Classic Star Trek Megathread: Waves and waves of jambalaya

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCARADb9asE

# ¿ May 28, 2023 10:21

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 12:52

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8one6 posted:

New thread for old Trek: food argument

Everyone in Trek complains about the food from the replicator except for the unfrozen people from the 20th century who all said it was amazing.

Clearly most of the people from the 24th century are spoiled.

Also Eddington was full of poo poo. "Have you ever had real food?" gently caress off with that poo poo. It's there 24th century equivalent of being into "raw water" or unpasteurized milk.

There were a few things the replicator couldn't really swing, from what I remember in the Technical Guide. Mostly Andorian stuff.

I imagine it's a mixture of the computer only having one 'version' or having minor variances on that version, so you begin to notice all its little flaws if you order crab rangoons twice a week and it's always the exact same seven rangoons; general organic touchi-feeliness because people in Star Trek all went to school in California; and the general complaining about the quality of clouds in Heaven.

# ¿ May 28, 2023 19:19

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Three ringworlds? Now you�re just screwing around.

# ¿ May 31, 2023 23:01

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My posting will never improve. I promise

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 22:11

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Move Along Home has powerful 70s sci fi energy and I respect that.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2023 17:10

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cenotaph posted:

I've been re-watching the x-files and I chuckle every time they talk about the syndicate fearing exposure. An entire generation of tv writers with Watergate brain.

When the X-Files began, the Watergate scandal was less than twenty years ago. We are further away from the X-Files' first episode than that episode was from Nixon's resignation.

Welcome to the only game in town.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2023 05:21

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Could be a natural tint that gets accented, sort of like how a lot of lipstick exaggerates natural lip colors.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2023 03:05

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Sash! posted:

There's a problem with that: there's nothing smarter than anyone has already designed. There's not a whole lot of combinations of how to make a government work and most of them are clearly right out the window based on everything else that's been mentioned in the show (there being an explicit president rules out a parliamentary system, etc.). There's a strong central figure or there isn't. People elect representation or they don't. And so on and so on.

One must have a King or a Parliament. There is no other option. Also, this New World thing will blow over. Latest fad. Now pass me a tobacco.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2023 21:19

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Sash! posted:

You mean aside from the 2000 year old ideas of democracy and republicanism that the Enlightenment dusted off?

There's surprisingly few ways for a government to work and most of them have been tried somewhere at some point. And I'd wager most of the ones that haven't were discarded because they obviously won't work, like putting everyone's ideas in a hat and picking one at random. Although that was probably tried somewhere too.

The literal aliens may have their own organizations. Since they�re aliens.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2023 21:05

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Grand Fromage posted:

This is why I don't give a poo poo about anything contradicting TOS. There was no attempt at a consistent canon until later so why bend yourself into knots trying to make TOS something it wasn't?

Kirk helped Satan (a good guy, ultimately) beat the rap and shot magic rays from his hands. You're not gonna take this from me.

SlothfulCobra posted:

I guess another explanation is just the fact that TV budgets and sfx costs are at the point where they can add these ridiculous flourishes and just because they can. I think there's a similar thing with the Star Wars franchise, where since the sequel trilogy had technology could add in a more robotic-looking hand, Luke at some point traded in his near-perfect simulacrum hand with fake skin for a rusty, lovely robot hand.

This one at least makes sense, he wasn't going to the ripperdoc to get the synth-skin replaced because he was in hiding. One Porg bite and that hand's done for, might as well shuck the fake meat and get on with your life.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2023 02:25

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"But I'm not hew-mon either. Does the Oracle condemn me?"

"Let me tell you about our great spiritual leader, Posadas..."

# ¿ Jul 8, 2023 20:00

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Der Kyhe posted:

Also, why is it always Section 31, not Starfleet Intelligence? "Normal" intelligence service is too nice for your writing, so it always has to be the team assholes from the already morally very grey group of people?

S31 lets you write cool tense spy movie poo poo while normal Starfleet Intelligence probably includes a lot of people who read and/or monitor computer filters to read public comm traffic, people who collect diplomatic reports, people who monitor crazy future spy telescopes/satellites...

You could probably have gotten a plot out of "the Federation does have an illegal cloaking program, and it's using it to cloak monitoring stations and/or their relief ships." You could even have an entire ethical structure. "The relief ships are less armed than a bulk tanker. All they do is go to the monitor bases for supplies and crew rotations. Nobody is hurt, nor even threatened. What's the harm? The aggression?"

