quote:

In the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds short story Research, Berlinghoff had the foresight to hide blueprints for the time-travel pod prior to his journey, and was able to retrieve them and successfully rebuild it. He then traveled back to the late-20th century, to the home of his ancestor, J. R. Rasmussen. Together, they travel back to 1964, where they relay information about the future to a television writer named Gene Roddenberry. Rasmussen died sometime before 1999 in an auto accident, while driving to an appointment with producers at Paramount Pictures.

Defiance Industries posted:

You got to fix the paradox somehow, the space shuttle Enterprise somehow exists in the history of the Star Trek universe.

Groke posted:

"Enterprise" had a long history as a ship name for centuries before either the American space program or the Star Trek series began, though.

Defiance Industries posted:

If it wasn't for Star Trek, the shuttle would be named Constitution, not Enterprise. It was a concerted letter-writing campaign to Ford that got it named Enterprise.

Defiance Industries posted:

If it wasn't for Star Trek, the shuttle would be named Constitution, not Enterprise. It was a concerted letter-writing campaign to Ford that got it named Enterprise.

Splicer posted:

In TOS by 1992 we were wrapping up a nuclear war about geneticly engineered supermen; "just kind of liked Enterprise more that Constitution" is much less of a shift.

General Battuta posted:

The X-wing game faced a bunch of different balance challenges over its first edition,

EVIL Gibson posted:

My story of Xwing is that there was one person who made it his goal to deny any special limited edition models from being won by anyone besides him. Official tournaments would give the winner a ship that you could not get anywhere else besides buying it from winners directly or from ebay. Like one year the ship was the Death Star.

Dude would travel all over Northern Virginia, Maryland, and DC to every event making sure he would always win those ships.

Napoleon Nelson posted:

Are you thinking of Star Trek Attack Wing? X-wing didn't have any exclusive ships until 2019 and even then they were only different paint jobs of existing ships. And they were for sale at specific conventions (and once as a prize at the world championships, which have never been in the DMV area). There has never been a death star unit in any version of x-wing.

HAmbONE posted:

My partner and I are groaning our way through season 3 of Star Trek discovery. We are eagerly awaiting to see how detached nacelles make it “more maneuverable.” A ship that has an experimental spore drive that was never reproduced and unknown to future Federation.

Spins up and the wheels fall off

Sobatchja Morda posted:

Maybe the show ends with the discovery and its spore drive being destroyed in a cataclysmic warp disaster that seals off any easy access to mirror universes?

HAmbONE posted:

We can only hope. This show inspired me to make my own Star Trek with an experimental plot hole drive.

EVIL Gibson posted:

There needs to be more creative warp tech.

Sword of the Stars has multiple races and each one has a unique FTL drive mechanic with my favorite being the Morrigi.

Their Voidcutter ship is the only type of ship that can warp. It uses an ungodly amount of energy to both continue cutting and pushing itself along.

The cool part is more ships can join in the FTL, including non-voidcutters, and the more ships join the less energy the FTL takes as they form a large V to distribute the energy more efficiently.

And if that doesn't make it obvious, the Morrigi are an avian race.

EVIL Gibson posted:

There needs to be more creative warp tech.

Sword of the Stars has multiple races and each one has a unique FTL drive mechanic with my favorite being the Morrigi.

Their Voidcutter ship is the only type of ship that can warp. It uses an ungodly amount of energy to both continue cutting and pushing itself along.

The cool part is more ships can join in the FTL, including non-voidcutters, and the more ships join the less energy the FTL takes as they form a large V to distribute the energy more efficiently.

And if that doesn't make it obvious, the Morrigi are an avian race.

Splicer posted:

You've mixed up a couple of races. All the Morrigi ships have an FTL drive that technobabble technobabble gravimetric technobabble which also creates a gravity "bow wave" in spacetime behind the ship. Adding more ships to the fleet allows them to take advantage of the bow wave and speed up the fleet as a whole. So more ships = more fast. They also have a ship type that's just a huge gravity generator with an engine attached that boosts speed even farther and slows down other ships in tactical combat.

The Humans don't have any kind of ftl drive, they have very fast but still slower than light ships that can jump into the naturally occurring hyperlane network. This makes them very fast but sometimes there's no appropriate hyperlanes and they need to take the long way around or slowboat in realspace.

Then there's the Zuul. The Zuul also use node space, but they do it using their one kind of FTL ship, the Rip Bore. It rips new temporary nodelines in space and then the rest of their non-ftl ships can fly after them. Rip Bores are mad expensive and prime sniping targets, but also the Rip Bores can use their engine in combat to send entire ships to the shadow realm nodespace.

Also there's the Hivers (stargates shaped like bugs), the Liir (lots of tiny teleports meaning they can spin on a dime but are slower near stars, are space dolphins) and the really boring lizards (it's just a warp drive)

pixaal posted:

Hivers are so slow because you have to sublight to other stars but once you are there you have an instant link to your homeworld forces.

Splicer posted:

Hivers are my favourite MY QUEEEEEEN

pixaal posted:

Not like you couldn't make your own universe with similar differences in ftl tech. There's not much lore other than the pages and pages of fanfic that one dev posted on the forums about the dolphins with the micro telepoet stutter drive thing.

Is fanfic the correct word when it's a dev posting noncanon?

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

New Jersey isn't a city.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

New Jersey isn't a city.

Tulip posted:

Maybe I was projecting a lot but I got a lot more out of in particular the Hivers than that. A lot of it just felt like efficient, effective storytelling, a lot conveyed through a few voice lines and small still images.

And plus its much harder to get any traction with a totally new IP than with one that has people who are still talking about the game 17 years later.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Actually comes to mind the GotG method of FTL is interesting, basically using a galactic portal network to go through random places til you finally arrive at your destination, and where reality starts falling apart around you if you go too fast.

And given the kitchen-sink nature of the setting, of course it's just one of multiple methods of FTL that different entities and factions use, probably all having their own upsides, downsides and quirks.

mind the walrus posted:

Cowboy Bebop has something similar and one of the few interesting pieces of worldbuilding in that show is the implication that the localized solar system fast-travel gates work but when they activated they hosed up Earth so badly that it's seen as a bit of a backwater.

Wonder what the origin points for that convention are.

Arc Light posted:

It's the New Jersey City

Lemniscate Blue posted:

Blew up the moon, if I remember correctly. Impact of debris all but obliterated civilization on Earth. I never really thought of Cowboy Bebop as a post-apocalyptic setting before, but in a very big way it would count.

Tulip posted:

Yeah there's just such care put into so much of that game. Dang I should play SOTS again.

MadDogMike posted:

I mainly remember the research failure pictures being hilarious, especially when you get a picture of a scientist exploding when researching an ALIEN LANGUAGE . Also pretty funny the Zuul one had a picture of a Zuul throwing up the horns as fire blazed behind them.

Splicer posted: