GD_American posted:

It's a giant universe and I always thought the Best and Brightest part of Starfleet rang false. Show me the 2nd line ships. Give me a show with washouts and career dead-enders manning an outdated ship in a forgotten sector.

Groke posted:

Based on what I've seen of Star Trek, it's also horribly unsafe to the point where no organization at all concerned with health and safety would allow one.

SlothfulCobra posted:

I don't know what you're talking about, pretty much every alien ship is about the same size as the Enterprise because working with an actual size disparity is a more complicated and expensive effect.

galagazombie posted:

The reason for the terrible ergonomics of phasers come TNG is part of the enlightened utopia theme where Starfleet/The Federation doesn't make weapons of war anymore. Roddenberry wanted phasers to not have any visual similarities to weapons, especially guns. The idea was that in the enlightened future Starfleet personnel would not carry around something with no purpose other than committing violence, and instead a multi-purpose tool. Think all the times they use it to heat rocks or weld something shut or as a cutting tool. It's the same philosophy behind the new Enterprise. Sure the Enterprise-D can function as a badass space battleship, but it's also a state of the art scientific research station, and a convention center, and a diplomatic embassy, and a frontier exploration vessel.

Cerv posted:

the federation president is explicitly a non-starfleet role

Cerv posted:

Cyrano Jones was the guy selling Tribbles. Mudd sold women.

zoux posted:

Startide Rising was the book that got me into sci fi. Too bad about the second trilogy though.

For the thread: Transporters were never supposed to be in ST. The original plan was to have the Enterprise or whatever ships just land on planets, but that would've been too expensive with models and sets, and when it came time to film the pilot, the shooting model of the shuttle wasn't ready, so they came up with transporters, which cost next-to-nothing. So, that's why every writer for ST has to come up with some reason that the transporters, which would easily solve whatever problem, won't do that this time.

Also remember when they used the transporter to de-age Dr. Pulaski and then forgot about and never told anyone about the loving FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH effect you get by messing around with some sliders in the transporter settings. We could probably come up with dozens of galaxy-transforming technological leaps made by rerouting and re configuring systems that never get brought up again.

W.T. Fits posted:

Yeah, because the Federation has a Temporal Prime Directive that says you're not allowed to go back in time and change the past.

Not that this stops Voyager from violating it at least twice per season.

Gravitas Shortfall posted:

If anyone is interested in a "what happens to all our infrastructure and nukes if humanity just disappears one day" deep dive, read "The World Without Us".

Turns out what you really have to worry about are chemical plants.

Elmnt80 posted:

Just pretend I quoted all the posts in this thread about star trek phasers here.

In the last season of DS9 it turns out the federation had made a fancy rear end prototype weapon which was just a regular loving gun that shot tritanium bullets. Its turned into like a perfect assassin's/sniper's weapon by some rear end in a top hat on a murder streak and once he's caught they just forget that you have a magical weapon that is nearly impossible to stop, can kill people inside buildings and tons of other reality breaking bullshit, but no, have to stick to phasers that can't hit poo poo in a big firefight. Oh, also these guns and their ammo can be easily replicated along with the magic attachments as shown in this same episode.

Megillah Gorilla posted:

Foxfire_ posted:

Enh, I think it's probably weirder if the death star is just a scaled up version of the gun on an X-wing. Like a real-world nuke isn't just a very big stick of dynamite. It doesn't need to be explained though and it doesn't really matter besides "you need a bunch of secret science to make a death star instead of just a bunch of resources". Little death star gun is still stupid though

Defiance Industries posted:

If the Empire had just listened to Grand Admiral Thrawn and put all the money for the Death Star into TIE Defenders, Luke would be dead and all the aliens would still be slaves, so it's probably a good thing superweapons are very stupid.

Mulaney Power Move posted:

I still don't know what the deal is with the three seashells

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.