Another cool Federation spy thing to do would be to have Betazed or other psychic species engage in tourism and then give reports on telepathic intelligence. You could also invent entire new intelligent species who incidentally have some kind of cool trick -- either as subjects of plotting or as another advantage in the Federation.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2023 16:42

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The actress was good and the character was OK but her primary trait was bullying our autistic son Data.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2023 19:33

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If doing bad things did not sometimes lead to (conditionally) good outcomes, they wouldn't really be a temptation or dramatically interesting irony, they would be the equivalent of neurological injuries.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2023 22:40

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MuddyFunster posted:

Should I keep posting my thoughts on the rest of the show as I go? I thought you guys would appreciate a first timer's experiences, but if you want me to cool off, I'll do so.

If you're discouraged because people aren't quoting you, don't be! Fresh looks are like delicious organs for our phage-raddled bodies! (in time, you will understand this)

# ¿ Jul 20, 2023 01:29

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Tighclops posted:

lmao I think that was a real sub

Submarines tend to be very low-polygon in real life

# ¿ Jul 24, 2023 22:45

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skasion posted:

Tosk also seems like a proto Jem�Hadar. Similar boxy/scaly design, similar invisibility powers, and even the same kind of character motives we see in a lot of JH�complete, unshakable determination to live out their objectively awful fate.

It would be reasonable that he might have been from the same original stock as the Jem'hadar, or had been a modified one.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2023 02:57

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No Dignity posted:

I can buy the conceit that Bajorans trusted him because he visibily wasn't Cardassian and at least tried to act as an honest broker, and the contradiction of Odo trying to be a fair cop and administering Cardassian law explicitly comes in an episode where Odo has to confront the reality of what he did during the occupation, like he's literally arguing with a past version of himself and calling him out on his poo poo!

I assume his attempts to actually enforce Cardassian law as written was greatly preferable to its usual implementation. To use the Jim Crow analogy: a lot of stuff wasn�t illegal for Black people, simply�. Unsafe.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2023 17:05

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Jose Oquendo posted:

Maybe? But I always remember when Sisko tells Worf he'll most likely never get a command because of the time he failed a mission to save Jadzia ( I think that's what happened in the episode).

I thought it was when he did some light terrorism.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2023 21:26

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Based on what I have read, all fictional forms of political organization are essentially fascism, and in a sense Garak is doomed. (This may also apply to all RL forms of government, except possibly the one the reader prefers.)

However it seems from what we can piece together that a Cardassian state not in conflict with the UFP might be able to establish a less adventurous foreign policy. I suspect their vague resource problems were self inflicted.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2023 22:52

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skasion posted:

I think the Cardassians are gonna have a hard time building a society that isn�t hosed up because 1) it�s the exact same people that were just previously part of a hosed up society, except for 2) all the people who ended up getting slaughtered either by their own hosed up government or in the gigantic war they just lost which devastated their planet on top of an honest to god genocide that killed hundreds of millions. Garak loves Cardassia but he wasn�t happy with the way things were, he can�t live with himself either as Cardassia�s servant or a traitor to it, and he has no faith his own return home (over the dead bodies of millions) is the beginning of a change for the better.

You miss 100% of the reforms you don't take. Garak already saved the Alpha Quadrant, at this point it's a victory lap.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2023 02:08

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ashpanash posted:

I mean, in the Star Trek universe at least, Humans did it. Why not Cardassians?

Because of the uniquely horrible nature of humanity� wait, uh, uh�

It would honestly be an interesting angle if they haven�t written grim dark post warp gray scale Federation of the future in stone, to show Cardassian involvement. There was that one timeline with a Cardassian lieutenant flying the D�

# ¿ Aug 17, 2023 16:39

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It seems like poor ship design to have your business end at the end of a long tube from your engineering section, but I guess when I look at it that way it actually makes sense. Kind of approaching the same implicit reason behind nacelle/saucer from a different perspective.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2023 20:51

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Angry Salami posted:

I really like that most of the TOS ships share some basic design elements - the Enterprise and the Klingon battlecruiser both have a saucer/forward section separated from the engineering hull, the Romulan bird of prey has a saucer design like the Enterprise, they all have engines separated from the main body of the ship on pylons. It gives the impression that there's some sort of physical reason and benefit for those choices when even alien ships that have their own design language follow similar rules.

