Star Trek: *hits blunt* The higher, the fewerrrrrr

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Star Trek: *hits blunt* The higher, the fewerrrrrr

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Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

I hadn't seen this before, and it's very good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoHzLLOL3sM

# ¿ Feb 19, 2023 07:22

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 13:17

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

This Youtube video puts warp speed into perspective pretty well. And what's funny is Star Trek is still very conservative with speeds compared to galaxy-spanning shows like Star Wars. The Federation really needs to redo the warp scale again though, all these 9.99... speeds are getting unreasonable.

Skip to 2:30 if you just want to see the side-by-side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSyfpUyzQGU

bull3964 posted:

The big glaring thing there is that thrusters aren't even related to impulse.

Also, they always refer to impulse as if it's a speed but really it should be an acceleration.

In the TNG tech manual, they say they try to limit sublight velocities to 0.25c to keep time dilation manageable. You should be able to reach 0.25c under ANY impulse output, it's just a matter of how long it takes you to get there.

Also funny how there's no forward facing impulse engines, how are they slowing down?

Are they blipping a subspace field into existence to lower the mass of the ship and then slowing down with the thrusters? If so, why even have impulse engines to begin with?

Clearly impulse engines both suck and blow.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2023 03:55

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

HD DAD posted:

Speaking of Dave Blass, he posted something on IG that referenced the Shrike being built by the Elachi aka the Silent Enemy aliens.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CpAh7XHOY4d/

I doubt any of this will be brought up, but I guess don't expand this if you don't want to see potential spoilers on the original of the Shrike. Though this really all sounds like designer backstory that no one else involved in the show would be even aware of.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2023 06:06

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Mister Kingdom posted:

I'm missing about six ships from the original 180 ship run. Of course, none of them are in the current batch.

Which ones? I only keep the "key" ships and I have some I haven't gotten around to selling off, if you're looking for some random Voyager or Enterprise aliens of the week.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2023 02:42

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Mister Kingdom posted:

#042 - USS Pasteur
#043 - Species 8472 ship
#156 - Melourne
#158 - Excelsior Concept II
#164 - Excelsior Concept III
#174 - Archer's Toy Ship
#180 - Borg Cube (First Contact)

Nope, doesn't look like I have any of those in my sell pile. Which is weird because I should have Archer's Toy Ship, I have all the ones around it, but I don't see it in my pile. I'll keep you in mind if it turns up.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2023 02:26

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Feldegast42 posted:

So is Picard like, ACTUALLY good in season 3 now, or is everyone still gaga over the gang getting back together

In my rankings I classify Picard S3 at the level Voyager and the TNG movies, it's not good, but it's not unwatchably bad and it is definitely a step above the previous seasons, mostly by virtue of the charisma of the old characters. Like Voyager and post-TNG TNG the characters aren't written consistently and the adherence to Trek technology rules is more namedropy than in-universe accurate, but it is at last advancing the story of 24th-century Trek past Nemesis and hasn't done anything I found absolutely egregious yet.

For example...

bull3964 posted:

I do have to say I was annoyed with one part of the most recent episode of Picard.

They go through this whole thing to get the cloaking device because they need it to rescue everyone they beamed aboard the station. They get it, they get to the station cloaked. They they are like "we have to decloak to transport." Huh? The LITERAL same cloaking device that you installed on the ship, the one that came from the HMS Bounty, was beaming people around left and right while the ship was cloaked when it was landed in the park in San Francisco. So then, what was the point of having the cloak? They showed up, cloaked, moved like 1000m, said they had to decloak to transport, did the shole strafing run to transport, and then warped away. How did the cloak help them in any way shape or form if they were only cloaked for a very short period.

Someone seems to have conflated not being able to shoot/shield while cloaked with not being able to beam while cloaked, which has never been a thing before. It can be justified away with something like the cloak was just jury-rigged onto the Titan so it wasn't configured correctly and they couldn't safely get a transporter beam through the cloaking field's emissions or whatever, but it's a perfect example of where it feels like someone came up with the idea that it would be cool to put in this weird callback to ST IV regardless of how clunky it'd come out.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2023 05:29

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

wesleywillis posted:

I may have posted it here before, or in another Star Trek thread somewhere, but I always thought that would have been a good foreshadowing or whatever the gently caress for a TNG movie.

