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Star Trek: Picard


Corvinus85

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8 hours ago, karaddin said:

@Mindwalker I will say that the starfleet in DISC not living up to starfleet ideals was at least not an accident, but part of what the show is looking at. 

That's what i was trying to say in a non spoilery way in that it makes more sense as the season unfolds.

I really enjoyed the pilot. Lots of nostalgia in there but so far it feels like they are drawing on past storylines to create something new. God, it's so refreshing to have something not limited by being set in past continuity (that's in general not just star trek).

I also really liked the surprises in the episode. There were all the rumours of it being about one thing but it turns out it's about another as well

data's daughter and synthoids outlawed. Did not see that coming and Even mire surprised with her being killed off. I'm guessing the "evil" mars attacks might be connected with the borg or at least retrofitted tech in use by romulans. It was also great to use maddox who I'm sure will turn up later after that intro

Stewart was unsurprisingly great. I think my favourite scene was the amount of warmth he exuded when the woman came asking for help. The empathy he showed was a part of the character i often forget but is really a part of him.

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15 hours ago, Toth said:

I know, I know. I was mostly kidding, though I get why my pessimism might have made it look like I wasn't.

So... I guess my curiosity won over my reservations. I watched it. And I must say... Well, it isn't the flaming trainwreck I expected, but it's awfully average. It felt like a Jason Bourne movie where an old man that may or may not be Picard happens to stick around. There is a noticeable disconnect between this having Picard hanging around just waiting for an adventure to happen and the girl's sleeper agent nonsense main story doing its own thing. So really, there was no real point for Picard to be there for this kind of story and the explanation we got at the end was tenuous at best.

So far nothing too egregious happened in terms of logical leaps, aside the fact that no character ever thinks to go to the fucking police when masked assassins keep beaming into your living room. Shouldn't that be the most obvious thing you'd do? Though I still remain wary of the worldbuilding. There is some stuff mentioned that just seems to be there to make the main plot happen and it does tie in into the interview on the prior page with Steward mentioning a hamfisted Brexit allegory. It's nowhere near as bad as I imagined, but well...

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... as far as I understand Picard is super sore about the Federation as a whole having turned super isolationist after the destruction of Romulus. Which happened now why exactly? Why would the Federation do that under any circumstances aside just to piss of the Romulans, cripple your political weight and piss off the main character? Wouldn't that power vacuum mean a prime opportunity to reach out to the survivors and bind them to you? Maybe my Star Trek Online experience is showing, but I always thought the fallout portrayed there very logical and very awesome, with the Romulan colonies forming a Romulan Republic that gets massive political and economical aid by both the Federation and the Klingon Empire, binding all three ever more closely together. Sure that might not be as edgy and generate as much conflict, but it was a cool premise with a lot of positive repercussions for the state of the Star Trek universe.

Also what the fuck is up with the 'synthetics' and a robot uprising incinerating Mars. Is this Battlestar Galactica all of a sudden? Will this turn into a "Who will be revealed as a Cylon next?" kind of show? So the show will be about Picard going to protect skinjobs made from a template of Data's neural network? I mean sure, why not. I'm still thinking a higher focus on diplomacy would make the most of the character, instead of being just the old man on the sidelines.

 

We definitely had different takes on the episode. Picard actually stated why he's just been sitting around and even criticised himself. It also seems pretty clear why Picard is involved and central to the girl's story

she's data's daughter which is good enough reason in itself. But there's obviously a borg connection (maybe they were able to recreate data's consciousness using borg tech?) In which case Picard is also very connected.

Also, i might have misread the episode but i thought it was the mars incident and not the Romulus one that lead to Starfleet's change in attitude? I agree it's still a bit of a stretch though.

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I had the same take - it was the Mars incident that caused the change. Responding poorly to a staggering terroristic attack is a reasonable explanation for a change, even if it's not something that interests everyone.

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First of all,

Spoiler

I think that the synthetic attack on Mars may be a cover up and the synthetics took the blame for someone else. But this is just my prediction, as it's a common enough trope used in such stories. The ships that attacked Mars looked suspiciously Romulan.

As to Starfleet

Spoiler

Why weren't they willing to use all available ships to help the Romulans? Why build a new fleet? Picard compared the effort with Dunkirk. At Dunkirk the UK mobilized existing civilian boats to aid in the evacuation. They didn't build a whole new fleet in 2 weeks.

