Star Trek: Discovery

[renegadeleader1]

1 hour ago, Dynaman said:

I was surprised to read somewhere that TAS is canon (had to look up TAS to figure it out too).  Although parts of it can't be - Kzinti, cough cough.

 

The Kzinti got mentioned in Star Trek:Beyond, which means a version of them exists in the main universe.

[Dynaman]

1 hour ago, renegadeleader1 said:

The Kzinti got mentioned in Star Trek:Beyond, which means a version of them exists in the main universe.

I see the Xindi are mentioned, which is the Enterprise arc for a season.  I looked and saw no online mention of the Kzinti however.  They do have the feline species Kirk was with in his room but their species was not mentioned and the one from Star Trek 3 of course.  (Trek 5 too?)

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, Sildani said:

Also, the UFP was in a declared war at the time. Much different than their usual state of being. Perhaps I should have not been so absolute by using “never.” 

The UFP wasn't in a declared war with anyone when the Constitution-class was upgraded to have an automated bridge defense system.

Also, for a nominally non-confrontational galactic power, the United Federation of Planets seems to be at war more often than not.  Just in the overlapping TNG-DS9-VOY era, you had:

• The Cardassian War (2347-2367)
• The Galen Border Conflict (mid-2350s, vs. the Talarians)
• One or more wars with the Tzenkethi (mid-2360s for the most recent)
• The Second Klingon War (2372-2373) 
• The Second Borg Invasion (2373)
• The Dominion War (2373-2375)
• The Borg-8472 War (2374)
• The Reman Invasion (2379)

Precious few were the years when the Federation Starfleet wasn't fighting a war with someone in the galaxy between 2332 and the present day... which gets worse when you factor in events from other sources (the Relaunch timeline):

• The Parasite Crisis (2376)
• The Iconian Gateway Crisis (2376)
• The Tezwa Conflict (2379)
• The Third Borg Invasion (2380)
• The Fourth (and Final) Borg Invasion (2381)
• Skirmishes with every Typhon Pact power (2381-?)

 

11 hours ago, Sildani said:

Is TAS canon though? Really?

2 hours ago, Dynaman said:

I was surprised to read somewhere that TAS is canon (had to look up TAS to figure it out too).  Although parts of it can't be - Kzinti, cough cough.

Paramount abruptly reversed course on Star Trek: the Animated Series around 2004-2005.  Up to that point, the series had been non-canon.  From that point on, it's considered to represent years four and five of the Enterprise's five year mission.

Surely it was only a coincidence that The Powers That Be decided to canonize TAS at exactly the same time they announced plans to release the series on DVD while Star Trek: Enterprise season five development (pre-cancellation) had an episode under development under the working title of "Kilkenny Cats" that featured the Kzinti and was explicitly billed as a prequel to TAS's "The Slaver Weapon".  (The episode proposal got as far as concept art for the 22nd century Kzinti ship when cancellation killed Season Five.)  Yes, surely there was no ulterior motive at play... 

 

 

Spoiler

Admittedly most of the Star Trek: Enterprise Season Five ideas were absolutely awful... so the show's cancellation comes across as a bit of a mercy kill.

It would've been interesting to see the Kzinti as something other than hilariously inept comic relief antagonists, but it would've come at the cost of stories like T'Pol's father turning out to have been a Romulan sleeper agent and a Borg Queen origin story in which it turns out that Queenie's the result of the Borg invasion bootstrap paradox created by First Contact and the ENT episode "Regeneration", originally being an Earth Starfleet medical technician who came into contact with the Borg in "Regeneration".

 

[UN Spacy]

HOLY MOLY

 

 

[UN Spacy]

 

[JB0]

On 6/20/2018 at 10:24 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

Having occurred between 1992 and 1996 doesn't help matters, nor does Voyager having gone back to 1996 and shown things really weren't as bad as Kirk and co. made out.

The eugenics wars are a pretty problematic lump in Star Trek's "timeline", and has been.. well, since the 90s. I'm assuming that some of the time travel shenanigans between Space Seed and now wildly altered the timing and scope of events, since the eugenics wars clearly didn't happen before 2011.

