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This thread is so bubbly and cloy and happy, just like [Star Trek]
Posts
"I, Q" and "Q Squared" spring to mind.
My interest is piqued. :o
OF COURSE Barclay is on a ship full of holograms.
The entire novel consists of the holographic crew brushing Barclay's hair and feeding him grapes.
There are some good Trek books out there. Prime Directive is a pretty terrific Original Series book with a great hook - Kirk and co. accidentally kill a whole planet and get fired! - and Peter David's Vendetta remains my favorite take on the Borg.
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I'm currently reading the Destiny Omnibus at the recommendation of someone in the last thread. Pretty good so far, though I'm still waiting for stuff to really hit the fan.
Unfortunately it's not. They dismantled it and auctioned off a lot of the stuff. I think Mike and Jerry actually talked about it a couple years back on a news post.
also all his holosubordinates are the enterprise senior officers
They put on sword fights for his enjoyment.
Anything by Peter David is good from my experience.
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And by giving Galaxy and D'Deridex class ships the survivability of a TIE fighter in battle.
There, I said it.
the hologram picardos arent supposed to be sentient, this whole "holograms rights" thing was hamfisted and conflicted with the plot. The Doctor is supposed to be special and unreproducable, an extremely unique set of circumstances beyond just being left on led to him being sapient. It's like one of the main plot points of the show that he's special.
Then by the end I guess holograms are people
Holy shit, holdecks are rape and murder machines. Thats super fucked up.
Pretty sure 'standard' holograms are still just giant challenge/response databases with a complicated search engine attached, incapable of genuine initiative or imagination.
Of course, the 'plot whimsy' fudge factor fucks all of that right up, so….
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Pretty sure if you can program an emitter to create a form suitable for working in a mineshaft, you could do a hell of a lot better than an EMH.
What kind of lazy technicians does Starfleet have that it can't program a simple photonic construct optimized for extracting minerals? Which probably means it doesn't require a personality of any kind, let alone bad bedside manners.
Jesus Christ.
They could man them using only photonics and Data-type androids, also replicated.
Would've saved lives and won the war handily, that's all I'm saying.
Now this just occurred to me: Did they have holographic emitters in those mines? I mean, they must have... That is so odd. It's definitely true that given control of matter and energy limited only by imagination, there has GOT to be a better way to get whatever if got out of a given mine than whiny medical professionals.
That would certainly make more sense than using sentient programs that apparently need breaks so they can take some time out to read "Photons Be Free."
"Well these EMHs have become obsolete, and for some reason we can't simply upgrade them or overwrite their programming. Apparently they're like horses, so that when we get new ones we need to put the older ones out to pasture."
What the hell.
DS9 had one of the political issues on Bajor be the use of industrial-scale replicators, so yeah, I'd imagine so.
Which turned out to be right, since Eddington was in charge of both security for the transfer and also the Maquis….
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There was that, but there was also the fact that replicators that big are a limited resource, so one group of Bajorans, who were promised use of them for a year, were getting them taken away after only a few months.
Like the mining machines in Cowboys and Aliens? /trollfaec
One of the quotes from the writers back in the TNG era was "if a society could replicate starships, it wouldn't need to." The technobabble explanation included replicators being limited in size, the inability to replicate (or at least replicate quickly) certain alloys and parts, and security limitations on what different replicators could do. After all you don't want your food replicators to produce heavy disruptor turrets...erm, disregard that link *sweep sweep sweep*
Given that most replication was supposed to be reprocessing existing matter, usually through molecular recombination (though apparently some atomic manipulation occurred? They were vague) it is not that unreasonable to assume Duranium Alloy is hard to mass-produce, and the idea that replicators have difficulty producing more than a certain volume of material per second is similar to the nature of the square-cube law of giant structure design.
