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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Same deal as the above, really... it's a function of how much mass you're trying to move and how much fuel you have and are willing to use doing it. On its own, a VF-1 with the standard combat load tips the scales at 18,500kg and with the Super Pack added it's up to 45,000kg. The Super Pack's verniers are intended to offset that difference in mass to preserve maneuverability in space, but moving the far greater mass also entails greater fuel consumption doing it... but a part of that weight is also the greater amount of fuel necessary to get away with doing it. Whether the Super Pack-equipped Valkyrie is more or less agile than the unaugmented Valkyrie is mostly down to how conservative the pilot is being with his fuel supply.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    So... to be frank, this is a question with no easy answer. Because the VF-1 Valkyrie's design was constrained to approximately the expected size of the crew of Alien StarShip One, its onboard fuel supplies are very limited. It's not really an obstacle in atmosphere since the thermonuclear reaction turbine engines used are extremely fuel efficient due to the use of OTM gravity and inertia control tech to control the reactors and contain the plasma stream, but because the engines use plasma from their reactors as propellant for space flight the fuel consumption increases by an enormous amount (4,200x) in space operations. The Super Pack compensates for this somewhat by adding external tanks with more fuel for the main engines and a pair of high-powered rocket boosters, but even then the actual window in which those rockets and the reaction engines can exert their maximum thrust is also very limited. Once the rocket boosters are depleted, the Super Valkyrie's maneuverability and speed decrease sharply. Consequently, a VF's top speed in space is more a question of "how much of your fuel are you willing to burn?". The Super Pack's hybrid rocket engines can only sustain their maximum thrust for 2 1/2 minutes (150 seconds) before their fuel is spent, and the main engines can only run for about 45 minutes at maximum power until they drain both their main tanks and the conformal fuel tanks. If all you cared about was red, raw speed from a standing start then the VF-1 Super Valkyrie's maximum achievable acceleration in a vacuum is going to be 6.35555 g (62.32761m/s^2) for the first 150 seconds until the boosters quit then acceleration will fall off towards 1.02 g due to the excessive weight of the Super Pack and much more limited maximum output of the thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. Burning out the rockets on that two and a half minutes of sustained acceleration would get you up to about 9.349 kilometers per second. At that point, the Super Pack is deadweight and it's going to take a fair amount of time and fuel to slow down. If you burned every drop of fuel aboard the fighter you'd theoretically get to a maximum of 35.274km/s but then you'd be a missile sailing into the abyss with no power, no ability to steer or decelerate, etc. (Bear in mind it's unlikely you could actually DO this, since the fuel is also used as a coolant for the engine in space and running at overboost for 45 minutes straight would probably overheat the engines.) Understandably, burning up the rockets like that is a Bad Idea and they're mostly used well below their maximum output in order to extend their operating time as much as possible. Agility invokes a similar concern, since the verniers are thermal rockets that are also drawing from onboard fuel tanks and the electrical supply from the compact thermonuclear reactor.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Terra Firma, Part 1 (DSC 3x09)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The Sanctuary (DSC 3x08)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    If there's anything left of the Star Trek franchise once Alex Kurtzman's contract expires for a new creative team to take over, that's definitely one possibility. As unpopular as Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard are - with almost no third party merchandising behind them - it'll be interesting to see what happens to Kurtzman's Trek once he's not in charge. There are basically three options from the way that previous franchise brain farts were handled: Alternate Universe AKA the Abrams Maneuver... for when an idea (like rebooting Star Trek) is so poorly received that the only way anyone is willing to give it the time of day is if it's officially branded as an alternate reality with no bearing on the rest of Star Trek, so that nobody has to acknowledge it in any way. Damnatio Memoriae AKA the "Big-Lipped Alligator Moment"... the preferred solution for Gene Roddenberry and other showrunners to deal with stories and concepts that didn't turn out the way they'd hoped for various reasons like TAS, Star Trek V, and various old shame episodes and aborted arcs like "Code of Honor", "Move Along Home", various Kazon-centric story arcs, and anything to do with deuterium scarcity once the science advisors reminded them how common that stuff is. "That was a thing that happened, but we will never speak of it again." Discontinuity AKA the "Threshold Solution"... for those rare occasions that something turned out so poorly, or was so obviously stupid in hindsight that even the showrunners can't bear to have it in continuity. TAS as a whole used to be on this level, but now this is occupied by just a few episodes that were such glaring messes that new material was written to establish that That Never Happened. Given how much ViacomCBS has invested in Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and Star Trek: Lower Decks, it's probably headed for alternate universe territory if the franchise survives just so they can try to recoup some of that money on home video/digital library sales while they pray that absence makes the heart grow fonder. The worst part is that there's an actual real world name for ships like that which, though old, is somewhat less corny: a ram or ramship. Of course, the reason that fell out of favor in the real world is that ramming was only really an effective strategy in the pre-Common Era days of wooden rowing ships and that steam-powered ironclad naval rams were so hilariously ineffective that it became evident there was no real point in building them. Especially once torpedoes came into service and it became obvious you could do the same job better from further away with a torpedo. Yeah, that was just undignified. Tilly talks sh*t to the leader of the Emerald Chain about how she'll never take the ship, and then she immediately takes the ship without firing a shot. The whole idea making Tilly, the lowest-ranking and least-experienced member of the crew, into the ship's new executive officer was such an obviously terrible idea that it's flat amazing that anyone on the crew went with it. The only thing I can conceive of as their reason for supporting her is that she's a bit dim and desperate for approval, and therefore would've been easy to the more experienced crew to manipulate. She's not only not command material, she's not Starfleet material. Even Reg Barclay had more of his sh*t together than Tilly, and he was more a pile of neuroses in the shape of a man than anything. (I've noticed that the writers seem to really like doing this plot where they put a complete idiot in charge over dozens if not hundreds of more qualified candidates and calamity immediately ensues. Lower Decks played it for comedy.) It'll take some serious bullsh*t from the writers for Burnham to ever be given command. She's already been dishonorably discharged for assaulting a superior officer and mutiny, censured several times for AWOL, and removed from her post as Discovery's executive officer over such a grievous instance of AWOL during an alert situation that she only narrowly avoided being cashiered out of the service again and the Starfleet Commander in Chief (correctly) thinks she's an irresponsible pillock. Nah, Michael has already proved she's not command material to the point that Admiral Vance wanted to discharge her and Saru removed her from any possibility of the center seat. They definitely need a proper, experienced captain though. At the rate they've been shedding crew, I expect at least one or two more people to either quit or come down with permadeath at the end of the season. Nhan has already left the crew to assist in running a Federation seed vault, and Mirror!Georgiou was sent into the past for a spinoff that's in development hell and will probably never happen. They've also killed Ryn in the last episode. Booker's probably save since he's Burnham's love interest, but I suspect they're either going to have Saru leave Starfleet to take care of Su'Kal full time or Tilly will be killed off trying to reclaim the ship. My money's on the writers killing off Tilly, since her character is redundant with the introduction of Adira Tal who's also socially awkward but more competent and better-liked (esp. by Stamets). and is also Star Trek's first nonbinary recurring character. That, my friend, is a sucker bet. The writers telegraphed the sh*t out of that when he had that conversation with Stamets and Stamets explained what an evil person she is... leading to him refusing to leave the bridge before she executed Ryn. Eh... I am less enthusiastic about that because that's headed into a Star Trek version of R2-D2... which is basically what those damned robots already are.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I wouldn't even say it's visually stunning, TBH. There is some impressive CG occasionally, but the obsession with using high-end digital VFX at every opportunity is increasingly turning the series into accidental greenscreen comedy when the poor CG design choices aren't just repulsive like the riced-out Discovery, Osyrra's Great Value Star Destroyer, or Booker's I Can't Believe It's Not the Millennium Falcon. The one decent bit of design work done for the show was the TOS-inspired uniforms and Discovery version of the classic Enterprise... which is probably why they're keen to reuse those for Strange New Worlds now that Discovery has moved out of the 23rd century to avoid the near-constant criticism for f*cking it up. (Personally, I will never get past the phrase "Klingon cleave ship". My hands feel dirty just from typing it.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    My headcanon is still that, since Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard take stylistic and narrative pointers from the unproduced Star Trek: Final Frontier series pitch and J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies, those shows are in a "bad future" timeline created by the actions of one or more hostile powers during the Temporal Cold War. The Star Trek relaunch novel 'verse Department of Temporal Investigations miniseries used that exact explanation to dismiss and indirectly poke fun at Final Frontier and a number of other needlessly grimdark rejected Star Trek series pitches. All of them got dismissed as "bad future" alternate realities created by Future Guy's tampering with history and then retroactively prevented from ever existing by corrective actions taken by the 29th century's Starfleet's Temporal Integrity Commission and the 31st century's civilian Federation Temporal Agency. Well, it is kind of a career-ending admission to make... copping to having effectively dismantled and destroyed one of the most beloved sci-fi properties of all time. I think he's hoping he can fake it 'til he makes it or hits retirement age.