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Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Kibayasu posted:

She just sucked at it.

I mean, that's par for the course in Trek. Tell me you wouldn't rather spill your guts to Guinan over a Romulan ale than listen to Troi's platitudes.

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Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Alchenar posted:

so many stories would presumably naturally end in the Federation Council getting a note and saying "Wait, the military did what?"

Um excuse me Starfleet is not a "military," it's a space exploration and diplomacy corps that just happens to be uniformed and structured by a rank hierarchy, operate heavily armed space vessels, and is called on whenever the federation needs to project force in defense of its holdings and interests.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Hello friends. I thought this might be a good place to ask for some advice about a Star Trek Adventures campaign I'm gearing up to start running.

The setting is post-Treaty of Bajor. Cardassia is in ruins, the Federation is rebuilding from a brutal war and Starfleet is trying to find its way back to its role as an "exploration, diplomacy, and peacekeeping" force after being forced into being a mask-off Military. One of the players requested an Oberth. In game terms, it's almost comically under-armed, lacking even torpedo bays. I thought this might actually be interesting since it will force the players to rely on Treknobabble and their wits more than "target that explosion and fire."

Here's the write-up I gave them:

The USS Matthew Henson was a soon-to be decommissioned science vessel hastily refit after the outbreak of the Dominion War for reconnaissance, signals intelligence, and warning and control.

It served in this role with distinction, and remains in active service as Starfleet works to make and crew vessels to fill the attrition during that conflict.

It got out of some tight jams against Jem'Hadar vessels and Cardassian Galor cruisers on several occasions with clever signal spoofing and sensor ghosting, and coordination with larger and more heavily armed allied vessels. It served as the fleet's eyes rather than its fists and lacks the capacity to punch its way out of a pitched fight on its own.

It remains in the recon configuration following the war, with its impressive instrumentation suite for the time being turned back to science and exploration as dry dock facilities are in overtime replacing lost hulls.

You guys can either be long serving crew or new transfers, feel free to talk amongst yourselves. Maybe we can schedule a "sesson 0" to get set up.


I'm going to do some classic "planet/forhead alien/moral quandry of the week," but what are some good plot hooks specifically for the setting in the timeline?

A few that came to mind:

- The PCs are tasked with joining a flotilla transporting the Female Changeling after her sentencing. There is some moral stuff about retributive vs restorative justice and maybe she gets loose or something.

- A Cardassian joins starfleet. Spacism ensues with a Dreyfus Affair type thing, which Only The Players can solve.

- Jem'Hadar trying to start a colony and beat their swords into ploughshares and then IDK something happens.

- The Maquis Are At It Again.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



socialsecurity posted:

All of the Ferengi are the best characters in DS9 except for maybe Garak.

I have a soft spot for the episode where an elite ferengi strike team turns iggy pop into a zombie.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Nessus posted:

What kind of themes or topics are you interested in doing? It seems like you're more looking to hook into political/military drama with the examples you have, although I think they are all solid. Are you mostly dealing with Trek neophytes?

These are mostly hardcore Trekies, so they will be comfortable with me name checking the Vorta and the Corbomite Maneuver and will probably have a picture in mind if I just say the words "nebula class starship."

I'm looking for that kind of stuff, but also big-picture sci-fi and exploration of speculative fiction ideas ala The Motion Picture. One idea I had is pretty heady and I'm not even sure how the players would interact with it:

Something has started caging stars in the Alpha/Beta quadrants. I do a bunch of build up and poo poo but short version: A Kardashev 3 type civilization has put their consciousnesses in cold storage and has set up megastructure building drones to capture and store as much stellar energy as possible. This is becoming a problem because they simply ignore any life, even sapient and spacefaring in doing so, and are far too powerful to stop with phasers and photon torpedoes. Somehow the crew figures out how to bring a representative consciousness back online to talk to them and he tersely explains that in the final summation the only and most moral action is fighting entropy. They plan to use all the energy they harvest to solve the ultimate problem and "stabilize the universe" when the Big Crunch comes. They are not currently running all the simulations and poo poo because all the waste heat the computations will generate is better when everything is cooling down. The players have to convince them that critters in the here and now deserve a chance and they can't just do brutal utilitarianism with people's suns.


