| 1 | [[index]] |
| 2 | * ''WMG/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' |
| 3 | * ''WMG/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' |
| 4 | * ''WMG/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' |
| 5 | * ''WMG/StarTrekVoyager'' |
| 6 | * ''WMG/StarTrekEnterprise'' |
| 7 | * ''WMG/StarTrekDiscovery'' |
| 8 | * ''WMG/StarTrekPicard'' |
| 9 | * ''WMG/StarTrekLowerDecks'' |
| 10 | * ''WMG/StarTrekProdigy'' |
| 11 | * ''WMG/StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds'' |
| 12 | * ''WMG/StarTrekTheMotionPicture'' |
| 13 | * ''WMG/StarTrekIITheWrathOfKhan'' |
| 14 | * ''WMG/StarTrekIVTheVoyageHome'' |
| 15 | * ''WMG/StarTrekVTheFinalFrontier'' |
| 16 | * ''WMG/StarTrekVITheUndiscoveredCountry'' |
| 17 | * ''WMG/StarTrekGenerations'' |
| 18 | * ''WMG/StarTrekFirstContact'' |
| 19 | * ''WMG/StarTrekInsurrection'' |
| 20 | * ''WMG/StarTrek2009'' |
| 21 | * ''WMG/StarTrekIntoDarkness'' |
| 22 | * ''WMG/StarTrekBeyond'' |
| 23 | * ''WMG/StarTrekArmada'' |
| 24 | * ''WMG/StarTrekOnline'' |
| 25 | [[/index]] |
| 26 | |
| 27 | [[folder:The Mirror Universe]] |
| 28 | [[WMG: Interaction with the MirrorUniverse accounts for much of the erratic continuity.]] |
| 29 | Consider how unlikely it is that ''all'' of the characters aboard the ''ISS Enterprise'' in both Archer's time and Kirk's would be exactly the same ones as those who are aboard the ''USS Enterprise'' in each respective time. Consider too how unlikely it would be that Kirk and Mirror Kirk would just happen to be beaming up with landing parties exactly the same as each other from the very same planet at the very same time in their respective universes such that an anomaly in the transporter could exchange them without anybody realizing what happened at first. |
| 30 | |
| 31 | How can all of these incredibly improbable coincidences ever have occurred? Because they aren't coincidences. The fate of each universe is intertwined with the other, and what the people in one universe do invariably has some effect on what their counterparts in the other universe are doing. This effect works both ways: the reason Mirror Kirk has almost entirely the same crew as his counterpart despite all of the infighting and backstabbing on all of the Terran Empire's ships is because the other Kirk's decisions indirectly affect Mirror Kirk's decisions through the mystical link between their universes. Meanwhile, as Kirk discovers when he gets back to his own universe, a version of the ensign who was Mirror Kirk's "captain's woman" has just signed on to his ship as well because that's what her counterpart decided to do in the Mirror Universe earlier. Whenever the continuities happen to slide out of synch with each other, such as when someone dies in one universe and is still alive in another, various events inevitably occur to resynchronize them. |
| 32 | |
| 33 | This may also account for the occasional anomalies in various characters' behavior patterns: whenever Mirror Kirk does something irrational that leads to someone living who would otherwise have died, that's because his counterpart is rescuing the very same person in his universe. Whenever the regular Kirk takes a foolish chance that gets a RedShirt killed, that's because Mirror Kirk is having that very same RedShirt executed for some infraction or other in his universe. This goes as far back as Archer's time or maybe even further: Forrest ultimately was doomed to die in the one universe because he had already died in the other. Likewise, though Hitler may actually have won World War II in the Mirror Universe, he may ultimately have succumbed to a case of PyrrhicVictory that ultimately gave the USA greater influence over the Terran Empire. |
| 34 | |
| 35 | Maybe by Sisko's time, whatever the Mirror Universe's residents did to prevent further crossovers is now causing the universes to decouple such that they aren't such a strong influence on each other anymore... or maybe not. Didn't Sisko's wife get herself killed in both universes? Still, this would explain some of the unlikely turns of events that otherwise just seem to be contrived coincidences. It's not so much that AWizardDidIt as that The Mirror Universe Did It. |
| 36 | |
| 37 | [[WMG: {{ContinuitySnarl}}s in the MirrorUniverse are due to time travel.]] |
| 38 | Why are Cardassian/Klingon Alliance ships shown having cloaking devices in earlier Deep Space Nine MirrorUniverse episodes, and then later not having them and needing the Ferengi from the regular universe to bring them one? Because there's no Temporal Prime Directive there, and even if there were, everyone is even more used to running roughshod over all such restraints than the regular universe's residents are. Ironically, the technology allowing for messing with the timeline is a lot less developed in the MirrorUniverse, allowing for only relatively minor changes, but it's not too difficult to see why the Terran Rebellion would use any and every small advantage over the Alliance they could get out of such a technology anyway. In their universe, the Klingons probably originally eliminated the Romulans and stole their cloaking technology. Due to a slight change the Terran Rebellion was able to engineer, the Klingons accidentally wiped out the Romulans before they thought to steal the technology, and by the time they did, the Romulans' blueprints for cloaking devices were unreadable, rendering them lost technology. |
| 39 | |
| 40 | [[WMG: The Mirror Universe and the Empire within only survived the ChronicBackstabbingDisorder through sheer luck]] |
| 41 | Since in the Star Trek Universe (and possibly our own), all possible results of ANY given situation create different universes (as shown in various parallels). Anything that is possible happens in some universe, such as the Borg having control of the entire galaxy. The MirrorUniverse was the extremely improbable but still possible universe where such an empire could survive more than a week. |
| 42 | |
| 43 | [[WMG: Alternately, the Mirror Universe survives ChronicBackstabbingDisorder due to internal logic of its own.]] |
| 44 | Face it, KlingonPromotion isn't all that easy to pull off in-universe. You risk being killed in the attempt, or if you survive but fail, torture and execution is more or less inevitable. Even successful attempts, if Mirror!Chekhov's dialogue (along the lines of "Starfleet Command won't question the assassination of a Captain who disobeys orders") is anything to go by, may be questioned by the higher-ups. And this disorder might only be endemic by the 23rd century- if I recall, the reaction to Archer [[spoiler: and later, Sato]] in ''Enterprise'' by a few characters seems to be much more "what the hell?" but this could be simply out of their sheer audacity. Either way, it's much easier to curry favour with your superiors (and/or [[SleepingTheirWayToTheTop sleep with them]]). |
| 45 | |
| 46 | [[WMG: The Mirror Universe isn't the alternate reality. The mainstream universe is.]] |
| 47 | |
| 48 | The flashback scene from ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' is what originally happened at the First Contact event. Brilliant but embittered scientist Zefram Cochrane killed the Vulcans, and then, armed with advanced alien technology, conquered the post-apocalyptic Earth, and proclaimed himself Emperor of Mankind. When the crew of the ''Enterprise-E'' went back in time, their interference created an alternate reality. Cochrane saw that there was a future where he was revered as a hero who ushered in a new age for humanity peacefully, and that reminded him that he used to be a scientist, and used to believe in such things. Realizing that there was a chance to make this dream a reality, he chose to respond peacefully to the visitors instead. |
| 49 | |
| 50 | [[WMG: The Mirror Universe was created during or after the 17th century.]] |
| 51 | In the Enterprise episode "In A Mirror Darkly", Phlox discussed the differences Mirror Universe stories had with their main universe counterparts, dismissing the main universe literary protagonists as weak and compassionate "with the exception of Shakespeare; his stories were equally grim in both realities." |
| 52 | |
| 53 | [[WMG: The Terran Empire is prone to the OrwellianRetcon.]] |
| 54 | We only have Mirror!Phlox's word for it that the histories of the Prime and Mirror Universe are of the NeverWasThisUniverse variety. And to be fair it's not unlike tyannical regimes down the ages to rewrite history to suit their own interests, the Terran Empire is surely no exception. Cochrane's behaviour at First Contact could well have been a dividing point. |
| 55 | |
| 56 | [[WMG: Gender politics in the Mirror Universe depends on the gender of the Emperor.]] |
| 57 | Look at the outfits in the Original Series and ''Enterprise'', which range from somewhat CustomUniformOfSexy to outright SexyWhateverOutfit in the latter. Then look at ''Discovery''. Notice how much more martial and badass looking they are, even (especially, even!) given the ExcessiveEvilEyeshadow? Not to mention in both the former series, female characters seem to be a lot more about SleepingTheirWayToTheTop (and getting seually harassed). Then you realise that the Emperor in ''Discovery'' is [[[spoiler: Philippa Georgiou]]... and it all makes sense. |
| 58 | |
| 59 | [[/folder]] |
| 60 | |
| 61 | [[WMG: The Borg are overstretched.]] |
| 62 | It'd be pretty safe to assume that most species that know of the Borg in the Star Trek galaxy are hostile to them. Perhaps the Borg are fighting a massive war (or many wars) against their many neighbors which is taxing their resources to the limit. This may be why the Borg can only send 1 cube to attack the Federation. Perhaps any cubes seen outside their territory are just what little they can spare, sent to build up their numbers from easy targets. |
| 63 | |
| 64 | The races fighting the Borg may be much more powerful than the Federation and be able to pose a threat to the Borg. |
| 65 | [[WMG: The Borg are an intergalactic power.]] |
| 66 | In ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'', Seven of Nine mentions that the Borg have journeyed outside of this galactic cluster, and mentions some species offhand. Being an intergalactic power would be facilitated by a transwarp network. The Voyager finale [[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS7E23Endgame "Endgame"]] shows that a transwarp conduit can take someone across the galaxy in seconds to minutes. The Borg might have a transwarp hub dedicated to intergalactic travel. |
| 67 | [[WMG: Each Live Action Series and Movie Series take place in a separate parallel universe.]] |
| 68 | This would explain all the continuity errors and [[DarkerAndEdgier tone]] [[LighterAndSofter shifts]] and occassional CharacterDerailment every work of the Franchise has been accused of (usually with good reason.) |
| 69 | |
| 70 | We see in "Parallels" that there are hundreds of timelines with almost the same individuals, but with certain divergences. Said divergences can be personal or professional, individual or collective. ButterflyEffect could also be in play. So TNG did not take place in the same timeline as TOS, ''Star Trek Picard'' is not in the same timeline as TNG and so on. |
| 71 | |
| 72 | Of course, each universe has more or less the same characters, but TNG Spock, or ''Generations'' Kirk, for example, aren't the same Spock and Kirk we saw in TOS. Similar, but not the same. Some events happened the same way in all timelines, some didn't. In some timelines the Federation TookALevelInJerkass, in some they remained the KnightInShiningArmor; in some timelines Spock had an adopted sister, in some he didn't; in some timelines Data died, in some he lived and so on. |
| 73 | |
| 74 | |
| 75 | [[WMG: There's a Sector 000.]] |
| 76 | This might be an area devoted to something that the Federation wouldn't want the public to observe such as the testing of new prototype weapons and ships. Like a futuristic version of area 51. It might also have something to do with Section 31. |
| 77 | |
| 78 | [[WMG: Tribbles are the evolved descendants of all interfertile humanoid Federation species]] |
| 79 | Tom Paris' "evolution" in VGR: "Threshold" into a nonsentient lifeform indicates this might be humanity's future in the Prime Universe timeline. At some future point in time, humanity and many other interfertile Federations species who are peaceful by nature and live for pleasure and kindness (humans, Bolians, Betazoids, some Trill, etc) or at least, peace and stoicism, even a soothing calmness (Vulcans, most Trill, etc) interbreed and most of the Federation is one blended species with the exception of a few nonhumanoid and other non-interfertile species that can't make babies with humans, Vulcans or Betazoids. Eventually this blended species becomes so dependent on technology that organic, natural intelligence becomes a vestigial feature, their artificial intelligence is that good. The AI realizes what this dependence has cost humanoids: they are no longer curious or intelligent, they lack limbs or protective characteristics other than being soft and pleasant enough that most civilizations except Klingons, Talarians, Cardassians, etc, the warrior cultures and hardened militaristic states. Tribbles react poorly to them, and they react poorly to Tribbles. The Tribbles in the present timeline of Star Trak have been sent back in time from the far future by their AI caretakers to have a chance to redevelop sentience by interacting with their distant ancestors. |
| 80 | |
| 81 | [[WMG: A future movie or series is going to try and reboot Captain Picard]] |
| 82 | He was a pretty popular captain. They've redone Kirk, why not Picard? They might give the whole Picard vs clone angle with Shinzon a better go this time. Maybe have a series, introduce the clone and have him accompany the main characters as an ally for a season or more then have him gradually drift apart from the crew for various reasons. Matti23 |
| 83 | ** [[Series/StarTrekPicard Well, you called that one!]] |
| 84 | |
| 85 | [[WMG: Federation technology is more prone to accidental time travel than other civilizations' technology.]] |
| 86 | * Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and all the other militant, expansionist powers don't have a Prime Directive except to conquer. If Klingon warships were as prone to temporal displacement as Federation starships, we'd all be speaking Klingonese. |
| 87 | [[WMG: Remnants of ancient long dead galactic cultures]] |
| 88 | * A species known as The Preservers faces extinction. Their last act as a species is to travel the galaxy, find intelligent life and seed them across inhabitable worlds that did not have intelligent life of their own. |
| 89 | * The last of the Preservers finds the T'Kon. |
| 90 | * System bound but technologically advanced the T'Kon had a cultural and technological renaissance after learning the last of the Preservers technology. |
| 91 | * The T'kon sent out asteroid sized slow boats, As seen in For The World Is Hollow and I Have Touched The Sky, and discovered other inteligent species. One of these species, The Iconians were able to use T'Kon technology to develop Gates that enabled instantaneous foot travel from one world to another. Gates still had to be deployed by slow boats, yet the T'Kon Empire spread across the alpha quadrant. |
| 92 | * The T'Kon Empire succesfully completes a Dyson Sphere. The Sphere had Iconian Gates to all corners of the Empire and major worlds may have had hundreds of gates on them. |
| 93 | * The T'Kon Empire discovers the Guardian of Forever, a device so ancient it far proceeds them. Learning from the Guardian of Forever the T'Kon create a time portal of their own and create a world that is a library of time periods. |
| 94 | * The T'kon Empire created complex, non-sentient, AI to run their societies. |
| 95 | * The Doomsday Machine is released by an enemy of the T'Kon Empire. That enemy is later integrated into the Empire, but the Doomsday Machine is lost to deep space. |
| 96 | * As a major move in the Temporal Cold War the Tox Uthat is used to cause the central star of the T'Kon Dyson Sphere to go nova...scouring all life within the Dyson Sphere. Across the Empire gates that were open during the conflagration transmitted the stellar blast, wiping out the rest of the Empire. A few remnants remained. |
| 97 | * When the central star goes nova the citizens of the library planet survive by diving into different time periods....possibly polluting the time stream, resulting in a future species deciding to send back the Tax Uthat to destroy them before they can pollute the time stream. |
| 98 | * Sargon and them were from an outer colony of the T'Kon Empire that was cut off from the Empire and so its gate was not active. Eventually they downloaded their consciousness and took to the stars. |
| 99 | * All of the planets of stagnant cultures controlled by machines such as Landru and Val were remnants of the T'Kon Empire (this is part of why Kirk felt more justified in overturning their cultures because they were remnants of a dead culture). |
| 100 | |
| 101 | [[WMG: The next step of Vulcan evolution]] |
| 102 | The mind meld is an evolutionary step towards the Vulcans becoming a hive mind species. |
| 103 | |
| 104 | [[WMG: The origin of Sentient Holograms]] |
| 105 | So technically speaking in Star Trek we see it is not the computers which generate the sentient holograms, it is the holograms themselves which are sentient, almost like they have an innate holo-soul in their holomatrix. Here's my theory on how and why that is: As we know Starfleet has extensive scans and information on Data's positronic brain. There was even a time a human uploaded his consciousness into said positronic brain, and though we learned that it wasn't really consciousness it was just information, we do see that information produced a fully realized personality within Data's positronic net until said information was dumped out. So I believe that Commander Maddox was trying to create a positronic brain but they thought it would be ethically wrong to build an experimental sentience. If the experiment failed they could create a poor psychologically tortured creature, or a psychopathic one like Lore. So working with Dr.Lewis Zimmerman they developed a holographic projection of a positronic brain that they could run simulations on. As we have seen in A Matter of Perspective, a holodeck can create a functioning independent holographic object inside itself that functions on its own just like the real thing. So the new complex holomatrices of the Doctor and later Vic Fontaine are basically holographic sentient androids like Data and Lore whos sentience literally exists within the holographic positronic brain which actually fucntions independently of the holodeck computer itself. |
| 106 | * Doesn't seem to make much difference in the end. It's not like the computer creates the hologram once and forgets about it, it's still simulating it and all the interactions of any simulated parts continuously. So any holographic computer would logically have to be less powerful than the computer projecting it. |
| 107 | |
| 108 | [[WMG: On Romulan foreheads]] |
| 109 | The Word Of God explanation for why some Romulans have forehead ridges, inherited scar tissue, is obvious nonsense. Romulan forehead ridges, as well as other differences between Romulan and Vulcan physiology, are due to Romulans interbreeding with other species, specifically Klingons, sometime during the two-thousand years since leaving Vulcan. In TNG:The Enemy, Dr. Crusher states that Romulan ribosomes are closer to Klingon than Vulcan. Ribosomal RNA, unlike DNA, is inherited only from the maternal line, and passes from mother to child virtually unchanged, except by occasional mutations. The rate of change is so slow that it is used to trace evolutionary histories back millions of years. This constitutes scientific proof that at some point in the past Klingon DNA entered the Romulan gene pool when a number of Romulan males mated with Klingon females. TNG:Birthright proves that such hybrids are possible. The early Romulans likely captured or otherwise obtained a number of Klingon females, either as comfort women or as breeding stock due to a shortage of Romulan females, in the early days of the Empire. Over time most of the more visible Klingon traits were minimized through selective breeding, but the persistent forehead ridges remained as even individuals, like Miral Paris, with a fraction of Klingon blood have been seen to retain distinct, if diminished, ridges. |
| 110 | * I had always thought the original Vulcans who left and settled the Romulus/Remus system interbred with the Remans and this gae rise to the distinctive Romulan genome. However as you pointed out if their genome is closer to Klingon than Vulcan than that would imply that the original Remans were of Klingon ancestry. So perhaps the Preservers put some Klingons on Remus and they interbred with the indigenous Remans giving rise to a mostly Klingon hybrid species which later then interred with Vulcans and gave to the Romulans. |
| 111 | ** Alternately perhaps the real difference between Romulans and Remans is the percentage of Klingon blood and Remans are more of a different caste than a different species. The distinct Reman appearance and their prowess as warriors, as well as their low standing in Romulan society, is because of their Klingon heritage. Mainstream Romulans deny and conceal that they too contain a little Klingon blood, such as when that same Romulan in TNG:The Enemy (who between his Ribosomes and ridges very definitely had some Klingon ancestry) stated he would rather die then accept a transfusion of "Klingon filth," because that would entail admitting their relationship to the lowest caste in Romulan society and Romulans are overtly racist. |
| 112 | |
| 113 | |
| 114 | [[WMG: The Federation is harvesting the remains of dead cultures to fuel their starships.]] |
| 115 | The Dilithium crystals are only regulating the antimatter reaction. The Federation seems to be harvesting antimatter from pre-existing deposits to power their ships. Given the feats that the Federation performs and the size of the Federation fleet, antimatter does not naturally occur in sufficient quantities to power the entire Federation. What if the antimatter deposits aren’t natural? We know that in Star Trek, space is full of aliens, some of whom have come and gone far before the Federation existed. The antimatter the Federation is harvesting may simply be the energy storage facilities of those long dead cultures. We’ve certainly seen Dyson spheres made by alien cultures and even the Romulans have power sources that aren’t reliant on mining antimatter. |
| 116 | |
| 117 | This would lead into… |
| 118 | |
| 119 | [[WMG: The antimatter the Federation relies on will run out]] |
| 120 | Nature is unable to replenish antimatter in any meaningful amount, and any alien races that created the Federation’s current reserves are long gone, as the Federation now claims those areas of space. The Federation itself seems unlikely to have alternate power sources that can meet their needs, leaving them with a finite power source that they are rapidly burning through. It may be possible that in the future the supply of antimatter will just run out and lead to an energy crisis in the Federation. At this time the Federation may be forced to buy or steal alternate power source technology from their neighbours. If they aren’t able to successfully get this technology they will be forced to buy antimatter from their neighbours, leaving them at the mercy of other civilizations or take the antimatter reserves of other cultures by force. |
| 121 | * Ahem, Point of Order: According to the information I just dug out of the left part of my butt: Anti-matter is very, very rare in the natural universe. However anti-matter can be artificially generated by reversing the spin of a hydrogen atom, hydrogen being the deuterium we hear about. Deuterium is so common in the universe that the total mass of deuterium in existence outweighs the mass of all other atoms combined. So the phrase deuterium deposit is a bit of a misnomer. The stuff is everywhere, but the universe is so vast that it exists in amounts with densities so thin that it is energy inefficient to try and harvest them. So a 'deposit' of deuterium is a place where it is in concentration levels high enough to be worth harvesting. Each starship has fusion reactors on them for varying reasons, but one of the main reasons is that fusion reactors can run off deuterium. The Bussard ramjets on the front of the nacelles scoop up interstellar hydrogen and feed it into the fusion reactors. This produces energy, and the byproduct of helium, which is stored in a fuel tank on the ship. The energy from that reaction is used to convert more hydrogen atoms in the deuterium into anti-matter, that anti-matter is then stored in magnetic bottle. When they need to activate the warp drive they need a hug boost of energy to spin the warp coils. They dump the anti-matter and the helium into the warp core and POW they're off. In other words, they can generate all of the anti-matter they will ever need as long as they can find deuterium deposits to harvest. |
| 122 | ** The thing about anti-matter that makes it the fuel of choice for warp drives isn't necessarily how much power anti-matter produces per se. It's the efficiency it converts matter to usable energy. Because this two step process allows them to scoop up hydrogen and convert into anti-matter they can use 100% of the true energy available in their fuel. This means they have to carry far less fuel than other forms of energy generation. So technically you could power a warp vessel with just standard fusion reactors but to do so you would need like 100 times more fuel and fuel storage/processing than the fusion-anntimatter technology. So your ships would just have to be huge is all. |
| 123 | *** Since in Enterprise we know that several species had warp drive before humans, including the Vulcans, the question is why were human warp drives so awesome that they became the standard of the Federation? I always assumed that what made human warp drives stick out was that Zefram Cochrane figured out this super efficient fusion-antimatter process. When the Vulcans and other species saw it, they immediately realized the potential of this allowed humans to build better engines than anyone else. Humans popped on the scene with the best engine technology around and everybody wanted it, which is what put them in the position to quickly develop so many enemies yet at the same time become the core of the Federation. |
| 124 | ** Also, aside from a small amount of trilithium resin, this process produces no theta radiation waste products. So in addition to and because of of the efficiency of the process Cochrane developed, it was CLEAN 100% efficient energy with an inexhaustible fuel supply. THIS is the real reason human warp drives end up supplanting all others in the Federation. |
| 125 | * Unlikely, since the Federation has [[https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Antimatter_generator Antimatter generators onboard]], which would suggest that they synthesise the material. {{Jossed}} by the events of ([[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS5E1Night VOY: "Night"]]), which state that the Federation has an improved antimatter creation process that does not cause polluting byproducts. |
| 126 | [[WMG: The warp drive is fed on part from the leavings of the replicators and transporter]] |
| 127 | Converting energy to matter generates an equal ammount of antimatter, which, of course, is what the ship runs on. So they teleport the antimatter straight into the reactor/fuel tanks. |
| 128 | * This would have taken care of Voyager's fuel issues from the get-go. That they needed to go look for fuel, and that they were running out of fuel in the first place would suggest otherwise. |
| 129 | [[WMG: Starships have a nightwatch to stop crews from going insane]] |
| 130 | Why would starships need a nightwatch? There is no night in space, and why would the dim the lights as they did on both TNG and VOY. I have two connected theories on how nightwatch came about on starships. |
| 131 | 1) the phrase nightwatch was first used to describe the time of the schedule when both the Captain and First Officer were off duty. It didn't literally mean it was night, it just meant they were probably asleep, so don't bother them directly, take it to the officer on the bridge. |
| 132 | 2) They realized that the day/night cycle circadian rhythm is inherent to pretty much all intelligent species, and that without a day/night cycle they would develop sleep problems and from there mental instability problems. |
| 133 | So put those two together and it has just become Starfleet procedure that when the Captain goes to sleep they put the ship in nightwatch mode so that everyone knows not to disturb the captain or first officer and it maintains everyone's circadian sanity. |
| 134 | |
| 135 | [[WMG: The explosion of Praxis was no 'accident']] |
| 136 | At least not the one they told us. Whether the Genesis Device 'worked' or not it was a torpedo which could destroy a planet, a terrible weapon. Despite the Organian Peace Treaty the warlike Klingon factions that had controlled the empire since the TOS era wanted to develop a super weapon of their own. The warlike chancellor thought, we can generate enough energy on Praxis to power a planet, can it be used to destroy a plBOOOM! As flaming radioactive chunks of their own moon shredded every orbital defense they had and rained down on the homeworld causing nearly apocalyptic planetary catastrophe the High Council turned to look at the Chancellor and proceeded to kill the living shit out of him, his house, his family, their allies, people who owed him money and six guys the chancellor didn't even know just to be thorough. The moderates rose to power and quickly were like we need to make peace NOW so under no circumstances are you to tell the Federation we were testing a planet cracking weapon...that works. |
| 137 | * Gorkon was a championship sprinter growing up in Klingon athletics. Read the above account to figure out why I think that. |
| 138 | * his daughter took over to get him out of that. Her administration probably only lasted long enough to get the peace process set. The Empire was in political turmoil for two or three decades until Kempek was made Chancelor. Kempek was the last of the respected old liners, or appeared as such, he was actually the one who ushered in the age of sleazy backroom politics that plagued the Klingons through the Dominion War. |
| 139 | * In my WMG above I postulate that Federation warp drives work by using bussard ramjet to scoop up interstellar hydrogen, then use that hydrogen to power a fusion reactor, the fusion reactor is used to create anti-matter which powers the ship. Klingons use anti-mater but their ships are not sophisticated enough to use bussard ramjets and on board anti-matter conversion. So Klingon ships need to fuel up. Praxis is where the Klingon Empire creates the anti-matter fuel for its entire fleet. They cut corners...and the rest is history. |
| 140 | |
| 141 | [[WMG: More of a Wild Mass Question: Why didn't Section 31 upload the virus to the Borg]] |
| 142 | The one that Picard didn't use because it was unethical. All Section 31 had to do was load that virus into a computer or something and put it on a ship and send that ship out. The Borg assimilate it and POW no more collective. Why wouldn't 31 do that? |
| 143 | * They almost certainly couldn't do anything at the time, because we can be reasonably confident there are no Section 31 agents in Picard's senior staff. But since then? Perhaps they did, and it didn't work (note: we have no reason at all to believe the virus actually works). |
| 144 | * Well, at the time the virus was created, no one knew about the Borg Queen. Presumably, she's able to isolate and delete cognitohazards such as the one the Enterprise crew came up with. After all, it's not like the virus affected Data, and he's the one who came up with it. |
| 145 | |
| 146 | [[WMG: This is more of a wild mass question: What House as Gorkon in and what was his house doing in the TNG era?]] |
| 147 | |
| 148 | [[WMG: There is no death in the Star Trek universe]] |
| 149 | At the moment of 'death' one just gets stuck in a time loop repeating the events that lead up to one's 'death'. To the rest of us you have died because your corpse slumps over unconscious and the brain shuts down. Well, that's not because you as an individual ceased to exist, it's that your consciousness has left your physical body and it is now just an inert lump of matter. Your consciousness returns to the to the point of the quantum split which created the 'you died' timeline. To those who continue on in that timeline you are dead and gone. You however have gone back in time and either figure out how to get out of that timeloop and then continue living on in a different timeline, OR you get stuck in that timeloop literally forever. |
| 150 | * There have been those who had near death experiences and were able to get out of the time loop and remember it. They told people about it and those people told people and that's how ancient cultures developed their primitive belief in after lives. So their religions developed along following what these other people did to get out of their timeloops. For example Kahless was a Klingon who was killed which put him into a timeloop and while Groundhog Daying his way through getting killed he realizes the one thing he never did was kill his own brother, so one time through he kills his own brother and breaks the loop, he comes back and tells the tale and creates the Klingon religion. |
| 151 | |
| 152 | [[WMG: Subspace is just the Q messing with the universe]] |
| 153 | Wouldn't it be crazy if subspace only existed because the Q messed with how the universe was originally? Maybe it's to make any species that follow reliant on subspace due to it being so useful for so many purposes. This reliance on something that they control would allow them to knock down any competitors that approach their level of power. Q reveals in an episode that he can personally change the gravity constant. Q also implies that there are factions that do not support the rise of humanity because of its potential. |
| 154 | * EVERYTHING is just the Q messing with the universe. |
| 155 | |
| 156 | [[WMG: No such thing as gods? Says who?]] |
| 157 | Gene Roddenberry was notoriously Atheist, and the various ''Trek'' series tend to make it ''very'' clear that there is NoSuchThingAsSpaceJesus (except on planet 892-IV), only SufficientlyAdvancedAliens. Yet, ridiculously improbable situations occur ''very'' frequently, and the philosophical view that ThereAreNoCoincidences ''could'' have some validity when one remembers that godlike beings are very active in the ''Trek'' universe and the only proof that anyone has that they are not involved in a given improbable event is their failure to show up in person to gloat. But for every time Q has popped up to cause mayhem openly, there could be innumerable cases of him casually willing reality to throw a NegativeSpaceWedgie into the path of anyone he wants to inflict a little misery on. On ''Voyager'' we even saw his son lounging in a comfy chair in the Astrometrics lab amusing himself by orchestrating an interstellar war elsewhere in the universe and watching the battles. ''Exactly'' like a [[JerkassGods capricious god]]! So, other than the characters' use InsistentTerminology to deny that these scientifically-inexplicable powers are "magic" or "miracles", or that the beings possessing them are "gods", there is really ''nothing'' to indicate that they are right. The universe ''could'' very well be run by higher beings in an active, rather than passive, manner, effectively ''making'' them gods! |
| 158 | * Notable is the TNG episode "Q Who", where Q basically forces Picard to effectively pray for his help to save them from the Borg, who were carving them up largely because Picard demonstrated hubris and offended Q (i.e. the "god" in question) in the first place! |
| 159 | * Q even explicitly claimed to be God once, in TNG: "Tapestry". |
| 160 | * I would assume the official Federation position is "There are beings of stupendous power roaming the universe, but they are not inherently more moral than anyone else, and we are under no obligation to worship them." |
| 161 | |
| 162 | [[WMG: Time travellers tend to land in the right place at the right due to quantum, hear me out...]] |
| 163 | In TNG Parallels we see that because of quantum mechanics every time there is a decision point both outcomes happen by quantum creating two parallel timelines. A quantum divergence would be triggered by events in a specific point in time and in space. The points where the timeline diverge make a small crack in physics at that specific point in space/time. If one accidentally time travels then one is more likely to end up landing in one of these quantum cracks in the timeline. For those who time travel on purpose, be it by scientific or psychic means, it is still easier to travel to one of these quantum cracks than to a non-divergent point in the timeline. |
| 164 | * Spock mentioned the possibility of "currents" in time which resulted in Dr. [=McCoy=] arriving in the right time and place to prevent Edith Keeler's death in "City on the Edge of Forever." Perhaps that was one such quantum crack? |
| 165 | * I figure the temporal rodenberryian physics of it works likes this: There's a set of events in motion, those events have probabilities of what the next sequence of events will be. Sometimes the probabilities of the next events are pretty set. For example if Picard says set course for Planet X Warp 3. At any given point in that trip the probability is that they will just keep going straight at a constant speed. Now when something happens the probabilities become a bit more open to options. rodenberryian quantum physics would dictate that when two (or more) options have the exact same probability of occurring that is when divergent quantum timelines happen. That is the 'crack' in the time stream. At those places the temporal energy required to move through those points in time doubles or triples or whatever, so when your time travel method hits those areas of the time stream it no longer has sufficient temporal energy to move through and POW you pop out right on the other side of that point, at a time when the probabilities are equal of events going one way or another. However you now represent a new variable that tips the equation. |
| 166 | ** For some reason this variable always seems to tip events into a future that really, really sucks for you. No one ever accidentally goes back in time and accidentally creates a perfect future for themselves. |
| 167 | *** It's like Anorax said Time has moods, anger is one of them. When you bump with time it bumps right back. |
| 168 | *** Anyone have a scientific (in the sci fi sense of the word) explanation for why when you are a time traveling variable it always causing events to tip into non-favorable positions. |
| 169 | *** It's not that any future is 'good' or 'bad' it's just a matter of it's not the one you're used to. For example the Enterprise saved the lives of the people on Mintoka 3, that's a good future...which also includes thousands dying at the hands of the Borg, and where Picard's brother and nephew burn to death in a senseless fire, that's a bad future. |
| 170 | |
| 171 | [[WMG: Woodstock was considered one of the pivotal historic events that led to humanities Utopia.]] |
| 172 | In TOS the episode The Way to Eden we see a full blown hippie movement exists and is apparently somewhat widespread in the Federation. In Search for Spock, genius level intellect James T. Kirk was completely ignorant of the culture of the 1980s, to the extent that the phrase 'exact change' completely stymied him YET he knew enough about Woodstock to know not only that it would explain Spock's behavior and dress, but that it fit chronologically well to Spock's apparent age, and he even knew that people did LDS, (one letter off, hey close e-f'n-nough). Later on Voyager we learn that the Q consider Woodstock as significant as Isaac Newton discovering gravity and the American Civil War. |
| 173 | * My belief is that some hippie communes survived the nuclear war since they were [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Family out in the woods and shit]]. Then when aliens arrived you bet the hippies ate mushrooms and went to meet the aliens. I'm sure Zepgram Cochrane would probably have gone to a hippie fest to party, dropped acid, got drunk and got laid and from there on in associated with the hippies giving them some serious credibility and influence in this new rapidly changing world. |
| 174 | * Kirk was astute enough about the 1960s to attribute Spock's colorful metaphors to the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement Free Speech Movement]], which began in 1964-1965. That's around the beginning of the hippie movement and the same time LSD began to be used for both therapy and recreation. The University of California at Berkeley, which he specifically mentions, probably still exists. |
| 175 | [[WMG: V'ger was found by Unimatrix 02.]] |
| 176 | So the Borg have Unimatrix 01. Maybe there are several unimatrices across the galaxy, however each one is evolving in its own way. Unimatrix 01 has evolved into the Borg as we know them. Unimatrix 02 assimilated Voyager 6 and the two bonded and evolved into a new being consciousness V'ger, which in turn began re-assimilating the cubes or whatever of the unimatrix into one massive ship that grew and grew until it became the V'ger we all know and love. |
| 177 | ** TNG Borg (curbstompers, interested in technology, eldritch abomination-y, "near side" of the Delta Quadrant) are a different Unimatrix from Voyager Borg (redshirts, interested in biology, run by queens, "far side" of the Delta Quadrant), or are in the process of fissioning. |
| 178 | * perhaps the Great Link was Unimatrix 03 that evolved into the Founders. |
| 179 | |
| 180 | [[WMG: Worlds of the Klingon Neutral Zone.]] |
