Star Trek: Discovery

[David Hingtgen]

On ‎7‎/‎18‎/‎2017 at 9:28 AM, azrael said:

Poster to be seen at Comic-con this week.

 

Still looks Klingon, specifically K'tinga class , etc. 

[mechaninac]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The Axanar fan-film did a much better job of looking appropriate to this period of time than Discovery is.

This!  It's been clear since the first JJ helmed Star Trek movie, and cemented now with Discovery, that fans and semi-professional independents, are far better at portraying the universe, as previously established, than the license holders.  I must admit that some of the hand props (phaser and hand communicator) look very good as re-imaginings of the original designs so that they don't look too out of place, but everything else just look too advanced for the intended prime timeline period the show is supposed to be set in.

[TehPW]

my only curiosity, is this: during any of the episodes they plan to make, will a Constitution-class ship make a visit on screen? If so, what is it gonna look like (specifically)?

[Seto Kaiba]

16 hours ago, mechaninac said:

This!  It's been clear since the first JJ helmed Star Trek movie, and cemented now with Discovery, that fans and semi-professional independents, are far better at portraying the universe, as previously established, than the license holders. 

Yep... though, to be fair, decent writing has been terribly thin on the ground in Star Trek since the end of Deep Space Nine.  Voyager's premise lost them a lot of ground when it was hijacked by the network and twisted into TNG 2.0, which even the actors weren't happy about.  Enterprise tripped itself up by breaking most of the cardinal rules for writing time travel stories and prequels so badly that several episodes (most notably "Regeneration") resulted in a sort of low-level revolt amongst the production crew.  The TNG movies were... well... the nicest thing that could be said is they've dismissed the fan theory that even-numbered Star Trek movies are good thanks to space zombies and then Picard getting beaten up by a clone of himself wearing a rainbow-tinted pleather onesie.

 

16 hours ago, mechaninac said:

I must admit that some of the hand props (phaser and hand communicator) look very good as re-imaginings of the original designs so that they don't look too out of place, but everything else just look too advanced for the intended prime timeline period the show is supposed to be set in.

The phasers in particular are nice, because they seem to be aesthetically cutting a dash between the multi-barreled laser pistols from "The Cage" and the hand phasers that were used in most of TOS.  The overall effect just makes them look like a more sophisticated version of the TOS prop.

 

 

8 hours ago, TehPW said:

my only curiosity, is this: during any of the episodes they plan to make, will a Constitution-class ship make a visit on screen? If so, what is it gonna look like (specifically)?

I doubt it... unless they do a series finale like Enterprise had where the whole series turns out to be badly-written in-universe historical fiction or something like that.

[Mommar]

On 7/23/2017 at 11:42 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

The phasers and transporter effect look like they're from the right time period at least... but the all-forcefield holding cell thing?  That's way too advanced even for Voyager or the TNG movies.  They didn't even have holding cells with forcefield doors until after Kirk's era, the cells aboard the refit Enterprise and Enterprise A still had physical obstructions in the doorway.

You got the bit about a "holding cell" wrong.  That's not a cell, that's the force field holding in the atmosphere around the outside of the ship where the walls have been blown away.  You can see the lead girl pass through it in one of the quick shots later in the trailer.

[sh9000]

[Seto Kaiba]

22 hours ago, Mommar said:

You got the bit about a "holding cell" wrong.  That's not a cell, that's the force field holding in the atmosphere around the outside of the ship where the walls have been blown away.  You can see the lead girl pass through it in one of the quick shots later in the trailer.

Ah, so it is.  It's hard to see through the VFX of the forcefield but the corridor's mostly gone just past it.

Still, isn't this a period in time when they were still struggling with planar forcefields?  Even later shows had a hard time doing anything more than simple flat field surfaces or cylinders.

[Mommar]

3 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Ah, so it is.  It's hard to see through the VFX of the forcefield but the corridor's mostly gone just past it.

Still, isn't this a period in time when they were still struggling with planar forcefields?  Even later shows had a hard time doing anything more than simple flat field surfaces or cylinders.

