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Oh I like to learn the game as the LP shows, I want to learn about the Lore. Cyth can tell you I'm all about Lore.
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Dec 27, 2018 18:00
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I'm at work and on my phone, but if nobody else jumps in between now and when I get home you better believe I can talk about Star Trek lore.
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Dec 27, 2018 18:35
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I'm sure people can write literal books about Star Trek, but here's at least a list of the major players:
There are endless numbers of other dudes, of course, but most of them are fairly unimportant, like the hundreds of tiny Federation member states.
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Dec 27, 2018 18:51
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one of the fundamental lore issues Star Trek Online faces is it's trying to synthesize stuff from fifty years' worth of TV shows and a couple of movies; the weird mix of hopelessly cheesy and really high-concept of the 1960s original series, the rough-edges-sanded-off of Next Generation, the rough-edges-sanded-back-on of Deep Space 9, the two odd wayward children in Voyager and Enterprise, and the most recent ones. fifty years' worth of people's visions of what the future would be (and fifty years worth of special effects development) smashes together very, very poorly. like, those Reman guys we just met? those were invented, from whole cloth, to be a new kind of space vampire, in the last Next Generation movie, which was exceedingly bad. they were also basically never mentioned again after that.
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Dec 27, 2018 19:12
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I just realized something, thinking about the Suliban that we helped a couple updates ago. Archer went up against the Xindi and the Suliban (and mentions the Remans) on Enterprise, so if those races are so goddamn important to events that ultimately shaped the Federation, how come Kirk and Picard never even mention them on their series, set centuries later? (The real-world answer is, of course, they didn't know they were gonna be making a prequel series in 1966 and 1987.)
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Dec 27, 2018 19:43
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Hmm, to focus on the main subject of this LP, can fill in some basics about the Romulans in this game. As mentioned, they are an offshoot of the Vulcans (AKA Spock’s pointy eared race), who when the Vulcans embraced logic their ancestors hosed off into space to start their own planet During most of the Star Trek series shows they basically have various plots and schemes to mess with our heroes. In particular their official spy agency/secret police the Tal Shiar stirs up tons of crap against the Federation in general and their cousins the Vulcans in particular. Spock, in the era after his series (Star Trek the Next Generation, as the name implies it’s about 100 years after when Kirk and friends ran around in the original series) did secretly go there to try to stir up a change in their behavior, and as a result of a very good episode in Deep Space 9 the Romulans get suckered themselves for a change into declaring war against that show’s main enemy the Dominion, but otherwise the Romulans are mostly left alone in their space to scheme until the next episode they show up in. However things got recently complicated for them when some sort of supernova (being a trifle more explodey than a real supernova can be due to Plot) endangers their homeworld. Spock tried to save them but failed (with various timey wimey shenanigans that result in the alternate timeline the newest Trek movies were set in) and Romulus and many Romulans went boom. This had a bunch of consequences including several Romulans like our current hero becoming refugees in various places. However it appears the previously mentioned spy agency the Tal Shiar is now kidnapping these refugees, undoubtably as part of some Evil Scheme to Make Romulus Great Again (which will be a neat change from its current status as debris). Tech wise the main claim to fame of the Romulans are their cloaking devices, a way to make their ships invisible until they attack. This of course works well for them in their sneaky bastard schemes. They did wind up trading the technology to the Klingons, the other traditional Star Trek enemy species, who despite having a hat of being honorable warriors apparently see no issue with ambushing people and shooting them in the back. This was part of an alliance based on the principle of “gently caress those Federation bastards”, an alliance which held for some time until the Romulans executed a sudden but inevitable betrayal in between the original series and the Next Gen series, causing the Klingons to declare them a blood enemy (something the Klingons do pretty much every Tuesday). MadDogMike fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Dec 27, 2018 |
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Dec 27, 2018 19:43
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It honestly never even crossed my mind that someone with absolutely no knowledge of Star Trek would be interested in reading this LP, so I'll make sure to include more background lore in the future!
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Dec 27, 2018 19:44
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Also, in general older Star Trek liked to play their fictional space empires as ersatz versions of real-world nations for veiled political commentary. The Federation was Space America, of course, and the Klingons were originally a stand-in for the Soviet Union. The Klingons have since been reflavored into Mongol samurai vikings, but the Soviet influences are obvious in TOS. To go with that, the Romulans historically in Trek have been something of an analogy for China: mysterious, inscrutable, suspicious, manipulative, master spies, briefly had an alliance with the Though in STO, thanks to Abrams, that obviously no longer applies. For the sharp-eyed with a keen memory for Enterprise (I'm sorry), the mysterious new bad guys with the black and green stuff are in fact a race that appeared in Enterprise, as one-episode wonders about which virtually nothing was revealed or established. STO has taken this obscure one-off bad guy race and turned them into a major plot thread. Which is how STO likes to work in general. 
