Mike and Rich have actually said that DS9 doesn't feel much like Star Trek and kinda implied that the current darkness of ST started with it. And they are correct. Voyager has more in common with TNG and TOS, not just because it's a ship rather than a starbase,
To be fair, it's not the astronauts' fault. It's like installing W11 in the Enterprise D.
Maybe I should do some about an admiral or ambassador having to deal with constant political shenanigans and incompetence of the political leaders.
Section 31 felt like the moment it got 2edgy4me.
Hehehe, I might.
Yes, but I am so tired of "hahah hurr durr cool 2edgy4you black ops"-stuff. Should I ever write Trek-fan fiction in a semi-serious manner, I'd probably do a story about a low to mid ranking Starfleet Intelligence analyst that's part of the "Naval Intelligence, Cardassian Desk"-department or something of that nature. It would be super dry technical stuff about spoonhead military movements, SIGINT, analysis of their ship classes and individual boats, their commanders, etc. pp.
That's what real intel officers do. It is a lot of paperwork and meetings.
Section 31 should be used for high-risk, low-footprint missions requiring deniable assets. Using Bashir to change the composition of the Romulan Continuing Committee is a good example of this, even if the way it was written in "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" was very dramatic. S31 having a science team to engineer a genocidal bioweapon is, I admit, way too high-footprint and would leave way too many loose ends for a realistic secret agency. Having a sooper sick nasty spaceship is ridiculous.
Their reasoning in STO was the Federation were doing temporal adventures and fucked their sun six ways to Tuesday. To where it was barely at room temperature and the Feds pulled the "Temporal Prime Directive" card on why they won't go back in time to unfuck their fuckup after the Na'kuhl had ask about it.
It's also what the average idiot would think of as 'boring', whatever that is supposed to be. I always found the work of analysts much more interesting than the shit the field operatives did and do. Without the paperwork and the intellectual overhead done by the pencil pushers and nerds, Sloan's edgy spy shit would fail in creative and horrifying ways. I'm tired of pretending otherwise.
It would depend. If S31 has say, less than ten biologists and geneticists working on the virus and has a super computer for the excessive number crunching they still need to do, I'd say it's not unreasonable for them to come up with a potent anti-goo people-bioweapon in two or three years. The question here is how complicit organizations like Starfleet are. DS9 gave us hints and bits and pieces to draw several conclusions, but most of them are... unsatisfactory.
Most normies wouldn't even know that the CIA isn't allowed to operate on US territory. That's why the NSA exists and why also certain departments of the FBI are equipped and trained to function as counter-intelligence organizations.
I like how Sloan beamed out when he was supposedly vaporized. Nice little story inversion of Ambassador T'Pel's escape.
Our CIA developed bioweapons with gain of function research. Section 31 would probably have a research installation built into an asteroid among billions in a belt somewhere, likely cloaked (since it's not a ship, hurdurrr). As for complicity the brass were all in line tricking the Romulans into the war, and no one at medical would help Bashir try to cure Odo. The best hope for the Dominion War was the disease. That Sisko would prophets ex machina was not a given. Some lonely black ops genetic engineer/s had an Oppenheimer and no one even knows. Sloan probably had their memories altered on completion of the project.
I think the problem comes from the idea that DS9 is this frontier fort and instead of going to the strange new worlds and new species, those species and worlds would be coming to them. And it's a great concept, but it kind of gets shoved to the side in the middle and later seasons in favor of the soap opera, Klingon/Bajorean/Cardassian, and Dominion story lines. Now add in the lack of a singular and unified purpose to the cast. In TOS and TNG, the crew are all Starfleet and explorers/soldiers/whatever they need to be. In DS9 you have Starfleet led by this demigod figure who has this weird way of enunciating and the Bajoreans who are led by this ex-rebel who is constantly overemoting and yelling. You don't have that Kirk-Spock-McCoy or Picard-Riker-Data paradigm of how the captain tries to solve a problem in favor of the ensemble cast soap opera shows (to be fair, those also were in TNG).
That's where I thought DS9 was more interesting: with the exception of Sisko and Jake, who are father and son, and Sisko and Dax, who are mentee and mentor, most of the characters are at cross-purposes in the beginning of the show and have different motivations. They are thrust into the mission and develop their relationships over time. To me, it feels a bit more natural. I wouldn't call it soap-opera-y. DS9 was very different, I agree there, but I liked it more. The characters were more interesting.
Classic Mission: Impossible that is not about Tom Cruise?
No, maybe in a generation but current writers are to retarded to pull it off. You also need some breathing room for episodes less you restrict it to a mini series.
No. The reality is that the Tal Shiar, Obsidian Order, and Section 31 should all work in tandem with other moving parts on the proverbial chessboard. Making it all about the spook agencies would end up in flanderization.