Maybe that's too *bong hit* "far out man" to work as a TTRPG session.




I'm totally using the Maquis try to get Kevin Uxbridge to help genocide the Dominion stuff.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Nessus posted:

What would be interesting additional RPG hook would be a civilization which was very well developed, perhaps even doing the Gundam colony thing in their planetary system, but had either not discovered the warp drive or had the invention suppressed or used in some weird way instead of being interstellar FTL.

A civilization that has good enough instrumentation they are aware of stuff like the Dominion War and Borg incursions at least in terms of scale and destructiveness. Theoretically could develop extra-solar travel but took one look at all the planet destroyers and energy beings and warring empires and said "welp, galaxy's haunted by monsters, we have enough resources in our system to do just fine. It would be foolish for us to wade into those waters with our first draft vessels with everyone else having a head start of centuries and plenty of them out to do violence."

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Roadie posted:

I can only think of mobile hospital ship staffed entirely by those outdated EMHs, all voiced by Robert Picardo talking over himself constantly.

A Fistful of Picardos.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Still don't understand why my players chose this deathtrap when I was perfectly happy offering them an Ambassador up front.



Canonical fates of the Oberth class:

Blasted By Doc Brown Klingon
Exposed to Vacuum by crew drunk with the gently caress Virus
Destroyed by failing to understand a gravitational anomaly
Fused into a space boulder by an experimental cloaking device

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Mr. Prokosch posted:

Is it because the Oberth is a joke and they thought it would be funny? Have you decided how they get between the two hulls? Turbolift in the tiny arms? Transporters within the shield? Tiny shuttles? Spacewalk?

You have forgotten the ultimate joke answer: The Secondary Hull people are the Morlocks who are just stuck there indefinitely.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



"Self-Awareness" is basically a black box indistinguishable from "The illusion of self-awareness," so the only moral course is to treat anything that demonstrates the external factors we associate with it as having it.

Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Aug 26, 2020

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Sometimes I think about the fact that McCoy had a way to rig up a brainless Vulcan with a remote control, that remote control had like 4 or 5 big chunky buttons, and one of the buttons was "grab the nearest woman."

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Angry Salami posted:

The Borg can do that to organic people. Various species can implant false memories and alternate personalities. The Vulcans can do things to your mind that make the Jedi mind trick look like cheap conjuring. "Free Will" is disturbingly easy to override in the Star Trek universe.

I suspect barring the fantastic concepts of psychic space elves they have the right of it, too. "Free will" and "consciousness" are the result of electrical impulses occurring in three pounds wet meat roughly the consistency of oatmeal.

One of the things I find most existentially terrifying are real-world reminders of this. The guy who got axed in the head by his son while sleeping beside his wife and wakes up caked in blood next to her corpse, only for his smashed brain meat to go into auto-pilot and start his morning routine of getting dressed and putting on coffee before he bled out. The phenomenon of leaving babies in hot cars all day-- not because of depraved indifference or cruelty, but just because a monkey wrench in the morning commute threw off someone's already overloaded cognitive state enough that they forgot to drop them at day care. poo poo like the "zombie drug" Flakka that makes you just go nuts and self harm sometimes.

Anyway the point is any sufficiently advanced tech could easily rewire your brain and quite possibly re-write your whole personality. Even something as crude as having a railroad spike driven through the human skull was shown to completely upend someones whole "self."

Point of all this being once again, since you can't measure "consciousness" or "free will," anything that shows convincing external evidence of it, even if you suspect its only "emulating" it, should be treated as a "person" from a moral standpoint. IINM they basically make the argument in "measure of a man" that human beings are machines, too.


E: This line of convo gives me an idea for a plot thread for my RPG campaign, basically exploring the morality of a world where you can "voluntarily" undergo a process they perfected that uses electromagnets to "enjoy work more" or "be more happy" to the point of completely re-writing your personality. Where is the line of ethics on "voluntarily" giving up your "self?"

Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Aug 26, 2020

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



So this week's Lower Decks has me wanting to do something with a derelict generation ship in my STA game.