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Dec 27, 2018 20:07
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So is this game worth playing? Would I put a ton of hours into it and watch it die in like a year?
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Dec 27, 2018 20:48
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People who have played more than I have can probably give better a better answer, but I don't think the game is going anywhere soon. At least it better not or this is going to be a very unsatisfying LP.
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Dec 27, 2018 21:34
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Pratan posted:So is this game worth playing? Would I put a ton of hours into it and watch it die in like a year? It's generally fun and, most importantly, you don't need to dump any money into it to play the single player stuff. Snorb posted:I just realized something, thinking about the Suliban that we helped a couple updates ago. Everyone's so embarrassed by what happened in the 22nd century that they all just agreed to not talk about it. But several Enterprise species show up later in STO.
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Dec 27, 2018 22:53
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The only thing I think I can add to basic Star Trek lore is that FTL travel is achieved through dilithium crystals which are able to filter matter and antimatter without exploding to create a special kind of plasma that forms a field around the ship where certain laws of physics don't apply anymore. (I'm pretty sure. I read this entire chapter of The Next Generation Technical Manual as a kid and thought I was just the coolest (I wasn't)). It's not like hyperspace or anything; ships are just going really fast but everything else is normal. It takes time to get from system to system via warp, too. Except in this game it kind of is like hyperspace, since there are no interactions on the overworld and you're just appearing in one system or another. Finally, if you've never seen an episode of Star Trek, the pacing of these updates might be odd because I'm deliberately trying to structure them like an episode. Except that as I'm working on the next few updates I think I've accidentally structured them more like an episode of Mission to Zyxx.  : Hey Satra? :   : Commander Sekah, I have an incoming transmission from Junior Missions Operations Manager Temer. : Hey guys!A few people might get this.
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Dec 28, 2018 02:30
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Moon Slayer posted:The only thing I think I can add to basic Star Trek lore is that FTL travel is achieved through dilithium crystals which are able to filter matter and antimatter without exploding to create a special kind of plasma that forms a field around the ship where certain laws of physics don't apply anymore. (I'm pretty sure. I read this entire chapter of The Next Generation Technical Manual as a kid and thought I was just the coolest (I wasn't)). It's not like hyperspace or anything; ships are just going really fast but everything else is normal. It takes time to get from system to system via warp, too. I think the ships in STO have 'Transwarp' drives for really long range travel which is closer to a Hyperspace. Traditional Warp Drives work more or less by bending space with the Warp Field generated by the Warp Core, which is powered by the aforementioned matter/antimatter reaction. Said reaction has nothing to do with the actual mechanics of the warp drive, it's just really efficient power generation. But yeah, the Warp Field bends space and subspace (which is sort of like hyperspace, but really only used for FTL Comms) to literally pull the ship through normal space at an insane speed. At one point they found out that going over a certain speed was damaging space time and instituted a Federation-wide speed limit of all things.
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Dec 28, 2018 03:21
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And they also found that if you go over another, higher speed it devolves humans into lizards.
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Dec 28, 2018 03:28
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A bit more detail: what warp drive does is move the ship into subspace, an alternate dimension where the rules of physics are different and lets the ship move faster than the speed of light in our universe, while preserving a bubble of our reality around the ship while in subspace so that the ship itself is unaffected by the different laws in subspace. Transwarp drive on the other hand folds space to create shortcuts, and by the technology of the current era in Trek, most races that use transwarp have to build specific networks of these transwarp shortcuts. In STO, all playable races have developed transwarp networks, and you slowly unlock new systems you can transwarp to in order to teleport across the game map. And to clarify for those unaware, my "From the Admiral's Desk" stuff (and From the General's Desk if I cover any Klingon ships) are, with Moon Slayer's permission, entirely made up by me. Very few of the new ships in STO get any sort of lore behind them, so I've found it fun to write out my own little history and overview of new ships.