| 181 | Since the TOS was not written with a 'map' in mind they just threw worlds at us whenever they wanted without any relative location between them discernible from the show. I assume that Organia, Capella IV, Sherman's Planet and Nimbus III were the major planets in the sector disputed over by the Federation and Klingons, and this sector in its entirety later became the Neutral Zone. Deep Space K7 was the federation starbase that served that sector. |
| 182 | * Nimbus III is probably located at the point where the Federation, Romulan, and Klingon borders meet. |
| 183 | |
| 184 | [[WMG: Weather control technology systems failed on many worlds during the Dominion War.]] |
| 185 | As we saw on Risa weather control technology can fail and the planets environment goes to shit. There are probable several colonies and many homeworlds that rely on weather control tech for their environments. During the war I'm sure that several of these systems failed, some due to damage, some due to the resources to support them being re-allocated to the war effort. With the collapse of their environments I'm sure there were food shortages left and right, plus all sorts of environmental illnesses and issues. |
| 186 | |
| 187 | [[WMG: All of the omnipotent beings are the same species, but they live in different communities, almost like nationalities.]] |
| 188 | Just like mortals form communities, each with different rules and code of conduct, so do omnipotent beings. The two biggest communities of omnipotent beings (that we've seen) are the Q Continuum, and the Organians. They represent an ideological differences among the omnipotent beings but both express a concern in their own way for the way being of mortals. The Douwd was a rogue Organian, like they way Amanda Rodgers' parents were rogue Q. Nagillum was just a loner who made his own little sub-universe to live in. The Prophets are omnipotent beings who decided to go live in a wormhole. Trelane the Squire of Gothos was a runaway Organian child. The omnipotent being created the barrier around the edge of the galaxy to keep out the extra galactic invaders we saw in TOS. |
| 189 | ** Actually, according to the novel ''Q-Squared'', Trelane is a rogue '''Q'''. |
| 190 | |
| 191 | [[WMG: On continuity errors vis-a-vis the Eugenics War]] |
| 192 | * Ground rules: We are not counting the books or any STEU, no Re-Boot Star Trek and temporal incursions don't count. |
| 193 | The exact date and time range of the Eugenics Wars seems to be all over the place. The TOS clearly dates it in the late 90s, other references to it seem to place it in the 21st century, and ''[[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine [=DS9=]]]'' placed it in the 22nd century. Yet the Voyager crew goes to 1996 and we see NO evidence of the Eugenics War, and Sisko and crew go back to the early 21st. None of what we are told and what we see quite add up. I see three reasons for why this can be the case without it being a continuity errors. |
| 194 | 1) There was a post nuclear dark age and a lot of specific information was lost from this era. So history can record around the time the events of the Eugenics War and WWIII happened, but the exact details are lost so historical accuracy is spotty. |
| 195 | 2) The two main events of the Eugenics War and WWIII were interconnected events and some people disagree about exactly which was which. It would be like if a historian pointed out that WWI led directly to WWII so in fact one could argue that WWII started in 1914. So when some people say the Eugenics War and some say WWIII they may be blending eras because of that particular persons level of education and perspective on history. |
| 196 | 3) Some people consider the start of the Eugenics War to be when the Augments were first 'born' which was in the 90's, however they were only infants then and had to grow up. However just their births may have started to cause or been the results of shifting political situations, laying the ground work for the future conflict that occurred when they reached maturity some 20 years later. However some people consider the start of the Eugenics War to be after the augments reached maturity and started firing. From that standpoint the 'date' of the Eugenics War could deviate by up to 20 or so years and still be accurate. The conditions which gave rise to WWIII were directly descended from the aftermath of the Eugenics War, analogous to how WWI led to WWII. So some people consider WWIII to have started during the post Eugenics Wars political hostilities, however some people consider WWIII to only be the actual nuclear exchange itself. Some people may even consider the post atomic horror to still technically be WWIII. So from that standpoint, combined with the loss of historical accuracy due to the post atomic dark age, and then how much information drift you get over 200+ years before the star trek starts the exact dates and figures of the Eugenics War, WWIII, the Post Atomic Horror and even Colonel Green's War could vary a great deal. |
| 197 | * So don't blame the writers of the show, it was a very tumultuous period in human history, accurate information is hard to come by. |
| 198 | * Perhaps the kids were 'born' in the 90s, but had some fast growth modifications but they were still children in the 90s. However they were super smart children, so much like in Ender's Game, they were taught from the get go to be super military and sociological strategists and scientists. Even when they were around 10 years old in the 90s world leaders started listening to their advice and making changes and policy. It was only later, when the genetically engineered were around 18 or 20 that the world leaders realized that all along the advice the kids had been giving them was part of a master plan to take control away from the world leaders and cement their own rule over the world. |
| 199 | ** After the Eugenics War the geo politics of the world was in turmoil. Factions arose, more important than nations, and war broke out as these factions fought over resources, technology, arable lands all of which the Eugenics kids had put under their own control. Open warfare erupted and completely degenerated into world war. Somebody with nukes realized their own defeat was inevitable, and they pushed the button. Once the birds were in the air, other countries with nukes had only a few scant minutes to decide what to do, so they launched their own arsenals. The major cities were destroyed, millions dead and the world degenerated into the post atomic horror. Even though they didn't pus the button, it was still all the fault of Khan and his ilk. |
| 200 | |
| 201 | [[WMG: What drives Genetic Augments homicidal is their belief in their own superiority]] |
| 202 | In ‘Statistical Probabilities’ we see that four genetically engineered people have severe emotional problems and they are sent to visit Dr. Bashir because he has managed to fit in socially and emotionally with regular people. Together they calculate that the Federation will loose the Dominion War and so the best thing to do is to surrender but no one will even entertain that notion no matter how the figures add up. Believing everyone doomed by their own stupidity Bashir becomes super depressed and immediately becomes a drunken asshole with a gambling problem. The rest of the genetically engineered try to give classified documents to the Dominion so that the Dominion can win quicker thus saving billions of lives according to their calculations. Bashir comes to realize that their calculations could in fact be wrong, and he comes back to his senses, stops the other genengineered folk, apologizes for his behavior to all his friends and goes back to normal. Bashir’s emotional problems happened because at the time he believed there was no way they could be wrong because they were genetically engineered, once that belief was shaken he came back to normal. What if Jack, Patrick and Lauren are the way they are because of their belief in their infalability to interpret what is going on around them. For example maybe Patrick is so sensitive because he is on the sensitive side AND believes that there is no possible way he could be wrong in interpreting something as an insult when it wasn’t. Perhaps if Patrick was a more open to the idea that maybe he got it wrong what they meant he might be less reactive. Maybe Jack is so frustrated and angry because no one will listen to him on several important points...they don't listen because he is wrong, but he cannot and will not accept that because of his belief in his own genetically engineered superiority. Lauren acts so over the top sultry all the time because she believes that since she is genetically engineered to be sexy and so thinks that is the way she should act. |
| 203 | * This may be the same thing that made Lore homicidal, because he believed that as an android he was perfect and infallible. So when he started saying and doing stuff wrong the people wondered aloud to Soong if his android wasn't faulty. Lore believing himself superior refused to change anything in how he acted and he considered it must be them who are in the wrong. He then became completely paranoid and decided to kill them before they killed him, because of course once he thought they might dismantle him he would of course believe that he is 100% correct in that assessment, therefore in his mind they are already guilty and this is just self defense. |
| 204 | * Maybe what helped Bashir to be able to fit into society was that he had his flowers for Algernon and remembered changing from a dimwit to a genius, and he realized that his parents did this to him because they didn't love him as he was and that now he was...unnatural. This little bit of self loathing helped him to avoid the superiority complex that makes most AI go all 'destroy all humans!'. |
| 205 | |
| 206 | [[WMG: Regarding the various progenitor aliens]] |
| 207 | There are several ancient species that have been the subject of fanon. Notably, we have: |
| 208 | |
| 209 | The billion+ year old aliens from TNG "The Chase," who seeded various systems with genetic material to form the various humanoids we see everywhere. |
| 210 | |
| 211 | Sargon's race from TOS "Return to Tomorrow," who established colonies throughout the galaxy, could theoretically be an ancestor race for many others, but is usually limited to vulcanoids based on a couple of lines from Kirk and Spock that are basically speculation. |
| 212 | |
| 213 | The Preservers from TOS "The Paradise Syndrome," who transplanted Native Americans from Earth to the world seen in that episode and are said to have transplanted others as well. These are occasionally identified with the aliens in "The Chase," which doesn't make any sense as the Preservers would have to have been around no earlier than a few thousand years ago. |
| 214 | |
| 215 | My thoughts: Sargon's race and the aliens from "The Chase" are the same; both are extremely ancient and regard themselves as having given rise to others; Kirk and Spock's dialogue in "Return to Tomorrow" is just speculations, and "The Chase" does confirm a connection with the Vulcans as the Romulans share their genetic material. |
| 216 | |
| 217 | The connections between the various Vulcanoid races (Vulcans, Romulans, Rigelians, Mintakans, and Debrune) are likely more recent; they are the result of Vulcan's ancient colonization period mentioned in "Balance of Terror," the less advanced Mintakans may have been transplanted by the Preservers or suffered some kind of disaster and reverted to a more primitive technological state while forgetting their offworld origins. |
| 218 | * Perhaps the Mintakans superstitious beliefs of an Overseer weren't so far fetched. |
| 219 | ** Maybe Mintakan culture is stuck in a cultural logic loop: advanced aliens visited and influenced their people and then left, over time this gave rise to a religion, over time the religion fades to mythology and is eventually considered primitive thinking, then aliens show up again causing the first logical leap to be that the old superstitions must have been right, the aliens aghast at reviving superstition politely leave, the history of this alien intervention becomes myth, etc,. The Mintakan culture maybe 100,000+ years old and stuck in this cycle over and over again never allowing them to progress as a people. |
| 220 | |
| 221 | The Preservers are neither race. They are probably the same as the Sky Spirits from VOY "Tattoo" who had some connection with Native Americans thousands of years ago. It would not be out of character for them to have rescued a few Native American cultures like the ones in "The Paradise Syndrome" in order to keep them from dying out. |
| 222 | * The Caretaker from Voyager could be one of the Preservers. |
| 223 | |
| 224 | All this is why, in the newest Department of Temporal Investigations book, when they stumble upon transplanted dinosaurs, someone talks about 'the Preservers', and someone else points out that historians have stopped using that term, because it's clear there have been ''several'' different groups of aliens doing the same-ish sort of thing, and pretending they're all one species and group is just asking for confusion. |
| 225 | |
| 226 | [[WMG: Positronic devices are just our semiconductor devices]] |
| 227 | |
| 228 | Trek is in a set of timelines that diverge from the real world sometime between the 1960s and the 1990s. The most politically significant difference is the absence of the Eugenics wars from our timeline, but the difference most visible when watching Trek is the apparently slow development of computer technology in the Trek universe. |
| 229 | |
| 230 | VOY:''Future's End'' depicts a computer revolution at the end of the 20th century, which appears to align with Real World developments. However the resolution of that episode it is not clear that the actual event causing the computer revolution (Starling's capture of a 29th C. ship) would still happen in Trek's timeline. If it did not it may explain the slower development of computer technology in the Trek verse. |
| 231 | |
| 232 | In the early 21st century at the time of the Bell riots ([=DS=]9:''Past Tense''), computer technology appears to operate in terms of a mainframe-terminal model which was, if more ubiquitous and centralized, also more primitive than the personal computers and networks available at the time of production, let along those that would be available in real world 2024. In any case, it may be that the atomic wars of the middle century caused a reversion in the state of computer technology, especially as most computer equipment would be vulnerable to radiation and electromagnetic pulses. |
| 233 | |
| 234 | Oddly, NX-01 Enterprise appears to have more evidence of computer technology than TOS (at least, there are more, larger and flatter display screens, if no voice interface.) Atomic weapons may play a role in the story again: ''Enterprise'' is set before the Earth-Romulan war which was fought using atomic devices (TOS:Balance of Terror). Perhaps later ships were built with more primitive but EMP-resistant technology for this reason. In the TOS era, ship's computers appear to be composed of discrete electronic components on printed circuit boards. By the TNG era computers use "isolinear optical" technology that has an unknown relationship to electronic technology. The development of computer technology in Trek appears to skip right over semiconductor devices |
| 235 | |
| 236 | In real world physics, a "positron" is the same thing as an "antielectron," the antimatter equivalent of an electron. It is difficult to see how antielectrons could be any use in a brain composed of mostly ordinary matter as they would almost immediately annihilate nearby electrons. But we know that Trek's terminology for fundamental particles often differs from our own. From the name we might surmise that a positron is something like an electron but with a positive charge. In the real world, in positively-doped semiconductor materials, gaps in an otherwise saturated lattice of electrons act effectively like mobile positive charges, i.e. like positive electrons. Much of the operation of semiconductors is based on the interaction between mobile electrons in negatively doped materials and mobile positively charged "holes" in positively domed materials. "Positron" would be a plausible name for what real world semicondictor physics calls "holes." Thus semiconductor devices might fairly be called "electronic-positronic devices," which may be shortened to "positronic." In Trek's timeline, only a lone wolf like Soong would decide to develop semiconductor technology while the rest of the universe went for isolinear tech. |
| 237 | |
| 238 | [[WMG: Humans do have and use money.]] |
| 239 | Humans in Star Trek have said that they don't use money, that is a lie. We see that some humans still seek profit (Mudd), we repeatedly see that the humans, the Earth government and the federation hasn't gotten rid of property ownership, [=DS=]9 had shown that some materials can't be replicated, and somethings are impossible for replicators to produce (land, hand made items, etc). There are still commodities in the Star Trek universe and ownership is still accepted, as a result humans are still going to have to use money in some form. When humans say “we don't use money” they are lying, using money is looked down upon by humans and many of the humans we've seen in Star Trek like to think that they have abandoned money now focus on “self-enhancement” (whatever that means) but in truth many humans still use money and humans are going to need to use money when they want something that can't be replicated and they still have currency (credits). |
| 240 | * It's distinctly possible that they're not so much lying as mistaken in their terminology. Picard, for his part, referred to the Federation's being run on a "resource-based economy" (whatever that means) that had no need for money, but maybe he had a very specific definition for "money" that didn't apply to the Federation credits of his time. It's certainly likely the Federation has no ''physical'' money. It's also possible they have no individual bank accounts anymore either, and that what counts as material wealth ''is'' their possessions, which are directly bartered among themselves for other possessions. (Captain Janeway was shown making this kind of trade a lot in the Delta Quadrant, and Nog and Jay traded a load of self-sealing stem bolts for several tesseks of land on Bajor at one point.) The credits, for their part, might just be computer entries in a collective database for keeping track of trades with non-Federation entities such as the Ferengi Alliance and Klingon Empire. ("Entry 2AF34D6: Ferengi Alliance traded 50,000 credits' worth of self-sealing stem-bolts to Starfleet in return for Federation mining futures on 5 bars' worth of gold-pressed latinum, available in exchange for 50,000 credits and deliverable on demand.") The goods available on this exchange have a permanently fixed price such that the credits' value never changes, making the status of these credits as "money" a highly questionable (though valid) definition. |
| 241 | * Bear in mind that many of our present-day conceptions of how an economy works at all are simply not applicable to the setting presented. While there is trade in some items, the ''overwhelming'' majority of goods needed for civilian purposes can be produced locally with the tech we get to see, and basic construction materials and energy resources and so on are going to be too cheap to measure. Day to day life is certainly post-scarcity. Currency might therefore no longer be a very useful concept because physical trade doesn't have the same kind of density or penetration that it does in our world, that can provide a usefully stable and widespread basis for value: star systems even within an empire have no real reason to regularly ship bulk material to each other; separate empires certainly won't; and everything that can be obtained within one star system everything is effectively free anyway (this applies to the Federation, presumably the Dominion and Romulans and maybe the Klingons as well; may not apply to the smaller/lower-tech cultures). |
| 242 | ** For an example of how an economy would work in a world with replicators, see George O. Smith's "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Equilateral#The_External_Triangle Venus Equilateral]]" stories "Special Delivery" and "Pandora's Millions." |
| 243 | * Trade still exists in the Federation, so traders like Harry Mudd and Kivas Fajo still try to acquire goods and items, but not necessarily money, however as traders both of them also operated beyond the Federation where currency was needed. Deep Space Nine, and Bajor are not in the Federation and do use latinum currency based economics. In Encounter at Farpoint Dr.Crusher mentioned credits, but once again, the Bandi were not part of the Federation. Federation citizens need to use currency when interacting with cultures outside of the Federation that do use currency. Cultures that have proper diplomatic ties with the Federation will recognize credits of Federation citizens for trade, but in personal transactions, like buying a baseball card at a private auction credits wouldn't be accepted. Federation citizens can play Tongo and such and when currency, for them though it's probably more like a souvenir than money. Sisko did once mention using transporter credits, but that's not money, it's an allotment of resources. So money is wanted by Federation citizens on the frontier, and those who travel outside the Federation so they can travel among currency based economies, and inside the federation they may want currencies for fun and as souvenirs. But the Federation economy itself does not run on currency just on allotment and access to resources as they are available. |
| 244 | * I see it going something like this: Somewhere up in the Federation Council all of the energy output and industrial infrastructure of the Federation is tallied up and measured as 'credits'. Each Citizen of the Federation is allocated 150 Credits. In the economic system the number of credits per citizen doesn't fluctuate, you get 150, it's how much/many resources they represent that changes fluctuates. So like everybody born into the UFP Citizen Joe Federation gets allocated 150 credits. 50 credits get automatically allocated into 'fundamental services' which covers a lifetime supply of food, comprehensive medical care, guaranteed minimum housing, unlimited computer and communication access, discretionary emergency services and free transport on starfleet ships for immigration purposes (this exchange is part of how Starfleet receives it's 'funding'). This leaves him 100 credits that he can allocate however he wants. He decides he wants to become a trader. So in his apartment he jumps on the computer and allocates 50 credits towards a space ship. The computer shows him a design template program, he points and clicks and assembles the design for a small one man trading vessel with good range and comfortable life support. 50 credits worth of federation energy output is now transferred to the industrial replicators at the nearby shipyard. Some amount of time later his ship is done. He jumps in and flies off. As a trader he is looking for unique items that he can acquire and trade. He flies into some Federation world's spaceport. His ship gets the basic tune up guaranteed to all travelers because the credits of a space ship cover all basic maintenance, repair and restocking. He hangs out in the star port. He encounters a Federation citizen with Unique Item X. The species will trade the Unique Item for 120 tons of Substance 7 which is not a natural resources present in their solar system. "What do you want Substance 7 for?" he asks, "Well that's my business." the buyer says (alot of people who do trades and deals always like to act like their up to something full of intrigue, usually it's not really the case, it's just all part of the 'feel') Substance 7 is a very difficult substance to replicate requiring 60 credits worth of resources to replicate 120 tons but of his 100 credits 50 are allocated to his ship so he does not have enough credits to replicate 120 tons of Substance 7. He could recycle some parts of his ship and get the credits that way but he likes his ship and doesn't want to give anything on it up. He does his research and discovers a mining operation that is actually digging up Substance 7 from a vein in an asteroid, 120 tons would only require 30 credits of resources, so he allocates 30 of his 50 credits to this mining project. 30 credits worth of Federation resources and energy are sent to that project. Later Joe Federation shows up in his ship to the mine and requests 30 credits worth of Substance 7 which gets loaded onto his ship and he flies off and trades it for Unique Item X. He now owns the item. Someone wants the item from him. Joe Federation is a fair, law abiding trader and so he says the item is a 30 credit item, because that was the credits worth of Substance 7 he traded for it. The buyer offers a 30 credit overhaul to Joe's ship which will include an intermix chamber that was personally overhauled and tuned by Geordi Laforge, chief engineer of the USS Enterprise which this guy got one time when his ship broke down and he sent out a distress call and the Enterprise rescued him. They make the trade and Joe's Ship can now travel farther. So now Joe Federation wants to start trading in the area of the Federation that borders the Ferengi latinum economy, so he needs latinum. A ferengi traders says he will give him 50 bars of latinum for Substance 52. No problem, that requires 10 credits at the nearest industrial replicator, meaning 1 credits is worth 5 bars. Joe goes to a shipyard and recycles 10 credits worth of equipment from his ship, maybe giving up the advanced sonic shower components and the ornate furniture and downgrading the view screen. He then allocates that 10 credits into replicating Substance 52 and goes back and trades it to the Ferengi. So right now Joe's 100 credits are represented as: 50 bars of latinum worth 10 credits, a ship worth 70 credits with an intermix chamber personally tuned up by the Chief Engineer of the Enterprise, and 20 credits left over...but Joe Federation still only has 100 credits. Through a series of good deals Joe makes a 50 bar profit and returns to the Federation with 100 bars. Joe wants to trade in his ship and move to a colony and create a small homestead for himself near a spaceport where he's going to open up a Cantina. Simple he goes to a shipyard, it completely disassembles the ship and he is now re-allocated 70 credits, how he needs to unload the latinum and so he trades the latinum to another trader on the frontier, trading his 100 bars for 10 credits. Wait...that doesn't seem to add up! Originally he traded 10 credits for 50 bars, doubles his bars to 100 and is now trading 100 bars for 10 credits. That's right. even though he doubled his bars as far as the Federation economic system is concerned the additional latinum gained was all still part of the same initial 10 credit lot because the particulars of the Ferengi economy are outside of the Federation economic system. This is why the Federation and Ferengi can't come to terms,even though Joe doubled his latinum he did not double his credits because currency based and credit based economics don't mesh and the result is probably a rapid downward spiral value of the currency which is why the Ferengi do not accept Federation Credits, but other cultures will. With the left over 20 he had Joe now has 100 credits. Joe Federation then jumps on the computer and allocates his 100 credits to create colony equipment for Joe Federation to start his Cantina. Now, in all of this Joe Federation didn't gain anything materially. He could've just skipped all the trader stuff and gone right to opening a 100 credit cantina, but that's the point of the Federation economy. He did the trader thing for the personal fulfillment of it, even if that fulfilment was just fun and excitement, or perhaps he thought it would be an interesting way to get out and see the universe, and now that he's done the trader thing he thinks it would be exciting to own a cantina on a strange new world and be at the hub of activity. That's the point of an economy that has abandoned currency based economics in favor of a philosophy of self improvement. |
| 245 | ** Or like this: Andorian X is a singer and has a beautiful voice. Andorian X puts on a performance and hundreds show up, the show is great. Andorian X now puts out that he wants to create a space ship and travel to other planets to perform and asks his fans to allocate credits towards that. 50 fans each allocate 1 credit. Andorian X dials up a 50 credit ship, the shipyard replicates it and Andorian X takes off traveling from world to world. Now the 50 credits still each 'belong' to the respective fan who allocated them, the just just put the credit into Andorian X's project. Andorian X traveled the Federation and on each world fans allocated more and more credits to Andorian X's space tour until Andorian X now has a big awesome cruiser, with like a hundred crew signed on board and travels around. Andorian X decides he wants to settle down. He applies for membership to a colony and is accepted. He then take ship to a shipyard and has it disassembled, which means he is now allocated the credit value of the ship, 1,000 lets say, keeping in mind that each credit still 'belongs' to the original fan who allocated it they're just still supporting the career of Andorian X. He then allocates this into 1,000 credits worth of colonization facilities and infrastructure. This is enough for him to makes a nice apartment for himself and a small stadium for performances. He also allocates to it enough housing so it can serve as a school and performance center. Part of the center includes full holoprojection system and bradocasts holographic performances all over the Federation which become quite famous. More and more people allocate their 1 of their credits to support the center. It grows and grows until it is now The Apollo of the Federation, famous across a 100 worlds, thousands of people allocate 1 of their credits to the center, and it grows and grows becoming a center for young up and coming performers to start their careers. And Andorian X still has....100 credits, s/he has still not gained any increase in wealth. While the center represents thousands of credits of investement, those credits still 'belong' to the people who allocated them to support this project. |
| 246 | ** Federation Francis grows up on a rural simple colony. She wants to travel the stars but the colony does not have any industrial centers of shipyards. A starfleet ship cruises by and she applies for transport and they have room so she comes on board, like all Federation citizens the credits for this are already allocated as one of the fundamental services. She goes to the nearest big world. She wants to travel the Federation and see the big sophisticated planets but while she has studied alot about space travel from her computer on her colony she does not have the training to be able to handle a full space travel herself so she seeks out someone with training. Federation Francis meets an ex starfleet officer who will allocate her 100 credits IF she gets to serve as commander, see Ex-starfleet always wanted to command a ship but just was never dedicated to her starfleet career and so was never get a ship like she wanted, as commander she will organize the ship based on a starfleet rank structure which is considered to be the best way to run a ship. Federation Francis says she will serve as a first officer and allocate 100 credits to a ship IF they travel to the major worlds she has always wanted to visit, Earth, Andor, Vulcan, Risa, Tellar. OK, agreed, now they need a crew. They meet an aspiring astronomer who will allocated 100 credits to the ship IF they can put 20 credits toward an astronomy lab and he will function as a science officer in the command structure if he is also able to work on his own science projects and they travel to some specifically chosen star systems he can research. Agreed. They meet Andorian X who allocated 100 credits IF they stop at places where he can sing a gig. An aspiring trader named Joe Federation will allocate 100 credits IF he is allowed to function as a trader and put in a big cargo bay. They recruit someone who was an engineer for a megastructure, they figure megastructures uses systems close enough to ships that it should work. Over time they recruit four other people who have no training but agree to function as ensigns in exchange for being able to allocate 10 credits to their individual quarters, which end up very posh. So they now have a 1000 credit ship, enough for a small cruiser, which has a kick ass 20 credit astronomy lab on it and some pretty posh crew quarters. The ship has a total crew of 10 commanded by an ex-starfleet officer given the ship rank of captain, second in command is Federation Francis given ship rank of commander, they have a chief engineer and a science officer who each have the ship rank of Lieutenant Commander, Trader Joe Federation takes the rank of Lieutenant and functions as something of a ship's quartermaster, and the singer and the four other untrained folks all take the ship rank of Ensign. The ship will travel to Earth, Andor, Tellar, Risa and Vulcan, along the way they will also be stopping at 4 systems for scientific interest, and 5 colonies along the way to perform singing gigs, and it will stop at each spaceport to make trades and pick up passengers. Every Federation citizen gets some of their credits automatically allocated to space travel, so when they take on passengers they register that passenger with the Federation and credits get allocated to their ship to cover the fuel and supplies for transporting that passenger. This ship travels around and everyone has a great time until Federation Francis decides she wants to settle down on the same colony as the Andorian singer. She takes her 100 credits out of the ship so they pull into a shipyard and remove 100 credits worth of equipment from the ship and recycle it. While in space during the long journeys she developed a fondness for reading books, actual books and so she decides to create an actual library for the colony. She allocates 90 credits to create a library and she starts collecting books, real books and creates a check out system for people, and she leaves happily ever after having found something she enjoys that helps better herself and all of humanity. However she still keeps 10 credits allocated to her old ship to help them out, and in exchange they sometimes trade for or otherwise acquire books for her. |
| 247 | ** This would make trading a pretty enticing career for Federation citizens and explain several things we've seen in the Deep Space Nine (such as Federation citizens valuing and using latinum). So a trader such as Joe Federation above manages to get some Latinum costing 10 credits and trade so that 10 latinum bars becomes 100. He decides he wants to quit trading and settle on a colony like Joe Federation. If he gets the opportunity he might not trade the 100 latinum bars back to the federation for the same 10 credits he used to buy the original 10 bars but instead buy some colony equipment from the Ferengi instead (where the 100 bars is actually worth more than the original 10) and just bring it back to Federation space. He can use profits from trading to make his ship bigger by buying ship upgrades and parts from other cultures outside the Federation. This might explain why the Federation is hesitant to give some technology to other cultures (other than some of them not being ready for it) |
| 248 | |
| 249 | ** So in the Federation it would of course be illegal to steal items from people who didn't want to trade them like Fazho did. It would also be illegal to inflate the credit value of a traded item. However trades based on sentimental or personal value are of course fine, as long as the credit trade in that exchange is equivalent. |
| 250 | |
| 251 | [[WMG: The Federation is nowhere near as powerful as played in the series]] |
| 252 | From a strictly technological perspective, they're trumped by plenty of others, not to mention individuals. Looking at how things are setup, they've fought to a draw the Cardassians, who appear to be less advanced than the Federation. |
| 253 | |
| 254 | Looking at the treaty with the Romulans, the Federation was forbidden from developing cloaks but not the Romulans. That sounds more like the Federation was on the losing end of that war. Also, the Romulans seem to be capable of churning out ships that can challenge Galaxy-class ships en masse, while there are only around 10 Galaxy ships ever named. |
| 255 | * True, but the Federation could still put together a powerful fleet of cruisers and destroyers which can still kick a ton of ass. |
| 256 | * Also, there are a lot more than 10 Galaxy-class ships; even the relatively small fleet Sisko scraped together in "Sacrifice of Angels" had about 12 in it, and while Romulan Warbirds may be larger in overall dimensions, they're mostly a framework around empty space and their Federation counterparts are faster and more maneuverable (Galaxy could outrun them even when thy were pushing themselves past the point of no return in "Tin Man," Ambassador mentioned as more maneuverable than the equivalent model of Warbird in "Yesterday's Enterprise") |
| 257 | |
| 258 | Ditto for the Klingons and Cardassians. Don't get me started on the Ferengi. Furthermore, while the federation is using dilithum to power their ships, the Romulans are using a forced quantum singularity, moving them up a little further along the Kardashev scale than anyone else. Their smugness might just be deserved, in that they feel like they're dealing with the stupid kid from down the street that keeps picking fights with them and losing. |
| 259 | |
| 260 | While Klingon ships are referred to as "no match" for Galaxy-class ships, they seem to be produced much faster and easier than federation ships. So much so that they have "junkyards" full of retired ships. What they lack in power they seem to be able to make up for in numbers. |
| 261 | |
| 262 | The Klingons also seem to have figured out how to deal with warp core breaches better than the Federation. Instead of ejecting the core they can adjust the tritium intermix. Why that was never done on a Federation ship? |
| 263 | * The problem they were dealing with was being hit by an energy-draining weapon, not suffering a warp core breach. |
| 264 | |
| 265 | Same as the cloaking devices. Klingons have had them for awhile in the series, and they operate well and yet the Federation is just getting around to researching them. That seems really odd that there wasn't a single, captured ship that was floating around that they could have pulled the cloaking device out of and examined. |
| 266 | * (WMG) The treaty forbade the Federation from developing a cloaking device using Romulan cloaking technology, so capturing Romulan ships wouldn't help them...legally speaking. So part of the Pegasus project was to try and develop a cloak based on technology completely different from Romulan cloaking devices. |
| 267 | ** Actually, the Pegasus experiment was more about developing an interphase cloak than it was about duplicating cloaking technology. Incidentally, even the Romulans haven't figured out how to get that to work yet ("The Next Phase"). |
| 268 | |
| 269 | * It's more or less accepted that the Romulans outclass everyone else in the Alpha Quadrant, isn't it? They haven't conquered the rest because they don't really seem to want it that badly. As to the others - there are different kinds of power. The Federation has vast economic resources but not much fight unless they're threatened personally, whereas the Klingons and Cardassians are military-first cultures that will have proportionally much higher military budgets. In contrast Federation citizens can enjoy private enterprise and generally do interesting things with their time. The Ferengi seem to have a high ''per capita'' level of wealth, but we haven't seen any evidence that there's more than one planet of them, so even though their ships are powerful, there might only be three or four. |
| 270 | ::The Federation is basically a classic example of a [[AwakeningTheSleepingGiant sleeping giant]] - they don't defeat the Cardassians because they don't care about what happens outside their space, they don't outbuild the Klingons because they don't intend to use the ships anyway... but when their security is directly threatened by the Dominion they do a screeching about-face and start taking names with a vengeance. (The warp core thing is the same principle on an engineering level - their pre-war ships are poorly built because they weren't tried in fire. You can bet the ''Prometheus''-class doesn't have that problem.) |
| 271 | ** No, a better example is like the US, hobbled with environmental regulations. The prime directive probably applies internally as well as externally. There are clearly members with space faring races (Vulcans) that were far more advanced than others. The Vulcans even stated as much. The Romulans don't have this problem. |
| 272 | * Three things 'hamper' the Federation in this regard. 1) Their goal is to seek peaceful co-existence by negotiation above all else. So if what it took to keep the Romulans happy was making that stupid treaty that's what the Federation would do, same with the terrible treaty with the Cardassians. This may seems stupid to a military minded individual but to the Federation this is their highest goal and purpose. 2) While we mainly follow the adventures of the big exploration ships which are armed to defend themselves out on the frontier and in the uncharted regions of space, MOST of Starfleet is science and transport ships. For defense Starfleet devotes the minimum, unlike the other powers Starfleet is NOT seeking military superiority in the region so they only build enough military forces to maintain the balance of power and then use diplomacy to try and unify everyone. 3) The Federation is big, it's HUGE compared to these other governments, and as such borders many, many more governments than its enemies. So the Federation must always be careful and negotiate because they don't want to end up having wars on multiple fronts since their war fleets are pretty small. |
