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States and nations have the means to do violence. It doesn't really matter if the person saying the words is personally carrying a phaser or not. If they're speaking for a planet full of people who are all armed, then their words have the power of violence behind them, even if they are being used to make peace.
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Nov 13, 2023 23:40
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I think the idea with Trek is you are supposed to adjust your expectations of how things work - in that world, yes, these massive weapon platforms are vessels of peaceful discovery. We're suppose to discuss that dissonance. Or consider it at least.
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Nov 13, 2023 23:42
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CainFortea posted:It'd be weirder if they were out doing exploration without being armed and able to handle suddenly agresive encounters though. Same for diplomacy. Not only because is it dumb as hell to just assume that you won't ever need guns while looking at quasars, but even just being able to travel in space means you can already destroy the planet. They don't even need phasers to destroy the biosphere. So going "We come in peace, look we have no weapons" is just absolute meaningless fluff. Sure being a bit armed is good, but when Starfleet parked one of their Galaxy class gunboats next to the tea planet, and forced the population to trade space drugs for earl grey, I thought that was a bit much. Don't even want to get into the kind of "diplomacy" Janeway got into after she became admiral to ensure here supply of coffee never ran dry again. 
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Nov 13, 2023 23:45
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There's bacon in that nebula. Fire.
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Nov 14, 2023 00:05
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maybeadracula posted:There's bacon in that nebula. "This is the End" by The Doors plays as we watch a slow motion montage of Voyager firebombing the peaceful coffee farmers of Vergungea....
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Nov 14, 2023 00:08
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maybeadracula posted:I think it's fair that Starfleet isn't a military because they say it isn't Actually better things aren't possible, even in aspirational fiction 
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Nov 14, 2023 00:56
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McSpanky posted:Actually better things aren't possible, even in aspirational fiction In the Grimdark future of AR-558, all is siege
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Nov 14, 2023 00:58
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alexandriao posted:
Okay there's absolutely no way that forward launcher was visible to the audience outside of modern HD, but I'll concede the point. But the Phasers were 100% focused on the saucer like 95% of them at least. There's a giant ring on the top and a second on the bottom that do pretty much all the firing in the show (they even have that awesome effect where two streaks of light shoot from each end of the ring to meet in the middle to fire like the Death Star). And those rings absolutely were visible even on an early 90's CRT TV. But regardless I remember several times (not just the Darmok example) that they just decided "How bout' the phasers come from here instead this week?"
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Nov 14, 2023 01:24
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I definitely remember being able to see the torpedo tube on my parents' busted rear end late '80s CRT when I was a kid
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Nov 14, 2023 01:31
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They'd often have little closeups on the launcher when it shot stuff. You couldn't see all the details in SD but you could definitely see there was a thingy there that did the shooting.galagazombie posted:But regardless I remember several times (not just the Darmok example) that they just decided "How bout' the phasers come from here instead this week?" Nah it was always meant to be from one of the modelled secondary arrays when it looks like they're firing from a random spot. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Nov 14, 2023 |
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Nov 14, 2023 01:34
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galagazombie posted:Okay there's absolutely no way that forward launcher was visible to the audience outside of modern HD, but I'll concede the point. But the Phasers were 100% focused on the saucer like 95% of them at least. The saucer phasers were the ones pointing forward, so yea they were usually the ones firing. The dorsal phaser bank has something like 200 degrees firing arc port/starboard.
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Nov 14, 2023 01:52
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Endless Trash posted:I’m not saying they can’t have warp drive I’m just saying they should separate their First Contact fleet from their Blow poo poo Up fleet. Showing up at the home world of a new species with a Planet Killer full of well meaning scientists is just absolutely bizarre to the point where it feels like we’re talking about a silly space show that sometimes needs pew pew Literally how this poo poo has gone down throughout history though. Captain Cook had cannon on his ships.
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Nov 14, 2023 02:35
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TNG in general had a very "one size fits all" idea about technology as part of its utopianism. Where everything does multiple things instead of one thing because the future is just that wonderful that technology will liberate us from constraints and limitations. You don't have space-guns like in TOS, you have multi-purpose dust bunny shaped tools that only have the death-ray as one of many different functions. You don't need separate "Battleships" and "Diplomacyships", the onward march of scientific progress means that spaceships can now be everything all at the same time without any tradeoff. The fact most other species still need to use dedicated warships isn't to show them being more efficient, it's to show them as "backwards" and technologically lagging.
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Nov 14, 2023 02:52
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"Wait, your ship has weapons?" "Yeah. See there are bad guys in space so we can't go around unarmed or we'll get jacked by pirates or some random space cloud might ensnare us. So yeah, do you guys have phasers yet? You're gonna want to develop those next. It sure would suck if Klingons showed up and decided to annex your planet and you had no way to defend yourselves... So, about this joining the Federation paperwork..." Starfleet's not a military, it's a protection racket.