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It'd be real convenient if it were just a fever dream by an incredibly self-centered person. It's one thing for, say, Q to choose Starfleet's finest captain as a representative sample of humanity to put on trial. It's quite another for a character whose only noteworthy trait is her entirely accidental relation-by-foster to two famous Vulcan ambassadors to keep being given such massive leeway despite constant insubordination that puts her life and the lives of her crewmates at risk. It's like Starfleet's been taking administrative pointers from Professor Dumbledore. It probably already has one, we just haven't found it. Yes, to our amazement this dumpster fire continues to burn fat stacks of cash to no useful end. At least Titan Comics apparently knew when to pack it in. Reports from entertainment news outlets talking to ViacomCBS, Netflix, and Amazon suggest the main thing keeping Kurtzman's odious take on Star Trek going is the sunk cost fallacy. ViacomCBS is so deep in the red after investing something to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars developing Star Trek: Discovery in expectation of a highly merchandised seven season run similar to previous Star Trek shows that they continue to spend lavishly on the series in the hopes that it will finally take off, attract merchandising, and start paying down the gargantuan debt incurred by its development. There were reports from some news outlets that Netflix's ongoing involvement for season three (and beyond?) as the show's principal source of production funding was secured by CBS threatening to sue Netflix for breach of contract if they withdrew from the project. So Netflix just slashes the budget based on the show's ever-diminishing returns and each new season ends up being shorter than the last as a result. The merchandise situation's almost as sad as Robotech's... being mainly CafePress-style t-shirts, mugs, etc. with some other odds and ends like replica Starfleet badges and cheap wine.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Hopefully our new website will continue to scratch that particular itch when it launches later this year. It's on our to-do list, which we're unfortunately a bit behind on due to "day job" matters.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I was working on my summaries of the last few Star Trek: Discovery season three episodes and @BlackRose's summary of the season's penultimate episode tops anything I could ever or will ever write about it. She summed up "There is a tide..." in eight words: Space Karen demands to speak to Starfleet's manager. I lost it.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's quite bizarre how they can do their research incredibly well in a few isolated places and do an absolutely terrible job of it everywhere else. Every now and then they'll reference obscure points of Star Trek lore and follow it up with middle school-level failures of basic science. Which isn't to say that previous Star Trek titles didn't also occasionally exhibit massive research failures. One of the most common recurring ones is medical officers pushing the enormously unscientific concepts of goal-oriented evolution and evolutionary levels: evolution following a set series of steps and that lifeforms evolving towards having a specific form or ability. This is the crux of at least seven entire pre-Abrams episodes including "The Omega Glory" (TOS), "Genesis" (TNG), "Transfigurations" (TNG), "Pen Pals" (TNG), "The Chase" (TNG), "Threshold" (VOY), and "Dear Doctor" (ENT). There are also a number of rather egregious recurring ones involving distance in TOS and the TOS movies WRT the distance from Earth to the edge/center of the galaxy (in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and Star Trek V), and a lot of really bizarre moments where the writers forgot about conservation of matter or energy. It's just Discovery has a far greater density of this kind of blatant cockup than any previous title. ... you a +1 from me for that, btw. In hindsight, it's rather odd that even groups that have regular contact with the Federation like the Emerald Chain never remark that the Discovery crew are claiming to be Federation Starfleet officers and yet aren't wearing contemporary Starfleet uniforms. They never question it. One of my favorite details that I learned as a result of various fans complaining about how often Starfleet changes its uniform design is that it's Truth in Television... the US Army has made minor or major changes to its uniform on at least thirty-nine separate occasions since the original uniform in 1775. I can only imagine how much worse it'd be if we'd had the ability to run off new uniforms in a matter of seconds using a replicator. Which, actually, makes it all the weirder that Discovery never updated its uniforms. Pike's variant of the TOS uniform was already entering service at the end of the Klingon war and Discovery never rolled it out even though it looked way better than the blue Jonestown tracksuits they're wearing now, and after moving to the future and trading their matter synthesizers in for 32nd century replicators it's even weirder that they haven't updated. (Here's a thought... since programmable matter is widely used, why not make uniforms out of the stuff and update the design with the push of a button?)