Seto Kaiba

I'm not sure that argument tracks, to be honest. Beverly and Jack Crusher are allegedly running their little Doctors Without Space-Borders operation at the behest of the Mariposa Medical Group. I say "allegedly" because I doubt very much that a Federation medical aid organization like the Mariposas would condone the Crusher family's criminal activities. The Mariposas benefit from the Federation's post-scarcity replicator economy. They should not need to commit crimes to obtain the supplies they need. A potential explanation for why they would need to commit crimes to get supplies would be that, well, the open warrants for their arrest make it difficult to go near Federation systems anymore. Two problems with the flashback you're referring to: The Romulan ale that Jack Crusher used to bribe the Fenris Rangers probably isn't illegal. The Federation lifted the embargo on Romulan goods in 2375 (DS9: "Inter Enim Arma Silent Leges") and the USS Cerritos is transporting Romulan ale as goodwill gifts for the Karemma in 2381 (LD: "Hear All, Trust Nothing). Sarnia's outside Federation space too, so even if the ban were reinstated (it probably hasn't been, given that the Romulan Free State is said to have better relations with the Federation that the Star Empire) it still wouldn't apply there. Jack Crusher openly acknowledges that he is running guns to the warlords who spread the plague on that planet. He uses a portion of that shipment of illegal weapons to bribe the Fenris Rangers to let him pass, but his brilliant plan - which he shares with them - was to supply arms to multiple warlords in the hopes of making the fighting worse and increasing the death toll! He literally says his goal is to get more people killed because it's "bad guys killing bad guys". That's not a Robin Hood move... that's a complete monster move of a type normally reserved for the insane admiral du jour. Specifically, Mark Jameson from TNG S1E16 "Too Short a Season". It was Toby Russel who kills at least one person in the course of that episode by using them as test subjects for untrialed and unapproved treatments... and nearly gets Worf killed after convincing him to try a never-before-tested procedure to replace his entire spine. But it was Dr. Crusher who flat-out refused to respect the culture and customs of her Klingon patient and openly dismissed them as barbarism. It's Dr. Crusher they're lampooning there.

Someone once told me that autocorrect and speech-to-text are very much like having a gnome or leprechaun in your phone that very much wants to help, but is also very drunk. Sometimes, less is more. In the VF-4's case, less mass but the same amount of fuel and rocket thrust means more endurance. Hmm... hard to say. Not just for lack of official information, but just in general terms. Apollo Base and the adjoining lunar colony city are in the Sea of Tranquility near to, and named for, the Apollo 11 landing site. While it's not as immediately evident, Clavius is also a location on the moon. It's a crater near the lunar south pole (south of Tycho). Presumably, at least based on the kit, there is a colony or military base in Clavius (possibly both, if the Apollo Base situation is the norm) in which Minmay held a concert at some point between the end of the First Space War in 2010 and her departure from Earth in 2012. The few times that such paint schemes have shown up in official or semi-official material, they've been presented as some sort of special promotional concession to a visiting idol by the local government. It may have started that far back, or it may be a more recent development. We can't say for sure. The few examples we have in those materials are from a lot later in the timeline like the Ranka Lee Visit commemorative paint scheme adopted by the NUNS Sagares Defense Force SVF-1429 Prismatics when she visited the planet on tour, or the SMS platoon Sheryl Nome contracted as bodyguards while visiting Macross Olympia who adopted a special paintjob, new MODEX numbers, and a new identifier as the Queen's Knights for the duration of her visit there.

That was a beautiful line... made all the better by John de Lancie's Q being the one to deliver it. That's the very episode that Lower Decks was spoofing with the "Medical Ethics" simulation: If Lower Decks is canon - and in this case I dearly hope it is because this is hilarious - Dr. Beverly Crusher's lack of professionalism is apparently so widely known that one of her very worst lapses of medical ethics is the basis for a standard Starfleet training simulation. Even funnier, this particular ethics test was apparently so appallingly easy for trained Starfleet medical personnel that the drill administrator had to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel (the crew of the USS Cerritos) AND tweak the difficulty level to find someone capable of actually failing it. Finding someone who could do as bad a job of respecting a patient's culture and wishes as Beverly Crusher required not only finding Starfleet's worst of the worst... but cheating too. ... I want this for the final episode of this series. So does Jack Crusher, apparently... All in all, I'm tempted to call BS on Beverly's claim that she's out in the middle of ****ing nowhere on a decommissioned old medical courier ship she got from Starfleet Medical on the sly for fear of her son being assassinated by people who hate Jean-Luc. Somehow, knowing about Jack's criminal background, it strikes me as rather likely that she and he keep to remote regions of space because they know if they landed in any major port they'd be arrested and extradited to any one of more than a dozen planets with outstanding arrest warrants for her son and she'd likely face criminal charges herself as an accomplice to his crimes or at least an accessory to his resisting arrest. If it weren't for the currently-vague hints of a conspiracy to destroy the Federation that can somehow only be foiled by a bunch of senior citizens so out of shape that they need to worry about reduced bladder capacity (yes, this is actually in the show), this would read like an episode of Cops or maybe Dog: the Bounty Hunter. Maybe Vadic really isn't involved in the conspiracy at all. Maybe this really is just her, as a top flight bounty hunter, attempting to collect on Star Trek's second attempt to get a Han Solo from Wish.com.

