scvn2812

Very impressive. Its been forever since I dabbled with photoshop.

I have the core books for B5 Wars, I've always wanted to play but never have managed to wrangle up players. That's about my only foray into table top war gaming. D&D is great if you have a good story teller and a good group of people to play with. I love gaming with my Star Wars ST, he's a gifted story teller. Complex, multilayered plots, almost cruel about subjecting us to realistic consequences to our actions and he even handles the power gamer who sulks when he doesn't get his way with an impressive degree of finesse.

Star Trek's elder races seem like they would have a lot of stories to tell too. I'd love to know just what happened to the Iconians. I suspect it may have been a "there's always a bigger fish" scenario, on the other hand they could have been their own undoing, hyperevolved beyond being interested in planets and conquest or splintered and devolved into lesser civilizations.

The Starfleet Museum I stumbled on this site a few years ago and didn't really take it seriously. Lately, after discovering Atomic Rockets and becoming more interested in the nuts and bolts versus the more abstract elements of sci-fi, I came back and started digging deeper into it. Its a great alternate history for Treknology and really does a much better job of working within pre-Enterprise canon and creating a design lineage that leads to NCC-1701 and all the way back to the dawn of the Earth - Romulan war. What I especially like is the detailed histories for each class and the design notes by the engineer who decided to create deck plans for the ships based on the histories and appearance. I liked how he tried to come up with ways of figuring out why each ship looked the way it did, i.e. what random bumps and lines are rather than ignoring them. Also I like that the interiors have a lot of space given over to storage and machinery rather than crew quarters. They're not mostly empty volumes and pleasure barges. Phaser cannon machinery takes up multiple decks, warp reactors are huge, deuterium tanks are likewise very large and both tanks and cargo bays grow in proportion to how long the ship is expected to stay in space unsupported. In many ways it sort of predicted the direction that the Star Trek reboot would take with its interiors. Emphasis on sort of. All in all, its one of very, very few fansites whose speculation and fiction I wish was canon.

I think the post Dominion war era would have a lot of story telling potential. Within the former Cardassian Union you could have analogies to the middle eastern events of recent times with the Cardassians struggling to rebuild both their infrastructure and their society and all that entails. Mean while you have the potential for the Federation to be confronted with quadrants whose political landscape has been radically reshaped with the decimation of the Cardassians and Klingons (the war having been a costly victory for the Klingons especially) and if it's post Hoebus, the loss of the Romulan homeworld following not long after a brief coupe that wiped out a lot of the top political leaders. So there is a lot of room to do what Star Trek does best: explore modern issues through the use of lumpy forehead aliens as stand ins for humans.

I think the post Dominion war era would have a lot of story telling potential. Within the former Cardassian Union you could have analogies to the middle eastern events of recent times with the Cardassians struggling to rebuild both their infrastructure and their society and all that entails. Mean while you have the potential for the Federation to be confronted with quadrants whose political landscape has been radically reshaped with the decimation of the Cardassians and Klingons (the war having been a costly victory for the Klingons especially) and if it's post Hoebus, the loss of the Romulan homeworld following not long after a brief coupe that wiped out a lot of the top political leaders. So there is a lot of room to do what Star Trek does best: explore modern issues through the use of lumpy forehead aliens as stand ins for humans.

To me it's a matter of semantics. I appreciate on one level the effort put into making it part of the Trek omniverse in an in setting way rather than leaving it for fans to rationalize it however they chose. Granted, CBS left a back door open so that they could return to the original setting, I think it's highly unlikely we will see any sort of continuation of the original setting outside of novels and games, neither of which have ever effected televised plot. So although the new movie series does not fully break with the old in the same manner that nBSG changed virtually every element, the difference is academic because the prime universe is effectively finished, barring Star Trek 12 being a spectacular failure, in which case CBS will likely reboot the setting fully rather than make something in the prime universe for the exact same reasons Trek 11 was a partial reboot: people identify with Kirk and TOS to a far greater degree than any other set of characters. A new series with new characters set in the prime universe will have to be a lot better than a new take on TOS would have to be in order to draw in viewers and justify the expense of an FX heavy show or movie. The one possibility for new prime Trek materials lays in TNG HD being a runaway success beyond all expectations.

Shrug, did iTunes break it up into individual tracks?

I give you kudos for writing an eye catching thread title. I thought you might have gone off the deep end. According to Memory Alpha its on the expanded Trek IV sound track that was re-released last year.

Is it deranged to be fascinated by the tech and despise the notion of a new, cheaper, more efficient way of killing other human beings? As for the reliability, I've had good but not slam dunk perfect luck with commercial gps. My own experience (a limited sample size to be sure) suggests that it can't be anything but an improvement over dumb shells. Of course a weapon with the ability to hit anything with magnificent precision is still only as effective as the information that dictates where it's aimed at.

If a router can be reprogrammed in such a way, I don't doubt that a smart phone or tablet could theoretically do exactly what you're describing. It might only take the right software.

And now the ability of most scifi universes to track the movement of persons on a ship through no apparent means starts to look pretty plausible.

The interstellar medium is so thin on particles that even going faster than light, the big E would burn more than she took in unless she was really plodding along or her engines use only the tiniest trickle of energy and the rest comes from Subspace applications. Edit: flying through a dense nebula might do the trick. Also while machinery has shrunk, there's no space savings in modern designs. They just take the space and put something else in there or put in a bulkier, more powerful version of the old system. Ships are getting bigger and more lightly manned as a general rule and I don't think the actual space for crew persons is getting much bigger. An altered timeline is an in universe way of saying reboot ;-)

Asimov would think of such a thing. I really need to read more of his work. My rocket punk cred is a bit limited. Some Clarke here, some Heinlein there but there's always more to discover...