Wasn't the vague idea something like 'you need two of these to go in warp and you really don't want to be in between them when they do their thing'? Of course the Defiant kind of ignores that :v:

# ¿ Aug 21, 2023 05:31

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Regarding the Bird of Prey 's cloaca, I think the torpedo tube was canonically used to launch probes when the D needed to leave something laying around an area.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2023 14:37

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Boxturret posted:

They reverse Tuvixed the whole ship and crew in an episode of Red Dwarf, so surely the inverse is possible.

Red Dwarf is much more rigorous about the science than Trek.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2023 18:47

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Grand Fromage posted:

Disco does it all the time. The ship is going to blow up in 30 seconds! Two minutes of deeply emotional conversation time!

Makes sense, they probably bought the spore drive from Freeza's people.

What would make sense for intra-system jaunts in the Solar system and presumably in other well developed Federation systems (I imagine Andor and Tellar are as bustling as Sol, although Vulcan may be all efficient and minimalist) is ferry service between planets. It could even be largely automated.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2023 18:26

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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:

Classic Dwarf (series 1-5) is as good as TNG. Hard to beat classics like Demons and Angels, Polymorph, Better Than Life and Back To Reality. There are a few clunkers here and there but the vast majority of the episodes still hold up.

It's genuinely excellent television, although I'd wonder about how well the comedy angle holds up. Perhaps the TNG/DS9 crew were watching fansubs at BBC cons. :v:

# ¿ Aug 30, 2023 14:35

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Eighties ZomCom posted:

Even then it's kind of all over the place, with gold and diamonds being considered valuable in one episode, and worthless in another because they can be made using the warp drive or something? I think the episodes were the Gorn episode and Catspaw.

I could see concerns over this kind of thing even in the TNG/DS9 era -- but they would probably analogize it to a planetary holodeck without any constraints. There are plenty of desires you couldn't fulfill in the Federation.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2023 23:39

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cenotaph posted:

The maquis are clearly back to the land reactionaries who want to cosplay tough frontier people while replicating all the poo poo they need, like a 24th century the pioneer woman. You can't get them to leave because deep down being an oppressed person fighting for a doomed cause is the only thing more compelling than roughing it (with fusion generators).

Yeah, it makes total sense to me that the Maquis exist, and even that many of them aren't necessarily dead-eyed slogan-spitting land fetishist maniacs, but I don't find them particularly sympathetic. We might presume that some chunk of the people in the disputed territories did in fact take the offer and went somewhere else.

The thing that does complicate it is the Native American planet, since, uh, this argument does hit somewhat different for those guys.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2023 22:01

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Thinking about that and also tribal law made me wonder just how strict the Federation's policy for unification on a planetary level is. I imagine it makes sense to have a requirement for something like a UN with internal peacekeeping authority or the like, since the Federation's goal here is probably in part practical: They do not want to risk starting a situation where the nation that clubs up with the Federation becomes the emperor of their home world (or invites a retaliatory strike by other nations which Starfleet cannot, reasonably, stop), and they also do not want to be asked to send the MACOs to quell local unrest.

But how strict would it be? Would a planet with a small irredentiest population be excluded? What about situations like the tribal nations in the United States, which enjoy considerable distinct autonomy and who might not necessarily all be specifically on board with joining a space federation? What if a planet joins the Federation and fifty years later a political movement splits off the True Authentic Constitutional Provisional Southern Continent Movement and tries to withdraw that continent from the planetary government and thus the Federation?

# ¿ Sep 9, 2023 22:35

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No Dignity posted:

Man the ending of The Big Goodbye is bleak, that has to be the only time TNG acknowledges the regular holograms are functionally people created and discarded for the amusement of the crew

If I recall, didn't this poo poo start happening after the Bynars did a system upgrade on the Enterprise (and implicitly all other holodecks, since I assume they were the same platform)? The Bynars got a lot to answer for here. Send Ace Rimmer.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2023 14:07

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Yeah, the tech manual suggests that the holodeck is meant to be realistic scenarios from recordings as well as allowing for recreational opportunities (for instance, you could simulate kayaking). Potentially if there was an upgrade that made it possible to easily have simulated people, as opposed to 'actors who can do a somewhat interactive stage play', that in turn led to the EMH and Vic and everything.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2023 00:20

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disaster pastor posted:

Yeah, on one hand, there was Frakes who was like, "if we're doing what you say we're doing, this should really be a male actor, or it takes a lot of the bite out," and on the other hand, there was Berman who was like, "we did a perfect job with our gay allegory and gay people still found things to criticize, you can't please them."