Quark gets caught all the time, and has a rather extensive criminal record. His saving grace throughout Deep Space Nine was that, on most of the occasions where his criminal ambitions exceeded relatively petty crimes, his co-conspirators either died (e.g. Rao Vantika), did something that allowed him to claim he was a victim rather than a co-conspirator (e.g. Pallra and Verad), or he was conveniently shielded from prosecution by the connections his business partners had to the Bajoran government (e.g. Hagath and Gaila). A few other times mentioned in the series, he only avoided prison himself by turning on his partners as the state's witness for the prosecution (e.g. Fallit Kot). Apart from his brief stint as an arms dealer, Quark's crimes tended to be relatively innocuous stuff like buying and selling stolen goods and the occasional bit of smuggling. Jack Crusher, on the other hand, seems to be a rather more hardened and callous criminal than Quark if the list of criminal charges filed against him is to be believed. He's wanted for transporting and selling illegal weapons, controlled/banned substances, and bootleg liquor. It's weirdly indicative of what an arsehole he must be that he's managed to end up as a wanted criminal on Bajor and Cardassia Prime. Like, those two planets don't agree on much but they both agree that Jack Crusher belongs behind bars. Unless there's been a major overhaul of the justice system on Cardassia, he'd better hope the Bajorans catch him first or he's going to have a VERY bad time. One must wonder what other worlds Jack's wanted on... Nausicaa? Qo'nos? Edo? Probably not Ferenginar, at least... his antics are practically boys-will-be-boys stuff there. Maybe we'll find out he's wanted by the Dominion too. Y'know, collect the complete set of galactic powers with inhumane prison systems. Yeah... though admittedly Dr. Crusher's grasp of medical ethics was always more than a little questionable throughout Star Trek: the Next Generation. So much so that it got lampooned in Lower Decks episode "I, Excretus" with one of Tendi's simulations titled "Medical Ethics". True, but if the audience's memory is better than the writer's it becomes a plot hole... one with significant Unfortunate Implications. Having human failings is fine... but what the writers have done here is just make everyone 100% miserable all the time. Nobody is allowed to be happy. Ever. Because the writers think Misery = Drama. So, of course, Jean-Luc Picard is a whiny, manipulative old man who's spent over a decade sulking over something that wasn't his fault because It's All About Me, Riker and Troi are burnouts who went to live in the space boonies rather than seek treatment for depression (despite one of them being a therapist), Data's so disgusted with it all that he opted to stay dead, Beverly's been living off the grid for decades in some sort of bid to be Galaxy's Worst Single Mom, Worf has already been through so much that I'm kind of afraid to find out what they've done to him since then. Did Geordi just... win at life compared to everyone else by having an apparently not-dysfunctional family and healthy career?

Once I noticed you were talking about a VF-1 with four booster packs, the field narrowed REAL quick... since that's about the only book that has that. ... wow, I just noticed the speech-to-text that I used to write that while folding laundry did a rubbish job with context-sensitivity. "Their in" instead of "therein". Good grief. That particular volume has a fair amount to say about postwar attempts to make the VF-1 a somewhat more efficient/effective space fighter. They're almost all brute force solutions like eliminating the transformation system to make room for more and larger fuel tanks or just strapping a ton of extra boosters and fuel tanks to the outside. Going back as far as Perfect Memory's "The Lost Two Years" piece about the timeskip in the original series, Apollo Base on the Moon was more or less THE headquarters for the New UN Forces out in near-Earth space and where many of the space-based VF patrols were launching from. It seems that Master File's writers decided to run with that when designing the 1.1 version of the FAST Pack. Than those unofficial versions? Hard to say. The VF-4 was, in general, a much better space fighter than the VF-1 Valkyrie. Its design allowed for a lot more fuel to be carried internally and that meant not just greater range and operating time in space but an effective weight reduction vs. the Super Pack since they weren't adding mass for large external tanks and verniers. Macross Chronicle claims it was a 40% more effective space fighter than the VF-1.

Okay, took me a hot minute there to place the specific models that you were talking about in your question. It's been quite a while since I last considered the Variable Fighter Master File: SDF-1 Macross VF-1 Squadrons book. The version 1.1 FAST pack configuration describe their in is primarily intended for range extension for Valkyries operating in the vicinity of the Moon. The W-ST configuration has replaced the HMMP-02 micro missile launcher assemblies with a pair supplemental fuel tank modules for the NP-BP-01 boosters. Master File presents this configuration as one mainly or at least commonly used by Apollo Base due to the additional fuel requirement that comes with operating in and around lunar orbit rather than simply in deep space. It could be described as a ferry configuration if you were so inclined. The only appreciable difference between it and the W configuration described beneath it is that, instead of fuel tanks, the W configuration has a second pair of HMMP-02 micro missile launchers. Both of these versions are presented as something of an ugly compromise in order to have Valkyries operating in deep space and near lunar orbit before the introduction of more space capable models like the VF-4.

