Yeah, time travel as a weapon only really makes sense if you're losing the conventional war.
Also, you can time travel anywhere. Why didn't the Borg go back in time in their own territory and then travel to future Federation space? Then they wouldn't have to build some fancy beacon to get in touch with 22nd Century Borg.
Maybe the plot would've worked better if the time travel was a desperation tactic instead of Plan A.
For First contact, it's pretty clear that time travel was their Plan B. Plan A was to just fly through everyone and take Earth, and they came pretty close. Then whoops, Locutus showed up and knew about our Achille's Thermal Exhaust Port, launch the Time Sphere.
Nobody remembers the singer. The song remains.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
For First contact, it's pretty clear that time travel was their Plan B. Plan A was to just fly through everyone and take Earth, and they came pretty close. Then whoops, Locutus showed up and knew about our Achille's Thermal Exhaust Port, launch the Time Sphere.
It looks like it's the Plan B in the movie, but it's such a damn weird backup plan that I have problems buying it. Plan A is to show up and shoot everyone in the face, but if that doesn't work then they'll pop out a smaller ship and go back in time to prevent their enemies from existing (relatively speaking) in the first place. The one doesn't flow from the other at all.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
For First contact, it's pretty clear that time travel was their Plan B. Plan A was to just fly through everyone and take Earth, and they came pretty close. Then whoops, Locutus showed up and knew about our Achille's Thermal Exhaust Port, launch the Time Sphere.
It looks like it's the Plan B in the movie, but it's such a damn weird backup plan that I have problems buying it. Plan A is to show up and shoot everyone in the face, but if that doesn't work then they'll pop out a smaller ship and go back in time to prevent their enemies from existing (relatively speaking) in the first place. The one doesn't flow from the other at all.
Why not? That was SkyNets plan. Huh this is the first time I'm realising that Frist Contact is ripping off the plot of Terminator.
Casual on
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
For First contact, it's pretty clear that time travel was their Plan B. Plan A was to just fly through everyone and take Earth, and they came pretty close. Then whoops, Locutus showed up and knew about our Achille's Thermal Exhaust Port, launch the Time Sphere.
It looks like it's the Plan B in the movie, but it's such a damn weird backup plan that I have problems buying it. Plan A is to show up and shoot everyone in the face, but if that doesn't work then they'll pop out a smaller ship and go back in time to prevent their enemies from existing (relatively speaking) in the first place. The one doesn't flow from the other at all.
Why not? That was SkyNets plan. Huh this is the first time I'm realising that Frist Contact is ripping off the plot of Terminator.
In The Terminator the time travel really was a last ditch ass-pull though. Skynet had to design and build the technology from scratch, and only managed to use it twice before the human resistance showed up and whupped its ass. In First Contact the Borg aren't losing the conventional war to the Federation, much less being threatened with extinction and time travel in Trek is borderline trivial, like there's probably thousands of people in the setting who run a slingshot around the local star every month or so to avoid being late for work. So Skynet fighting a losing battle until it could try and Bill and Ted its way to victory makes sense in a way that the Borg's actions in First Contact don't. Like why (other than causing there to be no movie) wouldn't the Borg lead with the time travel gambit? Or show up with a bunch of cubes?
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Remember the Borg adapt fast. They didn't launch an attack with the plan 'if Locutus shows up and blows us up', initiate plan ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha' already prepared to go.
They had one plan, and as soon as that wasn't viable they looked at their options and selected a plan B on the spot.
Given that they don't go around time travelling everywhere and assimilating everyone, we can assume that they don't like to do that as a matter of course. Maybe they've assimilated enough stories about it going so, so wrong that they're smart enough to steer clear for the most part.
And they want to assimilate knowledge and technology. If they just go back and absorb a species before they develop the things that are interesting about them, that's a net loss for the Borg.
Remember the Borg adapt fast. They didn't launch an attack with the plan 'if Locutus shows up and blows us up', initiate plan ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha' already prepared to go.
They had one plan, and as soon as that wasn't viable they looked at their options and selected a plan B on the spot.
Given that they don't go around time travelling everywhere and assimilating everyone, we can assume that they don't like to do that as a matter of course. Maybe they've assimilated enough stories about it going so, so wrong that they're smart enough to steer clear for the most part.
And they want to assimilate knowledge and technology. If they just go back and absorb a species before they develop the things that are interesting about them, that's a net loss for the Borg.
This sums up my thoughts pretty damn exactly. It makes sense as a Plan B in a "Oh, shit, we just got our asses kicked by guns" kind of way. The plan is no longer about assimilating Earth because it's a juicy tech and science target. The Cube just got stomped conventionally in a fight, which puts the Federation into a whole new threat tier for the Borg. They can't expect to win straight up anymore.
The simplest solution is to then time travel back and outright prevent there from ever being a Federation.
Went and watched the battle of Sector 001 per this discussion and I had a few thoughts. "Man, I would love to see this on the big screen again", and "Look what you can do w/o having a copy/paste fleet". There were more ships to defend Picard (by a LOT) than there were to defend Sector 001.
Went and watched the battle of Sector 001 per this discussion and I had a few thoughts. "Man, I would love to see this on the big screen again", and "Look what you can do w/o having a copy/paste fleet". There were more ships to defend Picard (by a LOT) than there were to defend Sector 001.
You gotta go big though. All of organic life is on the line. Every engagement is a million ships. DRAMA!
We don't know how large the force was originally. They engaged the cube while the Enterprise was on the Romulan border, and even at maximum warp it was hours from there to Earth. We see or hear about three ships biting it entirely and a fourth go all good-day-to-die right as the Enterprise arrives, they were probably not the first.
Still, First Contact took place on the eve of the Dominion War, and a really substantial change is seen in Starfleet's makeup and size by the end of DS9, and judging by what they were able to assemble with mere *minutes* of warning in Endgame (with more on the way) the new ships weren't immediately mothballed, Starfleet stayed at its wartime size for at least several years. And considering the Scimitar, Romulan Supernova/Narada, and Mars crises would all have happened within the next decade or so resistance to shrinking it again would only grow.
Yeah, I imagine that post-Dominion War a sizable portion of Starfleet is just...a standing military. Early TNG implied that the overwhelming majority of the fleet was scattered across the galaxy exploring. Static contingents like the Cardassian border were the extreme rarity. I'm guessing by the late-2390s, it's switched almost completely.
If they ever set a series in 25th century, I'd like to see the mains pushing a return to the exploration glory days—resistance to the idea, reasonable and otherwise, could make for some good storytelling.
Narratively they've reached a problematic point in the timeline post-DS9. There's been three series and a decades worth of ramping up tension and threats to keep things interesting, resulting in a much larger and more militarised Starfleet than the relatively smaller of collection of scientists, diplomats and explorers you see in ep 1 of TNG. Given the established chain of events it doesn't make any sense for starfleet to go back to that innocent time quickly.
There's going to have to be another century long or more narrative gap along with some explanation of how all the TNG era threats receded before we can plausibly see that more innocent Starfleet again. The federation at the end of DS9 is pretty much on the brink. The Borg are still there and all that really keeps them back seems to be their "one cube at a time" invasion policy. The Dominion were never defeated, they just had their shortcut to the alpha quadrant snipped. It's worth remembering that the Federation, Klingons and Romulans were brought to the brink of defeat by what was essentially just an expeditionary force.
All the federation can do is make mass-produced warships and churn out crews as fast as they can. From that perspective, what we see in Picard kind of makes sense, even if it was kind of lame visually.
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AbsoluteZeroThe new film by Quentin KoopantinoRegistered Userregular
I think the mistake is you don't need to ramp up threats to keep things interesting. In fact that's probably the laziest approach.
