- Star Trek: The Original Series
- Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Star Trek: Voyager
- Star Trek: Enterprise
- Star Trek: Discovery
- Star Trek: Picard
- Star Trek: Lower Decks
- Star Trek: Prodigy
- Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
- Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
- Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
- Star Trek: Generations
- Star Trek: First Contact
- Star Trek: Insurrection
- Star Trek (2009)
- Star Trek Into Darkness
- Star Trek Beyond
- Star Trek: Armada
- Star Trek Online
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.
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 Red Shirt killed, that's because Mirror Kirk is having that very same Red Shirt 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 Pyrrhic Victory that ultimately gave the USA greater influence over the Terran Empire.
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 A Wizard Did It as that The Mirror Universe Did It.
The flashback scene from Star Trek: Enterprise 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.
The races fighting the Borg may be much more powerful than the Federation and be able to pose a threat to the Borg.
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. Butterfly Effect 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.
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 Took a Level in Jerkass, in some they remained the Knight in Shining Armor; 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The last of the Preservers finds the T'Kon.
- System bound but technologically advanced the T'Kon had a cultural and technological renaissance after learning the last of the Preservers technology.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The T'kon Empire created complex, non-sentient, AI to run their societies.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
This would lead into…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Unlikely, since the Federation has Antimatter generators onboard, which would suggest that they synthesise the material. Jossed by the events of (VOY: "Night"), which state that the Federation has an improved antimatter creation process that does not cause polluting byproducts.
- 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.
- Gorkon was a championship sprinter growing up in Klingon athletics. Read the above account to figure out why I think that.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- EVERYTHING is just the Q messing with the universe.
- 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!
- Q even explicitly claimed to be God once, in TNG: "Tapestry".
- 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."
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- It's like Anorax said Time has moods, anger is one of them. When you bump with time it bumps right back.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- My belief is that some hippie communes survived the nuclear war since they were 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.
- Kirk was astute enough about the 1960s to attribute Spock's colorful metaphors to the 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.
- 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.
- perhaps the Great Link was Unimatrix 03 that evolved into the Founders.
- Nimbus III is probably located at the point where the Federation, Romulan, and Klingon borders meet.
- Actually, according to the novel Q-Squared, Trelane is a rogue Q.
- Ground rules: We are not counting the books or any STEU, no Re-Boot Star Trek and temporal incursions don't count.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!'.
The billion+ year old aliens from TNG "The Chase," who seeded various systems with genetic material to form the various humanoids we see everywhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Perhaps the Mintakans superstitious beliefs of an Overseer weren't so far fetched.
- 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.
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.
- The Caretaker from Voyager could be one of the Preservers.
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.
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.
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.
In the early 21st century at the time of the Bell riots (DS9: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.
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
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.
- 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.
- 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).
- For an example of how an economy would work in a world with replicators, see George O. Smith's "Venus Equilateral" stories "Special Delivery" and "Pandora's Millions."
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)
- 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.
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.
- True, but the Federation could still put together a powerful fleet of cruisers and destroyers which can still kick a ton of ass.
- 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")
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.
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.
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?
- The problem they were dealing with was being hit by an energy-draining weapon, not suffering a warp core breach.
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.
- (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.
- 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").
- 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.
- The Federation is basically a classic example of a 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Section 31 is probably behind this propaganda.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- So even in universe you would get 'trekkies' who use holodecks to LARP the adventures of the crew of the USS Enterprise.
- 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.
- And of course those who would play either Ensign or possibly even Sisko himself in the Dominion War holodeck novels. S Ome would play it with the Emmissary stuff thrown in, some not.
- And Tom Paris would make the complete Voyager holonovel and Voyager would have its small subset of holo-fans.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- That would explain why Spock felt an attachment to Isis.
- That is one of the oldest fanons in Star Trek history, dating back to an article in Spockanalia, a 1967 fanzine.
- That would explain why Spock felt an attachment to Isis.
The Borg could have long ago defeated and assimilated not only the Federation but 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The end result: 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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."
- So, it's like the Literary Agent Hypothesis, except instead of viewing a single universe through different lenses, it's the same lens with different universes. Fascinating....
- In real science, the transporter destroys you and makes a copy...
The existence of a 'Mirror Universe' is in-universe propaganda to account for the sightings of doppelgangers.
- They seem evil because they are suffering from transporter psychosis, which may be more common than is let on.
- 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.
- 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.
- This of course is the setup for the events in the first Star Trek novel, Spock Must Die by James Blish.
