Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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The Federation?

:thinking:
This reminds me of one thing I really appreciate about Star Trek compared to other sci-fi franchises. Way too much sci-fi is centered on humans, who tend to be stereotypically painted as galactic upstarts, highly adaptive, brazen, all that. But they're fucking uninteresting. Human culture in space sci-fi is rarely developed too far beyond contemporary human culture of today. Tons of wasted potential. Sometimes, like in the case of Mass Effect, humans are so fucking plain and boring while the alien races are so damn cool that it just infuriates me how the creators are insistent on focusing solely on human characters.

In Star Trek? Not so. The Federation, its history, laws, and culture are all pretty damn cool and come off as distinctive. Non-Federation human factions, colonies etc all have their own quirks and reason to exist. Earth as a planet still exists and many different Earth cultures have been preserved, which means humans aren't as homogeneous. And lastly the Federation is on friendly terms with many alien races, which means you often get to see characters who aren't the same old fucking humans, and not just one token character per race but many different ones.

It was kinda obvious to me from the get go that each Star Trek series would likely focus on a human-centric cast of characters and setting, such as a Federation starship, or DS9 which is Federation-operated, but I honestly don't even mind and I don't find it monotonous.

Love to see it.
 
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I don't think it goes deeper than that.
It is Star Trek, so overthinking can be par for the course.


alien races
I think I would like it if the world of Star Trek had more "starfish aliens", instead of mostly film effects "energy beings", and Homo sapiens with funny bumps humanoids with almost naught between. In other words, more races like the Tholians. Of course TOS couldn't do that because budget. At least TAS has more variety because animation.
 
The BQ still doesn't make sense to me. Why would a collective mind need a queen? The Borg seem "more human" with the BQ than without.
My headcanon for this is that when out of range of the larger collective, The Borg 'nominate' one of the local drones as a 'leader' to keep the drones on task as being away from the larger collective hampers their ability to function in some way. I know this only makes sense for First Contact but it was the impression I had for the longest time.
 
The Borg 'nominate' one of the local drones as a 'leader' to keep the drones on task as being away from the larger collective hampers their ability to function in some way. I know this only makes sense for First Contact but it was the impression I had for the longest time.
This was also the case in TNG with that one stray Borg drone who helped defeat Lore's Borg army.
 
I think I would like it if the world of Star Trek had more "starfish aliens", instead of mostly film effects "energy beings", and Homo sapiens with funny bumps humanoids with almost naught between. In other words, more races like the Tholians. Of course TOS couldn't do that because budget. At least TAS has more variety because animation.
They did more as effects got cheaper. Voyager started exploring more weird aliens. Enterprise did the whole thing with the Xindi and like 3 out of 5 or 6 of them being non-humanoid. The problem is always budget.

My headcanon for this is that when out of range of the larger collective, The Borg 'nominate' one of the local drones as a 'leader' to keep the drones on task as being away from the larger collective hampers their ability to function in some way. I know this only makes sense for First Contact but it was the impression I had for the longest time.
Yeah def works great for First Contact. Sucks that Voyager ruined it.

Though SFDebris had a theory/joke he ran with that the Queen was adopted by the Collective when they needed focus/direction and the two actresses playing her weren't two people portraying the same character but 2 distinct Queens (with 1 being more aggressive and expansionist and another being more defensive).
 
Star Trek died years ago when ENT ended.
JJ Trek and onwards are like "Zombie Trek", just like "Zombie Simpsons" is The Simpsons now.

Anyone else wanna go down to San Francisco to meet Sisko, Dax, and Bashir on the 30th?
2024 San Francisco IRL is almost like 2024 San Francisco in DS9.

The problem is always budget.
Did TNG have a very limited budget, or were they just continuing the "rubber forehead alien and energy being" trend of TOS?
 
There's a lot to dislike about Discovery, but having more alien aliens was good. Saru was a well-conceived and well-realized character who didn't look or sound human. Pity his species was apparently a one-off, but I guess that's what happens when the writers have ideas for new stuff but also need to explain why that new stuff was never seen before, given the time frame of the show.

DS9 SF didn't have poop maps and schizo homeless. The homeless in DS9 were more unlucky than anything else and those two episodes would have been significantly different if they had to deal with crazy people.
Clint Howard's character ("Whoosh! I'm invisible!") was mentally ill, but he still had an apartment that he was living in, rather than sleeping on a sidewalk.
 
Did TNG have a very limited budget, or were they just continuing the "rubber forehead alien and energy being" trend of TOS?
Yes actually. If you read stuff like the episode companion guide, they talk about things like the episode "Power Play" supposed to being a "bottle episode" to save money and ended up eating up a lot of it because they had several phaser shots in it.

Yeah - TNG back in the day if there was phaser fire it was a sizeable chunk of the budget.
 
Yeah - TNG back in the day if there was phaser fire it was a sizeable chunk of the budget.
Well that's just stupid. You'd think they'd stick to Type IIIs to cut down on the number of shots. But I guess they'd be paying more for the CG holes burned clear thru aliens...
 
Well that's just stupid. You'd think they'd stick to Type IIIs to cut down on the number of shots. But I guess they'd be paying more for the CG holes burned clear thru aliens...
Huh? Why would that make a difference. The rifle phasers didn't appear in TNG until s4 and even then they still fired a constant beam like the types 1 and 2. The beam special effect is what cost money.
 
That was the joke. But you're still my kinda autist. Bigger beams, fewer pews
Oh! LoL I think I get the joke now.

It is funny how much the show forgets wide-beam phasers are a thing.

Heck as Chuck pointed out, the Federation had lightweight phaser proof barrels they could have make body armor out of as well as a gun that could shoot teleporting bullets through walls, how were they losing the war to the Dominion?
 
Oh! LoL I think I get the joke now.

It is funny how much the show forgets wide-beam phasers are a thing.

Heck as Chuck pointed out, the Federation had lightweight phaser proof barrels they could have make body armor out of as well as a gun that could shoot teleporting bullets through walls, how were they losing the war to the Dominion?
The dominion had wider phaser beams, even lighter more phaser proof barrels and bullets that traveled through time.

Its Star Trek, you kind of have to forget 95% of the one use or off handedly mentioned bullshit they come up with before and after any given episode in order for the current plots to exist.
 
Its still quite pathetic how everyone loves to bitch about exclusively how the quality of writing has gone down in this franchise and not mention the quality of ship designs that haven't been good since Klingon Academy. Which also released long after the TNG shows stopped airing and before the TNG films started being produced.

Nothing but wack ass goofy ships in STO and the 2010's-present shows. Looks like the ships like the USS discovery themselves trooned out. Scotty would be rolling in his grave if he knew what they did to his Enterprise.
 
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Its still quite pathetic how everyone loves to bitch about exclusively how the quality of writing has gone down in this franchise and not the quality of ship designs that haven't been good since Klingon Academy. Nothing but wack ass goofy ships in STO and the 2010's-present shows. Looks like the ships like the USS discovery themselves trooned out.
Welcome to post-smartphone 2010s minimalism. Enterprise did a great job of making the ships seem dated yet futuristic; in the new shows they make things seem dated by making them minimalistic.
 
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