As I've noted in previous thread(s), some of the RP fleets I've been in in STO have made much of the in-character tension between captains who see the more innocent time as the baseline to be returned to ASAP and the ones who've come up during wartime and think that peace is the occasional brief anomaly. Canon Trek could definitely do the same.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited September 2021
The huge problems I see with the narrative at this point are that Picard is a Federation future I neither buy nor have any taste for whatsoever, so anything coming from that is something I'm not interested in. Discovery is the same issue except they're immensely more stupid about why their future is crap, and I have zero interest in Andromeda Trek on top of Discovery being Endless Hypderdrama Trek.
They've got nothing that I want to see now, and have fired the franchise off in the least-interesting directions I could conceive of for the material. The setting used to be a platform for exploring a potential future where peace is widespread and normal, and now the franchise is just endlessly wallowing in despair, conflict, and world-ending consequences. It's fucking tedious now, stuck on trying to drum up the next-biggest threat and utterly lacking the spine or writing for creative, interesting solutions or situations.
The only Trek that seems to actually get it is Lower Decks, and that's an animated comedy.
As I've noted in previous thread(s), some of the RP fleets I've been in in STO have made much of the in-character tension between captains who see the more innocent time as the baseline to be returned to ASAP and the ones who've come up during wartime and think that peace is the occasional brief anomaly. Canon Trek could definitely do the same.
A larger fleet has equal benefits on both philosophies, as starships are all multimission to some extent. The Defiant is almost guns on an engine but not quite - we've also seen it do a system survey and humanitarian intervention. The Galaxy is a luxury cruise liner but we've seen it go toe to toe with the big Warbirds.
The whole "We're the closest starship and it'll take us a week to get there," bullshit of early TNG is hamstringing Starfleet even in an era of total galactic peace, the kind of Starfleet STO shows is better able to handle any situation, even if the game only focuses on massive invasions by space cicadas or cyberzombies.
The huge problems I see with the narrative at this point are that Picard is a Federation future I neither buy nor have any taste for whatsoever, so anything coming from that is something I'm not interested in. Discovery is the same issue except they're immensely more stupid about why their future is crap, and I have zero interest in Andromeda Trek on top of Discovery being Endless Hypderdrama Trek.
They've got nothing that I want to see now, and have fired the franchise off in the least-interesting directions I could conceive of for the material. The setting used to be a platform for exploring a potential future where peace is widespread and normal, and now the franchise is just endlessly wallowing in despair, conflict, and world-ending consequences. It's fucking tedious now, stuck on trying to drum up the next-biggest threat and utterly lacking the spine or writing for creative, interesting solutions or situations.
The only Trek that seems to actually get it is Lower Decks, and that's an animated comedy.
Lower Decks is clearly made by people who love the shit out of the franchise, so that's not actually that surprising imo.
As I've noted in previous thread(s), some of the RP fleets I've been in in STO have made much of the in-character tension between captains who see the more innocent time as the baseline to be returned to ASAP and the ones who've come up during wartime and think that peace is the occasional brief anomaly. Canon Trek could definitely do the same.
A larger fleet has equal benefits on both philosophies, as starships are all multimission to some extent. The Defiant is almost guns on an engine but not quite - we've also seen it do a system survey and humanitarian intervention. The Galaxy is a luxury cruise liner but we've seen it go toe to toe with the big Warbirds.
The whole "We're the closest starship and it'll take us a week to get there," bullshit of early TNG is hamstringing Starfleet even in an era of total galactic peace, the kind of Starfleet STO shows is better able to handle any situation, even if the game only focuses on massive invasions by space cicadas or cyberzombies.
I don't think the system survey thing is the greatest example of the difference. Any ship engaging in combat is going to want really good sensor packages. A flat out warship should be pretty good at exploration stuff. The place it should fall down on is stuff like showing up to help combat a plague or something. The Galaxy class spaceships just have so much more crew and space for things like huge bio labs and industrial replicators and such. That kind of nuance has never really been a Star Trek thing though, outside of really niche things like the technical manuals.
For First contact, it's pretty clear that time travel was their Plan B. Plan A was to just fly through everyone and take Earth, and they came pretty close. Then whoops, Locutus showed up and knew about our Achille's Thermal Exhaust Port, launch the Time Sphere.