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Nov 14, 2023 02:52
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feedmegin posted:Literally how this poo poo has gone down throughout history though. Captain Cook had cannon on his ships. I don’t think Starfleet should emulate Captain Cook. There, I said it. Maybe Captain Crunch though
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Nov 14, 2023 04:59
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Imagine, we are to assume the feckless "Federation Council" is in charge...
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Nov 14, 2023 05:01
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Endless Trash posted:I don’t think Starfleet should emulate Captain Cook. There, I said it. And yet somehow I figure there were probably a LOT of Starfleet captains who just got loving murdered by the indigenous peoples of a planet they made first contact with for being loving assholes who had it coming 
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Nov 14, 2023 06:56
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MikeJF posted:They'd often have little closeups on the launcher when it shot stuff. You couldn't see all the details in SD but you could definitely see there was a thingy there that did the shooting. dude I literally have photographic evidence  sometimes they just screwed up
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Nov 14, 2023 08:28
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galagazombie posted:dude I literally have photographic evidence This one annoys me, they went out of their way to fix the erroneous phaser in the HD pass of "Darmok" but apparently saw nothing wrong in this case.
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Nov 14, 2023 08:35
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StrangersInTheNight posted:they were in fact designed to be the space Russian communists yes, but I believe the makeup was too complex/expensive, so it ended up falling back on the Klingons as like, a two-fer. The Klingons were so easy to depict as overt war-mongers, it was easy to just make them the overall villain race, which means when they want to tell thinly veiled stories about the US and Russia, its the Enterprise vs Klingons. I thought it was the other way around, Klingons are the space Russian communist horde that keeps taking over stuff that does not belong to them, and Romulans are the sneaky Chinese space communists. With Klingons you can sometimes agree and sort-of get what they are thinking, with Romulans you are barely aware of what they do and you just happen to have "the good Romulans", Vulcans representing Taiwanese and people who escaped to communists to West coast, on the Federation side. But yeah, 50's and 60's US foreign stereotypes showing. Der Kyhe fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Nov 14, 2023 |
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Nov 14, 2023 09:03
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galagazombie posted:TNG in general had a very "one size fits all" idea about technology as part of its utopianism. Where everything does multiple things instead of one thing because the future is just that wonderful that technology will liberate us from constraints and limitations. You don't have space-guns like in TOS, you have multi-purpose dust bunny shaped tools that only have the death-ray as one of many different functions. You don't need separate "Battleships" and "Diplomacyships", the onward march of scientific progress means that spaceships can now be everything all at the same time without any tradeoff. The fact most other species still need to use dedicated warships isn't to show them being more efficient, it's to show them as "backwards" and technologically lagging. The "one size fits all" is more in the vague descriptions of nodes and circuits. Getting ahold of Federation tech, regardless of what it was, was a huge boon because you could reverse engineer any number of things from it. The phasers, as far as I've seen throughout multiple series, are weapons 99% of the time and occasionally cutting tools, but it feels like the cutting tool aspect is an added bonus because of what it does as opposed to the intended usage. The tricorders and phasers in TNG, DS9, and Voyager are distinctly different tools, just like TOS. This is intentional because they don't want Starfleet personnel walking around with a weapon most of the time. When they need to be armed, they want it to be very obvious that they are armed.
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Nov 14, 2023 09:32
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Starfleet doesn't have/need a military, because their technology baseline is so high that their weakest weapons will glass a planet in the wrong hands. You gotta remember that most conflicts with neighbouring nations have been fought with Starfleet vessels designed for exploration, research and the like, and they've generally either won or made the war enough of a bloody slog that an armistice or peace was the better option than continue. It's only in DS9 that they truly need to consider upping their game and building something focused on firepower because they came up against a technological peer with suicidal shock troopers. Even the Borg were mainly about trying to Science a solution to them alongside better weapons for their existing ships.
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Nov 14, 2023 10:42
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Starfleet doesn't have/need a military, because their technology baseline is so high that their weakest weapons will glass a planet in the wrong hands. You gotta remember that most conflicts with neighbouring nations have been fought with Starfleet vessels designed for exploration, research and the like, and they've generally either won or made the war enough of a bloody slog that an armistice or peace was the better option than continue. To be far the Defiant was designed for fighting borg was it not? It didn't work out too well under Worf but still
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Nov 14, 2023 11:23
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galagazombie posted:dude I literally have photographic evidence There are phaser emitters right there on the pylons, this is them going all-out firing with everything they have at the Borg, right?