At the end of that episode Data says something like they sent out a signal, or a beacon (I forget exactly) and then when it cuts to space, you can hear some kind of Morse Code sounding stuff just before the credits.

They could have had that signal going to somewhere obscure like the other side of the Beta Quadrant, since by the time the TNG movies came about, there had been enough stuff set in Gamma and Delta Quadrant.

Bug aliens come to the alpha quadrant and try to gently caress poo poo up, TNG crew come and save the day blah blah blah.

They should do an episode where the bug fleet shows up, but by the time they got there their ships are all 40 year old technology and they get quickly obliterated.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2023 01:03

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Hollismason posted:

The Defiant has like 50 crew members and is like 1/4 the size of Voyager. Voyager having 140 crew doesn't make sense.

Was that their pre-Caretaker crew count? I could easily see Voyager being on a permanent skeleton crew even after the Marquis merger, and that maybe not being the normal crew load for an Intrepid-class.

Though Im guessing it's a safe bet we see more that 140 faces over the course of the show in the various background extras. They must replenish them from the shuttle dimension.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2023 20:09

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

It's been a long time since I've watched the whole thing in a row so I may be misremembering details, but I could buy the Winn thing because they'd set it up that she was getting increasingly frustrated that the Prophets wouldn't talk to her but were all chatty with Sisko. She saw herself as Bajor's representative to the Prophets since she'd been elected to that position but they refused to acknowledge her, so she wasn't just refusing to give up power but was rebelling against gods she felt had abandoned her. Yes it was all rushed and felt too quick a turn, but that's the second half of season 7 in a nutshell.

Agreed on the Dukat thing though, that arc for him never worked for me. I wouldn't have wanted to see him killed, but I'd have rather they had him disappear into a Starfleet institution for most of the season after the Ziyal thing and then pop back up in the final arc with some grand scorched earth plan. I just can't picture a Cardassian as nationalistic as Dukat surgically turning himself into a Bajoran, that would be like Hitler getting circumcised.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2023 21:50

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Just re-render all the series in full 4k but in VISOR-vision^�, then call anyone who complains abelist.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2023 21:38

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Delsaber posted:

It took a while but I think I finally found a weird-rear end music choice that beats Faith of the Heart and it's in the end credits of the live-action Space Battleship Yamato of all things

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xczrZlE7dMw

I very nearly fell out of my chair when I realized what they were dropping on me

Quite the interesting comment section on that video.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2023 07:31

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

CainFortea posted:

...and dealing with Captain Ransom by chasing him down and stopping him from brutally murdering any more aliens was the right move.

True, but someone should probably look into those Equinox crewmembers who "joined Voyager's crew" and were never seen again.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2023 22:23

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

CainFortea posted:

We never saw like 80% of the rest of the crew.

Exactly

# ¿ Apr 25, 2023 00:31

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Remember that time Sisko wore a weird vest for like a week?

Was Janeway the only captain not to get some weird uniform variant?

# ¿ Apr 27, 2023 02:46

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

MikeJF posted:

Muppets ST4: all future characters are muppets, all 20th century people are human.

"My god, what happened to humanity!?"

"...We do not discuss it with outsiders."

# ¿ Apr 28, 2023 11:52

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

I can only find the Enterprise bridges, and pivot around from a single point. There's other ships and you can move around the bridge? How the hell do you navigate that site?

# ¿ Apr 29, 2023 01:17

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:

At the bottom you can hold your mouse button and slide the timeline for more ships. Took me a second to figure it out too.

Yeah I got that, but it's just Enterprises. Is the Defiant and Voyager on there somewhere I'm missing?

# ¿ Apr 29, 2023 02:55

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:

I don't remember seeing the Defiant, but Voyager is at the very end under 'Other Ships'.