- 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- Celia Lovsky's ice-cold "Are thee Vulcan — or are thee human?" certainly showed an emotion. Yeow.
- 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.
- It's difficult to find any other explanation for Spock's half-blood status being such an angsty issue for him.
- 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.
- But angst is an emotion!
- Correction: Vulcans simply disdain expressing emotion, not possessing them. Having angst is fine, expressing it everywhere, wangsting in public and causing disorder is not. At least only in Vulcan society, since Spock is Not So Stoic around Kirk (with 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?
- 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.
- This goes from being subtext to text near the end of "Deep Space Nine." That baseball game...
- Vulcans are less racist and more on the superior side, ala Space Elves. This attitude is in part what led to the Romulans (who ARE racist/speciesist) - it's just the Vulcan view taken to extremes.
- And where do you draw the line?
- 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.
- And where do you draw the line?
- 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.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.Spock: With all due respect... Screw you. I'm joining Starfleet where I can make out with Uhura. Live long and suck it!
- Isn't the new movie a reboot?
- 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.
- The correct term is Canon Defilement.
- Nope, it's an Alternate Continuity - 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 Star Trek: Enterprise.)
- 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.
- 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
- 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".
- Except clearly it can't be a reboot because the presence of Spock Prime relies on the in-Universe existence of previous continuity.
- Also in-canon in TOS in "Journey to Babel".
- Isn't the new movie a reboot?
- "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.
- 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'
- There is no money; this is bragged about during "The Neutral Zone." Matter Replicators 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.
- 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.
- In the episode 'The Price', the Federation bids credits for use of the Barzan wormhole. This suggests transporter rationing.
- 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).
- Earth has canonically abandoned the use of money. The Federation overall may or may not.
- 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.
- 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"?
- 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...
- The government controls most industry, commerce, transportation, communications.
- Several private companies were mentioned on Star Trek (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.)
- 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.)
- There were companies in Communist Russia. They just did whatever the government said.
- Another point for Earth rather than the Federation being moneyless.
- There is plenty of private commerce. But it does seem like the Federation keeps track of as much of it as possible.
- Several private companies were mentioned on Star Trek (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.)
- 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?
- 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.
- But in Deep Space Nine, we see civilians — namely, Julian Bashir's parents — facing trial in front of a Starfleet judge.
- 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.
- The terms Federation and Starfleet are used interchangably.
- The communications are going to be handled by Starfleet if they are on a military installation such as Deep Space Nine.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Do you get the Defense Department's logo on your GPS? And if you did, would you use it?
- 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 totally use it.
- 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?
- It's been done before, and not just in a The Empire 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 The British Empire if you think about it, but it hardly shows a completely military state.
- Naval officers often handle diplomatic missions.
- 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.
- Starfleet seems to be responsible for federal-level law enforcement...this is potentially sinister, but still common in real life.
- 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.
- 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, Anti Matter, energy and territorial space).
- There is an old science fiction story, one of the excellent Venus Equilateral series, that delineates just exactly how this would work.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!!
- Neil Young will still be alive and making records, of course.
- Well, crack my knuckles and jump for joy!/Got a clean bill of health from Dr. McCoy!
- The Reboot film shows The Beastie Boys in Kirk's time.
- TV is "no" — but the eventual replacement had unintended consequences. (At least not all of them were bad.)
- 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.
- Yes, but surely someone has at least heard of The Beatles? Data is aware of them as philosophers, but does anyone know the music?
- 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 Unfortunate Implications in the vicinity, Captain!
- Alternatively, all modern music got DRMed to the point where the keys were lost and rendered it all unreadable.
- 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 Star Trek's present, so that's very likely.)
- 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.
- 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 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 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.
- Truth be told, the DRM-busters won't let us reach the sad state of affairs described above.
- We will find "the wisdom not to destroy ourselves".
- 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:
- They are in a meritocratic organisation and usually a long way from home.
- 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.
- Bashir and O'Brien were like that because Bashir was a young officer and O'Brien was a NCO.
- That's still a class difference if it holds when they're both off-duty.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- All novels are high class until proven otherwise. By the 24th century, no one knew Dixon Hill originally came in mass paperback.
- Even if Dixon Hill is high class, Captain Proton certainly isn't.
- 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...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Equivalent Exchange. 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.
- 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 A.I. Is a Crapshoot, 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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').
- 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 Green Rocks — they have limits. This link gives a thorough explanation; it is, however, from The Empire, so you may want to take it with a grain of salt.
- 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.