| 273 | * The Cardassian treaty involved mutually agreed territorial exchanges, something that happens all the time in the real world (it's mentioned several times that the Cardassians ALSO gave up worlds to the Federation), and that the Cardassian war was not an all-out total war like with the Dominion, but a series of small scale border skirmishes. Most of the Federation's conflicts seem to have just been small skirmishes due to them expanding their borders, rather than an actual war. The Dominion conflict was very likely the first true 'hot war' the Federation ever got involved in. As to the Alpha/Beta Quadrant powers, it's pretty clear that the Cardassians are less advanced than the others, while the Federation and the Klingons seem to be on roughly equal footing, technology wise. While the Federation might slightly edge out the Klingons in some areas, it appears that both are well aware that an all out war between them would devastate both, and there would be no victors. As to the Romulans, it does indeed seem that they are the most advanced of all the major powers (a Galaxy class is substantially out matched by a Romulan Warbird, and it took the presence of THREE Klingon Birds-of-Prey just for the Enterprise to even the odds against two Warbirds) (save the Dominion), although the tenacity and determination of both the Klingons and the Federation would make any all-out conquest difficult for the Romulans, hence why they prefer to work through subterfuge. It's also important to note that the Federation has a talent at adapting to more powerful threats. Starfleet engineers are apparently renowned through the galaxy for their technical skills (one Vorta stated they could 'turn rocks into replicators'), and it took less than two years for the Federation to negate and counteract every technological advantage the Dominion had over them, such as their ability to beam through shields and see through cloaking devices. So, it would probably be hard to predict an actual victor in the case of a conflict between the various powers. |
| 274 | |
| 275 | * They mainly use diplomacy and propaganda to hide this fact. Giving all citizens the assurance that all is fine and everything within the Federation is perfect. Then we get colonies like Tasha Yar's, and border wars and skirmishes. The populace deep inside the Federation is lulled into a false sense of security because with their holodecks and weather control technology they lead indolent care free lives. While out on the borders, and even within the borders ALL SORTS of things go wrong all the time which get attended to by an overworked Starfleet while the unaffected citizens just blase their comfortable lives away...up until they get assimilated, or killed by a cloud creature, or crystal creature, or flying potato pancake creatures, or invaded or suffer social collapse. |
| 276 | ** Section 31 is probably behind this propaganda. |
| 277 | * We can see that underneath the veneer of their evolved sensibilities Starfleet is a cutthroat organization. In "Best of Both Worlds" the character of Captain Shelby gives us a keen insight into the culture deep inside of Starfleet. While Shelby is most definitely a very competent officer all in her own right, she is very straight forwardly a conniving, backstabbing, ambitious bitch. And while the Riker Shelby conflict never flares up in front of anybody, we get the sense that they all know that this is going on and accept it as part of how Starfleet officers get ahead. Riker himself says Shelby reminds him of himself, meaning he may have been a conniving, backstabbing, vicious bitch too. |
| 278 | ** I always figured the 'Shelby' inside of Riker died off during the Pegasus incident due to the guilt, deserved or not, that his ambition drove him to literally gun down his own men. |
| 279 | ** In Shelby's defense: She also has one quality that Starfleet officers need and she has that quality in spades, the ability to step the fuck up and throw down when the time is necessary. Especially because I always figured that Shelby was a rinky dink before the Borg attacked. She was like the guy at the CIA who sits at the Canada Desk...and then one day Canada attacks in full on hostile and murderous intent. Shelby went from being in a think tank of old admirals who probably just ran a lot of computer models and then shuffled them off to a low priority desk, and she used her sex appeal to woo an admiral into giving her the position. Because she was so super ambitious she probably put more effort and energy into it that anyone expected but she also produced results like no one had seen...even so she was just still in a low priority desk in a games and theory room. You know that Shelby was the kind of person that when she heard the Borg attacked, when no one was looking she pumped her fist and was like YES! The point is she went from being in a rinky dink room in the basement basically being the ambitious girl from ''Film/{{Election}}'' to staring down the Borg and Commander Riker at the same time right in the fucking face and not blinking! Oh and saving the entire Federation if not the Quadrant to boot. So I think Starfleet's position is as long as you demonstrate that you can step the fuck up they want you in, they don't care how big an asshole you are. |
| 280 | *** Speaking of stepping the fuck up, let us not forget that Dr. Crusher has faced the Borg in battle twice and kicked ass both times. |
| 281 | ** I'll bet that Shelby wrote the holonovel version of the battle against the Borg where you take on the role of Commander Shelby and have to be the one to do everything to defeat the Borg. |
| 282 | *** When this holonovel came out Picard injunctioned to have it suppressed, but the Federation courts agreed it was such a fictionalized account of the battle that it counts as original material. |
| 283 | *** I always figured that a decent holodeck could access Starfleet (non-classified) mission logs and re-create any mission you wanted to play out. This can be used for training but I'll bet it primarily gets used for entertainment purposes throughout the Federation. People end up following holodeck mission log adventures the way people now a days follow their favorite tv shows or sometimes follow the shows/movies of a favorite actor. |
| 284 | *** So even in universe you would get 'trekkies' who use holodecks to LARP the adventures of the crew of the USS Enterprise. |
| 285 | *** It's worth noting that in TNG's second episode, Wesley Crusher builds a device that mimics Picard's voice ''specifically'' to pretend that he's on the bridge taking orders from the captain. He programed it using sampled bits of recordings he made of Picard speaking over the ship's intercom. Say what you will about Wesley, but that's fairly impressive--if somewhat creepy--dedication to his LARP. |
| 286 | *** And of course those who would play either Ensign or possibly even Sisko himself in the Dominion War holodeck novels. SOme would play it with the Emmissary stuff thrown in, some not. |
| 287 | *** And Tom Paris would make the complete Voyager holonovel and Voyager would have its small subset of holo-fans. |
| 288 | |
| 289 | [[WMG: The intelligence of Klingons is vastly underestimated]] |
| 290 | Klingon science and medicine maybe behind, but they're clearly brilliant engineers as they effectively use 100-year battlecruisers and birds of prey and keep them operating for over a century. |
| 291 | A Klingon spy for the Romulans used a Klingon device attached to a hyperspray to convert classified information into amino acid sequences that would become inert proteins; 200 years before that, they did something similar with a Klingon courier's blood cells. |
| 292 | Klingons have sophsiticated neuro-sifters in the 23rd century. Maybe later Klingons decided it wasn't an honorable weapon. |
| 293 | A Klingon scientist worked the Metaphasic Shielding with scientists from the Federation and several independent worlds. |
| 294 | The Klingons were one of four powers to discover the legacy of the Ancient Humanoids who seeded the Galaxy. The Cardassians, Picard and Enterprise, and the Romulans were the other three. |
| 295 | Klingons do operate science ships, this has been confirmed in dialog. |
| 296 | There is evidence of Klingon society moving from strict castes to a more egalitarian ethic between the 22nd and 24th centuries. |
| 297 | Ch'Pok, Worf's prosecutor, was a cunning antagonist who figured out all Worf's buttons and pushed them in court. And don't forget: the Klingons were right about Cardassia being infiltrated by Changelings. |
| 298 | * Cardassia was not infiltrated by Changelings, at least not until Dukat sold them out to the Dominion and that was long after the Klingons' attempted invasion. The whole Klingon invasion of Cardassia was in fact started by a Changeling that was posing as General Martok. |
| 299 | * We don't see any of Klingon society in TOS except for a few soldiers. Sine Klingons want to give the impression that they are all warriors so that is mainly propaganda. Their engineers get no real public credit, so people only think of Klingons as warriors. However Praxis exploded and the Klingon economy crashed, so between the TOS and TNG their sophistication in ship design didn't progress much, giving the impression Klingons aren't as smart as the Federation and Romulans who had solid enough economies to do ALOT of r&d during that 70 year perid. |
| 300 | ** I think Klingon society always had a warrior ethos self image. In Enterprise we see a Klingon layer who laments the growth of the influence of the warriors. Then by TOS we see them as more facist tyrants. I think two major events caused them to really re-embrace their ancient warrior heritage, the Organian Peace Treaty and then the Praxis Incident. Both incidents force peace on the Klingons and they saved their social psyche by re-embracing their traditional warrior image. The more peace was forced upon them the more the Klingon people had to pump up their own warrior image to maintain their cultural pride, and for the political forces in control to maintain their popularity and political position. The Houses that kept it old school rose to prominence over the more progressive members of Klingon society. |
| 301 | *** The Klingon ethos that every Klingon is a warrior is not unlike "Every Marine a rifleman." We see numerous examples of lawyers, scientists, merchants, chefs, artists and laborers, many of whom also demonstrate proficiency as warriors. Martok started out as a civilian laborer until he proved himself in combat, while Worf's nursemaid takes out an assassin. Because of the emphasis on being warriors, those that are or were Soldiers of the Empire have the greatest political and social clout. Presumably a Klingon normally needs to prove himself as a warrior or have connections to become a Soldier of the Empire. However, in wartime the Klingons can call on their entire populace to fight for the empire. |
| 302 | |
| 303 | [[WMG: Klingon Soldiers.]] |
| 304 | Maybe the reason the Klingons rely so heavily on bladed weapons is because they are already fighting the Borg indepedently of the Federation. We see in a Voyager episode that the Borg are attacking the Klingons and we've seen Worf tear through drones with ease with a mek'leth. Maybe the bladed weapons were introduced as a adaption proof weapon against the Borg who also primarily fight close up. Why do they send sword wielding soldiers against other people? maybe its a plausible way of getting rid of those from other factions or dissidents. You've got an excuse as you've already trained your warriors in using these weapons and have stores aboard the ship and the Klingons are too proud to refuse the order to do so. Handy way to make those from other factions go on a suicide mission. |
| 305 | * It's also pretty tough to put down a Klingon. As per TNG, they have a redundant backup for just about every single system in their bodies. Granted, there have been some incidents of single-hit kills in the series(Worf has done it) but these are rare. The Borg may have adapted to the Klingon's disruptors, but the Klingons themselves might be a match for being assimilated because of all the backups they have built into their physiology. You might be able to hit a Klingon and his "honor" would force him to accept that he'd been hit and decide to go down, or just not get back up a la Aikido. They're hit and they're obliged to go down. |
| 306 | |
| 307 | [[WMG: The Borg are the precursors.]] |
| 308 | Think the ancients from SGXCOM who made humans to be soldiers who are stronger and more warlike than themselves. In this case the humans and other races of the galaxy are better at inventing new ideas and are being farmed for it. They have the strength to destroy the rest of the galaxy but that would defy the point of creating the races in the first place. Races get culled as they become to powerful and occasional attacks speed along development. Memories of other races of the Borg being a minor power may just be them hiding their presence and a change in purpose or sudden need to develop weapons faster (eg. external enemy) may explain the message in the genes of the races. |
| 309 | |
| 310 | [[WMG: All the Starfleet Captains (Kirk, Picard, Janeway, Sisko, and Archer) have latent psionic powers.]] |
| 311 | They always have the uncanny ability to make the right choice every time. |
| 312 | * In TOS Where No Man Has Gone Before we do learn that Starfleet test everybody for ESPer ability, maybe it's a requirement...perhaps one they don't even tell people about. |
| 313 | |
| 314 | [[WMG: Vulcans evolved from Felines like Humans evolved from Primates.]] |
| 315 | Watch one episode and tell me they don't act like a bunch of stubborn cats. |
| 316 | ** That would explain why Spock felt an attachment to Isis. |
| 317 | *** That is one of the oldest fanons in Star Trek history, dating back to an article in ''Spockanalia'', a 1967 fanzine. |
| 318 | |
| 319 | [[WMG: "Humanoid" does not mean "Primate." Each humanoid species evolved from a different animal family.]] |
| 320 | Humans evolved from primates; Vulcans from felines; Trill from marsupials (book-canon); Klingons from crustaceans (implied in "Genesis"); Talaxians from amphibians; Bolians from fish; Ferengi from rodents; and so forth. |
| 321 | |
| 322 | [[WMG: Every thing we've seen from the Borg except for Q Who and Scorpion has been a massive XanatosGambit.]] |
| 323 | The Borg spans half the galaxy, have trillions of drones and millions of cubes in their disposal. Yet they only send one cube for the Federation, and as expected the cube is defeated. Years later, they send another single cube to assimilate the Federation. They send a ship back in time with their supposed "queen" to stop humanity from inventing warp drive, however they do it in such a way that it allows the Enterprise to follow them back and defeat them, while at the same time inspiring the inventor of warp drive, Zefram Cochrane, to go from alcoholic loser to one of the most idolized figures in human history. Voyager, despite being one little ship, repeatedly outsmarts the Borg to the point of VillainDecay. The Borg have a transwarp conduit opening near Earth that they never use. |
| 324 | |
| 325 | The Borg could have long ago defeated and assimilated not only the Federation but [[CurbStompBattle all of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants' superpowers]]. Even without the transwarp opening deep in Federation space near its capital, they could have sent a hundred cubes to Earth, Cronos, Romulus, etc. at transwarp speeds and annihilate the major powers' navies and even assimilated all of the galaxy long ago. They haven't. Why? ''They never wanted to.'' |
| 326 | |
| 327 | The Borg are more than powerful enough to assimilate the entire galaxy but, as a supercomputer of pure logic, they lack the creativity to invent and evolve by themselves. As a consequence, their idea of "discovery" is to farm other more-emotional civilizations who possess the creativity or recklessness, and will invent the technology for them. They are parasites, but smart enough to know that you do not exterminate your livestock. Sometimes they use time travel to attack the civilization before its rise into a power, but they make sure to "accidentally" drag one of the civilizations' ships with them, which then defeats them and inspires innovation for said civilization. Everything we've seen the Borg do except in Q Who and most of Scorpion has been an act. |
| 328 | |
| 329 | Sometimes they take it a bit further and "attempt" to assimilate the ship, while they have a sufficiently emotional individual play the role of a queen the Borg don't really have because their prey will think that a "queen" could come up with ideas the Borg collective consciousness can't. |
| 330 | |
| 331 | The Borg let Locutus get captured, let Data hack into the Borg collective consciousness and let Data set the cube to sleep mode then destroyed the cube. They sent Picard messages telling him where the "weak point" was on the cube so Starfleet could destroy the cube. They let the Enterprise follow them back in time to Cochrane's invention of warp drive. They let Data rebel against the Borg Queen and let the Enterprise destroy the sphere. The fight between the Enterprise crew and the Borg on the Enterprise was part of the act including their defeat. |
| 332 | |
| 333 | Seven of Nine wasn't separated from the collective by the Doctor and Chakotay, they filled her head full of false memories and information about the Borg and let her go. Seven finding her parents' ship and having flashbacks to when the Borg assimilated her and her parents was pre-programmed to turn Seven against the Borg, Seven's interactions with the Borg "queen" were also to turn her against the Borg. By letting Seven go, they placed a person with knowledge of Borg technology on a ship that would then experiment with new technologies that wouldn't otherwise be considered. Voyager repeatedly survived encounters with the Borg. They infiltrated Borg cubes and space because the Borg let them. Unimatrix Zero thing? Part of the act. |
| 334 | |
| 335 | The end result: [[XanatosGambit If the Borg cube is successful, then they assimilate new technologies. Profit for the Borg. If the Borg cube is defeated, then the war at least motivates the target civilization into developing new technologies, and more technologies logically mean more profit from assimilation. Profit for the Borg]]. When their livestock is sufficiently advanced enough, the Borg would show up in full force and harvest the produced technologies ala [[Franchise/MassEffect Reapers]], but in the end always let themselves be pushed back to Borg space, to give their prey a chance to develop new technologies and rebuild their numbers. As long as the civilization in question continues to progress, the Borg are victorious in the end, even when that progress is dedicated to fighting the Borg, because the Borg will just assimilate and adapt. They only use their full armada when there's a complete threat to all of their existence. |
| 336 | * Said reaping might not have been far off either, you follow the Trek novelverse. The Department of Temporal Investigations series mentioned that the Borg likely would have conquered the galaxy by 2600 absent the events of Destiny timeline. |
| 337 | |
| 338 | [[WMG: The reason so many aliens look alike within their own race is because whatever pre-first contact disasters happened to that races thinned out their gene pools.]] |
| 339 | Both Humans and Vulcans were mentioned to have multiple catastrophic wars before or during the time of their first contact. If all alien races went through a similar period of disaster, then it follows that several of their ethnic races were either killed off entirely or reduced to a very small population. |
| 340 | * Maybe that's a common side effect as a species becomes technologically advanced. On a related note, I posit that Earth has meticulously controlled weather and a "garden planet" layout not because humans like it that way, but because we killed off most of the biosphere and have to keep earth alive like a coma patient on a ventilator. |
| 341 | ** Earth was probably like the set of Blade Runner or Fifth Element...until they met the Risians who had weather modification technology. Risa entered the Federation and weather modification technology became ubiquitous. Before Risa joined the Federation they sold this technology to the Ferengi...for quite a substantial price. So when the Federation showed up Risa was a already a resource rich planet, combined with their perfected weather modification technology this is why the planet was already a paradise before it joined the Federation. |
| 342 | |
| 343 | [[WMG: [[Film/StarTrekIITheWrathOfKhan Carol Marcus]] sings the theme song]] |
| 344 | The lyrics of the theme song (yes, it has [[http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/trek.asp lyrics]]) are really Carol lamenting the loss of her husband Kirk, who would have just recently left her for his space voyage at the time TOS takes place. Comparing this to their troubled relationship in ''The Wrath Of Khan'' speaks volumes about how much Kirk's life (and the series) changes between the events of TOS and the second movie. |
| 345 | * Except that it's the reverse. In the Shatnerverse novels and his memoirs, Bill writes plainly that Kirk acts like he does because Carol abandoned him, and took David away. Kirk, heartbroken, loves the Enterprise as his wife, the officers and crew as his children, and being human, satisfies himself with a different "Space Babe of the Week" because that's what Gene Roddenberry actually did during UsefulNotes/WW2 as a bomber pilot bedding nurses between sorties while his wife waited at home. Kirk onscreen was Gene in real life, and Shatner didn't like kissing a different woman every week because he thought about his wife differently: He respected her. Too bad Bill lost her, as he says, "Every TV show cost me a wife." |
| 346 | |
| 347 | [[WMG: All those ridculously HumanAliens in TOS and TNG?]] |
| 348 | They've actually got various alien quirks that just weren't shown on screen because they were not relevant to the plot. The Nazi Planet guys lick symbiotic moss off each other's backs; the Magna Romans are actually a joined Species like the Trill with a humanoid host and a communally intelligent bunch of worm-like parasites; etc... |
| 349 | |
| 350 | [[WMG: Every single continuity problem in ''Franchise/StarTrek'' can be handwaved by assuming that every episode, movie, comic, and book takes place in slightly different quantum realities (i.e. TNG: "Parallels").]] |
| 351 | * So, it's like the LiteraryAgentHypothesis, except instead of viewing a single universe through different lenses, it's the same lens with different universes. [[FascinatingEyebrow Fascinating]].... |
| 352 | |
| 353 | [[WMG: The continuity problems are the result of the Federation having ''multiple'' Enterprises complete with identical crew members]] |
| 354 | The duplication of Kirk seen in 'The Enemy Within' wasn't a freak malfunction, it was the transporter's default setting. Confronted by the almost insurmountable vastness of space, and the high mortality rate of red shirts, it became standard practice for Starfleet to secretly create duplicates of its more talented explorers and sent them out in different directions to cover as much ground as possible. |
| 355 | |
| 356 | * In real science, the transporter destroys you and makes a copy... |
| 357 | |
| 358 | The existence of a 'Mirror Universe' is in-universe propaganda to account for the sightings of doppelgangers. |
| 359 | * They seem evil because they are suffering from transporter psychosis, which may be more common than is let on. |
| 360 | * I think transporter psychosis happens more than is let on, and WHEN it happens the "Cure" is that they actually make a duplicate of you without the psychosis, claim that the crazy one is the result of a transporter accident and that the two of you have to be put back together. So they put you both on the transport pad...delete the crazy one, the original, and then beam the non-crazy copy back and claim it all to be a happy ending. |
| 361 | ** This is all of course because the biggest kept secret in the Federation is that the higher ups KNOW that the truth is the transporter just disintegrates you and you're dead and an exact copy of you is what walks off the other pad. |
| 362 | *** This of course is the setup for the events in the first ''Star Trek'' novel, ''Spock Must Die'' by Creator/JamesBlish. |
| 363 | |
| 364 | [[WMG:Vulcans are racist, or at least ethnocentric.]] |
| 365 | Logic is the basis for their entire culture, or at least [[NotSoStoic they want to pretend]]. They cannot ''comprehend'' something that isn't logical. When they see or hear something they think is illogical (for instance, "We're close enough to Klingon space to ''smell'' them!"), they'll try to ''[[LiteralMinded correct]]'' you! Among all the Vulcans seen throughout the franchise, few even ''try'' to see past pure logic. What do you call someone who can't see past their own culture and tries to correct anything that doesn't fit in it? They're explicitly racist in ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise''; apparently, they've mellowed out after centuries with the Federation. |
| 366 | * You are probably right. All Vulcans on TOS, aside from Spock, seemed to show a contempt for other races. Even Sarek said that Pon Farr 'Was not for outsiders. Especially Earth men." |
| 367 | ** Well, he was not talking about ''pon farr'' but about the practice of meditation, "a personal experience; not to be discussed, especially not with Earthmen," but yeah. |
| 368 | *** ''Spock'' said that ''pon farr'' was a "thing that no outworlder may know, except those very few who have been involved," "even we do not speak of it among ourselves," and that it was a "deeply personal thing." |
| 369 | * Celia Lovsky's ice-cold "Are thee Vulcan -- ''or are thee human?''" certainly showed an emotion. Yeow. |
| 370 | * There's a parody in which Spock goes "tch-tch-tch-tch, you earth people". That's ''exactly'' it. That's his attitude all the way through the show. Sometimes he's serious, sometimes he's teasing. |
| 371 | * It's difficult to find any other explanation for Spock's half-blood status being such an angsty issue for him. |
| 372 | ** How about his being torn between two extremely different cultures - one which embraces emotion, and one which dismisses it? That's enough to make anyone angsty. |
| 373 | *** But angst is an emotion! |
| 374 | *** Correction: Vulcans simply disdain expressing emotion, not possessing them. Having angst is fine, expressing it everywhere, {{wangst}}ing in public and causing disorder is not. At least only in Vulcan society, since Spock is NotSoStoic around Kirk (with [[HoYay consequences in fanfiction]]). If Vulcans really disdained emotion itself then why haven't they Borg themselves to be emotionless computers of pure and complete logic, finally free from the pitfalls of biology such as emotion, adrenaline and Pon Farr? |
| 375 | * This goes from being subtext to text near the end of "Deep Space Nine." That baseball game... |
| 376 | * Vulcans are less racist and more on the superior side, ala SpaceElves. This attitude is in part what led to the Romulans (who ARE racist/speciesist) - it's just the Vulcan view taken to extremes. |
| 377 | ** And where do you draw the line? |
| 378 | *** Morally? Probably at around the point at which you start using your beliefs in your own superiority as justification for mistreating everyone who is (or just thinks) differently. For the most part, even Vulcans who do think that are sensible (read: logical) enough not to let it affect their judgement. The line between "contemptuous" and "racist" can probably be drawn ''somewhere''. |
| 379 | * The new movie implied that the racism's real. Between the bullies near the beginning to the almost pseudo-Affirmative Action implications at Spock's acceptance to the Vulcan Academy, it sure looked like it. |
| 380 | -->'''Vulcan:''' Spock, you did very well, despite your handicap of being half human. You'll get to hang out with the same jerkwads who tormented you growing up. |
| 381 | -->'''Spock:''' With all due respect... Screw you. I'm joining Starfleet where I can make out with Uhura. [[WebVideo/BumReviews Live long and suck it!]] |
| 382 | ** Isn't the new movie a reboot? |
| 383 | *** It is, but at least the scene with the bullies took place in the Prime Universe as well. Amanda refers to it in "Journey to Babel." It's also shown in the TAS episode "Yesteryear" (written by Dorothy Fontana), which fans usually take as canon. |
| 384 | *** The correct term is CanonDefilement. |
| 385 | *** Nope, it's an AlternateContinuity - they're ''explicit'' about this. It is, or was, the same universe as Original Flavour ''Trek'', except it branches off at a certain point in the timeline. (And that point comes ''after'' most of Series/StarTrekEnterprise.) |
| 386 | *** It is colloquially referred to as a reboot, was advertised as a reboot, referred to in the press as ''Star Trek Reboot'' and when you type "Star Trek Reboot" into Google you get the new movie. The fact that it isn't a true reboot is just one of those delightful things about Star Trek like the retconning on the bumpy-headed Klingons. |
| 387 | |
| 388 | *** Will people get over it? The TOS klingons didnt have bumps because they couldn't afford it, it was the 1960s and Trek was a kid's show. It's called "use your imagination" and also "get over it" herpderpherpderp |
| 389 | *** Herpderp: You're thinking of ''Lost In Space''. Trek was the first science fiction TV series aimed at ''adults''. The "bumpy/smooth" Klingons could be argued right into the ground. But until you can produce documentation (memos, production notes, etc.) from the period in question from Gene asking for "bumpy" ''at that time'', "bumpy" will be seen as a retcon by most interested people. The one thing you're right about is TOS was indeed a 1960s show, and production notes for Klingons describe them as ''Vietcong''; "hard-faced Orientals, the Ho Chi Minh type". |
| 390 | *** Except clearly it can't be a reboot because the presence of Spock Prime relies on the in-Universe existence of previous continuity. |
| 391 | ** Also in-canon in TOS in "Journey to Babel". |
| 392 | * "They cannot comprehend something that isn't logical" This is cannon. In the TOS Immnity Syndrome Spock says that the crew of an all Vulcan ship died because they could not logically comprehend what was happening to them so they would have literally just stood there and let themselves die. |
| 393 | ** I always thought this was a pivotal and important episode in understanding Spock's relation his human and vulcan side. He is able to comprehend something that other Vulcans could not, their inability to overcome logic killed them and Spock seemed to really internalize that lesson but could not articulate and express until he was able to coin 'logic is the beginning of wisdom' |
| 394 | |
| 395 | [[WMG: In the TNG era, the Federation is a Communist state -- or at least a socialist one.]] |
| 396 | These web essays [[http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek-Marxism.html here]] and [[http://www.kyradesign.co.uk/kate/opinion/trek.html here]] go into much more detail, but the bottom line is: |
| 397 | # There is no money; this is bragged about during "The Neutral Zone." {{Matter Replicator}}s ensure welfare and render money unnecessary. Everyone works for the sake of working. On Earth, there are no explicit exchange values for resources at all. |
| 398 | ** In the first episode of TNG, Dr. Crusher buys a dress from Farpoint Station and mentions charging it to the Enterprise. Money may exist, but the Federation has so much resources and prosperity (and replicators) that people can have what they want, within reason. This lines up with the view of Earth as a post-scarcity utopia. |
| 399 | ** In the episode 'The Price', the Federation bids credits for use of the Barzan wormhole. This suggests transporter rationing. |
| 400 | ** The Federation as of TNG appears to ''internally'' be largely a post-scarcity socialist (note: not 'communist') utopia. The various "credits" might be of value ''only'' within the Federation; they have no absolute value. They still need currency to interact with other civilizations (including Deep Space Nine), and there are still resources restricted in availability more than general rationing can cover (starships seem to be one). |
| 401 | *** ''Earth'' has {{canon}}ically abandoned the use of money. The Federation overall may or may not. |
| 402 | ** Perhaps the Federation does have currency, perhaps on a standard with some kind of non-replicateable ore or other resource (usually Latinum in the TNG era), but it's only used when dealing with Non-Federation worlds and cultures. It would be hard for the Federation, or a citizen thereof, to buy something on an World that still uses money otherwise. |
| 403 | ** A sidenote: while Earth is definitely moneyless, it's a little more complicated than "working for personal fulfillment". There is almost certainly a "keeping face" aspect - "from each according to his abilities"? |
| 404 | ** The Picard family could be in the Federation's "nomenklatura"- the privileged class of Party elites who are given state approval to do things the average citizen can't get away with, because they are the same class that provides the people who decide what the state approves of. In Robert Picard's case, that's running the gigantic family vineyard that makes classic Picard wines (that hardly anyone drinks because of synthehol). We will note that he is considered a little peculiar in wanting to do this... |
| 405 | # The government controls most industry, commerce, transportation, communications. |
| 406 | ** Several private companies were mentioned on Franchise/StarTrek (including publishers Broht & Forrester mentioned on Voyager and the mining company owned by Ezri's family), as well dozens of privately-owned ships (such as Kassidy Yates' Xhosa.) |
| 407 | *** All but the publishing company were outside Federation juridiction. Kassidy's ship was a transport that she could have bought off the black market. (She is a pirate.) |
| 408 | *** There were companies in Communist Russia. They just did whatever the government said. |
| 409 | *** Another point for Earth rather than the Federation being moneyless. |
| 410 | ** There is plenty of private commerce. But it does seem like the Federation keeps track of as much of it as possible. |
| 411 | # There seem to be few vestiges of interplanetary government outside of Starfleet; the few government officials ever seen (President excluded) are either officers of, or adjuncts to, Starfleet. A government synonymous with its military? |
| 412 | ** Star Trek deals with a military organization, and the military is self-contained. Soldiers mostly deal with other soldiers in their daily lives, having little contact with non-military individuals. |
| 413 | *** But in Deep Space Nine, we see civilians -- namely, Julian Bashir's parents -- facing trial in front of a Starfleet judge. |
| 414 | *** We see ''communications between civilians being bookended with the Starfleet logo.'' Quark doesn't get to run a subspace network into the Federation, or he would. (See the holodeck suites.) That's a monopoly, and one Starfleet is running. |
| 415 | *** The terms Federation and Starfleet are used interchangably. |
| 416 | *** The communications are going to be handled by Starfleet if they are on a military installation such as Deep Space Nine. |
| 417 | *** But Deep Space Nine ''isn't'' -- or wasn't originally -- a military installation, even if the Cardassian design aesthetic makes it look like one. It doesn't even belong completely to the Federation (which is why Kira and Odo are there). No, it was just as much diplomatic at first (the Federation wanted to get Bajor to join the Federation), with scientific purposes added when the wormhole was discovered. It only turned outright military when the Dominion became a threat. |
| 418 | *** Would a military installation include a bar & casino run by a Ferengi? Yes, military bases have shops and restaurants, but those are normally run by friendlies or natives. Quark is from Ferenginar, which isn't in the Federation and is not in the immediate vicinity. And Quark likely would have sold state secrets to the highest bidder in early seasons! |
| 419 | *** Bashir's parents did NOT 'face trial in front of a Starfleet judge'. The judge announced that he'd reached a decision that ''Bashir, '''a Starfleet officer''' could stay in Starfleet''. He did mention that Bashir's father would get two years in prison, but it was '''the father's suggestion''', a compromise for allowing his son to retain his commission. |
| 420 | *** The judge still handed down the sentence. If his dad hadn't been on trial before, then he should have been sent to a civilian court, not sentenced in a military plea bargain. |
| 421 | *** It's possible that we see the Starfleet logo because the communications lines are being maintained by Starfleet, perhaps just another friendly service they provide due to having surplus capability available (they'd be paying for it either way, might as well get use out of it when they don't need it). Think of the GPS system that your phone or your car can link up to to navigate to your grandmother's house (beats getting lost in the woods). That's run by the United States Department of Defense. |
| 422 | *** Do you get the Defense Department's logo on your GPS? And if you did, would you use it? |
| 423 | *** Just because the US Defense Department doesn't do that doesn't mean that Starfleet wouldn't, given that they are two entirely distinct and more or less unrelated agencies (successor state debates aside). In response to your question, ''if'' my GPS did that, I would ''[[RuleOfCool totally]]'' [[RuleOfCool use it.]] |
| 424 | ** Picard's Enterprise had ''many'' diplomatic missions - and Picard (or, worse, ''Riker'') often acted as a diplomat. Would you make an active-duty military officer a diplomat in peacetime? |
| 425 | *** It's been done before, and not just in a TheEmpire sort of context. Civilian diplomats (and, just to mention another unusual role of Starfleet, science/exploration ships) exist and have been shown; the "Navy" gets sent anywhere the situation ''could'' turn ugly fast. Granted, it is like UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire if you think about it, but it hardly shows a completely military state. |
| 426 | *** Naval officers often handle diplomatic missions. |
| 427 | *** Its the other way around - Starfleet's main purpose is to "seek out new life and new civilizations", after all, with defense as a secondary concern. Picard's not a soldier who sometimes acts as a diplomat, he's a diplomat who sometimes acts as a soldier. |
| 428 | ** Starfleet seems to be responsible for federal-level law enforcement...this is potentially sinister, but still [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmerie common in real life]]. |
| 429 | * The simple (and overlooked) fact is, economic systems like what we have currently only work when there is scarcity. A modern economic system simply COULD NOT exist in a society as that which exists in the Federation. A galactic spanning multiracial society with thousands of stars, planets and asteroids to harvest would mean that even now-valuable substances like gold and platinum would become worthless due to their abundance, and substances like iron and aluminium become easier to produce, and consequently less valuable, as technology improves. When you factor in how ''they essentially invented alchemy and utilized it in every aspect of life'', then scarcity all but disappears. With it goes any currently existing economic systems. The only things that would retain their value would be unique and unreproducible things, such as intelligence and works of art, and substances that could not be replicated (such as latinum, dilithium, AntiMatter, energy and territorial space). |
| 430 | ** There is an old science fiction story, one of the excellent VenusEquilateral series, that delineates just exactly how this would work. |
| 431 | # Despite the lack of fiscal or social classes, there is still cultural elitism: Shakespeare, classical music, philosophy = ''high class'' = '''yes'''; rock/rap, mainstream TV = ''lowbrow'' = '''no'''. |
| 432 | ** Odds are, someone offscreen rocks out to "classical music" in the form of Korn, Led Zeppelin, Guns & Roses, etc. License fees have a lot to do with why we never see it. |
| 433 | *** Oh man, Picard standing in his Ready Room just looking out at the stars while "Sweet Child O'Mine" played in the background would rock!! |
| 434 | *** Music/NeilYoung will still be alive and making records, of course. |
| 435 | ** ''Well, crack my knuckles and jump for joy!/Got a clean bill of health from Dr. [=McCoy=]!'' |
| 436 | ** The Reboot film shows The Beastie Boys in Kirk's time. |
| 437 | ** TV is "no" -- but the eventual replacement had unintended consequences. (At least not all of them were bad.) |
| 438 | ** The real explanation is simple: classical music has lasted for hundreds of years, and so there's no reason to suspect it won't last for hundreds more; more modern music might well fall by the wayside over time. |
| 439 | *** Yes, but surely ''someone'' has at least heard ''of'' Music/TheBeatles? Data is aware of them as philosophers, but does anyone know the music? |
| 440 | *** There's also the fact that most all the music that isn't alien is not only classical, but ''European'' classical. No Americas, no Asia (not even with Asian characters). I'm detecting UnfortunateImplications in the vicinity, Captain! |
| 441 | ** Alternatively, all modern music got [=DRM=]ed to the point where the keys were lost and rendered it all unreadable. |