Why 2011? If Enterprise's opening is canon, the ISS is a part of Star Trek history. We can safely assume that an ongoing global war would've disrupted construction of the ISS, even assuming that the space shuttles and Soyuz rockets needed to construct it were still usable*.

And on the other hand the existence of technology on the level of the Botany Bay would've made the ISS hopelessly antiquated, so clearly the ISS wasn't constructed AFTER the Botany Bay left.

THEREFORE, the eugenics wars HAVE to have begun after the ISS was completed.

 

My personal canon benefits from this hypothesis anyways, as my solution to the space shuttle Enterprise existing in Star Trek while being named after Trek's fictional starship, is that in the Trekiverse the test orbiter was named Constitution as originally planned. The space shuttle Enterprise is the Trekiverse name for Challenger's replacement, first flown in 1992 and known as Endeavour in the real world.

 

*Actually, the shuttle mission depicted in Enterprise is from 2010. The Spacehab module only flew to the ISS twice aboard Atlantis. This stupid bit of trivia is brought to you by cross-referencing Memory Alpha with Wikipedia for obsessive levels of detail about real-world events taking place in a fictional universe.

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, JB0 said:

The eugenics wars are a pretty problematic lump in Star Trek's "timeline", and has been.. well, since the 90s. I'm assuming that some of the time travel shenanigans between Space Seed and now wildly altered the timing and scope of events, since the eugenics wars clearly didn't happen before 2011.

9 hours ago, JB0 said:

And on the other hand the existence of technology on the level of the Botany Bay would've made the ISS hopelessly antiquated, so clearly the ISS wasn't constructed AFTER the Botany Bay left.

Thus far, the only semi-official attempt I've seen made at addressing the subject of the Eugenics Wars occurring when they did is in the Relaunch novels Department of Temporal Investigations series.

The Suliban cabal's sponsor, referred to by the DTI as just "the sponsor" until a new recruit starts sardonically referring to him by the ENT production nickname of "Future Guy", figures prominently in the novel Watching the Clock which ties up a number of the loose ends left by the hasty conclusion of the Temporal Cold War arc in Enterprise.  On several occasions, the DTI agents in that novel voice a popular-but-unconfirmed theory the agency has that the Eugenics Wars was a front in the Temporal Cold War.  The theory holds that the unnaturally rapid progression from the discovery of DNA in the 1950s to workable genetic enhancement of human subjects in under twenty years was the influence of an unknown party from the future giving anachronistic technology to Cold War era nations to try to derail humanity's development.  

Spoiler

Late in the novel, a joint effort by the 24th century Department of Temporal Investigations, the 29th century Temporal Integrity Commission, and 31st century Federation Temporal Agency results in the capture of Future Guy and in exchange for his being tried in the more lenient/less draconian 31st century he confesses that a lot of what he'd done was efforts to close a "Spock loop" bootstrap paradox resulting in his own existence.  As a 28th century augment, he communicated back through time to ensure the emergence of the technologies and organizations that would result in his own creation.  He neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the Eugenics Wars, but he did admit to a raft of other cases of introducing anachronistic tech to other worlds.

One of the accompanying revelations is that the Borg didn't assimilate time travel technology from anyone... it was given to them by the Sphere Builders as a last kind of hail mary attempt to prevent their defeat by the Federation in the 26th century.

A related theory that the DTI was able to prove thanks to events that occurred in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's episode "Little Green Men" was that the unusually advanced-for-the-time technology of the DY-100 series sleeper ships was based on technology which the US Government had analyzed when they briefly captured the Ferengi ship Quark's Treasure in Roswell.

 

 

9 hours ago, JB0 said:

Why 2011? If Enterprise's opening is canon, the ISS is a part of Star Trek history. We can safely assume that an ongoing global war would've disrupted construction of the ISS, even assuming that the space shuttles and Soyuz rockets needed to construct it were still usable*.

The ISS is definitely a part of Star Trek's history.  Captain Sisko had a model of it in his ready room on DS9.

It's possible, given the above, that the ISS in the Star Trek universe also contained (and was built with) anachronistically advanced technology.