If you have time travel, it's always plan B. There might be a ton of other plans, but the first one you're going to go for is "Whoops, reload!"
In fact, this might have been plan Z - part B. Having savescummed their way from the Romulan border, finally there was a problem that didn't have an obvious short term jaunt back solution.
We just see the version of history that ends without repeated time travel, after all the alternatives have resolved.
A reminder that somewhere down the line, the Borg develop some super ass transporter tech that could let them transport a million Borg into the dead ass center of Starfleet Command if they so wanted to. And apparently this never occurs to them.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
There's a fan theory that until the Federation, the Borg had never encounted a species with anywhere near the level of adaptability an rapid innovation as the Federation, so rather than wiping them out in one go, the Borg are farming them; attacking, taking their tech and then getting their one lone cube defeated, then the Federation goes on to improve their tech to better fight the borg and the process repeats.
I doubt that's what the writers had in mind, and it makes the time travel idea make no sense unfortunately.
Is Discovery universally maligned? I get the impression that it is. I don't typically follow along with TV as it's being developed, but I just wonder - is there any chance that the show-runners are attentive to feedback and upcoming seasons might be a bit less ridiculous. That's assuming that the feedback they're getting is actually generally negative. I honestly have no idea, maybe there's a substantial segment out there that loves it.
There's a fan theory that until the Federation, the Borg had never encounted a species with anywhere near the level of adaptability an rapid innovation as the Federation, so rather than wiping them out in one go, the Borg are farming them; attacking, taking their tech and then getting their one lone cube defeated, then the Federation goes on to improve their tech to better fight the borg and the process repeats.
I doubt that's what the writers had in mind, and it makes the time travel idea make no sense unfortunately.
The Borg send a Sphere back in time so that early humans get their hands on the tech, backwards engineer it and have even more advanced tech to farm in Trek's present.
This leaves it stuck in another timeline though. Unless they use the sphere as a beacon in space/time and jump into that timeline.
Is Discovery universally maligned? I get the impression that it is. I don't typically follow along with TV as it's being developed, but I just wonder - is there any chance that the show-runners are attentive to feedback and upcoming seasons might be a bit less ridiculous. That's assuming that the feedback they're getting is actually generally negative. I honestly have no idea, maybe there's a substantial segment out there that loves it.
It is not. Enough people like it that they’ve booked in at least another two seasons. Quite how many people that is or of it makes it successful is a point of debate. But there are people here and out there who live it (I am one!).
There are other people who hate it, but hey, that’s showbiz.
ETA: scroll back a bit and you’ll find us discussing this very thing!
Is Discovery universally maligned? I get the impression that it is. I don't typically follow along with TV as it's being developed, but I just wonder - is there any chance that the show-runners are attentive to feedback and upcoming seasons might be a bit less ridiculous. That's assuming that the feedback they're getting is actually generally negative. I honestly have no idea, maybe there's a substantial segment out there that loves it.
Not universally. I like most of it. A couple things didn't hit right, but not significantly more than any Trek I've watched. Just about finished S3 of Voyager, and the hit/miss ratio there is not that much different to the first three of Disco. Some great parts, a lot of decent to good parts, some crap parts, and a few "WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING!?!?" parts.
The problem in this day and age, is identifying what is wrong with something, from what people on the internets are screaming about.
Some of the arguments I've heard out there, were from people who were either NEVER going to watch it (racists, sexists, etc), or the kind of Trek purists that were ALWAYS going to complain.
Most people in here, at least justify what they don't like, and why they don't like it, and even if I disagree on something, at least I understand why we differ.
But finding those people, and whether those people outnumber people who do like it (and people who do are less likely to complain than people who don't), among the screeching howler monkeys of the internet, is difficult.
Basic facts are, with streaming, they know viewership numbers, they now income levels, and they know budgetary costs. If they're happy with that now, unless they see a dip in the first or second, or a rise in the third, there's not much incentive to change.