Not wanting to raise a child aboard a flying disaster magnet like the USS Enterprise is one-hundred percent reasonable in and of itself. Beverly Crusher's reasoning, however, is even more completely insane than it appears at first glance. First... how did Beverly get pregnant? Contraceptives exist in Star Trek and as of Deep Space Nine contraceptive injections administered to men seem to be the norm. Kassidy Yates got pregnant by her boyfriend Benjamin Sisko because he forgot to get his scheduled injection from Dr. Bashir despite repeated reminders. Captain Jean-Luc Picard's physician at the time was none other than Dr. Beverly Crusher. He would've been going to HER for contraceptive injections while in a relationship with her. Given that the two broke up while taking leave together on Casperia Prime, it's unlikely that they were planning to start a family together. That means Beverly either got pregnant as a result of her own professional negligence... or through deception. Neither of those is a great look. Second... she decided to keep the pregnancy secret from the father. While there's typically no legal obligation to inform the father of the child, it's still kind of a scummy move on Beverly's part. It raises some awkward ethical questions especially given the above-mentioned problems WRT contraception. Third... while remaining aboard the Enterprise and trying to raise a child there would not be a healthy environment, neither she nor Jean-Luc Picard remained on the Enterprise for more than a few months after Jack's conception. Jean-Luc Picard took a promotion to Admiral that came with a shore posting to Starfleet Command on Earth. Beverly Crusher's options were by no means limited. She had almost two decades as CMO of the Federation flagship and could easily have arranged a shore posting for herself almost anywhere, including Starfleet Medical's headquarters in San Francisco. There's not really anywhere more secure than Earth, and in the very shadow of Starfleet Headquarters no less. That she'd had her son educated on Earth for an unspecified span of time and then took off into lawless regions of space on a secondhand decommissioned medical support ship in search of "safety" is gun-eating madness. Fourth... for someone supposedly so concerned with her son's well-being, she's done a stellar job of raising him. His criminal record makes Quark look like a rank amateur. He's wanted under at least four separate aliases throughout Federation and non-Federation space... and not for little stuff either. If you zoom in on his rap sheet as it comes up, he's wanted on Archer IV for possession of unregistered weapons, on Bajor for possession of unregistered liquors, on Minas V for fraud, and distribution or possession with intent to distribute of illegal firearms and/or controlled substances on planets as diverse as Risa, Betazed, and Cardassia Prime. And that's just the highlights! There are at least two more aliases we don't get to see rap sheets for! Her little Jack, who she was so desperate to protect from everything, is a massive piece of **** who runs guns, sells drugs and bootleg liquor, and defrauds people. While Jack seems to resent the absence of his father, his behavior and sheer list of outstanding warrants suggests that his mother was probably just as absent from his life as Jean-Luc was. Jack's conception and birth is dodgy enough as it is. Making him thirty-four and having Beverly conceal his existence from both his half-brother Wesley AND his father Jean-Luc for five years aboard the Enterprise-D and then another decade or so aboard the Enterprise-E would be even more monstrous than what she's already done and make her a consciously absentee parent when they're busy guilt-tripping Jean-Luc for unknowingly being one.

It likely helped considerably that many of Chakotay's people were ex-Starfleet to begin with, that the Voyager crew outnumbered the Maquis more than five to one, that serving under Janeway as part of the Starfleet crew promised a far higher standard of living than spending the next seventy years in an improvised jail cell, and that Starfleet disciplinary measures are a lot less Klingon than "the Maquis way": I don't think that was ever really a thing. Esp. since Gene Roddenberry had full creative control of the early seasons of TNG and he was death on the entire idea of interpersonal conflict among the crew. Disliking and distrusting Burnham is a completely understandable reaction for most anyone on the Discovery, but the only crew member who really has a reason to be unhappy to be on the Discovery at all is Chief Engineer Stamets. He was a researcher who was more or less drafted into the war effort because Starfleet shifted to exploring military uses of his technology. Nobody else in the crew really has a reason to just hate everyone on the ship the way so many of them seem to.

That broadly echoes one of the main complaints audiences have with the writing in Star Trek: Discovery. Namely, that the lighthearted camaraderie that audiences are used to seeing among Starfleet crews in Star Trek is almost totally absent from Star Trek: Discovery. We see bits of it here and there, on the USS Shenzhou early in the first episode and among the crew of the USS Enterprise, but the crew of the USS Discovery seem to absolutely LOATHE each other. It might have been understandable if it were confined to interactions with Burnham, who'd given everyone in Starfleet and especially the survivors of the Shenzhou ample reason to despise her, but it's almost everyone. It says a lot that the most affable person on the crew in the first season is (Mirror) Gabriel Lorca, a man considered excessively evil and overly racist by Mirror Universe standards. It never really gets better either. Captain Pike replaces Captain Lorca as the token nice character and he treats people with more respect, but it's not until season three that the writers seem to realize that the crew are frankly awful to each other and they seem to struggle to address it. There's that dinner party in S3E4 "Forget Me Not" where the crew's loathing of each other spills out into the open and almost everyone storms out after several minutes of trading barbs. It gets a little better in season four, but that's partly because the focus of the discontent shifts from Burnham and the Discovery crew to their interactions with the rest of the Federation and especially the new President. They never really manage to overcome the fact that these characters vocally hated each other and there's no real resolution to it. It just sort of peters out. That's not a generational thing. As a hiring manager, I can say with a good deal of confidence that's a change in how corporations operate and especially in how they consider the question of staffing. That's also off-topic, and veering towards another warning from the mods.