[Dynaman]

Star Trek's timeline and our real timeline diverged in the late sixties - it is much cleaner to think of it that way.

[JB0]

11 hours ago, Dynaman said:

Star Trek's timeline and our real timeline diverged in the late sixties - it is much cleaner to think of it that way.

It is, but the shows keep dragging stuff from later on in the real world into it. No one ever considered the implications of the ISS existing in Star Trek, they just declared that it does and to hell with consequences.

[lechuck]

Less timeline and more new trailer talk.

From the trailer it seems Season 2 will be more upbeat instead of all scheming and broody.

 

[kajnrig]

"This video is not available."

Someone did not unleak the trailer properly...

[lechuck]

Hmm... weird, it is an official Netflix trailer, mind you for UK and Ireland. Geo-blocking shenanigans for a trailer...

Alternative video:

 

[Dynaman]

I was toying with watching Discovery till I saw that trailer.  The little "joke" at the end and "The power of math" bits are infantile 

[Seto Kaiba]

22 hours ago, Dynaman said:

Star Trek's timeline and our real timeline diverged in the late sixties - it is much cleaner to think of it that way.

AFAIK, the original official stance from Star Trek's creators was originally that the timeline diverged from our own history around the time TOS was being filmed (~1966).  

The original Star Trek series had a few plots that supported that position.  "Assignment: Earth" was one of them, depicting a 1968-era Earth where the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies was either never ratified or never created and where orbital thermonuclear weapons platforms were a thing.  It was later shaded back to the 50's by Enterprise's writers, who put the break in the timeline shortly after the discovery of DNA.

 

11 hours ago, JB0 said:

It is, but the shows keep dragging stuff from later on in the real world into it. No one ever considered the implications of the ISS existing in Star Trek, they just declared that it does and to hell with consequences.

Star Trek is usually pretty firm about the idea that it takes a really significant event to spin a parallel universe off an existing timeline and that some timelines reconverge and branch off multiple times as probabilities converge and diverge.  There's bound to be overlap between Star Trek's later history and ours, but things that happened may not have happened at the same time or the same way.

 

53 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

I was toying with watching Discovery till I saw that trailer.  The little "joke" at the end and "The power of math" bits are infantile 

I was really hoping that Star Trek: Discovery's season season would stop trying to be an action series and settle down into a more credible science fiction offering.  That hope seems to have been dashed, and it looks like we're in for another season of Star Trek written by people who really don't understand Star Trek and wish they were writing Star Wars.

For my money, the worst part of that trailer isn't the juvenile humor.  It's the stupid, spinning one-man bubble pod fighter things.  Is Star Trek so hard up for ways to make Star Trek an action series that it's resorting to stealing designs from the old Lost in Space movie?

I think I'll once again refrain from taking out a CBS All Access membership.  I might pirate the show if there's any real recommendation of Season 2's content, but there's no way I'm supporting this mess financially.

[TangledThorns]

I'd rather watch Orville instead.

 

[JB0]

Yeah, that a MacFarlane parody is more like Trek than the ACTUAL Star Trek show is embarrassing.

[Seto Kaiba]

23 minutes ago, JB0 said:

Yeah, that a MacFarlane parody is more like Trek than the ACTUAL Star Trek show is embarrassing.

Well, that's what happens when you let someone like J.J. Abrams who never understood, and really doesn't like, Star Trek helm a new Star Trek series.

The producers and writers who don't "get" Star Trek will only ever be able to produce a generic sci-fi action series with a thin Star Trek veneer.  For whatever reason, neither J.J. Abrams nor Discovery's producers seem to understand that what made Star Trek a sci-fi classic was that it was a fundamentally optimistic "High Adventure in Space" story.  They're so intent on using space warfare as the quick and easy source of drama in the story that they overlook that it's only one method among many, that it's incredibly overused in American SF, and that NOT being a space warfare story was one of the things that set Star Trek apart.  There were occasional skirmishes, the odd major battle or two like Wolf 359, but they typically ended in both sides walking away or solving the dilemma with a clever trickery.  To make Star Trek work with the kind of space war story they want to tell they have to twist its optimistic setting into a Bad Future where the Federation and its rival powers are more militant, which makes things comically grimdark.