 

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1 hour ago, Corvinus said:

First of all,

  Reveal hidden contents

I think that the synthetic attack on Mars may be a cover up and the synthetics took the blame for someone else. But this is just my prediction, as it's a common enough trope used in such stories. The ships that attacked Mars looked suspiciously Romulan.

As to Starfleet

  Reveal hidden contents

Why weren't they willing to use all available ships to help the Romulans? Why build a new fleet? Picard compared the effort with Dunkirk. At Dunkirk the UK mobilized existing civilian boats to aid in the evacuation. They didn't build a whole new fleet in 2 weeks.

 

Not enough ships.

Spoiler

Galaxy-class starship can hold about 15,000 people if they absolutely packed out the corridors and filled every quarters and cargo bay. And even that would be just for a few days to a couple of weeks. You'd need 60,000 Galaxy-class starships to evacuate 900 million people from Romulus. The Federation didn't have that many (it had maybe two dozen, tops, and even less Sovereigns). So yes, they needed to build lots and lots of new ships and press in every ship the Federation and the Romulans had.

 

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8 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Not enough ships.

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Galaxy-class starship can hold about 15,000 people if they absolutely packed out the corridors and filled every quarters and cargo bay. And even that would be just for a few days to a couple of weeks. You'd need 60,000 Galaxy-class starships to evacuate 900 million people from Romulus. The Federation didn't have that many (it had maybe two dozen, tops, and even less Sovereigns). So yes, they needed to build lots and lots of new ships and press in every ship the Federation and the Romulans had.

 

Understandable, but for the most part you're talking about Starfleet's capabilities.

Spoiler

 

What about civilian ships? Surely the Federation, with so many planets and peoples has thousands of civilians ships - cargo ships, cruise liners, etc. 

Also, the Romulan Empire seems to have had a relatively low population, if 900 mil was the number to evacuate from all planets that would be affected by the supernova.

 

 

 

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1 minute ago, Corvinus said:

Understandable, but for the most part you're talking about Starfleet's capabilities.

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What about civilian ships? Surely the Federation, with so many planets and peoples has thousands of civilians ships - cargo ships, cruise liners, etc. 

Also, the Romulan Empire seems to have had a relatively low population, if 900 mil was the number to evacuate from all planets that would be affected by the supernova.

 

 

 

Assuming the Romulans are like the Vulcans, they likely have a much longer lifespan than humans and a much lower birthrate with perfected birth control methods (as the Federation has in DS9) and sustainability being a major concern.

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7 hours ago, red snow said:

We definitely had different takes on the episode. Picard actually stated why he's just been sitting around and even criticised himself. It also seems pretty clear why Picard is involved and central to the girl's story

  Reveal hidden contents

she's data's daughter which is good enough reason in itself. But there's obviously a borg connection (maybe they were able to recreate data's consciousness using borg tech?) In which case Picard is also very connected.

 

Also, i might have misread the episode but i thought it was the mars incident and not the Romulus one that lead to Starfleet's change in attitude? I agree it's still a bit of a stretch though.

Well, to the girl's story:

Spoiler

As far as I could tell the explanation wasn't that she is actually Data's daughter (that's more like Picard's projection), but rather an illegal Cylon skinjob created from a tracing of Data's neural network that somehow transplanted some memory snippets of Data into her. Also she was modelled after that painting of Data for some reason and I highly doubt anything will come out of that. Because honestly, if it turns out they actually ARE Data's daughters despite there being no point in hiding another Lal and their connection to this cult thing with the necklace, then that would be just a plain stupid ass pull.

To the Mars incident, here is what I got:

Spoiler

I thought the timeline was as follows: Starfleet was building the fleet to evacuate Romulus, then the Cylon uprising happened that destroyed Utopia Planetia and Starfleet just went "Too bad, now we can't do anything to help you whatsover despite having all our other ships and shipyards. So long!" And that's the point where my thoughts were just going... why exactly now? What's the connection there? It's like after Pearl Harbor the US went "Oh too bad, now we can't send any troops to Europe. Tough luck." This is something that feels like an explanation when looked at the surface level, but still is incredibly dumb when you look closer. My guess is that Kurtzman wanted Picard to be disillusioned by the Federation and wasn't sure whether the reason was their failure to rescue Romulus or that ban on Cylons and in the end decided to throw in both. And then tried to haphazardly connect them for some reason.

 

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Not enough ships.

