/STG/ - Star Trek General

so east LA?

Just a reminder, lest we forget.

My players are insane but actually managed to pull some surprisingly bullshit piloting off.
In a “flashback” mission taking place during the Dominion War they managed to force a Jem’Hadar Attack Cruiser to cut and run with a freaking refitted Miranda-class outfitted for Tactical Operations. What was going to be a “this is how bad the war got” flashback for the veteran characters who fought in the Dominion War ended up being a tale of heroism and daring while incredibly outgunned and outclassed technologically speaking.

How the in the world did they pull THAT off?

Basically by flying like lunatics.
The flashback was for the ship’s XO, the Chief of Security and the Helmsman, who all served on the same Reliant-class Miranda refit, the Miranda refit type where those pods are replaced with big phaser cannons. The Jem’Hadar opened up the fight by hitting the ship’s structure and redshirting the Captain and the XO with their phased polaron bullshit, forcing the present-day XO (who was then just a Lieutenant) to take command as his event roll said he was.
He had the Helmsman fly basically right up at knife-fight ranges with the ship and perform evasive maneuvers constantly. Since the Miranda-class had better Conn then the big attack vessel as well as was basically way too close for their medium range and long-range weapons it kept netting them a hefty Difficulty 4 defense against the Jem’Hadar, at which point THEY kept opening fire with their phaser cannons and dumping half of their power into each shot. The tac officer’s Focus on tactical systems, the Fast Targeting Systems talent, and the Helmsman’s Precision Flying Talent, kept their accuracy pretty good even as they kept targeting the Attack Cruiser’s engines over and over again with their big guns.
After about four rounds of ridiculously good rolls their reinforcements arrived in a Excelsior-class ship after doing a crapton of engines damage and basically completely depleting the Cruiser’s shields, forcing them to cut and run against a ship literally half their size that was over a century old all because the players did that tactic from the Orville’s first freaking episode.

The thing is, this was going to be a “In The Pale Moonlight” type flashback episode and instead became a “yeah, back in our early twenties we literally outfought a ship three times our size and won” story.

There's a whole episode about how that shit isn't Trek.

Yeah, I KNOW, but they damn well rolled pretty well and system-wise it was perfectly legal. I still tried to drive home that they took horrible losses during the fight (Captain crippled, XO dead, a crew of 350 dropped to around 205), showing that basically they scraped by a win (more like a stalemate at best) only by taking massive casualties and doing a tactic that the longer they pressed it the closer they came to death.
The XO’s player has decided that though he technically took command and saved the ship from complete destruction he still treats it as a major personal defeat due to loosing so much of the crew during the fight, including his immediate superiors.

Yeah, but Red Squad was all fucked up on speed and disobeying orders on a ship they didn't know how to fly, nevermind that they started to promote themselves into officerhood. Oh, and holding a civilian at gunpoint because he was the only one to figure out how fucked the situation was.

Also, if Nog could get his Red Squad boner under control he'd have realized he outranked all of them as an ensign. They all got what was coming to them. Starfleet needs to stop the whole Red/Nova Squad shit, it seems to only produce assholes. Maybe this is where all those murderous Admirals come from.

I think that's just inherent to being an admiral. Did we ever get any decent ones other than Ross and that guy from Starfleet Security that walked out on the House UnStarfleet Activities Committee?

Nacheyev, the admiral who keeps bitching at PIcard about some banquet in the "Data hallucinates" episode, Paris, the admiral who thinks something is going on in SF command and grills the Ent crew to make sure they're not in on it, Cartwright, and that's off the top of my head.

And judging by the story the user told, also luck. Lots of it.

Really, really good rolls, and the correct ship and character talents and focuses. In-universe, basically they were taking advantage of a Miranda’s superior maneuverability and excellent close-range firepower because running would have been fatal simply because they’d be within excellent range of the larger, more powerful ship’s weapons with bigger, faster engines preventing them from getting away.
I guess you could make a comparison about a very strong but small boxer with short arms getting inside the reach of a larger, heavier boxer and hitting him as hard as he could as fast as it could do it; if the bigger boxer landed just one solid hit the smaller boxer would be done, but as long as the smaller one kept inside of his reach he could pummel him with impunity.