MacFarlane and the various Star Trek fan film makers better understand that Star Trek was about exploration, and that part of what made its stories stand out was that its approach to conflict resolution was conflict avoidance by way of diplomacy or clever trickery rather than brute force.  The Orville gets the "spirit" of Star Trek much more than Star Trek: Discovery does.

[kajnrig]

Is Orville still on? I haven't heard anything about it for a while until just now.

[Focslain]

10 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Is Orville still on? I haven't heard anything about it for a while until just now.

They are working on Season 2 now. So Fall premier I think. 

[peter]

On 7/22/2018 at 10:52 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

I might pirate the show if there's any real recommendation of Season 2's content, but there's no way I'm supporting this mess financially.

I haven't bothered watching any of it yet, but I might do the same.  Curious to see how bad season one is, only because I want to see what's going on with 1701.

[Focslain]

1 hour ago, peter said:

I haven't bothered watching any of it yet, but I might do the same.  Curious to see how bad season one is, only because I want to see what's going on with 1701.

Hate to break it to you, but it was just eye candy and to drop off Pike to the Discovery so he can command it for season two.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, peter said:

I haven't bothered watching any of it yet, but I might do the same.  Curious to see how bad season one is, only because I want to see what's going on with 1701.

Star Trek: Discovery's first season has some very impressive visuals but suffers terribly at the hands of its writers and producers trying to make Star Trek dark and edgy.  

It's fine for characters to have flaws among their character traits, because that gives them something to overcome as they grow and develop and it helps make it easier for the audience to relate to them.  Giving the characters nothing BUT flaws... well, that just makes them unlikeable jerks.  Commander Burnham and the crew of the USS Discovery manage to be so very difficult to like and do so many questionable things that they fall somewhere between "designated hero" and "villain protagonist".  So much so, in fact, that even when the show makes a rather drawn-out detour through the Mirror Universe of Evil Twins the crew's evil alternate selves literally have to resort to onscreen recreational cannibalism to establish that they are, in fact, the (more) evil versions of the characters.

 

 

3 hours ago, Focslain said:

Hate to break it to you, but it was just eye candy and to drop off Pike to the Discovery so he can command it for season two.

Hey, that's still a 100% net increase in the number of functional moral compasses aboard the USS Discovery.

Pike's a stand-up officer with an impeccable record.  He is absolutely slumming it by letting himself be temporarily reassigned to the Discovery.  If it weren't so technologically advanced I'd say it was Star Trek's version of the Soyokaze from Irresponsible Captain Tylor.

[JB0]

15 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Hey, that's still a 100% net increase in the number of functional moral compasses aboard the USS Discovery.

Pike's a stand-up officer with an impeccable record.  He is absolutely slumming it by letting himself be temporarily reassigned to the Discovery

Maybe Starfleet is aware of the problem and he was assigned to turn the ship around(or dump it in the mirror universe so the crew can feel at home)

[Focslain]

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Hey, that's still a 100% net increase in the number of functional moral compasses aboard the USS Discovery.

Pike's a stand-up officer with an impeccable record.  He is absolutely slumming it by letting himself be temporarily reassigned to the Discovery.  If it weren't so technologically advanced I'd say it was Star Trek's version of the Soyokaze from Irresponsible Captain Tylor.

I'll have to keep an ear out on the course S2 takes then, because if they end up pulling a Captain Taylor for this I will sign up for a trail month just to see that.

[Seto Kaiba]

13 hours ago, JB0 said:

Maybe Starfleet is aware of the problem and he was assigned to turn the ship around(or dump it in the mirror universe so the crew can feel at home)

Frankly, the crew of the USS Discovery is just lucky that the Starfleet Command of this time period is run by out-of-touch desk jockeys.  If the brass ever actually looked into Discovery's activities out on the frontier, the whole crew would be clapped in irons and summarily tossed into the prison colony Lorca illegally removed Burnham from...

Spoiler

... for, among other things, grievous and repeated violations of orders, sheltering an enemy spy, and at least one count of attempted genocide.