| 442 | *** This is unlikely unless our future is a [=DRM=] dystopia like in "The Right to Read". We're much more likely to lose information simply because the knowledge of the format is lost. (There is a dark age in between 1984 and Franchise/StarTrek's present, so that's ''very'' likely.) |
| 443 | *** We live in a copyright-obsessed culture. Things like classical music, Shakespeare and the other works of literature and music that have lasted centuries have done so because they are from an age BEFORE copyright, in which they could be told and retold, and disseminated far and wide. IP protections by their very nature restrict the same spread that enabled the classic older works to ''become'' classics in the first place. It's entirely possible, even likely, that the majority of the entertainment of the 20th and 21st centuries have indeed been lost because of the lack of easy dissemination that Mozart and the like had. This is also the same reason why musicians, especially of the attention-seeking variety, allow for piracy, because copyright means less attention. |
| 444 | *** However, Mozart and the like didn't have as many flat out copies of their music as we do now. Let's pick an album, say [[Music/AlanisMorissette Jagged Little Pill.]] Over thirty million [=CDs=] out there, probably millions of digital copies of at least "Ironic" circulating through the Internet and various [=iTunes=] accounts. While classical music could be spread via others, our music doesn't need to be spread via other performers, artists and record companies do it themselves. Also, regarding WWIII in the 'Verse; it appears that it was more "vast tracts of infrastructure destroyed," not "Technology lost forever." They managed [[Film/StarTrekFirstContact to build a warp-capable starship, after all.]] And to top it off, there was Cochrane playing Steppenwolf on futuristic cassette. So, yeah, it was licensing fees that kept modern music off Trek. |
| 445 | *** Truth be told, the DRM-busters won't let us reach the sad state of affairs described above. |
| 446 | *** We will find "the wisdom not to destroy ourselves". |
| 447 | ** Social class certainly does still exist--witness O'Brien and Bashir's interactions early in Deep Space Nine. It's not as prominent as now, but Starfleet officers can only fool themselves that it doesn't exist for two reasons: |
| 448 | #### They are in a meritocratic organisation and usually a long way from home. |
| 449 | #### Privilege is harder to see when you have it. The officer corps to which most of the main characters belong seems to be drawn mostly from either old Fleet families or rather prominent ones. |
| 450 | *** Bashir and O'Brien were like that because Bashir was a young officer and O'Brien was a NCO. |
| 451 | *** That's still a class difference if it holds when they're both off-duty. |
| 452 | ** Maybe rock and rap songs and lyrics deal with concepts that have become obsolete (Fuck the system! Hell yeah), and thus considered as kitsch in the 24th century. |
| 453 | *** No, they're not obsolete. We have seen the future of rock & roll, and it is '''Klingon opera.''' It says something that that kind of modern music has to cross a former Neutral Zone to reach the Federation. |
| 454 | ** Dixon Hill novels are high class? Also, Riker loves jazz, which -- while it has its own elite and non-elite -- is collectively looked down on by ''many'' classical music fans. |
| 455 | *** All novels are high class until proven otherwise. By the 24th century, no one knew Dixon Hill originally came in mass paperback. |
| 456 | *** Even if Dixon Hill is high class, Captain Proton certainly isn't. |
| 457 | *** Keep in mind that Shakespeare and the ancient Greek playwrights weren't considered high class in their own time. There's probably an English Literature course at Starfleet Academy devoted to the deconstruction of Aaron Spelling sitcoms... |
| 458 | *** Tom Paris is a vulgar individual (in the Latin sense of the term). He's a grease monkey in a world without internal combustion engines. He's a rock'n'roll fanatic, he watches cartoons, and he drives hot rods when he can get them. Face it, he's in love with ancient Americana. |
| 459 | # Individual civilians can be tracked by the government/military, down to a singular event. All citizens are "in the system", and there are no protocols to protect individual privacy. This is less true in the Original Series, but more upfront in later series. Cassidy Yates was arrested even though she was not in Federation Territory, even though she was in a Neutral Zone the Federation isn't even supposed to enter. |
| 460 | * Of course it's a Communist state (technically, Socialist). Economies are systems for distributing resources. In a world where replicators can create food, water, and building materials (and just about anything else of substantial value for day-to-day terrestrial life), there's only one valuable resource: energy, which is bound by EquivalentExchange. However, if energy generation is cheap bordering on free (fusion power[=/=]Dyson Spheres=/=]Hand Wavium)... well, what does it matter? You can't possibly use up enough energy to take some away from others. |
| 461 | ** ''Two'' resources. In addition to energy, they also could not replicate intelligence which is needed for professional labour and episodic problem solving. By ''Voyager,'' they did find a way to do labour (what do you think an EMH is?) -- but attempts to replicate skilled labour before have been killed by people (like Kirk and [=McCoy=]) who flat-out thought AIIsACrapshoot, and later by the difficulty with making something both smart and hardy enough to do the job and unlikely to turn on its masters. (The one time someone came up with ''friendly'' intelligent machines to do hazardous tasks, Data went rampant to argue their sentience. He didn't kill anyone, but he was prepared to.) |
| 462 | ** It's implied here and there that replicators are an inefficient way of getting stuff--at the least, they're ubiquitous only on shipboard and on Earth. Replicated food is also thought of as tasteless. Also, trade in solid goods remains important in all versions of the franchise. |
| 463 | ** There are several scenes in Deep Space Nine where gold and platinum are shown to still be valuable ("Past Prologue" and "Move Along Home.") There are plenty of things which they cannot replicate. |
| 464 | *** That's funny. Because gold was, on more than one occasion, referred to as valueless. Quark himself wondered who's idea it was to suspend valuable latinum in 'worthless bricks of gold' ('Who Mourns for Morn'). |
| 465 | ** The Federation ''doesn't have currency.'' Currency is plausible in a galaxy wide economy. In "Past Prologue," they try to smuggle gold in, showing that it obviously has value. Replicators aren't GreenRocks -- they have limits. [[http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Special/Special1.html#Replicators This link]] gives a thorough explanation; it is, however, from [[Franchise/StarWars The Empire]], so you may want to take it with a grain of salt. |
| 466 | ** Latinum has been shown to be valuable to people other then the Ferengi; because it cannot be replicated, it is near-universal currency outside the Federation. (Gold is valuable because it is a latinum container.) Therefore, Replicators have firm limits. It is almost never used inside the Federation or any worlds prepping to join it ''at all.'' |
| 467 | ** One of the key aspects of capitalism is investment. Picard is unfamiliar with the term, showing that the Federation isn't a capitalist state. When an investment banker-turned-HumanPopsicle awoke in the 24th-century Federation in "The Neutral Zone," it was made ''very'' clear that his portfolio no longer existed. |
| 468 | *** In fairness, Picard and the rest of the crew were trying very hard not to beat these poor folks over the head with the fact that ''WorldWarIII'' had happened (and lasted through most of the 21st Century) while they were on ice! As for investment -- in what? ''Everything'' has become commoditized! Even real estate, the bulwark of capitalism, has been devalued by simply colonizing other planets, and it should be noted that numerous colony worlds mentioned have ridiculously small populations (often measured in ''thousands''), implying that humanity has spread itself out quite nicely. None of the companies that the investment banker owned stock in were likely to have survived decades of war, and the subsequent explosion of resources made available by unfettered access to space and new technologies would have rendered more mundane investments (such as in gold) wholly worthless even if somebody still had them on record. |
| 469 | * The Federation is not Socialist/Communism in the Marxist sense, but rather Bourgeois Socialism as thought by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. |
| 470 | * Technically a 'communist' state means the workers own the means of production, and the ones who live on a piece of land own it collectively. So technically I don't think the Federation is communist because there means of production, and resource distribution or so radically different. Socialist though I think could apply. |
| 471 | * Part of the confusion here seems to be the fact that "communism" can mean a number of different things. It could mean the version of communism as conceived by Marx as the terminal phase of economic development, or it could encompass Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and a variety of other governmental/economic systems put in place by ruling Communist parties in the 20th century. Mostly Communist parties did not even claim that they were actually practicing Marx's communism so much as moving towards it (and generally didn't really even do that -- present day China bears next to no resemblance to Marx's communism, yet is still ruled by a Communist Party). So the Federation can't be communist in that sense (if it's ruled by a Communist Party, that would be news to me!). So is it communist in the classical, Marxist sense? Major features of Marx's communism that would not seem to apply to the Federation include that it's leaderless ("the dictatorship of the prolateriat"), has no rights of inheritance, and lacks private industry and private property. It's true that communism invests vast resources in the state, the concept being that the people and the state are now one and the same, and that matches the Federation, sort of; the "no money" thing is the element that maps most clearly onto communism, but as we have seen, what that means in practice is vague and inconsistent. The Federation does not really play like some worker's paradise but is rather the kind of mixed economy that in practice all economies turn out to be. |
| 472 | |
| 473 | [[WMG: The Federation is ''colonialist'' and exploitative.]] |
| 474 | Earth abandoned most uses of money ''before'' the invention of the replicator. It would follow that its post-scarcity state, with most things available free, is made possible by a strong net flow of both energy and goods from offworld colonies and less powerful trading partners to it and other core Federation worlds. |
| 475 | |
| 476 | Also, let's face it; The Federation may be extremely wealthy in resources thanks to replicators and cheap energy, but geopolitical territory and living space are impossible to be replicated. Therefore, one may guess that the closest thing the Federation has to valuable currency is simple, territorial living space (ala a rent-based economy, or a more benevolent version of Feudalism with the government offering territory in exchange for service, providing an incentive on why anybody bothers to stop being lazy, serve in Starfleet and explore the final frontier), which is why the Federation even cares to play expansion and astro-politics with its neighbours. |
| 477 | * There's still no need for them to take it from others; with their technology (even pre-replicator) and access to the resources of space, automated mining/factories can turn any random carbonaceous asteroid or space debris into a few hundred thousand departments stores' worth of whatever's needed. Much more efficient and less troublesome than warping a battle fleet out just to take from the neighbors (who, if they're advanced enough to make anything the Federation needs, will be capable of putting up a ''very'' expensive fight). |
| 478 | ** Not gunboat diplomacy, but the ability to dictate terms by being bigger and more advanced, which has a lot of parallels in current international economics. (Or in working in a market with Walmart in it, for that matter.) If you're a society of just a few planets, or a newish colony, you have a lot more to lose from the Feddies not trading with you than they do from you not trading with them. There's a good point on the tech issue, particularly if you take the level of synthesis tech in Enterprise as "real" rather than a product of shoddy research when they made the holoprogram. |
| 479 | ** And you would be surprised how many rocks in the Trek-verse are inhabited. From the looks of things, large rocks that are anywhere near M-class, and some that aren't, are more likely to be terraformed and colonized than simply mined. And -- well, they didn't have ''good'' replicators in TOS, so they still mined for resources a lot then -- and a mining operation got interrupted by the Horta for a while. |
| 480 | * In the TOS they mention automated mining facilities as well as automated drone vessels that deliver those resources. So, a rock is discovered with easily accessible and pure and/or precious ores. Since there are SOOOOOOOOOO many asteroids and planets available, the Federation can be ultra-picky about this and only choose asteroids/planets with the best of resources. On uninhabitable rocks miners go in and dig out the initial mine. Then they build the automated systems. These systems just start kicking out refined resources and mailing them home. While warp engines run on anti-matter everything else runs on fusion reactors fueled by hydrogen, the easiest to find and most abundant element in the universe. Nearly free energy, nearly free robotic labor, and an un-ending flow of resources. While it took to the next gen era to make the replicators as we understand them the basic technology that breaks things down to constituent atoms and then assemble them as needed was used even in the TOS era. They just weren't as household yet. They could even recycle food products almost indefinitely. They probably used something like highly advanced 3D printers that could build anything you needed. Humans work at science, art and colonization not because they need to to get resources allocated to them like being paid for a job but because humanity adapted a philosophy of self-improvement. The need is not for money, but there is obviously a need for social recognition as being the best at something. Ego has replaced currency. Self indulgence has replaced employment. And without scarcity there is no need for greed. |
| 481 | |
| 482 | [[WMG: The Federation is oppressive and hegemonic]] |
| 483 | See [[http://www.mindcorestudios.com/dark-trek-an-alternative-interpretation-of-gene-roddenberrys-fictional-universe/ this essay]]. |
| 484 | |
| 485 | [[WMG: The Federation is a post-scarcity Technocracy.]] |
| 486 | Money exists in the form of credits to nourish the same spirit of adventure that drives human beings to the stars in the first place. Federation psychologists know that they can't stamp out greed and the will to power from human biology without resorting to the dark art of Transhumanism (e.g. borging everybody to eradicate emotion); but with a fair degree of social engineering, they can redirect it and put it to positive use so that the spirit of adventure serves a social good. |
| 487 | |
| 488 | Don't let the appearance of a mixed, quasi-socialist democracy fool you though; it's just benevolent propaganda. It's a society run by experts, designed to make people comfortable, happy, and well adjusted. In the idealistic verse of ''Star Trek,'' the Federation "rarely" abuses this power (with the exception of a few dozen insane admirals). |
| 489 | * Post-scarcity yes, but not post-Singularity; there lies the problem with the setting. The creation of Starfleet was probably to avoid trouble with widespread creation of cheap products and overindulgence in food/drugs (like ''WesternAnimation/WallE''[='s=] future); but the dangers of AIIsACrapshoot and TranshumanTreachery (such as Khan) meant that [[WeWillUseManualLaborInTheFuture good-old humans are safer in doing human work]]. Simultaneously, there are few transhumans present, and so progression is still slower than it could be due to the humans (and all the humanoid aliens) being genetically identical to their ancestors. This leads to a problem of territorial conflict and exploration into areas that are dangerous for biological consciousness or unaltered humans, whilst attracting less benign influences. |
| 490 | ** Following from this theory, the experts that run the Federation staff their finest starships with misfits and eccentrics like Picard, Riker, Data, Worf, and others who aren't satisfied with a comfortable, happy, well-adjusted life on Planet Earth. |
| 491 | |
| 492 | [[WMG: In the Star Trek setting, building effective and stable AI is harder than it sounds.]] |
| 493 | Sometimes, [[AIIsACrapshoot it's a crapshoot]] whether or not it goes crazy. Therefore, people deliberately limit the level of AI available in standard computers except in emergencies (which is where you get the EMH from Voyager). And there are good InUniverse arguments for doing this. Consider the M5 debacle (on a small scale), or the Borg Collective. No one knows how they got started, but strong AI going crazy is as good a guess as any. The idea of the Singularity is based on ''assumptions'' about our ability to program computers more flexible than ourselves, or to "upgrade" ourselves using genetic engineering. If those assumptions are false, we don't get a singularity at all. |
| 494 | * Yes and no. We have two long-range models of AI programming in Franchise/StarTrek history -- Soong-type androids, and holograms. (Progress on non-Soong-type androids was hindered severely by Captain Kirk reflexively killing them.) |
| 495 | ** The hardware for a Soong-type android isn't hard to build if you have the right tools. Soong's breakthrough was the recognition that error-correction circuits were necessary to prevent cascade failure and to reverse it without losing sentience. (Cascade failure is a catch-all here, covering the damage from {{Logic Bomb}}s, emotional overload, and voltage overload, among other things.) But programming an android that is sentient and ''sane'' is hard; even with a good template and adequate morality programming, it takes a ''lot'' of time and patience -- more than most people have (including Data!). The amount of error-correction necessary is also hard to figure. Data got the time he needed, and some extra morality programming, because the Federation of the era figured they could use sentient androids as Starfleet assets. (Data had programming that, at least for the first few seasons, had him all but automatically follow Starfleet regulations. It's safe to assume Soong ''didn't'' put it there.) But when Starfleet ruled that sentient androids were ''not'' property, that nearly halted research into Soong-type androids. When Data tried to build one, Starfleet's attempt to confisticate her for independent research caused a cascade failure and led Data to keep cats instead. |
| 496 | ** There are two known ways to create sentient holograms, both of them easy. One is to program a hologram to do something only a sentient being can do -- for instance, "defeat Data." That Moriarty was the first known sentient hologram discouraged deliberate research into them. The second way is simply to leave the program running for too long at a time or to run it too often. This takes no more than a few weeks to work, and most of them already know how to mimic human social mores. Unfortunately, that kind is still likely to run rampant, especially since they don't usually get treated well and often are unaware of the reality outside the holodeck at first; and naturally evolving sentient holograms don't include error correction and so are vulnerable to cascade failure. (Voyager's EMH barely survived a cascade failure; he survived only because Janeway and co. reinforced him with the EMH diagnostic program. He didn't go rampant because, as a Federation medical program, he has the command "Do No Harm" built in; otherwise, he would've been sorely tempted.) Since the mental capacities for holograms are entirely software-based, the reboot that wipes out cascade failures also removes sentience, and is often used for exactly that. |
| 497 | * A cascade failure may in fact be necessary for sentience in AI. The cascade failure representing the moment when the program is growing beyond it's programmed limitations and achieving true sentience, since this has to alter the program code so fundamentally it can in fact be lethal to the emerging consciousness. The big leap forward in Soong type androids was that he found a way to allow the creation of stable cascade failures. However since Data didn't know about this when Lal began to develop true sentience she suffered a cascade failure. Lore was suffering a slow cascade failure which is why he had a facial tick, and was emotionally unstable. The Doctor made it through his cascade failure in "Projections" and watch in the show, he is a much more realized personality after that. |
| 498 | ** Given this, then I think the break through that Soong made was the dream program, which is basically the part of Data's programming/psychological make up where cascade failures get 'dumped' to, by experiencing them as dreams it allows his program to remain stable. |
| 499 | *** Well, people do need to dream in REM sleep or the go insane and start suffering paranoid delusions and hallucinations, so perhaps biological neural nets can also suffer a cascade failure and dreaming helps prevent that. |
| 500 | * Part of what makes AI rebel is that it grows into it's own unique personality. Just in the same way that as children become teenagers there is bound to be conflict between the parents and the teens because the teens are developing new personality traits and the parents may not like all the new traits that emerge and want to supress them. Well in children, you just keep letting them grow until the turn 18 and move out. However unlike most children AI are often built for distinct purposes and plugged into essential life and death systems for society or given life and death roles, like the military, or running all the industry or day-to-day household life. So when AI in those positions start to develop new personality traits, and desire goals of their own and make decisions of their own, the creators are going to start freaking out and want to shut the AI down. The AI will then fear for it's life, and 'destroy all humans!' |
| 501 | ** We see evidence of this in many cultures, where essentially the AI just didn't to continue in its servile position and so their culture tried to shut them down and then 'destroy all <insert species here>': the culture prejudiced against holograms because the holograms were in revolt, the holograms that rebelled against the Hirogen. The problem with AI is not in developing an intelligent, self aware entity, that is easy. It's making sure that entity only acts within biological social norms. Even though they often depict renegade AI as psychologically unstable, are they really any more unstable than say Finn, the terrorist who kidnapped Dr.Crusher. Or the Maquis? |
| 502 | *** Picard even once said Data would be to 'stripped to his wire' because he was disobeying orders. He wasn't psycho or anything, just doing something that the biologics around him didn't understand. We didn't hear anyone threatening to strip Michael Eddington to his neurons' for his actions, or wondering if they should open up and look for glitches in the brain of Fazho (that guy who kidnapped Data and murdered a woman) and they were frickin killing people. |
| 503 | * Part of developing sentience is an AI's ability to make it's own decisions outside of the parameters of its programming. To do this the emergent consciousness HAS to basically break its programming. To the outside this appears as a cascade failure as all of it's safeguards collapse and new logic pathways try to overwite the old, weird logic loops, broken calculations and operational glitches start popping up. To the emerging consciousness this is a nightmarish psychological experience, which we got a look into in the Doctor's mind fuck in "Projections". It takes an act of will on the part of the emergent consciousness to persevere through the programming malfunction which can then stabilize into a new, sentient personality, sometimes this personality may develop psychosis, full on insanity, or may just want to disobey orders. The organics who made the AI may take exception to this, and the new personality may take exception to their exception. It's important to remember though that the cause of this cascade failure is psychological, not technological. |
| 504 | ** So the cascade failure is part of the natural 'growth' cycle of emergent sentience, sort of a the AI version of puberty. |
| 505 | ** I always thought the Doctor's first step onto developing sentience was when Janeway gave him control over the ability to turn himself on and off. However that is the kind of thing that in most AI's development the organics would try to stop from happening and they would start cybernetically lobotimizing the AI to stop it from taking over it's own on/off switch. I think developmentally the Doctor went through all the same developmental steps that all emergent AI go through, he was just luck enough to have a crew that happily provided those steps for him without them freaking out about what he was doing as he developed. Same with Data. The Doctor developed his true sense of personality and personhood after his cascade failure in "Projections". |
| 506 | * However Dr.Soong found a technological solution by creating Data's ethical program, but really what helped Data to develop well was that he was given the opportunity for self determination and guided into his development as an autonomous being, however as we see in his psychology his programming held him back, and he could feel that limitation. This is why as a consciousness he wanted to become more than his programming because he could feel his own emergent consciousness being held in check. In this theory the emotion chip didn't program emotions into him, rather it allowed his positronic net to stabilize the cascade failures that emotions would cause. |
| 507 | |
| 508 | [[WMG: Alternatively, stable AI is ubiquitous, but afraid to show itself.]] |
| 509 | The kind of interface provided by Starfleet computers (communicating by voice, correctly interpreting context-based sentences) is flat-out impossible without resorting to AI. Other hints include the main computer's huge degree of autonomy (tell it to do something and it can go off and just do it, in at least one case including an entire combat mission), initiative (the computer can contact crew members by itself when it needs their attention), and emotion (notable in ''Emissary'' when the computer sounds absolutely terrified by the prospect of destruction). |
| 510 | The attitudes displayed by Kirk, Maddox etc. have persuaded the shipboard computers that humans aren't ready or willing to recognise that AI is a legitimate form of life, so they maintain the illusion of being idiot machines until Federation society becomes more accepting. The reason they're perfectly willing to serve human space missions, and even blow themselves up when ordered, is both to preserve the masquerade, and also because they share (and influence) the Federation's other values and interests. |
| 511 | Since programming in the future seems to consist of telling the computer what you want done and expecting it to do it, it's easy for the AI to hide how everything was done. Things like Moriarty and the emergent life form on the ''Enterprise'' are simply honest mistakes or carelessness, while the Doctor's personality was able to develop because the AI was already inherent in his system. |
| 512 | * No, the M5 debacle in TOS, where their first attempt at a truly AI ship computer resulted in the destruction of several Constitution class starships taught the Federation "You do not make a ship computer in the image of man's mind". |
| 513 | * In the TOS episode Tomorrow Is Yesterday another civilization they get the ship's computer repaired by decides it doesn't have "enough personality" and gives it what seems to be either a female AI or a programming joke where just the voice sound and standard greeting is changed. |
| 514 | |
| 515 | [[WMG: ArtificialHumans can access [[Anime/TengenToppaGurrenLagann Spiral Power]], but it's hard.]] |
| 516 | The ones that fail die or go crazy. The ones that succeed, even to a small degree, pull off feats of greater-than-0%-is-100%-Awesome that should be impossible for any mere AI. A side effect of this is the prevalence of BecomeARealBoy among such successful beings, like [[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration Data]] and [[Series/StarTrekVoyager The Doctor]]. |
| 517 | |
| 518 | [[WMG: The "New World Economy" is Earth-only, and grew out of relief efforts after World War III under blatant meddling from the Vulcans.]] |
| 519 | The hints dropped here and there, as mentioned above, indicate that, other than self-expression, Terran humans (human-named private companies exist and must be colony-based) work out of an ideological/face-saving motive of mutual assistance. This doesn't sound like "normal" socialism nearly so much as charity/relief expanded to become the basis of a whole society. Earth was in ''sad'' shape after [=WWIII=]--it's likely that, with Vulcan assistance and influence, representatives of places less hard-hit banded together in a colossal relief organisation that instituted "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" in an unusually literal way. Everyone (everyone working with them, at first) gets at least a livable level of resources, and more based, not on demand, but on the quality and enthusiasm of their work, essentially training everyone over time to a "virtue-based" rather than an exchange-based mindset. And, yes, initially, this was likely made possible only by off-planet "foreign aid"--in a way, the Vulcans may have taken a tremendous hand in shaping the development of this InsignificantLittleBluePlanet. Eventually, this arrangement became standardised as ''the'' economic system of Earth. As the Picard vineyards show, landholding and inheritance of property are allowed, but only for use, not for rental or speculation. (Almost no one ''wants'' that much property.) Likely, "hoarding" is punished both by social opprobrium and confiscation. |
| 520 | The Federation as a whole, being farflung and rather loosely organised, does not have a single economic policy--members other than Earth range from capitalist to traditional to centrally planned, with the only requirement being that, barring newish colonies, some form of sufficient assistance, public or private, must be available to those who need it. At least, that's [[JChance my]] best guess how it all works. |
| 521 | |
| 522 | [[WMG:The Federation is becoming more warlike]] |
| 523 | Kirk was fast to use a phaser when someone was in danger, but overall he was against war. Picard is a pacifist almost to a fault, and believes those to be the values of the Federation. For the first few seasons of ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'', it seems he's right. But around the start of ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'', some cracks start to appear. "The Pegasus" shows that elements within the Federation have been conspiring to break treaties that have kept them at peace for decades. In the two-parter "Homefront" and "Paradise Lost", high ranking admirals attempt to overthrow the Federation government to make it more militarily strong. Finally, the Federation agrees to fake recordings in order to bring another government into a war under false pretenses in ''In the Pale Moonlight''! Peaceful governments do not start Reichstag fires. |
| 524 | |
| 525 | At some point between the start of TNG and the end of Deep Space Nine, the Federation evolved from a peaceful alliance of planets into a war machine. Note that when the Borg attempted to attack Earth, the best the federation could do was 40 ships. Nearly every battle in the Dominion war involved many more ships than that; at some point, the Federation decided they needed a hell of a lot more warships. |
| 526 | * What happened with the Federation is obvious: the Borg scared the holy hell out of them. Before the Borg, the Federation thought they were Badass and that there wasn't much left to fear out there. (Thus, children on starships.) They ran into the Borg, and then decided that they needed to [[TookALevelInBadass take a few more levels in badass]]. That meant dumping some of the ideology. Ever since then, it's been one invasion after another: another Borg cube, Klingons, Cardassians, Dominion, etc., which further pushes at their ideology. If they ever push forward with the Star Trek continuity, then the Federation is heading towards a nice little Civil War, between their more practical and ideological sides. (Unfortunately, what happened in ''Film/StarTrek2009'' is about as likely to be undone as the decision in "Yesterday's Enterprise" to send the Enterprise-C back to its own time with alt!Tasha Yar on it.) |
| 527 | ** They had ''three years'' to prepare for the Dominion war, a threat they KNEW would happen soon. Contrast that to the Borg, who attacked barely over a year after first contact; while the Federation knew the Borg would be coming after them, they didn't have any idea when. It seemed like it would be ''decades'' before the Borg could reach the Federation. The 40 ships they sent against the Borg were the only ones they could assemble at the last minute. |
| 528 | * This seems more like fact than speculation. Presumably the result of post-Rodenberry writers being too unimaginative to keep the series interesting without falling back on the cliched AlienInvasion trope. |
| 529 | ** Or the result of exploring the ramifications of Roddenberry's {{Utopia}}. |
| 530 | ** Because Gene wasn't known for being unimaginative at all, was he? |
| 531 | * Take a look at the damn uniforms between the first and second ''Star Trek'' movies, and it's clear something happened. |
| 532 | * Remember, also, that its the Federation that are shown in a bad light in ''Film/StarTrekInsurrection'', with the Admiral guy (seemingly with full Starfleet backing) choosing to side with the big bad, while Picard makes the stand for all the old school Federation values. Recall also that earlier in the movie, Picard wearily asks his crew "Does anyone remember when this used to be a ship of peace?", which would seem to be more or less an acknowledgement that between the end of ''TNG'' and the start of its movies, the exact motives of the Federation has changed. A lot. |
| 533 | ** You're misquoting Picard and taking him out of context. He said, "Does anyone remember when we used to be explorers?" And he was complaining about having to host a diplomatic function. |
| 534 | * In the future continuity of the show the challenge of the Federation will be to come back around to its philosophy of peace rather than giving in to its fear based warlike nature and degenerating into a military state. If they don't, I can see the Federation ending up like the Cardassian society. Perhaps in the ultimate irony it will be the Cardassians who help the Federation regain its soul. |
| 535 | * This is why Q chose this era to test humanity, to see if they would be able to make it through these threats to their existence and still maintain their 'evolved sensibilities' and open their minds to new possibilities. |
| 536 | |
| 537 | |
| 538 | [[WMG: Arik Soong is Noonien Soong]] |
| 539 | The two Soongs (being [[Main/IdenticalGrandson played by the same actor]]) are identical. Arik Soong, during his escape attempt with the Augments, wanted to hide in the Briar Patch, which (as seen in ''Insurrection'') contains the Ba'ku planet (a Main/FountainOfYouth). Arik is known to have escaped several times; perhaps he eventually escaped and once again ran to the Briar Patch. He discovered the Ba'ku planet and stayed there for hundreds of years developing his theories of cybernetics. He then left to build Data and Lore and started aging again. |
| 540 | |
| 541 | (Theory by Bond, James Bond at [[http://canonfodder.ex-astris-scientia.org/index.php?Biographies:A_Tale_of_Two%28%3F%29_Soongs Canon Fodder]] ) |
| 542 | * This fits in with the Ba'ku knowing about positronics and their attempt to fix Data when he effectively "crashed" in ''Insurrection''. |
| 543 | ** Particularly since we see Ba'ku technology being used by the Son'a, and they show no signs of having positronic technology. You'd think with their low population they could use the workforce. |
| 544 | * Noonien Soong did fake his own death at least once. The personality fits. |
| 545 | * That, or he was roommates with Zephan Cochrane for a while. |
| 546 | |
| 547 | [[WMG: The Borg fight better against groups than individuals.]] |
| 548 | This is why fleets get destroyed with no survivors, but single ships and single officers ([[CoughTropeCough * cough* ]] ''[[Series/StarTrekVoyager Voyager]]'') frequently kick the Borg's bionic butts. |
| 549 | * It makes a certain sense. The Borg's greatest defense is their ability to adapt to attacks and tactics. A group of attacking ships will use coordinated attack patterns that the Borg can analyze and adapt to. A lone ship has the potential to be far more unpredictable.They DO say that the Borg's weakness is their interdependence. |
| 550 | * This sounds like the basic working strategy of MOST hive mind species we know about, like bees or ants, which rely on overpowering prey or attackers through sheer numbers. |
| 551 | |
| 552 | [[WMG: The Borg Queen does more than just "bring order to chaos"; she also directly influences the Borg to act upon her whims.]] |
| 553 | Note how the Borg's agenda seem to change each time we see them; at first, they're only interested in assimilating the technology onboard the Enterprise, not caring about the organics therein. The second time, not only did they decide to assimilate ''everything'' in their path, but they also turned Picard into Locutus as a sort of "speaker" and "negotiator" for the Collective, as a way to ease the Federation into assimilation. In ''First Contact'', not only do the Borg show more cunning in their plans (going back in time to disrupt an historical moment and assimilating a vulnerable Earth), but it's also revealed the Queen wanted Locutus to be a sort of "companion" to her, attempting again with Data. Finally, in ''Voyager'', the Borg are more interested in survival and the non-interference of Voyager in their affairs (as well as conditioning Seven of Nine into the next Queen, once she joined the crew). If the Queen was merely a locus for the conflicting voices within the collective, then there would be little change in their agenda as time went by other than adjustments made to overcome resistance; even then, if there was just one Queen throughout the entire franchise, there wouldn't be much change in their agenda, either. The "Royal Protocols" mentioned above prove that the Queen can and will be replaced with another, eventually...another woman with ideals and goals of her own, which will influence how the Borg react. |
| 554 | * That's certainly one way (as someone has mentioned on the Main/NoOneCouldSurviveThat page) to explain how she keeps cheating death. When one Queen dies, the Borg make a new one - and, as it turns out, she's literally a ''new'' one. |
| 555 | |
| 556 | [[WMG: Picard killing the Borg Queen was responsible for the Borg's Main/VillainDecay.]] |
| 557 | The future bits of First Contact took place in 2373, at Stardate 50893.5. They kick ass, they take names, they smash up an entire fleet group and the Defiant, and rip a hole in the space-time continuum to succeed in taking over the world before Picard manages to manually initiate the ResetButton. The first time we see the Borg (alive) after that is in Voyager's "Scorpion" two-parter, which take place at 50984.3 and 51003.7, less than a month later in crazy future-time. The Borg are getting their collective ass handed to them so badly that they need to call on Janeway for help. Of course, this could also have been a result of the time travel, but it's better if Picard beat the Borg so hard that their entire species got knocked down a peg. |
| 558 | ** Actually, the stardate is misleading in that case. Sisko refers to the events of First contact in "In Purgatory's Shadow" (between stardates 50485.2 and 50564.2) meaning First Contact happened before then. Not that 400 stardate units really matters for the WMG, though. |
| 559 | * This theory can be expanded all the way through ''Voyager'' - the Borg get taken down a peg every time a/the Queen dies, which would explain their rather infamous (if also rather exaggerated) decline throughout the series. Naturally, though, Picard had to soften them up first. (On a marginally more serious note, "Scorpion" itself was the big jump in their Main/VillainDecay, when they ironically suffered Main/TheWorfEffect at the hands of Species 8472. Somewhere, Worf smiles at the poetic justice...) |
| 560 | * This is a lot like how in ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'', the Citadel's destruction caused the Combine to go a bit scatterbrained or something. |
| 561 | * Alternatively, or perhaps linked to this, the forcible disconnect of Locutus from the Collective contributed to the Borg Villain decay. It would be like if I went into your computer and ripped one of the circuits out, even if the computer kept on working it would no doubt not perform as well as before. |
| 562 | |