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Unification III (DSC 3x07)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Scavengers (DSC 3x06)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek: Discovery is a show with a lot of different problems... but you can distill most of the show's issues down to just a few basic points: Discovery's showrunners and writers do not care for Star Trek. As was explicitly the case with J.J. Abrams, it truly feels like Discovery's showrunners do not want to be working on Star Trek and don't have any real idea of how to write in a science fiction setting that isn't just a big sandbox for a never-ending series of interstellar armed conflicts like Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, or Warhammer 40,000. Discovery's showrunners and writers DO NOT do their research. These writers are working in a shared universe and don't seem to want to check to make sure that the stories they want to do actually make sense in the context of the established setting. Worse than that, they don't seem to want to go to the lengths previous Star Trek showrunners and writers did in terms of making sure their science makes sense and is internally consistent. The whole idea of tardigrades and horizontal DNA transfer was a published study that was retracted well before the show's first season came out because the experiment's results couldn't be reproduced and were later determined to be sample cross-contamination in testing. Other concepts in the series are just completely unscientific nonsense like Saru's homeworld food chain or the entire situation with Control wanting to evolve into a self-aware AI. Discovery's showrunners have their priorities all wrong when it comes to special effects. This isn't just that ships like the Shengzhou and Discovery look much more advanced than their 23rd century counterparts from previous shows. The showrunners consistently overspend on unnecessary - and unnecessarily complicated - digital VFX for things that don't need it and then cut corners all over the place where it actually counts and is really obvious. This tendency has only become more blatant now that they've moved to the 32nd century. The Discovery's spinning saucer section is something that was near-universally mocked the minute it came to light and a bunch of other ships have tons of unnecessary moving parts. Booker's Nautilus is probably the worst offender since, on several occasions, it's shown to come apart into something like a dozen different pieces and reconfigure itself for no clear reason. This also shows up in digital set design and nonphysical props like the seed vault ship in which the seed vault is made up of a bunch of stacked rings of storage cells which counterrotate against each other for no reason, the gravity projector Tilly uses to capture that asteroid at the start of season two that starts out about the size of a manhole cover and unfolds into dozens of moving parts and ends up being at least the size of a family car, and Burnham's Red Angel suit that unfolds a massive set of unnecessary wings out of nowhere. Probably the worst example of the corner-cutting is the new combadges. These new combadges are not just the Starfleet badge and a long-range communications device, now they're also rank insignia, a personal transporter, a tricorder, and a PADD, all with a badly rendered purely holographic interface so the characters using them in any given circumstance are now just left gesticulating wildly into the air like they're conducting an invisible orchestra or operating an invisible telephone switchboard. The best part is the interfaces for all of these look exactly the same, so we have no idea if someone is attempting to beam away, scanning the area, or just frantically dictating their last will and testament at any given time. Other terrible examples include a proliferation of purely green-screened sets where characters do nothing but stand around and talk while the animators run an old-school OpenGL screensaver in the background like the episode with the Tal symbiont. Bill Shatner is also probably not someone the creators want to bring back. He was a difficult guy to work with back when he was a regular, and he's burned a lot of bridges since. That's like trying to treat someone's cancer by giving them syphilis.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Die Trying
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Forget Me Not
  17. Seto Kaiba
    People of Earth
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Far From Home
  19. Seto Kaiba
    So... since I'm in kind of a foul mood and can't sleep, I figured I'd get cracking on my retrospectives for this steaming turd of a season Star Trek: Discovery is nearly done evacuating from the bowls of CBS All Access. That Hope is You, Part 1
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Really, they should have flooded the damn ship with 32nd century Starfleet officers for precisely that reason... to keep the 23rd century crew from screwing things up by approaching every problem from a 23rd century angle. *incensed beeping on the behalf of the Temporal Prime Directive* ... yeah, and the penultimate episode of Discovery's third season isn't making it any better. The season's big bad, Osyrra, has a brief moment where she's actually more competent and sane than any of the main characters. She hijacked the Discovery to go to Starfleet headquarters and propose an alliance between the Federation and Emerald Chain. One that would have forced her to make significant concessions and basically have ended the conflict in the series in a way that did literally nothing but benefit the Federation AND the people living under the Emerald Chain. Negotiations break down when it becomes apparent Starfleet is hung up on wanting Osyrra to stand trial for her various acts of piracy. It comes freighted