I'm sure the admiral on the Death Star whom Vader warned not to be too proud of his technological terror would be quite shocked by what goes on on Dathomir. Maybe not quite as much after being choked by the mind of the guy he just mocked for his sorcerers ways and silly religion...

Read some of the books they were in, they're force users who approach the force as if it were magic. I don't know if that was retconned in the series or not, haven't seen their episodes. As Palpatine said, the Dark Side of the Force is a gateway to many abilities that some would call unnatural...

One would assume that an artillery shell moving at several thousand kph would be harder to spoof than a pretty leisurely flying drone. For one you have at best a few seconds to try and spoof it before its out of range of the signal generator, the other you have a few minutes or more. Still, if someone had enough intelligence in advance and had enough raw computing power to do it in an automated way, that could be very bad. Not that I've always had reason to be awed by the performance of my off the shelf Garmin Nuvi that I'm pretty sure no terrorist or military intelligence organization is trying to spoof. I do like this notion of moving towards smaller, less destructive and more precise munitions. I'd like the notion of air strike assassinations going the way of the Dodo bird a lot better but try as I might, no amount of pinching myself has ever resulted in me waking up to find myself in 24th century Federation Earth.

An exceptional ability to deal with waste heat is pretty much a given for every last mainstream scifi universe. Especially those that wield enough energy to blow up planets but even those that are closer to our reality still would have to have an enormously superior, basically magical, way to deal with waste heat. Running a nuclear reactor for example would require a lot of radiators. I can't seem to dig up the Atomic Rockets page that talked in more detail about it. Suffice to say, my understanding is that just about every ship in popular scifi that either accelerates at more than a snail's pace or uses energy weapons would need a massive amount of heat disposal gear or just flat out can't work.

Very sorry to hear that, lost a beloved cat to an extended bought with feline leukemia a few years back.

I love George Takei like the gay nerdy great uncle I never knew I wanted. A great entertainer and a great human being in general. I really appreciate the way he's using his celebrity for great causes.

Not knowing the circumstances, I won't comment on the banning. However, there never is any excuse for cyber stalking / bullying no matter how much you think a person might have it coming. That's my biggest issue with boards like SD.net who encourage "the mockery of stupid people." In the context of these types of communities, stupid is very subjective. It seems to be a label used to tar and feather people who take unpopular positions or argue poorly. For that matter, once you sanction ANY amount of personal attacks, it then becomes necessary to figure out where the line is and at this point, you've created a shades of gray system that people are going to interpret according to their own personal feelings. In your case, some individuals felt cyber bullying was "fair game," which is the inevitable result when you permit personal attacks. There are thoughtful, intelligent people on that board and Spacebattles who are able to make rational, well argued cases for their beliefs and then there's a lot of swaggering trolls who like to play at being geniuses. I've learned a lot about various scifi universes and science from both boards but elect not to participate because I don't like their standards of conduct. However, not everyone sees things in black and white and automatically makes this personal. I'm here because I respect Brian Young's tone and approach to versus debate and I choose to put in a modest amount of effort in trying to help him "reboot" the debate community. So in that light, I keep it impersonal and while I might get frustrated when I feel like I'm spinning my wheels in an argument, I pride myself on trying to keep a filter between the annoyance I might feel and what I allow my fingers to type. If I feel my temper rising, then I walk away. Either from the discussion entirely or I go do something else until I'm able to compose the kind of response I expect out of myself. To dislike someone for disagreeing with me, let alone take the effort to insult them or cyber bully them is a waste of energy better spent in more pleasurable pursuits.

Actually XI really can't take place in even a close alternate version of the original timeline, the first ship Nero destroys is itself as large or larger than the original Enterprise, by the time we get to Kirk's era, the new 1701-null is considerably larger than any ship to bare the name Enterprise in any other era of any other timeline. This Federation must have a vastly greater industrial base than the original, you can pack the mass of all 13 original Constitutions into the frame of the new timeline's. Now I have seen it theorized that the faster development in technology (faster warp drive, bigger starships, more sophisticated computers etc.) is the result of the original Borg incursion into the 21st century and the pollution of the timeline, resulting in the NX-class developing phasers and photon torpedoes early rather than relying on lasers and nukes for battle. Spock didn't just get sucked into the past, he was sucked into the timeline created as a direct result of the Borg's attack on Zephram Cochrane's first warp flight. Whether you accept that explanation or not (I'm rather indifferent about trying to justify the differences in Trek XI from the original) it is clear however, that this is not the same Federation or technology base as in Kirk's era and thus not the same universe and should be debated as a separate entity much as BSG-TOS is not used as a reference point for nBSG. Also, those topics were not statements of belief but me trying to guess what Ali was talking about.

So I assume you can point out a series that did not borrow any thematic elements from any other right, a series that is pure, pristine and completely original?

You're missing the point. For the purposes of debate, we have to assume that what is on screen actually happened and happened exactly the way we saw it with our own two eyes. Otherwise we are left without a common set of facts to argue about. If you can't even agree on what the facts are, then you're left with two people arguing in the context of two entirely different universes they claim are the same one. Kind of like the US political system right now....

If we assume science fiction films, unless stated otherwise, are not documentaries, then we have nothing to debate. We can only shrug our shoulders and say it didn't happen like that. That works fine for personal visions of what a universe should be like but everyone needs to have the same common ground when you enter into a discussion with another person about what we should take away from what we've seen in a movie or show. If anything I prefer to wonder why things happened the way they did in a film rather than assume its wrong and make up my own version of events. Except for the Star Wars EU. That I prefer not to even try reconciling.