Discovery is interesting to me. To me it's felt a lot like each season took a popular series episode topic and asked what happens if we draw that out into a season. And I think it does a lot more hitting than missing on those to me. And it's kind of interesting that they're now spinning off a couple of those things.
The latest season as "what if we did andromeda" felt too obsessed with trying to unravel the mystery of the status quo but now I'm interested in them just telling a story about existing in this space and time now, you know, what I'd have liked them to do last season
As I've noted in previous thread(s), some of the RP fleets I've been in in STO have made much of the in-character tension between captains who see the more innocent time as the baseline to be returned to ASAP and the ones who've come up during wartime and think that peace is the occasional brief anomaly. Canon Trek could definitely do the same.
A larger fleet has equal benefits on both philosophies, as starships are all multimission to some extent. The Defiant is almost guns on an engine but not quite - we've also seen it do a system survey and humanitarian intervention. The Galaxy is a luxury cruise liner but we've seen it go toe to toe with the big Warbirds.
The whole "We're the closest starship and it'll take us a week to get there," bullshit of early TNG is hamstringing Starfleet even in an era of total galactic peace, the kind of Starfleet STO shows is better able to handle any situation, even if the game only focuses on massive invasions by space cicadas or cyberzombies.
I don't think the system survey thing is the greatest example of the difference. Any ship engaging in combat is going to want really good sensor packages. A flat out warship should be pretty good at exploration stuff. The place it should fall down on is stuff like showing up to help combat a plague or something. The Galaxy class spaceships just have so much more crew and space for things like huge bio labs and industrial replicators and such. That kind of nuance has never really been a Star Trek thing though, outside of really niche things like the technical manuals.
The Defiant is an extreme example (and we do see it responding to humanitarian disasters), and we've only seen five ships of that class. The next smallest starships of the era are the Saber-class and Nova-class, both of which are more than twice the volume of the Defiant, and in the same range as the Miranda and the Constitution.
Yeah, I imagine that post-Dominion War a sizable portion of Starfleet is just...a standing military. Early TNG implied that the overwhelming majority of the fleet was scattered across the galaxy exploring. Static contingents like the Cardassian border were the extreme rarity. I'm guessing by the late-2390s, it's switched almost completely.
If they ever set a series in 25th century, I'd like to see the mains pushing a return to the exploration glory days—resistance to the idea, reasonable and otherwise, could make for some good storytelling.
The Cerritos bridge crew seems to be what happens to most Dominion war vets. Star Fleet tosses them aside because they arent useful anymore
I have a podcast now. It's about video games and anime!Find it here.
There's a fan theory that until the Federation, the Borg had never encounted a species with anywhere near the level of adaptability an rapid innovation as the Federation, so rather than wiping them out in one go, the Borg are farming them; attacking, taking their tech and then getting their one lone cube defeated, then the Federation goes on to improve their tech to better fight the borg and the process repeats.
I doubt that's what the writers had in mind, and it makes the time travel idea make no sense unfortunately.
See you can go with that and write off the Borg Queen as a defective experiment precisely because she tried to alter the timeline
There's a fan theory that until the Federation, the Borg had never encounted a species with anywhere near the level of adaptability an rapid innovation as the Federation, so rather than wiping them out in one go, the Borg are farming them; attacking, taking their tech and then getting their one lone cube defeated, then the Federation goes on to improve their tech to better fight the borg and the process repeats.
I doubt that's what the writers had in mind, and it makes the time travel idea make no sense unfortunately.
The Borg send a Sphere back in time so that early humans get their hands on the tech, backwards engineer it and have even more advanced tech to farm in Trek's present.
This leaves it stuck in another timeline though. Unless they use the sphere as a beacon in space/time and jump into that timeline.
The only time I can recall seeing us have different timelines is in NuTrek. Prior to that it's all malleable time loops (using mumbo jumbo like chronoton particles to avoid paradoxes).