with an absolutely terrible attempt at a quip involving waste recycling on starships where replicated food (despite its structure being identical or nearly identical to the genuine article depending on the replicator's mode) is repeatedly compared to (and acknowledged to be technically made from) biological waste. Burnham and Booker come to the rescue and it seems we're ending this season by doing Die Hard on a Starship. Stamets is the latest casualty of Burnham's sociopathic tendencies, since he wants to go back to the nebula to rescue everyone who was left behind with Su'Kal, and Burnham spaces him to keep him out of the Emerald Chain's hands. (Yeah, he's rescued immediately but she doesn't even have the kindness to use an airlock. She traps him on one side of a force field with an overloading phaser. All in all, a flat, boring, and lifeless episode where the writers seemingly forgot the Sphere Data AI can't be deleted... because Osyrra seems to have a special Fonzarelli touch that can, and forces the AI to take shelter in a bunch of those anachronistic repair robots that Discovery shouldn't have had in the 23rd century.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not... the way the Guardian of Forever worked in previous episodes, the only way to bring him to the 32nd century using it without massively screwing up the timeline would be to send someone to 23rd century Talos IV and collect him after he'd been cripplied in that training accident and left there to live out the remainder of his life. Not to mention using the Guardian of Forever would probably be considered a violation of the Temporal Accord and the subsequent ban on time travel. The Guardian of Forever itself went into hiding during the Temporal Cold War and wouldn't let anyone use it without them passing its secret test of character. (Talk about an insane arbitrary rule... how do you even enforce a ban on time travel? Whatever agreement banned it seems to have involved dismantling or destroying all temporal technologies. How do you enforce a ban like that when you no longer have all the infrastructure to monitor and police the timeline and protect yourself from unauthorized changes to it? Moreover, it wouldn't exactly stop factions from the past from traveling into the future to interfere there either. It smacks of a really badly thought-out idea intended to work around the existence of 31st century institutions like the Federation Temporal Agency who could've potentially solved "the Burn" and made it un-happen without the intervention of Discovery.) I'd imagine 32nd century Starfleet could drum up a few good men, women, and/or beings of no, other, indeterminate, or multiple gender to babysit Saru and the Discovery crew without having to resort to abducting capable officers from the past.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know... that's more or less what everyone from the online pundits to casual fans predicted was going to happen when the word leaked that Patrick Stewart was too expensive for the show and that his character going to be killed off at the end of the show's first season. It certainly wouldn't be without precedent. 24th century Starfleet had named at least two ships after deceased Starfleet officers in canon: the USS Chekhov in TNG (among the ships lost at Wolf 359) and USS Archer in Nemesis. The relaunch novelverse had a USS James T. Kirk as well.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Why are literally all of us better writers than the people actually writing for Star Trek: Discovery? Yup... at this point, Saru seems to be playing to the reverse of every Vulcan trope. Instead of being the one who's always on an even keel and is consistently immune to whatever the weird space condition of the day is, he's the one who's always losing his cool and being affected while the rest of the crew is fine. Tilly's... "performance"... as Discovery's first officer is a very strong argument for why the chain of command exists in the first place. Sylvia Tilly is the least experienced officer on Discovery. Full stop. No ifs, ands, or buts. She didn't even finish her training at the academy. She got a commission to the rank of ensign as a reward for her at-best peripheral involvement in the events which ended the Klingon War. She rates herself as the top student in her year at theoretical engineering, but we have no reason to believe this is anything other than her exaggerated opinion of herself (and all her knowledge is now 900+ years out of date). Her only noted skill on her Memory Alpha profile? A proficiency at beer pong. She entered the command training program but was only in it for a few months at most. If Saru actually followed Starfleet regulations, Tilly would literally be the last person in line for the big chair. Burnham disqualified herself based on her own egregious displays of incompetence and disregard for orders, but there's still (in rough order of rank): Commander Nhan (Chief of Security) Commander Reno (Chief Engineer?) Lt. Commander Stamets (Deputy Chief Engineer?) Lieutenant Rhys (Tactical) Lieutenant Detmer (Helmsman) Lieutenant Haj (Helmsman) Lieutenant Nilsson (Spore Drive specialist) Lieutenant (JG) Bryce (Communications) Lieutenant (JG) Owosekun (Operations) Lieutenant (JG) Linus (Science) ... and a number of other officers who are not named, but serve as second or third-shift bridge officers and relief bridge officers. The only named characters on the show who wouldn't be ahead of her would be Dr. Culber and Dr. Pollard, who are not part of the normal chain of command as shipboard physicians. Basically, the way it should have worked is as per this quote from O'Brien and Nog in DS9 "Behind the Lines": The only way Sylvia Tilly should ever