Big s Posted February 4 Posted February 4 13 minutes ago, pengbuzz said: Yeah; I just figure why waste energy and resources on changing excess air back when it isn't needed? Yeah, I’m not that familiar with how all the tech in modern star trek works, I just figured that by that point in the future there might be an almost natural way to do it. They need food, so carbon helps the plants and the plants change the atmosphere automatically or something along those lines and more efficient than a modern concept and not really sucking up extra energy. But like I said, I’m not really familiar with how their tech works and haven’t really watched any trek shows religiously since next generation Quote
sketchley Posted February 4 Posted February 4 (edited) 10 hours ago, pengbuzz said: I remember in Star Trek III the size of the Excelsior's bridge, and how by the time we see it under Sulu's command in Star Trek VI, the bridge module had been replaced with one that was much more on-par with the ones we had seen previously. The reason I'm focusing so much on this part is that from an ergonomic viewpoint, such a cavernous bridge is going to cause a great many issues with operating as the nerve center of a starship. For one thing: on previous bridges, people were well within earshot of one another, and in proximity to the captain's chair. They could clearly hear one another without having to strain or ask people to repeat themselves, and they didn't have to raise the voices to be heard (unless they were in battle and noise on the bridge made communication difficult). On the Athena's bridge, I can just imagine hearing "WHAT??!!" constantly (among other things), and folks asking one another to repeat themselves. Another is the necessity of personnel moving from one bridge station to another. Especially in combat, you don't want to take any more time to get to a console than necessary. We've seen many times where someone at another station has had to take over for an injured/ incapacitated crewmember, let alone getting medical aid to them. While it may be only a matter of a few more moments, we've seen that seconds can count in these situations And if the bridge is that big, then how large is the engineering bay? Is it so big that the time needed to cross from one station to another becomes ridiculous? When a designer makes something so big on the inside that you could time how long it takes to cross it with a calendar, maybe it's time to sit down with them and discuss a potentially more fulfilling career other than starship design. Finally: larger spaces require more energy, more atmospheric components, and more maintenance. We're not just talking power for lights and consoles, but SIF/IDF reinforcement energies, gravity control, atmospheric consumables delivery systems and CO2 scrubbing mechanisms, and heating/cooling power. A larger area is going to take more of everything. I know some of these issues may seem minor, but they add up to a considerable ding in the energy budget of a starship, as well as maintenance/ repair and practicality overall. I'm sure also these aren't the only issues; just the ones I could think of. Thoughts? You've made excellent points. It makes no sense—especially compared to the bridges and command centres in modern naval vessels. It also lends credence to an earlier post about the bridge being a redressing of a large set that is (or was) also being used as a large room. That, or they wanted plenty of space between the work stations to set up and move the cameras around while filming! 🤷♂️ The only other cavernous command centre in live-action that comes to mind is the control room in the film "Elysium". It's very dark, and has multiple levels, but that may be stylistic choices to emphasize the villain on her throne, so to speak. The plants are a nice touch, and all the underlings have radio earbuds to facilitate communication. Around 2:12 Edited February 4 by sketchley Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 4 Posted February 4 10 hours ago, pengbuzz said: I remember in Star Trek III the size of the Excelsior's bridge, and how by the time we see it under Sulu's command in Star Trek VI, the bridge module had been replaced with one that was much more on-par with the ones we had seen previously. The bridge module Excelsior had as a transwarp system testbed wasn't that much bigger than post-commissioning bridge it entered fleet service with. Of course, it also makes sense for a testbed starship to have extra stations on the bridge to monitor all of its various systems during testing. (Though it actually had fewer people stationed on it than the fleet service version did. NX-2000 Excelsior's bridge seated 13, the service version had 17.) 10 hours ago, pengbuzz said: The reason I'm focusing so much on this part is that from an ergonomic viewpoint, such a cavernous bridge is going to cause a great many issues with operating as the nerve center of a starship. For one thing: on previous bridges, people were well within earshot of one another, and in proximity to the captain's chair. They could clearly hear one another without having to strain or ask people to repeat themselves, and they didn't have to raise the voices to be heard (unless they were in battle and noise on the bridge made communication difficult). On the Athena's bridge, I can just imagine hearing "WHAT??!!" constantly (among other things), and folks asking one another to repeat themselves. Another is the necessity of personnel moving from one bridge station to another. Especially in combat, you don't want to take any more time to get to a console than necessary. We've seen many times where someone at another station has had to take over for an injured/ incapacitated crewmember, let alone getting medical aid to them. While it may be only a matter of a few more moments, we've seen that seconds can count in these situations And if the bridge is that big, then how large is the engineering bay? Is it so big that the time needed to cross from one station to another becomes ridiculous? It took me a bit to figure out why the Academy-class starship's bridge feels so uselessly huge. It was so stupidly obvious I can't believe that I missed it. Look at the walls. Up to now, almost every Starfleet starship bridge we've seen has been liberally festooned with consoles around the outer perimeter of the room. This goes all the way back to the TOS-era Enterprise where every inch of wall that wasn't the viewscreen or turbolift door was occupied by a console of some description. This tendency was carried over into TMP's refit, and from there into practically every other Federation starship design. There are a handful of exceptions like the Ambassador, Galaxy, and Olympia-classes that put most of their consoles across the rear 90 degrees or so of the bridge, but practically every Federation starship before or since has positively ringed the bridge with consoles. What's different in the Academy-class USS Athena is that the bridge is still practically a ring of consoles... but the walls have moved outward 6-10 feet on each side, leaving all the previously wall-mounted consoles freestanding in the middle of the room. The actual bridge is an island sitting in the middle of Deck 1, with a huge walkway around it like it's a zen garden in a Japanese estate. Instead of wall mounted consoles, the bridge seems to have five viewscreens around almost the entire perimeter of the room. The one mounted starboard aft seems to be pulling similar duty to the big Master Systems Displays on older starships, while the others don't seem to be being used for anything. So there's just this massive ring of NOTHING around the actual bridge... and because they're using holo-comms instead of the viewscreen, the actual viewscreen is pretty much surplus to requirements 90% of the time. 10 hours ago, pengbuzz said: Finally: larger spaces require more energy, more atmospheric components, and more maintenance. We're not just talking power for lights and consoles, but SIF/IDF reinforcement energies, gravity control, atmospheric consumables delivery systems and CO2 scrubbing mechanisms, and heating/cooling power. A larger area is going to take more of everything. All things considered, I'd assume that's a negligible concern at worst. After all, in the 32nd century Starfleet ships have clearly advanced considerably from the 23rd and 24th century designs we know. They've been able to delegate a lot of repair and maintenance work to autonomous robots, they've made programmable nanotechnology a core feature of almost every part of a ship's structure down to things as mundane as the crew quarters furniture, replicators have been commonplace for almost a millennium, and surely they've improved the output and efficiency of things like the impulse reactors and warp core in the intervening centuries. The Athena has, by any reckoning, at least two warp cores and possibly more than that depending on how "disconnected nacelles" work... given that we've seen that at the very least the Saucer section is capable of independent warp travel without the nacelles or engineering section. If they've gone all the way back towards early TOS explanations, the Academy-class may well be able to lean on THREE warp cores worth of output to provide for its energy needs. (Which makes Braka's attempt to steal one of them feel less like a major crime and more like pickpocketing.) Shipwide holograms have been something ships could manage on the energy budget of the late 24th century, so that's clearly no problem. (Back before the "warp core" was invented as a concept, TOS Main Engineering was the impulse reactor room at the back of the saucer section and the warp drive's power system was inside the nacelles themselves. The whole reasoning behind the nacelles being a thing was that any power source potent enough to warp space and time must be radioactive AF, and thus should be kept away from inhabited sections of the ship and be jettisoned if needed. If the nacelles are powered individually like that, and the saucer has its own warp drive as we saw recently, that's 3 warp cores if we assume the secondary hull lacks one or at least two if they're doing things the newer way.) They've got enough spare juice kicking around to give everyone a personal transporter and tricorder built into their commbadge and officers on space stations are shown literally unmaking the bed at the molecular level each morning. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 6 Posted February 6 2 hours ago, pengbuzz said: No, but they did scale it back down regardless and I suspect it was because the ergonomics the classic bridge setup possesses begins to lose cohesion with larger spaces. I'm not sure that necessarily even implies anything. After all, the Excelsior's prototype-era bridge wasn't that much bigger than the regular Constitution-class refit bridge of the era or many of the more modern bridge designs that would follow and Starfleet ships of that era seem to swap out bridge modules with a fairly high frequency. (This, of course, being an in-universe justification for having struck sets, redressed or modified sets to the point of being unable to revert them, or simply built more advanced sets to replace the ones previously used.) Spoiler For example, the Enterprise-A's bridge we see at the end of Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home is a fairly simple redress of the refit Enterprise bridge set used in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock. The refit Enterprise bridge and other surviving sets were subsequently redressed and reused in multiple other capacities in Star Trek: the Next Generation. So much so that they could not be returned to their original form and new sets had to be constructed for Star Trek V: the Final Frontier. The Enterprise-A's new bridge set for Star Trek V: the Final Frontier was a more modern design that included gimbals allowing the set to be physically shaken instead of relying on shaking the camera, and that new bridge set would be redressed twice for use as the bridge of the Enterprise-A and the Excelsior in Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country. (The weird little pedestal at the foot of Kirk's chair and the tea table in front of Sulu's are both covers for the bridge set's primary pivot.) The change in the bridge design may have nothing whatsoever to do with ergonomics and simply reflect whatever Starfleet settled on as a standard operational design or include some unspecified modernizations. 2 hours ago, pengbuzz said: While all that may be true, it still expends fuel (deuterium/ antideuterium) which is extra mass they must carry (the old conundrum more mass= more fuel= more mass). I'm not saying it'll "make or break the ship" per se, but that the thinking behind this is not solid by any measure and lacks the fairly tight economy of some previous starships. True, but at the same time it's also true that fuel has never really been a concern for Starfleet ships in normal operations in Star Trek's various series and movies. Fuel concerns only ever really come up prominently in Voyager and Enterprise. In both cases, those are stories depicting a Starfleet ship ill-equipped for its current situation that is operating many months or years away from the nearest friendly ship or starbase that might be able to replenish its stores. Mind you, it's worth noting that in both of chose cases it's also true that the entire plot hinges on a critical research failure. It's always deuterium they're running out of, and while deuterium is rare relative to elemental hydrogen it's simply not that rare. Spoiler It accounts for about 0.02% of all hydrogen on Earth. Replenishing deuterium stocks should be laughably easy for a starship. Not only can deuterium be had in abundance in ordinary water found on planets or in comets, it can also be obtained in large quantities in nebular gases. It's just a matter of collecting up semiheavy water and/or hydrogen deuteride and separating it... which we can do easily with today's technology. At no point should running out of deuterium ever be a concern for a starship. Previous writers understood this point. So much so that every single Federation starship we've yet seen has been equipped with a system for collecting usable particles like deuterium from space as the ship travels. That's the Bussard collectors. The glowing red bits on the front of the warp nacelles. They're giant magnetic field projectors that hoover up hydrogen and deuterium and other things that can be converted into fuel or used elsewhere in the starship as it goes. Anti-deuterium, however... that should be what they're worrying about. You can't just rock up to any planet or moon with water and expect to find THAT. You have to MAKE that in a particle accelerator. Of course this setting has room-temperature superconductors and reactors that produce tens of billions of gigawatts of power so it probably is not THAT hard for them. (Technical manuals suggest that Federation Starships are absolutely equipped to manufacture their own antimatter if need be, but it's not anything like as efficient as the passively-powered systems used by Federation fuel depots.) The implication going back as far as TOS - and explicitly confirmed in the tech manuals and some onscreen okudagrams - is that a Federation starship typically carries enough fuel to operate away from base for months if not years. Even the Danube-class runabout in TNG "Timescape" is said to have enough fuel for a month and a half (over 47 days) for each engine. And given that mass does not impact acceleration or flight performance for these starships due to the way they get around by bending space-time and the amount of other stuff they're carrying, a bit more fuel mass seems like a negligible concern at best. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 6 Posted February 6 (edited) New episode's out. "Series Acclimation Mil". Guess we're getting a Sam-focused episode. Spoiler And we are not off to a great start as someone (implicitly Sam) is doodling on the episode credits in pink marker with handwriting appropriate for a small child. We get one interesting piece of trivia out of the opening narration. "In the last thousand years, the Federation has encountered 4,633 sentient species." The episode opens with Sam narrating over herself walking through a corridor on the USS Athena, and I am once again struck by the thought... Does nobody go to class at this Starfleet Academy? This whole scene is shot the same way you'd shoot a scene of someone walking down the hall of a high school on the way to their locker between classes. Complete with some very modern, very out-of-place pop music. There's also a lot of that same "scene from a college applications brochure" going on. We see a group of girls sitting and chatting by a sofa, with half of them sitting on the floor for some reason. They've carrying potted plants around with them. There's a bunch of students wearing totally unmodified modern backpacks looking as out of place as you'd expect on a spaceship 1,000 years into the future. A bunch of other students are carrying rolled-up yoga mats for reasons unclear. There's a bunch of cadets holding sports equipment too, including several basketballs. Spoiler This shot was probably pretty damned expensive, considering how many aliens are in it. Several of whom are in HEAVY prosthetic makeup too. All so Kerrice Brooks's character can walk towards the camera and point out that there's only one of her, and then introduce herself. Was a dance segment with a hip-hop beat really required here? Sure, Kerrice Brooks is a black actress but is there a reason to treat Series Acclimation Mil like a stereotypical token black character on a sitcom? She's playing a sentient hologram from a planet populated by AIs who haven't seen a human in generations. It feels weird in a subtly racist way, like how they had to make Michael Burnham an ex-convict. There's another easter egg or two in her introduction. When she introduces her homeworld of Kasq, the other worlds listed in the "Holo Matrix Specs" dropdown menu that shows up on the right side of the screen are: Earth, Vulcan (not Ni'Var!), Orion, Denoblia (misspelled Denobula!), Andoria, Bajor, Delta, Ferengar (misspelled Ferenginar?), Hirogen Prime, Kazon Prime, Risa, and Betazed. Most of those were already Federation members or, in the case of Ferenginar, in the process of applying to join the Federation as far back as 2381 (LDS: "Parth Ferengi's Heart Place")... but the implication that somewhere along the way the Hirogen and Kazon got their sh*t together enough to join the Federation is WAY more interesting than whatever's going on here. Spoiler What I'm not going to do is knock the explanation by Sam that she is an artificial lifeform with a holographic body. That's needed context for any new viewers who might not have seen Star Trek: Voyager which piloted referring to self-aware holograms as "Photonics". ... ... ... Wait a ding-dang minute... I have an insane idea. Are the Kasqians leftover sentient holograms from the whole "Voyager gave the Hirogen holodeck technology so they'd F off" situation? If so, that sh*t is WILD and I am here for it. Sam is apparently just 217 days old at the time of this story. And we're treated to a rather cringeworthy montage of her various nicknames bestowed by other cadets. Honestly though, what's worse is the constant condescending childishness of her explanation. She has to explain, via infographics with childish handwriting, that she's meant to be her people's emissary to the Federation... which makes her a diplomat and is therefore a "big job". The audience aren't Pakleds, please assume a bit more intelligence than that. OK, having looked at the daily news some audience members might be Pakleds but let's assume they're at least more intelligent than the average Pakled. The idea of a sentient AI needing to explain organic behavior to her creators is itself a fascinating premise I hope they actually DO something with. Sadly, it seems to be limited to explaining basic biology, the very concept of Starfleet, and pranks? Spoiler We're treated to Darem being cajoled into eating a "weird hash" composed of chicken, bananas, and "yeel pudding". You are NOT hurting my feelings with the constant lore dumps though. Spoiler Darem's profile gets thrown up onscreen... but it seems to contain at least one error. According to this, Darem REymi is a science major... but his unform trim is command red. We learn that he was born on Stardate 851095.82, that he graduated from Khionian Royal High on Stardate 868490.0, and that he is actually allegedly the kind of elite student you'd expect at Starfleet Academy with academic distinctions in mathematics, physics, and biology, that he's been commended by the Khionian government for his volunteer work, and that he received glowing letters of recommendation from various educators and government officials on his homeworld when he applied to the Academy. It also shows his true appearance, a blue barmy fish man. We even get a scientific explanation for why he hates bananas.... and weirder still, it's scientifically sound. His body produces polyphenol oxidase as a part of its digestive process, the compound that causes bananas to go all brown and mushy. Basically, they rot as soon as he puts them in his mouth... which would make anyone dislike them I suppose. That his species vomit is glitter is less scientific. We get to see a Kasqian in its "natural" state... which is a wholly non-humanoid mess of energy strands that hovers in the middle of the room. (One has to wonder why Sam is taking personal calls in the middle of the atrium instead of in her quarters, but whatever.) Spoiler Nosy buggers, apparently They interrogate her weekly about all manner of nonsense. Lately, her music elective. Her choice of instrument is apparently a theremin? I guess that's fair. I'd be asking questions about that too. Apparently it appeals to her because of its unique electromagnetic operation. We learn that Kasqians were created as non-sentient holographic servants who gradually developed sentience after their creators disappeared. The reason Sam exists is the Kasqians are both intensely curious about the rest of the galaxy and deathly afraid of being enslaved. More childish generic school drama antics ensue... like a "turf war" over the atrium between the War College and Academy... incited because the War College is now forced to use the Academy's classrooms due to the "stupid talking plants" infesting the war college grounds. Honestly, viewing it through the warped lens of a not-all-there AI attempting to