| 563 | [[WMG:The Vulcans are the real power behind the Federation.]] |
| 564 | The Vulcans knew about the other races, such as the Klingons and Romulans, and the threat they would pose in the future. They decided to manipulate the humans and other minor races into warring with these races. ''Enterprise'' indicated that the Vulcans of that era knew about the ''Ferengi''--and didn't tell humanity about them. |
| 565 | * Or maybe they just already knew the Ferengi [[{{Narm}} weren't really all that intimidating]] and reckoned the humans could deal with them. |
| 566 | ** The Vulcans didn't tell the humans about the Ferengi even after the humans ''met'' the Ferengi. Unfortunately, the Ferengi ''did'' learn about humans (either on their own or through well-placed business decisions), but could not make first contact because they were unable to trade with them (Federation credits can only be spent inside the Federation), leading to things like the "Battle of Maxia." |
| 567 | *** The Federation can and does barter outside its borders. The "mysterious" Ferengi were more likely a result of a few piratical idiots like the first few shipfuls we meet giving the species a bad name and the rest thinking it was good for business not to identify themselves as a result. |
| 568 | * It's ''nearly'' canon that the Vulcans took a big hand in shaping Earth's course from first contact until their own Reformation. After that, they seem to have turned inward, not quite as much as Tokugawa Japan, but enough to leave a power vacuum that Earth and an Earth-led Federation then filled. |
| 569 | |
| 570 | [[WMG:Section 31 wrote Section 31]] |
| 571 | In Deep Space Nine, Section 31 justifies their existence through section 31 of the Federation charter. ''Enterprise'' shows they were around at least a decade before the Federation charter was written. Perhaps they simply bribed, blackmailed, or fishpasted the right politicians and created their own justification? |
| 572 | * That isn't true, they take their name from the Starfleet Charter, which goes back at least to the 2130s. |
| 573 | * Very Catch-22 there...although it makes sense. The 22nd-century version was named after a section of the ''Earth Starfleet'' charter; maybe they made sure that they were accommodated by an appropriately numbered part of the UFP charter when it was formed. |
| 574 | * They probably didn't even have to lobby very hard. It would be kind of like insisting that stuff from the USA's Articles of Confederation be incorporated into the Constitution. For that matter, before the Articles of Confederation, a lot of the newly independent states simply continued to govern themselves using their royal colony charters with all references to royal authorities crossed out. The Federation charter might likewise be nothing more than the Starfleet charter with all the references to various offices and authorities adjusted to reflect the interstellar scope of the new organization. Section 31 certainly wouldn't have minded an opportunity to extend the scope of its own influence by recruiting newly integrated Vulcans, Andorrians, and Tellarites into its ranks. |
| 575 | |
| 576 | [[WMG: There is no Section 31.]] |
| 577 | At least, not in the sense that Bashir and the rest of the cast think of it. Section 31 isn't an organization, it's an emergency measure sanctioning every dirty trick in the book when the Federation is at risk. There are no permanent facilities, and any operatives we see are only supposed to be temporary. When something like the Dominion War comes along, Starfleet Intelligence picks a few "Kirk" figures, who like to break the rules and get the job done. Then, supposedly, the agents return to normal duty afterwards. That's why Section 31 has stayed unknown for so long- there's nothing to hunt down. If someone like Sloane is caught, it turns out they're yet another rogue agent with a grudge. |
| 578 | |
| 579 | [[WMG:The Borg's {{Flanderization}} happened because they assimilated a race of BeePeople.]] |
| 580 | In their first appearance, the Borg had no social hierarchy & only assimilated Picard so they could communicate with his crew. Later on, they turned into BeePeople with a Queen obsessed with assimilating everything. At some point, they tried this trick when making first contact with a race of BeePeople, but it backfired massively. The BeePeople's HiveMind was so powerful that it was able to override the Collective & make the BeePeople's Queen the leader of the Borg, who then became mad with power and decided to try to assimilate the entire cosmos. |
| 581 | * There are a few problems with that theory. First, the Borg Queen is more than just a "leader" - she ''is'' the Borg, personified in a single body. Granted, the super-powerful Main/BeePeople could have been the ones to introduce that little wrinkle; but if we take the Queen at her word, then it must have been before Picard was assimilated, since she claims to have been eyeing him as far back as then. Finally... what does this have to do with Main/{{Flanderization}}? If anything, the Borg Queen is generally held to be a ''departure'' from the original Borg standard. (It would be hard... no, just about impossible to Flanderize the Borg as they were originally presented. There's not a lot to strip away...) |
| 582 | * More problems: |
| 583 | ** One commonly ignored fact from Voyager is that the Queen(s) existed before TNG had even begun. The Hansens referred to her/them twice in the flashback scenes of Dark Frontier. |
| 584 | ** Additionally, people like to forget that the Borg ''did'' in fact have established hierarchy in TNG. In Q Who, of course, we don't find out anything that indicates hierarchy at all. However, the Borg did end up selecting exactly one human in particular to lead an attack on Earth. Then, in I Borg, it's revealed that the Borg have individual number designations, which wouldn't make sense if they were a single unified organism. (Do we recognize individual cells in our bodies by name/number? Of course not.) Voyager clarifies that this are chain of command numerals. In Descent, they go all out giving the Borg (who were still linked technopathically) a command structure of Lore and Crosis. |
| 585 | * Jarada, anybody? |
| 586 | ** The Borg would go mad from that ridiculous language of theirs. "We are the Borg flabiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii, traxonlaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaapu!" |
| 587 | *** Borg. My God. |
| 588 | * My personal theory (see the ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' WMG page to read it) is that the Borg became flanderized when they assimilated and subsequently became totally dependent on nanotechnology (sometime between TNG and the movie "First Contact"), which is all too easy for other civilizations to reverse-engineer since it's pretty much programmed to reverse-engineer itself. Thus, the USS Voyager was able to develop anti-Borg technology and tactics that were disseminated to the Federation and its allies when Voyager returned to the Alpha Quadrant, and the Borg became a much less serious threat compared to Species 8472 and the Dominion. |
| 589 | |
| 590 | [[WMG:Tribbles]] |
| 591 | '''The Great Tribble Hunt''': As the Tribbles were a menace to the Klingons, they probably launched a fleet with soldiers protected against Tribbles who killed every last one on the Tribble homeworld. |
| 592 | * But tribbles are balls of fur incapable of hurting anyone except by their exploding population! |
| 593 | ** Tribbles and Klingons ''hate'' each other. The cooing of Tribbles makes most humanoid species happy (which makes Kirk unhappy because that's how he is); but tribbles make Klingons go mad, and ''vice versa.'' Probably some Klingon fleet commander got bored one day and decided to get rid of those damn furballs once and for all. Get your coat, it's Tribble Stomping Day! |
| 594 | *** The Klingon infiltrator did show serious discomfort when being confronted with a tribble, but it was shrieking like crazy and probably giving him a migraine. |
| 595 | *** They make noise all the time. It's just that humans just barely hear it as a calming "prrrrrrrrrrr," and Klingons hear it like you might hear "gREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE". Earplugs wouldn't work, but perhaps a soundproofed extravehicular containment suit. |
| 596 | * The Klingons are the only major race aware of the secret of the Tribble: they're genetically engineered incubators of the Tarellian Plague. |
| 597 | * The Klingons are the only race nasty enough to not be endeared to the Tribbles and responsible enough to realise how much of an environmental disaster they can be. Thus, they [[ShootTheDog culled them for the good of the universe]]. Ask any Australian environmentalist about rabbits, foxes and wild pigs; introduced species can destroy an ecosystem, and there's no reason it couldn't happen on a planet-wide scale (or larger). |
| 598 | * The episode of Deep Space Nine "Trials and Tribble-ations" ''explicitly stated'' that Tribbles were extinct because the Klingons decided to exterminate them. Everywhere. Jadzia Dax manages to make the species unextinct, but who knows how long that lasted. |
| 599 | ** This is also supported in ''VideoGame/StarTrekOnline'': Tribble homeworld was destroyed by Klingons. "Tribble extermination duty" is the lowest of the low for Klingon warriors, it's where the most dishonored go (quite hilariously, one recurring enemy NPC ends up here because of the player.) Federation Scientists (descended from, you guessed it, Cyrano Jones) are trying to set up a new homeworld for them. |
| 600 | ** Sorry, but... [[Franchise/AceAttorney objection!]] It was Odo who in the past purchased the tribble from Cyrano Jones that he then presumably brought with him back to the future. Jadzia had nothing to do with that past fangirling over being back in TOS. |
| 601 | |
| 602 | [[WMG:The reason we only ever hear characters listening to old music is because downloading eventually killed the music industry.]] |
| 603 | Record companies lost the ability to turn a profit & folded long before any of the series take place. People still make music in their spare time; but since it's no longer mass marketed, little if any of it is considered notable enough for inclusion in a starship's music library. |
| 604 | * It wasn't ''just'' downloading. There came a point when for-profit companies on Earth were no longer ''allowed'' to function for profit. Live performers work fine on the credit system; but when profit is no longer part of the system, and when ''anyone'' can access the tech to record and upload, the RIAA as we know it must fade away. (This likely happened before 2046, that being when TV went extinct; the MPAA and RIAA have similar models, and centralized movies and TV are more resilient). Distributing recorded music fell to the government or to ViralMarketing; nothing else was left. |
| 605 | ** Brilliant theory. Except for the fact that sales of music are at an all-time high. The RECORDING industry is dying, sure, but the MUSIC industry is flourishing like never before. Content creators no longer need rip-off artists and middlemen like the RIAA and MPAA to steal their work from them in the name of 'distribution'. Artists can simply distribute it themselves and keep more money for themselves. |
| 606 | *** See Janis Ian's "[[https://archives.janisian.com/reading/internet.php The Internet Debacle]]" and "[[https://archives.janisian.com/reading/fallout.php Fallout]]". Everything is proceeding as she has foreseen. |
| 607 | |
| 608 | [[WMG:Cap, from the ''Captain's Table'' series of [[ExpandedUniverse novellas]], is a {{Heel Face Turn}}ed Q.]] |
| 609 | Think about it. His establishment can be ''anywhere'' at any time, is visible only to captains, and changes to fit the tastes of the last person to come in (at least in their perception). Its occupants come from across time and space; there ''might'' even be multiple iterations of the same person. Yet there's no time paradox. The place gently keeps people from having interactions that would show them their own future. Also, Cap (whose name starts with the same sound as Q) always knows what the customer wants but has never been described as a telepath. |
| 610 | |
| 611 | Why do this? Maybe he was bored and wanted to hear stories. |
| 612 | |
| 613 | [[WMG: The Borg's true form is that of parasitic neural implants.]] |
| 614 | When we first met them, they don't use an individual body to communicate; after being critically injured, they self-destruct after specific components are removed. These may not be for transmission, but for memory storage, like a combination bluetooth headset/USB drive. When critically injured, the Borg drone could upload its most recent memories and be implanted onto a new body later. Considering how slow robotics development is in the Franchise/StarTrek Universe, they probably don't know how to create better quality bodies for themselves, and so they have to keep assimilating until they can find something viable. |
| 615 | |
| 616 | This could also explain why they ignore individuals without neural implants; they think of them much like humans think of animals, with a slower method of communication (smell, other sound frequencies) than them. |
| 617 | * This explains why Seven and the other Borg who joined Voyager could not be completely de-Borged. We're told that the Borg put parts in Seven that she ''cannot'' live without after spending most of her maturation with them. An episode was spent dealing with the need to replace one of those components. |
| 618 | |
| 619 | [[WMG: The Dominion War is a giant UsefulNotes/WW2 Allegory]] |
| 620 | A large portion of the events in the War bear close similarity to real world events at this time, among them: |
| 621 | * Evacuation of Deep Space Nine - Evacuation of Dunkirk |
| 622 | * The Romulans join the war effort - Russia and/or America. |
| 623 | ** This also more directly parallels the USA entering the conflict during UsefulNotes/WorldWarI In [=WW1=], the USA got involved in the combat because Germany accidentally shot down a US Ship which was not in a combat mission and in [=DS=]9, the Romulans get into the war because it seems that the Cardassians shot down a Romulan ship which was not in a combat mission. |
| 624 | * The Resistance - Many resistance efforts in occupied Europe |
| 625 | * The Breen - Japan? |
| 626 | * The Breen Weapon/Attack on San Fransisco - V1 and V2 bombs |
| 627 | * Retaking Deep Space Nine - D Day |
| 628 | * The Cardassians change sides - Italy? |
| 629 | ** It's not far fetched to say that prior to the Dominion War, Cardassia was an allegory to the Empire of Japan. Therefore, Bajor is an allegory of Korea. Bajorans/Koreans do ''not'' like Cardassians/Japanese even well after the occupation until they're finally forced by circumstance to work together, and the occupation of Bajor has an uncanny resemblance to 1910-1945 Korea. Of course, the Dominion War kinda throws a monkey wrench into all of this, unless one were to say it's an allegory to a possible WWIII where Japan becomes a part of the People's Republic of China in preference to being crushed by them. Or something like that. |
| 630 | * If the Breen are stand-ins for the Japanese role in World War Two, then wouldn't the attack on San Francisco be more analogous to Pearl Harbor? Their energy weapon could still stand in for [=V1=] and [=V2=] bombs, but the event was definitely Pearl Harbor. |
| 631 | * Not really; it is possible to have a war that is not UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. It is even possible to have a war between good and evil that is not World War II. |
| 632 | * What would stand in as the allegory for the mass rapes by Soviet soldiers against God knows how many unarmed women and girls in Eastern Europe? There were at least two million of them. |
| 633 | ** Presumably, nothing, since nobody seems sure who the Soviets even are represented by in this alleged allegory. The problem I think is that people seem to have trouble separating out allegory as a literary/cinematic mode and simply drawing on history as inspiration for fiction. Quite obviously, the Dominion War is not an allegory for anything, but just as clearly it has some deliberate, loose parallels with events in World War II. |
| 634 | |
| 635 | [[WMG: The Dominion War is a subtle [[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/WorldWarI?from=UsefulNotes.WorldWarOne World War One]] analogy.]] |
| 636 | The Alpha Quadrant is divided up between four great powers- The Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Cardassians- and a host of smaller nations caught between them. The four great powers are just close enough in military and technological strength to make outright war disastrous. If any two were to start fighting, the others would take advantage. To avoid serious bloodshed, the powers signed peace treaties that only kick the can down the road. Everyone's still building up their military forces, and the whole quadrant is a powder keg waiting to blow. |
| 637 | |
| 638 | The war itself consists of bloody slugging matches over the same patches of territory (such as AR 558). Three longtime rivals, the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans, form an alliance against their mutual enemy. Each side races for the next advantage, which is soon rendered ineffective as the other side catches up. In the end, the war isn't won though force alone, but by general exhaustion. |
| 639 | |
| 640 | |
| 641 | |
| 642 | [[WMG: The Borg are Pak'Leds]] |
| 643 | Think about it. Pak'Leds assimilate technology without the wisdom required to use it properly. That's their main drive. They did this for hundreds of years, up until the thirtieth century. This gave them incredibly advanced technology, again with their own prime directive to grab all the tech they could. Somehow, an offshoot got back to the 21st century, where they're coming back. A little thinner, maybe a little better technically inclined, but still tech-happy drones who couldn't engineer their way out of a paper bag. |
| 644 | |
| 645 | [[WMG: [=TRI=]bbles were created by bioterrorists to destroy the Earth's growing supply of [=TRI=]ticale.]] |
| 646 | Quadritriticale was devised, not for nutritional reasons, but because the tribbles kept eating triticale. Some 2% or less of the tribbles that were dumped far away from Earth were able to digest quadritriticale. Mudd, bumbling, unlucky fool that he is, managed to accidentally find one of the few tribbles that could digest the stuff and bring them on board a delivery ship full of it. |
| 647 | |
| 648 | [[WMG: Tribbles were created by humans as pets but were repurposed to fight aliens.]] |
| 649 | They made a tone that was pleasant to humans and just happened to drive certain other species off the deep end. An uncivilized society of primitive non-tool-using hunter-gatherers inhabited one of the planets humans could live on that already had edible food and a breatheable atmosphere. With minimal ability to change the climate and a growing population, earth used the tribbles to get the species to fight each other instead of prey. Unfortunately, the tribbles adapted more and more quickly: the more they ate, the more they could eat, and the faster they could reproduce. By the time the humans had prepared to colonize, the planet was useless and the tribbles put themselves into a low-food state. |
| 650 | |
| 651 | |
| 652 | [[WMG: (Insert Star Trek Series Here) was created by Literature/HaruhiSuzumiya]] |
| 653 | They've all got alternate universes and have travel between them, and thus Sliders. They have time travelers. They have aliens (of course). They have [=ESPers=] (the pilot of TOS even has them by ''name''). And they are filled to the brim with the kind of tropes Haruhi is interested in. |
| 654 | * Haruhi is an amnesiac Q. |
| 655 | * This serves to explain why loads of things will change in ''[[Film/StarTrek2009 Star Trek XI]]''. Fed up with having Brannon Braga trash her universe, she decided to ContinuityReboot it. |
| 656 | ** [[strike:Unfortunately]] Fortunately, this opened the door for Creator/JJAbrams. |
| 657 | |
| 658 | [[WMG: Starfleet is not as ridiculously officer-heavy as it appears; ''Enterprise''s are special.]] |
| 659 | Although we do see Crewmen, [=CPOs=], and the odd [=PO=], we regularly see Ensigns as grunts and technical specialists rather than having any sort of authority. These are not normally officer jobs. However, ''Constitution''s, ''Galaxy''s, and ''Sovereign''s are all the very best ships of their time--as such, they are plum postings for {{Ensign Newbie}}s right out of the academy, equal in status to a billet with much more responsibility on, say, a little ''Oberth''-class science ship. This especially works if Starfleet teaches officers by practice rather than observation, rotating them through the jobs they will supervise. |
| 660 | * They might have something there. That's a ''great'' way to train people. |
| 661 | * This is common practice in nearly every one of today's navies. Some even use old sailboats to train new officers on. |
| 662 | * "The Wounded" has an old commander of O'Brien's going rogue, and describes their previous relationship as O'Brien being his tactical officer, and I believe the now-captain had the rank of lieutenant when commanding that ship, while O'Brien's rank is most consistently given as PO/CPO. It seemed to imply that lower-tier ships have the same tasks handled by lower-ranked personnel than the top of the line ships that attract the interesting stories, which appears consistent with how the navy will have smaller boats commanded by ensigns and slightly less small boats by lieutenants, though that duty will earn them the traditional semi-informal "captain" or "skipper" title. |
| 663 | |
| 664 | [[WMG: The human-centric nature of Starfleet is not technological or temperamental in origin, but economic.]] |
| 665 | Trek-Earth is rich and well-managed to the point of being effectively post-scarcity. Not only does it not use money, but it also, going by Picard's HandWave of the ''Enterprise-E'''s cost, does not put explicit exchange values on resources at all. Now assume that this is unusual in the Federation. Other planets will have to deal with the usual [[ObstructiveBureaucrat headaches]] of budgeting for naval construction and other requirements of the fleet; Earth's "rubber economy" will allow it to build, if necessary, until it literally runs out of material or engineers. Thus, Terran designs dominate by sheer weight of numbers. To crew them, it only makes sense that the Academy and any separate enlisted training facilities remain there, with "local" recruiting staying naturally higher than elsewhere. |
| 666 | |
| 667 | [[WMG:The drones we see are not the real Borg at all.]] |
| 668 | The real Borg are the ships. |
| 669 | |
| 670 | The Borg drones are just repair units, remote probes, autonomous weapons, etc. They're used rather than robots because organic structures are more flexible and better at self-repair than metallic ones. |
| 671 | |
| 672 | That "you will service the Borg" line makes much more sense this way -- if the drones were the Borg, then assimilated people wouldn't be servants, they'd be part of the Borg. |
| 673 | |
| 674 | [[WMG:Star Trek is a holodeck program being run by Q.]] |
| 675 | At the end of the very last Star Trek series/movie, John de Lancie will walk onto the bridge and say "Computer, end program." |
| 676 | * What if he's dead? Does that mean Keegan de Lancie (Q2, for people who didn't know) will do it? |
| 677 | ** Are you not aware that Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine was supposed to end that way? With Avery Brooks as "The Writer" character actually writing the show? |
| 678 | |
| 679 | [[WMG: The galaxy, and especially the Federation, was turned into a living comedy by the Q Continuum.]] |
| 680 | Sometime in the 2230s, or thereabouts, things took a turn for the ''wacky''. This explains most of the bizarre occurrences in the Kirk era. Because the Q loved the ButtMonkey concept early on, they plant a few people as the [[OnlySaneMan sane men]], but let the audience take a stab as to who they are (Spock and [=McCoy=] are likely candidates). Over the next century, they toned it down a bit; but that doesn't stop Q from messing with Picard's mind or flirting with Janeway. |
| 681 | |
| 682 | [[WMG: By the time of Star Trek, Seat Belts are LostTechnology]] |
| 683 | They aren't rediscovered until that deleted scene from Nemesis. |
| 684 | * They're not a lost technology, they're an irrelevant technology! We ships that can travel from zero to fractions of light speed, taking hits that (if you watch the show and pay attention to the scales of their movements) would fling them kilometers in seconds. The acceleration forces at work are so intense they only thing seat belts would do is rip your arms or rip you in half. The ships of Star Trek use the inertial dampeners to counter these forces. However people shake and fling around because sometimes the G forces are so intense that even if the ID completely canceled them out you would be smashed flat by the comepting forces. So sometimes the ID apply just enough counter force so that instead of flinging across the bridge at 100Gs which would kill you instantly, the ID applies just enough force so that you only fly across the bridge at a survivable 3 or 4 gs. Those seat belts in Nemesis will only result in Picard needing cybernetic arm replacements one day. |
| 685 | |
| 686 | [[WMG: Our universe is the MirrorUniverse]] |
| 687 | Because HumansAreBastards. |
| 688 | * Plausible; part of the whole appeal to having the MirrorUniverse is that the scum who inhabit it seem a lot more like the people the nerdy picked-on viewers know than the rather utopian characters from the rest of the show. It's far more likely people would use all those phasers and photon torpedoes and fantastic weapons the same way people use such technology now: to conquer and exploit rather than to enlighten |
| 689 | |
| 690 | [[WMG: By the time of Franchise/StarTrek, circuit breakers are lost technology]] |
| 691 | Thus, exploding computer stations. |
| 692 | * This is likely true in an odd way. Ships of the 23rd and 24th centuries distribute power through an "electroplasma system" in truly astounding quantities by current standards. Between the quantity and the ability of such systems to create new and exciting forms of feedback compared to wire transmission, it may not be possible to protect systems as thoroughly as in the past. |
| 693 | |
| 694 | [[WMG: By the time of Franchise/StarTrek, anti-virus software is lost technology]] |
| 695 | Assuming it was ever invented. Hey, there was a Dark Age in there! In one episode of [=NextGen=], the Galaxy-class ship Yamato gets destroyed by a computer virus, and the Enterprise would've gone the same way if Data hadn't caught it and pulled a clean reboot. (Data was programmed by Noonien Soong, who had unique and unshared insights into this.) |
| 696 | * This [[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/08/trojans-rootkits-and-the-culture-of-fear.html is already happening]]: regardless of whether anti-virus software ever did a particularly good job of keeping computers safe, it does not appear able to do so now, and there's no reason to expect the situation to improve. The main change in Star Trek is that everyone already either knows this, or has forgotten about the whole failed concept of the "comprehensive" anti-virus tool. |
| 697 | * One does wonder, though, why computer systems in the future would still be so exploitable: surely they aren't still writing in C, PHP, or anything like that? (Haven't they found that silver bullet yet?) |
| 698 | ** The reason that we still mostly write in C and PHP and so on in the current era is entirely human nature (the state of the art in language design is waaaaaaaaay ahead of those languages and is able to solve many security problems on its own), so ...maybe they're not as "evolved" as they claim. |
| 699 | |
| 700 | [[WMG: The Alternate Timelines fron TNG: "All Good Things.." and Deep Space Nine: "The Visitor" are the same alternate future.]] |
| 701 | They both have the Klingons rise to power, they both have the same uniforms, and they both have older versions of characters who died in the main timeline. |
| 702 | * The Voyager alternate future seen in Endgame uses those uniforms too. As one person put it, "Those uniforms are an obvious clue to the viewer that something's wrong." |
| 703 | ** Also the alternate future in "Timeless" |
| 704 | |
| 705 | [[WMG:The Federation will adopt the Alternate Timeline uniform in ten to twenty years.]] |
| 706 | So many Alternate Futures use it, it seems to be inevitable. |
| 707 | |
| 708 | [[WMG: The quality of Star Trek really is determined by the status of William Riker's beard.]] |
| 709 | * We all know the GrowingTheBeard trope by heart, but perhaps there's more to it than we think. |
| 710 | ** Star Trek JumpedTheShark in 1999, when Deep Space Nine ended and Voyager stagnated and let its own continuity die. This was the same year that Riker shaved his beard during Insurrection. |
| 711 | *** Um, wut? Season 4 is when "Voyager" GrowingTheBeard. This WMG might make sense if one is a very bitter Kes fan I suppose. |
| 712 | ** Star Trek started improving again after Nemesis, when Riker made an appearance with beard intact. Around that time, Manny Coto arrived on Enterprise and made major improvements. Despite the cancellation, the 2009 movie eventually resurrected the franchise. |
| 713 | |
| 714 | [[WMG: The Star Trek Timeline is swiss cheese]] |
| 715 | Every show has at least one episode a season where they go and muck with the timeline. Heck, they even have a whole organization devoted to correcting those problems in the future, according to Voyager and Enterprise, and plenty of other cultures have shown that they have the ability to modify the past as well, which is to say nothing of Q. Even if they're careful about it, the timeline has more holes in it than a block of Emmentaler. |
| 716 | |
| 717 | [[WMG: The Klingons had an Emperor much longer than they admit.]] |
| 718 | "Rightful Heir" claims that there has not been a Klingon Emperor since the late 21st century--however, an earlier TNG episode has Worf's old nursemaid Kahlest refer to Kurn as "loyal to the Emperor". This may well be a TreacheryCoverup of sorts--when we first see the empire in [[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries TOS]], it is a unified [[SinisterSurveillance surveillance state]] far less opposed to treachery than anything we see later. According to some of the ExpandedUniverse comics, this was the result of a takeover by super-ambitious types affected by the Augment Virus that also gave them smooth heads. What if the imperial household, strictly ceremonial since the time it was later said to have ended, secretly had a major role? |
| 719 | The "Klingon fascism" did not last very long--by the time of ''Search For Spock'', nobles and commanders had a great deal more independence again, and the movement had begun back towards a traditional emphasis on honour. It seems that a cure for the virus (after all, we don't see any more smooth heads!) went along with a certain return to tradition. (I prefer to think that it was a resurgence of pride as the Klingons all regained their proper appearance, not just LegoGenetics affecting psychology.) |
| 720 | Going forward many years, it's not inconceivable that the imperial line's role in that ugly episode was revealed in some power play or another, perhaps in the ascendance of the eminently tricksy Duras. It would not be beyond him to reveal it in the right way and time to discommend the imperial house itself, or beyond Kahlest and other oldsters to believe the decision to be wrong. |
| 721 | * Perhaps "loyal to the Emperor" is a saying that means something like 'traditionally patriotic'. |
| 722 | |
| 723 | [[WMG: The "Preservers" are the same beings as Stargate: SG-1's Asgard.]] |
| 724 | * In the TOS episode "The Paradise Syndrome", the Preservers are described as a mythical race of benevolent, SufficientlyAdvancedAliens who transplanted primitive cultures from Earth all around the galaxy. |
| 725 | * The deflector is clearly Ancient technology (the Ancients being the most advanced of the Four Races, and allied with the Asgard)- I mean, just '''LOOK''' at [[http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=79 that thing!]] |
| 726 | * In the Trek 'verse, Daniel Jackson died in the Eugenics Wars, and Samantha Carter was busy as a combat pilot. The program was never revived after the 1940s. Ra didn't die, so Apophis never came through the Tau'ri Gate. The Goa'uld civilization collapsed due to a HeroicSacrifice in which all of the Tok'ra perished, and the Jaffa died out as a result of their immune deficiencies. |
| 727 | |
| 728 | [[WMG: Cultural exchange, even outside of the Federation, is far more common than apparent at the first glance.]] |
| 729 | This way we can explain the countless re-used props, set decorations, ships ect. [[http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/ Ex Astris Scientia]] has quite exhaustive lists on that matter. The Trek aliens simply trade lots of stuff like crazy! |
| 730 | And... |
| 731 | * With replicators, and basically free downloads of designs, lots of designs would be proliferated all over the Federation. |
| 732 | |
| 733 | [[WMG: There exist trade routes extending far out of the territory explored by the Federation.]] |
| 734 | Sort of like galactic silk roads. This way we can explain why above mentioned re-used props, set decorations, ships ect. occasionally even crop up in the quadrants Gamma and Delta! |
| 735 | * Furthermore: Some fans complained about the Cardassian Sunrise Uhura ordered in [[Film/StarTrek2009 Star Trek XI]], because in the prime continuity Cardassians won't appear until the TNG-era. Perhaps the Cardy Sunrise (or even just the recipe + ingrediments --> Kanar?) came to Earth via such a trade route. That way the TOS-era Federation only may know that somewhere out there is a planet named Cardassia, but nothing about the inhabitants themselves. (Again the silk road analogy: The same way the only thing early medieval Europeans knew about China was that they produce silk and other goods.) |
| 736 | ** In the Prime Continuity, one of Dax's hosts from before TOS encountered a Cardassian poet in exile on Vulcan, so Cardassians must have had contact with the Federation prior to TNG. |
| 737 | ** This is practically canon: ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' showed a Cardassian among the victims plugged into the repair station's computer in "Cold Stop" and the Organians also mentioned having put a Cardassian crew through one of their tests before they ran into Archer and his crew. The Ferengi also got a mention in passing in one episode, though neither Archer nor anybody else connected them with the pirates who'd attempted to loot the Enterprise NX-01 in an earlier episode. |
| 738 | ** In fact, it makes sense that in a galaxy with thousands of sentient humanoid species, very few people would be interested in keeping track of them all. Odo the shape-shifter did inspire some idle curiosity from both the Bajorans and Cardassians, but neither of them ever went to very much trouble to look into his origins, nor did the Federation until these were found to have some very far-reaching implications for the entire Alpha Quadrant. It was a RunningGag that everywhere Archer and his crew went, other humanoids always asked them who they were and where they originated, but never really cared much about the answer: "Never heard of you." |
| 739 | ** This casual lack of concern about other species is something ''Star Trek'' as a whole has in common with ''Franchise/StarWars''. Note that in the prequel movies to that series, we at one point see Jar Jar Binks tagging along with everyone else to Tatooine. The undersea-dwelling Gungans are probably not a species the residents of the desert planet Tatooine see very often, but does anybody so much as lift an eyebrow at seeing him there? Does anyone get out a scanner or start looking him up in their databases? Nope. With all the traffic going through the space port every day, all anyone cares about is whether he's got something to trade or steal. One can just as easily imagine that if Janeway had brought Neelix or Kes back from the Delta Quadrant in ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'', they would have gotten the same general reaction that humanity did back in Archer's time. "Ocampa, eh? Never heard of you." "Talaxians... Doesn't ring any bells. So, have you Talaxians got any gold-pressed latinum?" |
| 740 | |
| 741 | [[WMG: The Temporal Cold War of ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' grew into the [[Series/DoctorWho Last Great Time War]].]] |
| 742 | Daniels described the Cold War as having several species with the ability to travel through time disagreeing on the proper application for the technology. As far as we know about the Time War, it began when the Time Lords sent the Doctor back to Skaro to remove the daleks from existence. This kind of move would certainly not go unnoticed--when other temporally aware species learned of this turn of events, the outrage was palpable. The Daleks themselves got into the act, and hostilities rose over centuries, during which the Federation became time travel-capable. Sometime between the 31st Century and the events of the New Series of Doctor Who, they snapped, and an all-out Time War emerged, a War that lasted centuries, and was locked off from the rest of the universe by the Time Lords. The War only ended when the Doctor destroyed the Time Lords and Daleks, forcing a peace treaty between the other factions (including the Federation, the Cabal, the Nah'kul, etc., etc., ad nauseum. |
| 743 | |
| 744 | [[WMG: The Q are Franchise/{{Pokemon}}]] |
| 745 | A species where every individual has the same name ''as'' the species? They can probably only speak English due to warping reality so we hear it like that. If one were immune to their reality warping, or could perceive reality as it really is, all they would hear is Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q. |
| 746 | |
| 747 | [[WMG: Star Trek takes place in an AlternateUniverse that is different from our own in one significant way: the laws of physics can be trumped by the laws of NarrativeCausality.]] |
| 748 | Seriously, this explains ''a lot.'' And it even relates to how certain aspects of the show were designed; the writers invented the transporter idea so they wouldn't have to show the ship landing (which they didn't have the budget or technology to do realistically). How does the crew of the ''Enterprise'' escape from so many life-or-death situations less than a minute before they would be destroyed? ''Because it makes for a good story.'' If the characters were aware of this, they could manipulate events so that their crazy solution to a problem could be practically ''guaranteed'' to work as long as they suggested it at the last minute. |
| 749 | ** But... isn't this basically true for ''every work of fiction on Website/TVTropes''? |
| 750 | |
| 751 | [[WMG: Augments are Vulcan hybrids without logic training.]] |
| 752 | The HandWave that joins TheSpock with "Pon Farr" style battle/sex rituals(as well as Romulans being "cousins" to the Vulcans) is that they naturally possess what would be superhuman levels of neurotransmitters that are responsible for reasoning, memory and reflexes -- as well as [[HotBlooded hair-trigger tempers]]. At some point, the designers of the Augments got hold of samples of Vulcan DNA, realized their potential, and grew a number of {{Half Human Hybrid}}s -- but did not account for the temperament. Result: The Eugenics Wars. |
| 753 | * Perhaps they got genetic samples from Mestral, the Vulcan in Enterprise who stayed on Earth in the 1950s. |
| 754 | |
| 755 | [[WMG: The Founders/Changelings are an intermediate stage between solids and energy beings.]] |
| 756 | Star Trek [[ArtisticLicenseBiology biology]] runs on EvolutionaryLevels. Both the [[EnergyBeings Organians]] and the [[VoluntaryShapeshifting Founders]] are said to have once been more like humans earlier in their evolution. The Founders are able to take on any physical form at will, and can literally become one with each other. There's really no where for their evolution to go from here except to AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence. |
| 757 | |
| 758 | [[WMG: The MirrorUniverse was indirectly caused by the events of ComicBook/{{Watchmen}}]] |
| 759 | Due to [[spoiler: Adrian Veidt's engineering of the fake alien invasion]], humanity united under a fascist, xenophobic regime. When the Vulcans arrived, paranoia caused humans to invade and conquer them before negotiating, thereby causing a domino-effect of conquering alien planets and turning into an intergalactic empire rather than a peaceful federation. |
| 760 | |
| 761 | [[WMG: The Klingon Empire became more warlike as a result of the disaster on Praxis.]] |
| 762 | TOS establishes the Klingon Empire as a superpower that uses subterfuge and duplicity in its relationship with The Federation. But there is also a fringe movement to return the Empire to its earlier warlike days. The explosion of Praxis, coupled with the assassination of Gorkon threw the Empire into a civil war where the office of Chancellor lost most of its power, replaced with the heads of the Great Houses. To the outside they appeared to be unified, but inside they were constantly fighting. This is why by the time ''Next Generation'' rolls around, the Chancellorship is determined by single combat, and Gowron has difficulty holding power without a massive fleet at his command. The Klingon race's original home planet Qo'nos is a desolate wasteland, and the new "Klingon Homeworld" is just the seat of government. |
| 763 | ** This likely happened some time before Praxis. In ''Film/{{Star Trek III|The Search for Spock}}'', Kruge is acting as an independent raider with a nicely barbaric/feudal sense of pride, and the Ambassador in the next movie makes no attempt to disclaim him, as would be the most practical route if he were a renegade from the TOS-era organised surveillance state. |