It’s called “infighting”, and that’s an actual boxing tactic. An rather high-risk one mind you, but it can be pretty effective too so long as you have good endurance and are fast enough.

Huh. I don’t actually know anything about boxing.

youtu.be/GD6qtc2_AQA

>Ross
>the guy who was placed in command of an entire fleet and the most important theater of war in a generation and left it all to a captain with 0 combat experience to run day to day because the captain happened to have captained a station - not a ship - that happened to be at a strategic location where aliens had turned him into a figure of worship for the superstitious natives

>sisko
>0 combat experience
>implying that all his station experience (supply movement, minor ship repair, etc) isn't useful when they mostly sit on a station all day

>Operation Return
>Operation Get Dax Killed
>Operation Gang Rape Cardassia To Death With Two Major Empires Suborning Their Fleets To Your Command

Zakdorn and Miri Make a Porno

there I said it

I said what we were all thinking

>left it all to a captain with 0 combat experience to run day to day
Huh?
For one thing, Sisko was a staff officer. Captain is a pretty high rank, and appropriate for a staff officer. Managing a base would also be pretty useful experience for a staff officer as well. Hell, if he hadn't an prophet, he probably would have been able to trade in his pips for a bar in short order.
Second, Sisko had lots of combat experience. He had five seasons of it, and in multiple fields: personal combat, small ship combat, starship combat, and even station combat.

Oh, and he had literal staff officer experience for some time, when he got transfered to Earth.

Zero combat experience? We SEE him in shipboard combat in the very first episode.

...

...

Please, you’ve overstuffed your mcguffin, leave some words for your obstacle and the resultant horseshit solution.

>If we use charge the nadion pulse emitters with hyperpolerised aceton particles, that might just create a large enough inverse resonance cascade to dissipate the tachyon flow pattern and free the ship!
>Just like pushing a kayak off of the rocks with a paddle!
>Or popping a balloon!

While they look like Uruk-Hai, these are far better than STD Klingons. That's like the only good thing i'll say about JJTrek

Who's been installing nadion pulse emitters on my ship?! Jesus christ that shit's dangerous! We're here to do science, not slowly kill the crew with space cancer! An inverse resonance cascade? That's engineer talk for blowing up the ship! Who are you people, where's my engineering crew? I'm calling security!

I quite like the Helmets and the overall Soviet feel to their uniforms. As for their faces, I think that it’s close enough to older iterations to be a stylistic variation rather than a total redesign.

>If we beat the captain over the head with the butt of a phaser rifle and then lock down key locations around the ship, we can continue our work with impunity!
>Just like clubbing a deal to death!
>Or popping a balloon!

Totally agree, really like the Soviet vibe they give out, and the helmets are immediately recognizable as Klingon as I'm primed to think it from previous Trek. I thought JJtrek did a great job with designing the Klingons.

Didn't Admiral Layton use Red Squad as part of his coup attempt?

Yeah, they went around sabotaging key Federation facilities and never considered that something was fishy.

>Also, if Nog could get his Red Squad boner under control he'd have realized he outranked all of them as an ensign
If he'd tried to exert his rank, then Cadet "I'm the Captain Now" would have accused him of insubordination and got his Lord of the Flies crew to lock him up. I'd wager that unless an actual captain showed up, they would have plowed on with their suicide mission regardless.

And he immediately loses his ship. As the senior surviving officer, that should be an automatic court martial; one with a foregone conclusion perhaps, but also one which would preclude his becoming so "expert" on the Borg that he ended up designing the anti-Borg starship class.

That's the point. He's a staff officer. He's not fleet at all. The runabouts never do anything particularly useful in major engagements; his experience with those would qualify him to be captain on one of those federation fighters that explode so easily.

He ends up with the Defiant because Starfleet is broken, and the Defiant is a stupid, overbuilt ship anyway, so i guess if anybody sane was left on Earth by that point they felt that the Emissary would just get himself killed; but even when he didn't, they still had him under oversight from Starfleet Security (via a guy who.. yeah, let's remind ourselves that Starfleet is broken, and just say Eddington reported directly to an admiral, not Sisko).