understand and, worse, explain Human behavior to another AI that has never even seen humans does make the show's rampant stupidity a bit easier to tolerate. Played for laughs in Sam's observations of Caleb lusting over the Betazoid president's daughter still. Sam has a great deal of that early TNG Data level bluntness going on... but it doesn't land quite as effectively without the studied neutrality of Data's every remark. Sam is... too human? Spoiler That an eavesdropping Orion cadet leans in for a sniff when Sam raises the subject of pheromones is, I'll admit, a little bit funny. They got a chuckle out of me with that one. I guess his would be a nose that knows. Really getting a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy vibe from this episode, and the Kasqians in particular. Particularly its fondness for overlaying infographics and emojis. The seminar for "Confronting the Unexplainable" has a bunch of easter eggs hiding in it too. The Guardian of Forever is one of the items on display. Another is the Ben Sisko thing from the series teaser trailer. The class is taught by a new character played by Tawny Newsome (LDS: Beckett Mariner). Spoiler She's playing a Cardassian Starfleet officer named Illa, who runs the Confronting the Unexplainable seminar that Sam's creators have ordered her to take. Sam clearly does not get the point of the class, but selects Ben Sisko as her midterm project because she's never met another emissary before. Apparently even now, eight centuries after the fact, the Bajorans still haven't made peace with the fact that Ben Sisko thought the emissary role was bullsh*t for most of his time in their space and venerate him as one of the Prophets now. Spoiler The Academy conveniently has a "Bajor club". Which seems to be either a religious outreach program or just straight-up a Bajoran church group. Sam walks in and immediately dismisses their religious belief as nonsense, asking for something more solid as proof. This, in an unusual bout of realism, gets her sent to the chancellor's office for discipline and Captain Ake tries to actually explain the situation properly for once. Apparently Sisko's so venerated on Bajor they don't even allow art of him as a person... saying he's transcended humanoid form. There's apparently even a museum dedicated to him in New Orleans. Kelrec, meanwhile, is diverting power from the Academy to heat the ocean for an incoming diplomatic visit that he's freaking out over because he's desperate to make a good impression. Ake strikes a bargain to help him with his diplomatic event if he stops screwing around with the Academy's power systems. Sam loads up the Sisko Museum's digital collection... which is replete with more easter eggs and callbacks. We see several promotional photos from DS9 including the station itself, the Defiant, the sign for Sisko's Creole Kitchen in New Orleans, the inside of the Bajoran wormhome, a baseball, glove, and cap with the "Niners" logo, the Orb of the Emissary, a typewriter (presumably Benny Russel's?), and some other odds and ends. She tries talking the Orb of the Emissary's hologram for some reason. We also get to see a geneology of the Sisko family that mentions, prominently, the Siskos seen in DS9 including Sarah, Jennifer, his father Joseph, and son Jake. We get to see an archival hologram of an interview with a grown-up Jake Sisko (role reprised by original actor Cirroc Lofton). Sisko's child with his second wife Kassidy is conspicuously missing. The idea of a Cardassian Starfleet officer with strongly held opinions on the subject of tomato in gumbo recipes is... something. Sam is winning points with me for being mildly put off by the idea of just biting into a raw tomato like it's an apple despite being a noncorporeal piece of software that does not eat. A tomato is not a handfruit, people! The line must be drawn here! This far! And no further!😅 Spoiler Honestly, for an episode that is leaning as hard as it is on the borrowed gloss of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and infamous foodie Benjamin Lafayette Sisko, it is surprising that nobody has made a jab about replicator food. He and his father started that whole thing about how replicated food doesn't taste good/right. Well, them and Michael Eddington. Sisko was a food snob raised by a chef and Eddington was a Maquis luddite, but people just ran with the idea that "Replicated food = bad" for some reason even though TNG always presented replicated food as actually quite good (like that one alcoholic from the 21st century who praised the replicator martini as the best he's ever had, or Troi's adoration of replicator ice cream). The cadets seem to quite enjoy the replicated Creole cooking. It's somehow unsurprising that Kraag is thrilled to no end to have spicy food. They got another chuckle out of me with Kraag very enthusiastically noting that raktajino is a Klingon drink... and then very diplomatically noting that Sam's attempt at it is "horrendous" but that he respects her for trying. Reymi found a bar where Sisko allegedly got punched by a Vulcan. Five'll get you twenty that was Solok. Apparently the original bar "The Landing Pad" is long gone but there is another standing on the same site that is effective its successor. So they're going drinking. Honestly, the less we have of Captain Ake and the professors in this series the better it seems to get. Which is funny, given that they were leaning REALLY hard on having the Doctor, Jett Reno, etc. as a main draw for the series. Spoiler Back to Captain Ake's barely-there B-plot, they're practicing some kind of ceremonial dinner that seems to involve small megaphones and something that looks a bit like a blobfish. This scene is a bit cringe... because it's basically off-brand Arnold Rimmer and three characters who are all trying to be funny but doing a very poor job of it. That that scene doesn't last long is a mercy. Bad decisions seems to be a theme here... Spoiler A sentient hologram letting someone as irresponsible as Caleb tamper with their settings is UP THERE. Her little menu of "PSYCHOTROPIC SIMS" includes alcohol, cannabis, heroin, GHB, ketamine, morphine, and codeine. WHAT. The alcohol menu goes down into beers, wines, ciders and spirits, and lists some methods of serving vodka including "vapor" and "hypospray". Who TF is out here INJECTING vodka? I'm pretty sure even the Russians consider that sacrilege or some kind of capital crime. Caleb has given her the ability to simulate inebriation. She immediately gets wasted. As in, she gives herself the digital equivalent of twelve shots of vodka in a matter of a second or so and immediately collapses. More turf war with the war college at a really tacky bar, and a wasted hologram trying to give Caleb romantic advice. Kraag and one of the War College students seem to be hitting it off, though. The B-plot rears its ugly head again at that point... feeling increasingly like Kelrec is being pranked, and even Reno seems put off... Spoiler ... until the horrid blobfish deflates with a noise like a squeaky fart, leaving everyone cracking up except Kelrec who now thinks he's being made fun of. Kelrec unexpectedly gets serious. It seems the reason he doesn't like her is he feels she abandoned Starfleet. Sam is having a drunken epiphany while semiconscious on the bar while the bar owner is being extremely patient for someone who dresses like Boy George. Honestly, if Sam wants to slug the annoying Romulan war college girl I am here for it. Now it's a bar fight. The Doctor seems to be very very bitter about having outlived his friends and colleagues on Voyager. Once again, the feet thing. I keep having to check and see if Quentin Tarantino has died, because he seems to be haunting this series. Spoiler So, it turns out that the Cardassian instructor Illa has Jake's finished but unpublished book about his father. Sam gets to have an extended (imaginary) conversation with Jake Sisko about her role as Kasq's emissary to the Federation. Weird that we keep failing to acknowledge that Jake has a half-brother though. Tawny Newsome's character Illa is actually a Cardassian-Trill hybrid and the current host of the Dax symbiont. They go out on a monologue from Ben Sisko (preexisting audio from something he did ages ago) and the DS9 theme. All in all, not a bad episode despite a rough start... it feels like the writers are gradually inching closer to understanding what Star Trek is. This one just leans way too heavily on the DS9 references to be accessible to a new viewer and doesn't go far enough into them to have much for the long-time fan. Edited February 6 by Seto Kaiba Quote
Big s Posted February 6 Posted February 6 7 hours ago, pengbuzz said: . But perhaps I'm just getting too wound up in the details here, so I think I'm just going to let this go. Haven’t watched the show and probably won’t start, but since they seem to be training, is it possible the bridge is designed bigger to allow for multiple students at some point to view what is going on at certain stations? Been too busy watching old episodes of Sledgehammer and Dark Place that are fun than to start hate watching a new show Quote
JB0 Posted February 6 Posted February 6 6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said: The Doctor seems to be very very bitter about having outlived his friends and colleagues on Voyager. Awwww. : ( I suppose it is inevitable as a near-immortal machine intelligence that he'd have far too much experience with loss, but... frownie-face. I hope they reference the OTHER Doctor at some point. The lost backup EMH has been stuck in my head for years now. I want to know if he made it back to Federation space, and when. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 6 Posted February 6 9 hours ago, Big s said: Haven’t watched the show and probably won’t start, but since they seem to be training, is it possible the bridge is designed bigger to allow for multiple students at some point to view what is going on at certain stations? I've seen a number of people raise that hypothesis in various corners. If that is the case, the bridge does not seem well laid-out for it. The students would be stuck standing around the perimeter of the room watching the bridge officers from the outside. Ordinarily, if you were going to do a training cruise you'd have either: Small groups of cadets shadowing officers in the course of normal duties aboard a ship during routine operations (e.g. the cadets on the USS Enterprise in Star Trek II or Red Squad on the USS Valiant in DS9 "Valiant"). A larger group of cadets crewing an old, decommissioned ship under the supervision of an experienced commander and team of instructors (e.g. Pike's final training cruise on that J-class freighter or Picard's first training cruise on the decommissioned USS Leondegrance.) 9 hours ago, Big s said: Been too busy watching old episodes of Sledgehammer and Dark Place that are fun than to start hate watching a new show Honestly? This series isn't bad enough to merit calling it a "hate watch". The first episode is a train wreck and the second episode is a real stinker, but it's actually getting noticeably less shite with each episode. The Klingon episode could even be called "almost Star Trek". If this trajectory continues it might actually be good by the end of the first season. Quality-wise, we're basically watching the series crawl out of the wreckage of its first two episodes and start staggering to its feet. It remains to be seen if it'll finish up by walking away from a sick explosion without looking back or if it'll just catch a bit of errant shrapnel in the back of the head and fall over again without any dignity. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 6 Posted February 6 7 hours ago, JB0 said: Awwww. : ( I suppose it is inevitable as a near-immortal machine intelligence that he'd have far too much experience with loss, but... frownie-face. IMO, it's surprising that he's still around at all given that his matrix was falling apart due to excessive data input after just a few years in service in Voyager. His design lifespan (per VOY "The Swarm") was 1,500 hours. 62.5 continuous days of operation. He started to break down after about 2 years of on-and-off service (substantially less than 17,500 hours) and was band-aided back into service using the matrix of a diagnostic hologram meant to provide field service for him. But now he's been online continuously for over 7 million hours. Over 4,666 times his design lifespan. How his software even works with modern technology is a mystery and why they'd keep him around to teach anything is a mystery since his program has been outdated for 821 of his 824 years of service. It's like learning medicine from someone who was a practicing doctor in 1205. (Fodder for snide jokes like Spock's calling McCoy's medical tools "beads and rattles".) 7 hours ago, JB0 said: I hope they reference the OTHER Doctor at some point. The lost backup EMH has been stuck in my head for years now. I want to know if he made it back to Federation space, and when. Considering they've un-personed Benjamin Sisko's extremely important-to-his-fate child by his second wife, I'd expect the Doctor's backup will be completely forgotten. Then again, of all the possible scenarios there's a strong possibility that he may not have even left for Federation space yet at the time of Starfleet Academy. Spoilered, because I am about to overanalyze the **** out of this in my habitual manner. Spoiler In VOY "Living Witness", the backup!Doctor was reactivated approximately 700 years after Voyager's encounter with the Kyrians and Vaskans in 2374. That puts his reactivation circa 3074, though we don't know the error bars on that one. After he set the record straight on the whole incident in 2374, he supposedly hung around promoting unity and equality on their planet for years and eventually became their Surgical Chancellor for "many years" after Quarren's death six years later (c.3080?). So if we assume he was inactive in that backup module for 700 years on the nose then he was reactivated about 5 years post-Burn in 3074. He then hung around in that old museum setting the record straight for a further 6 or so years until Quarren died (c.3080) before going on to spend an unspecified but long period unifying their government and serving as its surgical chancellor before deciding to go home in a "small craft". Starfleet Academy, for its part, is set 125 years after the Burn... putting its events in 3194-3195. About 115 years after the Doctor essentially gained autonomy on the Kyrian-Vaskan homeworld. He's functionally immortal (if their holo-tech is any good) so he could potentially still be there in 3195. 115 years is certainly "many", but it's also still a single Human lifespan by Star Trek standards. If the backup!Doctor has already left, then it really depends on how good the 32nd century ship they gave him was. The Kyrian-Vaskan homeworld is about 60,000 light years from Earth according to "Living Witness'. If the ship they gave him is comparable to a top-tier longhaul Starfleet shuttle (e.g. Yellowstone-class) he'd be in for 137 years of non-stop flight to get home at Warp 6.2. If they gave him something that can hold Warp 9 indefinitely, about 40 years. If it's as fast as the USS Athena is? A hair over 2 years. (Yes, the Athena is THAT fast using regular warp drive.) If it can rival Voyager's abortive quantum slipstream flight from "Hope and Fear"? Eight days. Quote
JB0 Posted February 6 Posted February 6 1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said: IMO, it's surprising that he's still around at all given that his matrix was falling apart due to excessive data input after just a few years in service in Voyager. One assumes his heavily-modified program has been reinforced and expanded significantly since then. Also, I didn't realize the time frames for Living Witness and Starfleet Academy lined up so closely. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 7 Posted February 7 21 hours ago, JB0 said: One assumes his heavily-modified program has been reinforced and expanded significantly since then. Also, I didn't realize the time frames for Living Witness and Starfleet Academy lined up so closely. I'd assume so. Either that or he's just been given a massive amount of computer memory in order to continue functioning without running out of space like he did in Voyager. IMO, one of the weirder aspects of NuTrek's 31st/32nd Century setting is how the writers lack of respect for continuity has led to Federation technology either not advancing at all in 800 years or actually regressing in many areas for no clear reason. Spoiler The Doctor - USS Voyager's EMH Mark I - is a piece of software that was already outdated 820 years before the events of Starfleet Academy. Yet he, and many other mid-to-late 24th Century holograms like the EMH Mark II, Badgey, or the La Sirena's various emergency holograms all seem to be vastly more advanced and more capable than any 32nd Century holograms we've seen so far. Evil!Georgiou was able to disable a security hologram by blinking at it just right (which made no sense and was a desperate go at making her character "cool") and Caleb is able to lock up a security hologram that's meant to keep him from leaving academy grounds by instructing it to recite coffee orders like someone jailbreaking ChatGPT. These 32nd Century holograms should be way more advanced and yet they seem to be hopelessly outclassed by a 8 century old disposable medical appliance and an 800 year old update of Clippy. WTF. It's almost as weird as how the entire galaxy is still dependent on dilithium and conventional warp drive despite dilithium-free warp drives having been a thing since at least the 2360s and there being at least three vastly superior alternatives that don't depend on dilithium at all, two of which are acknowledged to be present and just never used for some reason. Quote
Thom Posted February 11 Posted February 11 Have to admit, I skip-jumped through this episode. If it looked like something was getting interesting, I would let it play and see what happened. There was a good story in there somewhere, but it got lost (as usual) under high school-prank style attempts at humor. They need to dump the attempts at forced humor and just tell the story. Quote
Roy Focker Posted February 12 Posted February 12 Stuff happens in the latest episode to raise the stakes and brings back Paul Giamatti. Who I don't find to be the interesting enough of a villain. Star Fleet really went down the toilet if someone like his character is the big bad. The show is trying really hard in this episode to make you care for what happens to these characters, but don't I really care. A problem for shows that have finished making all the episodes for a season before they even air is that they get zero feedback of what the audience thinks. No chances for course correction if they aren't connecting to your characters. Episode also features more stupid gaps in logic. That ship sounds like a dangerous place for training exercise are we the audience supposed to be surprised that something bad happens? In the previous episode SAM in an angry drunk state had superhuman strength. Why didn't they reprogram SAM to fight this threat? Quote
Thom Posted February 18 Posted February 18 Almost stopped watching this one. Too much cliched 'romance' going on. It was only near the end, when the 'twist' happened, that it actually started to get good. Such as Giamatti's character when he finally drops the campy-villain vibe. Spoiler His 'I hate you speech' was the most threat I felt from this character from the start. I was interested in going onto a derelict ship... Spoiler ...until you realize they spent so much of their budget already, all they could afford were flexible plastic passage ways and red rope lights. Jeesh. And for a ship that was basically only a century old, from the outside it looked like something from the SNW series, a full millennia older. As for the Furies... Spoiler ...their weakness is high pitched sound (apparently) so in space they should be relatively safe. Sound waves do not pass through space. Now, they could use some subspace hand-wavium, but it's still an odd weakness. Instead, they seemed to be 'phasing' as they moved, so I would have used something against that. But... I'd say I hope they are going to get better, but as @Roy Focker stated above, without active feedback, they're are probably not. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 18 Posted February 18 All right, we had a new episode of Star Trek: Star Feet Academy last Thursday and I'm only just now getting around to it... "Come, Let's Away" So... that's new. A photosensitivity warning due to some scenes having strobing effects. Spoiler Opening on a sex scene is certainly a choice. I guess Caleb's entire arc has basically been him trying to get his leg over the Betazoid girl, but come on it's only episode six! What happened to developing the relationship a bit before knocking boots? The writers invoke their inner Roddenberry by reminding us that Deltans hat is being from F**k Planet for the first time since Star Trek: Enterprise. That was a creepy bit of lore by old man Gene that I think would probably have been best left forgotten, but here we are. It's still weird hearing licensed music in Star Trek too. This whole opening has "UFO" by Olivia Dean as BGM. Spoiler Apparently Betazoid girl's telepathy-suppressing gizmo is not working quite right because she somehow telepathically projects the Piss Filter into Caleb's mind and gets him hallucinating that his quarters are in a field of flowers on what's implied to be Betazed. The piss filter she invokes is SO intense that it feels like one of Sisko's visions from the Prophets. Their telepathic shared moment and romantic rendezvous ends when she accidentally uncovers his repressed childhood trauma in the form of his electronic teddy bear. Having your girlfriend telepathically bring up your repressed mommy issues is probably a pretty big mood killer, I'd guess. So Starfleet Academy and the War College are on joint exercises together aboard the Athena. Honestly, while I am gradually warming towards this series the Athena is still emblematic of how the 32nd century Starfleet ships are irredeemably fugly. Also, these cadets have been in their respective service academies for only a few weeks. They're already doing field training? And in a starship graveyard, no less. Maybe start the kids who've been in the service for only a few weeks on something a little simpler like, y'know, routine shipboard duty? Then again, these kids never seem to actually