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Dec 28, 2018 03:37
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Moon Slayer posted:And they also found that if you go over another, higher speed it devolves humans into lizards. Aside from being the only episode the creators wish they hadn't made, they somehow turned the Warp Drive into the Infinite Improbability Drive, because half the explanation was exactly the same as that
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Dec 28, 2018 03:52
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Voyager, thanks to it’s premise, was the reigning king of “Even Faster Than Warp Drive” drives. There was Quantum Slipstream, which has been referenced in a bunch of other Star Trek related books and games. It’s basically Hyperspace from Star Wars, where the whole ship literally transitions into different layer of reality that looks like an energy tunnel and allows it to go even faster than Warp 9.9. I think the estimate they gave was that the Slipstream drive on the Dauntless was fast enough to traverse the Milky Way in three months time. And the Dauntless was a Babby’s First Hyper FTL ship. Then there was the aforementioned Warp 10 lizard sex drive that even Brannon Braga wants deleted from Trek canon. The idea behind that is that Warp 10 was “infinite speed”, meaning you would theoretically exist at every point in the universe at the exact same time, so it was simply a matter of “stopping” at your intended destination functionally instantaneously. Side effects include lizard mutation for some reason. Then there was the Coaxial Warp Drive, which was a space-folding FTL jump drive similar to what’s seen on Battlestar Galactica. Instantaneous A-to-B transit rather than linear travel through sub space. I think the drawback was it’s range wasn’t as vast as standard warp travel, but because it was instantaneous you could just daisychain jumps together until you got to where you were going and would still arrive LONG before you would at regular warp. And then there was some bullshit space magic slingshot that we never actually saw in action but was the centre of a conspiracy episode featuring Seven of Nine. It was basically a Jumpgate from Babylon 5 or Freelancer only without a hard exit point so it literally just spit you out of hyperspace hopefully close to where you intended to come out. Apparently the Enterprise-J has both a Slipsteam and a supped up Coaxial drive on it in addition to standard Warp Drive, as befitting a ship that can travel between galaxies. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Dec 28, 2018 |
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Dec 28, 2018 04:34
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And let's not forget the latest addition, the spore drive! Thanks to an interdimensional network of fungal spores that exist everywhere in all dimensions, a ship fitted with the the magic mushroom machine can teleport to any point in any universe, or weaponize it to destroy all life in the entire multiverse because life fundamentally depends on the spore network. God I wish I was making that up.
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Dec 28, 2018 04:36
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Moon Slayer posted:It honestly never even crossed my mind that someone with absolutely no knowledge of Star Trek would be interested in reading this LP, so I'll make sure to include more background lore in the future! Well I know you from the SWTOR LP so I know I like your writing style, and I love SSLPs which have been slowly dying off, so I like to read them when I find them.
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Dec 28, 2018 04:44
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Cythereal posted:And let's not forget the latest addition, the spore drive! Thanks to an interdimensional network of fungal spores that exist everywhere in all dimensions, a ship fitted with the the magic mushroom machine can teleport to any point in any universe, or weaponize it to destroy all life in the entire multiverse because life fundamentally depends on the spore network. I love how they had to concoct the excuse that it was literally a crime against humanity to continue using and had to be covered up as a way of explaining “Well why don’t we ever use this amazing poo poo on TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY?”
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Dec 28, 2018 04:45
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Cythereal posted:(The mycelial spore drive network is bullshit) I'm trying to like Discovery, and I like what I've seen of it so far, but Christ on the cross the spore drive is the dumbest loving thing I've ever seen in science fiction. Yes, it's dumber than midi-chlorians in Star Wars. nine-gear crow posted:I love how they had to concoct the excuse that it was literally a crime against humanity to continue using and had to be covered up as a way of explaining “Well why don’t we ever use this amazing poo poo on TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY?” "Because the key word in that description is 'poo poo.'"
