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Star Trek: Picard


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54 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. 

 

Ha, I thought about this too. But you know, there's one tiny problem about this. Space is BIG!!! 

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7 minutes ago, Werthead said:

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.

Okay you are more or less right. I was just guessing at numbers there, but making a quick google sweep our closest estimate (given how wildly warpspeed fluctuates) is Voyager's estimated travel time that gives us 0,1 ly per hour at maximum warp. That means 30 ly need 12 days to be traversed.

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1 hour ago, Werthead said:

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.

I know it wasn't Federation tech, but was the long range transporter used to kidnap Kira from DS9 to the other Cardassian station Cardassian tech or Dominion? If the former I'd have thought they had access to it after the end of DS9

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6 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I know it wasn't Federation tech, but was the long range transporter used to kidnap Kira from DS9 to the other Cardassian station Cardassian tech or Dominion? If the former I'd have thought they had access to it after the end of DS9

Dominion, I'm pretty sure.

But that does remind me of another TNG thing, the subspace transporter. A bit tricky and dangerous, but it had a range of several light years. With some relays, that could get some percentage of people transported to another planet safely, although presumably some would be lost.

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Re transporter evacuations: Completely ignoring previously useful technologies in service to the plot is in the finest of Star Trek traditions. Every second episode of TNG had that problem.

Like if they just set up the computer to notify security when anyone unexpectedly boarded / disembarked the enterprise. Which we know they could do because they did exactly that several times, and then conveniently forgot about it next time the plot needed someone to disappear. 

As for the first ep. That was ok. Not amazing, but I'm intrigued enough.

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My thoughts on Starfleet going isolationist after Mars

- the interviewer implied that Picard was a major factor in persuading Starfleet to mount the rescue operation in the first place, which implies that there was a significant faction who didn't want to get involved in the first place. Mars was just a convenient excuse for that faction to explain why Starfleet was withdrawing.

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10 hours ago, Werthead said:

Star Trek has a horrible history of following up logically on its own inventions.

Indeed. I love an in-depth discussion about Star Trek but there’s no way this will ever reach a conclusion with so many counter examples to every possible example. It got forgotten on account of it being a terrible episode, but remember in Threshold* where Paris invented Warp 10 but turned into a lizard? And then the Doctor completely cured the lizardness with zero side effects? So basically, load up you de-lizarding meds on to the shuttle, go home, take your meds, sent the shuttle back for more of Voyagers crew, repeat. They could have got home back in Season 2.

*Just on a Voyager rewatch now and how this episode gets remembered as bad but The Fight doesn’t is beyond me ... The Fight is a complete mess, comfortably the worst ST episode for me.

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4 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Indeed. I love an in-depth discussion about Star Trek but there’s no way this will ever reach a conclusion with so many counter examples to every possible example. It got forgotten on account of it being a terrible episode, but remember in Threshold* where Paris invented Warp 10 but turned into a lizard? And then the Doctor completely cured the lizardness with zero side effects? So basically, load up you de-lizarding meds on to the shuttle, go home, take your meds, sent the shuttle back for more of Voyagers crew, repeat. They could have got home back in Season 2.

*Just on a Voyager rewatch now and how this episode gets remembered as bad but The Fight doesn’t is beyond me ... The Fight is a complete mess, comfortably the worst ST episode for me.

I enjoyed my TNG and DS9 rewatch a lot but the Voyager rewatch was sometimes rather painful and I just stopped watching some episodes. I even started liking the Doctor less. Tuvok is now my favourite Voyager character by far and Seven has grown on me. 

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Ok, I enjoyed it but didn’t really understand what was going on with the whole romulus/mars connection. But here’s another question 

Spoiler

Why would they have to make sentient synthoids in pairs? No explanation given and Picard just accepts it.

 

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On 1/24/2020 at 10:16 PM, Werthead said:

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.

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.

Star trek needs a Varys drive which allows faster than in show defined travel!

And, yes, it does seem like Q hates Romulans.

Clearly intergalactic empires should have a "homeworld escape plan" - something you think most of them would consider the first time one of their colonies blow up and a few million proves problematic to evacuate. Or do they all just say "too much hassle - if it happens, tough"?