Y'know, I never looked up Kurtzman's full filmography before now. It's unsurprising to see that it's a stream of unremarkable pap punctuated by the occasional stinker. Imagine my surprise to see his portfolio as a producer and writer extends to titles like Hercules: the Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. It seems it was all downhill from there. Unfortunately, Hollywood's as much about who you know as what you know and idiots like Kurtzman often manage to fail upward the way J.J. Abrams did. I'm not sure people in general are necessarily getting tired of grimdark sci-fi. After all, there's talk of a Warhammer 40,000 TV series in the offing and there've been a number of quite highly regarded bits of dark or dark-ish SF recently like Halo. There are whole franchises that make that their bread and butter. Star Trek just isn't one of them. That's the "why" of NuTrek's negative cashflow problem. Audiences clicked their way over to Star Trek: Discovery's series pilot expecting some optimistic high-concept sci-fi only to be given a big budget production of a pointlessly (and often literally) dark and edgy Star Trek fanfic seemingly penned by Buckets of Blood Guy. If you want your audience to like and/or relate to your protagonist, it's a good idea to actually make them likeable so the audience will become invested in their story and their struggle. Michael Burnham was a dangerously irresponsible, manipulative, paranoid, racist shitheel whose main hobby seemed to be gaslighting her crewmates. That's not going to win anyone over. It's like she once read a book about the traits of toxic coworkers and decided to collect the complete set. The last time Star Trek had a character like her, that character was unambiguously the villain. The writers only managed to give her the briefest moment of self-awareness, when she goes to the Mirror Universe of genocidal bigots and worries she's fitting in too well.* Nothing about that is likeable or relatable. The audience is supposed to feel bad for her, but the few folks who didn't drop it in disgust were sitting there going "Well *****, if it isn't the consequences of your actions." and then getting annoyed when she pulls a Karma Houdini once a season. None so insulting, perhaps, as when Burnham was made captain of the Discovery just a few episodes after being told she was utterly unsuited for command by the same admiral who promoted her. People turn on Star Trek to see a vision of a brighter and more hopeful future. You don't turn on Star Trek to see horribleness... and that's what Discovery offered. Horribleness. A genocidal war with an even more bestial take on the Klingons. A genocidal AI bent on wiping out all life. The collapse of modern civilization into a nightmare of isolation, slavery, death, and green Karens. Then casual genocide because fancy dress genocide had apparently lost its charm. None of that it the upbeat, charming, optimistic spacefuture that the audience tunes in to Star Trek for... and it cost them the audience. The very faithful audience with a very long history of spending big on merchandise. * FFS, the only three people who actually LIKE Michael Burnham in the whole of the first three seasons are an undercover genocidal Klingon zealot, a genocidal despot who rules known space because she's massacred every alien race in range, and the guy that genocidal despot considers too dangerously unhinged to hold a position of power. If these are the people in your corner, that's a strong argument that you're a villain if not THE villain.

Being a radio drama, I've never listened to Macross Generation... the only person I know offhand who IIRC did is Gubaba, of Gubabablog. I think he's done some writing about that on his site.

It'll be interesting to see if the writing in Discovery's newly-announced-to-be-final 5th season will be as dreadful as this obviously phoned-in mess. I'm sure it sounded better in the writers heads, but having Will Riker tell Picard... ... is insensitive to the point of bordering on cruelty. Jean-Luc Picard is not just chronically single and unlucky at love, he's the last living member of his family. It's even harsher in the episode's in-story hindsight, since the real Jean-Luc Picard died back in season one... ... and the character we have now is an android programmed to believe it's Jean-Luc Picard running around creeping everyone out. Beverly Crusher's... motivation... makes little to no sense in context or out. The way the Titan-A gets its arse handed to it at the end of the episode is just embarrassing. That is some yakity sax-level dumb.

Are we sure those two things are mutually exclusive? (Just joking!) Jokes about our mutual cantankerousness aside, there's absolutely nothing political about the cancellation of Star Trek: Discovery. It's purely a matter of dollars and cents. The show's cost-performance has been abysmal for its entire run. Production ran over budget so frequently that several producers were fired for it. Its viewership numbers on streaming services were never better than mediocre, with Discovery being handily outperformed by multiple shows even on Paramount+ and Netflix being so disgusted with it that they not only tried to quit the project they passed on Star Trek: Picard. Merchandising revenue was practically nonexistent with many Trek licensees passing on the series altogether or settling for reduced stakes because they knew its aesthetics would not be popular due to its resemblance to the Kelvin timeline. The series was a money pit, and one that got deeper every season thanks to overspending on production and underperforming revenue streams. On the whole, I think this is part of a larger trend of the industry being in the "find out" part of "**** about and find out". We're seeing a bubble burst. The networks got jealous of Netflix's success and decided to launch their own streaming services instead, only to discover that doing so is far more expensive than most of them thought. Paramount+ has been running over a billion dollars in the red since it launched with even Paramount's own quarterly financials predicting losses to continue to mount until at least 2024. It's doubtful that any other network-run service was doing much better. Now we're at the part of the story where the cost-cutters move in and start slashing anything with a poor return-on-investment, and that means a lot of these massively expensive direct-to-streaming titles are first on the chopping block.

