I find it funny to hear the argument that "Disco is for a wider audience while LD is for fans versed in the minutia of Trekdom". My gf dislikes sci-fi and won't sit down for an episode of Disco, but loves LD and watched the entire show with me. And I know I'm not the only one in this situation.
I'd really like to see an episode of Lower Decks where they actually have to sit down and have a full 10 minute conversation in the briefing room about how to solve a crazy engineering problem or whatever, while Mariner is losing her mind in the background.
I mean the show is VERY aware of the tropes, so it might happen..
Edit:
I definitely laughed at this joke both during the show and just now while rewatching it. But I still love all the ship porn with beautiful swelling orchestrals in the background and was one of the tiny few who didn't think that that scene in The Motion Picture was too long. Give me 2hrs of that shit and I'd watch it, especially if James Horner were writing the score.
Yeah that scene is hilarious but ALSO kind of a love letter to the scenes its parodying, it's not mean spirited at all.
I'll be honest and say that watching all through TNG I didn't enjoy many of the ship battles at all, they weren't interesting and I didn't really get the appeal; they were almost always just caps to an episode story or going on while more important plot things were happening elsewhere simultaneously. If what was happening on the bridge was exciting, it was almost always because of the character drama behind it and not because I was invested in ships slugging each other with photon torpedoes. They were fine and used well as a narrative tool but with the exception of a few episodes I was never excited just by two ships clashing.
It wasn't until I finally watched Balance of Terror that I fundamentally understood the appeal of Star Trek ship battles; this intense submarine-inspired combat, where every hit matters and the pace of the fight is a drawn out battle of wits between the two crews. To this day I think the only time (I've seen) that they've capably recreated what they did with Balance of Terror was in Wrath of Khan, and even that didn't feel quite as fleshed out as a battle, ultimately being reduced to a vehicle for expressing things about the characters (which is good, and the model that Star Trek generally tries to follow with good battles).
There are some exciting to watch ship battles in DS9, but those are when they started investing a lot more in CGI, and honestly tend to be exciting because they show the Defiant whipping around larger ships/DS9 like the millennium falcon flying around star destroyers, etc.
Ship battles in Trek have always varied widely between sub battles, ships of the line duking it out to WW2 fighters a la Star Wars depending on the writer. I mean, it's a show where ships encounter each other constantly upright at a distance measured often in 10's of meters with lightspeed (or faster) weapons. A lot of the rules were (un)fortunately set during TOS era and have just been gone with. BSG had a lot more realistic combat physics but meh, I don't know that it added or removed anything from the story. You watch Disco's combat where they are launching all these shuttlepods/etc as fighters and the realization is that there is no way those pilots are surviving those manuevers without some kind of just massive inertial dampeners and AI support to even manage the movement.
Yeah, DS9 was when ship size actually became a thing. In TNG, most ships were about the same size as the Ent-D with few exceptions (Borg cubes, the standard random alien tapered rectangle ships). And, of course, we're always told that these other ships "match our speed and firepower." DS9 was the first Trek show that really employed scale regularly, no doubt because of CG.
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
The thing that's stuck out to me more in recent rewatches is just how much of the Star Trek battle action is performative garbage solely there to fill time and communicate something battle related to the audience. Shield percentage numbers, exploding panels (I swear I've seen other crew members take the place of a casualty and continue working at their exploded panel), attack pattern this and evasive action that (the Enterprise-D is 800m long fighting a similarly sized ship firing ray-trace type weapons)... It's all very silly in a way that many other scifi shows aren't if there isn't enough story support and emotional buy in on the part of the audience by the time the pew pews start up. Leading to stuff like this paragraph from Ebert (about Nemesis, of course).
I've also had it with the force shield that protects the Enterprise. The power on this thing is always going down. In movie after movie after movie I have to sit through sequences during which the captain is tersely informed that the front shield is down to 60 percent, or the back shield is down to 10 percent, or the side shield is leaking energy, and the captain tersely orders that power be shifted from the back to the sides or all put in the front, or whatever, and I'm thinking, life is too short to sit through 10 movies in which the power is shifted around on these shields. The shields have been losing power for decades now, and here it is the Second Generation of Star Trek, and they still haven't fixed them. Maybe they should get new batteries.
Frankly I think it's a problem with the combination of the ship size, weapons, and shields as established around the TNG period. FX technology probably played a part too.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Look... at least they aren't polarizing the hull platin.... oh.. damn..
I always wondered what "rerouting power" was supposed to accomplish after hull plating had already failed. I kind of assumed that if hull plating was down, that more or less meant it was already blown to bits. I mean these aren't shields where you can just allocate more energy to maintain field integrity.
I was about to posit a whole theory, and then decided to erase it. Look, it's Enterprise, it's not as bad as Abramsverse, but it's logic and adherence to physics was... unique. Let's just leave it as, "plot armor"
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Look... at least they aren't polarizing the hull platin.... oh.. damn..
