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Episode over. I can't say I get why people don't like that one. Even if not a lot happened the premise was solid and it had a lot of little touches like the lighting I mentioned or the part where Data said something to Picard who just stared vacantly so he got on comm and said "... this is acting captain Data."
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Aug 29, 2017 04:21
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Marshal Radisic posted:Nerd talk, there's something like sixteen power levels on TNG phasers. The first three are stuns of increasing intensity, the next four just burn people to death, and everything above that vaporizes them. I think at level 16 you can basically blow the side off a mountain, which is handy if you're lost in the wilderness and need to do some emergency fracking. Also phasers stop vaporizing people pretty much entirely once you get to DS9. It still happens from time to time, but at some point the writers must have realized that it's really limiting and boring if your guns always kill everything and instantly vaporize the body. edit- this is actually one of the only times I can remember it happening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIomRwtVXpY
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Aug 29, 2017 04:23
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Jeb! Repetition posted:or the part where Data said something to Picard who just stared vacantly so he got on comm and said "... this is acting captain Data." Data's getting cocky ever since he took over the ship in Brothers
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Aug 29, 2017 04:25
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The scene with Crusher in the makeshift morgue. 
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Aug 29, 2017 04:47
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Technology discovered: Soliton Wave Don't they just shoot it with torpedoes until it goes away?
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Aug 29, 2017 05:01
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Marshal Radisic posted:You don't remember the time Riker shot that guy in the face in the first season and his head blew up like a Polish sausage in a microwave? I was watching an ep of TOS the other day (That Which Survives) and Kirk is shooting rocks with his phaser and they won't melt, which surprises him because as he mentions, the beam is 8000 degrees or something like that. Then he turns it up higher. 
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Aug 29, 2017 05:02
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Timby posted:"Who is thissss ... Hitler you mention? He sounds interesting." Flash Gordon beat them to this by miles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtKFB0pERx4&t=30s
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Aug 29, 2017 05:05
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I'm pretty sure every Federation antagonist combs through earth history in the hopes some captain tries to use the moral high ground.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:09
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Jeb! Repetition posted:One of the bodies on the ship was killed by a phaser, which surprised me because I didn't think phasers could leave dead bodies behind. Depends on the setting, a phaser on kill mostly just causes burns and the tissue disruption that comes with flesh suddenly turning into steam. Using the maximum setting is pretty irresponsible if you think about it; what if you miss and take out four feet of bulkhead? DS9 has a nice scene where Kira criticizes Starfleet weapons for being impractically capable. 99% of the time you either want stun or kill, but a Starfleet phaser has like 16 power levels and a bunch of other controls too. It's very characterful and we know from years of watching TNG that it makes sense that Starfleet is incapable of producing anything simple. They do occasionally make use of more unusual phaser settings in DS9 and Voyager like carefully cutting a hole in a wall without damaging anything behind it or stunning an entire room but the writers usually forget they can do that. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Aug 29, 2017 |
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Aug 29, 2017 05:15
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To be fair, complicated but overcapable makes sense for Starfleet where you're probably going to get trapped by an energy being in a dimensional pocket where you need to play a game for your life or whatever bullshit and only a frequency of 1.3726 dulohertz will break you out.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:20
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Oh yeah, it's just a great piece of world-building through a character. Kira's background is paramilitary; she doesn't care about reverse tachyon wedgies. The context of the scene is her teaching somebody else how to shoot, and she mentions that a Starfleet phaser rifle is a whole different beast from a Cardassian disruptor. I think her point is that the Starfleet weapon is a powerful and complicated tool best left to an expert while the Cardassian one is point and shoot. But she does mention the phaser is a bit fragile for a field weapon.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:32
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Arglebargle III posted:Depends on the setting, a phaser on kill mostly just causes burns and the tissue disruption that comes with flesh suddenly turning into steam. Using the maximum setting is pretty irresponsible if you think about it; what if you miss and take out four feet of bulkhead? DS9 has a nice scene where Kira criticizes Starfleet weapons for being impractically capable. 99% of the time you either want stun or kill, but a Starfleet phaser has like 16 power levels and a bunch of other controls too. And why not? It's not like they can go over budget. (I assume there's some kind of resource tracker for large-scale poo poo like building starships, of course.) Hell, they probably replicate the phasers, or at least most of the parts. Why not have the best design you can as the basic model?