Best news I've had in ages. The main thing keeping the series going was the sunk cost fallacy, thanks to overspending on the show's development. Rather than canceling it and taking a loss after it flopped and the sponsor bailed, they just kept spending in the hopes that it would take off if they just gave it enough time. I guess all the red ink finally caught up with them. Either that or the legal department announced that they're not allowed to sell any more stock to fund the production due to the risk of violating their merger agreement. Here's hoping that everyone who worked on this mess finds their career marched into an early, shallow, unmarked, and entirely unmourned grave. Between the news of Discovery's premature cancellation with just five of seven seasons produced and Picard ending after just three of its proposed five seasons were produced, it seems that we may soon be seeing an end to the tyranny of this odious vision of abject misery. The future of Star Trek is looking a little brighter today.

This is a fair point, and one I hadn't properly considered. IMO, the only one that's really inexcusable is the Titan-A. Kathryn Janeway's Intrepid-class USS Voyager was a ship so ridiculously out of its depth that the fact that it made it back at all is flat amazing, never mind with most of its crew, the majority of the Maquis crew they went chasing at the start of their misadventure, a Borg kill count that dwarfs every other Starfleet ship's record combined, the destruction of most if not all of the Borg transwarp network, and the head of the Borg queen to boot.* She EARNED that letter. It's not unfair to assume that, by the 32nd century, Starfleet would've had so many ships that a couple dozen displayed such uncommon valor that they were rewarded with their registry numbers not being retired. Even the Discovery's letter makes a moderate amount of sense, since Starfleet effectively broke the Discovery down to the spaceframe and rebuilt her with modern technology and needed to cover up the fact that the ship and its crew were illegal time travelers. The Titan-A doesn't really make sense, since we know what the previous USS Titan was up to and the bits we've seen haven't exactly been remarkable. They don't reward ships which went to the breakers due to obsolescence or battle damage with continuation of their registry... not even if the captain doesn't want to bother remembering a new registry. It REALLY doesn't make sense given that the series keeps acting like the Titan-A and Titan are somehow the same ship. * Prior to Picard retconning the network and Borg collective back into existence because why not?

... that's fine, I have long since accepted that I'm a weirdo. EVs are 100% my thing, and my day job for nearly ten years now... first as part of a gov't project, then in private sector R&D and with the SAE standards committees. Ah, yeah... there's a LOT more choice in the market now than when I was running the interoperability test center at a certain automaker. The major players haven't changed, though... 'cept that AeroVironment (yes, the UAV people) sold their EVSE division to Webasto. It's Webasto/AV, Clipper Creek, ChargePoint, and Leviton. Enel-X has been moving up in the world since Webasto acquired AV, and they make some pretty reliable stuff too. With the old, and damn near indestructible* 32A-class AeroVironment EVSE-RS-PI-25s now out of production**, it really depends whether you're looking for integration with a smart meter or not. I'm assuming you probably are, if you're the cost-conscious sort. Enel-X's 40A and 48A "Juicebox" EVSEs are solid and dependable units but somewhat hard to get since they're MOPAR's current favorite. Clipper Creek's 32A chargers (e.g. the HCS-40) is known to be a solid and dependable unit, but can be somewhat flaky depending on the brand of vehicle you're charging.*** Hyundai's preferred brand of chargers is ChargePoint, who I've always felt were middle-of-the-pack but dependable performers... but I've only worked with some of their pedistal-form units and not their newer wallboxes. They seem to be a bit forward-thinking about the whole affair, since they have a website set up to help buyers find trusted installers for their preferred ChargePoint HomeFlex units. All in all, I'd say probably go with either Hyundai's preferred ChargePoint HomeFlex or an Enel-X Juicebox. EDIT: I will say this too... avoid BTCPower like the ****ing plague. My professional experience with them would have to get considerably better to be called "appalling" with a straight face. Probably the only time I've ever been convinced a piece of test equipment was going to kill me. * I had a LOT of experience working with those as part of a gov't project, and despite the many horrible things I did to them that the manufacturer absolutely NEVER intended I only ever had one unit fail. ** But still available from some vendors. *** I had some issues with older Clipper Creek units involving the tolerances on the control pilot and proximity circuits, meaning some cars had to be unplugged and replugged several times before they'd accept the charger as a valid one. And one memorable case of a ChargePoint unit causing some minor scorching on the inlet of a test vehicle.

That would make more sense. Not much more... but enough to not be an especially glaring bit of bad writing. That doesn't really make sense to me in practical terms. Putting aside basic practical aspects like the sheer size of starship computer cores and the fact that you'd essentially HAVE to disassemble the ship to get to them... if a starship is so badly damaged that it's judged to be beyond repair, why bother attempting to salvage parts from it? It'd be one thing if they were salvaging parts and materials that couldn't be replicated for use on other ships of the same class, but isolinear circuitry can be (and is) produced via replicator. Come to that, why reuse battle-damaged 20+ year old computer systems for a brand new ship with a completely different design? Surely technology has advanced in that time and installing computers designed for that class of ship would be much less problematic than adapting ones from another class entirely. (There's also the more practical question of how the computer cores survived whatever cripplied the Titan intact enough to use... the engineering computer core is usually placed between the warp core and navigational deflector, and the primary core or cores are typically either in the core of the saucer or towards the rear of it near the photon torpedo magazine.)

Plato's Allegory of the Cave? Eh... maybe back in the 90's, before the internet made fansubs and information about the Macross franchise readily available to people outside Japan. Nowadays, there's nobody keeping them in the cave. They know full well what's outside and voluntarily remain in the cave out of sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.