It is weird because they have the field being generated at two ninety-degree angles in a box shape which is either inaccurate or sloppy or both.  The only instance I can think of where they depict a more complicated forcefield is when Bones is looking out the gaping maw after the Bow of the Enterprise B is torn off by the Nexus in Generations.  That was far more than just a planar field.

[Chronocidal]

I might be remembering wrong, but didn't launching a shuttle in TOS require evacuating the shuttle bay because they had no forcefield to hold the air in?

[Seto Kaiba]

19 hours ago, Mommar said:

It is weird because they have the field being generated at two ninety-degree angles in a box shape which is either inaccurate or sloppy or both.  The only instance I can think of where they depict a more complicated forcefield is when Bones is looking out the gaping maw after the Bow of the Enterprise B is torn off by the Nexus in Generations.  That was far more than just a planar field.

I'm not so sure it wasn't a planar field... if you look at the areas where the Enterprise-B suffered damage in Generations the area Kirk was suffered a hull breach across a large, almost perfectly flat stretch of hull right along the edge of the portside engineering section "fin".

(The most complicated force field seen to date would have to be TAS's life support belt... but who knows if that still counts?)

 

17 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

I might be remembering wrong, but didn't launching a shuttle in TOS require evacuating the shuttle bay because they had no forcefield to hold the air in?

Nope, your memory is quite accurate... and it appears we've found our first genuine non-aesthetic anachronism.  

The USS Shenzhou and USS Discovery are about fifteen years too early to have the kind of force field technology we see in the Star Trek: Discovery trailer.  The show's set in 2255, when the Federation's most advanced starships were still dependent on emergency bulkheads to seal hull breaches and had to depressurize their shuttlebays in order to launch or recover shuttles.  It's a set of advancements in force field technology made in the 2270s and 2280s, with the refit Constitution-class receiving just the shuttlebay containment field, and the emergency force fields not showing up until the Excelsior-class circa 2287-2293.  The first chronological appearance of an emergency force field was on the Enterprise-B in 2293.

Edited July 28, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[Focslain]

41 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

(The most complicated force field seen to date would have to be TAS's life support belt... but who knows if that still counts?)

Depends. In recent years TAS as canon is a grey area. In general though several parts are pulled from TAS and made canon. The belts were adopted by Star Trek Online as the base for the personal shields in the game. 

[Seto Kaiba]

11 minutes ago, Focslain said:

Depends. In recent years TAS as canon is a grey area. In general though several parts are pulled from TAS and made canon. The belts were adopted by Star Trek Online as the base for the personal shields in the game. 

Yeah, that's why I wasn't willing to commit to that one as still viable... some bits of Star Trek: the Animated Series fit pretty well without any finessing like the Constitution-class pre-refit USS Enterprise having a sort of proto-holodeck, while others fit rather less well like the life support/personal forcefield belts, automatic bridge defense system, or that 1:1 scale inflatable USS Enterprise decoy deployed from the shuttlebay.  I know Star Trek Online isn't canon, so its use of them isn't exactly a fair indicator.

(Still, the automatic bridge defense system would've made Starfleet security's job SO. MUCH. EASIER. if it hadn't been abandoned.  Aliens beam in and take over the bridge?  Let a huge automated phaser turret sort 'em out.)

[Mommar]

Here's some food for thought.
 

 

[Sandman]

It looks like the legal and political situation means it's unlikely to ever see a true prime timeline ST ever again. Which I'm almost glad about as I have no confidence that any future production would produce a series that wouldn't frakk up the prime timeline. It's almost better to just leave prime timeline alone and remember it for what it was. I think I'll enjoy discovery more if it was a reboot.

[TehPW]

Why the hell did they NOT go for an anthology series in the first place? I'd pay for THAT.

[Dynaman]

6 hours ago, TehPW said:

Why the hell did they NOT go for an anthology series in the first place? I'd pay for THAT.

Suits are notoriously risk averse.  Anthology shows in general have not done well for a long time and Star Trek has never been done as well.  Serialized shows are all the rage now so that was considered a good bet.  I'm not faulting them for this either, putting a Star Trek series together is an expensive proposition.