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Dec 28, 2018 05:25
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Pratan posted:So is this game worth playing? Would I put a ton of hours into it and watch it die in like a year? Game's going through a rough patch right now, but it's been through rough patches before. And for a price of free, I can't complain much. Snorb posted:I'm trying to like Discovery, and I like what I've seen of it so far, but Christ on the cross the spore drive is the dumbest loving thing I've ever seen in science fiction. Honestly, the spore drive isn't what bothers me about Discovery. It's dumb technobabble, but I'm numb to that after Voyager. What bothers me is that Discovery thought that cannibalism, naked tits, Section 31, introducing gay people only to kill them or make them evil, and hard men making hard choices were all things Trek should feature prominently. At any rate, this LP has by now seen the Mogai warbird. Contrary to the general assumption by the player base, STO did not create the Mogai.  The Romulan warbird Valdore and her unnamed sister ship come to Star Trek from the movie Nemesis, where they accomplished absolutely nothing and got the poo poo kicked out of them by the Scimitar. This admittedly lives up to the example set by the D'Deridex, which never actually got to kick rear end on screen (though mainly due to a lack of budget in the movie Generations, which originally had Romulans as the villains and the Enterprise-D would have been destroyed in an epic space battle with a D'Deridex or two) and got blown up a lot in big battle scenes in Deep Space Nine because it was only one of two Romulan ship models. STO did, however, dub these two warbirds the Mogai class, and established them as smaller, swifter ships than the D'Deridex. Mogais fill the medium-size cruiser role for the Romulan Star Empire in STO, and conspicuously aren't used by the Romulan Republic NPC faction at all. From the Admiral's Desk The Mogai 'heavy' warbird is an early 24th century design, a contemporary of Starfleet's Ambassador class and the Klingons' Vor'cha, and developed alongside the mighty D'deridex warbird. However, the Mogai was built for a very different role than its more famous stablemate. Where D'deridex warbirds were to be the anvil of the fleet in being, guided by Dhelan and T'Varo scouts, the Mogai was to operate independently. Traditional Romulan naval doctrine reserves a place of honor for what might best be translated as a hunter/killer role. Operating independently of the primary fleet, swift and well armed mid-size warbirds would patrol the Empire or enter hostile territory under cloak, and engage targets of opportunity without warning before cloaking again to evade hostile response. In times of peace, these hunter/killer warbirds preyed on smugglers, pirates, and other uninvited guests to Romulan space. In times of war, they operated behind enemy lines wreaking havoc. From the early 24th century until the Hobus Supernova, the Mogai filled this role admirably for the Imperial Navy. Mogai warbirds served with distinction in the Star Empire's conflicts with the Klingon Empire, then the Dominion War. After Hobus, though, the Mogai has found itself pressed into service into open battle as a common cruiser among the successor states. The Imperial Remnant, Tal Shiar, Romulan Republic, and Reman Resistance all acquired many Mogai warbirds, and all but the Remans inherited shipyards capable of building more. Given their size and crew requirements, however, the Mogai has fallen out of favor with the Republic in favor of the less capable but more affordable Dhelan. The Valdore class, named after a particularly ill-fated Mogai warbird, is a variant produced exclusively by the Imperial remnant in small numbers. Praetor Donatra, now missing for some time, has been hailed as a new Romulan hero, and these more advanced Mogai variants were named after Donatra's most famous command. Inevitably, some have since fallen into the Republic's hands. Like most of the warbird fleet, the Republic Navy later refitted most of its surviving Mogais with modern technology. The Mogai's true successor in the Republic, the Morrigu class, has recently entered production.
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Dec 28, 2018 05:44
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Re: STD-chat. I don't mind the idea that there's a mushroom analogue living throughout the higher dimensions in M-theory or whatever it was they hand-waved for their magical teleportation engine. It's every bit as incredibly dumb as most  but at least it's novel. The actual drive is still stupid, mainly because it makes the protagonists seem like idiots when they don't solve all their problems with their magical mushroom teleportation device, but that is a problem it shares with a lot of Trek tech (see: that one episode with the transporter rifle that shoots through walls, or anything else related to transporters). It's really a concept they should've dropped and not ported into video games, but I guess the producers wanted more mileage out of their magic mushroom VFX.The "hard men making hard choices" angle in Discovery is one where I kinda see what they were going for but the execution failed. The first season is intended to be a rejection of that philosophy. After doing bad poo poo and witnessing worse Burnham finally concludes that compromising your core values for results is ultimately counter productive and the Federation can only win by being itself. It's intended to be the culmination of a season's worth of character growth and the finale is supposed to affirm that there is greater strength in diversity, dialogue, trust and all that hokey earnestness that Trek actually does well. Unfortunately, in order to build tension the writers decided to have a lot of episodes of "well, Captain Jerkass McWarcrimes and his torture gets results, dammit, we need people like him" before that point. The fact that he's allowed to go unchecked for so long ends up tainting half the cast and undermining the entire larger plot. Even with all the big glaring flaws it's still probably the best first season a Trek show has had to date, but I sure wish it didn't have all the big glaring flaws. If I never see a Trek mirror universe episode with an evil bisexual dominatrix in it again it'll still be too soon...
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Dec 28, 2018 08:21
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So what I hear is: if the first season of STD is the best first season there has been in the show's story, and it is apparently terribad, that means all of star trek is terribad.
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Dec 28, 2018 08:32
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First seasons of Trek tend to be bad. Trek series tend to be good series. Both of these statements can be true.
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Dec 28, 2018 10:10
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Also the Valdore shows up as a Romulan capital ship in Star Trek Armada III and they even stated it to reflect the piss poor performance it puts in in Nemesis, almost as an in-joke I think, so they tend to go down stupid easy in fleet battles.