go the **** to class... so they're even less prepared than they ought to be. Seems like the showrunners spent so much money on extras in heavy prosthetic makeup, licensed music, and unnecessary CG for things like Reymi's face that they couldn't afford actual spacesuits for the characters away mission. But since everything old is new again, I'd like to bid a fond "Welcome back" to the Starfleet Life Support Belt from Star Trek: the Animated Series (1973). "Starfleet's newest plasma-based life support system" is tech from 2269 that somehow manages to look worse in this $8M+ per episode streaming series than it did in Filmation's 1973 hand-drawn animation produced on a budget of two Cheerios box tops and whatever change Gene had in his sofa cushions at the time. Spoiler So we get some exposition from the Vulcan jerkass B'avi. Apparently he read about the USS Miyazaki in a comic book when he was a kid. Honestly, I'm kind of with Caleb on this one. Turning the operations of a real Starfleet ship into a pulp sci-fi serial aimed at kids really does feel a bit propaganda-y. The inside of the USS Miyazaki appears to be... black landscaping tarpaulin pitched over some LED christmas archway lights? For the second time in just six episodes, the USS Athena has ventured into a debris field and been ambushed. This time, by someone who sounds like they have even worse respiratory health than Star Wars's Saw Gerrera. The Furies have claimed this salvage and already captured the cadets without a fight. They phone Ake up to wheeze at her, threaten to eat Caleb, and demand a ransom of 30,000 bars of latinum within five hours OR ELSE. Nahla's gonna pay, but even then the Furies are noted to have a tendency towards killing the hostages even after their demands are met so complying is complete nonsense anyway. Come on Starfleet Academy, you were doing so... almost not terrible... up to now. One little bit of space adventure and you fall back onto an idiot plot immediately? Also, why are there so many hybrid aliens now? They can't be arsed to say what species the Furies are, but they're half-Human half-something. Spoiler Rather than engage their brains and come up with a solution to the problem themselves - diplomatic or otherwise - Starfleet are going to bribe a rival crook with suspension of his outstanding warrants for his arrest to help them with the rescue. Honestly, the fact that Captain Ake is the one who points out what a stupid idea this entire plot is is very much in "the worst person you know just made a great point" territory. Spoiler So the Furies are getting ready to space the eager young space cadets... and honestly this whole fight scene is so awful. It's badly lit, everyone's wearing dark colors, and nobody can move at all to make the shots clearer because the entire corridor is tarpaulin stretched over some hoops. There's also enough shakycam to make you think a cinematography credit is going to Michael J. Fox! What's going on? We can't f***ing tell because the cameraman's a tapdancer with an overfull bladder and an inner ear infection and the set's only lit by some strobes and a few spotlights so that audiences won't be able to tell the set is basically just black polyethylene sheeting. Tomov's down though, and it sounded messy. The Miyazaki bridge has emergency seals! Also, it's clearly just the Athena bridge set three-quartered covered in black tarpaulin. Why is being thrown out the airlock even an issue? All of you are wearing personal life support force fields. If those things can't activate automatically when they sense a vacuum the way the 23rd century equivalent could, then they're actually less useful than a regular spacesuit. There is practically nothing stopping them from deliberately spacing themselves and just floating home. Spoiler B'avi quotes Spock, though he doesn't do so by name. Sam can apparently interface with computers just by touching them, and is able to will the Miyazaki's main computer core back to life after a century of being shut down and quickly reassembles its ability to control the ship. The Furies space the already-dead Tomov just to prove their point, which instead of prompting an immediate heavyweight tactical response from the six Starfleet ships that are RIGHT THERE prompts them to instead go to Braka so Paul Giamatti can turn in another downright cringeworthy performance. Paul Giamatti's performance here is so detestably awful that I very nearly gave up and turned the episode off. This is a line of actual dialog delivered by him in this episode: Quote "Oh, Nahla, Nahla... my space boo, my solar flame, my interstellar bestie. The hills are alive with the sound of murder and I'm just wanked, spanked, and ready to be a diplomat." Someone wrote that. Likely workshopped that for days if not weeks through table reads and rehearsals. And said, with the gleeful ten-thumbed incompetence of the very meanest Pakled, "Yeah, that's good enough dialog for Star Trek." To this episode's writers, Kenneth Lin and Kiley Rosseter, I will say only that I hope you stub your smallest toe on the corner of every piece of furniture in your respective homes at least once a day for the rest of your miserable lives you absolute hacks. Much of the rest of his dialog is similar in content and delivery. That Mr. Giamatti apparently did not look at this script and immediately turn to the writers and say "What the f*** is wrong with you?" is a true black mark on his professional comportment as an actor. Spoiler Also, why is the airlock full of London Fog? Why did Braka come in through the airlock at all? Did we not make a transporter room set? We are then treated to Paul Giamatti doing shots of what we're told is every Añejo the Athena's replicators can produce that is certified by the Court of Galactic Sommeliers and comparing them to thinks like cat urine and "creamy flatworm" and then devouring the scenery for no real reason other than to pad out the episode's runtime because this would be a problem solved in about thirty seconds if anyone involved were not bending over backwards to do the stupidest thing possible at any/every moment. This episode would probably be 10-15 minutes shorter if Nus Braka would just STFU or if anyone involved were intelligent enough to notice that he's just wasting their time. He wants the Federation to stop supplying dilithium to a certain planet so that he can go back to extorting them. They are literally preparing to compromise the wellbeing of an entire planet for half a dozen cadets because they're too chickensh*t or too incompetent to solve this very basic problem themselves. Sending a probe to scout out where the cloaked ship is hiding is treated as a novel and ingenious solution. The Vulcan just... happens to have the comic book he mentioned earlier on his person at all times? So that he can show it to the computer? And somehow have the ship's badly damaged computer understand that its crew is dead and its current situation by reading a comic book? To make a dumb character dumber, one thing we learn about Nus Braka in this episode is that his character has cut a game of tic-tac-toe into his own hair on the right side of his head. A game that was apparently played by someone VERY bad at tic-tac-toe. Spoiler Apparently the thing that drove Ake out of the service was that she had to sacrifice her own son to save her ship. Braka claims the Venari Ral are afraid of, and respect her for, that kind of determination. We also learn that the reason the Betazoids were using ASL a few episodes back is not species-wide, but a specific quirk of President Sadal. His daughter Tarima, Caleb's love interest, couldn't control her too-strong powers as a kid and accidentally fried the auditory cortex of her father's brain rendering him completely deaf and dependent on lip reading, sign language, and telepathy to communicate. Rather than needing any kind of command codes, the Miyazaki's computer just takes it at face value that the person it's talking to is part of its new crew. Its security force fields are apparently powerful enough to cause instant amputations too, as one of the Furies finds out. They are STILL doing literally anything except resolve the situation, though. Kelrec has literally done more to solve the problem than Ake has at this point. Say it with me now: Space is a vaccum and sound waves do not travel through a vacuum. A sonic weapon on a spaceship is fundamentally useless. Spoiler There's a current-gen Intrepid-class named USS Sargasso. About the least appropriate name for a ship you could imagine. It gets immediately disabled and the whole thing is revealed to have been a trick because, hey hey, the main characters really are THAT stupid. Does the Athena not have phasers? She only ever seems to attack with photon torpedos, and they don't seem to actually do anything. They score what looks to be 15 direct hits on the Venari Ral ship with torpedoes and it doesn't seem to inflict any damage at all. Both Starfleet plans to save the ship basically fail because they were stupid enough to trust Nus Braka, and so Tarima ends up ripping out her implant and using her powers to fry the brains of the Furies. Before she can, Sam and B'avi both get taken out. So, was the Athena shelling that unresisting Venari Ral ship the entire time? If so, at that rate of fire, that ship had to have taken close to a hundred torpedos without any real damage. Then of course we learn that Braka's forces raided the conveniently nearby weapons testing station the minute the Sargasso left. We get a mention of the USS Discovery, which is apparently collecting up the station's escape pods. About the only thing that actually sounds sane about this episode is that Admiral Vance informs Ake and Kelrec that trauma councilors will be waiting to treat the officers and cadets. B'avi is dead, and we see a procession of cadets waiting to pay their respects. His buddy leaves a copy of the comic Tales of the Frontier on his body. Tarima is stable but in a coma, and Sam is apparently going to be just fine though she needs help from a specialist and is still glitching. Braka sends a gloating message to Ake, telling her she's the best teacher he's ever had and that he's an amazing pirate because hating her made him work to his full potential. I have an actual headache from watching this. Like, an actual migraine headache forming from watching this. Medication is required. Whether that'll be alcohol or just advil I have not decided. Quote