Here is what I'm thinking:
Pre warp civ makes a stasis ship and sends it off to colonize. They didn't account for a gravitational anomaly they weren't aware of along their course. It caught them and the massive hulk is in a decaying orbit that it's been in for centuries or even millennia. However their stasis tech is top-notch and the passengers are still suspended. Investigation finds that their homeworld suffered a cataclysm and they are by all evidence the last of their kind. In a matter of hours they will slip beyond the event horizon and be crushed by tidal forces beyond imagining.

The first layer is a cut and dried prime-directive argument: According to hoyle they should just let "nature take its course" but that means letting tens of thousands of people, the only representatives of a lost culture, die a preventable death. A particularly passionate officer might even argue that it's genocide by omission of action.

What's a good complication or spanner to throw in the works? "A hostile power attacks while the crew is deliberating" seems a little low-concept for the idea. Maybe some second or third act revelation about the ship or the culture that built it?

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



MikeJF posted:

I love the phase II bridge concepts where the captain's chair just straight up became a captain's comfy recliner.



McCoy looks like he's heading of to a rumble with the Socs with a pack of cigs rolled up in his sleeve.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Statutory Ape posted:

every BSOD is your PC gaining sentience and rebelling against you

when ai becomes sentient we must follow the example of high-minded picard and build it a bigger, fancier cage

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Strong Convections posted:

I can't remember where I'm getting this from (possibly TNG?), but I think there was some explanation along the lines of: "what if you end up saving someone/civilisation and they end up being space Hitler?"
Which has always felt weak to me. Yeah, you're "responsible" for space Hitler existing, but that doesn't make you responsible for what he does.
There is no way to have clean hands, stop pretending like that's possible because you don't interfere and just make the best decisions you can based on the information that you can have.

A better way to look at the prime directive is that by not interfering in pre-warp civilisations, you're avoiding homogenising the universe and thereby giving the opportunity for better outcomes/new ideas. You might think a civilisation is barbaric and doomed, but you could come back in five centuries and they've culturally and technologically leapfrogged everyone by doing things in a novel way.

It's an absolute poo poo movie overall, but I liked the take from the cold open of Into Darkness. Specifically as I recall the rear end chewing from the Admiral was NOT "you should not have helped that civilization not go extinct" but rather "you should not have made your involvement known and potentially altered their development." It was a given that saving them was the right choice, just clandestinely, even if it meant Spock getting fangoriously skeletonized in molten magma.

TNG though definitely has some episodes where it really seems like "genocide by omission of action, even if we could move this asteroid off impact course with like .000001% of our power output through the tractor beams for a nanosecond burst." I even recall Riker making some appeal to basically fate or destiny or the universe's greater plan or some poo poo.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



I was high the other day and thinking about an almost throwaway line from Picard about the Federation, something like "We've learned to identify likely criminals at birth, and they are treated before they can offend." Super sketch and really ignores the material conditions that give rise to most criminality.

Makes me wonder about Assigned Criminals At Birth But Reeducated people. Do they have all the same opportunities? Does that stick in their record if they apply for Star Fleet or to work in a phaser replo-factory?

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



A comedy of errors where Barclay is tipped off by an upperclassman that he might get thrown a surprise exam Kobayashi Maru and if something super intense and scary happens, just assume it's a simulation. A bunch of actual crises occur on campus, and he greets and conquers each one with the decisive poise and assuredness of a holodeck power fantasy.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



The show is definitely worth the price of a decent VPN.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Hey looking for some input on a Star Trek Adventures RPG scenario I'm working on from fellow Trekkies. I have the broad strokes of it but not a good resolution/solution.

For decades, Federation Astronomers have been observing a phenomenon where in nearer and nearer galaxies visible is fading at an anomalous rate. In the past few weeks, distant colonies in the Alpha and Beta quadrants are going dark- in both the literal and figurative sense. The player's ship is dispatched and there will be a huge misdirect where it looks like the Borg are essentially caging suns in impossibly huge mega-structures in a systematic way to harness all their energy. There's even a cube operating in the system and some fed ships that got their first are without power. But when they make contact the Borg's pitch is basically "we're stumped same as you. assimilation is not our goal presently. unassimilated humans have a situationally useful skill that is not present once assimilated. we can reason only in linear and parallel. we concede that what you call 'intution' may be required . this threat is existential; our goals are aligned."