... that is a strong contender not only for the dumbest thing I've heard all year, but also as an all-time "dumbest thing I've ever heard from Star Trek" in general. Those two ships have NOTHING in common appearance-wise and that's not even how registry numbers work! If the ship was refitted, it would keep the same number. The only time that a refit has led to a new registry was in Discovery when the titular 23rd century ship was refitted to 32nd century tech levels and issued a new registry to conceal that fact that the ship and its crew were unlawful time travelers that the Federation was harboring in violation of various treaties banning the use of time travel. The Luna-class USS Titan and Constitution III-class look nothing alike. At all. They have NOTHING in common. They don't even appear to be anywhere close to the same size! This explanation not only doesn't make sense, it's so transparently and obviously stupid that I'm flabbergasted ANYONE approved it to go to print. By far! This explanation is complete nonsense.

True, but where it gets a bit hard to swallow is that Raffi somehow concealed her substance abuse problem despite working an environment that mandates frequent medical exams using technology far more advanced and precise than today's modern drug screenings. An environment where, I might add, her superiors incl. any of the medical officers which she'd have had to submit to examination by could have ordered her into therapy and would have been obligated to report her substance abuse problem. Yeah, Memory Alpha doesn't include the aforementioned additional backstory that was displaced into the official tie-in novels. The Last Best Hope is kind of a sh*tshow that gets into just how stupid the whole situation was. The Romulan government most of its time denying there was any need for Picard's aggressive evacuation measures, downplaying the problem, and having the Tal Shiar vanish anyone who talked about the actual urgency of the matter. A fair amount is depicted of the political opposition to the effort, with Picard effectively losing in the diplomatic arena to a semiliterate political shyster from a remote farming world who raised a stink about a relief effort diverting resources from Federation worlds. That Jean-Luc Picard threatens to resign if he doesn't get his way, then meekly does resign when Starfleet tells him to go pound sand is probably one of the biggest out-of-character moments related to the series... alongside him spending a decade pouting about it in France. Maybe the Romulan Free State remembers the amount of BS the Romulan senate and Tal Shiar pulled in an attempt to obstruct the evacuation that got so many people killed. Not that they're forgiving, but the Federation are simply the lesser sh*theads by comparison. You'd think they'd have at least remembered the Romulans, like the Klingons, have a massive fleet that could easily have done the job. They fought on an even footing with the Federation and Klingon Empire in the Dominion War.

Fold systems can be installed. Modular fold systems can be set up and removed as needed... the very principle behind the Fold Booster. Very large objects are typically folded by a network of small fold systems working in concert, much like how Sound Force attempted to steal Gepernich's spiritia farm using many fold boosters working in tandem. Since humanity is already mass producing fold systems for its ships, it's probably not much of a stretch to also produce fold systems to move factory satellites as needed. It's generally assumed that most, if not all, of the factory satellites captured in the 2010s were Boddole Zer main fleet assets that the New UN Government learned the location of from defectors. Later in the timeline, humanity has stumbled upon others and appropriated them as necessary.