I always wondered what "rerouting power" was supposed to accomplish after hull plating had already failed. I kind of assumed that if hull plating was down, that more or less meant it was already blown to bits. I mean these aren't shields where you can just allocate more energy to maintain field integrity.
Tachyons
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 2021
Look, when you shoot polarized hull plating, it makes the energy fall out. Then you just pour more in the, um, plate batteries and everything is fine.
And I mean they literally pour it. There's just some ensign with a bucket full of energy watching all the power slop out from a hit, then they fill it back up. Rerouting power means he just borrows another ensign's bucket and dumps that power in the tank instead.
The thing that's stuck out to me more in recent rewatches is just how much of the Star Trek battle action is performative garbage solely there to fill time and communicate something battle related to the audience. Shield percentage numbers, exploding panels (I swear I've seen other crew members take the place of a casualty and continue working at their exploded panel), attack pattern this and evasive action that (the Enterprise-D is 800m long fighting a similarly sized ship firing ray-trace type weapons)... It's all very silly in a way that many other scifi shows aren't if there isn't enough story support and emotional buy in on the part of the audience by the time the pew pews start up. Leading to stuff like this paragraph from Ebert (about Nemesis, of course).
I've also had it with the force shield that protects the Enterprise. The power on this thing is always going down. In movie after movie after movie I have to sit through sequences during which the captain is tersely informed that the front shield is down to 60 percent, or the back shield is down to 10 percent, or the side shield is leaking energy, and the captain tersely orders that power be shifted from the back to the sides or all put in the front, or whatever, and I'm thinking, life is too short to sit through 10 movies in which the power is shifted around on these shields. The shields have been losing power for decades now, and here it is the Second Generation of Star Trek, and they still haven't fixed them. Maybe they should get new batteries.
Frankly I think it's a problem with the combination of the ship size, weapons, and shields as established around the TNG period. FX technology probably played a part too.
Yeah while the criticism of new Trek's bullet sponge battles is fair, I think old Trek was just as guilty of arbitrary definitions of how many hits a ship can take, though they tended toward the other end of the spectrum. Shield strength and "we can't take another hit!" always just felt like such conveniently squishy concepts that was adjusted as needed by the story. I rolled my eyes at it during TNG in the same way that I roll my eyes at it in Disco.
The Expanse was brought up earlier and I feel like that show does space battles well, in the sense that they're brutal and don't last long because stuff blows up easily. But that doesn't really cater well to a show that is ostensibly character driven so /shrug.
TNG did space battles just fine for a show where there needed to be space battles but wasn't interested in them, as far as I'm concerned. They're threats that aren't particularly engaging and I'm fine with that.
Yeah while the criticism of new Trek's bullet sponge battles is fair, I think old Trek was just as guilty of arbitrary definitions of how many hits a ship can take, though they tended toward the other end of the spectrum. Shield strength and "we can't take another hit!" always just felt like such conveniently squishy concepts that was adjusted as needed by the story. I rolled my eyes at it during TNG in the same way that I roll my eyes at it in Disco.
TNG had some especially wonderful moments about this, such as when the shields went down three times in a single scene...
I always disliked how inconsistently the Galaxy class was portrayed. It was at once both constantly played up as a titan among starships but was also always one hit away from exploding from an attack by <rando alien of the week>
Yeah while the criticism of new Trek's bullet sponge battles is fair, I think old Trek was just as guilty of arbitrary definitions of how many hits a ship can take, though they tended toward the other end of the spectrum. Shield strength and "we can't take another hit!" always just felt like such conveniently squishy concepts that was adjusted as needed by the story. I rolled my eyes at it during TNG in the same way that I roll my eyes at it in Disco.
The Expanse was brought up earlier and I feel like that show does space battles well, in the sense that they're brutal and don't last long because stuff blows up easily. But that doesn't really cater well to a show that is ostensibly character driven so /shrug.
I feel like the Expanse is fairly character driven!
I don't want to compare how competent The Expanse is to TNG in terms of the spaceshippy FX and combat bits that appeal to my inner 12 year old - that would be insane, it's 3 decades newer in its effects. I do think it's fair to compare it to Discovery or Picard and easily see some areas where those shows get it wrong!
Like, does anyone think the final scene of Picard wouldn't have been better with one starfleet ship and one romulan ship?
But BloodySloth has the right of it, for TNG the space battles were simply there for the story. If TNG was a tabletop game, the DM doesn't have a set of complex rules for space combat because its an afterthought, people just say what they wanna do and the DM wings it
Yeah while the criticism of new Trek's bullet sponge battles is fair, I think old Trek was just as guilty of arbitrary definitions of how many hits a ship can take, though they tended toward the other end of the spectrum. Shield strength and "we can't take another hit!" always just felt like such conveniently squishy concepts that was adjusted as needed by the story. I rolled my eyes at it during TNG in the same way that I roll my eyes at it in Disco.