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Dec 28, 2018 11:30
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Cythereal posted:Not obscure at all, the Thrai dreadnought warbird is a ship available in STO and looks like the odd little lovechild of a D'Deridex and T'Liss. Yes, but the name "Thrai" refers to a native predator from the Romulan homeworld all the way back from the (excellent) TOS tie-in novel My Enemy, My Ally.
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Dec 28, 2018 12:43
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Previously, on Let’s Play Star Trek: Online posted:
And now, the conclusion …  : What kind of ship is that ?!: We don’t know. It attacked our colony on Virinat.: And now they’re attacking here. We need to warn other colonies!: Believe it or not, that’s what we’re trying to do. : Look out! : The forcefield is down!: Tal Shiar!    : Were you able to repair the primary transmitter? I set up a portable transmitter relay and gathered as many neighbors as I could. And I’m glad you found Slamek. : That makes one of us.: We need to evacuate immediately!: I’m not going to argue. Our security field is down and the Tal Shiar are attacking the colony. Hopefully everyone who hasn’t already heard the message will realize what’s happening and evacuate. There are more people on the outskirts of town. If I can get to them in the shuttle, I may be able to get them to safety.: Sounds like a plan. We can beam everyone here up to our ship.: Understood. Please take Veril with you. I’ll take Slamek with me to help scan for survivors.: We’ll rendezvous in orbit. Good luck, Zden. I’ll contact my ship.: Father, I should go with you. It took me weeks to repair the shuttle’s drive system. If something goes wrong, you’ll need me there.: You’ll be safer on their ship. Slamek can help me if we run into trouble.: Oh I highly doubt that.: I’ll broadcast the coordinates to every shuttle within range once we’re in the air. Now go. We need to look for survivors.  : Let’s get you to those shuttles. : Why is that shuttle on fire?: … Tal Shiar. : Keep those things away from the shuttles!: Lieutenant, are you there? We’re safely onboard, and you may want to get up here. More Tal Shiar ships are entering the system by the minute, and I don’t think the Decimus can hold them off for long.: Tell the transporter operator to get us out of here.  : There’s, uh, nothing we can do here anymore. [A short time later …]  : Status?: The Decimus has engaged the Tal Shiar and is forming a wedge so we can get the shuttles out of the system. Zden’s shuttle was one of the ones that made it to the ship. He’s hailing us.: Open a channel.: Lieutenant Sekah, we’re in position and ready to make a run out of the system. Is my daughter safe?: She’s aboard. She’ll be safe.: I’m making myself useful. The singularity core on this ship is practically an antique. I’m keeping an eye on the power levels to make sure we don’t blow apart in combat.: Oh thank the Elements someone is finally doing that.: Dad, don’t forget to put all the shuttle’s power into the shields.: Don’t worry, my child. It was the first thing Slamek did. Tell the lieutenant when we are away from the planet, we’ll await the signal to warp to the rendezvous point. Once we’re all safe, you can transfer back to the shuttle. Zden out.: Helm, form up with the Reman ships and take us out. Ready to shoot at some Tal Shiar, Tovan?: Always.  : Commander, you need to see this. The Tal Shiar fleet ...: What is it, Satra?  : Seven warbirds, several escorts, … and a Scimitar.: …: … Get us out of here.: Commander Khiy is hailing us. : We’ve broken the blockade! All ships fall into formation. Tarlon, we’re reading an unknown ship near the beacon. It appears to be a battleship. If it attacks, our ship will be completely outmatched. Are you able to scan the vessel or determine its armaments?: On screen. [Ignore that massive structure to the right of the Tarlon, it’s a “navigational beacon.” Several things in this game are comically oversized.] : No, but we’ve seen similar ships before.: They’re emitting some sort of passive scanning field. We cannot get a weapons lock and our singularity core power levels are fluctuating. : I’ve noticed the same power level variations. The field is definitely emanating from the enemy vessel. If I use the deflector array, I may be able to send a high-frequency proton burst that should disrupt the field long enough to get a weapons lock.: Fire the burst on my mark. Fire!  : Wha …: They’re behind us! : Massive power spike! They’re charging some kind of forward weapons battery!: Hard to port! Get us to one side of them!: Incoming!  : Try to stay behind the enemy ship. It has a deadly frontal assault weapon! : That’s not exactly easy when it keeps jumping around!: This is Zden … Help! … We’re being boarded …[pshhhhhh][This is the first “boss”-like encounter of the game. As seen, the Elachi battleship can teleport short distances, and it has a forward energy barrage that it can charge up. You don’t want to be in front of the ship when that happens. They can also deploy these:]  [A torpedo with throw out a bunch of tractor beam probes, letting the ship bombard you while you are motionless and can’t rotate your shields. Fortunately, there are several Reman ships lending a hand.]   [The ship dropped an item, which is what that glowing thing is.] : Helm, get us back to those shuttles. : Tarlon to Zden.: …: Zden, please respond.: …: I’ve scanned the shuttles. They’ve taken everyone. Everyone. Even my …: …: …: How? Did we miss something?: Logs show that a cruiser warped in during the fight with the battleship. They warped away less than a minute later. They must have taken the colonists while we were in combat.: We have to go after them! We need to track their trajectory and follow them! They could still be alive and we can catch up if we hurry!: Tovan, do we have any data on their heading?: …: Nothing. There was too much interference from the battleship.: How many people were on those shuttles?: About 50.: And the planet?: 300,000.: …: How many did we get on the ship?: … about 20. : The Decimus is hailing us.: On screen.: Lieutenant Sekah, we’re aware of the situation, but we need to set a course for the rendezvous point immediately. There are other Remans there who will need our protection. After we regroup, we will have time to fully understand what has happened here. And to mourn our losses.: Of course, and if the Republic can do anything for you …: We appreciate the offer, but that isn’t my call to make. I’ll relay your offer to Obisek and the rest of the fleet, but for now I think it would be best if we go our separate ways. When you understand more about what the Tal Shiar is after, perhaps that will change. Thank ou for your help. I know you tried your best.: Good luck, Commander Khiy.: Veril, you should probably get to the transporter if …: No. I’m coming with you and we’re going to find my father.: But …: In the meantime, if you expect to keep a ship this old from blowing apart at the seams, you’re going to need an engineer. Good thing I’m here.: …: Welcome aboard.  : We will reach out to the Remans, but it will be difficult to get over centuries of mistrust and abuse. Perhaps if this Obisek is willing to speak to use directly it might make a difference. I know you did your best to help them, and that the attack could not have been anticipated. I’m very concerned about this communications sabotage you reported, however, and that the culprit was never found. The Remans may very well have a Tal Shiar operative in their midst. : We should let them know.: Agreed. We will not win every battle, but we will win the war. Count on that. Jolan tru.: Jolan tru. : …
Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Dec 28, 2018 |
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Dec 28, 2018 13:11
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: The Tal Shiar sent detachments to the surface and our colony is not responding to hails.
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Moon Slayer posted:I know you did your best to help them, and that the attack could not have been anticipated. I know you did your best to help them, and that the attack could not have been anticipated I think you pasted the line twice there!
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Dec 28, 2018 14:11
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So I did. Thanks!
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Dec 28, 2018 14:26
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So, the Elachi. They appeared in Enterprise as the unnamed bad guys in the episode Silent Enemy where they were more advanced than the Enterprise and attacked without warning or communication at any point throughout the episode. Aside from an utterly excerable b-plot, they made for a tense and spooky episode as the Enterprise fought a, well, silent enemy whose goals and nature were a complete mystery. Naturally, a fair few books and STO have all brought back the weird, aggressive, mysterious aliens from that episode, and STO has dubbed them the Elachi and given them a significant story role. Perhaps it's only fair that every Elachi ship up to and including the Sheshar dreadnought has been stolen by the galactic powers and made available to players. Siegkrow posted:So what I hear is: if the first season of STD is the best first season there has been in the show's story, and it is apparently terribad, that means all of star trek is terribad. Nah. Most Trek fans would agree that the first seasons of most Trek shows have generally been of poor quality, but most first seasons are good about striking the tone they want and setting the story's direction. The stumbling point is generally not yet figuring out character dynamics and what plots, races, and characters most resonate with the viewers. First season episodes of Star Trek include the amazing, always in Best Episodes lists, City on the Edge of Forever and Duet. Discovery on the other hand knows exactly what kind of show it wants to be and what kind of atmosphere it wants to portray, and a lot of Trek fans don't like where Discovery is going. Also, seriously, save the Mirror Universe for later. Deep Space Nine made the same mistake putting Dramatis Personae in the first season. Seeing evil versions of the main characters only really works if you already know and are attached to the good guy versions. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Dec 28, 2018 |
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Dec 28, 2018 14:29
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My knowledge of Star Trek is limited to all the memes that still exist. Like Cmander Kirk being a total manslut and sleeping with as many aliens as possible. "That there is Commander Kirk, homeboy hosed a Martian". I know that Riker tends to sit very awkwardly by lifting his leg over the back of the chair, and follows in the Kirkian manslut ways of alien diddling. I know there is a dude called word who is A) really big, strong and tough and B) gets thrown like a ragdoll once an episode. I know that Leonard Nemoy was a great man. I know that George Takei knows every time there is innuendo around, "Oh My" And I know that Wesley should Shut Up. But I know nothing of the setting. Like, at all.