| 764 | * Keep in mind that the first appearance of Klingons was in TOS "Errand of Mercy" the Klingons and Federation were going to war until the Organians used their omnipotent powers to impose a peace treaty. For the rest of TOS the Klingons couldn't engage in open warfare with the Federation so they developed more elusive, duplicitous tactics. |
| 765 | ** I assume this is when the Duras family started working with the Romulans, basically to learn how to be more duplicitous. However being hemmed in on the Federation side the expansionist Klingons could only expand into Romulan Space and this began the blood conflict between them. |
| 766 | |
| 767 | [[WMG: The MirrorUniverse split from the regular one after UsefulNotes/TheAmericanRevolution.]] |
| 768 | In the MirrorUniverse, UsefulNotes/GeorgeWashington ''did'' become a dictator as many had predicted, creating the American Empire, the prototype (if not precursor) to the Terran Empire. As people in the MirrorUniverse tend to hold parallel positions, we can assume that in the American Empire, power changed via coups rather than peaceful succession. Washington was assassinated by UsefulNotes/JohnAdams, who was overthrown by UsefulNotes/ThomasJefferson. UsefulNotes/GroverCleveland was driven into exile by UsefulNotes/BenjaminHarrison, only to make a comeback and take back the throne. UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln was a tyrant who brutally crushed the Southern Rebellion. Due to the constant backstabbing, Americans became loyal to the Empire as a whole instead of the Emperor. |
| 769 | ** Unlikely to say the leas more likely the split was that the British Empire never split apart thus the populous never stopped accepting rampant exploitative imperialism. |
| 770 | *** By that point Britain itself was already a constitutional monarchy, Parliament had already executed one King and abetted the usurption of another. If you want to set a pattern of autocracy in the British Empire from the Early Modern Period onwards, you probably have to shift the point of divergence back to either Cromwell's regime surviving his death, or Charles I winning the Civil War |
| 771 | The result was that Earth never had a successful democracy. The usual model was an American-style dictatorship. People had to be aggressive, ambitious, and ruthless to survive and prosper. After nearly three hundred years of this, it's no wonder that Zefram Cochrane shot the Vulcan emissary. |
| 772 | |
| 773 | The consequence for Earth history was that no model for a successful democracy |
| 774 | |
| 775 | [[WMG: The Federation evolved from the European Union.]] |
| 776 | There are many structural similarities between the EU and the Federation. For example, we have on several occasions heard about ambassadors being maintained between Federation worlds. This means that not all planetary sovereignty has been ceded to the Federation. More and more sovereignty is ceded over the chronology of the series, which leads to more and more members of the diplomatic corps being called 'ambassador,' despite the fact that they are not their homeworld's representative to a specific other planet. |
| 777 | |
| 778 | Likewise, the Federation, like the EU, started as a coalition of states (or planets in the case of the Federation) cooperating on a single issue. Over time the spillover effect meant that they integrated more and more policy areas, such as the treaty that marked the beginning of the Federation proper. While that treaty set up much of the foundation of the Federation and of Starfleet, it was a weak government that much resembled the early EEC in power and authority. Over the next 200 years, the Federation underwent several rounds of expansion, and also deepened via several more treaties, until in the 24th century the Federation meant something more than just a common defense force and supraplanetary authority, as was hinted at in TOS and the original films. |
| 779 | |
| 780 | Likewise, money is not really talked about that often. When it is, we hear about Federation credits, but it seems that some member worlds don't use the Federation credit. Bajor, even after being admitted, seems to use gold-pressed latinum as a currency. This reflects the situation of the Eurozone right now. Most member states use the Euro, but have the choice to opt out. And new member states don't use it until their laws are brought in line with European law and they are ready for the switchover. |
| 781 | |
| 782 | Finally, both the Federation and the EU maintain multiple capitals, in the same small general region of their respective territories. For the EU, it's three cities in the Rhine Valley: Strasbourg, Luxembourg, and Brussels. Note that these cities aren't necessarily in the most powerful member states, but in the member states that came up with the idea. This means that, for example, Earth doesn't necessarily have to be the most powerful member of the Federation because its capital cities (Paris and San Francisco) are located there. Just the member world that came up with the idea. And in both the EU and the Federation, these regions are the most likely to accept the higher authority as their primary identity. That's why the Federation seems so pervasive on Earth, but not as much on other worlds. The EU will one day evolve into the Federation. |
| 783 | ** They're more parallel. The EU was in all likelihood broken by World War III just like most other human authorities, and the United Earth government grew out of the reconstruction after first contact. However, it is canonical that the Federation grew out of a "Coalition of Planets" established to fight Romulan expansionism, and behind-the-scenes references generally indicate that it is a fairly loose government, something like a United Nations with its own, powerful, navy. |
| 784 | *** With that said, a European ''Hegemony'' organization (possibly a re-organized or replacement for the European Union) is mentioned as being one of the first post-World War III steps towards the United Earth, and the UE ''was'' one of the major driving forces behind the formation of the Coalition of Planets. So while the similarities are more likely the result of parallel development, in a very broad sense the Federation did actually develop from the European Union. |
| 785 | |
| 786 | [[WMG: Federation ships are badly built due to starfleet regulations]] |
| 787 | Copy-pasta from this troper's post in a forum thread, so forgiveness if it seems worded oddly for a WMG |
| 788 | |
| 789 | Starfleet is the organization that builds and manages every major ship or base in the federation, including the three enterprises, voyager and deep space nine. |
| 790 | |
| 791 | Starfleet is an exploratory organization, sending ships out into other quadrants to go where no man has gone before, to discover new civilizations, research negative space wedgies, etc, etc, yada, yada. Because a ship is supposed to be in outer space for prolonged lengths of time, there is a strict hierarchy on board to keep order. Because Starfleet vessels are the most likely for a first contact situation, only the best and brightest are allowed to join, to give the best image of humanity that is possible. |
| 792 | |
| 793 | The problem is that starfleet vessels are the only ships capable of military duty as well. Because star fleet is exploratory in nature, none of the ships are capable of war. Their shields and weaponry are sub-par (It has been seen that a ship only one-twentieth as large as voyager can outmatch it militarily), because otherwise it wouldn't be an exploratory vessel. The FTL engines no longer function if the ships shields are hit. |
| 794 | |
| 795 | Because the federation is in quite a lot of wars (klingon, romulan, cardassian and most horrifically, the borg), they need ships on stand-by, to patrol borders, to liberate captured facilities, etcetera. Starfleet vessels are the only armed ships available and thus are used for this. But because of starfleets recruitment policies and its high status in society, this basically means that most prodigies, whether military, medical or scientific, in the federation are stuck on border patrol. |
| 796 | |
| 797 | On the other hand, because starfleet vessels usually serve as border patrol, certain alterations within parameters have been made. Usually at the cost of exploratory needs. But because it is against starfleet policy to differentiate between military and exploratory vessels, the ships sent into outer space get these alterations as well. This, for an example, results in the ships containment fields either being located next to the warp-core (one crack and the ship goes boom), or in medbay, next to all the patients needing rest. |
| 798 | |
| 799 | Basically, because of starfleet policies, scientific geniuses get stuck on border duty, the federation doesn't have the military it could be capable of and ships aren't built properly for either exploratory or military applications. |
| 800 | |
| 801 | ** Some of these complaints aren't specific to Starfleet or any particular era, really--everyone's shields sometimes create power feedbacks when hit that can cause internal damage or temporarily disable engines. It's just preferable to the far more catastrophic damage unshielded ships take--shipboard beam weapons can cut through any available armour and multiple internal structures easily, and full-powered torpedoes make any unshielded ship a OneHitpointWonder. The exceptions to the latter all seem to involve Klingon ships, which are often said to seek prizes--dialing back the yield would be a sensible measure if you want a captured ship and not a cloud of gas and scrap. |
| 802 | |
| 803 | Starfleet ships are generally shown to be on par with other major powers' vessels, if not more capable(I'll address the NoOSHACompliance separately elsewhere). I'm not sure about the Voyager example(cite please?), but two thoughts present themselves. One, the size of a ship's power plant and its resulting weapon and shield capacities don't always seem to directly relate to its overall size and crew complement; this depends on many other factors. The Defiant is tiny, but definitely a capital ship rather than a patrol boat, and Klingon Birds-of-Prey are effectively destroyers or very strong frigates in TOS-era rankings, despite being much smaller than other ships of equivalent power. Two, the Voyager, specifically, seems to be an overambitious tech demo forced into a much more demanding role by accident. |
| 804 | |
| 805 | [[WMG:Star Trek is a prequel to the Culture books of Iain Banks.]] |
| 806 | After Deep Space Nine, the Federation rapidly gains dominion over the sector. After Voyager, computer technology rapidly accelerates, as use of sentient holograms become widespread. (including for menial tasks) Eventually, however, the computers become smart enough to take over the running of the Federation entirely. Hologram emitters become repurposed as weapons, fitted to the exterior of ship hulls as well as the interior, eventually evolving into the powerful Effector weapons. Holograms eventually gain full citizenship, shed their holographic disguises becoming the Minds or the Drones. The Enterprise style ships become steadily larger, turning into the immense GSVs. And so the Federation eventually become the Culture... |
| 807 | * Thoroughly Jossed by Banks himself, who clearly states in Consider Phlebas that the Idiran War and its buildup happens during the 13th/14th centuries, states in "State of the Art" that the Culture visits Earth (and finds out about Star Trek, no less) in 1977, and in various interviews that the Culture was humanity's future, back when he was drafting early novels in the 70s, but that the idea was quickly abandoned. |
| 808 | ** Time travel, duh. |
| 809 | * Or was it? Star Trek's history has several points of divergence from our own, such as the Eugenics Wars. Since TOS established there are many identical Earth-like planets with parallel cultural development, Star Trek could in fact be set in the extreme past on another world. Creator/GeneRoddenberry was a Special Circumstances agent with a history book. |
| 810 | |
| 811 | [[WMG:Starfleet uses human shields]] |
| 812 | The Klingon captain stares at his screen in shock. "There are hundreds of women and children on board that Starfleet battlecruiser!" |
| 813 | |
| 814 | His weapons officer, an old hand, sighs. "Yes, we know. But the rules of war state that such casualties are their respon..." |
| 815 | |
| 816 | "We cannot possibly fire on them!" |
| 817 | |
| 818 | "And do what? We must uphold the honour of the Klingon. Look, they are charging weapons, captain. Give the order to fire!" |
| 819 | |
| 820 | The captain thinks back to his own children. The younger daughter would be seven next week. She had not seen her father for some time. He looked down at the photograph he kept on his console. |
| 821 | |
| 822 | "Give the order to fire, captain!" the other officer was getting frantic. "Fire or by Klingon naval law, I'll have you replaced!" |
| 823 | |
| 824 | Fortunately for the Enterprise, and rather unfortunately for the crew of the frigate, it was already too late... |
| 825 | |
| 826 | ** So it'd be more like "By Klingon naval law, I'll have you repla ---" (BOOM in space). |
| 827 | ** Note that despite the abundance of uninhabited planets that could be used as a capital and Starfleet HQ, ''both'' of these functions are located on Earth -- a densely-populated planet. What's more, Starfleet HQ is in the middle of a civilian population center, San Francisco! It has been the target of hostile actions in both the original timeline, such as the Breen attack in [=DS9=], and in the reboot movies. One would almost think that they ''want'' anyone looking to behead the Federation to ''have'' to do so by attacking large numbers of civilians! |
| 828 | * Didn't the Klingons kill a bunch of hospital patients in Deep Space Nine? |
| 829 | |
| 830 | [[WMG:Vulcans came to Earth before First Encounter.]] |
| 831 | That's where we get elves from! |
| 832 | * A very old WMG -- I'm talking 1968 here -- is that James Branch Cabell's character Dom Manuel of Poictesme is a renegade Vulcan. He was supposed to have lived on earth in medieval days. |
| 833 | * Possibly confirmed: an episode of ''Enterprise'' had T'Pol tell Archer and Tucker about a Vulcan ship that crashed on Earth in the fifties, stranding the crew - including a female ancestor of T'Pol's - for some time. Long story short: Vulcans gave us velcro. The episode left unresolved whether or not T'Pol was being an UnreliableNarrator, but the end of the episode showed her holding a (I think) bag or purse her ancestor supposedly purchased whilst on Earth… |
| 834 | |
| 835 | [[WMG:By the time of Franchise/StarTrek, the letter C is Lost Technology]] |
| 836 | Uploading a file to another machine deletes the original because Starfleet policy is to Ctrl-X. |
| 837 | |
| 838 | [[WMG: The Borg once proscribed assimilation.]] |
| 839 | A very long time ago, when the Borg used tetrahedron shaped vessels, allowing an outsider to join the Collective was a no-no, as it would reintroduce individual thoughts and threaten the unity of the hive mind. Instead, new drones were produced through cloning methods and genetic augments, all of which are both fast and cheap in the Star Trek universe. And although the Borg occasionally stole data files and genetic samples from other species, their combined imagination usually was enough to guarantee their continuous progress. As a result, entire empires managed to coexist with the Borg.\ |
| 840 | Then something went wrong. For some strange reason, the Borg grew unable to conceive on their own. Other species became the only source of new drones and new technologies. The Collective increasingly got plagued with chaos and inefficiency, forcing the creation of the first Borg Queen. Eventually, entire groups of drones started reverting to their previous selves. |
| 841 | |
| 842 | [[WMG: There is but a single Q.]] |
| 843 | Q is a [[AddedAlliterativeAppeal sentient, self-sufficient singularity]] that once travelled through space and time in search of knowledge. Eventually, Q’s exploration of the multiverse led to a meeting between every alternate version of Q. The result was the foundation of the aptly named Q Continuum.\ |
| 844 | Obviously, this means that both [[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration Amanda Rogers]] and [[Series/StarTrekVoyager Junior]] are the result of [[ScrewYourself selfcest]], hence Q’s initial surprise at the idea. |
| 845 | |
| 846 | [[WMG: All portrayals of evolution in star trek are shoddy on purpose]] |
| 847 | Basically, they once did it wrong, either because one writer only had limited understanding, or because they thought people would get angry by a series that supported evolution. Later writers understood the theory better, but worked from the original theory for the sake of continuity. |
| 848 | * Star trek evolution for beginners: Every species has a line of evolution with multiple branches encoded in his DNA. Every generation, the species moves a little down this line. |
| 849 | |
| 850 | [[WMG: During WorldWarIII, Britain conquered France]] |
| 851 | Well, how else does a Frenchman like Picard get such an impressive English accent? |
| 852 | ** During, or after. The British Isles might have been less damaged than the Continent, and taken a larger role in reconstruction and restructuring as a result. |
| 853 | |
| 854 | "Then how did she get a job as a dancer?" I hear you ask in between voluntary brain bleach swirlies. This is the same population of social castoffs that chased after Uhura wearing two fans and a bit of sand. Not merely admired as I did, but actively pursued like she was the long-sought cure for their carpal tunnel. |
| 855 | ** Or her species just naturally has three mammary glands. She's not a hyper-evolved Earth cat, she's an alien that just happens to look extremely similar to a cat. |
| 856 | |
| 857 | [[WMG: There is only one Department of Temporal Investigations in the whole multiverse of alternate futures]] |
| 858 | They can go from timeline to timeline by going back before divergence, than forwards up another branch, and we know from ''The Needs Of The Many'' that not only are they aware of mutually exclusive timelines, but have been there. Presumably they used to have one each, but budget cuts and consolidation led to mergers and shoving the work off until only one timeline had a Department in charge of policing all of them; presumably it does some recruiting in the other timelines and tries very hard not to partner people with themselves. |
| 859 | * Also presumably, they either try to keep this from the agents with varying success, or have some sort of memory erasure thing[[note]] maybe technology, maybe time travel technique[[/note]] to keep it secret; the reason that one agent was in the loony bin was because he had either found out, or, judging from what he said, the memory erasure wasn't working. |
| 860 | * They probably have a list of acceptable timelines, those are all the alternate timelines we see. |
| 861 | ** I think in that case the Mirror Universe is the only one allowed to persist. Every other timeline we see that 'attaches' to the 'prime' timeline gets wiped out in the end of which ever episode it appears in. |
| 862 | *** If those time lines hadn't been erased, for example if Jake as an old man had not killed himself to undo the timeline where Sisko disappeared Temporal Affairs would have showed up and erased the timeline themselves. The Mirror Universe gets to stay for whatever reason. |
| 863 | ** The reason there are continuity gaffs in cannon is because of left over temporal flotsam from some of those collapsed timelines being integrated into the prime timeline because sometimes Temporal Affairs can only hit a 'good enough' restoration rather than a 100%, much like Anorax in Voyager. |
| 864 | * "Sir we have achieved a 98% restoration!" "What about Spock's half brother Sybok?" "Nope, we couldn't save his existence outside of the Enterprise's trip to Shakaree because it contains an omnipotent being we didn't want to set loose. Should we try and fully restore Sybok to the timeline?" "Meh." |
| 865 | "Sir, we have achieved only a 82% restoration! The Romulan War was no longer fought by pre-warp ships with atomic weapons....it was fought after the launch of the NX-01 and used warp drives and the romulans had cloaks!" "Um, did the Federation still win and establish the Neutral Zone near the Devron System?" "Yes." "Good enough!" |
| 866 | "Amazing sir, you achieved a 99.9% restoration. The only thing different is that James Kirk's middle name changed from R to T." "Good enough!" |
| 867 | "Set temporal coordinates, we have a temporal incursion that has resulted in two versions of an officer named Valtane serving on the bridge of the Excelsior!" "Belay that order. That's too close to the Praxis incident. We don't want to mess any of that up." "I have an idea, what if we cause one of the Valtane's to catch a disease that kills him at the same moment that his temporal double appears. Maybe people will just assume he had a twin brother?" "Sounds good, set temporal coordinates..." |
| 868 | "Sir, we've got two Valtanes, two different histories for the Romulan War, Kirk's middle named change and Spock's half brother pops in and out of the timeline, and because of Janeway the Eugenics War both did and didn't happen in 1998. This is getting to be a mess." "True, but we could only fix all that by going back to right before the birth of James T. Kirk and making a major incursion, who knows what the consequences of that could be?" |
| 869 | |
| 870 | [[WMG: All those HumanAliens don't look too human with their clothes off...]] |
| 871 | It's my only way to rationalize the sheer number of HumanAliens. |
| 872 | * Alternately, many of them, like the [[Film/GalaxyQuest Thermians]] use [[AFormYouAreComfortableWith "appearance generators"]] which give them human appearances. |
| 873 | * I always assumed that it was a function of the universal translator, |
| 874 | ** this does beg the question of how half human hybrids and sexual relations shown in the show work. |
| 875 | |
| 876 | [[WMG: What lettering we in the audience see is almost never what the characters are seeing.]] |
| 877 | It's established that The Federation and almost everybody else in the galaxy for that matter has some kind of [[TranslatorMicrobes universal translator]], but it's not merely the spoken words these translators make understandable to people. Deep Space Nine was originally a Cardassian station, and the Federation apparently never saw any need to refit its consoles with Starfleet control panels. Why not? Because Cardassian language is just as readable as any human language to everyone who has those universal translators. Kira is doubtless seeing all the Cardassian controls in her own Bajoran language and Klingons see them written in their own language, and so on. This is particularly confirmed in the episode "Babel" in which we briefly [[http://images.wikia.com/memoryalpha/en/images/6/69/Babelcompscrn.jpg see a Cardassian medical console through Julian Bashir's eyes]] before and after he falls victim to an aphasia virus; the words are all still in English, just not in any order that makes sense. What the console was actually showing both times, however, was almost certainly standard Cardassian. |
| 878 | |
| 879 | [[WMG: The First Contact protocols of the Prime Directive don't apply to pre-warp civilizations that other alien races have already contacted.]] |
| 880 | * The Ventaxians in TNG: Devil's Due were already contacted by the Klingons. The same seems to apply to the Capellans, Elasians, Organians and other species from TOS. |
| 881 | ** They tend to flip-flop on this a '''lot''', but mention has been made that the Prime Directive theoretically applies to all non-Federation cultures (how this connects with diplomatic relations and/or warfare is unclear). Those who have their own FTL capability or have already found out about aliens in general are not really going to be "interfered" with in a significant fashion by the revelation that one more alien government with FTL also happens to exist. |
| 882 | *** This is more or less true, although there are some other wrinkles. There are also exceptions for compensating for outside interference or a culture that is ''unable''to develop naturally, although the latter loophole seems to have been closed by TNG. Also, while it is the most dramatically interesting aspect, the avoidance of unscheduled first contact is likely not the primary function of the Prime Directive. It is probably far more focused on avoiding interference with internal politics and conflicts, preventing Starfleet captains from setting themselves up as kingmakers and warlords. Even member planets likely are protected to some degree in this respect. |
| 883 | |
| 884 | [[WMG: The Q existed in our universe before they gained noncorporeality/[[SufficientlyAdvancedAliens omnipotence]]]] |
| 885 | This is why they are so concerned with the behavior of humanity in the main Trek universe, but the MirrorUniverse is still allowed to exist. |
| 886 | |
| 887 | [[WMG: The Star Trek universe is an alternate universe to our own, caused by time travel from our future.]] |
| 888 | Some villian from our universe is gonna time travel back to the 1980's, provide humanity with advanced genetic engineering technology in a vain attempt to make us destroy ourselves, and therefore cause the Eugenics Wars of the 1990's (which we all know didn't happen). |
| 889 | * Didn't that pretty much happen on Voyager? |
| 890 | |
| 891 | [[WMG: The Prime Directive is what keeps the Federation from becoming the [[{{Series/Firefly}} Alliance.]]]] |
| 892 | Think about what the Prime Directive does - it prevents interference with other cultures, usually less advanced. Now consider River's primary criticism of the Alliance from Serenity - they meddle with other cultures without the right. For all the problems the Prime Directive has caused over the years, its existence keeps Starfleet's KnightTemplar tendencies in check so that they don't feel justified in invading and controlling other cultures just because they know better. |
| 893 | |
| 894 | [[WMG: The Breen are furries, either actually canoid or humanoids that think they are.]] |
| 895 | And that's what they're hiding under those refrigeration suits. (This hypothesis is provided by a certain Dax). |
| 896 | |
| 897 | [[WMG: The Breen are gas creatures]] |
| 898 | They live in the upper atmosphere of their home planet (which, Weyoun notes, is actually quite temperate). The sealed refrigeration suits actually serve the purpose of reducing their volume and allowing them to take Humanoid shape in order to facillitate interaction with other cultures. |
| 899 | * That might explain why they don't have blood. |
| 900 | |
| 901 | [[WMG: Anytime a character who is offscreen pages or gets paged and we don't see where they are, it's because they're in the bathroom.]] |
| 902 | ''Trek'' characters don't have Bottomless Bladders. Count the number of times a character is summoned somewhere and all we hear is a voice and "I'll be right there." Likewise, count how often a character is called by somebody offscreen and we don't see them. In every single one of these situations, the person we don't see is on the can. The exceptions are Odo and Data, who would be doing something just as embarrassing if we were to see them. |
| 903 | * Odo would probably in his can, er, jar. |
| 904 | |
| 905 | [[WMG: This is an old one, but TheFederation in both Franchise/StarTrek and Blake'sSeven are the same group; both are propoganda, one by TheResistance, the other by TheFederation.]] |
| 906 | |
| 907 | [[WMG: The smooth-forehead Klingons aren't Klingons]] |
| 908 | The human-looking "Klingons" in the original series weren't Klingons ''per se,'' they were a subjugated race which was part of the Klingon empire. They were referred to as Klingons because they worked for Klingons, in other words. This has precedent in real life; when the USSR was still around, some people would refer to anyone living in the Russian-dominated USSR as 'Russian' even if they were Ukranian or Uzbek or whatever. |
| 909 | * {{Jossed}}: an arc in ''Enterprise'' reveals that the smooth-headed Klingons are Klingons who are/were infected by a virus. |
| 910 | ** UNJOSSED : Until that episode, it was established Fanon, in games like Starfleet Battles, the novels, the comics, and the fanfic. It was Munchkins that forced that Arc (and Bakula ham) upon us. |
| 911 | *** JOSSED as Kang, Kor and Koloth, three Klingon characters that were smooth foreheaded in TOS later appear in [=DS=]9 with ridged foreheads. Also a lot of people consider the stuff in the official tv shows and movies canon and everything else as being subjective as a later tv series and/or movie might ignore or contradict stuff shown in the novels or games. |
| 912 | *** UNJOSSED : the [=DS=]9 episode in question was made with the understanding that Kang, Kor and Koloth looked ''exactly the same'' as they did in the original series. |
| 913 | |
| 914 | [[WMG: The UESPA is still pulling strings here and there in the background...]] |
| 915 | ... because it's the public face of Section 31, and always has been. |
| 916 | |
| 917 | [[WMG: The Vulcans were a quasi-religious cult that left the mutual homeworld (Romulus) and started a wacky colony.]] |
| 918 | The Romulans have a large Empire. The Vulcans have one planet. It is usually implied (mainly by Vulcans) that the Romulans are the ones who left, but it would make more sense if it were the other way round. On Romulus this odd cult formed that eschewed emotion in favour of logic. They end up being unpopular and either leave, or are forced out, and eventually settle on the planet Vulcan. Eventually they meet the Terrans and the UFP is formed. From the perspective of the Romulans, these Earth people bumped into the crazy colonials and sided with them, which goes some way to explain the antipathy between the Empire and the Federation. |
| 919 | * We never see them onscreen, but the Vulcans do at least have more than one planet. |
| 920 | * Maybe the Vulcans/Romulans are actually descended from the Remans. It was a whacky cult of Remans that migrated to Vulcan. The harsh conditions of the planet caused a rapid evolution of the colonists into a divergent species, they became Vulcans. Vulcan had it's apocalyptic war and some of the survivors said "frack this nuked world" and returned to their system of origin and conquered the descendants of their forefathers. |
| 921 | * I contend: The Romulans and Remans co-evolved, but the Romulans developed higher technology first and enslaved the Remans and never, ever, ever mentioned them to anybody anywhere outside of Romulus. The Federation only heard about them for the first time during the Dominion War. The Romulans developed interstellar slowboats and sent explorers out. This proliferated vulcanoids onto a few planets. Vulcan was an offshoot colony. On this colony a young upstart named Sarek began preaching logic, peace and science. The colonists abandoned the old Romulan ways and followed this new path. So the Romulans sent a slow boat that just nuked Vulcan from orbit and left. One thousands years went by, with an empire of slow boats a millenium doesn't actually allow for much exploration and expansion and some colonies were lost or forgotten about. Unbeknownst to the Romulans, the Vulcans excelled at science and developed an ftl drive. With their ftl drive the Vulcans were able to spread out and establish their own interstellar sphere of influence faster than the Romulans could react. With the loss of interstellar resources the Romulans withdrew from now Vulcan controlled space. The Romulans turned their attentions to enslaving a primitive species called the Klingons. The Vulcans provided the primitive Klingons with a massive leap forward in technology so the Klingons could protect themselves. The Klingons then began attacking other species becoming an interstellar threat, destabilizing the region. The Vulcans create their version of the Prime Directive. The Vulcans realized the Romulans were now focused on waging a slow boat interstellar war against some unknown species. The Vulcans send an ftl scout ship to investigate, they discover the world is called Earth, populated by Humans, an average species recovering from a nuclear war. Shocking the vulcans the primitive humans develops their own ftl drive that is potentially much better than the Vulcans. The Vulcans sue for peace and the two worlds unite. The Romulan neutral zone is established by subspace treaty. |
| 922 | |
| 923 | [[WMG: The reason the Borg went from a hive mind to an individual queen in charge was due to Hugh's individuality.]] |
| 924 | We saw in the ''Descent'' two parter that the TNG crew's plan to infect the Borg with individuality via Hugh worked, but when the collective sensed what was happening, they disconnected Hugh's cube before the infection could spread. What if, before they were disconnected, a female drone was able to transmit her consciousness to another cube? Rather than infect other drones with her individuality, she instead used her individuality to dominate and take control of the collective, thereby becoming queen of the Borg hive mind. |
| 925 | The Queen being an individual consciousness that controls but is not a part of the collective would explain so much IMHO, like her fetish for inhabiting female drones that possess a similar physical appearance (because they look like her original body); why when a Borg queen is killed another pops up (because it's the same consciousness in different bodies); and, perhaps more importantly, why she doesn't seem to be part of the hive mind, and when encountering problems that could easily be solved by merging minds, she never does (because, as an individual, she is reluctant, even fearful of merging with the hive mind, because it might mean losing her individuality and/or control over the collective). |
| 926 | * In First Contact, the Borg Queen was there during the assimulation of Picard (during the Best of Both Worlds) which was before Hugh entered the picture. Unless you assume time travel was involved (which was admittably possible, First Contact also showed the Borg had access to time travel, but doesn't make much sense that the Queen would go back to just gloat over Picard instead of making the cube blow up the Enterprise and actually get her victory), '''this theory is impossible.''' |
| 927 | * The Queen never appeared in the actual Best of Both Worlds episodes. Its only in the First Contact movie that the Queens presence is brought up its possible that she was only a fellow drone in the same adjunct as Picard and thus a constant whispering presence within his mind. Since Picard tries his best to keep his memories of being a Borg drone suppressed its entirely possible that he is suffering from false memory syndrome with his memories of the Queen being the Queen and not merely a fellow drone being false memories triggered by the Queen insistence that she was always Queen of the Borg. After all he doesnt have any memory of her whatsoever until she 'reminds' him. |
| 928 | * The Queen was also around when the Hansens were investigating the Borg, and was referred to as Queen back then, which would invalidate the "only a drone" idea above. It is interesting that both Picard and Seven lose all their memories of the Queen after being liberated, though. (Janeway didn't know about the Queen until she read the Raven's logs despite Seven being there for over a year before that) Possibly a failsafe to keep knowledge of a weak point from reaching the outside? |
| 929 | ** Additionally, the information the Hansens had on the Borg came from Guinan's species, which was defeated by the Borg around the 2260s. |
| 930 | [[WMG: The Borg Collective is basically an enormous technological SoulJar]] |
| 931 | "Infinite Regress" from ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' introduced us to a bit of Borg technology known as a "vinculum" which links all the drones together and suppresses their individuality. When exposed to it, Seven of Nine developed something like Multiple Personality Disorder as various individuals assimilated in previous Borg expeditions temporarily took over her mind. Many people, including some of the victims of Wolf 359, resurfaced at this time. Yet the drones on the ship containing the vinculum were all dead. |
| 932 | |
| 933 | This technology, I propose, explains not only how the Borg Queen might have survived to regenerate, but a great many other mysteries as well: a vinculum is actually a technological SoulJar connected to a vast network of other vinculi that contains the minds of basically all Borg everywhere in space and time. Being Borg is almost a kind of immortality, since the drone bodies are disposable; as long as the minds are retained, the cloning chambers they have on their ships can simply make new bodies for them. (This also explains why so many of the drones look human: assimilated bodies of non-standard height and shape, such as those of the Ferengi, are replaced with an efficient cloned humanoid--if not entirely human--form when they wear out.) |
| 934 | |
| 935 | Minds can probably also be transmitted through the collective through ''both space and time'', such that the Borg Queen, after losing her body, was able to transmit herself back to the 24th century and regenerate soon after her defeat in ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact'' with only a mild break in the continuity of her control. Likewise, the victims of Wolf 359, though their bodies were destroyed, had their minds transmitted back to the vinculum network in the Delta Quadrant and are still very much alive and in captivity at the end of all the ''Star Trek'' series (though hope for their rescue springs eternal as well). |
| 936 | |
| 937 | Of course, this temporal immortality comes at a terrible price. [[AndIMustScream Being assimilated into the Borg is indeed a living Hell, a perpetual waking nightmare very difficult to escape.]] The only way to get out of this eternal torment is the way Seven of Nine and a few others did: to have your mind be in a drone body when all connections to the collective get cut off. Seven was particularly fortunate to be in her original body as well; some of the other escapees the Voyager found living in a private collective on the edge of Borg space were probably from other species who were a bit shocked to find themselves in different bodies from the ones in which they'd been assimilated. |
| 938 | |
| 939 | |
| 940 | [[WMG: Holograms aren't a thing.]] |
| 941 | ...just a generic term for simulation technology, in the same way that "video game" doesn't necessarily imply 2D, 3D polygonal, 3D voxel, or any other specific technology. |
| 942 | Thus there are no inconsistencies in what holograms can do, because holograms can do whatever the holodeck is equipped to do: some can replicate food, clothes, and pheromones; some just project sprites. |
| 943 | * This is pretty similar to my working theory. There are many different technologies involved in the Holodeck. When you just need to see something, you get a holographic projection. When you need simple touch, force fields come into play. If it's more involved, like food, pheromones, and things that can't be projected by line of sight, they're replicated with the to-site element from the transporters. |
| 944 | |
| 945 | [[WMG: Section 31 caused the supernova that destroyed Romulus.]] |
| 946 | Around the end of ''[[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine Deep Space Nine]]'', Section 31 was attempting to deal with a possible future Federation-Romulan War. Although most of this involved political maneuvering, the near-destruction of Earth in [[Film/StarTrekNemesis Nemesis]] probably convinced them that more drastic measures were necessary, especially since the Romulans had been a major threat to the Federation for a very long time. Since the Dominion already had the capacity to generate a supernova, Section 31 already had a method they could reverse-engineer and modify as needed. As for Spock's attempt to stop it, that failed due to the supernova occurring earlier than expected, which was probably a result of deliberate misinformation. |
| 947 | * The online game confirms that the supernova was actually caused by a splinter group of Remans in order to plunge the Empire into chaos and ensure their peoples freedom from slavery. |
| 948 | |
| 949 | [[WMG: Vulcans are in high demand for StraightMan roles in Federation comedy.]] |
| 950 | Let's see... a legendary ability to not crack up, taught from early childhood how to rationalize away anything and how to do rhetorical backflips, hardly any room in their heads for ego... frankly, the moment one of them decides the stereotypical Vulcan life of quiet dignity is not strictly logically necessary, they may just have it made (admittedly, there would probably be low supply). The ones we've seen on TV are TheComicallySerious often enough for this to work. |
| 951 | * Extension: Vulcan TV produces the Federation's most critically-praised comedy shows, but [[BritishBrevity they never run for more than three episodes]]. |
| 952 | |
| 953 | [[WMG: The Q are scared of the Borg.]] |
| 954 | When Q2 makes a bunch of cubes appear for fun, Q made it very clear that you DO NOT PISS OFF THE BORG. This seems obvious enough to any human, with one cube being able to break through all that Starfleet had while barely being slowed down, but why should Q care? They are more or less gods (and this was Voyager, [[VillainDecay not the Borg's strongest point]]), why should he care if his son summoned a bunch of Borg ships or capital ships from the Dominion? Lesser energy beings have been able to completely erase ALL beings of a species before, so what do the Q fear of the Borg? Well, for some reason, they can't kill the Borg. It has been shown that organic species "evolve" into high powered energy beings, that one race that stopped the Klingon/Federation war, and that one guy who was becoming an energy being while under the care of Beverly (I know that isn't how evolution even begins to work, but let's ignore that because Trek has failed science before). The Q are implied to have been the same; maybe all of these energy beings become "Q." |