- 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-Human Popsicle awoke in the 24th-century Federation in "The Neutral Zone," it was made very clear that his portfolio no longer existed.
- 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 World War III 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.
- The Federation is not Socialist/Communism in the Marxist sense, but rather Bourgeois Socialism as thought by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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).
- 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 WALL•E's future); but the dangers of A.I. Is a Crapshoot and Transhuman Treachery (such as Khan) meant that 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.
- 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.
- Yes and no. We have two long-range models of AI programming in Star Trek history — Soong-type androids, and holograms. (Progress on non-Soong-type androids was hindered severely by Captain Kirk reflexively killing them.)
- 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 Bombs, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!'
- 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?
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- So the cascade failure is part of the natural 'growth' cycle of emergent sentience, sort of a the AI version of puberty.
- 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".
- 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.
- 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".
- 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.
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.
- 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 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 Star Trek (2009) 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.)
- 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.
- 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 Alien Invasion trope.
- Or the result of exploring the ramifications of Roddenberry's Utopia.
- Because Gene wasn't known for being unimaginative at all, was he?
- Take a look at the damn uniforms between the first and second Star Trek movies, and it's clear something happened.
- Remember, also, that its the Federation that are shown in a bad light in Star Trek: Insurrection, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
(Theory by Bond, James Bond at Canon Fodder )
- This fits in with the Ba'ku knowing about positronics and their attempt to fix Data when he effectively "crashed" in Insurrection.
- 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.
- Noonien Soong did fake his own death at least once. The personality fits.
- That, or he was roommates with Zephan Cochrane for a while.
- 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.
- 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.
- That's certainly one way (as someone has mentioned on the No One Could Survive That! 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.
- 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.
- 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 Villain Decay, when they ironically suffered The Worf Effect at the hands of Species 8472. Somewhere, Worf smiles at the poetic justice...)
- This is a lot like how in Half-Life 2, the Citadel's destruction caused the Combine to go a bit scatterbrained or something.
- 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.
- Or maybe they just already knew the Ferengi weren't really all that intimidating and reckoned the humans could deal with them.
- 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."
- 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- That isn't true, they take their name from the Starfleet Charter, which goes back at least to the 2130s.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Bee People 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 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...)
- More problems:
- 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.
- 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.
- Jarada, anybody?
- The Borg would go mad from that ridiculous language of theirs. "We are the Borg flabiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii, traxonlaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaapu!"
- Borg. My God.
- The Borg would go mad from that ridiculous language of theirs. "We are the Borg flabiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii, traxonlaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaapu!"
- My personal theory (see the Star Trek: The Next Generation 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.
- But tribbles are balls of fur incapable of hurting anyone except by their exploding population!
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- The Klingons are the only major race aware of the secret of the Tribble: they're genetically engineered incubators of the Tarellian Plague.
- 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 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).
- 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.
- This is also supported in Star Trek Online: 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.
- Sorry, but... 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.
- 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 Viral Marketing; nothing else was left.
- 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.
- See Janis Ian's "The Internet Debacle" and "Fallout". Everything is proceeding as she has foreseen.
- 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.
Why do this? Maybe he was bored and wanted to hear stories.
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.
- 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.
- Evacuation of Deep Space Nine - Evacuation of Dunkirk
- The Romulans join the war effort - Russia and/or America.
- This also more directly parallels the USA entering the conflict during World War I 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 DS9, the Romulans get into the war because it seems that the Cardassians shot down a Romulan ship which was not in a combat mission.
- The Resistance - Many resistance efforts in occupied Europe
- The Breen - Japan?
- The Breen Weapon/Attack on San Fransisco - V1 and V2 bombs
- Retaking Deep Space Nine - D Day
- The Cardassians change sides - Italy?
- 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.
- 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.
- Not really; it is possible to have a war that is not World War II. It is even possible to have a war between good and evil that is not World War II.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- Haruhi is an amnesiac Q.
- This serves to explain why loads of things will change in Star Trek XI. Fed up with having Brannon Braga trash her universe, she decided to Continuity Reboot it.
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UnfortunatelyFortunately, this opened the door for J. J. Abrams.
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- They might have something there. That's a great way to train people.
- This is common practice in nearly every one of today's navies. Some even use old sailboats to train new officers on.
- "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.
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.
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.
- What if he's dead? Does that mean Keegan de Lancie (Q2, for people who didn't know) will do it?
- Are you not aware that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was supposed to end that way? With Avery Brooks as "The Writer" character actually writing the show?
- 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.
- Plausible; part of the whole appeal to having the Mirror Universe 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
- 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.