[Seto Kaiba]

On 7/30/2017 at 2:30 AM, Mommar said:

Here's some food for thought.

Well, if I wasn't going to avoid the show like the plague before... I sure as hell am NOW.  

There's nothing that says "drooling incompetence" quite as much as the producing saying "we know what the essence of Star Trek is, but we're shelving it because having characters on the same side constantly yell at each other is more dramatic".  The simple fact that they're surprised that the established fanbase is pissed about the massive departures from canon shows that they didn't learn a damn thing from the failure of Star Trek: Enterprise either.  Fans were OK with a prequel as long as the timeline isn't being dicked with, and Enterprise went well out of its way to make dicking with the timeline something that underpins the entire plot.  If Enterprise was the actual Titanic, hitting an iceberg because its crew wasn't paying proper attention, then the Discovery series seems to be more like the starliner Titanic from Futurama, jackknifing from hazard to hazard for no reason beyond the ineptitude of the people in charge.

I can only hope that this show meets with an early end so it doesn't have a chance to inflict much collateral damage on competently-made Star Trek.

 

 

19 hours ago, Sandman said:

It looks like the legal and political situation means it's unlikely to ever see a true prime timeline ST ever again. Which I'm almost glad about as I have no confidence that any future production would produce a series that wouldn't frakk up the prime timeline. It's almost better to just leave prime timeline alone and remember it for what it was. I think I'll enjoy discovery more if it was a reboot.

After Voyager, the TNG movies, and the jumping-off point for the Abrams movies, I'm pretty convinced the Prime continuity is unviable now.  There's no credible antagonist left, which is why it seems like every non-canon Star Trek title seems to think the only recourse is for the Klingons to withdraw from the Khitomer Accords again.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine established the Gamma Quadrant's one major power was the Dominion, and when it went down it took almost every credible Alpha and Beta quadrant antagonist with it.  The Cardassian Union took one on the chin no less than six times in the series: they lost Bajor to the Bajoran rebels, they lost whole planets to the Maquis, the Obsidian Order walked blithely into a Dominion trap and was wiped out, the Klingons invaded, then the Alliance invaded, and their allies began decimating them when they switched sides at the end.  The Romulan Star Empire lost most of the Tal Shiar in the same fool's errand that the Obsidian Order perished in, then lost a huge chunk of its fleet in the ensuing war, the entire senate was assassinated in one go by a single intelligence operative, and then they lost a good chunk of their territory to a botched illegal subspace weapons test that destroyed Romulus.  The Klingon Empire wound up taking a beating against the Cardassian Union thanks to Federation intervention, then another one when they declared war on the Federation, then a third beating when they joined with the Federation to fight the Dominion.  The Breen lost a good chunk of their fleet siding with the Dominion.  The Maquis were wiped out by the Dominion.

Voyager stepped in and took a whack at the last credible established antagonist, putting the Borg Collective through a humiliation conga that ended with the near-destruction of the collective, the death of the Borg Queen, and the loss of their transwarp network.  That aside, they encountered and neutered Species 8472, the only other serious threat they encountered.  Everyone else they found was largely outmatched by the technology of a relatively lightly armed Federation science ship.  The Kazon and Vidiians were never a serious threat to a properly equipped ship, and they couldn't find a recurring antagonist after that except the Borg.

The only faction left standing when the dust settled was the Federation, who not only came out with the least casualties in the Dominion War but also beat the Borg and now have future tech toys from Admiral Janeway's temporal shenanigans.  

Who's left, besides the conspirators in the Temporal Cold War plot that Enterprise did such a poor job with?  Most of them are established to be less advanced than the Federation's own Starfleet temporal agents.  Even Future Guy, the Sphere Builders, and the Na'kuhl didn't really have the muscle to match Starfleet.

 

They wrote themselves into a corner, so I wouldn't be opposed to a reboot if it were actually well written.  Discovery... isn't, as far as we can tell.