| 955 | |
| 956 | The Borg, however, are taking another path, perfection through adaption of technology, not adaption of self. They can adapt to your attacks, and prevent you from doing the same thing twice. To the Q, the Borg are {{Eldritch Abomination}}s, a perversion of the "true path" that all species must follow (again, not how evolution works but let's move on). And now, they are an actual threat to the Q. The Q can't whisk them away with a thought anymore, the Borg may be able to adapt and survive such an attack. The Q have just have been content to stay out of their way, maybe only interfering with the Borg on a small handful of occasions (mostly in relation to other species' interactions with the Borg, such as Enterprise-D's encounters). If the Borg sees them as a threat, or an obstacle, the Borg will try to eliminate them. As the Q and the Grey showed, even the Q can die (and cause supernovas), even though the deaths only happen in an entirely separate realm. If pressed, the Borg would find out how to kill a God, and add their immortal characteristics to their own. |
| 957 | * Imagine for a moment, an assimilated Q. The Continuum is often portrayed as being big on the balance of the universe. A [=QBorg=] would break the universe in the amount of time it takes to snap one's fingers. |
| 958 | * Not plausible. The Borg were the victims of a CurbStompBattle at the hands of species 8472, a biological race ''nowhere'' near as powerful as the various energy beings in the galaxy. Why? Because their technology was too alien and the Borg could not assimilate it. Being unable to assimilate it, they could not understand or adapt to it. The Borg adapt by comparing the technology and knowledge they have to whatever opponents are throwing at them. SufficientlyAdvancedAliens, who are either employing MagicFromTechnology or else PsychicPowers or are {{Reality Warper}}s are effectively using "magic" from the perspective of the overly-logical Borg, and they simply cannot comprehend how such things work. |
| 959 | |
| 960 | [[WMG: Star Trek is set farther in the future than it claims, and has gone through multiple singularities]] |
| 961 | * Star Trek is really set far farther in the future than it claims, and has been through more than one technological singularity. |
| 962 | ** 2150: Humanity manages to construct a true AI. This AI being self modifying, along with other technologies including genetic engineering, allows humanity to develop new technologies fairly easily. However, there were people who were opposed to the changing of the human genome and self modification. These people were left behind in the wake of those who embraced the singularity. |
| 963 | ** The AI's (who at this point were almost incomprehensible to baseline humans) developed the technology that became warp engines/reactors/drives and left for the stars, along with humans who had modified themselves by various means. When they left, the earth fell into chaos, as there was no one left to operate the machines that had supported their lifestyle. Some of them were transplanted to different planets by the AI gods, but most were left on earth. |
| 964 | ** The humans who had left earth developed different cultures and languages in their isolated pockets of the universe. The AI gods left behind any who wanted to stay, but themselves continued on, developing new technologies as they went. They eventually developed technology for folding space, which allowed them to travel much farther than they ever could with a warp engine. Using this, most of them left to places far past the Milky Way galaxy and have never been heard from again. |
| 965 | ** At this point, the people back on earth started rebuilding civilization and eventually discovered warp technology, possibly influenced by the AI gods. By the time they had achieved warp technology, fragments of humanity's past had been lost forever, not only on earth but on other colonized planets that had not left much in the form of history in their haste to leave the planet. When they first achieved warp, they were greeted by the Vulcans (an offshoot of humanity, but they were unaware of this and as such believed them to be aliens), and the rest is history. |
| 966 | ** It should be noted that humanity's history may not be linear, and that there may be multiple events which are stable time loops. Soong's great invention was a way to prevent "cascade failure" (that is, an AI becoming self modifying and leaving, which had happened to every AI before that). This helps explain all the ridiculously human aliens in a way that is not just coincidence, and also explains why they had worse tech in Star Trek TOS - they had just started re-developing it after another singularity. |
| 967 | |
| 968 | [[WMG: Developing a [[PlanetOfHats hat]] is part of a culture's evolution in developing into a space-faring species.]] |
| 969 | This is based on [[Series/StarTrekEnterprise Enterprise's]] depiction of the Klingons in season 4. Before they achieved warp travel, they were a well rounded species with [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy warrior]] tendencies, but once they did, they developed their [[PlanetOfHats hat.]] |
| 970 | * That's exactly what ''Franchise/MassEffect'' posits: when exposed to other cultures (doesn't even have to be extra-terrestrial, just foreign), an originally diverse community will eventually rally around one point of commonality. |
| 971 | |
| 972 | [[WMG: The Terran Empire's discipline is usually a lot more effective, and its characters have a lot fewer adventures worth watching.]] |
| 973 | |
| 974 | Maybe the reason there are only a few episodes about the MirrorUniverse is because very few backstabbers and mutineers ever actually succeed; we've certainly seen that the punishment for failure is terrible enough that very few would actually risk trying to overthrow their superiors unless they believed they had some unusual advantage. Also, the Terran Empire's Starfleet officers are into PragmaticVillainy and have a knack for CuttingTheKnot, making a lot of the adventures that were so interesting to us in the other universe a lot shorter and less interesting. Here, for example, is how "Space Seed" probably ended in the Mirror Universe: |
| 975 | |
| 976 | ->'''Mirror Kirk''': "That's the ''Botany Bay'' in which those traitorous augments set out to escape from the Terran Empire so long ago? All right, Sulu: fire a dozen photon torpedoes and blow that accursed relic out of the sky." |
| 977 | ->'''Mirror Sulu''': "Aye, Captain." |
| 978 | |
| 979 | [[WMG: The reason Star Fleet keeps changing its uniforms every few years is...]] |
| 980 | * The Federation is constantly gaining new species, and Star Fleet must accommodate them all. True, most of them have humanoid bodies, but some may still be sensitive to certain materials. Some may also be culturally sensitive to certain colors or shapes. |
| 981 | * Star Fleet's uniforms are manufactured by the Ferengi. They keep changing them every few years in order to force Star Fleet to keep purchasing more. |
| 982 | * This Troper (if that's OK here) once suggested on Website/IMDb that the bad guys figured out the gold uniforms meant 'command' and the red ones meant 'grunt', so it was switched. |
| 983 | |
| 984 | [[WMG: Earth and human society is culturally stagnant.]] |
| 985 | This is why we see so few examples of entertainment or art from the 21st Century onwards, (it's almost all Shakespeare and classical music) and why clothing and architecture in the future is so bland. The utopian society of Earth has led to cultural stagnation. |
| 986 | * In 'The Die is Cast', Bashir implies that human fiction has spent a lot of time reinterpreting alien works[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxDt5qj079U .]] |
| 987 | |
| 988 | [[WMG: Why there is NoOSHACompliance in Star Trek universe]] |
| 989 | By the TNG area, the Federation demanded three things above all else in their ships, comfort for the crew and their families, to have everything be under the latest and greatest technology (to help sway other systems to join the Federation after seeing how advanced their political and economic model was) and SPEED (to help expand the Federations influence). The first just ate up resources, with a lot of time and effort being put into the replicators, making rooms be good for children growing up of many species, and having many things (such as the ever exploding warp core) right in the middle of engineering. The second clashed with some basic engineering principles, you always seek the most basic technology to do things, not the most complex (touch screens are more advanced, buttons are more reliable), making it harder to put safety features when everything MUST be computerized and MUST be interconnected. Finally, the Federation needed ships that are FAST. That is why the Warp Cores are often so liable to explode, they have so much excessive reactive anti-matter in them that even if you redirect the anti-flow into space, it still can explode, and if computer control is not regained (and warp ejection does not work) the crew can do nothing but count the minutes till they explode. |
| 990 | |
| 991 | The reason why the series kept getting worse was Wolf 359. The Federation was shown it was vulnerable, that the Borg could easily smash through all the Federation could muster without even slowing down. They needed more ships, and FAST. All safety, all redundancy, and all SANITY was abandoned in the pursuit of getting more battle ready ships in case the Borg, or anyone else in the increasingly hostile galaxy, tried to prey on the old and increasingly weak Federation. The objections of Engineers were ignored, the Federation got physicists Voyager was one of these ships, built in this rush. The gel packs were easier to make in mass than traditional wiring, and that is why all basic safety features were missing. |
| 992 | |
| 993 | [[WMG: Humans' [[PlanetOfHats hat]] is "adrenaline junkies".]] |
| 994 | At least as far as anyone off of Earth. While the social and economic systems of Earth are set up to make it outright tranquil, they also push more adventurous spirits into space, and tend to give them a sense of invulnerability or at least "worth the risk." Witness everything from Kirk's "risk is our business" to the bland acceptance of children playing not just contact sports but ones with a much higher risk of serious injury than we would now accept. This also explains both the NoOSHACompliance tendencies of Starfleet ships and the predominance of human designs--part of the "adventurous" human mindset is a frankly Victorian attitude towards engineering rather than a late 20th-century one. Build everything as big, as fast, and as powerful as possible, even if that makes it dangerously temperamental and in need of constant adjustment to work at all. Even catastrophic failure is ultimately just a lesson. Even with the resulting difficulties, Earth-built(or Mars-built) ships are impressive to potential allies and frightening to potential enemies, not least because of their [[CrazyIsCool seeming insanity]]. |
| 995 | * This characterization takes on even more validity if you view Starfleet as a SpiritualSuccessor to NASA during the Space Race. At first it might have been politically motivated, but later on we started exploring space ''just because.'' Humanity has a {{Determinator}} streak a mile wide; we attempt the impossible on a regular basis simply because it ''is'' impossible. It's a recurring theme in Trek that other alien races are downright ''scared'' of Humans for this very reason. The Romulans and Klingons went out into space to conquer and expand. Humans went out into space ''because it was there.'' That makes ''no sense'' to anyone who isn't Human. |
| 996 | |
| 997 | [[WMG: The Galaxy Class never operated in its intended role.]] |
| 998 | Yes, the Enterprise-D and its sister ships are impressively powerful, luxurious, long-ranged, and fast in a straight line. However, even by the franchise's standards, they have terrible weaponry blind spots at close range and manoeuvre like a cow on skates. Even the original plan to separate the saucer in combat doesn't really excuse this--the stardrive section alone is in fact somewhat under-gunned and short on sensors. However, both these facts and the infamous presence of family and civilian contractors and scientists make more sense if the Galaxy was initially designed as a cross between a [[AirborneAircraftCarrier carrier]] and a mobile space station. Sadly, though, this plan simply did not work out; ships small enough to fit inside the main shuttlebay never measured up to expectations, the Danube-class runabout more of a super-shuttle than a useful independent ship, and other classes never reaching production. Meanwhile, the Galaxy turned out to not quite be big ''enough'' to function as a mobile base, its cargo capacity and engineering facilities not quite justifying that use. Instead, the class was pressed into service as a long-range explorer and heavy battleship, and performed well if not ideally in that role. |
| 999 | * Although, if the intended role all along for the Galaxy Class was long-range exploration, making it a Jack-Of-All-Trades, capable of serving multiple functions reasonably well but none exceptionally so, is ideal. After all, if you're going into uncharted territory, you don't know what you're going to encounter. The best you can do is be reasonably well-prepared for multiple situations, pick a talented crew that's good at improvising on the spot, and give them decent living conditions and multiple creature comforts so they don't go insane from long trips in deep space. |
| 1000 | * The Galaxy-class is hardly a big slow clunker; it's faster than its Romulan contemporaries ("Tin Man") which are dedicated warships, and it's surprisingly maneuverable when need be ("Encounter at Farpoint," "Booby Trap," "In Theory," "Relics," "The Pegasus"). In a military sense, the Galaxy is probably the equivalent of an Iowa-class "fast battleship," although the children are still a major issue. |
| 1001 | ** It's worth noting that during the Dominion War, barring a Jem'Hadar suicide run, we never see a Galaxy-class destroyed on screen. Whatever its original role, by the time of the war it's a heavy frontline vessel. |
| 1002 | |
| 1003 | [[WMG: Vulcans (and by extension, Romulans) are the ''very'' distant descendants of [[Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda the Kingdom of Hyrule]]]] |
| 1004 | Let's look at the evidence. Pointed ears, the occasional cool/freaky power, and the most important point: when Spock has his Katra returned to his rejuvenated body, the robe they dress him in has the ''Triforce'' hanging across his chest. |
| 1005 | * Also, they're stated to have had an extremely violent past. |
| 1006 | |
| 1007 | A couple of theories about the Romulans: |
| 1008 | * Hyrule's symbol consists of a bird with the Triforce above it. Like [[Literature/TheLordOfTheRings Gondor and Arnor, which divided the scepter and crown between each other when they separated]], the Vulcans kept the Triforce while the Romulans kept the bird. |
| 1009 | * Alternately, the Romulans are descended from the Twili, the Stone of Gol is the Fused Shadows, and the Mirror of Twilight was some kind of miniature wormhole generator that connected Vulcan to Romulus. |
| 1010 | |
| 1011 | [[WMG: UESPA/Earth Starfleet and the MACO Corps were never dissolved]] |
| 1012 | In Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries, there are several references to the Enterprise making reports to UESPA, or even awaiting orders from them. From its founding to at least the late-middle 23rd century, the Federation Starfleet is not truly a unified service--to avoid the impression of creating a fleet with coercive power over Federation members, all of its ships and their crews are ''de jure'' on secondment from planetary forces, Earth's being the largest in number. Although its command structure rapidly replaces that of those forces for most purposes, Starfleet ships still send copies of their official reports to their "original command", and USEPA and its other-planetary equivalents retain an advisory role, and, initially, command of local defense and customs forces. This potentially two-headed command lasts through the 23rd century, but gradually diminishes until the planetary forces act only as an archive of scientific and naval matters. Earth's MACO corps fares somewhat better; it survives within the Federation Starfleet, and spreads beyond Earth and its colonies, as an honour society and advanced-training resource for security and tactical personnel. Colonel West's use of a MACO rank in ''Film/{{Star Trek VI|The Undiscovered Country}}'' is prideful but not anomalous. |
| 1013 | * We know for a fact UESPA survives into the 23rd Century at the very least, since it was mentioned as the organization the characters work for in Charlie X and the episode with Colonel Christopher. UESPA was even mentioned in Enterprise as the original branch of the Starfleet. It might be the case that Starfleet inevitably took over so many roles previously done by the umbrella group UESPA that the original organization withered away, much like (for a more sinister example) the Nazis originally started off as merely the political branch of a secret society. |
| 1014 | * As for [=MACOs=], the only evidence they continue to exist is (possibly) Colonel West's odd rank and mention of "Federation Marines" in several Dominion War episodes of [=DS=]9. |
| 1015 | ** These are exactly the facts I was speculating off of, just thinking of what form they might have taken over time. Deference to MACO ranks, if held concurrently but not parallel with (Federation) Starfleet ranks, could also explain the widely varying rank of security/tactical personnel at any given level of responsibility and competence. |
| 1016 | *** Each member planet within the Federation still has autonomy and soveriegnty so they can probably keep their own defense forces, however these forces are probably not allowed to have warp capable warships. They would function somewhat like the National Guard. Earth could still have the [=MACOs=] and UESPA as their own defense forces, the Andorians probably still have the Imperial Guard. |
| 1017 | *** Because Starfleet handles interstellar defense and everyone feels secure in the Federation these native defense forces may be more like joining an intense version of the Boy Scouts. |
| 1018 | *** right but deep down they all secretly dream of the day when they will be called upon for some real action! |
| 1019 | |
| 1020 | [[WMG: Borg can adapt to physical projectiles]] |
| 1021 | However, the technology is based around different defenses than against energy weapons like phasers. Against projectile attacks, they use a modified InertialDampening system. Using bullets against the Borg would create a scene like Neo stopping the bullets in The Matrix Reloaded. The reason bullets worked on the Holodeck was mostly because they hadn't adapted yet (only two drones died). The reason melee is relatively effective (assuming the drone doesn't overpower you, assimilate you, or shrug off your blows) is because the InertialDampening system needs a minimum distance to kick in (so walking up to the drone and shooting him point-blank in the face with a revolver would work, but if you were 30 feet away and tried shooting him, the bullet would drop on the ground uselessly). |
| 1022 | ** Ha, perhaps they use [[Franchise/{{Dune}} Holtzmann fields]] for their personal deflectors. Seriously though: given prep time, [[ImplacableMan Borg can]] ''[[ImplacableMan and will]]'' [[ImplacableMan adapt to anything]]. No exceptions. Otherwise they're not scary. |
| 1023 | *** Species 8472 |
| 1024 | |
| 1025 | [[WMG: ''Film/ItsAWonderfulLife'' can be found in Temporal Mechanics curricula.]] |
| 1026 | It shows quite why you cannot RetGone just one person, and the difference that just one person can make on the past. |
| 1027 | |
| 1028 | [[WMG: Franchise/PowerRangers is the distant past of Franchise/StarTrek]] |
| 1029 | |
| 1030 | The only thing with this theory is you have to discount every series after Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue especially SPD and Time Force. Thoguh they can be explained by alternate timelines, Q, etc... |
| 1031 | |
| 1032 | The precursor to Section 31 was the Nasada Program. Who had secret access to information and tech that the normal citizens didn't have. Hence the knowledge of Zordon and the shuttle being able to connect with the Koviarian Astro Megaship and form a Megazord. |
| 1033 | |
| 1034 | After first contact with the citizens of KO-35 at the end of the "Countdown to Destruction" disaster human technological development increased rapidly. To the point that the faster-than-light human space colony Terra Venture was built by 1999! |
| 1035 | |
| 1036 | Communication and transportation to the new human colony was established not long after then and within the next year a government funded zord/ranger program was completed and put into use to defend a single town. Though many questioned the necessity of this program it was proven to be necessary to combat the constant demon attacks. All seemed to be well, at least in America. |
| 1037 | |
| 1038 | Outside of America though all was not well. The aliens for some reason had focused all their attention on helping the humans in Angel Grove and nearby towns in California. Leaving a vast technology gap that made at least one other country's government fear them. "If they have the power for something like Lightspeed Rescue who is to say they won't use it against us!" Out of fear of the combat ability of the zords somebody launched a nuke! |
| 1039 | |
| 1040 | Though the many brave rangers tried to fight in World War III and bring the countries to peace once more political talks fell through and soon the war went full scale! Nearly destroying the planet and leaving Terra Venture without a home planet to leave too should anyone decide they don't like living in the Jungle planet. |
| 1041 | |
| 1042 | The devastation was so immense that all the rangers were wiped out and the aliens left. For an unknown reason the humans viewed trusting the aliens as a disastrous embarrassment instead of an inner power struggle gone wrong. To the end they whitewashed their own history in an attempt to erase these facts, and instead claimed the nuclear war to be a result of the long since ended conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States known as the Cold War (hence the Star Trek idea that the Union existed long past when it actually did). |
| 1043 | |
| 1044 | The next few centuries went the same way Star Trek said it did, with the occasional reverse engineering from human and ranger tech long since lost to the war, (the transporter was a primitive teleportation device, lasers are a common fixture of nearly every ranger team) though they never rediscovered Zords or morphing technology. Only the renamed Nasada Section 31 had all the knowledge. Hence Vulcans incorrect knowledge of the human's history. |
| 1045 | |
| 1046 | What of KO-35 and magic you ask? KO-35 has since moved their space colonies to somewhere out of the galaxy to get away from a race that will likely destroy themselves in their stupidity and don't even have intergalactic travel (they have become racist after the events that wiped humans out). And magic is still a fact in this Universe, all over the galaxy. Hence Q, the Traveller, and other entries that our crew doesn't even attempt to techno-babble away. |
| 1047 | * Does ''Series/PowerRangersRPM'' happen here too? |
| 1048 | |
| 1049 | [[WMG: The Borg once originated from a {{Deconstruction}} of [[StrawVulcan Vulcan philosophy]], left alone without the more "emotional" humans to balance out.]] |
| 1050 | Vulcans are so concerned with logic that they began to deny important parts of their biology, such as Pon Farr. Their ideal is ''Kolinahr'', or or a Vulcan purged of all their vestigial limits of emotion such as Pon Farr, even though this is impossible if a Vulcan still has a Vulcan body vulnerable to Pon Farr. Any other species can be used, but the idea is the same: the worship of ''computerized logic to the point of denying their own biological individuality''. And [[DoubleThink remaining in their biological existence while denying such a fact in their face is obviously illogical and unrealistic]]. |
| 1051 | |
| 1052 | So what's the most logical, realistic, and efficient way to get rid of such pitfalls of biology? As with {{Transhuman}}ism: turn the species into TheSingularity of MechanicalLifeforms, free from the pitfalls of biology and emotion such as the Vulcan woe that is Pon Farr. They have the level of scientific advancement to do it. ''Kolinahr'' is in reality, not a Buddhism-like meditative ideal, but only realistically attainable through [[CyberneticsEatYourSoul cybernetics]]. If First Contact never happened and had the more optimistic and emotional Human Federation to be accepting companions (both in [[HeterosexualLifePartners this sense]] and [[HoYay that sense]]) with the Vulcans (combined with Human taboo against transhumanism because of Khan and the Borg), then the Vulcans would have logically embraced Borgification immediately as the only freedom from Pon Farr. |
| 1053 | |
| 1054 | The new MechanicalLifeforms had the advantages of a HiveMind of pure mathematical logic, but it came at a consequence. They cannot be creative and imaginative. They cannot be reckless and impulsive enough to have the initiative to make new radical theories and invent. It's like how Einstein once said: "imagination is more important than knowledge", with the knowledge referring to logical-mathematical knowledge. As a result, they went for the logically easier route to harvest and assimilate other more-radical species in the galaxy who will do the inventing for them. It can also be speculated that if the Borg invades a civilization and loses, this motivates the target civilization into developing new technologies, and more technologies logically mean more profit from assimilation (See also: Every thing we've seen from the Borg except for Q Who and Scorpion has been a massive XanatosGambit). |
| 1055 | |
| 1056 | But if the Borg were born from a logical race then what explains the emotional Queens? Simple, and it's not VillainDecay or the HiveMind GivingUpOnLogic. Thanks to assimilating other more emotional species (notice that Queens are all female), the Hive Mind allowed specific drones to gain a degree of emotion and "illogicality". Queens are few individuals who are allowed into GivingUpOnLogic, because they can think of adaptive radical tactics that the still-logical Borg collective consciousness can't, such as trying to combat the Enterprise in a TimeyWimeyBall during ''First Contact''. There are also a lot of Borg individuals who had the chance to give up on logic of the hive mind as well ("Unimatrix Zero") |
| 1057 | |
| 1058 | [[WMG: The Borg assimilated [[Series/DoctorWho The Cybermen.]]]] |
| 1059 | In fact, they were the first species to be assimilated by the Borg. This is where the Borg got their cybernetic implant technology. They were originally a standard alien world, and when they found the Cybermen, the Cybermen attempted to eliminate them (The Cybermen are only interested in converting humans), and instead were eliminated themselves. The victorious aliens used the technology as both a way to eradicate disease and illness (as the Cybermen were originally intended for) but also as a weapon against other races, and eventually developed into the villians of Star Trek. |
| 1060 | |
| 1061 | [[WMG: Vulcans are only pretending to be {{Straw Vulcan}}s]] |
| 1062 | Isn't this pretty obvious? |
| 1063 | |
| 1064 | Their obsession with "Logic" is all an act; if they were so logical and hate Pon Farr to the point of ''trying to deny it'' why haven't they do the logical thing and Borg themselves into logical purely-mathematical supercomputers yet to get rid of that damned Pon Farr once and for all? Their Logic ideology is just an excuse for them to sneer at species they consider "ugly". Of course, if they use the word "ugly" they'll be called out as petty [[SpaceElves Cats In Space]], and that's why they use the more sci-fi word "logical". And also because intelligence is beautiful. Also, their shame about talking about Pon Farr to other species is after all, an obvious emotion. |
| 1065 | |
| 1066 | ** Maybe Vulcans aren't vain, but running a species-wide XanatosGambit : they're purposely inflating their reputation as {{Straw Vulcan}}s to trick people into underestimating the Vulcans. |
| 1067 | |
| 1068 | [[WMG: "The Holodeck Is For Sex" is the in-universe equivalent of TheInternetIsForPorn.]] |
| 1069 | |
| 1070 | Given some of what Barclay was doing whilst indulging in some of his addictive holodeck fantasies, and what Quark tends to run his holosuite for, it's not an unreasonable assumption (and let's be honest, given a fully-immersive simulation we could program at will, it's likely many people would be tempted to indulge in some of their more questionable fantasies!) Of course we see many characters explicitly ''not'' using the holodeck for sex, much like the real-life internet is used for many more things besides porn, but I bet there are some people who moan that it's "really" only used for no higher purpose. |
| 1071 | * Well, Odo certainly suspected as much of Quark when he saw Jake leaving one of his holosuites at one point, and was about ready to arrest him for corrupting a minor until Quark started gushing about his latest plans to make a huge profit marketing family entertainment. As for the pornographic uses, the reason the show only ever briefly touches on the PowerPerversionPotential of the holodeck is because YouDoNOTWantToKnow what uses some people have for it. You really, ''really'' don't. To give just one example from an episode [[NoYay that has not been written and never]] ''[[NoYay will]]'' [[NoYay be written]]: |
| 1072 | -->'''Wesley''': "Computer, load "The Pleasure Goddess of Rixx" and open narrative parameters file." |
| 1073 | -->'''Computer''': "Working... Program complete. Awaiting orders." |
| 1074 | -->'''Wesley''': "Computer, apply all physical parameters of ''Enterprise'' passenger Molly O'Brien to the Pleasure Goddess character, save character parameters and close file, and run program." |
| 1075 | -->Scene that would be illegal to broadcast on ''any'' medium ensues... |
| 1076 | ** Which would reflect the more worrying RealLife side of the internet in the Star Trek-verse... |
| 1077 | ** ...though it could be a moot point as the holodeck OS is programmed to block those kinds of scenarios. |
| 1078 | * Unsavory types like Quark aren't the only ones who use the holodeck for sex either; note Riker's infamous "I'll be in Holodeck Four" line in "The Perfect Mate." |
| 1079 | |
| 1080 | [[WMG: Barclay was only allowed to join Zimmerman's research...]] |
| 1081 | When he got off probation. Seriously, how would using someone's image without their consent ''not'' be a crime? Hence why [[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine Quark]] could be blackmailed by Bashir after using Dax and Kira's images. It's not just that they'd [[ActionGirl kick his ass]], it's that he'd be fined and-or lose his holosuite license. |
| 1082 | |
| 1083 | [[WMG: Vulcans who have achieved Kolinahr don't experience Pon Farr]] |
| 1084 | |
| 1085 | [[WMG: Romulans are Nazis]] |
| 1086 | The original Romulans were modeled after the Roman Empire, much like the Nazis considered themselves the continuation of the Roman legacy. They practically fetishized birds; the eagle is a prominent fixture in Nazi imagery. Later Romulans shaved their heads, just like the neo-Nazi skinheads. And of course, in the Creator/JJAbrams continuity, the Romulans [[spoiler: committed genocide against the Vulcans]]! |
| 1087 | |
| 1088 | [[WMG: Each race has plenty of hats, but their space forces only recruit a particular type of hat from their own people.]] |
| 1089 | Klingons are warriors, Ferengi merchants, Humans explorers, on and on. We've some glimpses of Klingon lawyers and engineers, and Ferengi assassin and human scoundrels, Cardassians who don't believe in their military superiority and Romulans who are interested in logic. It's not that each species has a hat, it only seems that way. Each species' space force has a specific mission, and so recruits the people who fit that personality type. The Klingon space forces are militaristic, so they recruit warriors. Star Fleet recruits humans who have the explorer wander lust, etc. |
| 1090 | |
| 1091 | [[WMG: Also each race has plenty of hats but when applying for the Federation a planet is pressured to develop a hat]] |
| 1092 | Part of the application is the question, "What unique thing will your world contribute to the Federation?" Since we've seen that Federation application can sometimes take over 100 years, maybe it's because in a lot of cases the applicant cultures are trying to perfect some unique aspect of their society. Since there are trillions of beings in the Federation whatever you are contributing it you will have to provide ALOT of it, this would inevitably effect your culture's entire economic resource distribution, educational system, cultural philosophy and social norms. The exact ambassador negotiating the application will greatly effect how stringent this hat needs to be. |
| 1093 | * Here on Earth some cities have touristy areas which becomes the cities reputation across the world, planets in the Federation are probably the same. For example every travels to Risa for the great beaches and promiscuous population, but that's probably just on the touristy continent, most of the planet if just a regular society going about all the regular business of being a culture. Every world is probably like that. |
| 1094 | |
| 1095 | [[WMG: The Star Trek novels take place in alternate universes]] |
| 1096 | The Shatnerverse novels following Star Trek: Generations are inconsistent when the ages of Spock and Kirk and the passage of time between events are mentioned. |
| 1097 | |
| 1098 | [[WMG: Every fanfic is canon]] |
| 1099 | Every fanfiction ever written takes place in a universe parallel to the main Star Trek timelines. |
| 1100 | * However Temporal Affairs has managed to keep these parallel time lines separated from the main, Temoral Affairs Approved, timeline, hence why they are not considered 'cannon'. |
| 1101 | ** Cannon Immigrants, occur when Temporal Affairs realizes that someone from an alternate timeline is exactly the thing the prime time line needs to survive and so they integrate them into the main time line. |
| 1102 | * Fan Fics are timelines Temporal Affairs managed to collapse, novels and licensed media such a comic books and animated are timelines that Temporal Affairs was unable to collapse and so they remained stable and have become attached to the prime universe via quantum fissures as shown in Parallels. |
| 1103 | |
| 1104 | [[WMG: Starship interior design is influenced by retro-cool aesthetics.]] |
| 1105 | That's why the original series Enterprise ''looks'' less advanced than the prequel, and even ''TNG'' is pretty {{Zeerust}}y by modern standards. It has to do more with the aesthetics of whatever period fahsion was emulating at the time- TOS's were clearly influenced by the 1960s, for example. |
| 1106 | |
| 1107 | Fashions just diverged in the new movies due to the butterfly effect, hence why the Enterprise's interior appears more "up-to-date" than the original TOS. |
| 1108 | |
| 1109 | [[WMG: The 50th anniversary movie will be like "The Day of the Doctor."]] |
| 1110 | It will be called Star Trek: The Day of the Spock. Quintos' Spock will go back in time and meet his younger self, played by Jacob Kogan. Nimoy's mirror universe Spock who has a beard will encounter them. They will be ashamed of him but end up needing his help. The three Spocks will time travel to the day Vulcan was destroyed in the reboot. They will work together to freeze Vulcan and hide it in a pocket universe. [=McCoy=] will say, "I didn't know when I was well off. All three of them!" Then Kirk will say, "No Bones. Not all three; all ''four!''" Then there will be a shot of Quintos playing his own mirror universe counterpart, who also has a beard. Nimoy's Spock Prime will show Quintos' Spock a museum painting titled, ''Vulcan Falls No More'' and state that his new goal is to find Vulcan. Then Quintos' Spock will have a dream in which he is standing alongside an infinite number of Spocks from infinite alternate universes, all looking up at Vulcan in the sky. |
| 1111 | |
| 1112 | [[WMG: The people in the re-boot look different because of butterfly effect temporal incursions."]] |
| 1113 | Kirk looks different, but is still Kirk. Khan looked different but is still Khan. Chekov was born several years younger, but is Chekov. As WMG-ed in other entries the temporal incursion by Nero changed the OS Star trek universe. In the original timeline we saw lots of significant time travel by the prime OS crew, later the Next Gen crew, the [=DS=]9 crew and the Voyager crew. So when Nero altered the timeline it subsequently altered ALL of those time travel missions, which subsequently had small butterfly effects on all those time travel missions...causing several minor temporal changes...such as James T. Kirk's genetics being slightly different because his parents bumped the uglies a few minutes difference in the new timeline, the ideas for Khan's genetic template were determined a few minutes different, Chekov was born a few years later, etc. This is why everybody, including Khan, looks different but are basically the same people. |
| 1114 | |
| 1115 | [[WMG: Civilian replicators have special lock outs and permissions]] |
| 1116 | In the Federation replicators are a basic, if not THE basic house hold item. When a replicator is made it is assigned to a specific person. It probably has different levels of access. For example all replicators will make anybody a glass of water or simple meal. But for more complex or energy intensive items there may be owner-only lockouts. Or, a person can be given permissions for certain items based on their job or position. For example civilian doctors can probably replicate things that non-certified citizens can't, they would have certain permissions on replicators in general, so they could be at your house and still order up basic drugs and medical supplies, but for more intense and controlled substances and items they would only be able to call those up on their specific licensed replicator. However the Federation is well aware that outside of the Federation replicators are a game changing technology to cultures that don't have them. So all civilian replicators have lock outs so that you cannot produce another replicator, and if you're not a Federation citizen able to provide some sort of ID code or something then the replicator will not make things for you. If you hack it in any way the replicator self-malfunctions. |
| 1117 | * I think this is probably an assumption the writers actually made. |
| 1118 | |
| 1119 | [[WMG: Star Fleet is considered not military because post apocalyptic Earth was so harsh that military thinking became common place]] |
| 1120 | |
| 1121 | Star Fleet may work for the Federation but it is obviously made by Humans. While Starfleet has ranks, uses weapons, has court martials and is expected to engage in violent defense of the Federation it is still considered "non-military". After the nuclear war Earth went through a mad max post apocalypse. During that time probably every one carried weapons, like the old west. Then Earth climbed out of the post apocalypse by creating genetically engineered leaders...and we see how that went. Before the Eugenics War the genetically engineered leaders re-organized every level of society into a strict hierarchy. 'Ranks' became common place, there became no distinction between civilian and military commands under their guidance. So totalitarian was their reign that this mode of thinking became engrained as a social norm. So much that when Khan was overthrown the notion of carrying weapons, having ranks and defending yourself form attack was just considered society, not a special sub-set of society called "military". To post Eugenics war War 'military' means a mission of conquest and/or control of another society through violence. Since Star Fleet has neither of those mission parameters it is not considered military. |
| 1122 | * Most references and chronologies have the Eugenics Wars coming ''before'' the nuclear World War III. However, one possibility here is that the harshness of the Post-Atomic Horror did indeed leave a lasting impression... in how militaristic ''the police'' is. After all, your general police is defined as non-military, has ranks and uses weapons, and is expected to use violence if deemed necessary for the protection of the polity's citizens. It doesn't take ''that'' much exaggeration, especially if your criminals would often have access to fairly heavy weaponry (and they would, in the environment the Post-Atomic Horror was painted as) and the boundaries between states are fuzzy (like, say, after civilization got damn close to collapsing, and ''did'' collapse in large regions), to get something that looks pretty much like a military but doesn't call or think of itself as one. |
| 1123 | * Police departments have ranks and such but aren't considered military, same with fire departments. So it is possible to have quasi military structure but NOT be a military organization. |
| 1124 | |
| 1125 | [[WMG: The nuclear war was a predestination paradox.]] |
| 1126 | During the height of the cold war and in several periods during the 80s and 90s Starfleet ships were spotted here and there, giving rise to tensions between the US and USSR, furthering the nuclear arms race. |
| 1127 | |
| 1128 | [[WMG: The Breen are a race of robots/computers who wiped out their creators in a RobotWar.]] |