He ends up with the upgraded station because of the Dominion making threats; then the Klingons make threats so he ends up using the upgraded station. Then it gets upgraded some more before he loses it, and the wormhole, and is forced to eventually launch an incredibly costly fleet assault to retake both (during which the horrific losses of the Federation and Klingon fleets may well be due to his style of Wolf 359 battle planning).

At this point, he's personally lost 2 commands to enemy action (and will go on to lose a third in the form of the original Defiant, and that's only such a low number if we count runabouts as auxiliary craft). That's two courts martial and they're still sucking his dick; not to mention his battle plans are things like "see that gap between those heavy cruisers? fly into it relatively slowly, space is a wide flat plane and our magic engines couldn't possibly be configured to zip through a gap faster than any living being could react to stop us".

>And he immediately loses his ship. As the senior surviving officer, that should be an automatic court martial;

You'd need to court martial most of the survivors of the battle of Battle of Wolf 359 in that case. Or heck, court martial Picard for being involved on the Borg side because he was assimilated.

I'm not sure he did outrank them at all. Janeway was empowered to give the Maquis on her ship field commissions that, so far as we know, Starfleet upheld for several years after finding out about them (but possibly out of sensitivity to the Maquis' sensibilities, didn't make them "official" ranks).

That meant that, for example, Chakotay was giving orders to people who'd earned their commissions through the normal channels; although a lot of the senior Maquis on Voyager had been to Starfleet Academy, some (like Torres) had dropped out before completion, so her rank was always a field-granted promotion from nowhere. But the crew honored it as though it were a normal rank, as they did with all the other warrant officers (including Paris, who for some reason got his rank as a normal pip rather than provisional).

So the Valiant crew might actually have outranked Nog per protocol, despite being cadets in cadet uniforms with provisional field-granted (and self-field-granted) ranks, because that's how broken Starfleet is.

>And he immediately loses his ship. As the senior surviving officer, that should be an automatic court martial;

Since when was that a thing you court martial people for. I mean, the number of times a ship named 'Enterprise' has been lost, most protagonists would have been court martialed. Only one guy in all of american history has ever been court martialed for such things and it was Charles B. McVay III, who was posthumously exonerated.

So you want to court martial him for a thing that literally no captain has ever been court martialed for and stayed court martialed for.

Are there any tools for designing a ship from the ground up visually?

No, just the commanding officers of vessels lost. Sisko gave the abandon ship order; Sisko answers for that.

Picard is an interesting argument; but I'd fall on the side of medical exemption (he was being coerced by the hive mind). In fact while that would likely return him quickly to duty (if medically fit) his later exclusion from the fleet sent to stop the Borg cube in First Contact would be a very logical recommendation from the court. It's actually kind of weird that he doesn't say "after my off-screen court martial, Starfleet decided I could not face the Borg again until the limits of their influence over me were better understood".

And of course nobody really understands how to remove Borg implants until Voyager comes back.

Whenever a vessel is lost, a court martial is convened. Every time. It's not automatically a criminal trial, it's more of an inquest.

But Sisko doesn't even face that.

Lmao

Where does the Fed get it's antimatter from? Can it be created in a lab? Do you have to get it out in space with bussard collectors or what?

Why would Sisko be punished for the loss of a ship he wasn't the commanding officer of?

Generally that is suspended during war or when a ship is lost in active combat. Furthermore that really only happens to the higher ranking officers, Sisko was not of a high enough rank at the time and only was in the position he was because those above him died.

Voyager is a special case because they're alone and isolated and the crews have to work together. If you make all the Maquis including Chakotay basic crewmen then they'll revolt. Making Chakotay her first officer and giving the Maquis positions roughly in line with their jobs on Chakotay's ship was the best way to integrate them into the crew and prevent internal disaster, and shouldn't be taken as proper Starfleet protocol. The Valiant has no such excuse, especially when Cadet First Class Captain Dipshit was disobeying the ship's higher orders from the start.

>But Sisko doesn't even face that.
On screen.

And really, it'd be boring as hell TV for them to sit down, say "nobody could've predicted the Breen weapon, you saved everyone you could, good job."