[Mommar]

I'll still watch the first episode I don't have to pay for just to see what's going on.

[spacemanoeuvres]

On 7/30/2017 at 2:30 AM, Mommar said:

Here's some food for thought.
 

 

ooo lordy, this sounds like it's going to be a hot mess lol

Was planning on skipping entirely it but I may checkout an episode or two out of morbid curiosity 

[Chronocidal]

So, if I read this correctly, what we need to do now is have the entire galaxy overrun by battling swarms of Whale Probes, and Doomsday Machines.

I'm actually rather surprised that with all the universal translation tech that's developed over the years, we never got around to an "I speak whale" moment.

[Seto Kaiba]

19 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

So, if I read this correctly, what we need to do now is have the entire galaxy overrun by battling swarms of Whale Probes, and Doomsday Machines.

I'm actually rather surprised that with all the universal translation tech that's developed over the years, we never got around to an "I speak whale" moment.

Funnily enough... they DID get around to it.  (Just, presumably, not back then.)

Star Trek: the Next Generation had mention in materials provided to its writers that the Galaxy-class's cartographic staff included a pair of orcas and a small pod of dolphins, who were kept in the Cetacean Ops lab in the saucer section.  They were apparently considered full members of the ship's science staff.  (The existence of the lab and the animals in it is mentioned in passing twice in the series, once in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and once in "The Perfect Mate".  It was also in a line in "Relics" that was modified to address the holodeck instead.)

[renegadeleader1]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Funnily enough... they DID get around to it.  (Just, presumably, not back then.)

Star Trek: the Next Generation had mention in materials provided to its writers that the Galaxy-class's cartographic staff included a pair of orcas and a small pod of dolphins, who were kept in the Cetacean Ops lab in the saucer section.  They were apparently considered full members of the ship's science staff.  (The existence of the lab and the animals in it is mentioned in passing twice in the series, once in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and once in "The Perfect Mate".  It was also in a line in "Relics" that was modified to address the holodeck instead.)

God I hope they were kept in seperate tanks. I'd hate to be the officer to explain to Picard why Lt. Shamu ate Ensign Flipper.

[Chronocidal]

Wow.. I kind of had no idea about the CBS/Paramount nonsense.  That's approaching Robotech levels of license shananiganry there, and doesn't speak well for the future of the franchise at all.

[derex3592]

You said it...crazyness.

[Mazinger]

8 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

After Voyager, the TNG movies, and the jumping-off point for the Abrams movies, I'm pretty convinced the Prime continuity is unviable now.  There's no credible antagonist left, which is why it seems like every non-canon Star Trek title seems to think the only recourse is for the Klingons to withdraw from the Khitomer Accords again.

I agree with this.  One of the compelling aspects of other shows more recently, such as Walking Dead, is that they are willing to loose principal characters. Or in the case of Game of Thrones, entire clans.  Trek, while constant putting our heroes in danger, rarely kills them off.  It's a balancing act, to be sure, but if your heroes never loose battles, what is at risk?  You fall into the Doctor Who trap where you know the dreaded Daleks will show up, and just as surely, that the Doctor will defeat them, again and again.

I'm not saying you gotta kill of Indy, or blow up Vulcan, but there has to be real peril, else the Federation is really just leveling up season after season to essentially be the last great super power.  Klingons, Romulans need to have real Pineapple power.

That being said, I don't just want space battle after space battle from my Trek shows.  That isn't what hooked me on Trek as a kid. Sure the season ending cliff-hanger better have plenty of explosions, but what would be the point of 5 year missions if the Enterprises just become prettier Galacticas.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Mazinger said:

I agree with this.  One of the compelling aspects of other shows more recently, such as Walking Dead, is that they are willing to loose principal characters. Or in the case of Game of Thrones, entire clans.  Trek, while constant putting our heroes in danger, rarely kills them off.  It's a balancing act, to be sure, but if your heroes never loose battles, what is at risk?  You fall into the Doctor Who trap where you know the dreaded Daleks will show up, and just as surely, that the Doctor will defeat them, again and again.