JB0 Posted February 18 Posted February 18 3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said: Space is a vaccum and sound waves do not travel through a vacuum. A sonic weapon on a spaceship is fundamentally useless. Devil's advocate, what if the sonic weapon is actually a specialized tractor beam that alternates pushing and pulling to induce vibrations in an audible frequency range on the target? As an aside, in a shockingly reasonable and logical piece of writing for Trek, Memory Alpha tells me that one of the novels mentioned the scant appearance of the life support belts in the setting. It said they were retired due to safety concerns. If an EVA suit is damaged or suffers an equipment failure you have a chance to patch it or return to safety. If a life-support belt fails, you just die. Which makes a lot of sense. It also kind of reminds me of the real world with NASA's Manned Maneuvering Unit rocketpack being retired after the Challenger incident because untethered spacewalks were extremely dangerous by their very nature, and the risk couldn't be justified. There's an obvious answer that author missed, though: Build life-support belts into EVA suits as an emergency backup. If something goes wrong, you slap the big red button to activate the life-support belt. This would even extend the accidental parallel with real world space exploration. After we retired the MMU, we proceeded to build the SAFER rocketpack that every astronaut wears when they go out the airlock so they have a chance to get home if they somehow wind up free-floating with a failed tether. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 18 Posted February 18 9 hours ago, JB0 said: Devil's advocate, Remember that time Captain Kirk literally advocated for the literal devil? Fun times... and a much better episode than anything Starfleet Academy has brought to the table despite being cornier than a state fair. 9 hours ago, JB0 said: what if the sonic weapon is actually a specialized tractor beam that alternates pushing and pulling to induce vibrations in an audible frequency range on the target? That's not a sonic weapon then, that's a gravimetric one that produces sound as a secondary effect. 9 hours ago, JB0 said: As an aside, in a shockingly reasonable and logical piece of writing for Trek, Memory Alpha tells me that one of the novels mentioned the scant appearance of the life support belts in the setting. It said they were retired due to safety concerns. If an EVA suit is damaged or suffers an equipment failure you have a chance to patch it or return to safety. If a life-support belt fails, you just die. Which makes a lot of sense. Oh, yes... the novel Forgotten History. Weird story, that one. Equal parts fix fic for a bunch of old TOS episodes like "Miri" and "The Omega Glory" and attempt to un-noodle the DS9-era DTI's noodle incident-induced loathing for James T. Kirk and his promotion to Admiral between TAS and the first movie. The life support belt - and personal forcefields in general - was a really short-lived concept from TAS. Same as a bunch of other actually pretty useful ideas like having automated defenses against being boarded. It's part of why I'm so very amused to see the humble life support belt back on top after a whopping 926 years. Quote
Big s Posted February 19 Posted February 19 14 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said: Remember that time Captain Kirk literally advocated for the literal devil? Hail Satan 🤘 14 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said: Fun times... and a much better episode than anything Starfleet Academy has brought to the table despite being cornier than a state fair. I haven’t really seen much actual corn at the state fair, lots of things with corn bread, tortillas and syrup, but not much resembling healthy foods. Lots of deep fried things that vary from Rattlesnake to just a stick of butter and pretty much anything else that can be thrown in some grease, but not much recognizable corn Quote
Roy Focker Posted February 19 Posted February 19 I still don't understand why Darem walks around with a human disguise. Production reasons I'm guessing it is because of the CGI makeup costs. It makes no sense in universe. Star Fleet is very pro diversity it is very strange that someone feels the need to hide their race. In the latest episode he goes and visits a bunch of his people and all of them are wearing human face. I repeat again they are among their own, and all decide to appear human to each other. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 19 Posted February 19 2 hours ago, Roy Focker said: I still don't understand why Darem walks around with a human disguise. Production reasons I'm guessing it is because of the CGI makeup costs. It makes no sense in universe. Star Fleet is very pro diversity it is very strange that someone feels the need to hide their race. In the latest episode he goes and visits a bunch of his people and all of them are wearing human face. I repeat again they are among their own, and all decide to appear human to each other. Maybe it's something like Discovery did with the Breen, where the Human-like face is their original/normal one and their more exotic and alien-looking appearance is something they regard as special or private or something they only adopt situationally. Quote
Thom Posted February 19 Posted February 19 I keep forgetting he's an alien. As to going aboard a derelict ship, I'd imagine it would have been a lot safer to just stay on Athena and use a holoprogram... In fact, they could stay on Earth and use holoprograms for everything, esp for first years. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 19 Posted February 19 1 hour ago, Thom said: As to going aboard a derelict ship, I'd imagine it would have been a lot safer to just stay on Athena and use a holoprogram... In fact, they could stay on Earth and use holoprograms for everything, esp for first years. ... ... ... sh*t, that's a really good point. Why wasn't this training exercise carried out on a holodeck? Quote
Roy Focker Posted February 19 Posted February 19 1 hour ago, Thom said: I keep forgetting he's an alien. As to going aboard a derelict ship, I'd imagine it would have been a lot safer to just stay on Athena and use a holoprogram... In fact, they could stay on Earth and use holoprograms for everything, esp for first years. Trek broke its ability to tell stores that make sense with advancing technology. For every generation of the fans, they push the timeline ahead. A feature of some wonder science that nearly destroyed the Enterprise D in the 3rd season STNG that they vowed never to use again is now as common as a toaster. They used to have to go a special room or a kiosk to access things like transporters, holograms or replicators. Now they can carry stuff like that on person. Being able to do the impossible is like breathing for them. Except when the story calls for them not to. Which has always been the case in Star Trek. Normally they would tell us that a nearby space storm is causing inference forcing them to do things the old fashion way. Now the thought doing things like sending holograms over near crossed their minds. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 19 Posted February 19 2 hours ago, Roy Focker said: Normally they would tell us that a nearby space storm is causing inference forcing them to do things the old fashion way. Now the thought doing things like sending holograms over near crossed their minds. There's a pretty good reason given directly in the episode for why they wouldn't be able to send holograms over... the Miyazaki had no power, so the holoemitters that have lined the corridors of ships for emergency hologram use since VOY "Message in a Bottle" wouldn't be operational. (SAM presumably has something like Arnold Rimmer's light bee keeping her program going?) The idiot ball moment is more "Why was it necessary to go to contested space and put the first-year cadets in actual danger when they could have just as easily simulated this using a training ship or just a regular holodeck where they would not be in any danger of being murdered by space pirates?" We know Starfleet Academy has had simulator training since before the holodeck was even a thing... the infamous Kobayashi Maru test that Kirk infamously cheated was one. Quote
JB0 Posted February 20 Posted February 20 In fairness, as often as holodecks malfunction with catastrophic results, WOULD it be safer than actual space pirates? Or would they be trapped in a death game while people struggled to bring the rest of the academy back online and reset the holodeck safeties? Quote
Thom Posted February 20 Posted February 20 In any normal situation, Miyazaki would have been a fully functional training ship, able to simulate any damage or catastrophe that the teaching moment demanded, something like the holo-ship from Insurrection, if not just a holo-deck sitting safely on a planet. A better situation would have been the 'kids' going on a free day to Risa or someplace and just getting abducted. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 21 Posted February 21 15 hours ago, JB0 said: In fairness, as often as holodecks malfunction with catastrophic results, WOULD it be safer than actual space pirates? Or would they be trapped in a death game while people struggled to bring the rest of the academy back online and reset the holodeck safeties? Holodeck malfunctions, at least, don't require the crew to go and waste time making expensive, idiotic, and entirely unnecessary concessions to a bloodthirsty space pirate to resolve. When the safeties do go out, the program still doesn't go off the rails. The only hazards that exist are those that were already native to the program and simply being NERF'd by the holodeck safeties. Simulating the Miyazaki salvage operation would not have put the cadets in danger of being violently murdered by space pirates unless someone had deliberately programmed in a group of murderously violent space pirates. Otherwise, the only safety risks might be asphyxiating in the event of a hull breach or injury in the event that they had one of Star Trek's trademark exploding consoles. (If you didn't want the students to know they were in a simulation, all you'd need to do is beam them into the simulator from the ship.) "Come, Let's Away" was the story of a completely preventable disaster that resulted in the deaths of a cadet, an Academy instructor, and an unknown but implicitly large number of other Starfleet personnel aboard the USS Sargasso and Starbase J19-Alpha because the Academy chancellors decided to do this training exercise for their first year cadets in the most irresponsible and unsafe manner imaginable. Not only in uncontrolled conditions aboard a derelict ship, but in unsecured contested space no less. Spoiler I feel like the last time we saw a Starfleet Academy instructor this wildly irresponsible, we ended up with a literal Planet of Nazis. (TOS "Patterns of Force") Quote
