Star Trek

Remember that one time the Enterprise D used its phasers like a scalpel to perform a C-section?

Edit: “Great men do not seek pagetoppers; they have pagetoppers thrust upon them.”

Edited by WillKeaton on Oct 9th 2023 at 1:15:27 PM

Eh, they missed plenty especially in DS 9's war scenes. The high accuracy thing was a big argument when Wars Vs Trek was a big internet thing, I remember one compilation vid of all the many misses we see in the show but It's not around that I can find any more.

Remember when shipboard phasers had a stun setting capable of neutralizing an entire city block?

The main difference between Star Wars and Star Trek is Trek ships are generally more maneuverable and it isn't difficult to direct their main weapons at any given target. Wars have their capital ships a lot more sluggish, focusing on smaller 1-2 man fighters for strafing actions (evoking WWII carriers). The Defiant and Maquis Raiders are the closest equivalent to dogfighters in Star Trek, and both are at least three times larger than the Millenium Falcon.

Trek also has those phaser strip things. If you can see a phaser strip from where you are, it can hit you. Starfleet doesn't really go in for cannons on most of their ships, the Defiant is a rare exception. Once they figured out the phaser strip, it seems like it was relatively trivial to ensure full coverage and remove most weaponry blindspots.

I did see one suggestion that the Federation's true trump card is the deflector dish though. Because those things are goddamn insane in how much they're capable of and no one else seems to have a clear equivalent that can be used the same way.

Edited by Zendervai on Oct 9th 2023 at 4:50:27 AM

I've also seen suggestions that it's the Federation's sensor tech. To the point there was a low key arms race between Romulan cloaking devices and Federation sensor arrays during the latter half of the 24th Century.

This made a lot of sense to me, but sadly Picard contradicted this in season 3, since a century-old cloaking device was shown to fool 25th century sensors just as well as the 23rd ones. Unless Laforge had also been upgrading the Bounty's cloaking device in his spare time.

Based on ST 3, the Bounty's cloak isn't perfect. Sensor echos and visual distortions at close range but you had to be looking for it. Not something modern cloaks have thus were not looking for it.

That's the funny thing about arms races like that. You stop looking for or accounting for the outdated tech. Why would you keep scanning for a cloaking device that's over 150 years out of date? The Klingons are definitely not going to use it, they'll just assume everyone can see right through it. Combine that with it being put on a non-Klingon ship, it not working very well and it being really jury-rigged, the result is likely to be a really fucking weird looking cloak signature that isn't being actively scanned for and since the station seems to be automated, it's not going to react to something on a frequency it's not being told to look for, and the Borg near the end are going to have the same scanning problem.

Edited by Zendervai on Oct 10th 2023 at 8:31:38 AM

Technology may evolve and improve but that doesn't mean there aren't fundamental weaknesses that remain over time. Passive sensor tech requires something to produce some type of noise that would register as unusual, and even active sensor tech requires something to reflect what they are sending out. An older Klingon cloak design may still be effective at keeping hidden at a first pass but would light up like a neon sign with a tachyon scan, while newer Romulan cloaks were explicitly said to be extra efficient and better immune to deeper looks. Picard season three also said that the cloak proved a good counter to the fleet formation override, a brand new tech that required line of sight.

Reminds me a little of The Last Jedi having the First Order easily piercing cloaks through cloak scans. If it was that easy to defeat stealth tech that would be standard procedure in a combat scenario and nobody would use it in the first place.

Wait, isn't the whole point of passive sensors that they don't produce noise?

You got it backwards. A passive sensor is just quietly listening to anything that might be happening. Like, a passive sensor is likely to notice a starship operating normally, because a normally operating starship will have a ton of noise that's easy to pick up without actively looking. An active sensor sends out pings to bounce off things and come back.

It's like...a passive sensor is like someone looking around. If something's hidden or in the dark, you won't see it because you're just observing the images light is bringing to you on its own. The light would do that whether you were there or not.

An active sensor is like sonar. Where it sends out a sound that bounces off whatever it hits and the return is what you're tracking. In submarines, it's usually relatively easy to tell if someone else is using sonar on you because it's possible to hear the ping when it hits your submarine.