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Dec 28, 2018 15:06
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For the record, I thoroughly enjoyed Disco, warts and all. Of course, I also loved The Last Jedi, so I might just be a Bad SciFi Fan.
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Dec 28, 2018 15:27
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Siegkrow posted:My knowledge of Star Trek is limited to all the memes that still exist. Like Cmander Kirk being a total manslut and sleeping with as many aliens as possible. "That there is Commander Kirk, homeboy hosed a Martian". This is a good (but long) read, Kirk's reputation is complete bullshit. He wasn't a womanizer. The only thing Kirk loved more than his career was the Enterprise, and on the rare occasion he was interested in a member of the opposite sex, he had a type: strong, career-minded women with whom he could have a meaningful, long-lasting relationships (but who also had their careers and wouldn't miss him overly much). Edit: There's a lot of things people remember about TOS that never happened or simply weren't there but somehow entered our cultural consciousness and everyone "knows" they happened. You can watch the entirety of TOS and you will never hear anyone say "Beam me up, Scotty!" PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Dec 28, 2018 |
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Dec 28, 2018 16:29
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PoptartsNinja posted:This is a good (but long) read, Kirk's reputation is complete bullshit. And as a captain, Kirk's signature was his cunning and guile, not brute force or seduction. Kirk lost most of the straight-up battles he and the Enterprise were in. Kirk won most of his battles, including famous ones like Khan, by outwitting his opponent, not simply beating them in a brawl. He was a very intelligent man, but not in the intellectual way that Picard and Janeway (when she was written well) were. He was clever and came at problems sideways, often with a bluff and a good poker face. It's the same sort of phenomenon you see with the popular image of Sisko. He's often thought of as the angry captain who punches things, but that does him a gross disservice. Sisko is smart, too, but he's smart in the way that he's pragmatic and terrific at quickly analyzing and deconstructing problems. He's underhanded in a way the other captains rarely are, as shown in the very first episode where he blackmails Quark into staying on the station to keep the station's community and economy alive. One even gets the impression that this is exactly why Sisko was assigned to Deep Space Nine by Starfleet, he's a man who excels at quickly assessing a situation and determining whatever needs to be done to prevail.
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Dec 28, 2018 16:39
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PoptartsNinja posted:This is a good (but long) read, Kirk's reputation is complete bullshit. The third one had a much better Kirk (and I liked it better overall as a Star Trek movie in general), but the damage had been done.
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Dec 28, 2018 16:51
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Before I forget ...Cythereal posted:Transwarp drive on the other hand folds space to create shortcuts, and by the technology of the current era in Trek, most races that use transwarp have to build specific networks of these transwarp shortcuts. In STO, all playable races have developed transwarp networks, and you slowly unlock new systems you can transwarp to in order to teleport across the game map. "Transwarp drive for everyone" is a game mechanic, and Not Thread Canon. And stay tuned: there will be a very important vote starting this weekend.
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Dec 28, 2018 19:25
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Moon Slayer posted:"Transwarp drive for everyone" is a game mechanic, and Not Thread Canon. Your choice, but there are visible in-game transwarp gates at Sol, Qo'noS, and REDACTED. STO in general portrays the major races of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants as quickly catching up to the likes of the Borg. Quantum Slipstream is fitted to all sufficiently advanced ships, too, though that might be Not Thread Canon again. So, for the strangers to Trek, let's talk cloaking devices since this is a Romulan LP. Cloaking technology in Star Trek hides a ship and its emissions from sensors, most prominently optical - the ship turns invisible, but it also conceals the ship's impulse and warp trails among other things. Cloaking debuted along with the Romulans in the TOS episode Balance of Terror, an episode that consciously played out like a WW2 drama with the Enterprise as the destroyer and the Romulan warbird as the submarine. Cloaking has been a thing for the Romulans ever since, and their most iconic trick. The Klingons picked up cloaking in the third Star Trek movie along with the bird of prey. Now, this wasn't intended to be a thing. In the first version of Search for Spock, the bad guys were Romulans and the bird of prey with its ability to cloak was designed as the first Romulan ship on the big screen. Then the bad guys were changed to Klingons, who were more popular and iconic as bad guys to finally have a Trek film with Klingon baddies, but kept the bird of prey and cloaking since the model and effects had already been done. First it was going to be Klingon pirates in a stolen Romulan bird of prey, then that angle was dropped and it just became a Klingon ship and the Klingons had cloaking technology from that point