Oh, it was going in chronological order so I just stopped scrolling at the 32nd century Enterprise, I didn't even realize there were whole other categories. Wow they really just used straight-up cheap office chairs for those side stations on Voyager, huh? The Defiant feels like a pretty big omission now.

Powered Descent posted:

The interface is... finicky. First you have to click the "enable navigation" button under the bridge video window. Then pick a ship from the list at the bottom -- there's no scroll bar, you have to click and drag horizontally. Then (on most ships, at least) the video should have "click anywhere to continue" written along the bottom of the video. Click the video, and it'll enable mouselook and WASD movement. Hit escape to get your cursor back.

That took some trial and error to figure out. Yeah, extremely finicky.

And this feature just straight up isn't available under Firefox. But in Chrome, that is insanely awesome.

BattleMaster posted:

Looks like WebGL rendering it in real time in the web browser, not server-side video streaming stuff. You can load a scene, disconnect from the internet, and keep looking around it if you want - I tried just to be 100% sure, and it definitely works.

WebGL has existed for a while but doesn't see very much use. Independence Day: Resurgence blew as a movie but it had a really cool website that uses a bunch of 3D stuff. https://web.archive.org/web/20160209014603/http://www.warof1996.com/

The archived Wayback Machine version of it is a little slow to load all the art assets though.

edit: Wait while the default view is clearly rendered in the browser the walkaround thing is hitting my network connection hard and stops working when I unplug my cable. What in the world? Are they actually doing Stadia poo poo for something like this? I wonder how expensive that is especially when these scenes wouldn't be very difficult to render in the browser client-side even on phones and poo poo.

edit 2: The more I look at it the more it actually looks... ray traced? They're spinning up servers with RTX GPUs just to show off Star Trek bridges? I feel like I'm going crazy

edit 3: The blog doesn't say for sure but it has ads for a real-time path tracing engine that the company behind the website seems to have made, I guess that's one way to get people sold on it

edit 4: Well my mind is loving blown, I thought there was no way it would be cloud rendered with loving ray tracing but here we are, they're doing it and apparently it's no big deal to do that in 2023

Whatever they're doing they seem to be using a FPS engine rather than free-floating camera, I tried to walk forward on the TOS bridge and got stuck on one of the rails so the camera has collision. Agreed that this is some insane tech for what it is.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2023 04:02

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

MikeJF posted:

They wanted to have everyone facing forward, so the nooks were the way to do that. The big mistake was the side stations that were too far to the side and so they just ended up kinda forgetting about them.

I've always wondered what came first, the set nooks or the model nooks, and if they had to build in one in response to the other. Even though I don't think the scale lines up right, so maybe the model bits are supposed to be something else.

MikeJF posted:

DS9 was viewed more at the time because of it going straight to syndication while Voyager was the flagship of UPN, so Voyager got more corporate attention and push in that role even though DS9 technically has higher numbers, so it was easy to get the impression DS9 was less popular.

I think regardless of viewership at the time, Voyager is remembered a lot more by the rest of the fandom outside of SA and Paramount, see for example nothing from DS9 being on that Roddenberry site, various captains lists and montages over the years that have just straight up forgotten Sisko, stuff like that.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2023 22:00

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Grand Fromage posted:

The bridge is the middle part, the Y around it is the conference room, ready room, and a bunch of stuff that was never on screen.

Oh right, that makes a lot more sense.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2023 02:33

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Eighties ZomCom posted:

Didn't we see one in season one? It was pretty small IIRC, Geordi goes there to look out a window or something.

Pre-Ten Forward I think they regularly blocked off the corridor set to make a meeting nook, or confusingly mirrored tiny exercise room, or various other things because they hadn't planned ahead to make a set where characters could meet to have off-duty conversations. Once they had Ten Forward that all pretty much stopped, even though the Ent-D must have had tons of other common areas.

Since Ten Forward was always full of the senior staff it was probably only where the suck-ups went to hang out. All the cool crewmembers were probably smoking in the nacelles or something.