If anything, I find it to be the only believable part of Star Trek: Picard's character development. After two decades of high concept sci-fi life-or-death shenanigans, the crew collectively says "**** it, I'm going to go somewhere quiet for a while." Damned by faint praise seems to be the order of the day for everyone who's not on the ViacomCBS/Paramount payroll directly or indirectly. Conservation of drama. Vadic's and her ship, the Shrike, aren't quite Shinzon and the Scimitar... but they're certainly copying his homework. Going everywhere in too much leather? Check. Massive spiky warship that massively outguns the Federation ships in the story despite it stretching believability to do so? Check. An army of horror movie extra gimps in pleather with no humanizing traits whatsoever? Check. Clearly the Titan-A is going to get REKT at some point in this story similar to the Enterprise-E or the Kelvin Enterprise. I have a suspicion they're going to find themselves rescued by whatever the new Enterprise is and commendeer that. Fry: "It took an hour to write, I thought it'd take an hour to read!" It's especially glaring because they more or less did exactly that for the last person who claimed to be a relative of Jean-Luc Picard's (Praetor Shinzon). Office politics. While this version of Jean-Luc Picard may be retired, undead, and a complete arsehole, he's still Starfleet royalty. ... is a career-limiting move if ever there was one. While Captain Shaw is clearly the Only Sane Man in this series at present and has very little time for Picard and Riker's BS, he is probably career-minded enough to know that Picard and Riker could still ruin him for letting Jack die. Even if Jack is actually a wanted criminal. Now THAT'S on-brand for TNG. How many times did folks escape from the Enterprise-D's brig on Worf's watch because they failed to check them for concealed gimmicks and gadgets? The first prison break in TNG had security fail to catch that the Klingon renegades were carrying a whole-ass disruptor pistol in their clothes. Because this show runs on protagonist-centered morality. Even though any reasonable viewer would be thinking Shaw is actually a pretty reasonable, if somewhat stiff, captain we are supposed to think he's The Arsehole because he's nominally opposed to Jean-Luc Picard despite Picard lying, breaking regulations, etc. and technically not actually being Jean-Luc Picard. Because that's how ship-to-ship combat worked in the last two TNG movies. Picard's ship runs away, and the villain ship leisurely chases. Oh, it's far dumber than that... partly because protagonist-centered morality is so heavily in play, and partly because Picard has devolved into a very self-serving and manipulative person. Sure, Jean-Luc Picard was being very noble spending every last bit of political capital he'd accrued over twenty years as the captain of the Federation flagship to get that relief fleet built. But along the way he seems to have forgotten that: The Romulans are the Federation's oldest enemy. So much so that the Federation was founded shortly after the Earth-Romulan War partly to provide a common defense against further Romulan aggression. It's hardly surprising that many Federation worlds that suffered under Romulan hands would be resistant to the idea of saving their mortal enemy. The Federation has absolutely no reason to trust the Romulans. Not only had the Romulans historically sided with multiple Federation enemies including the Klingons and the Dominion, they were actively engaged in espionage against the Federation and just two years previously had attempted to murder Picard himself for his blood and only narrowly been prevented from deploying a biogenic weapon in a genocidal attack on Earth itself. The Romulan Senate was clearly and unambiguously telling the Federation that it did not want help. The relief fleet was destroyed in a terrorist attack that wiped out the Federation's oldest and largest shipyard, so Starfleet probably could not have caved to Picard's childish demands even if they wanted to. Picard's resignation from Starfleet and retirement to the family vineyard for over a decade was basically a product of him throwing a temper tantrum over being told that he can't divert resources from worlds all over the Federation (again) to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign power that explicitly and on no uncertain terms told him to get lost and that they neither need nor want his help. Of course, extra levels in stupid are taken with both Picard and Picard apparently forgetting the Romulan Star Empire is a Star Empire older than the Federation and rivaling it for size with hundreds of inhabited worlds and that the Romulans should have had no difficulty evacuating their own people without outside help via the Romulan Navy that rivals Starfleet for size and power. Losing Romulus itself should be little more than a mild inconvenience. Bonus levels in stupid are awarded for the fact that both the showrunners and tie-in novels run with the idea that the Romulan supernova wasn't natural. Like the Pakleds in Lower Decks, the Romulans accidentally destroyed their own homeworld while testing treaty-banned weaponry they intended to use against the Federation. Unlike the Pakleds, the many Romulan officials can't claim congenital stupidity as a defense for destroying their own planet. This gets dumber still in that Picard and the Federation Council are aware of this... and Picard is still somehow surprised that the Federation Council is unwilling to bankrupt countless worlds in the name of saving an enemy that was trying to genocide those very same worlds all of like fifteen minutes ago. A child, but even then it's only relevant to the plot because it's another reason for Picard to feel guilty because he feels personally responsible for the ban on the technology which could've saved the child even though the ban has no connection to his actions in any way, shape, or form and is actually something he argued unsuccessfully for years previously in "Measure of a Man". They've told us what Geordi was up to... he was a yard foreman at Utopia Planetia. Fans were understandably rather upset by this, since until the announcement that Picard had cast Levar Burton some fans assumed that Geordi had died in the synth revolt. Seven was never a Starfleet officer prior to Picard. She was just a member of Janeway's crew on Voyager in an informal capacity. Icheb's death was pointless story-wise, but the main reason is probably that Icheb's original actor (Manu Intiraymi) is more than a bit of an arsehole and they were unwilling to cast him despite Icheb being fairly integral to Seven's character. The whole bigotry-against-the-Borg thing is pretty pointless considering how well-established it is that Borg drones are victims of the most profound violation of the self. Starfleet were previously shown to be pretty darn compassionate towards ex-Borg, so this is a jarring and nonsensical shift. That seems to be the direction the showrunners are taking, yeah... that the Luna-class Titan was destroyed SOMEHOW and this fugly thing was its replacement. The main indicator is that they kept the registry number of the Luna-class version that was first used for the Star Trek Titan novel series the Luna-class was designed for. That's the thing, though... Star Trek: the Next Generation was the story of an enlightened future and more advanced humanity where everyone was able to lead a fulfilling life on their own terms in a post-scarcity society. It was very much a happy-go-lucky future most of the time. So much so that, even as the series attempted to highlight some of the problems in society, the Federation is still presented as essentially utopian with the societal problems being on the frontier where a utopian standard of living hadn't taken hold yet. This was a society where therapy to deal with traumatic experiences was not only normalized and accepted, but presented as easily accessible and highly effective too. It's why Raffi's backstory makes no sense at all. She was a Starfleet officer living on Earth and with a fairly high security clearance... but she was also a barely functioning addict whose substance abuse problems somehow went undiagnosed and untreated despite regular medical screenings required by her job? She would've had to report to the CMO on every starship she boarded as a matter of course, and she was traveling all over hell's half-acre with Picard during the relief effort. None of these highly-trained Starfleet doctors noticed Picard's aide de camp was a strung out junkie barely keeping it together amid paranoid episodes? Admiral Picard was apparently the ONLY thing standing between Raffi and a bad conduct discharge. Did NOBODY think to order her to therapy? After she's dishonorably discharged, she's absolutely miserable and so deprived now that she *checks notes* lives in a private country residence with every modern convenience that also adjoins a state park where she can grow her own drugs and indulge as she sees fit without having to hold down a job or really do much of anything. This is presented as abject misery that she blames Jean-Luc Picard for even though any sane viewer is going to look at this and say it's a product of her own actions and a fair few would say her standard of living is far higher than their own. And this is repeated over and over again. These people DECIDED to resign from Starfleet and go live in the sticks. Yet they all have to be miserable. Nobody thinks to go see a therapist? One of them IS a therapist.