Regarding Mars in the Trek world. How does the timeline work? Because if humans had warp drives and joined the federation prior to colonising Mars, I'd have thought no-one would bother living there. When there's a galaxy of habitable planets out there why bother with Mars? Or had it been terraformed before humanity had the ability to live elsewhere. "the expanse spoilers"

something the expanse handles really well in the books is Mars collapsing upon the discovery of earth-like planets

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What does everyone think about the cards Data presentend to Picard in the dream sequence? 5 queen of hearts. It may mean nothing, of course.

My first thoughts were:

- Q (loved him, but don't think I want him in this setting)

- Borg Queen (God, I hope not)

- one card too many -- 4 androids (quadruples or 2 sets of twins) plus a spare

- Alice in Wonderland

- ???

 

 

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On 1/25/2020 at 1:48 AM, mcbigski said:

Have they said anything about how many seasons they are planning?  If the buzz stays good I might just wait a few years and watch it all at once.

They're doing it season-by-season. Patrick Stewart turns 80 in June so it may be for as long as he wants to do it and the stories remain interesting.

One suggestion has been that if Stewart retires or quits, they may continue the series under the same name with the new characters they establish in the run, with Stewart perhaps making the odd cameo appearance (sort of like Blake's 7).

 

Quote

 

Regarding Mars in the Trek world. How does the timeline work? Because if humans had warp drives and joined the federation prior to colonising Mars, I'd have thought no-one would bother living there. When there's a galaxy of habitable planets out there why bother with Mars? Or had it been terraformed before humanity had the ability to live elsewhere. "the expanse spoilers"

 

In the Star Trek timeline, Mars has been settled but they haven't bothered terraforming it. Instead it's the site of the Federation's Utopia Planitia shipyards.

Star Trek is a bit inconsistent on this though. In First Contact Riker says that the Moon has been terraformed (which isn't remotely possible but okay) and millions of people live there, but every time we see the Moon in Star Trek it looks like the lifeless lump of rock it is now.

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I started my Star Trek: Voyager rewatch/first watch. I haven't watched the bulk of Voyager Season 5-7 or thereabouts before, and not every single episode of the first four seasons (I tapped out in agony before the end of Season 4). It's the biggest gap in my Star Trek viewing history so I decided to get into it.

It's been rough. Caretaker is so utterly inept it makes Encounter at Farpoint look like a work of rare and subtle genius, and the two episodes immediately following have exactly the same time travel plot. Phage uses the exact same sets as the previous episode, Time and Again, to represent supposedly completely different alien environments. Neelix walks into shot with a studio mike visible in front of his face. There's one moment when they cut to Kes speaking and the actress's lips aren't moving (a common problem in HD remasters, but this was in the original episode). This is a basic level of amateur mistakes.

I'm also surprised at how cheap it looks. Voyager started with the same budget as DS9, but DS9 had way more standing sets and much bigger ones, and needed tons of extras in every episode (for every scene they did in the Promenade). Every cent was on screen. Voyager uses a lot of repurposed TNG sets so they didn't even need to build everything from scratch and the ship only had 130 crewmembers, with maybe a dozen in shot at the most and mostly way less than that. I have no idea what they were spending the money on. The cast was also much less experienced than DS9 and presumably much, much cheaper (I can see Mulgrew negotiated to take over Bujold's salary, but the rest of the cast bar Picardo were pretty inexperienced).

Baffling.

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I don't think there is any reason to believe the Romulans of all people would have a Romulus escape plan. They were always very territorial, and there was literally no reason to expect that the star would go supernova soon, or else they would have long abandoned their core system and whatever colony worlds that would be affected by a supernova.

The idea that there would be no time (i.e. years or decades) before such an event is ludicrous considering that these people should have the technology and science to actually investigate the status of their own sun and predict its behavior reasonably well. But that's that the shit J. J. Abrams gave Stark Trek.

The 900 million refugees also don't sound that off, considering the Romulan Star Empire itself would have a lot of ships themselves, being able to evacuate and relocate more than a decent portion of their population (which they seemed to have been able to do, considering that there are still quite a few Romulans around). Also, the fact is to consider that Romulus itself might indeed no longer be as populated as it once was considering the fact that the Romulans to have their Star Empire - meaning they would have colonized many worlds, subjugating and ruling over many a species in the process of all that. This kind of thing would hardly work if the bulk of their species still sat around on Romulus.

Now, as for the overall setting, I'd not be surprised if it turned out that those Romulans who didn't want Federation help or thought they wanted to use the offer of help as a pretext for invasion might have been behind the attack on Mars. The Borg connection the Romulans obviously do have could given them technology necessary to hack/reprogram synthetic lifeforms. It might be they only stumbled on that Borg cube after the supernova but I don't find that very likely.