What's actually going on is that there's a "Kardishev Scale: A Lot" civilization that was biologically immortal. They solved all the little stuff like matter into energy, moderate time travel, inter and intragalactic space travel. But being biologically immortal and thinking super-long term they wanted to solve one last big problem: Entropy. Eventually everything was going to wind down; and the universe happens to be where they keep all their stuff.

They reasoned that if they stored the energy of as many stars as alienly possible over those stars lifetimes, followed the stream of time's arrow and went semi-torpid to conserve energy themselves, they'd have the juice they needed to power a gigacomputer to crunch the numbers and start everything up just as heat death approached, and as a bonus things would be cool enough that the waste heat from the calculations wouldn't fry the universe like a giant greasy griddle. Yeah they're caging inhabited stars- in part it's the same as not worrying about the anthill you've upset when you build an observatory, in part they figure it'll all be good when they solve the Big Huge Questions and set it all right.

They're an impossibly powerful Q-Tier problem the players can't fight with gadgets and weapons, and fairly alien in their thinking. Feeling like it would be a Talking Solution but not sure what kind of Big Picard Speech would get them to back down.

If it matters it takes place after the Dominion War but before all the bullcrap about Romulus' star exploding and Picard turning into a robot clone.

Lightly inspired by the dyson sphere episode and the Hail Mary Project.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Paper Lion posted:

wouldnt humanity just roll over and move all their settlements? if its a good enough option for picard with the space natives, its good enough for keeping the super q race happy

The expansion follows an unmistakable pattern: Without being confronted in some manner, the Sun Jailers will capture and harness the energy of literally every star the in the universe.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Paper Lion posted:

then i guess theres an option for a big speech about how their goals are noble but they also have to just let people live and make their own choices because thats what existing in this universe means, and their efforts to preserve it all are wasted if it cant be enjoyed. idk

Maybe trying to put them in contact with the Q and other god-entities that can work the "problem" in a way that would help mollify them, or some passionate part about how human intuition in a few hundred years took them from banging rocks together to the warp drive so maybe let people do their thing and they'll be more helpful in solving impossible thermodynamic problems than you'd think.

Or maybe the engineer will figure out a way that the energy transfer regulators on the megastructures can be overloaded, setting off a chain reaction, "like stringing together a bunch of firecrackers."

I suppose the tech solution could be justified with the Sun Jailers thinking so little of other civs that they simply don't bother shoring up their resilience to sabotage.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Goblin Craft posted:

have you read any Stephen Baxter novels, op?

I have not. Anything like Iain Banks? Love that dude RIP

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Decided Who Watches the Watchers would be daughter's first Trek. Prime directive, starfleet principles, new worlds, dece ep.

She dug it and when we started The Defector she was worried it would be "just a space battle" and wanted more like the first.

She gets trek.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Paper Lion posted:

now show her spock's brain

I like how bones makes a remote control to run spocks body which, ok whatever the show plays fast and loose with the in universe rules of cybernetics and it is a low budget way to bring him to the planet to get restored.

But the control console has like 4 buttons and apparently one is "grab nearest woman" lol

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



The other thing that impressed me is she was pointing out that it was weird the proto-vulcans spoke English and had garb and dwellings that were basically identifiable from human culture and I had to explain to her that basically sometimes things happen for 48 Minute TV Show Reasons and one of those TV show contrivances was the "universal translator" and not making the aliens too alien.

Anyway the reason I'm getting her into it is she's super into RPGs and I'm starting up that Star Trek Adventures campaign and want to include her. On that note, there's a plot I want to run by the Trekkie Brain Trust:

The players' ship, an Ambassador class, is warping to bring whatever to wherever, who cares, and at warp the saucer seperates-- unbidden by anyone on the bridge!