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Aug 29, 2017 05:32
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I think it's a combination of Starfleet being unable to do anything in a technically simple way and being uwilling to design a pure weapon. Starfleet probably sees a phaser as a tool that needs to be able to remove a mountainside or stun a school of fish or punch exact holes in a casing and you know maybe, I guess, occasionally shoot somebody but we hope not guys, but you can but we hope not okay. Insurrection is kinda funny in that it, while bad, is the only example of how the Federation would really fight. It's all aerial drones and non-lethal weaponry. Nobody is in any real danger. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Aug 29, 2017 |
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Aug 29, 2017 05:37
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Jeb! Repetition posted:Episode over. I can't say I get why people don't like that one. Even if not a lot happened the premise was solid and it had a lot of little touches like the lighting I mentioned or the part where Data said something to Picard who just stared vacantly so he got on comm and said "... this is acting captain Data." Mostly Troi's dreams are pretty dumb looking imo
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Aug 29, 2017 05:38
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Given how much energy must be in the batteries of those things it's always amusing to see someone set it up to overload and act as a grenade, and all it does is fizzle out like a dud firework in a console instead of nuke the ship O'Brien says that phasers can be tuned to blow up at whatever energy level you want because lol of course they can.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:43
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Arglebargle III posted:I think it's a combination of Starfleet being unable to do anything in a technically simple way and being uwilling to design a pure weapon. Starfleet probably sees a phaser as a tool that needs to be able to remove a mountainside or stun a school of fish or punch exact holes in a casing and you know maybe, I guess, occasionally shoot somebody but we hope not guys, but you can but we hope not okay. Yes, the hand phaser is a hippy weapon idea, The phaser rifles they pulled out were a clear attempt at trying to sex up the gun appeal. Didn't they premiere in First Contact? E: According to Memory Alpha, first appeared in The Mind's Eye.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:46
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Nah they go all the way back to TOS and the phaser rifle prop shows up in TNG and DS9. The First Contact rifles were just much much cooler looking. Then they kept turning up the cool knob and they became dumb. Voyager had its own bizarre phaser rifle design that only showed up a couple times. It looked like something a Ferengi would build.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:48
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Here's the quote: KIRA : Now this is an entirely different animal. It's Federation standard issue. A little less powerful, but with more options; sixteen beam settings, fully autonomous recharge, multiple target acquisition, gyrostabilized, the works. It's more complicated, so it's not as good a field weapon. Too many things can go wrong.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:56
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I really like how they made a big deal of STD being back in the Prime timeline, but then made the Klingons look like the Xtreme JJTrek versions. I will try to remain open minded, as I'm sure people were flipping their poo poo when TMP came out and Klingons looked entirely different, but... Eh.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:56
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CPColin posted:The scene with Crusher in the makeshift morgue. I kept expecting one of the corpses to open its eyes suddenly or jerk up but it never happened. Still a good creepy scene though.
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Aug 29, 2017 06:01
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I think the phaser thing is basic m16 vs ak-47 reliability from Vietnam.
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Aug 29, 2017 06:36
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Arglebargle III posted:O'Brien says that phasers can be tuned to blow up at whatever energy level you want because lol of course they can. On the one hand it's goofy as gently caress since I felt like most times it was implied the phaser had been illicitly tampered with to explode, on the other hand there was such a thing as "dial-a-yield" for some nuclear weapons in real life. Arglebargle III posted:Nah they go all the way back to TOS and the phaser rifle prop shows up in TNG and DS9. The First Contact rifles were just much much cooler looking. Then they kept turning up the cool knob and they became dumb. The TOS phaser rifle only ever appeared in the second pilot and never came back after that; if I remember right Gene Roddenberry hated it (and to be fair it was a lovely prop).
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Aug 29, 2017 06:57
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I hate the boxy TNG phaser rifles. Just like the hand phasers you can't aim with, those double-handled rectangles look incredibly uncomfortable to hold, much less shoot. Just terrible lovely designs that don't even look cool. The TNG films finally got it right. The MACO phase rifle is probably my favorite Trek weapon though, with all the TOS pistol variations in second.
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Aug 29, 2017 07:24
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Isn't it hinted at that lots of power cells are some kind of mini-fusion device? That would be perfectly capable of dialing in a specific energy output.
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Aug 29, 2017 07:26
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I was 9 years old when Descent aired and I thought the equivalent of "Holy poo poo, they're really loving serious about this."