# ¿ May 1, 2023 02:41

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

MikeJF posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_ta7K2dR54

Man that is a bland line reading. I thought it was an AI voice at first.

# ¿ May 2, 2023 19:50

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

I like the look of the Sovereign-class, but not for an Enterprise. I think it works as an updated look on Excelsior-style ships, but I like my Enterprises with distinctive hulls, less sleek and more functional looking.

# ¿ May 3, 2023 02:50

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Don't think too much about the universal translators. That way lies madness. The TNG tech manual stuff said it was in the badges, and but then Quark et. al. don't wear badges, so they had to come up with the workaround that it's something hidden in their ears. In TOS it was a standalone device that looked like a lightsaber.

Presumably "modern" Trek environments have it bundled in every computer speaker everywhere so whenever anyone's on a starship or similar they don't need to have their badge on.

Arivia posted:

from M-A: "According to Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, the Nova-class is the successor of the Galaxy-class starship as the next primary explorer ship of Starfleet. Four different concept designs were presented on pages 177 and 178. The direction the actual Nova-class eventually followed was the down-sized ship with less internal volume that allowed each ship to be refitted for specific mission types and an angular-curvilinear shape designed to allow an enhanced utilization of warp energy."

(other sources may disagree)

ah yep, a couple paragraphs later: "According to the Star Trek: Starship Spotter, the Nova-class became the replacement to the Oberth-class as a research and science ship. The ship was equipped with only two cargo management units and two shuttlecraft. The phaser arrays were classified as type X, the same as the Galaxy and Intrepid-class phasers. The ship had a mass of 110,000 metric tons."

Yeah the tech manual Nova-class designs don't have much in common with the eventual Nova, and are clearly just something some concept artist threw together real quick as alternate starships without much thought behind the concept. Apparently one of the Galaxy-class successors was going to be a tug.

# ¿ May 12, 2023 20:49

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Penitent posted:

I like how music is just stated with no definitions or clarifications.

What kind of music? Good Music? Christian Rock? Niche German Techno of the 1980's?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7szk0ybN7JA

# ¿ May 18, 2023 08:52

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Alfred P. Pseudonym posted:

Did they ever address the implications of that TNG episode where they discover that warp drive is destroying the universe? I can�t remember anything about it in DS9 and only one or two throwaway lines in TNG.

Nessus posted:

I thought the implication with the adjustable nacelles was that they figured out a warp-neutral drive configuration by then.

The behind-the-scenes apocrypha says Voyager's moving nacelles fixed the issue, and then later designs figured out how to fix the issue with stationary nacelles. I don't think the issue and "fix" were ever brought up on screen past TNG season 7, other than there may have been a throwaway mention about the the purpose of the variable warp nacelles somewhere in early Voyager?

Basically it was quickly realized it was a dumb plot decision, that everyone immediately wanted to forget.

# ¿ May 19, 2023 21:13

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Somehow I have ended up with a bunch of old Star Trek commercials in my Youtube recommendations.

This one goes hard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l96aDWIbn48
And this one is ridiculously well done, but apparently never aired in the US.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZBTDlvShYg

# ¿ May 19, 2023 23:02

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

MikeJF posted:

_{Although George Takei wishes he was built like that, jeez Sulu}

I think the Sulu's by far the weakest. Everyone else is a pretty dang good lookalike, then Sulu's just some Asian guy in a wig.

Besides no one's ever going to beat the guy SNL used for Sulu.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpPgavT5am4

CainFortea posted:

Yup, that's why whenever I post about the whole teleporter/replicator stuff I sprinkle "Please ignore all the times on screen this is wrong" throughout.

Whenever you see them use the transporter or replicator, a space wizard did it.

# ¿ May 21, 2023 02:19

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

jeeves posted:

I think they only changed the LCARS screens for engineering and nothing else!

From that same page, apparently not even that.

# ¿ May 22, 2023 21:03

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 13:17

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

We also saw some aboard a Titan but then it turned into an Enterprise.

# ¿ May 24, 2023 06:21

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Star Trek: *hits blunt* The higher, the fewerrrrrr

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