I'm not saying you gotta kill of Indy, or blow up Vulcan, but there has to be real peril, else the Federation is really just leveling up season after season to essentially be the last great super power.  Klingons, Romulans need to have real Pineapple power.

An enemy in Star Trek doesn't even necessarily need to be a full-on strategic rival for the United Federation of Planets, a clever or determined foe can do an awful lot... like how the crippled and nearly bankrupt House of Duras managed to bring down Starfleet's flagship with a painfully obsolete D12-class Bird of Prey, or how one traitor managed to help the criminally inept and stupid Kazon seize Voyager.  

Star Trek's prime continuity has just held onto the conflict ball too often, and for too long, and now they don't have a credible antagonist left unless they resort to serial escalation the way those relaunch novels did where desperate writers made a kind of bad guys federation called the Typhon Pact out of all the one-time villains and absent antagonists that've cropped up in previous shows like the Breen, Gorn, Tholians, and Tzenkethi.  Unless they go extragalactic or bring back some vanished power like the Iconians, they're kinda hosed for menace.

 

 

2 hours ago, Mazinger said:

That being said, I don't just want space battle after space battle from my Trek shows.  That isn't what hooked me on Trek as a kid. Sure the season ending cliff-hanger better have plenty of explosions, but what would be the point of 5 year missions if the Enterprises just become prettier Galacticas.

Yeah, for my money that's one of the things that made Enterprise such a bore... for the entire third season exploration, diplomacy, and allegory took a powder so Jonathan Archer and his crew could rampage around the Delphic Expanse with their freshly upgunned NX-class ship to blast the crap out of everyone from the House of Duras to the various flavors of Xindi.  They abandoned the spirit of Star Trek in favor of doing a vaguely Star Trek-themed version of Die Hard complete with Archer dropping the bad guy off a tower at the end.  After that, trying to return to the old Star Trek formula just felt incredibly forced.  Like, OK Captain Archer's murder-tantrum is over now let's get back to space exploration and forget about the people that he marooned in deep space and/or killed.  (Unless, as Daniels suggested, it all un-happened once he killed Vosk and the timeline reset itself.)

[Sildani]

As far as Trek antagonists go, the Gorn should be well-rested.

I'd watch an adaptation of New Frontier, or the Titan novels. Some good stuff in there. 

[Sandman]

I think they could come up a new menace or return an old one to prominence. But I dunno as it looks like a real prime show will be un doable for the foreseeable future, maybe it's best for the prime universe to have finally achieved peace. A good way to end the prime universe. All the work the previous series' protagonists did help usher in an era of peace. 

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, Sildani said:

As far as Trek antagonists go, the Gorn should be well-rested.

Being one-dimensional space dinosaurs, I'll only accept a return from the Gorn if the ambassador to their homeworld is played by Chris Pratt.

 

10 hours ago, Sildani said:

I'd watch an adaptation of New Frontier, or the Titan novels. Some good stuff in there. 

... ... ... please tell me you're joking.

[Dynaman]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Being one-dimensional space dinosaurs, I'll only accept a return from the Gorn if the ambassador to their homeworld is played by Chris Pratt.

 

... ... ... please tell me you're joking.

The Klingons started out as one-dimensional as well, and if their makeup had been as complex as the Gorn they would have only been in one episode (and thus no Day of the Dove for them) too.

[Seto Kaiba]

5 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

The Klingons started out as one-dimensional as well, and if their makeup had been as complex as the Gorn they would have only been in one episode (and thus no Day of the Dove for them) too.

Eh, having read The Making of Star Trek I can attest that the Klingons were never conceived as a one-dimensional antagonist... from the start, they were an allegory for the Russians, while ducking most of the "evil Russians" tropes that normally would make for a one-dimensional antagonist.

[Sandman]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Eh, having read The Making of Star Trek I can attest that the Klingons were never conceived as a one-dimensional antagonist... from the start, they were an allegory for the Russians, while ducking most of the "evil Russians" tropes that normally would make for a one-dimensional antagonist.