Emeraldsource wasn't saying that passive sensors create noise, they were saying they detect noise.

Edited by Zendervai on Oct 10th 2023 at 3:12:02 PM

Oh, I just misunderstood, that's all.

There's a "making of" feature for the Very Short Treks.

News from Deadline: Netflix has picked up Prodigy.

Both seasons of Star Trek: Prodigy, including its upcoming Season 2, are moving to Netflix, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Amusingly, this comes a few months after a GoFundMe campaign launched a banner-flying plane over Netflix's offices, trying to encourage the company to pick it up. Though it probably helps that Paramount and Netflix continue to have a liscening partnership.

At least this time, Netflix isn't responsible for cancelling a show after one or two seasons.

Hopefully they finance season three

RE: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=12955024930A26145200&page=474#comment-11850

They're not just lethal, they're quick.

A 24th century starship with a reasonably modern set of phaser arrays can fire off bursts at multiple different angles in quick succession, in addition to being able to fire torpedoes spreads that are able to individually track targets.

While they might work for 23rd century ships, since they have a physical turret that needs to be rotated, a swarm/fighter tactic wouldn't really work for a newer ship, since the amount of power you'd need to beef up the weapons and shields to be viable means you're basically designing a whole starship anyway, and you might as well scale it up.

We actually see the Federation using fighters in the Dominion War so they can't be entirely useless.

When the E-D blasted some, it was in Conundrum and they were hopeless outmatched in terms of tech anyway.

The tech level between Wars and Trek also works different. Wars have different types of shields, one for energy weapons and ray shields for solid ordinance. Ray shields are usually used for stationary locations such as entire planets and are generally not on capital ships, which makes relatively small bombers surprisingly deadly (as shown in The Last Jedi). Trek has universal shields that are as strong against most everything as long as they can maintain the power, so low power phasers and small bombs from a fighter have little hope against a larger ship short of a Zerg Rush. That said, not everything is open fleet engagements and some ships like the Delta Flyer carry a surprising punch for its size.

I think a lot of the Trek vs Wars stuff basically settled down to "on a grand scale, it doesn't work" and to like "the Enterprise-D could probably take out a Star Destroyer on its own" and "Imperial fighters would be pretty useless against the Federation" but anything more specific than that is really difficult to figure out.

Edited by Zendervai on Oct 12th 2023 at 12:13:06 PM

I remember giving this a lot of thought at some point. To me, the question boils down to how the technology "translate" from one universe to the other. Is hyperspace the same thing as a transwarp conduit? Can Wars shields block the transporter? Is the Force a telepathic / telekinetic ability or something more? Etc...

Depending on what you chose, the two techs can be more or less on the same level or ridiculously unbalanced in one way or the other.

Considering Star Trek shields block lasers like nobody's business... Starwars is just a billion years behind.

Oddly, the most interesting element of this most recent Lower Decks episode is the fact that it reverses a lot of longstanding Star Trek prejudices and treatment of AI in the setting dating back to "Measure of a Man." Basically, the Federation does not have a great history with the treatment of artificial beings as people and I'm not sure this episode really gels with the Federation that refuses to recognize the Doctor's humanity (save as an artist), the future Picard banning of all synths, and the attempted kindapping of Lal.

However, that's probably a good thing.

In this version of the Federation, all of the various "evil AI" of which Peanut Hamper is certainly an example are not put away in storage forever but apparently actually have parole hearings as well as reformative therapy sessions. Which also is very different as a take on "prisons in the 24th century" as while TOS had the idea the Federation had largely moved beyond prisons as punishment, other shows had Tom Paris breaking rocks during the VOY pilot and Burnham serving a lifetime punishment for mutiny (which i pointless for a rehabilitation-based restorative justice model).

It doesn't fit with continuity that AI will be not treated as people after the Mars attack and banned but works VERY well with Star Trek's ideals as they should be practiced.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 13th 2023 at 5:34:32 AM

they are talking about the most recent Lower Decks episode for context.

oOoo, I forgot to mention that.

My bad.