It's implied that creating antimatter is clean and trivial at that point, and they can do so using bussard collectors to get deuterium if they need to.

youtube.com/watch?v=LtmF8RRxBXg

I'm surprised the Academy didn't disband Red Squad for its role in the coup and the Valiant incident.

I suppose because they were manipulated by the Admiral they got off scot-free.

To be fair, how many Starfleet officers can say they haven't been an unwitting pawn in an admiral's plot to overthrow the Federation council and declare a military Junta? I'm guessing that number is fairly low.

What are the best talents to have in STA for various roles? Obviously engineering wants I know my ship but I'm not sure what's useful beyond that. Also what talents are traps?

>see that gap between those heavy cruisers? fly into it relatively slowly, space is a wide flat plane and our magic engines couldn't possibly be configured to zip through a gap faster than any living being could react to stop us".

ALL Star Trek battle plans are like that due to special effects limitations of the time rather then the more realistic but less visually engaging “we’re shooting at each other from tens of thousands of kilometers away” that space combat would probably be like.

If the Krogan can run a solar-powered supercollider built into the equator of a Mercury-type planet to refine AP fuel, you can damn well bet the Vulcans can do it.

It’s really just extending their forehead plate farther up the skull then older makeup stuff would allow. We already know Klingons have those bony ridges all over the place, even on their feet.

>Command
Advisor is really helpful due it being almost universally useful since all the officer needs to do is be there and be helpful and you get a free re-roll on the d20. Follow My Lead is handy too, but only in combat situations.
>Conn
Precise Evasion is STUPID useful, because it lets the helm make the ship harder to hit in combat without the resulting penalty to accuracy with shooting.
>Security
Quick to Action is great because it lets your entire group take control of the flow of combat. Mean Right Hook is really helpful as well because it’s Star Trek and inevitably fisticuffs will be involved somewhere.
>Engineering
In The Nick of Time helps make Work go by faster, which is always a good thing. I Know My Ship is also generically useful.
>Science
In The Nick of Time is still good, and Testing A Theory gives you an extra d20 as long as you succeeded at your last test, which is great!
>Medicine
Pretty much EVERYTHING is useful here because the situations a doctor can be found in are somewhat more specific and mostly these will apply to all of them.

Well, it can also be explained that since particle weapons are the most efficient means of tearing down shields so torpedoes are most effective, and those have a limited range before losing coherence, and if you fire torps from too far out phasers can point defense them, you can easily explain why combat happens at closer ranges like that.

youtube.com/watch?v=89WcIwjlQxA

Can confirm Mean Right Hook is useful.
Playing an Andorian Chief of Security, and when combined with The Ushaan species Talent my Officer hardly needs to draw his phaser to kick someone’s ass.

Because user here seems to really hate him.

>ridges even on their feet
>spots go all the way down
Worf and Jadzia: a match made in Sto'vo'kor!

My one real annoyance with the rules is that while they have Stat+Skill can be used for basically any combination, when you get to combat (Space or meat) they become a lot more set in place and rather force certain stats to be really high. It kinda got me in trouble my first game when I made a Vulcan Security officer and tried to make them melee without realising that melee is hard locked to a stat Vulcans suck at and Vulcan Neck Pinch isn't really that useful if you are not a science or medical officer.

Query for my own group; what exactly are the Starfleet regulations on using lethal force in combat? Like, when are they allowed to employ it and when are they overreacting?

I don’t think it’s ever been spelled out, but it’s basically a pure judgement call rather then a strict set of rules.
The basic idea is that Starfleet uses minimum available force to defend itself and to attack only if an immediate threat is found. Notice how whenever a ship is endanger Captain’s first strategy is generally to raise shields (a defensive move) rather then power phasers or load photons? That philosophy is how they generally operate. So mostly keeping the phasers set to stun unless they are obviously and deliberately planning on killing you themselves, generally with energy weaponry.
You could argue that an especially violence-adverse Captain order his people to never set above maximum Stun since in most cases where the creature isn’t arbitrarily immune to phasers that is enough to really knock a guy down and out pretty hard which allows you to take prisoners or resolve the situation without any more killing, though in situations like the Dominion War and open military conflict with groups like the Cardassians or Klingons this strategy would likely not be practical since it’s just giving your enemy time to recover their temporarily downed soldiers.