onwards, justified as being the result of a brief alliance between the Klingons and Romulans where the Romulans gave the Klingons cloaking. Now, you might ask why the Federation with all its wonderful technology doesn't have cloaking. The answer is that Gene Roddenberry didn't want them to. He felt that cloaking and sneaking around were distinctly bad guy things to do and the cloaking device was morally dubious, so the upstanding men and women of the Federation would never resort to such underhanded methods. The Next Generation justified this as the Federation agreeing to not research or employ cloaking technology as a condition of the Treaty of Algernon that ended the Earth-Romulan War sometime in the 22nd century. That's not to say the Federation doesn't have cloaking tech, mind. Secret Federation experiments with cloaking devices cropped up in one episode of The Next Generation, and in Deep Space Nine the USS Defiant, and the USS Defiant alone, was given a Romulan cloaking device that was only to be used in a very hostile region of space with a Romulan liaison officer on board in exchange for the Federation giving the Romulans all the data they gathered on that part of space. The Romulan officer was never mentioned again after her first episode and the Defiant subsequently cloaked whenever and wherever the hell it wanted. In Star Trek Online, this particular rule has continued to leak and there's a number of Federation ships that can cloak, justified as the Treaty of Algernon having been signed with the Romulan Star Empire and, uh, the Romulan Star Empire doesn't exist anymore. Only a handful of other races in Trek have access to cloaking technology, notably the Cardassians due to another short-lived alliance with the Romulans. Due to the nature of cloaking, it's obviously rather hard to say who outright doesn't have it versus who does have it but doesn't advertise. Now, cloaking can be defeated. If a ship is damaged, particles tend to leak, and cloaks aren't good at hiding really exotic energy signatures. There's also specialized sensor technology that's good at beating cloaking, polaron scans can best be thought of as active sonar that ping areas of space and can detect the signature of a cloaked ship, and all known cloaking devices emit tachyon particles that can be detected by sensors tuned for them like passive sonar. With a very, very few exceptions, ships cannot fire while cloaked and cloaking drops a ship's shields, rendering it very vulnerable to attack if detected. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Dec 29, 2018 |
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Dec 28, 2018 20:08
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 It’s time to make a very important choice: what species and gender will our Starfleet captain be? Here are your options: Andorian    Notable members: Shran. Bajoran    Notable members: Colonel Kira, Ro Laren. Benzite    Notable members: That one dude Wesley had to take a test with, some redshirt on a runabout in DS9. Betazoid    Notable members: Everyone’s favorite TNG character Lwaxana Troi. Bolian    Notable members: Mot, the best barber in Starfleet. Ferengi    Notable members: Quark, Rom, Nog, Moogie, etc. Human    Notable members: It’s like Starfleet is some kind of homo sapiens only club. Rigellian    Notable members: lol, nope. Saurian    Notable members: This handsome devil, there was also one in the season 2 trailer for Discovery (but they retconned the appearance  ).Tellarite    Notable members: Some ambassadors in an episode of Enterprise. Trill    Notable members: Jadzia (the second-best Dax) and Ezri (the best Dax, fight me) NOTE: Joined Trill characters were a pre-order bonus, which I do not have. A Trill captain would be unjoined and would stay that way. If you don't know what this means, don't worry about it. Vulcan    Notable members: Tuvok, Sarek, 50% of Spock. DON’T VOTE FOR THIS: Pakled    Nope. Why is this an option? I don’t care what that description says, this would be like a low-INT Fallout run; the novelty would wear off quick. Each species has unique in-game traits but that really doesn't matter. I need a species and gender. Voting closes when it’s 2019 or when people stop voting!
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Dec 29, 2018 03:31
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Siegkrow posted:I know that Riker tends to sit very awkwardly by lifting his leg over the back of the chair. quote:I know there is a dude called word who is A) really big, strong and tough and B) gets thrown like a ragdoll once an episode. (This one of the reasons why I like the one-episode wonder Roga Danar. A guy whom, if they had let Worf get into a brawl with him, well, yes, Worf would have lost, but it would have shown that the Federation was capable of violence when needed, and thus someone who could listen to his viewpoint.) quote:And I know that Wesley should Shut Up. It didn't help any that due to the Writer's Strike in season 2, they had to rush several scripts out to be filmed. These included several "Wesley Saves The Day" episodes, that had the show not been under a time crunch to get something ready, would have been dropped as redundant. We would have gotten one episode like that, maybe, and the rest would have been tossed to the dumpster. quote:But I know nothing of the setting. Like, at all. EDIT: Moon Slayer posted:Vulcan A Vulcan Male to contrast a Romulan Female could work as a nice dichotomy. This is my vote, please. berryjon fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Dec 29, 2018 |
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Dec 29, 2018 03:32
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