If the Maddox fellow actually used remnants of Data's neural network to create the twins then he could have done that at the Borg cube and with 'Data substance' salvaged by the Romulans after Data's destruction in Nemesis (or by samples they got while the gang was on Romulus earlier in the movie).

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3 hours ago, Werthead said:

I started my Star Trek: Voyager rewatch/first watch. I haven't watched the bulk of Voyager Season 5-7 or thereabouts before, and not every single episode of the first four seasons (I tapped out in agony before the end of Season 4). It's the biggest gap in my Star Trek viewing history so I decided to get into it.

It's been rough. Caretaker is so utterly inept it makes Encounter at Farpoint look like a work of rare and subtle genius, and the two episodes immediately following have exactly the same time travel plot. Phage uses the exact same sets as the previous episode, Time and Again, to represent supposedly completely different alien environments. Neelix walks into shot with a studio mike visible in front of his face. There's one moment when they cut to Kes speaking and the actress's lips aren't moving (a common problem in HD remasters, but this was in the original episode). This is a basic level of amateur mistakes.

I'm also surprised at how cheap it looks. Voyager started with the same budget as DS9, but DS9 had way more standing sets and much bigger ones, and needed tons of extras in every episode (for every scene they did in the Promenade). Every cent was on screen. Voyager uses a lot of repurposed TNG sets so they didn't even need to build everything from scratch and the ship only had 130 crewmembers, with maybe a dozen in shot at the most and mostly way less than that. I have no idea what they were spending the money on. The cast was also much less experienced than DS9 and presumably much, much cheaper (I can see Mulgrew negotiated to take over Bujold's salary, but the rest of the cast bar Picardo were pretty inexperienced).

Baffling.

I think Robert Beltran tapped out in season 4 too, showing up dor the cheque and the faint hope of a plot. 

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I wonder, is Voyager worse than Enterprise? I watched Voyager as a child and liked it well enough. Now as an adult I realize it's a terrible show that almost immediately betrayed it's premise. 

But Enterprise's crew is somehow even more bland, and the setting kept them from doing anything too interesting most of the time. It did get better towards the end. 

If I had to choose I'd probably re-watch Voyager. But nostalgia is a factor. 

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35 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I wonder, is Voyager worse than Enterprise? I watched Voyager as a child and liked it well enough. Now as an adult I realize it's a terrible show that almost immediately betrayed it's premise. 

But Enterprise's crew is somehow even more bland, and the setting kept them from doing anything too interesting most of the time. It did get better towards the end. 

If I had to choose I'd probably re-watch Voyager. But nostalgia is a factor. 

Enterprise has several things going for it. It's much shorter (which is a huge boon), it doesn't have nearly as much technobabble, it has much more serialised story arcs and when they realised they were making a mistake, they generally rectified it and did something better. It also got better as it went along. They differentiated each season as well.

Voyager seems to double down on the mistakes it made and there seems to be more of a feeling that it got worse as it went along, or maybe peaked with Seven joining and started trailing off around Season 5, when it became clear that they weren't going to make the Borg back into the unstoppable enemy they should have been. The show also evolved remarkably little as it went along. Aside from Kes being gone and Seven being, you can swap episodes around from its entire run without any problem at all.

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The weird thing is I rate the Star Trek shows usually by counting how many all-time favorite episodes they contain. Those episodes that I could watch again and again without being bored. Of Voyager I can only remember "Blink of an Eye" and "The Void" as the episodes that struck me as terrific. "The Void" essentially has the honor of being a contained single episode that is what Voyager should have been about in the first place: A stranded lone Federation ship surviving in a hostile environment far from home not by betraying their ideals, but by playing up their strengths and form a powerful alliance through diplomacy. That episode was damn good!

Of Enterprise... I must admit I have a hard time coming up with any really strong episodes like the ones above. Maybe the one where they faked a bad future simulation to get information out of that Xindi dude? Morally questionable to be sure, but at least very creative. But this is not me saying that Enterprise was overall bad. I actually quite liked it, even if they squandered their chance of making it a truly ambitious prequel with a focus on the formation of the Federation. In that case it is very similar to Voyager in how it has a good premise but till nearly the end didn't really know what to make of that.

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