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Galaxy-class starship can hold about 15,000 people if they absolutely packed out the corridors and filled every quarters and cargo bay. And even that would be just for a few days to a couple of weeks. You'd need 60,000 Galaxy-class starships to evacuate 900 million people from Romulus. The Federation didn't have that many (it had maybe two dozen, tops, and even less Sovereigns). So yes, they needed to build lots and lots of new ships and press in every ship the Federation and the Romulans had.

 

Hey,
 

 

They should have just beamed the Romulans off the planet and held them in "pattern buffers" until they got them to saftety like the people Barclay rescued in the TNG episode "The Realm of Fear":

 


  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realm_of_Fear

 

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Good point, @Ser Scot A Ellison.

As for the 'incident'

Spoiler

that made Picard disillusioned with Starfleet, I do hope it will be explained later. Maybe there was more to it and it will become clearer when Picrd unravels the mysteries of the Borg cube and Dahj etc.

I really, really wanted to love DISC, not the least because it offered a female black lead, and a different POV (non-captain, resurrection plot), but the writing is just not there. (Even though I liked s2ep1 a lot.) Yes, some of my complaints have been resolved as far as Lorcas was concerned, but not others. Normally, I would love those parallel plots within an alen culture, but alas, it's the Klingons. I know many people like them, but to me they are the dullest (major) civilization of Star Trek. Ever. They like to use Babylon 5 stuff; I wish they had taken hints from their depiction of alien cultures...

Spoiler

I tend to do other stuff when their scenes are on, but if I'm not entirely mistaken, they have handled the aftermath of (male) rape very poorly...

Yeah, Picard is much more my cup of Earl Grey. I wish I could binge the whole season!

 

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2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Hey,
 

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They should have just beamed the Romulans off the planet and held them in "pattern buffers" until they got them to saftety like the people Barclay rescued in the TNG episode "The Realm of Fear":

 


  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realm_of_Fear

 

That was only possible because there were five crewmembers in the transporter pattern buffer of an advanced scientific vessel. To hold a billion people in pattern buffers would be more logistically complex than actually just moving them through space normally.

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13 minutes ago, Werthead said:

That was only possible because there were five crewmembers in the transporter pattern buffer of an advanced scientific vessel. To hold a billion people in pattern buffers would be more logistically complex than actually just moving them through space normally.

I don't know.  Scotty stored himself for 75 years.  Wasn't Riker's clone stored that way too?  Why not build lots and lots of "Pattern buffers" designed to hold people for longer periods of time instead of building lots and lots of ships?.  

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They should have just lined up all the ships they had at max transporter range distance from each other in a line from romulus to the nearest safe planet. Then just beamed the people from ship to ship to ship to ship until they were safe. 

 

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3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

That was only possible because there were five crewmembers in the transporter pattern buffer of an advanced scientific vessel. To hold a billion people in pattern buffers would be more logistically complex than actually just moving them through space normally.

Scotty kept himself in a pattern buffer for ~75 years on a smaller, less advanced craft. Though the other guy's pattern was 53% degraded in the same time and couldn't be recovered. 

That said, it sounds like the real limit is just how many patterns can be buffered at once. Apparently a Voyager episode had a couple hundred Klingons transported all at once, and it's suggested that that requires modification and isn't entirely safe. Trek also seems to use the idea that the danger to patterns is that they inevitably become less coherent with time, with varying speeds, while buffered. So while instantly transporting 200 people is a strain on the buffer, so long as it spits them out again immediately it's okay; but if you wanted to hold them in the buffer, it seems like things will get dicier.

Would it be possible to dedicate more memory to a pattern buffer? Maybe, but maybe not. In a DS9 episode, the less-advanced Cardassian pattern buffers on the station were unable to retain coherent patterns for long enough to fix a problem that had five people buffered, so much of the station's computer memory was wiped to store the buffer instead, leading to problems like power going out. And that's just five people. 

End result, I think, is that there's probably a technobabble reason to say that there's no way you can create enough buffers with enough space to simultaneously hold a billion people. If you had 60,000 Galaxy class ships and each could theoretically hold, say, 2000 in a buffer, it really doesn't make much of a dent in the problem.

What they really needed was transwarp transporters, as @Corvinus says. 

 

 

 

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41 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I don't know.  Scotty stored himself for 75 years.  Wasn't Riker's clone stored that way too?  Why not build lots and lots of "Pattern buffers" designed to hold people for longer periods of time instead of building lots and lots of ships?.  

Okay, Ran ninja'd me in saying that the data degradation would make using the buffers this way extremely dangerous. Remember you have to store position and movements of all the atoms in a body, add a bunch of faulty storage cells and there is no guarantee anymore you come out as the person you were when you came in.