Yeah, the Russian allegory was really strong in the TOS movies.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 minutes ago, Sandman said:

Yeah, the Russian allegory was really strong in the TOS movies.

Having grown up with TNG and later shows, I did find it interesting that the Klingons and Romulans seem to have switched stereotype hats in the creators notes around the time TNG got rolling. Roddenberry's notes from TOS describe the Klingons as being the untrustworthy habitual schemers and the Romulans as the mildly admirable honor-obsessed militaristic ones.

Seems like Star Trek III: the Search for Spock was the last hurrah for the underhanded Klingons and from then on it was the Romulans who became the compulsive backstabbers and the Klingons became Mr. Honor-before-Reason.

 

Makes you wonder what's going to be the deal with this new batch of Klingons in Discovery... the released information seems to suggest they're an isolated religious minority in the Klingon Empire like the Klingon pilgrims from the Voyager episode "Prophecy".  Considering the claims that this is modern allegory, that probably won't be anywhere near as benign as the ones in "Prophecy" were.  Since they're trying to upset Klingon tropes, I wonder if this is their return to scheming Klingons?

[Sandman]

Yeah always thought that was weird how Romulans and Klingons switched roles.

If that is true about the discovery Klingons, it mildly makes me feel better about their look. I can swallow it if there is a reason why they look and act differently like being an isolated minority. The Klingons are one of the most unique and iconic alien races out there, to redesign to be so generic looking is a huge misstep IMO. 

[Seto Kaiba]

10 minutes ago, Sandman said:

Yeah always thought that was weird how Romulans and Klingons switched roles.

At least they managed to sell the new Romulans pretty easily... if you want an alien race to seem quietly menacing in a "don't rush me, I'm deciding where the best place to stick the knife" sort of way right away you cast Marc Alaimo as their representative.

 

 

10 minutes ago, Sandman said:

If that is true about the discovery Klingons, it mildly makes me feel better about their look. I can swallow it if there is a reason why they look and act differently like being an isolated minority. The Klingons are one of the most unique and iconic alien races out there, to redesign to be so generic looking is a huge misstep IMO. 

As explanations go, I'm not sure it's really enough to justify the sudden and enormous shift in their overall design aesthetic.  Isolated religious minority or not, these are still supposed to be the Prime continuity's Klingons, so it makes no sense for them to look like a cross between the Kelvin 'verse's Klingons and that complete prat Krall from Star Trek Beyond.  

The different taste in armor and starship designs can be justified easily enough, especially since it's implied by the makeup team that the Discovery Klingons belong to some kind of rogue, isolationist Great House that we've never seen before.  It's been down since about halfway through TNG that the Imperial Klingon Defense Force's procurement isn't through common channels, but rather that the individual Great Houses all maintain their own separate supply chains and shipyards, and they aren't always singing from the same psalter even in starship design.¹  So on that note it's certainly believable that this rogue Klingon group might have its own unique ships and armor.

 

 

Spoiler

1. The Great Houses allegedly all pursue their own particular weapons development programs independently of the IKDF, and the output of that research may or may not make its way into ships built by other Houses.  The two examples that usually come up are General Chang's Bird-of-Prey from Star Trek VI and Chancellor Gowron's Negh'var.

General Chang's Bird-of-Prey is usually described as being a one-of-a-kind prototype developed in secret by Chang's house as a way of explaining why even the Chancellor didn't know about it.  The record is sketchier on why the technology was never applied more widely, with most sources suggesting it was a genuine case of No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup with Chang keeping even the blueprints secret.  The novelization implies the technology was abandoned because it made the ship stupidly vulnerable, since the modification entailed briefly reducing power to the cloaking device and thus temporarily making the ship much more detectable even in silent running mode.

Chancellor Gowron's flagship, the IKS Negh'var is cited as an example of shared developments.  The Negh'var-class was apparently the handiwork of the House of Gowron's shipwrights, and the base design was later shared with the IKDF and other Great Houses.  Martok (well, the real one) was reportedly less than impressed with the class being a slow, ponderous, terribly graceless gunboat.