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Aug 29, 2017 07:28
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DrNutt posted:I really like how they made a big deal of STD being back in the Prime timeline, but then made the Klingons look like the Xtreme JJTrek versions. I will try to remain open minded, as I'm sure people were flipping their poo poo when TMP came out and Klingons looked entirely different, but... Eh. I'd be perfectly fine with a redesign of it actually looked competent and interesting. Like so many other designs in this show, it manages to be overly-busy and generic. If it weren't for the chevrons and other familiar logos, would you even recognize this as Trek or just another Friday night SyFy original series? It's just really uninspired and underwhelming.
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Aug 29, 2017 07:36
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:On the one hand it's goofy as gently caress since I felt like most times it was implied the phaser had been illicitly tampered with to explode, on the other hand there was such a thing as "dial-a-yield" for some nuclear weapons in real life. It's not clear how much energy is released in the overload process but the TNG tech manual states that the power cell of a hand phaser can hold 45 terajoules. If even a fraction of that energy is available during an overload that's comparable to a small nuclear bomb. Presumably you'd want to dial it lower than a kiloton of TNT for most scenarios you could think of. The power cell is supposed to be some kind of crystal matrix that's stable until you bring it into contact with some kind of complicated bullshit to get it to release energy. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Aug 29, 2017 |
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Aug 29, 2017 08:05
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WampaLord posted:Yes, the hand phaser is a hippy weapon idea,  First appeared in the first episode of TOS (besides The Cage), Where No Msn Has Gone Before.
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Aug 29, 2017 08:50
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Arglebargle III posted:
Oh I always forget about those until they randomly show up, looking all weirdly bulky and awkward to hold. Are you just supposed to just clasp that back handle? 
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Aug 29, 2017 09:05
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That's how it was always held on the show. Though I think later in the show they swapped to the First Contact model.
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Aug 29, 2017 10:25
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Orv posted:That's how it was always held on the show. I want to say... compression phaser rifle? Ye gods why do I know all this poo poo.
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Aug 29, 2017 11:05
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It always annoyed me that Troi, when needing the tells the aliens that they figured out what element they needed, is floating around going "i need to find you!!" when its really obvious they already are in communication with her. She should just be yelling the solution rather than trying to make a new friend. It works out in the end but that poo poo was annoying.
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Aug 29, 2017 11:38
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Troi is an incompetent moron
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Aug 29, 2017 12:07
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Beachcomber posted:I think the phaser thing is basic m16 vs ak-47 reliability from Vietnam. This is pretty obvious, yeah. Arglebargle III posted:It's not clear how much energy is released in the overload process but the TNG tech manual states that the power cell of a hand phaser can hold 45 terajoules. If even a fraction of that energy is available during an overload that's comparable to a small nuclear bomb. Presumably you'd want to dial it lower than a kiloton of TNT for most scenarios you could think of. Wow, iirc in the aforementioned DS9 scene Kira says the Cardassian rifle is 4.7 megajoules and is slightly more powerful than the Starfleet version. That may not sound like much in comparison, but it's enough to run a kilowatt beam continuously for well over an hour. I don't know a whole lot about lasers/phasers but I'd guess a kilowatt would easily be on the strong side of kill. I know a 1 watt laser pointer can pop balloons and burn small objects, or at least ignite matches and stuff. So 10W would probably be a good light stun, I'm getting your attention kind of setting. Winifred Madgers fucked around with this message at 13:20 on Aug 29, 2017 |
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Aug 29, 2017 13:17
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The point-defense laser the Navy wants to build will be about 150kW, which should be enough to shoot down antiship missiles. True ballistic missile defense lasers would probably have to be multiple megawatt due to how fast the targets move and how long a range they'd need. I am honestly not sure what a kilowatt laser would do to a person. I mean, it would probably be lethal, but maybe not instantly and it certainly wouldn't vaporize someone.
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Aug 29, 2017 16:32
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Vaporizing a person is in the gigawatt range
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Aug 29, 2017 16:35
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Sash! posted:Vaporizing a person is in the gigawatt range for a laser maybe, but this is a phaser. Much more efficient. Disruptors even more so. Because 
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Aug 29, 2017 16:37
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I think somebody misread the tech manual and didn't notice the exponent. Joules doesn't make sense as an output rating anyway and 4.5 MJ is kinda lame for a future space weapon. It's great energy density now in that you could run a smartphone for a year on that battery but it won't take out an aquaduct like Data did.
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Aug 29, 2017 16:49
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But nadions.
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Aug 29, 2017 16:56
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I thought Night Terrors was a memorable episode, it's just too bad it's mostly about Troi, who sucks. Watching Troi deal with a problem is like watching your grandma use a computer for the first time.
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