Yeah, I imagine that post-Dominion War a sizable portion of Starfleet is just...a standing military. Early TNG implied that the overwhelming majority of the fleet was scattered across the galaxy exploring. Static contingents like the Cardassian border were the extreme rarity. I'm guessing by the late-2390s, it's switched almost completely.
If they ever set a series in 25th century, I'd like to see the mains pushing a return to the exploration glory days—resistance to the idea, reasonable and otherwise, could make for some good storytelling.
The Cerritos bridge crew seems to be what happens to most Dominion war vets. Star Fleet tosses them aside because they arent useful anymore
I don’t really see it that way. Most of the younger officers on the ship (Boimler, Tendi, etc.) likely didn’t serve in the war. Mariner is on the Cerritos because she’s a fuck up, not because she’s an inconvenient veteran. It doesn’t seem like Freeman has captained any other ship, either.
Theory:
That could be one source of tension between them, if Mariner served on the frontlines while Freeman was rear echelon.
Ransom, Shax, and... I can never remember Dr. Cat's name don't seem to be exactly prime officers. Freeman in particular seems to know she is (or at least is seen as) a mediocre captain, hence her failed experiment with maximum micromanagement and her frustration with fuckups on the crew.
Shax is the only one on the show aside from Mariner I can buy being a hardened veteran, but at the same time being a tough guy who's never actually gotten a real fight to test his skills makes sense, too.
Most of the crew seems to be just unimpressive officers perfectly suited for important but rarely glamorous workhorse ship jobs.
I mean, Ransom, Shax and the Dr are expies for Riker, Worf and Pulaski. They all punch way above their weight class, but as it's a comedy about a second tier ship, they still have flaws (like going feral). It's not like the TNG crew didn't have their foibles. Getting seduced by a hologram, quitting Starfleet every other season to fight a blood war, etc. The senior officers almost certainly have to have fought in the war. If they were putting the Excelsiors in the war effort, surely a more modern ship would be there for at least some battles. If not, it was at least showing the flag somewhere else.
Yeah, I imagine that post-Dominion War a sizable portion of Starfleet is just...a standing military. Early TNG implied that the overwhelming majority of the fleet was scattered across the galaxy exploring. Static contingents like the Cardassian border were the extreme rarity. I'm guessing by the late-2390s, it's switched almost completely.
If they ever set a series in 25th century, I'd like to see the mains pushing a return to the exploration glory days—resistance to the idea, reasonable and otherwise, could make for some good storytelling.
The Cerritos bridge crew seems to be what happens to most Dominion war vets. Star Fleet tosses them aside because they arent useful anymore
I dunno, the self-loathing the Cerritos crew seems to have aside, they do serve a useful purpose, assisting with lower priority stuff you don't necessarily need the flagship to show up for but is good for the Federation to either work on (Infrastructure and exploration) or be present for. (Dangerous artifact retrieval, distress signals, anomalous flora/fauna sightings)
"Go down, kick ass, and set yourselves up as gods, that's our Prime Directive!"
Cerritos is the essential janitor role in Starfleet; it's not prominent or prestigious, but if they weren't there doing their jobs you'd soon start to wonder why everything stinks.
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Also, you can time travel anywhere. Why didn't the Borg go back in time in their own territory and then travel to future Federation space? Then they wouldn't have to build some fancy beacon to get in touch with 22nd Century Borg.
Maybe the plot would've worked better if the time travel was a desperation tactic instead of Plan A.
It looks like it's the Plan B in the movie, but it's such a damn weird backup plan that I have problems buying it. Plan A is to show up and shoot everyone in the face, but if that doesn't work then they'll pop out a smaller ship and go back in time to prevent their enemies from existing (relatively speaking) in the first place. The one doesn't flow from the other at all.
Why not? That was SkyNets plan. Huh this is the first time I'm realising that Frist Contact is ripping off the plot of Terminator.