I think I remember seeing in one episode of a Trek series that stun settings can sometimes kill?

Yeah, it's a Superior Taser. The only truly non-lethal weapon in Star Trek is the Hypospray. Dual wield them and no one can stop you.

Thanks.
Agreed, I could see control being used for combat as well through more trained combat styles. Fitness as well.
Yeah but that's only certain species and certain situations or high stun settings (more energy puts it closer to kill).

You’re probably thinking of one of the OS films where a character gets hit close range with a phaser on stun and it kills him. At lowest power settings a phaser can hurt or shock a person but not much more then that, basically something to chase or scare away folks relatively harmlessly.
Maximum stun actually physically strikes a person though along with shocking them, and does so hard enough to knock them down. It stands to reason that at close range when pressed up against vital points maximum stun might actually kill someone the way a taser might give someone cardiac arrest or a riot gun’s beanbag rounds might kill a man if you hit him in the head with it.

>Nechayev, another constantly bitchy admiral, and an actual traitor and conspirator
I think we have different definitions of "decent", user. Paris and the guy who got bluegilled were alright, though.

>Dual wield them and no one can stop you.
I've just seen that VOY episode. Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy.

To anybody who's played STA and had a character (played, in the group, or as a player) with a prosthetic limb how did that affect the game?

Atleast some of the Dominion War battles are as close quarters as they are shown as we see Jem'Hadar Bug Ships intentionally crash into Klingon and Starfleet sips during the fighting.

Honestly, it wouldn’t affect it much.
A prosthetic limb or attachment would be a Trait much like Geordi’s VISOR is a Trait, so it would just reduce the Difficulty of certain tasks just like how Vulcan’s Trait of being a Vulcan means Difficulties involving great strength are reduced due to how physically strong they are compared to humans.

That's what I was thinking.

Maybe throw in sensor checks or anomaly penalties, like how Picard's heart would've been fine but the replacement was fried by lightning effect No. 5 in "Tapestry"

Ferengi trader Online is at it again.

arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/10830644-infinity-r&d-promotion!

That’s invoking the Trait for negative stuff rather then posititive stuff, which is all there in the rules.

Just watched S1E1 of Discovery. Really fucking bad. How could you fuck up even harder than Star Wars with TLJ?

What pissed me off about episode 1 was that they tried to slam as much character background in as possible. That and nothing happens at all during it until the very end they finally decide to do something, and bam better go pay for the subscription service to find out in episode 2. Also Episode 4 is probably the worst. The writing in it is atrocious.

Dunno but Shield of Tomorrow is a way better trek show than STD.

By putting someone with an already rocky track record with individual Trek episodes in charge of a whole series.

>Implying
The only thing Shield of Tomorrow is good for is boosting your confidence that your own games will never be such a clusterfuck of tumblrisms and special snowflakes.

It was more a comment on just how shit STD is. Way better != good.

I see what you mean. However, I would honestly take another BLACK ALERT than have to listen to the otherkin (or whatever the fuck Sam is today) snap another pencil into the mic.

I'm just watching the VOD so I haven't seen any pencil snaps. Maybe when the next episode goes up, not looking forward to it since nobody should be snapping pencils over a fucking game.

Not that user, but she doesn't even do it as a legit moment of rage. Its this stupid running joke. Also there's an ad for SoT that's literally just her doing a high pitched scream.

It's supposed to be "stress relief" or some shit, but user speaks the truth. It's a rather retarded running gag that the fanbase eats up just like how people praise Marisha in CR.

What really cemented the nail in the coffin for me was the latest episode. Sure, shore leave episodes and/or lower deck type stuff can be fun, but the GM played shipper the whole game and more or less forced a fade to black.

In STDs defense, it has made me laugh harder than any previous Star Trek. Not on purpose, mind you, but still.

...

It disappoints me that there wasn't an episode where the augments steal a runabout solely so they could have her yell to fire the torpedoes.

So, how IS Star Trek Adventures?

I'm having a load of fun with it. I think it lends itself well to the source material. You can have a myriad of situations like in the show. Combat, Intrigue, RP, Philosophical Conundrums