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Nov 14, 2023 11:24
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if you combine a ship designed to win fights with a man who always loses, the worfness is always going to prevail. which is itself a bit paradoxical, i suppose.
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Nov 14, 2023 11:25
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galagazombie posted:dude I literally have photographic evidence Yeah thought you'd use that one. (Or the aft cobra hood phasers from Arsenal of Freedom) hosed-Up Little Dog posted:There are phaser emitters right there on the pylons, this is them going all-out firing with everything they have at the Borg, right? Yeah those are the pylon phaser emitters. They did mess up slightly in that they positioned the beam source a pixel or two high, but the pylons have always had a phaser array, the FX team didn't just randomly add phasers from nothing. 
MikeJF fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Nov 14, 2023 |
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Nov 14, 2023 11:55
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:if you combine a ship designed to win fights with a man who always loses, the worfness is always going to prevail. which is itself a bit paradoxical, i suppose. Captain our warp field is somehow attracting barrels And your son would like to see you
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Nov 14, 2023 12:41
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Now I want to see Donkey Kong: The Next Generation with Worf in place of Mario
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Nov 14, 2023 13:24
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star fleet is like american cops they are better armed than many armed forces but they have a paper that says that they are civilians
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Nov 14, 2023 13:46
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ChubbyChecker posted:star fleet is like american cops Not even close American cops do use the word civilian, but not to describe themselves
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Nov 14, 2023 14:10
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I just watched the Voyager episode "Alliances". The Kazon were a fractured people who freed themselves from the Thrabe by finally uniting. Most Thrabe had no idea how truly bad it was for the Kazon, or so they claimed. In any case, the Thrabe became a scattered, diasporic people, and the Kazon, with no enemy to unite them, fractured again. The episode is specifically about how Voyager finally meet the Thrabe, who are now persecuted in exile themselves by the Kazon. Voyager had failed to negotiate an alliance with the Kazon because of sexism and misogyny, so they decided the Thrabe seemed nice because they claimed that they combined strength they could make true peace. The Thrabe claimed they had changed and called a conference of all leaders, including Voyager. The Thrabe then tried to kill everyone at the conference except Janeway because they really wanted to get back to oppressing the Kazon and finally with Janeway's help (her scientific weapons platform) they could do that. Janeway ends their alliance and decides to leave them to their misery. It's considered one of the worst episodes of Voyager. It's screaming to me that the writer really had something to loving say about Palestine.
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Nov 14, 2023 15:42
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ChubbyChecker posted:star fleet is like american cops Heavily militarized?
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Nov 14, 2023 15:44
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galagazombie posted:dude I literally have photographic evidence You realize that even if your image was a screw up, showing that a screwup happens isn't actually an argument against the idea that "There are supposed to be other phaser banks they shoot from sometimes"? On top of that, no, there is a phaser bank on the pylon.  That 2nd beam is a bit of a screwup still though cause the lower phaser beam is coming a little bit high. Edit: I see we've moved on. Starfleet isn't anything at all like american cops because if a starfleet officer murders civilians they'll usually face a trial.
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Nov 14, 2023 16:08
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I have photographic evidence.
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Nov 14, 2023 16:13
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Grey Cat posted:I have photographic evidence. badass
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Nov 14, 2023 16:14
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Turns out for the Enterprise D the D stands for Death Blossom.
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Nov 14, 2023 16:16
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ChubbyChecker posted:star fleet is like american cops I'm not aware of them shooting any dogs. Ships with targs on board at the time of destruction do not count unless the targ was on the viewscreen at the time the order to fire was given.
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Nov 14, 2023 16:42
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In one of the Voyager episodes we watched yesterday Kim complains about the acoustics of his quarters. Paris replies to him that the ship was designed for combat.
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Nov 14, 2023 16:49
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Big rear end On Fire posted:In one of the Voyager episodes we watched yesterday Kim complains about the acoustics of his quarters. Paris replies to him that the ship was designed for combat. Tom Paris, reliable source of grounded data
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Nov 14, 2023 16:57
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I haven't watched Discovery, but can we take a moment to appreciate some of the concepts they did for the 32nd Century Federation? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGxD0XAQobY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ3Sv_AmSe0 Like, this is, I feel, the closest we've ever gotten to a depiction of the Culture on TV. It's like they finally went and thought about what the true implications would be of having a post-scarcity society with the capability of manipulating matter on a subatomic level and traveling by warping the universe around them. Of course you can just teleport to every deck, make your ships out of holograms, or have your space station look like a Christmas ornament or a flying rainforest. Of course all your ships look like UFOs and pieces of modern art. Why not? You can do whatever you like!
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Nov 14, 2023 17:25
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