In The Terminator the time travel really was a last ditch ass-pull though. Skynet had to design and build the technology from scratch, and only managed to use it twice before the human resistance showed up and whupped its ass. In First Contact the Borg aren't losing the conventional war to the Federation, much less being threatened with extinction and time travel in Trek is borderline trivial, like there's probably thousands of people in the setting who run a slingshot around the local star every month or so to avoid being late for work. So Skynet fighting a losing battle until it could try and Bill and Ted its way to victory makes sense in a way that the Borg's actions in First Contact don't. Like why (other than causing there to be no movie) wouldn't the Borg lead with the time travel gambit? Or show up with a bunch of cubes?
They had one plan, and as soon as that wasn't viable they looked at their options and selected a plan B on the spot.
Given that they don't go around time travelling everywhere and assimilating everyone, we can assume that they don't like to do that as a matter of course. Maybe they've assimilated enough stories about it going so, so wrong that they're smart enough to steer clear for the most part.
And they want to assimilate knowledge and technology. If they just go back and absorb a species before they develop the things that are interesting about them, that's a net loss for the Borg.
This sums up my thoughts pretty damn exactly. It makes sense as a Plan B in a "Oh, shit, we just got our asses kicked by guns" kind of way. The plan is no longer about assimilating Earth because it's a juicy tech and science target. The Cube just got stomped conventionally in a fight, which puts the Federation into a whole new threat tier for the Borg. They can't expect to win straight up anymore.
The simplest solution is to then time travel back and outright prevent there from ever being a Federation.
You gotta go big though. All of organic life is on the line. Every engagement is a million ships. DRAMA!
Still, First Contact took place on the eve of the Dominion War, and a really substantial change is seen in Starfleet's makeup and size by the end of DS9, and judging by what they were able to assemble with mere *minutes* of warning in Endgame (with more on the way) the new ships weren't immediately mothballed, Starfleet stayed at its wartime size for at least several years. And considering the Scimitar, Romulan Supernova/Narada, and Mars crises would all have happened within the next decade or so resistance to shrinking it again would only grow.
If they ever set a series in 25th century, I'd like to see the mains pushing a return to the exploration glory days—resistance to the idea, reasonable and otherwise, could make for some good storytelling.
There's going to have to be another century long or more narrative gap along with some explanation of how all the TNG era threats receded before we can plausibly see that more innocent Starfleet again. The federation at the end of DS9 is pretty much on the brink. The Borg are still there and all that really keeps them back seems to be their "one cube at a time" invasion policy. The Dominion were never defeated, they just had their shortcut to the alpha quadrant snipped. It's worth remembering that the Federation, Klingons and Romulans were brought to the brink of defeat by what was essentially just an expeditionary force.
All the federation can do is make mass-produced warships and churn out crews as fast as they can. From that perspective, what we see in Picard kind of makes sense, even if it was kind of lame visually.
They've got nothing that I want to see now, and have fired the franchise off in the least-interesting directions I could conceive of for the material. The setting used to be a platform for exploring a potential future where peace is widespread and normal, and now the franchise is just endlessly wallowing in despair, conflict, and world-ending consequences. It's fucking tedious now, stuck on trying to drum up the next-biggest threat and utterly lacking the spine or writing for creative, interesting solutions or situations.
The only Trek that seems to actually get it is Lower Decks, and that's an animated comedy.
A larger fleet has equal benefits on both philosophies, as starships are all multimission to some extent. The Defiant is almost guns on an engine but not quite - we've also seen it do a system survey and humanitarian intervention. The Galaxy is a luxury cruise liner but we've seen it go toe to toe with the big Warbirds.
The whole "We're the closest starship and it'll take us a week to get there," bullshit of early TNG is hamstringing Starfleet even in an era of total galactic peace, the kind of Starfleet STO shows is better able to handle any situation, even if the game only focuses on massive invasions by space cicadas or cyberzombies.
Lower Decks is clearly made by people who love the shit out of the franchise, so that's not actually that surprising imo.