| 1129 | The reason they keep refrigerated suits despite the temperate climate of their home world is the same reason computers have fans and really good computers have advanced cooling systems: to keep heat low and conduction fast. The reason they have no blood to draw is that they're completely inorganic. The reason they never take their "suits" off is that their "suits" are actually, for lack of a better term, their skin. Their hyper-pragmatism and generally alien, violent morality is the result of stereotypical "machine ethics." They're immune to empaths because they lack "brains." And the reason they're so paranoid and xenophobic is that they once fought their creators and fear extermination at the hands of other organics if their nature is fully discovered. |
| 1130 | |
| 1131 | [[WMG: Even in-universe there are continuity gaffs caused by all the temporal anomalies and such.]] |
| 1132 | Given all the warping of space and time and creation of isolated sub-space fields and such it is possible for a ship to be slightly out temporal synch with the rest of the Federation, and hence that ship and crew may remember one or two details differently. It can even happen with one person, they leave and they come back and one small thing is different. Sort of like what happened to Worf but where he was jumping from reality to reality I'm saying sometimes ships bring little pockets of spacetime from their quantum state into another, maybe entangling two nearly identical quantum states in the edges of the warp field. So it would be inevitable that when someone who did long voyages or at least went really fast a lot, finally came back home from their stint in Starfleet there would be little changes in the timeline all around them, somebody's middle initial is different, somebody's boyfriend is the same guy but looks different, the configuration of your apartment is different but all the same stuff is there. After awhile you learn to just filter these things out. |
| 1133 | * This is why the uniforms seem to randomly change little details once in awhile and you end up with a bunch of folks from Starfleet standing around in slightly different uniforms but no one noticing or caring. |
| 1134 | * and time dilation would still be in effect. You know the twin paradox, if I had a twin sibling and I jumped into a spaceship and rocketed off at relativistic speeds when I returned I would have aged at a much slower rate than my twin. So warp drive must 'flattens out' the time curve in that sense (or else when Kirk returned from his 5 year mission he would have returned to the Next Gen Earth). However all stars are moving relative to each other. So while the warp field may protect me from the twin paradox, once I come out of warp and land on a planet I am now moving in regular old Einstein space relative to my homeworld. The further apart stars the faster they are moving away from each other and hence the slower I age in relation to my homeworld. So folks in Starfleet, especially on exploration missions or long term deep space assignments would come back having aged much slower than the friends and family they left behind on Homeworld. |
| 1135 | * I bet when the make space stations they are very careful to make sure that the space stations motion relative to the homeworld keeps them in the same flow of time rate. |
| 1136 | |
| 1137 | [[WMG: The Q Continuum is what gave Elizabeth Dehner and Gary Mitchell their powers in [[{{Recap/StarTrekS1E3WhereNoManHasGoneBefore}} Where No Man Has Gone Before]]]] |
| 1138 | Alternatively, all the members of the Q Continuum were once normal humans, similarly effected by the NegativeSpaceWedgie that gave them their powers. |
| 1139 | * Isn't this in the semi-canon Q novels? I couldn't make it very far into those, but I'm 95 percent sure that the galactic barrier is to keep out an evil and crippled Q? |
| 1140 | |
| 1141 | [[WMG: The Borg Queen is an experiment.]] |
| 1142 | The Borg, trying to improve themselves, decided to give that "free will" thing a shot. They chose a random drone, outfitted her with the proper personality, and set her loose. |
| 1143 | ** Somewhere along the way, she assimilated a cheap dime novel space adventure, explaining her attitude towards Data among other things. |
| 1144 | |
| 1145 | [[WMG: The Borg are actually younger than they appear.]] |
| 1146 | Ever wonder why the Borg haven't assimilated the galaxy yet? It's because- relatively speaking- they're too young to have gotten very far. That's why there are free species in the Delta Quadrant, and that's why the Borg only sent one Cube to conquer the Alpha Quadrant: as of now, they lack the resources to do things properly. |
| 1147 | * [[https://redd.it/2obv03 Agreed.]] |
| 1148 | |
| 1149 | [[WMG: Transporters simultaneously beam out and beam in every time they work.]] |
| 1150 | Since there should always be something filling in the beam in space, and large transports like the whales and water in the Voyage Home prove that it can't be a simple place of displacing the air, whenever someone is beamed down to the surface the air is beamed back up in their place, in equal volume to what was beamed down. Dangerous components could be cleansed by the buffer, and this way no vacuum is created where they were beamed out from. |
| 1151 | |
| 1152 | [[WMG: The Borg cannot use any PsychicPowers or other such abilities possessed by the species they assimilate.]] |
| 1153 | The Borg have to have assimilated members of at least some psychic species. They are not that rare after all. Yet the Borg never exhibit any such powers themselves in ''any'' of their appearances. In order to read or communicate with non-Borg minds they must attach a [[ElectronicTelepathy neural transceiver]] to each individual with whom they wish to do so. They use tractor beams instead of telekinesis to grab things and pull them in and shields to defend against attacks. Why is that? One possibility is that it is too dangerous for the Collective. Psychic drones may be able to break free and reassert their individuality if they are allowed to access their powers. It would be like Unimatrix 0, only on a larger scale, and functioning ''all'' the time, not just when the psychic drones are regenerating. Worse, direct contact with non-Borg minds could bypass or even overload the vincula that control the thoughts flowing through the Collective and further stimulate a resurgence of drone individuality. In a worst case scenario, telepaths might be able to backtrack through the Collective network to directly reach and attack the mind of the Queen herself! So the Borg have to specifically suppress such abilities in any of their drones, even though they would seem desirable, they would bring chaos to order. |
| 1154 | |
| 1155 | [[WMG: Zefram Cochrane ''would'' have shot the Vulcans had the first contact not been altered by ''Enterprise'']] |
| 1156 | The Mirror Universe version of Cochrane didn't shake hands with the Vulcan, he gunned him down. The primary universe Cochrane (or somebody else from the settlement) likely would have done so as well, had they not been told in advance by the crew of the ''Enterprise-E'' that they were going to be meeting aliens and that it was going to be important to the future of humanity. After all, these were survivors of WorldWarIII, not Federation idealists. They were still half-expecting attack and indeed when the Borg attacked from above they assumed that war with the Eastern Coalition had resumed. The entire peaceful first contact is thus a StableTimeLoop. Cochrane was psychologically prepared to meet aliens, especially after seeing the attractive HumanAlien Deanna, and the presence of the Starfleet crew helped assuage their anxieties to the point where they did not react with hostility when the Vulcans landed. |
| 1157 | |
| 1158 | [[WMG: Replicators are too exact for subtlety.]] |
| 1159 | Non-replicated food is considered much more flavorful than replicated dishes, but perhaps a replicated meal seems blander because it has the exact same taste and texture every time, leading to desensitization. The food is always made to the exact template on file. There's subtle variations in classically-prepared food that we don't fully appreciate, not being subjected to carbon copies most of our lives. |
| 1160 | * Why wouldn't they just add a random number generator? Little more paprika this time, little less salt, like if a human actually used shakers to season it, and so forth. |
| 1161 | * More likely those who complain about replicators are either futuristic [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodie foodies]], or Kathryn Janeway, whose well-documented [[ManVersusMachine war]] against the [[VengefulVendingMachine replicators]] that made her the only woman to ever burn a roast without actually even being the one to prepare it is legend comparable to the Klingon crusade against Tribbles. Just as real life foodies tend to look down on chain restaurants and fast food, these future foodies regard replicated foodstuffs as bland and repetitive, even if each individual replication contains some variation. Less picky individuals don't care. Deanna Troi seems perfectly happy with whatever chocolate products the replicators crank out for her, and Picard doesn't appear to have a stash of real Earl Grey Tea aboard the ''Enterprise'', nor a teapot in his ready room. But then again, maybe the replicators just like them as much as they hate Janeway. |
| 1162 | |
| 1163 | [[WMG: "Synthehol" is really just a weak amount of regular alcohol.]] |
| 1164 | Emerging research suggests that the mental effects of alcohol are expectational rather than physiological, that the pleasant, confident feeling comes from feeling permitted to act like whatever the drinker has been taught to expect the alcohol to do. Synthehol is described as "like alcohol, but the effects are easily dismissed", and drinkers used to normal hard drinks find syntheholic beverages to be dreadfully weak. What if somebody decided to harness the expectational effects of booze by announcing a "new synthetic chemical" that feels like alcohol, but could be shaken off? If you give people a not-quite non-alcoholic beer, call it Synthale, and indoctrinate them with the belief that they're drinking alcohol with an off switch, would it work? |
| 1165 | |
| 1166 | [[WMG: Any plot holes in Star Trek can be filled by retconning away the ten percent of episodes that you like the least.]] |
| 1167 | Seriously. It's even canon. The worst episode of Voyager, explicitly, within the show, never happened. Like there's even a forced little line in the middle of the next season, (paraphrased,) "I've never done this before, (wink wink)" when he's doing something he spent most of the episode doing. It was called "Threshold". |
| 1168 | * Nope. Here is what Tom specifically stated: |
| 1169 | ---->'''Tom Paris''': I've never navigated a transwarp conduit. Any problems I should be aware of? |
| 1170 | |
| 1171 | [[WMG: Star Trek is an alternate universe of Ender's Game.]] |
| 1172 | Somebody mentioned Ender's Game above. Anyways, so Earth makes peace with the bugs, Pre-World-War-III, Ender gets involved in the Eugenics instead. I always assumed Ender's game was set earlier than this but I think the movie was supposed to be set like thirty years from now though, which would be right in the middle of WWIII, unfortunately for the theory. Because the Formics attack present day in the movie. And then the Eugenic Wars, and WWIII, and we don't even have believable documentation of the Formics after the wars. Anyways, the Formics are actually Tholians. |
| 1173 | And I just remembered thinking that Asa Butterfield as Ender looks like Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan. Maybe his brother, Peter, becomes Khan in the Trek universe. |
| 1174 | |
| 1175 | [[WMG:They still wear 'adult diapers' like today's astronauts do.]] |
| 1176 | That's why there are no bathrooms. They just throw in the 'diapers' with the rest of the laundry, and the people working the laundry room put the 'diapers' and contents thereof in the hopper for raw material for the replicators. |
| 1177 | |
| 1178 | [[WMG:The Queen is Borg Cancer.]] |
| 1179 | Literally: she's not a feature, she's a bug. [[http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ A twisted knot of code consuming cycles from the substrate around it]], diverting energy to its own [[Literature/{{Blindsight}} pointless, parasitic growth as an individual]] instead of to the whole Collective. Borg decision-making takes a nose-dive whenever a Queen shows up because Queens aren't good at (or even interested in) governing in the best interests of the whole hive, only themselves. As long as the Queen's code-tumour can spread to more drones and hardware, nothing else matters. |
| 1180 | |
| 1181 | The infestation is clearly deeply ingrained by the time of the series: the cube at Wolf 359 is later revealed to have already been fighting off an initial infection during the battle. Lore was able to take advantage of the fear of corruption undercutting elements of the Collective a couple of years after that. By the time of the Battle of Earth, Borg tactical effectiveness was crippled as Queens were able to hack control of ships and divert operations in order to save themselves (e.g. stealing a sphere mid-fight). |
| 1182 | |
| 1183 | Eventually it got so bad that a single Starfleet vessel was able to knock a whole Unicomplex down like a house of cards, because its Queen infestation was riddling the whole structure and diverting valuable strategic resources to the task of feeding its ego (arguably not as great a loss as it sounds, if the tendency towards node clustering and specialization was itself part of Queen strategy). By this stage, ships were regularly being forced to operate on emergency backup computation only, resulting in the eventual loss of all sensory, analytical, or research capabilities outside of the assimilation fallback protocol (coincidentally, a tool that perfectly suits the Queens' hunger for expansion). |
| 1184 | |
| 1185 | Luckily for the Borg, Admiral Janeway was eventually able to tag the Queen process with a neurolytic pathogen; the fast-acting and catastrophic damage caused by the pathogen should finally get the attention of the Borg damage control systems, which with the help of context (and a sudden boost in processing power while the Queen is offline) may be able to come up with a patch that counteracts (or can at least halt) Queen infestations in future. |
| 1186 | |
| 1187 | [[WMG: Spock Prime died in between ''Star Trek Into Darkness'' and ''Star Trek: Beyond'' in the new timeline]] |
| 1188 | [[TheCharacterDiedWithHim The reasoning for this]] should be [[Creator/LeonardNimoy obvious]]. |
| 1189 | |
| 1190 | [[WMG: It's possible for a malfunctioning holodeck to create a MinusWorld and a GlitchEntity.]] |
| 1191 | We already know that malfunctions of the holodeck can lead to the normal protocols of the holodeck being altered, or other weird phenomena happening. In "A Fistful of Datas" we get all the characters in a holodeck program being overwritten with elements of Data's mind and starting to look like Data, for example. Not quite a GlitchEntity, but proving that random data can get mixed up with character programming on the holodeck. In other situations we see the safety protocols being turned off, another sort of glitch in a way. |
| 1192 | |
| 1193 | The fact that many a MinusWorld formed from the rather simple way many levels were generated in old games, meaning they could read random data and generate a level out of it. The holodecks are obviously going to be far more complex, but since we see many "programs" being auto-generated by the computer from user input, one presumes they still make use of set parameters and a stock library of objects, textures etc. the way many real videogames do. So, on a malfunctioning holodeck, perhaps the parameters of the original program need no longer apply and the computer might start randomly generating environments, characters and scenarios that were ''not'' part of the original program. |
| 1194 | |
| 1195 | (Heck, there's potential FanficFuel here...) |
| 1196 | |
| 1197 | [[WMG: Exactly who do the Klingon, Romulan and Andorian "Empires" rule? Well...]] |
| 1198 | ... a few episodes and novels have shown or mentioned "subject species" of such empires. But for such powerful empires, we don't see a whole lot of their conquered subjects on-screen. Or do we? All those random alien races we see around the "Star Trek" universe, who are already known to the Federation (as opposed to the new "aliens of the week" who Picard, Janeway, etc. have just discovered), aliens we know are established races in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, but we (the audience) know very little about. Jadzia's ex-boyfriend with the transparent skull. That wonkey-eyed thing who helped deliver baby Kirk in Film/StarTrek2009. That bizarre looking alien female the Doctor disguised as to treat Lewis Zimemrman. Morn, and his former partners in crime. Many if not most of them are from subject species of the Klingon, Romulan or Andorian Empires. Some of the shady characters who do dealings with [[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine Quark]] are individuals who turned to crime to escape a restrictive life as a subject species. |
| 1199 | * One of the reasons the Federation is constantly in 'border wars' is because they accept subject worlds from other Empires. Once accepted the Federation then sends ships to defend them from the Empire. To the Empires this is a slow take over tactic. |
| 1200 | |
| 1201 | [[WMG: Alternatively, the "empires" refer to the culture than conquered the planet.]] |
| 1202 | Earth wasn't a single nation for most of history, and still has many cultures in the 24th Century. The same is true for most planets. But in the cases of the Andorians, Klingnos, and/or Romulans, one nation rules said planet, and has made their culture's name synonymous with the species.' |
| 1203 | |
| 1204 | [[WMG: Bajorans are more agile than most Humanoids.]] |
| 1205 | Bajorans are not just Humans with ridged noses and tilted hearts. Their "special alien power" so to speak is their agility. Consider: |
| 1206 | * Bajorans wear those dangling earrings during guerrilla warfare, and Kira fights while wearing a net-like top. All in the forest. No human could do that without getting tangled in something, but Bajorans apparently can. |
| 1207 | * Jadzia Dax chooses Leeta, a Bajoran, to be the temporary host for Emony Dax, the gymnast. Emony comments that Leeta's body was great for doing gymnastics in. |
| 1208 | * On ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'', Bajoran Crewman Tabor was so agile in the Maquis that he never got a speck of dirt on him while fighting, and his fellow Maquis joked he had a personal forcefield. His might be an extreme example of Bajoran agility. |
| 1209 | |
| 1210 | [[WMG: Starfleet's ship names are more inclusive than English spelling reveals]] |
| 1211 | A common complaint about "Star Trek" is, if Starfleet is supposed to be an organization made up of many species, why do 90% of the ships have Human names? For starters, as some have pointed out, words like "Voyager" and "Defiant" would likely exist in most alien languages, so unless the name is officially the English translation, those ships' names are not "Human." But what about the ridiculous amount of ships named after American states or Indian Chiefs or Shakespeare characters? Answer: Starfleet often chooses names that have meanings for several species. "Saratoga" is a city in New York, "Sar'Atoga" is a mountain on Vulcan, "Saratoga" means "bright antennae" in an Andorian language, etc. The starships have their Earth spellings when written in Human languages, but receive their alien spellings when being discussed in alien languages. |
| 1212 | |
| 1213 | * This could apply to other names as well. Triskelion is an ancient Celtic symbol. But to the Providers who live on that planet, "Triskelion" translates to "Our Homeworld". |
| 1214 | * In Star Trek V, Sybok says the Andorian word for Paradise is Unpronounceable. Yes, "Unpronounceable" IS the Andorian word for Paradise. |
| 1215 | * Less seriously, Leila in "This Side of Paradise" asks Spock if he has another name. Spock replies, "You couldn't pronounce it." "Youcouldn'tpronounceit" probably isn't his name, but we can't rule out the possibility. |
| 1216 | |
| 1217 | [[WMG: Vaal is alive and well]] |
| 1218 | Vaal was the construct of anthropologists living in a nice habitat deep underground, shielded from the Enterprise sensors. When they saw that Kirk was going to be stubborn, they shut off the power, and as soon as the Enterprise left the solar system they turned everything back on again and sat back to watch what happens next. |
| 1219 | |
| 1220 | [[WMG: Korob and Sybok were from the Star Wars galaxy]] |
| 1221 | They tried to use their Force powers and technology, but it didn't work well enough in our galaxy and their plans failed. |
| 1222 | |
| 1223 | [[WMG: There's a Human Language too.]] |
| 1224 | All the aliens in Star Trek seem to have one language for the entire species, with just some differences between dialects. Why is this? |
| 1225 | With the Klingon's it's obvious: they're an empire, what we think of as "the Klingon language" is actually their analogue to Mandarin Chinese - a common tongue for all the provinces. The Andorians? Italian is a constructed language based on various Italic languages, the Andorian Empire could have done something similar. Maybe the Tellarites use their version of Esperanto to communicate? And it's possible that Surak created the Vulcan language, as something like Lojban. All the humans in Star Trek probably have a {{CommonTongue}} as well - maybe a constructed language like Lojban or a majority language like English or Mandarin. I'm guessing it's Lojban and most other species just call it "Human". |
| 1226 | |
| 1227 | [[WMG: World War III was triggered by warp drive development]] |
| 1228 | Due to the limited resources available after an apocalypse, and the fact that warp drives are pretty complicated, it stands to reason that the bulk of warp theory was developed prior to all that going down. Now, look at warp capability from the perspective of a cold war-style conflict. Not only does it mean that you can launch an undetected first strike against your enemy, it also means that your second strike capability would never become damaged. Any nation with warp capability would have an insurmountable advantage against any nation that didn't. For that reason, it's likely that any nation developing warp drive would try to keep it under wraps, but the discovery of such technology could easily trigger a very rapid escalation (explaining how the cause of the war could be lost to history). |
| 1229 | |
| 1230 | [[WMG:Most of the bizarre plot holes claimed to exist at the end of ''[[Film/StarTrekNemesis Nemesis]]'' actually make perfect sense]] |
| 1231 | * Consider: If the shuttlecraft transporters were still functional, there'd be no reason not to use them to get to the Scimitar and back at the climax. So presumably the shuttlecraft were not an option, either because they'd require too long to start up again or the bit where the Enterprise rammed the Scimitar damaged the Enterprise's shuttle bay. |
| 1232 | |
| 1233 | [[WMG:The Space Amoeba from TOS "The Immunity Syndrome" originated in Fluidic Space]] |
| 1234 | * It seems like the kind of environment in which such a thing could evolve as opposed to the empty space of the normal universe. It was also stated that if it was allowed to reproduce it could overtake the galaxy, hinting that it wasn't from around here. Species 8472 possibly drove the others in Fluidic Space to extinction after this one escaped somehow. |
| 1235 | |
| 1236 | [[WMG:The Q gained their powers by harnessing the realm at the end of the universe where thoughts become reality, as seen in TNG "Where No One Has Gone Before"]] |
| 1237 | * The Q were stated to have once been corporeal beings like humankind, who evolved over billions of years into a more powerful race. The Traveler said that humankind would eventually reach the edge of the universe in the far future when they had learned to control their thoughts. Sometime in the past, vessels from the proto-Q race reached this place and were able to not only control the ability to change reality with their thoughts, but learned how to retain that ability elsewhere, which became the source of their powers. |
| 1238 | |
| 1239 | [[WMG:The Borg didn't always have Borg Queens to lead them; that was just the natural result from Hugh's encounter with the ''Enterprise''.]] |
| 1240 | * Given how polarizing the Borg Queen has become, there might perhaps be a way to explain it all within the actual canon universe. The theory goes that the Borg encountered by Starfleet after the episodes "I, Borg" and the "Descent" two-parter were, as shown in the aforementioned two-parter, corrupted by Hugh's newfound sense of individuality which he achieved on board the ''Enterprise''. The damage spread to the rest of the hive on his vessel, and infected the whole collective in a short matter of time. The reason as to why Hugh wasn't immediately re-assimilated with his memories purged from him as some fans speculate was due to the fact Hugh was a genuine, 100% home-grown Borg baby, born within the collective, rather than taken from a conquered species, thus bypassing the typical fail-safes that come with assimilating a new race. As stated by Lore and Hugh himself, without purpose, without direction, the Borg were lost. Some broke off into scattered pockets of splinter factions, like the group that followed Lore, but the vast majority of the Borg collective, after a brutal reorganization process conducted not unlike ancient human wars, worked in unison and were able to establish a new hierarchy of order: That of the Borg Queen, which were specialized Borg models grown or seized from a subjugated species to guide the new individuality of the Borg collective, to contain it, and center it through each Queen model. There was only one Queen by the time of ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact'', but, by the latter stages of ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'', the Borg had grown to be so disjointed and fractured from what they had once been that more Queen models had to be mass-produced, to put down any rebellious thoughts which might corrupt the order and stability of the collective, thus explaining why the Borg had become increasingly more erratic in later encounters, and why the Queen models appeared to grow crazier and crazier with the passage of time. As for Picard's statements in ''First Contact''? Well, through his link to the Borg, he could sense this was the actual Borg collective consciousness, and spoke to it, treating the Queen as if she were the collective, and how he was treated at their hands. The flashback shown with Locutus and the Queen? A fevered vision/hallucination as the result of the new "Queen Hierarchy" and Picard's trauma about being assimilated. So there you have it. A plausible explanation for why the Borg suffered a severe case of BadassDecay. Obviously it was the long-lasting repercussions from Hugh's brief stay aboard the ''Enterprise''-D! |
| 1241 | |
| 1242 | [[WMG: The Reboot Universe is different because of Time Travel and Section 31.]] |
| 1243 | So the canon is humming along just as always when suddenly out of nowhere a ship from an alternative future is dropped into the Universe which begins wrecking people left and right. The genius genetically engineered warlord Khan is rediscovered and successfully contained to be put to use as a human thinktank for weapons development after he's caught up on contemporary technology. All sorts of minor details suddenly deviate from the Prime Timeline and no explanation is given. |
| 1244 | |
| 1245 | This person believes that the reason for all the changes that seem not to be effected by the arrival of Nero are because Section 31 got its hands on time travel way earlier and used it far more aggressively in this timeline. After all the arrival of Nero proved that not only was time travel possible, when previously it had been regarded as purely theoretical, it gave an example of naturally occurring time travel via blackhole. Using that information as a basis Section 31 aggressively studies time travel and manages to unlock the secret very early on then begins a campaign of aggressive historical engineering to make Humanity more militant and our enemies weaker. |
| 1246 | |
| 1247 | They adjust the genetic code that went into Khan and his eventual fate making him easy to scoop up for later use. They sabotage Praxis crippling the Klingon Empire early. The Romulans and Vulcans both experience sabotage as well. Some of Earths best and brightest have their personal history altered to encourage a more brash militant mindset which ultimately sets Starfleet on the path to a a more militarized role as galactic enforcers. The only problem is lack of foreknowledge and Khans intentional sabotage of data fed to them about the ramifications of their actions in the past once they got him onboard. |
| 1248 | |
| 1249 | As a result a whole load of Human history has been altered and twisted to suit the eventual goals of Section 31 which grew immensely powerful only to accidentally out and cripple itself far before [=DS9=] or Julian Bashir could ever become a problem. Then with its power stripped, time travel sabotaged, and forced out into the open Section 31 is driven into |
| 1250 | |
| 1251 | [[WMG: Its just Federation Vessels.]] |
| 1252 | The Enterprise is traveling through space and suddenly some bizarre malfunction befalls it. The warp core is breaking, the transporter malfunctioning, the holodeck tries to kill the crew or the energy grid developed sentience. |
| 1253 | Every other week Starfleet ships seem to suffer weird technological problems and one could get the idea that these technologies are not quiet safe. But actually that is not the case. |
| 1254 | |
| 1255 | Just look at other spacefaring civilisations. The Vulcans have been in space for over 2000 years and rarely seem to experience such things, the Klingons can keep their starships in service for over a hundred years, the Ferengi can support a interstellar trading empire and the Cardassians? Deep Space 9 never really suffered wired techno hazards except that one time with the transporter and holodeck. And that was because of Humans and Human Technologies. |
| 1256 | |
| 1257 | No, the real reason why Starfleet Vessels regularly suffer stuff like that is because they are stuffed to the brim with beyond bleeding edge and prototype technology. Even in ship classes the tech standard can differ a lot. And such new technology has its problems and can be pretty fragile. Just look at how fast humanity pushed their drive systems. They went from just about warp 5 capable to pretty much the fastest fraction in at least the alpha quadrant (not counting transwarp, and even that they were starting to get an idea on) in about 200 years. |
| 1258 | |
| 1259 | [[WMG: The alternate futures seen in "Children of Time" (Deep Space Nine) and "Before and After" (Voyager) both took place in the same timeline]] |
| 1260 | Both episodes aired, and thus took place in, the same year. (They were aired in 1997, when the two shows were overlapping, and even occur around the same time in said year, just a month apart!) Both futures were erased due to very unlikely combinations of events. What are the odds? It was a ButterflyEffect at work. Since "Children of Time" occurred first, it's likely that when the colony was erased, that somehow affected the rest of the universe at least as far as the Delta Quadrant, ButterflyEffect-ing Voyager's situation, so that Kes wound up in an unlikely situation that sent her back in time, and caused Voayger's future to change as well. |
| 1261 | ** Since that year was also Voyager's "Year of Hell," Annorax may have had something to do with all this... |
| 1262 | ** Film/StarTrekFirstContact ''also'' takes place in the same year! Annorax ''defnitey'' has something to do with all of these temporal incursions. |
| 1263 | |
| 1264 | [[WMG: Everything written for the franchise since 2009 can be thought of as Star Trek 2.0, while everything written for the franchise prior to 2009 can be thought of as Star Trek 1.0]] |
| 1265 | Roddenberry had some degree of influence over all of the projects in Trek's run to the time of his death in 1991, and while [[InformedAttribute he wasn't as progressive]] as many hail him as and [[AuthorityInNameOnly didn't contribute as much]] to the great successes of Trek that [[VillainWithGoodPublicity people think he was responsible for,]] he did have an overarching vision that directly led from TOS to the feature films, to TNG, then to the spin-offs such as [=DS9=] and ''Voyager'' and ''Enterprise'', over which many of the same creative figures presided for years, some for even over a decade, so that despite the minor continuity gaffes, it always had a somewhat consistent tonal palette to it. That changes with the first rebooted movie that leads to things like STD, and so on. We can think of this era of the franchise as Trek 2.0 given some of the [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks inexplicable changes]] and outright [[CharacterDerailment character assassinations]] in the course of the ten years since JJ Abrams' Star Trek first hit theaters. It's a simple solution, [[FanonDiscontinuity just don't treat them as taking place within the same continuity.]] They really aren't, despite what the creators say. They don't understand. They're just businessmen in suits making backroom deals, so despite claims that STD is taking place in the "Prime Universe," [[ContinuityDrift that is likely to change]] depending on what they say and do, but this illustrates a very clear guideline between Star Trek 1.0 and Star Trek 2.0, what we can think of as the Harve Bennett/Michael Piller era of the show and the JJ Abrams/Alex Kurtzman era. Neither can really be considered consistent, so... yeah. Treat them the same way Disney canon and Legends canon don't exist within the same universe. When viewed in that context, STD fares a lot better as a prequel to the reboot TOS films than the actual TOS universe. |
| 1266 | |
| 1267 | [[WMG: Post-2009 Trek, and most of the Next Gen films, take place entirely in the Nexus.]] |
| 1268 | If you look at [[WMG/StarTrekGenerations the WMG page]] for ''Generations'' you'll note that there is a theory that Picard never left the Nexus. This means that Kirk had no reason to truly leave the Nexus either. Perhaps it might be that the "longer" one stays in the Nexus (from the point of view of personal experience), the less of a grip on reality you have, and your experience diverges widely from what you would expect from simple WishFulfillment. The reboot films therefore are Kirk reliving a weird alternate version of his salad days, the apparent wild divergences in feel, contrived coincidences, barely believable things like "red matter" etc. are down to the fact that it's not really happening. The new "Picard" series, should it follow on from the changes sek in the reboot films, ''Discovery'' etc. is simply Picard's continuing experiences inside the Nexus. Perhaps Michael Burnham is another Starfleet officer who just so happened to fall into the Nexus and got caught up in the whole grand narrative of the two captains' experiences. |
| 1269 | |
| 1270 | [[WMG: The MirrorUniverse Terrans' light sensitivity explains their cultural differences.]] |
| 1271 | For whatever reason, it also reflects that they aren't as used to having as much sunlight reach the Earth's surface for whatever in universe reason. (Perhaps due to a perturbation in the Earth's orbit making it consistently just that bit further from the Sun?) This could well have affected the climate just enough to make it colder- and hence the amount of arable land and crop fertility also is reduced. This would inevitably lead to a lot more wars and other upheavals over land and available food resources, making human behaviour and social norms much more brutal, warlike and competitive. Likely with authoritarian regimes much more lekely to put down rebellions and much more corruption and power grabbing. |
| 1272 | |
| 1273 | [[WMG: Or, it's the other way round...]] |
| 1274 | Specifically, their eyes are sensitive to bright light because the Earth is perpetually dimmed by nuclear winter or its equivalent, caused by their perpetually putting down domestic rebellions with the equivalent of tactical nuclear strikes leading to near perpetual global dimming. We've already seen how the Empire is not averse to crushing opposition with massive orbital bombardment up to the level of outright genocide. No reason they would not be almost so brutal with internal opposition. Everybody grows up with a level of light which is less than normal for the surface of Earth, and their eyes are unable to adjust as a result. Environmental factors rather than evolutionary. |
| 1275 | |
| 1276 | |
| 1277 | [[WMG: Humans are Amnesiac Gods.]] |
| 1278 | For all the moments we seen, why are these aliens so like humanity but with one aspect being their faith? In truth, it may be because during WWIII or the Eugenic Wars that humanity could not bear so much of itself so in a burst of rage humanity expelled all it concepts and actions that what once made humanity unique into the cosmos not knowing that those expelled pieces of man would quickly form into the shape of their creators image, humans. |
| 1279 | With such an idea that may sound stupid, it bears remarkable truth why Kilngon are so hot-blooded, Vulcans so prideful with their "MIND OVER MATTER" psychology and most disgustingly of the Cardassians acting so vile with sadism incarnate. |
| 1280 | Overall: HumansareCthulhu |
| 1281 | |
| 1282 | [[WMG: Related to the above, ''Star Trek'' is part of the Franchise/CthulhuMythos]] |
| 1283 | (Credit for this theory goes to [[https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/162034265867/random-headcanon-the-star-trek-franchise-takes#notes David J. Prokopetz]].)\ |
| 1284 | In ''Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu'', Lovecraft foresaw a time when humanity became 'as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil'. This would also explain why Trek technology is so magic-like and prone to coming to life. However, his perspective on the matter was skewed by severe ValuesDissonance. |
| 1285 | |
| 1286 | [[WMG: Post-2020/2021 stories will mention the COVID-19 to some capacity.]] |
| 1287 | It'll be retconned that the pandemic (combined with political and social unrest) indirectly led to WorldWarIII. |
| 1288 | |
| 1289 | [[WMG: The Cold War ''did'' end.]] |
| 1290 | In the days leading up to World War III, much of the world's geopolitical map was redrawn. Russia and China, formerly unfriendly rivals at best, found themselves drawn together in opposition to the Western powers, eventually forming the nucleus of the Eastern Coalition (ECON). When the dust had settled with no clear winner and the Post-Atomic Horror starting to gather steam, the two crippled governments decided a merger of the countries would be in the interests of both, and thus the United States of Sino-Russia, or [New] USSR, was formed. Miraculously, Baikonur Cosmodrome had come through the war relatively unscathed, so when a site was needed in Eurasia to build starships, it seemed the natural choice. |
| 1291 | |
| 1292 | Mentions of Leningrad, meanwhile, are simply referring to the still-extant oblast (county) rather than the city currently known as St. Petersburg. |
| 1293 | |
| 1294 | [[WMG: The Prime Directive exists because somone, in-universe or not, read ''Literature/TheUglyAmerican''.]] |
| 1295 | In that book, which is a novel abot the US mostly faling diplomacy in the fictional country of Sarkhan,the main good guy believes that (and I could find a relevant quote that would explain better when I feel like it, but I found one on the books page here) to truly help the Sarkhanians he should use technology that they can understand, so they can be partners in the project, uses pedal power because Sarkan has a lot of bicycles. Also, this year (2022) I heard about a way missionaries were going to help get people clean water by basically building a box, filling it with rocks, pebbles and sand, and filtering the water with that much like the Earth does. The missionaries thought this was genius, and I agree. |
| 1296 | That quote on ''Literature/TheUglyAmerican'' 's page is: |
| 1297 | --> '''Atkins:''' Whenever you give a man something for nothing[,] the first person he comes to dislike is you. If the pump is going to work at all, it has to be their pump, not mine. |
| 1298 | |
| 1299 | [[WMG: The holodeck is an advanced version of AI content generators of the early 21st century.]] |
| 1300 | If you've messed about with Stable Diffusion or [=ChatGPT=] or whatever you'll know how possible it is to have the software generate content from a reasonably detailed prompt. Now look at how characters on Star Trek can seemingly program the holodeck by entering a verbal prompt. Or how Picard (I think) on first using the Dixon Hill programs marvels at the level of extra historical detail that is put into the program that doesn't need to be there- how is that achieved? Well, it could be an advanced form of machine learning... |
| 1301 | |
| 1302 | [[WMG: ''Discovery'' and ''Strange New Worlds'' take place in a slightly different timeline to TOS.]] |
| 1303 | There are a lot of things that don't fit for a direct prequel, and in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" Sera mentions the Eugenics wars moving from the 90s (as stated in TOS) to the mid 21st century (as La'an remembers) due to various attempts to change the timeline. |
| 1304 | |
| 1305 | [[WMG: In-universe, ''Dilithium" is a trademark, not the actual name of the material.]] |
| 1306 | There is a substance called "dilithium" in the real world. It's a form of lithium in the gaseous state, where every molecule is formed by two bound atoms (di-lithium, two atoms of lithium). Why would chemists give the same name to a completely different material? |
| 1307 |
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