- This 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.
- 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?)
- 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.
- 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."
- Also the alternate future in "Timeless"
- We all know the Growing the Beard trope by heart, but perhaps there's more to it than we think.
- Star Trek Jumped the Shark 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.
- Um, wut? Season 4 is when "Voyager" Growing the Beard. This WMG might make sense if one is a very bitter Kes fan I suppose.
- 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.
- Star Trek Jumped the Shark 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.
- Perhaps "loyal to the Emperor" is a saying that means something like 'traditionally patriotic'.
- In the TOS episode "The Paradise Syndrome", the Preservers are described as a mythical race of benevolent, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who transplanted primitive cultures from Earth all around the galaxy.
- 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 that thing!
- 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 Heroic Sacrifice in which all of the Tok'ra perished, and the Jaffa died out as a result of their immune deficiencies.
- With replicators, and basically free downloads of designs, lots of designs would be proliferated all over the Federation.
- Furthermore: Some fans complained about the Cardassian Sunrise Uhura ordered in 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.)
- 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.
- This is practically canon: Star Trek: Enterprise 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.
- 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 Running Gag 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."
- This casual lack of concern about other species is something Star Trek as a whole has in common with Star Wars. 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 Star Trek: Voyager, 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?"
- But... isn't this basically true for every work of fiction on TV Tropes?
- Perhaps they got genetic samples from Mestral, the Vulcan in Enterprise who stayed on Earth in the 1950s.
- This likely happened some time before Praxis. In Star Trek III, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
The consequence for Earth history was that no model for a successful democracy
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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 One Hitpoint Wonder. 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.
Starfleet ships are generally shown to be on par with other major powers' vessels, if not more capable(I'll address the No OSHA Compliance 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.
- 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.
- Time travel, duh.
- 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. Gene Roddenberry was a Special Circumstances agent with a history book.
His weapons officer, an old hand, sighs. "Yes, we know. But the rules of war state that such casualties are their respon..."
"We cannot possibly fire on them!"
"And do what? We must uphold the honour of the Klingon. Look, they are charging weapons, captain. Give the order to fire!"
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.
"Give the order to fire, captain!" the other officer was getting frantic. "Fire or by Klingon naval law, I'll have you replaced!"
Fortunately for the Enterprise, and rather unfortunately for the crew of the frigate, it was already too late...
- So it'd be more like "By Klingon naval law, I'll have you repla —-" (BOOM in space).
- 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!
- Didn't the Klingons kill a bunch of hospital patients in Deep Space Nine?
- 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.
- 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 Unreliable Narrator, but the end of the episode showed her holding a (I think) bag or purse her ancestor supposedly purchased whilst on Earth…
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.
Obviously, this means that both Amanda Rogers and Junior are the result of selfcest, hence Q’s initial surprise at the idea.
- 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.
- 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.
"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.
- 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.
- Also presumably, they either try to keep this from the agents with varying success, or have some sort of memory erasure thingnote 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.
- They probably have a list of acceptable timelines, those are all the alternate timelines we see.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- "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."
- Alternately, many of them, like the Thermians use "appearance generators" which give them human appearances.
- I always assumed that it was a function of the universal translator,
- this does beg the question of how half human hybrids and sexual relations shown in the show work.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 unableto 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.
- 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.
- Didn't that pretty much happen on Voyager?
- That might explain why they don't have blood.
- Odo would probably in his can, er, jar.
- Jossed: an arc in Enterprise reveals that the smooth-headed Klingons are Klingons who are/were infected by a virus.
- 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.
- JOSSED as Kang, Kor and Koloth, three Klingon characters that were smooth foreheaded in TOS later appear in DS9 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.
- UNJOSSED : the DS9 episode in question was made with the understanding that Kang, Kor and Koloth looked exactly the same as they did in the original series.
- 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.
- We never see them onscreen, but the Vulcans do at least have more than one planet.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- Additionally, the information the Hansens had on the Borg came from Guinan's species, which was defeated by the Borg around the 2260s.
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 Soul Jar 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.)
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 Star Trek: First Contact 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).
Of course, this temporal immortality comes at a terrible price. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Extension: Vulcan TV produces the Federation's most critically-praised comedy shows, but they never run for more than three episodes.
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 Abominations, 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.
- 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.
- Not plausible. The Borg were the victims of a Curb-Stomp Battle 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. Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, who are either employing Magic from Technology or else Psychic Powers or are Reality Warpers are effectively using "magic" from the perspective of the overly-logical Borg, and they simply cannot comprehend how such things work.