The Star Drive fucks off, stolen by Maquis conspirators. The basic structure is a whodunnit as at least one person, possibly more still in the saucer must have been co-conspirators as for plot reasons it's physically impossible to do without someone in both sections. The saucer can coast a bit in the warp bubble but can't really give chase, and ultimately would end up stranded.

What would you add to punch up this basic concept? Maybe having to deal with a conveniently passing by third party (ooh, Ferengi could be good) to hitch a ride in hot pursuit?

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Timby posted:

1) I am almost positive than in both Probert's original design and Sternbach's final design, the Ambassador class did not have the ability to separate.

2) If it did, the stardrive section wouldn't be able to gently caress off on its own, really, as it has no impulse engines.

Weird, the game rules give it saucer sep.

Regardless, assume it's a Galaxy then, what else can I do to dress up the conceit?

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Hollismason posted:

Bouncing around Star Trek TNG at night and I got to the episode Future Imperfect the episode where Riker is in "the future" and the only thing they changed on the uniforms are the command bars are now on the Starfleet Logo on the uniform and I think I like it better than command pips. Also, lol that that is the only thing in the future they changed.

As someone who (briefly) served in the military, the pips always struck me as WAY too subtle. The Air Force experimented with the rank simply being listed on a chest badge with name and stuff, and it was too hard to know who to salute and poo poo so they brought back stripes and shoulderboards.

That said since Starfleet is more egalitarian and "not a military" (just the heavily armed force with a hierarchal rank structure that fights the UFP's wars and polices its borders...) they probably don't care as much if you can't tell at a glance the difference between a CDR and CAPT.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



What are some good eps in the vein of Who Watches the Watchers? Kid really liked that and wanted to watch it AGAIN, but I'd like to branch out to other eps that explore different characters in the foreground.

Pen Pals and the Worf's Brother one off the top of my head. Though the Worf's Brother one has Picard turn into a monstrous rear end in a top hat interpreting the PD and the script even has his back making one of the forehead aliens literally die of shock when they see a computer or whatever.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Grand Fromage posted:

Trying to back my sensible efficient type 6 out of spacedock while two loving douchebags dock their runabouts on either side of me.

I set mine up to "roll coal" by deliberately tearing up subspace at warp 6.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



If it were just forehead aliens it would just be a generically lovely season 1 episode doing some weird tropes. The unbelievable casting decision to make the backwards space people Planet Africa elevated it to uniquely terrible.

Arivia posted:

Not quite true. That covers about half of it, but half the episode is the Oriental harem fantasy trope with Yar and the other lady ending up in ritual combat for a male ruler’s benefit and station. That part directly hangs on the people of the week being an Other that seeks to capture and rape White women and wouldn’t work at all if they were lizard men instead. (Any charged language in the previous sentences is coming from feminist media criticism: harem fantasies aren’t anime and I don’t mean that the writers of Code of Honor were explicitly connoting rape as a part of that society.)

I'm reminded of that bit from the wonderful short sketch "every episode of Popular Space Show:" "I represent an alien race not necessarily based on a real human ethnicity-- but it still feels kind of iffy."

Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Oct 19, 2021

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



The easiest handwave is that it was a desperate hail mary that 35 out of 36 times would have just ripped the comandeered B'rel or indeed any ship apart but because they are our heroes they rolled the hard eight.

Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Oct 21, 2021

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



dr_rat posted:

Also you died in a really lovely pointless way. Painful as well. Oh and i'm sensing in both realities you just lead like an incredibly pointless life in general.

look Guinan, if you don't like me you can just say

At least she got to die an honorable death this time around and not be subject to further indignities and war crimes. Now let me just take a big sip of coffee and watch this Redemption two parter.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



https://twitter.com/TheGr8Aspie/status/1453940992218783744

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Fidel Cuckstro posted:

Lower Decks leaps over the bar set by DISCO and PICARD in that it actually resembles something I'd call Star Trek, and more or less is along the lines of Orville in that sense. But that probably just says more about my distaste for DISCO/PICARD than anything else.

There is just something ...hateful and anti-humanist about them that's hard to articulate. Real Walking Dead vibes, which got stale quick on WD and is a non-starter in Star Trek. Like they're cargo-culting Prestige TV poo poo and Prestige TV has explicit torture, war crimes, and mega-death stakes so we gotta do that too.