I don't think the system survey thing is the greatest example of the difference. Any ship engaging in combat is going to want really good sensor packages. A flat out warship should be pretty good at exploration stuff. The place it should fall down on is stuff like showing up to help combat a plague or something. The Galaxy class spaceships just have so much more crew and space for things like huge bio labs and industrial replicators and such. That kind of nuance has never really been a Star Trek thing though, outside of really niche things like the technical manuals.
If you have time travel, it's always plan B. There might be a ton of other plans, but the first one you're going to go for is "Whoops, reload!"
In fact, this might have been plan Z - part B. Having savescummed their way from the Romulan border, finally there was a problem that didn't have an obvious short term jaunt back solution.
We just see the version of history that ends without repeated time travel, after all the alternatives have resolved.
I doubt that's what the writers had in mind, and it makes the time travel idea make no sense unfortunately.
The Borg send a Sphere back in time so that early humans get their hands on the tech, backwards engineer it and have even more advanced tech to farm in Trek's present.
This leaves it stuck in another timeline though. Unless they use the sphere as a beacon in space/time and jump into that timeline.
It is not. Enough people like it that they’ve booked in at least another two seasons. Quite how many people that is or of it makes it successful is a point of debate. But there are people here and out there who live it (I am one!).
There are other people who hate it, but hey, that’s showbiz.
ETA: scroll back a bit and you’ll find us discussing this very thing!
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Not universally. I like most of it. A couple things didn't hit right, but not significantly more than any Trek I've watched. Just about finished S3 of Voyager, and the hit/miss ratio there is not that much different to the first three of Disco. Some great parts, a lot of decent to good parts, some crap parts, and a few "WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING!?!?" parts.
The problem in this day and age, is identifying what is wrong with something, from what people on the internets are screaming about.
Some of the arguments I've heard out there, were from people who were either NEVER going to watch it (racists, sexists, etc), or the kind of Trek purists that were ALWAYS going to complain.
Most people in here, at least justify what they don't like, and why they don't like it, and even if I disagree on something, at least I understand why we differ.
But finding those people, and whether those people outnumber people who do like it (and people who do are less likely to complain than people who don't), among the screeching howler monkeys of the internet, is difficult.
Basic facts are, with streaming, they know viewership numbers, they now income levels, and they know budgetary costs. If they're happy with that now, unless they see a dip in the first or second, or a rise in the third, there's not much incentive to change.
The latest season as "what if we did andromeda" felt too obsessed with trying to unravel the mystery of the status quo but now I'm interested in them just telling a story about existing in this space and time now, you know, what I'd have liked them to do last season
The Defiant is an extreme example (and we do see it responding to humanitarian disasters), and we've only seen five ships of that class. The next smallest starships of the era are the Saber-class and Nova-class, both of which are more than twice the volume of the Defiant, and in the same range as the Miranda and the Constitution.
Ypu know what
The Cerritos bridge crew seems to be what happens to most Dominion war vets. Star Fleet tosses them aside because they arent useful anymore
See you can go with that and write off the Borg Queen as a defective experiment precisely because she tried to alter the timeline
The only time I can recall seeing us have different timelines is in NuTrek. Prior to that it's all malleable time loops (using mumbo jumbo like chronoton particles to avoid paradoxes).
I don’t really see it that way. Most of the younger officers on the ship (Boimler, Tendi, etc.) likely didn’t serve in the war. Mariner is on the Cerritos because she’s a fuck up, not because she’s an inconvenient veteran. It doesn’t seem like Freeman has captained any other ship, either.
Theory:
Shax is the only one on the show aside from Mariner I can buy being a hardened veteran, but at the same time being a tough guy who's never actually gotten a real fight to test his skills makes sense, too.
Most of the crew seems to be just unimpressive officers perfectly suited for important but rarely glamorous workhorse ship jobs.
I dunno, the self-loathing the Cerritos crew seems to have aside, they do serve a useful purpose, assisting with lower priority stuff you don't necessarily need the flagship to show up for but is good for the Federation to either work on (Infrastructure and exploration) or be present for. (Dangerous artifact retrieval, distress signals, anomalous flora/fauna sightings)