as a whole and little more than a sideshow curiosity.

You would still save their particular part of culture and allow it to evolve.
Dooming an entire race because you would turn them into "sideshow curiosity" is unacceptable.

Besides, is tellyporting books and other recordings of the civilization such a hard thing for a starship that can travel between stars, use energy as its mean of defence and offense and which also has a fucking daycare center on it.

>No, some tech manual source is not canon

It doesn't have to be. We know they can synthesize knock-out gas, or use the shipboard phasers to stun populations from orbit (TOS "A Piece of the Action", plus a few additional times I think), and we know that the Enterprise D could potentially fit *at the very least* a thousand additional people inside of it simply from what we've seen of hallways, quarters, and cargo bays in the show itself.

>in which case all they've done is delayed their inevitable extinction by a few generations at most

Minimum viable population of humans in the real world is 160, or 80 if you're very good at social engineering.

If the entire population of Earth was going to die and some alien told me that they could only save Wales, I'd tell them to save Wales. If they told me they could only save the population of the Andaman Islands, I'd tell them to save the population of the Andaman Islands.

If I knew that the alien ship had the ability to save 1,000 people and they only saved 100, I'd spend my dying moments begging them to save more. And I don't care if I'm in it.

A scenario like that I think would be good fodder for not a lone starship but a department of some kind that seeks to try and preserve civilisations with the aim of potentially bringing them into the fold. If only to try and limit the amount of worlds out there ripe for exploitation by others far less principled. Through secretly influencing them towards an amicable settlement and neutering more self-destructive elements or even just outright turning up and mediating as a 3rd party. Bound to have some super-social engineering skills and simulated modelling that they can call on.

Though granted this is because I don't think that allowing a species to exterminate itself or go all Mad Max counts as a win for non-interference.

And of course there is the tricky question of what about civilisations that have managed to deliberately contact warp-capable races without having warp-drives themselves? We've seen it happen. Unfortunately it was in Enterprise in that episode of horror, and yeah in that case it was understandable that they couldn't just give them warp drive without the infrastructure to support it. But damn it, by even TOS the Feds should have some organisation in place to to help uplift a society like that.

>Mr. data, beam me up their library
>Yes sir
>Contents
>30,0000 documents of porn
>10,0000 documents of actual literature.
Great, we've just saved a bunch of pornographers dedicated to sheep shagging.