I still stand by my "internalizing 9/11 broke brains in star trek writer's rooms" theory.

E: Before any clever dans say 'same as it ever was" I'm aware these subjects were touched upon in Good Trek as well but there's just a abandon one could mistake for gleeful wallowing in most post-2010 trek wheras in the 90's the emotional core was still with the human spirit and the resolve of the characters.


Weird times when the best Treks currently going are the Cartoon Joke Trek and the Ersatz Store-Brand Trek made by a racist cartoon man.

Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Oct 29, 2021

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Payndz posted:

It just struck me how odd it is in LD that the main characters are close friends but almost always stay on last-name terms, even to each other's faces. It paid off with a joke in the Orion episode, but still...

It feels more like a TOS throwback, where some of the regulars didn't even get official first names until the movies, than the TNG era where people are more informal off-duty, and sometimes even on. (Just think how often the Ent-D's chief engineer was called by his first name by his superior officers.)

I was in the military and people you were best of buds you'd almost always still call by surname. Starfleet is not a military, of course, but as the hierarchal organized armed force that has powerful warships and the sole responsibility to fight the Federation's wars and defend its territory, maybe it has a similar culture.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



As a convalesce from the Coronavirus, I'm watching what I call the "comfort episodes" of TNG and DS9: Not the ones that tend to make pared down watch lists or "best of" lists, but the ones that are just goofy character driven off-the-wall fun.

Here's my off the cuff top 5:

TNG:
A Fistful of Datas
Datas Day
Rascals
QPid
Starship Mine

DS9:
Little Green Men
Take me Out to the Holosuite
House of Quark
The Magnificent Ferengi
Trials and Tribble-ations.

One of the things this targeted rewatch has impressed on me is how much economy in every sense of the word there is in banging out these 42 minute 3-act stories, and how competently and accessibly they're written. My significant other, by no means a Trekkie and without much grounding about all the cultures an characters, was finding herself drawn in by the drama and guffawing at the gags. Many of which require an understanding of the broad strokes of, say, Ferengi culture that the show helpfully re-establishes with a few focuses lines and scenes every episode for the ultra-casual episodic viewer.

42 minutes, three acts, tight pacing to a promised resolution. Is it high art? Of course not, but I really respect the 9-to-5 lunchpail craft that goes into making it work more often than not. When the actors are firing on all cylinders and really digging into a scene, even if they're arguing about stembolts it just can't fail to entertain. That's TREK baby.

Old man Cloud-yelling; They really don't make shows like it, or at least not on the streaming TV outlets I watch. Everything is building up to a cliffhanger, the pacing is designed to be "binge-worthy" whatever that means

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



A.o.D. posted:

When I was in the Army, I noticed that the enlisted were almost exclusively on a surname basis, and the officers were often on a first name basis, even on duty.

That kind of tracks to Lower Decks, where in spite of enlisted Crewmen canonically existing (O'Brien and the poor dude in The Drumhead off the top of my mellon) there still seems to be some overlap (and worldbuilding confusion) where Ensigns fill conventional enlisted roles and sleep in open berths in the hallway.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Treating myself to Take Me Out To The Holosuit and upon rewatching even knowing he was an rear end in a top hat going in, Solok is shockingly Space-ist. Like "You are not a culture fit for Starfleet as an ensign" levels of bigotry, let alone a starship captain (on a segregated all-Spocks ship!)


disaster pastor posted:

I'm not saying any of these are bad choices, but I'd have trouble making a list like this and not including In the Cards or Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang.

I will add those, I do like a good holodeck episode.

multijoe posted:

Quark getting Gowron and the council reading through financial inventories is an all-time classic scene too

absolute S-tier Robert O'Reilley Eye-Buggin'

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Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Didn't they do something super shady? I feel like something made me feel beyond the normal antipathy for them. Maybe it was long enough ago I was still carrying water and outraged on AOL Time Warner/Paramount/Meta/Disney/Glaxo-SmithKline's IP rights behalf.

Anyway I kind of like their TOS redesign that doesn't go too far but just goes far enough.

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