Come to that, one of the most frustrating things about the writing in Star Trek: Discovery is the way its writers keep making Michael Burnham into a Karma Houdini.  She commits mutiny and assaults a superior officer in order to commit an act of war, and she serves only six months for those crimes before Lorca's jailbreak puts her back in uniform and on the front lines.  She also commits a war crime by boobytrapping a corpse with a photon torpedo warhead in the show's second episode and is never so much as called on it despite the show establishing the Geneva conventions are still in force (boobytrapping a corpse is a violation).  She never catches flak for being intimate with an enemy spy, nor helping a genocidal fascist from the mirror universe impersonate a Starfleet officer (Georgiou, not Lorca), nor for her role in an attempted Klingon genocide. 

Hell, her role in attempted (and very nearly successful) genocide not only doesn't get her punished, she's able to spin it into a presidential pardon, getting her criminal record expunged, the restoration of her rank, and the medal of honor.

Every other character to pull any one of the stunts she pulled would've been the villain in any other Star Trek show.  Hell, her stunt in the first episode was a more extreme version of what Captain Benjamin Maxwell did in TNG, and Maxwell got twenty years in prison after his court martial and dishonorable discharge from Starfleet.  

 

7 minutes ago, Focslain said:

I'll have to keep an ear out on the course S2 takes then, because if they end up pulling a Captain Taylor for this I will sign up for a trail month just to see that.

That might actually make it watchable... so there seems little danger of that.  It wouldn't be nearly gritty enough.

[Thom]

To bad Pike didn't stay on Enterprise and just told Discovery to go back to the barn, holding Enterprise's beer.

[tekering]

26 minutes ago, Thom said:

To bad Pike didn't stay on Enterprise and just told Discovery to go back to the barn, holding Enterprise's beer.

Not possible.  Discovery is a much more important ship than Enterprise.

That's not quite scale-accurate; The Discovery model is 1:3000, and the Enterprise is 1:2500.

So the Enterprise should actually be smaller.  

[Seto Kaiba]

34 minutes ago, tekering said:

That's not quite scale-accurate; The Discovery model is 1:3000, and the Enterprise is 1:2500.

So the Enterprise should actually be smaller.  

That fact alone could well explain why the Federation apparently built so few Crossfield-class ships.  Being so much larger than the Constitution-class would make them more expensive and more time-consuming to build, having a bit more than half the crew of its smaller counterpart probably means more automation is necessary, and apart from the spore drive the Crossfield-class doesn't appear to have better capabilities than the Constitution-class according to official spec.

That beast is 750.5m, vs. the Constitution-class's 289m.

 

I wonder... since the McQuarrie design for the Enterprise was recycled for the Discovery, if this could mean the reused Star Trek: Planet of the Titans that appeared in Star Trek III, TNG's "Unification Part 1", and TNG's "Best of Both Worlds Part 2" are examples of post-refit Crossfield-class ships with the spore drive saucer design stripped out and shorter, more traditional warp nacelles?

[Mommar]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That fact alone could well explain why the Federation apparently built so few Crossfield-class ships.  Being so much larger than the Constitution-class would make them more expensive and more time-consuming to build, having a bit more than half the crew of its smaller counterpart probably means more automation is necessary, and apart from the spore drive the Crossfield-class doesn't appear to have better capabilities than the Constitution-class according to official spec.

That beast is 750.5m, vs. the Constitution-class's 289m.

 

I wonder... since the McQuarrie design for the Enterprise was recycled for the Discovery, if this could mean the reused Star Trek: Planet of the Titans that appeared in Star Trek III, TNG's "Unification Part 1", and TNG's "Best of Both Worlds Part 2" are examples of post-refit Crossfield-class ships with the spore drive saucer design stripped out and shorter, more traditional warp nacelles?

Except the guys at Trekyards did scaling for every ship from discovery and ALL of them are oversized, even the new Enterprise is larger than the Enterprise.  Their scaling is just JJ levels of wrong.

[Thom]

7 hours ago, tekering said:

Not possible.  Discovery is a much more important ship than Enterprise.

That's not quite scale-accurate; The Discovery model is 1:3000, and the Enterprise is 1:2500.

So the Enterprise should actually be smaller.  