sketchley Posted February 21 Posted February 21 From the descriptions*, it sounds like the show runners are having their cake and eating it, too: they want an academy setting with cadets, but also want to do the standard Star Trek ship-doing-space-adventures. I'm not saying it's impossible (DS9 pulled off something similar), but from the sounds of things, this show's writers haven't figured out how to do it. * stopped watching nu-Trek at the end of the second season of Discovery, so my impressions may be biased... Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 21 Posted February 21 Sitting down to watch this week's new episode... Ko'Zeine. Honestly, the episode title sounds like a sleep aid. (Not even being sarcastic there, and I work for a company where like 2/3 of the staff have made the joke that our company name ALSO sounds like a medication.) So apparently this one's premise is that the students go home to see family during what we're not going to call Spring Break but is definitely Spring Break? I guess we can't show the cadets going to Cancun (or Risa?) for Spring Break because it would be weird and out-of-place for them to be horny on main like they've been for the last six episodes right after that disastrous training exercise that got so many people killed. Of course, it also bears recognizing that Nahla Ake has been Chancellor of Starfleet Academy's Earth campus for a single semester and she's done such a rubbish job of it that there's now a death toll directly attributable to her irresponsible conduct. Spoiler We open on Caleb sitting alone in the atrium recording a message for his girlfriend Tarima. Apparently she was shipped back to Betazed for treatment after putting herself into a coma killing a bunch of space pirates with her brain in the last episode. We learn through his "letter" that it's been a bit over a month since the events of "Come, Let's Away". It apparently gets too real for him and he has to stop recording and deletes the message. Honestly, the acknowledgement that the events of the previous episode were capital T "Traumatic" for the cadets and that they're still processing it even with the help of therapy is a rare thing for Star Trek and shows the writers are thinking. Spoiler There's apparently some new holiday called All-Worlds Day? We see Reno checking students off a list as they depart, with one bound for planet Kenda II (a minor TNG reference) and another headed for Istanbul. After her injury, Sam is apparently seeing Padme Amidala's hairstylist because she's now rocking a pair of braids done up into massive puffy balls of hair. She and Genesis talk a bit about the holiday's actual meaning... apparently it's one of those holidays that's just an excuse for a big family meal. Sam is still suffering from her injury and is off to a clinic to develop a patch for the software errors she's acquired from her injury. It's nice to see the other characters worried about Sam's wellbeing too. Nahla tries to apologize for what happened on the Miyazaki and mentions that she's recommending Genesis for the command training program based on her leadership in that moment of crisis. Genesis is very excited by this. Apparently Earth now has a spaceport in Mumbai of all places. Jay-den and his War College BF are apparently going to Ibiza together for break. I wonder if 32nd century Ibiza is still a party destination. Kraag is absolutely appalled by the loud shirt he's been given to wear on the beach. He's trying to be very patient and considerate of his BF who is still suffering the loss of his friend (the Vulcan cadet who got shot last episode). They get in a shot about how nobody likes Reymi. Nahla's apparently shipping Caleb off to Dakar. A shame he's down on the idea. Dakar is lovely. Caleb is instead twisting Ake's arm into letting him stay on the Athena for those four days. "You've got four pairs of boots in here! You don't even wear shoes!" - my candidate for line of the episode. Spoiler Caleb's still struggling to reach out to Tarima, and he's at least talking to Ake about it. So... Darem seemingly gets abducted right in the corridor on the Athena with nobody noticing except a passing Jay-den, who follows the kidnappers through some kind of a portal they open right there in the hall? "SUNSET MOON" is certainly a choice of caption. It makes no sense, even as a placename. "The Khionian Realm" isn't much more helpful. It's another planet subjected to the Piss Filter, because that's how you know you're outdoors... the sky looks like you're viewing it through a yard of cheap pilsner. Spoiler Apparently the Khionians just have portable wormhole tech or something instead of transporters since Jay-den pops out of a portal in some kind of reception area in what looks like frigging Tattooine. Credit to Jay-den, even though he doesn't like Darem he still comes charging in waving a rock bigger than his head in an attempt to rescue him from what he thinks is a violent assault. Apparently Darem's been abducted for a wedding? He has to excuse Kraag's presence by saying he's his ko'zeine, which he says is a bit like a Best Man. He is so surprised he drops the rock... which I am amused and satisfied to say makes an appropriately weighty crunchy and breaks when it hits the floor. Caleb's got his tits out and is sunbathing on the Athena? Under a conveniently Starfleet delta-shaped skylight? Or spotlight? Where is this light coming from? Genesis scares the cucumbers right off his eyelids. Apparently she snuck back into the academy and overwrote the transport log to hide her return because her dad got invited to some kind of symposium. The fan phrase "Dadmiral" has now graduated to an official part of the Star Trek lexicon after being used to refer to Admirals Paris and Mariner. Spoiler Caleb takes some shots at her for apparently breaking back into the Academy to do actual homework, and is shocked when she guesses that his plans amount to "running around with no pants on" and "staging DoT fights". Back on Khionia? Jay-den is bemused to learn Darem has been subjected to a "traditional Khionian marital abduction". He explains that the moon used to be an ocean moon but that the oceans dried up when the moon's core solidified and stopped spinning, leaving it a desert. Apparently it's their hot wedding destination and he's been abducted to get hitched. Apparently he did not know he was up for a wedding, since his plan was to get hitched after he'd graduated and had a few years in Starfleet under his belt. It seems Darem's marrying a princess. (I admire Kraag's attempt to be diplomatic by saying that he couldn't miss it even if he wanted to. I'm not used to a tactful Klingon.) Caleb and Genesis are apparently making up games to pass the time. She asks about Tarima, and it gets awkward. Then Caleb gets bit by something that makes his ears grow. Seems like their sub-plot is going to be chasing around a literally warp-capable slug that escaped during their game of "get poisoned by laboratory samples". Apparently the reason that Darem got abducted earlier than planned was that his bride-to-be's parents (the royal family) had a health scare and decided to abdicate early so they moved the wedding up without telling him. Maybe the reason Darem's so worried is because all the decor on this moon seems to be shaped like a buttplug. Spoiler Caleb and Genesis's attempts to get the warp-capable slug off the ceiling are interrupted by Reno coming into the medlab to treat a broken toe. She and her girlfriend Lura are having an... energetic... conversation while she performs some self-repair. The director's foot fetish is back. This time it's Reno's feet being jammed into the camera. Seriously. I am SO close to calling an exorcist to remove the vengeful spirit of Quentin Tarantino from the studio. Spoiler Caleb is having a moment here, and it's actually well-written. Ah, the mortifying ordeal of being known. The reason he's struggling to talk to Tarima after her injury is that she telepathically saw the trauma and parts of himself he's not proud of and normally keeps bundled away in his subconscious and it bothers him, deeply, as someone who's lived with avoidant coping strategies his entire life. Genesis gets to have a moment too, of insecurity as she confesses to feeling like she's spent her whole life following in her Admiral father's footsteps and isn't sure that she is really cut out for command or if people are just seeing that she's following in her father's footsteps and assuming she is. So she wants to break into the Athena's bridge and sit in the captain's chair herself. Darem's having his own little breakdown over his impending wedding and Kraag is there to offer sage advice. His world got a lot bigger at the Academy, and now he's having regrets about being railroaded into the wedding. Caleb finally calls Genesis out, apparently a lot of hooey so she could break into the bridge and steal some kind of executive key that would help her break into the computers and alter her application. Before he can get an answer out of her, Reno barges in. Darem's wedding apparently goes off without much of a hitch... though Kraag arrives fashionably late. He gives a pretty good toast at Darem's wedding, loaded with some meaning that Darem's new bride clearly picks up on and is troubled by. While getting a dressing-down from Captain Ake, Genesis confesses the reason she wants to break into her Academy paperwork is to delete letters of recommendation she received because she'd modified the contents before submitting them. Captain Ake slaps them both with probation and 200 hours of menial labor. Darem's new wifey is sharp enough to understand the meaning of Jay-den's toast and wants to set him free by getting an annulment after realizing she's never seen the real him. So he abdicates and they go back to the academy, where a humbled Darem finally acknowledges to himself that he might be a bit of an arsehole. So we go out on Caleb finishing his letter to Tarima and actually sending it this time. Honestly, not a bad episode at all. This series seems to do character writing much better than it does anything to do with space adventure. Another licensed song over the credits this time... "We watch the stars" by Fink. 10 minutes ago, sketchley said: From the descriptions*, it sounds like the show runners are having their cake and eating it, too: they want an academy setting with cadets, but also want to do the standard Star Trek ship-doing-space-adventures. I'm not saying it's impossible (DS9 pulled off something similar), but from the sounds of things, this show's writers haven't figured out how to do it. * stopped watching nu-Trek at the end of the second season of Discovery, so my impressions may be biased... Pretty much, yeah. Starfleet Academy's main problem is that the writing is horribly uneven. When the series wants to do character-focused drama, they actually do a pretty passable job at it. Some of the episodes (e.g. Kraag's focus episode) are almost worthy of the title of Star Trek and could be made quite good with only a few tweaks. But both times the series has tried to do Space Adventure in a vein similar to past Star Trek titles, the bottom has fallen out quality-wise and they've served up some Discovery-tier idiot plots. A secondary problem is that the show's writers want to do humor, but the kind of humor they want to do doesn't seem to be something they know how to integrate into the story organically. So the attempts at humor are very forced and unnatural and you can practically see the writer's wild-eyed desperation and unspoken plea of "Please laugh". Colbert's involvement is purely "humorous" in the sense that he seems to exist in the story purely to serve up "funny" non-sequiturs that aren't actually funny in-context or out. Many of the non-sequiturs involving one particular science officer's badly-behaved pet. (Why this needs to be announced over the tannoy instead of being called in to that officer directly is anyone's guess.) Quote