Mining is more problematic, but if you disregard Voyager (I certainly do) it can be hand-waved away that setting up force-field emitters that can punch through deep rock or setting up individual emitters for each tunnel aren't cost effective. Also everybody knows dilithium mines are just as tech-jammingly radioactive as the plot demands.
And Data-type androids couldn't be recreated because his amazing positronic superbrain was not so much built as it was evoked by the powerful science-magic of Dr. Soong, noted technomage and conjurer of forbidden artifice.
Besides, droid-ships always get hacked, everybody knows that.
Really though, this is like the fridge-logic of Star Wars. Droids are literal slaves, bought and sold and chained by restraining bolts, despite (by all appearances) being sapient. And the explanations in the expanded universe just made things worse with contradictions and "droid philosophy" and the argument that since they can't channel the force, they aren't alive so slavery is a-okay...
The lightest moral grays just have the AIs and genetic constructs programmed to be predisposed towards service, allowing them to be a slave race without the messy morality of yearning for freedom. Ex. Vic Fontaine.
"Humans claim they want a robot that thinks for itself but what they REALLY want is something that will do what it's told."
Oh man.. Q Squared was epic.
@Boring7: That was actually a quote from the Star Trek: The Next Generation technical manual. )If a society could replicate a starship... etc)
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The Trek books since the series went off of the air have largely been phenomenal and are definitely worth picking up. After the TV series all ended, and Berman and Braga got the boot, that's basically where all the real writing talent went too.
They avoided all of the traps that the Star Wars EU had, while keeping true to the theme of the shows and expanding on it by doing things that were too expensive to do in a TV format. Like show how each race, even Vulcans, have sub-cultures and aren't a "planet of hats".
There's too much to go over here, but the basic aspects of how the books are structured is that the relaunch series are basically extended seasons of the TV series, and are all awesome. They include everything from a TNG relaunch, to a Voyager relaunch, to a DS9 relaunch. They all run along the same time-line, and things that are large enough to happen in other books or justify a cross-over will get a mention and effect them. I can't really detail that, however, without spoiling some plot-lines.
There are also other series that they run, like the Starfleet Corp of Engineers books. Which steps back from the whole "explore a bright new frontier" thing, and shows a more "Chief O'Brien" sort of look at the universe as they try to help maintain the Federation. Usually while hijinks or a space crisis occurs. And in true O'Brien form, suffering may or may not be guaranteed. You can get a lot of laughs out of them, setting aside their quality, which is good, if you read it from the perspective that the "O'brien Curse" follows every member of the Corp of Engineers.
Even Enterprise: Relaunch is awesome. They literally lifted the script from the unaired season that would have saved the show had the new writing team that was brought in during the last season been allowed to continue. It explains a lot of stuff, like why T'pol was so emotional and got her character development through that, how the Romulan War got started, and ret-cons B&B's horrible series finale that made no sense and was basically a cock-slap to the fans, into being something that actually works.
You were all thinking it.
I'm currently re-reading the Avatar series - which takes place immediately after DS9: WYLB. There is a whole series following the same post-tv show series. The characters are universally excellent... and Ro Laren comes back! WOO!
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The hologram thing in general always felt weird because Picardo (and Andy Dick... ugh) were always presented as being self-aware. The Doctor gains experience, but the underlying sense of self was always there. Or, at least, portrayed as being there.
I admit I never watched Voyager as closely as the other series, but I don't recall any innate characteristic that made their EMH more special/unique than any other.
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It was supposed to have come on gradually to the EMH, as a result of being active for such an extended length of time, instead of just as a short term measure in the case of an emergency.
And it's hard to judge him against the other EMH's as we only saw another EMH briefly used as slave labor in one episode, and again as a Borg distraction in First Contact. Hard to judge if they had any kind of character or growth.
I think Data was treated as de facto sapient mainly because nobody in authority thought to raise the issue or make a formal decision, kinda like a brand new drug or technology which hasn't been regulated at all yet. It took Commander Bruce "My name's way cooler than I am" Maddox to force a legal definition to come about.