As best as I can tell the actors were always a lot more hip than Berman, which is a drat shame given that relatively minor shifts could have let Trek continue its tradition of social progressivism, potentially to the benefit of the world at large. But maybe then the Vegas restaurant might have closed a year sooner, or something.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2023 14:52

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Soul Dentist posted:

Wow surprised it wasn't pedophilia again

Now now, let's not get ahead of ourselves, it can be all these things and more.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2023 19:09

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Railing Kill posted:

Holy poo poo.

Even in less extreme cases, I have always had a hard time understanding reactionaries being super into Trek. Trek has always been progressive relative to its own time (TOS for the 1960's, TNG for the 1980's, DS9 for the 1990's, etc.) I mean, not with everything, but generally it's progressive. How someone could watch the particular kind of moralizing going on in Trek and still be a fan if their worldview would call it "bleeding heart" or whatever is just vexing to me.

I remember an old paperback about Trek fandom from like 1980 having a lot of talk about how some of the early big wheels in Trek fandom were equally fanatical about Trek and, uh, Objectivism.

I think it makes more sense when you only had TOS, TAS and some random novels as well as fan product to work with. While there were moral lessons and poo poo there, they tended to either be unfortunately close to United States policy consensus of the period or to be generally humanist, and at the time I believe Objectivists neither loved organized religion nor Nazis all that passionately.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2023 19:31

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Sir Lemming posted:

Exactly. As long as the Federation can be considered analagous to America, and the Federation (ergo America) is being portrayed as having already solved all its problems, it doesn't necessarily matter if Roddenberry suggests that those problems were stuff like capitalism, racism, traditional sexuality, or even religion. What matters is America fixed it and they're the good guys and they're winning. It's not unlike how even the most extreme right-wingers speak pretty highly of MLK, but from the angle that he fixed racism and now we must never confront it again. (Never mind how they would've treated him back then.)

Oh yeah, they didn't like him at ALL at the time.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2023 23:24

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Powered Descent posted:

That's one of the more curious blind spots about the Trek setting. Given the amount of territory and power they control, those empires must each have a whole bunch of inhabited alien worlds under their boot, but we never hear anything about them. Maybe it's just that the writers don't want to deal with that complexity when writing an on-and-off ally like the Klingons, or even an "occasionally we see the good in them because this is Star Trek after all" like the Romulans and Cardassians.

I think the Gorn are affiliated with the Klingons but that may just be from the Star Trek Online mythos. It seems plausible that most space-nations might have had a single origin point and would thus have only one species (or two, in some cases) as natural citizens. They might include other species, but potentially in situations looking more like Bajor under Cardassia.

The Federation, obviously, is the exception, and seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train from the perspective of other space-nations. Look at this intolerable aggression on the part of the Federation, letting Bajor consider membership when they're mere light-years from Cardassian space-clay!

# ¿ Oct 2, 2023 04:50

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BonHair posted:

You could also do a cool backstory about a peaceful space faring species making first contact with the Klingons and getting the tables turned on them to explain how they got the tech. Hell, weave it together with their slaying the gods myth and you're going somewhere.

Ah, the Kzinti again :v:

What I would do if I was Trek King is write the Klingons as having had a post-atomic horror like Earth did, but Earth got contacted by the Vulcans and got a little uplifting along the way. (This also seems like a good reason if you're like 'but there's no way that (insert modern earth problem) could have been resolved!' -- the Vulcans broke the logjam. How? Very well, thanks.)

The Klingons didn't. They crawled out to space on their own. Perhaps they were lucky enough to have a few settlement candidates in the area, but their culture was strongly marked by a Mad Max period.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2023 20:43

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 12:52

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Seemlar posted:

In general, we see a whole lot of entirely affable Klingons around even during the times of the cold war with the Federation so I think you just have to assume there's more to the Empire than violent conquest and domination the same way you have to assume there enough of a culture beyond Honourable Warriors to make their society workable.

From how the Klingon/Federation relationship thawed you would have to think there would be numerous ways to get into the Klingons good graces whether it be as protectorates or client states, etc. that aren't just getting conquered.

Another possibility is that the Klingon government name is actually something like 'The Military League United Under The Glorious Wisdom of Kahless' but Klingon diplomats were like "hmm, KLINGON EMPIRE. That's metal. Go with that. We are the KLINGON EMPIRE to you hew-mons." *gowron eyes*

# ¿ Oct 3, 2023 14:02

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Classic Star Trek Megathread: Waves and waves of jambalaya

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