- Star Trek is really set far farther in the future than it claims, and has been through more than one technological singularity.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- That's exactly what Mass Effect 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.
Maybe the reason there are only a few episodes about the Mirror Universe 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 Pragmatic Villainy and have a knack for Cutting the Knot, 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- This Troper (if that's OK here) once suggested on IMDb that the bad guys figured out the gold uniforms meant 'command' and the red ones meant 'grunt', so it was switched.
- In 'The Die is Cast', Bashir implies that human fiction has spent a lot of time reinterpreting alien works.
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.
- This characterization takes on even more validity if you view Starfleet as a Spiritual Successor 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Also, they're stated to have had an extremely violent past.
A couple of theories about the Romulans:
- Hyrule's symbol consists of a bird with the Triforce above it. Like 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 DS9.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- right but deep down they all secretly dream of the day when they will be called upon for some real action!
- 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.
- Ha, perhaps they use Holtzmann fields for their personal deflectors. Seriously though: given prep time, Borg can and will adapt to anything. No exceptions. Otherwise they're not scary.
- Species 8472
- Ha, perhaps they use Holtzmann fields for their personal deflectors. Seriously though: given prep time, Borg can and will adapt to anything. No exceptions. Otherwise they're not scary.
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...
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
- Does Power Rangers RPM happen here too?
So what's the most logical, realistic, and efficient way to get rid of such pitfalls of biology? As with Transhumanism: turn the species into The Singularity of Mechanical Lifeforms, 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 cybernetics. If First Contact never happened and had the more optimistic and emotional Human Federation to be accepting companions (both in this sense and 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.
The new Mechanical Lifeforms had the advantages of a Hive Mind 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 Xanatos Gambit).
But if the Borg were born from a logical race then what explains the emotional Queens? Simple, and it's not Villain Decay or the Hive Mind Giving Up on Logic. 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 Giving Up on Logic, 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 Timey-Wimey Ball 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")
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 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.
- Maybe Vulcans aren't vain, but running a species-wide Xanatos Gambit : they're purposely inflating their reputation as Straw Vulcans to trick people into underestimating the Vulcans.
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.
- 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 Power Perversion Potential of the holodeck is because You Do NOT Want To Know what uses some people have for it. You really, really don't. To give just one example from an episode that has not been written and never will be written:Wesley: "Computer, load "The Pleasure Goddess of Rixx" and open narrative parameters file."Computer: "Working... Program complete. Awaiting orders."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."Scene that would be illegal to broadcast on any medium ensues...
- Which would reflect the more worrying Real Life side of the internet in the Star Trek-verse...
- ...though it could be a moot point as the holodeck OS is programmed to block those kinds of scenarios.
- 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."
- 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.
- 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'.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- I think this is probably an assumption the writers actually made.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- Somewhere along the way, she assimilated a cheap dime novel space adventure, explaining her attitude towards Data among other things.
- 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.
- More likely those who complain about replicators are either futuristic foodies, or Kathryn Janeway, whose well-documented war against the 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.
- Nope. Here is what Tom specifically stated:
- Tom Paris: I've never navigated a transwarp conduit. Any problems I should be aware of?
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).
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).
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.
The fact that many a Minus World 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.
(Heck, there's potential Fanfic Fuel here...)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- On Star Trek: Voyager, 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.
- 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".
- In Star Trek V, Sybok says the Andorian word for Paradise is Unpronounceable. Yes, "Unpronounceable" IS the Andorian word for Paradise.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Star Trek: First Contact, but, by the latter stages of Star Trek: Voyager, 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 Badass Decay. Obviously it was the long-lasting repercussions from Hugh's brief stay aboard the Enterprise-D!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
- Since that year was also Voyager's "Year of Hell," Annorax may have had something to do with all this...
- Star Trek: First Contact also takes place in the same year! Annorax defnitey has something to do with all of these temporal incursions.
In The Call of Cthulhu, 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 Values Dissonance.
Mentions of Leningrad, meanwhile, are simply referring to the still-extant oblast (county) rather than the city currently known as St. Petersburg.
- 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.
The answer is that they didn't. The function of "dilithium", in Star Trek, is to dilute matter, to contain and regulate the matter/antimatter reaction in the warp drive. It operates a dilution'. The person who named the material knew its function, but not enough chemistry to actually give it a chemically correct name, so, instead, they operated from a marketing perspective. They registered a trademark based on an intentional misspelling of its function, to make it distinctive and give it an easy to remember name that merely sounds technical.