have become First Officer is if every other commissioned officer on Discovery was dead or missing except for herself and Saru. The one thing we can say with certainty is that, now that Tilly's incompetence is directly responsible for the Emerald Chain seizing control of the Discovery and likely using it to stage an attack on Starfleet Headquarters, her mother's statement that allowing her into the command training program was a terrible mistake will be triumphantly vindicated after 900 years. THAT'S ANOTHER QUESTION. Why is the Discovery still apparently crewed exclusively by 23rd century Starfleet officers? The USS Discovery is this dismal 32nd century Starfleet's most important and versatile ship due to its spore drive allowing it to instantly teleport anywhere the way that any Starfleet ship should have been capable of for six hundred years if the showrunners had done their homework. She was even upgraded with 32nd century Federation technology during a refit at Starfleet Headquarters. Her crew's scientific, technical, and situational knowledge is NINE HUNDRED YEARS out of date, and none of its crew are qualified on the new 32nd century systems. Even if Starfleet were going to charitably allow the 23rd century crew to remain aboard, the Discovery didn't even have a full crew complement. She went into the future with a skeleton crew of about eighty. It's insane that Starfleet didn't assign a 32nd century Starfleet captain to the ship to replace acting captain Saru and make sure the crew followed orders and fill out the crew with 32nd century Starfleet officers who could retrain the 23rd century ones on all the new tech that'd been incorporated into the ship. Actually, that raises further questions. Why is the Sphere Data AI still present? The USS Discovery's systems were all upgraded with 32nd century technology. The only system that didn't get replaced wholesale was the spore drive. How is the sphere data AI still around if the ship's computer cores were replaced with 32nd century ones? You can't tell me that the Federation made no advances in computer technology in those 900 years, because we know that's not true via other Star Trek shows. The USS Discovery had duotronic computer systems, a technology introduced in 2243 which lasted about eighty years before being replaced by isolinear optical systems in the 2320s. Bio-neural circuitry was introduced in 2371, and by the 31st century Starfleet ships had organic circuitry. On the wrong side of the grave on Talos IV for about the last eight hundred and fifty years... also, waiting for filming to start on his own show.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That, in and of itself, was implied to be a pretty fun philosophical argument in-universe and definitely was outside of it... at least until the showrunners spoiled it by revealing that a person maintained continuity of consciousness throughout the entire transport process and could literally feel themself in two places at once during the process (as in "Realm of Fear"). That kind of had some fridge horror of its own when taken with "Relics" and "Counterpoint" where people were stored in transporter buffers for very long times... presumably aware but helpless the entire time. Jean-Luc Picard didn't have continuity of consciousness during his alleged transfer into the golem body Dr. Soong had created, so it's open to debate whether that golem is Jean-Luc Picard or just a replicant that thinks it's Jean-Luc Picard because it has copies of his memories.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Apparently not... and not just because of how dilithium works. They've got enough egg on their faces to make omelettes to feed an army after declaring that nobody could make a warp drive without dilithium and following it up by revealing the Romulans were members of the Federation for centuries before the Burn. The subspace pulse in Prime Directive didn't destroy the Enterprise either... it just messed the ship's engines up something fierce. Hell, the Burn would've made a lot more sense if it HAD been a prank by Q or some other higher-dimensional lifeform. If it weren't for the death toll, it'd be exactly the kind of thing Q might've done to troll Picard or Janeway. It doesn't even really make sense that they're still using conventional warp drives in the 31st or 32nd century. USS Voyager brought back an enormous amount of data on Borg and Voth transwarp drives, Borg transwarp conduits, quantum slipstream, and coaxial warp drive in 2378... all of which are faster and more efficient than conventional warp drive and none of which need a dilithium-based warp core. Starfleet was already adopting quantum slipstream as its next-generation FTL system in the late 24th and early 25th century, and based on remarks by designer Doug Drexler about the Enterprise-J design, Starfleet's engineers had developed a production version of coaxial warp drive (space fold) technology by the 26th century. That the Federation and every other major power in the galaxy was entirely dependent on dilithium-based matter/antimatter reactors to power conventional warp drives instead of the more advanced and capable alternative technologies over eight centuries after Voyager returned with its goldmine of alternative propulsion designs from the Delta Quadrant. They never even address the fact that Booker mentions his humble little courier ship has a quantum slipstream drive. Why is anyone faffing about with conventional warp drive that tops out around 5,100c (Warp 9.975, based on the TNG-era warp factor speed formula) when you could be getting places at ~2,630,000c (derived from "Hope and Fear" that put slipstream at approx. 300ly/hr).
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