I know, Discovery is the 'hero' ship. It would be like Admiral Adama choosing to save the Pegasus as his flagship over the Galactica. 

I would also counter that Enterprise is faaar more important than Discovery ever will be.

But maybe I'm just old school Trek and would choose the Enterprise over the Disc. Plus, it's still just so butt ugly!

Edited July 26, 2018 by Thom

[pengbuzz]

10 minutes ago, Thom said:

I know, Discovery is the 'hero' ship. It would be like Admiral Adama choosing to save the Pegasus as his flagship over the Galactica. 

I would also counter that Enterprise is faaar more important than Discovery ever will be.

But maybe I'm just old school Trek and would choose the Enterprise over the Disc. Plus, it's still just so butt ugly!

Frankly. the Discovery looks like a hood ornament attached to someone's partially disassembled hard drive.

[SMS007]

6 hours ago, Mommar said:

Their scaling is just JJ levels of wrong.

Ugh. Every time I think about that sheer bit of stupidity in the 2009 movie, I shudder. 

[Keith]

3 hours ago, Thom said:

I know, Discovery is the 'hero' ship. It would be like Admiral Adama choosing to save the Pegasus as his flagship over the Galactica. 

I would also counter that Enterprise is faaar more important than Discovery ever will be.

But maybe I'm just old school Trek and would choose the Enterprise over the Disc. Plus, it's still just so butt ugly!

To be fair, Adama "should" have chosen to save the Pegasus, it had onboard Viper factories, a lot more room (which would have saved the crew for sardine conditions). Most importantly, the Pegasus wouldn't have had a jump fatigued hull.

[tekering]

4 hours ago, Thom said:

I would also counter that Enterprise is faaar more important than Discovery ever will be.

In Star Trek lore, of course.  But in universe, the Enterprise is a much lower priority for Starfleet.

4 hours ago, Thom said:

Plus, it's still just so butt ugly!

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Frankly. the Discovery looks like a hood ornament attached to someone's partially disassembled hard drive.

It's a poor design based on a poor design, and one of my least-favorite starships...

...but Eaglemoss did a terrific job with their reproduction.

(Ever-present QC issues aside, of course.)

And it's completely out of scale with the Shenzhou, because Eaglemoss.

But, since their only competition to date is the $9000 ANOVOS model, we can't really complain.  

[JB0]

On 7/24/2018 at 9:26 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

Frankly, the crew of the USS Discovery is just lucky that the Starfleet Command of this time period is run by out-of-touch desk jockeys.  If the brass ever actually looked into Discovery's activities out on the frontier, the whole crew would be clapped in irons and summarily tossed into the prison colony Lorca illegally removed Burnham from...

  Reveal hidden contents

... for, among other things, grievous and repeated violations of orders, sheltering an enemy spy, and at least one count of attempted genocide.

Come to that, one of the most frustrating things about the writing in Star Trek: Discovery is the way its writers keep making Michael Burnham into a Karma Houdini.  She commits mutiny and assaults a superior officer in order to commit an act of war, and she serves only six months for those crimes before Lorca's jailbreak puts her back in uniform and on the front lines.  She also commits a war crime by boobytrapping a corpse with a photon torpedo warhead in the show's second episode and is never so much as called on it despite the show establishing the Geneva conventions are still in force (boobytrapping a corpse is a violation).  She never catches flak for being intimate with an enemy spy, nor helping a genocidal fascist from the mirror universe impersonate a Starfleet officer (Georgiou, not Lorca), nor for her role in an attempted Klingon genocide. 

Hell, her role in attempted (and very nearly successful) genocide not only doesn't get her punished, she's able to spin it into a presidential pardon, getting her criminal record expunged, the restoration of her rank, and the medal of honor.

Every other character to pull any one of the stunts she pulled would've been the villain in any other Star Trek show.  Hell, her stunt in the first episode was a more extreme version of what Captain Benjamin Maxwell did in TNG, and Maxwell got twenty years in prison after his court martial and dishonorable discharge from Starfleet.  

 

Okay, yeah. Pike DEFINITELY needs to dump the entire crew in the mirror universe and just call it a wash. The Terran Empire will doubtless be glad to see them.