I personally think discussing the Hobus supernova is futile because even without further retcons it just makes your head hurt to think about any of the logistics. Heck, there isn't even a canon explanation yet what the fuck actually happened. In Star Trek Online it is revealed (and I think that was in line with the now non-canon comic books for Star Trek 11) that the supernova was caused by terrorists tinkering with the star and sending the shockwave "through subspace" to make it go faster than light and destroy Romulus without any chance of evacuating it. Of course this makes little sense if you consider that the comic at the same time claimed that Spock's ship was constructed for the sole purpose of stopping the supernova, so there had to be at least a few months of time to prepare stuff. The new revelation of the Federation preparing a whole fleet of transport ships for the sole purpose of the evacuation stretches this timer out to at least a year or so (which of course makes it all the more mindboggling how if Spock's entire plan revolved around dumping a bit of 'red matter' into the star, why the Romulans couldn't just do it and be done with it when they had so much time on their hands).

So now we have to assume that 800 million people died on Romulus? That number is suspiciously tiny. So while I am personally inclined to believe that's just Kurtzman sucking at math, I think it is fair to assume that this is just the amount of people they couldn't evacuate in time while they still managed to rescue billions of others. I think it is fair to assume that if Romulus calls all of its Warbirds and civilian transports to the evacuation effort and has at least a year time, they could actually get a sizeable amount of people off planet. The idea that you have to transport 10 billion people all at once for this to work is laughable. The question is just the distance to the next safe planet. If it's about 30 or 40 lightyears away, then a ship travelling at maximum warp could do such a trip in maybe one or maybe at most two days. Or a few minutes, if we go with Abramsverse logic.

So... if you've got 366 days time, imagine the Romulan fleet has 1000 ships that each can carry 1000 refugees. That makes... okay, fine, only 183 Million people evacuated if they need one day per trip. I guess having dedicated people carriers might indeed be a necessity here. Let's say they can scrounge together 30 colony ships that can carry a million people each. Those alone would be able to carry 5,5 billion people. But you still can't tell me nobody got sizeable colony ships in this setting.

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Interesting trivia: Picard marks the third time that Jean-Luc Picard is the first character to appear and speak in a Star Trek show. He previously did the same thing in both TNG and DS9 (albeit as Locutus in the latter).

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I don't know.  Scotty stored himself for 75 years.  Wasn't Riker's clone stored that way too?  Why not build lots and lots of "Pattern buffers" designed to hold people for longer periods of time instead of building lots and lots of ships?.  

Because it makes things too easy ;) Star Trek has a horrible history of following up logically on its own inventions. Remember the Season 2 episode of TNG where they cured ageing through the transporter and then immediately forgot about it?

Those are both described as freak events where by rights they should be dead, so would be too risky to use on civilians.

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2 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Interesting trivia: Picard marks the third time that Jean-Luc Picard is the first character to appear and speak in a Star Trek show. He previously did the same thing in both TNG and DS9 (albeit as Locutus in the latter).

Because it makes things too easy ;) Star Trek has a horrible history of following up logically on its own inventions. Remember the Season 2 episode of TNG where they cured ageing through the transporter and then immediately forgot about it?

Those are both described as freak events where by rights they should be dead, so would be too risky to use on civilians.

What bothers me is that the “too dangerous” excuse flies out the window if the people it is “too risky” to save that way would end up dead.  In any event seeking logic and consistency from Trek technobabble is a hopeless endeavor.

:)

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37 minutes ago, RumHam said:

They should have just lined up all the ships they had at max transporter range distance from each other in a line from romulus to the nearest safe planet. Then just beamed the people from ship to ship to ship to ship until they were safe. 

Ignoring the Kelvin timeline bullshit, the maximum range of the most powerful transporters in the Federation is 40,000 kilometres. So you'd need a line of 236.5 billion starships to transport a relative handful of people one single light-year.

Quote

 

If it's about 30 or 40 lightyears away, then a ship travelling at maximum warp could do such a trip in maybe one or maybe at most two days. Or a few minutes, if we go with Abramsverse logic.

 

Going by the TNG speed limit, it takes 6 days to travel about 5 light-years at Warp 9.6. Although TNG itself doesn't exactly follow this rule exactly: it takes the Enterprise-D six days to travel from one of the Federation's "outermost colonies" to Earth in The Best of Both Worlds. So the speed limitation is nicely vague.

What would be more helpful is Q showing up in a good mood.

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