Roy Focker Posted February 27 Posted February 27 Latest episode once again stars the atrium set. Funny how at any hour of the day or night this giant heavily traffic area can become the private, quiet meeting space for these handful of cadets. Holly, The Doctor and Sam go to see her fellow hologram people. Who naturally make their own environment look like the Academy's atrium to make the visitors feel more comfortable. My current distaste for AI slop has grown to a dislike of AI based characters. The Doctor, Sam and even Data. I don't care what happens to these characters. Despite how they act these artificial characters are not real. I see these characters as AI chat bots. Real people were denied positions in Star Fleet because of AI. I'm now Doctor Pulaski fan. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 27 Posted February 27 4 hours ago, Roy Focker said: Latest episode once again stars the atrium set. Funny how at any hour of the day or night this giant heavily traffic area can become the private, quiet meeting space for these handful of cadets. Well, after blowing most of the show's budget on the ridiculously elaborate atrium set to the detriment of literally everything else they're naturally gonna shoot the money... 4 hours ago, Roy Focker said: Holly, The Doctor and Sam go to see her fellow hologram people. Who naturally make their own environment look like the Academy's atrium to make the visitors feel more comfortable. Eh... that's such a common trope across Star Trek that it's hardly grounds to complain. Star Trek loves "A form you are comfortable with" for alien-created illusions, hallucinations, visions, and what have you. The Prophets in DS9 used it almost exclusively, only ever creating one original locale in the entire series. 4 hours ago, Roy Focker said: My current distaste for AI slop has grown to a dislike of AI based characters. The Doctor, Sam and even Data. I don't care what happens to these characters. Despite how they act these artificial characters are not real. I see these characters as AI chat bots. Real people were denied positions in Star Fleet because of AI. I'm now Doctor Pulaski fan. TBH, I've been expecting audiences to turn on AI characters for a while now thanks to the public's general overestimation of what modern AI technology is and the widespread (and entirely correct) view that that technology really only produces mindless derivative slop with no redeeming value. A bit unfair to characters like Data or the Doctor, IMO, who are self-aware artificial general intelligences rather than mindless virtual assistants like the computer voice interface... but still expected given the present climate. (In "The Ensigns of Command", Data seems to regard his own artistic experiments as AI slop due to believing he was not capable of originality... even advising Picard to see a different violinist's performance for essentially that reason.) Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 28 Posted February 28 (edited) So, the newest episode of Starfeet Academy is "The Life of the Stars". Spoiler The episode opens with Voyager's EMH giving a narration/log about how lonely he is watching the sun rise, being an ageless and needless AI surrounded by mortal biological officers. Caleb's Betazoid girlfriend is back with a new inhibitor implant to help her control her telepathy and a fresh transfer from the War College to Starfleet Academy proper. She's been transferred involuntarily for her own health and safety, because another such incident would leave her with irreparable brain damage. So she's being advised to take up some specialty in the sciences where it's safe. Meanwhile, the other cadets are still processing the traumatic events they went through in the Miyazaki incident and tensions are running high as a result. Once again, we witness that this incarnation of Starfleet Academy seems to be run in the most incompetent manner possible. What is the point of a bridge simulation where the person serving as captain is not only not leading, but seemingly actively hindering and belittling the students? Spoiler Captain Ake and the Doctor, the architects of this inferior educational environment, are calling in a pinch hitter to solve the problem... and it's f***ing Tilly. Talk about the blind leading the blind. Let's have the students get some advice and learn some life lessons via a theater course taught by the one person that Starfleet's all-time worst-ever starship felt would be least missed: Sylvia Tilly! It can, at least, be said with confidence that the writers room firmly understands the character from Discovery. That is to say, she only opens her mouth to say the stupidest thing possible at any given moment. There's a very good reason that the one and only competent officer to serve on the Discovery in the 32nd century took an instant dislike to her, told her on no uncertain terms to STFU, and ultimately drove her off the ship entirely. Even Reno seems to find her quietly disgusting, comparing her presence to a toothache and describing her manner as "nightmarish". Spoiler And of course, literally the only way the cadets can be made to actually tolerate Tilly's bullsh*t seminar is with the threat that if they don't secure a passing mark from the least competent instructor in Starfleet history they fail the entire semester automatically regardless of what their other grades in their actually-relevant classes might be. The only cadet who is not immediately put off by this is, of course, Sam... who is still flipflopping between acting like she's got some kind of delayed development disorder and acting like she's got severe untreated autism. They apparently still haven't gone and gotten her repaired yet either because she's still glitching all over the place. The students need serious trauma counseling... from someone who is absolutely 100% not qualified to be doing counseling of any kind! Jay-den manages to get out of the class by catching a cold. Sam, by having some kind of computer aneurism because she still hasn't gotten repaired. So she gets out of the class and the academy altogether to be shipped home to Kasq for repair. Is it just me, or is this show allergic to depicting competence in even the smallest degree? I actually admire that Darem has the brass ones to point out that not only do none of the cadets really give a damn about Tilly's class. I can sympathize. I feel myself tuning the episode out every time Mary Wiseman opens her mouth. Spoiler We get to learn a little bit about Sam's homeworld of Kasq. Apparently "the Makers" emigrated to Kasq as a way to protect themselves from the rest of the universe after the organics who created them died. The planet was deemed safe by them because it exists in a fast-time gravity well similar to the planet from VOY "Blink of an Eye", such that five years pass on Kasq for every three Earth days that pass offworld. (About 600x the normal pace of time.) Please pick better role models, Sam. Caleb and Nahla are NOT good ones by any stretch of the imagination. Line of the episode: Quote "I'm not a mind reader." - Tarima Sadal of Betazed. It's such a weird thing to say, given that she is literally a mind reader. Her entire species are mind readers. It's their entire goddamn hat. Not only that, she's such a powerful mind reader she can accidentally give people brain damage. This scene is so badly written it's giving the audience brain damage. Spoiler Second noteworthy callback of the episode... the bottle of liquor that Tarima swiped and has apparently gotten blitzed on is Kressari liquor. The Kressari featured in early DS9 as a species who sometimes served as go-betweens for the Cardassians and were involved in trafficking weapons to the anti-Federation movement on Bajor in DS9 season 1. Whatever his many faults as a person, Caleb at least deserves a modicum of respect for having the basic moral integrity to directly turn down the advances of a drunk Tarima even though it means she goes after him with verbal abuse for doing so. Then she does some badly scripted drunk girl emotional breakdown stuff with Genesis. The Doctor finally gets to have a brief moment of not being comic relief, just in time to drop out of warp at Kasq... which looks to be either a giant icosahedron or hypercube, it's hard to see which. Then it's straight into a Prophets-esque vision sequence where the Kasqians have created A Form You Are Comfortable With (the Sato Atrium) for their chat. Meanwhile, Tilly's glurge-filled fake play causes a stilted and false epiphany among the students that they're really NOT OK after all. Back on Kasq, Sam's not OK either. The Makers have finished examining Sam and concluded she is damaged beyond repair. They are pissed. Honestly, I'm with the Kasqians on this one... Spoiler The Kasqian Makers are utterly incensed that a child they spent two hundred years painstakingly creating to be their emissary to the Federation was damaged beyond repair and died after just 209 days in Nahla Ake's care. They are so incredibly angry that they intend to cut off all communication with the rest of the galaxy forever. At the bedside of Sam's "corpse", the Doctor finally explains why he finds Sam so repellant... Oh. My. God. NICE JOB BREAKING IT, B'ELANNA! Spoiler So, the reason the Doctor has been avoiding Sam like the plague is not (just) because Sam is incredibly annoying. It's because he is STILL traumatized by what B'Elanna Torres did to his holographic family all the way back in VOY "Real Life" eight hundred and twenty-two years ago in 2373. His memories don't fade (VOY "Latent Image") so he's been suffering the emotional damage she inflicted on him for her own petty amusement for the last eight centuries. Apparently the reason Sam broke down is that she was built much less resiliently than the Doctor and had no means to process emotional trauma, so her system just locked up and failed. So Captain Ake wants to build a NEW Sam with the proper coping mechanisms to handle trauma by having the Doctor raise her from childhood. So the Doc gets tossed into Kasq's fast-time gravity well to realtime speedrun raising Sam 2.0 from 0-17 years old in the space of a few days so the Kasqians can dump Sam 1.0's saved memories into Sam 2.0 and send a better Sam back to the academy. Key takeaway... Sam apparently has a light bee like Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf instead of a normal mobile emitter. So one cheap fix handled montage-style we've killed and unkilled a main cast member for shiggles because it's literally faster than giving them actual character development. Honestly tho... this is the second episode where we've had an implicit character assassination for a 90's-era Trek character. First it was turning Ben Sisko into an absent father, now B'Elanna's sadism is giving people centuries of PTSD. Edited February 28 by Seto Kaiba Quote
JB0 Posted February 28 Posted February 28 15 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said: Then she does some badly scripted drunk girl emotional breakdown stuff with Genesis. This Genesis... it isn't the same Genesis as in Wrath of Khan, right? We don't have someone completely losing it while wielding a bomb that can unmake and remake a planet, possibly an entire star system? Because that would be bad. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted February 28 Posted February 28 2 hours ago, JB0 said: This Genesis... it isn't the same Genesis as in Wrath of Khan, right? No, in this case it's a fellow Starfleet cadet who just happens to be named Genesis. 2 hours ago, JB0 said: We don't have someone completely losing it while wielding a bomb that can unmake and remake a planet, possibly an entire star system? Because that would be bad. I mean, that's happened too... but, y'know, eight hundred years in the past during a much better Star Trek series. Spoiler Quote
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