Yes, I know you were. The problem is that the reality is so stupid that there's no immediate distinction between satirizing the stupidity and simply reporting on it. You may have been joking, but Riker's Luna-class USS Titan would have to have met its end in some excessively dramatic high-stakes act of derring-do for Starfleet to honor it with a new USS Titan sharing its registry number. That was an honor reserved for only Starfleet's most celebrated ships. None of the returning TNG characters are normal Starfleet officers. They were the senior staff of not one but two separate Federation flagships... Starfleet's most elite. Picard, for its part, seems to argue for exactly that... that, after the crew broke up following the events of Nemesis, they went on to have relatively normal careers and civilian lives. Jean-Luc Picard accepted a desk job overseeing humanitarian aid then resigned his commission and spent a decade or so running the family winery. Will Riker and Deanna Troi served aboard the USS Titan on an exploration mission then apparently took a promotion and retired to have a family. Geordi took a transfer to Utopia Planetia and became a yard foreman like Sisko had been before Deep Space Nine. Depending on whether they're about to retcon their own novels, Worf may or may not have briefly commanded the Enterprise before moving on to a desk job. Dr. Crusher apparently took twenty years of maternity leave to raise her bastard. By their standards, positively boring humdrum lives. While season three's writing is definitely an improvement over the previous two seasons of out-of-control dumpster fire, it's still some incredibly weak sh*t that's clearly running on protagonist-centric morality. Things are right or wrong not because there's any moral reason or logic behind them, but because it advances the agenda of the main characters. It reminds me of nothing so much as Bill Shatner's novel The Return, which was seemingly written by Shatner for no reason other than to settle the Kirk vs. Picard debate in his own favor once and for all by having Kirk brought back from the dead to one-up every member of the TNG cast.

Which is a cheap copout at best. The showrunners want every ship to be like the Enterprise... but they shouldn't. The Enterprise is special. After TOS, the Enterprise was the Federation flagship. It had the most elite crew and the best of everything and was frequently the first to charge into danger. That's why they go through Enterprises at such a terrifying rate. Seldom does the Lady E go to her rest quietly. But that was already a tired cliche by the time of Star Trek: Generations. It was shocking EXACTLY ONCE. Riker's Luna-class USS Titan is no Enterprise. She's a smaller, long-range deep space explorer and her mission was exploration not combat (Pakled nonsense aside). There's no real reason for the Titan to have been destroyed offscreen in some act of incredible valor that got a new USS Titan commissioned almost immediately. It's so fanfic. But then, all of Picard reads like a BAD fanfic. It's especially bad in the novels, where you almost suspect the writers are taking the piss. They make ZERO effort to disguise the fact that Rios is Han Solo from Wish.com, that Raffi is just a racist stereotype, and that everyone else is an idiot. Yes, but have you ever known me to miss a chance to grumble? 😛 Reviews can be bought, and frequently are. Not to mention the reviewers have had two seasons of absolute dogsh*t from this show lowering their expectations. What came before this was so bad that they're praising this season for almost achieving "basic competence in storytelling". Discovery did it first, introducing a Voyager-J in the 32nd century Starfleet. Prodigy introduced a Voyager-A, and then Picard a Voyager-B not even 20 years later. The original USS Voyager went through seven years of hell from 2371-2378, so that it was decommissioned after its return is completely expected given that she was probably held together with spit, bailing wire, and wishful thinking by that point. The commissioning of a Voyager-A by 2384 is entirely expected... but why is there already a Voyager-B just 17 years after that? There have been eleven Voyagers in 819 years... why are they burning through them so damned quick, unless the Voyager-J is actually 700 years old? But a justified one, esp. since the theme is "Family". Plus there's a BIG difference between a cartoon and a big budget live action series. That's not quite the same. Prior to the adoption of Star Trek Online designs in Picard's second season, the Excelsior-class design was justified by nothing fancier than literal decades of mass production as a major Starfleet workhorse class. The Excelsior-class had almost a century of distinguished service under its belt (2285-2378+) by the time they stopped doing 24th century Trek and it explicitly remained in service that long thanks to technological updates and refits. It's not a new class, it's just POR for Starfleet ships: Periodic upgrades to keep ships in service for decades. The tech materials conceived around TNG put the expected lifespan of a 24th century starship at over a century.

Because the showrunners are complete imbeciles. The honor of reusing a registry with a letter suffix was a signal honor for Starfleet's most celebrated ships. The Discovery showrunners went nuts with it when they jumped their show to the 32nd century (after jumping the shark) and had a bunch of lettered Starfleet ships all at once. Prior to that, there were only one other 23rd/24th century example that wasn't a ship in the Enterprise legacy: the Galaxy-class USS Yamato. The third and last (legitimate) example was the 29th century USS Relativity. Having the Luna-class USS Titan in Lower Decks was a huge coup for the Lower Decks showrunners and was near-universally well-received. Apparently Picard's showrunners have a crippling fear of money and success, and commissioned that fugly kitbash to replace it even though Riker's USS Titan would have been only slightly over 22 years old (with the life expectancy of a Starfleet ship being a century or more).