I always disliked how inconsistently the Galaxy class was portrayed. It was at once both constantly played up as a titan among starships but was also always one hit away from exploding from an attack by <rando alien of the week>
Like that time they got attacked by two ferengi-piloted birds of prey, who were firing pulse phaser bolts like machine-guns. And in response the Enterprise fires one of those a single, long-buildup phaser beam shots from the saucer, and it just gentle caresses one ferengi ship, and that was their one and only offensive move.
Yeah while the criticism of new Trek's bullet sponge battles is fair, I think old Trek was just as guilty of arbitrary definitions of how many hits a ship can take, though they tended toward the other end of the spectrum. Shield strength and "we can't take another hit!" always just felt like such conveniently squishy concepts that was adjusted as needed by the story. I rolled my eyes at it during TNG in the same way that I roll my eyes at it in Disco.
TNG had some especially wonderful moments about this, such as when the shields went down three times in a single scene...
I always disliked how inconsistently the Galaxy class was portrayed. It was at once both constantly played up as a titan among starships but was also always one hit away from exploding from an attack by <rando alien of the week>
To be fair, two points stand out:
1) This was a rehash of the Constitution class problem
2) This was the entire reason for the Defiant and Sovereign class ships later on in the series. (Per plot, the real reason obviously being rule of cool). In an escalating threat environment, Federation needed more battle capable ships.
Yeah.. The galaxy class is basically a small city in space able to defend itself with a vengeance, but the enterprise is not a dedicated warship.
Later dominion war refits/builds of the galaxy class saw most of the components needed for the non-war functions removed and more fighting capability added per canon, as in more shield generators, more torpedo launch tubes and storage space, and more phaser strips.
It's kind of why fighting a war with the federation in setting was always a dicey proposition - their non-war spaceships were absolutely more than capable of holding their own against the dedicated warships of the other big players, and that was without switching to a full war footing.
So any war against the federation you didn't win decisively fast would be less and less likely to be won as it turned into a stalemate, as the federation very much was capable of ripping out those recreational facilities and replacing them with armament, and so for progressively more dangerous.
And that's without the power of federation technobabble / prophets disappearing a whole fleet
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
(Another clear parallel to The Culture, here, where ECM aside their fleet is largely disarmed but can self-refit to blow up a planet within a week or two of necessary.
(Another clear parallel to The Culture, here, where ECM aside their fleet is largely disarmed but can self-refit to blow up a planet within a week or two of necessary.
(Do Not Fuck With The Culture.)
Even worse if your opponent is the culture, because they don't give much shit about planets - They're all living on movable structures.
Idrian War spoiler
So they let the idrians "take" and planetary systems in culture space, which they then had to "defend", draining even more ressources, while the culture lost very little, churning out warships like crazy.
The Idrian-Culture war might have been equivtech, but it was a foregone conclusion in my mind that the culture would've won it.
Even if the idrians somehow captured a culture Mind and were able to reverse engineer it, it's not like they would've been able to harness it- Much more likely it would've played along and fucked them over
Yeah while the criticism of new Trek's bullet sponge battles is fair, I think old Trek was just as guilty of arbitrary definitions of how many hits a ship can take, though they tended toward the other end of the spectrum. Shield strength and "we can't take another hit!" always just felt like such conveniently squishy concepts that was adjusted as needed by the story. I rolled my eyes at it during TNG in the same way that I roll my eyes at it in Disco.
TNG had some especially wonderful moments about this, such as when the shields went down three times in a single scene...
yeah... but that was a Bullshit fake ship made by a Q like entity with no-clip and other Hacks, the point was that the encounter made no sense.
I think my favorite part of this is the endless word vomit from people decrying Star Trek as having "fallen" to the Left.
How the fuck do you miss at any point that Star Trek is a massively anti-capitalist far-Left civilization? It's literally been that way from the start!
I think my favorite part of this is the endless word vomit from people decrying Star Trek as having "fallen" to the Left.
How the fuck do you miss at any point that Star Trek is a massively anti-capitalist far-Left civilization? It's literally been that way from the start!
I mean, these are the people who watched Kirk defeat multiple gods and watched Let this be your last battlefield, and said "well, there's no political message whatsoever in this show."
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I think my favorite part of this is the endless word vomit from people decrying Star Trek as having "fallen" to the Left.
How the fuck do you miss at any point that Star Trek is a massively anti-capitalist far-Left civilization? It's literally been that way from the start!
I mean, these are the people who watched Kirk defeat multiple gods and watched Let this be your last battlefield, and said "well, there's no political message whatsoever in this show."
I'm impressed, in a weird way. Watching Star Trek and missing the whole point of it at the same time is an incredible feat of dissonance. I honestly don't get how a person can fail so utterly to understand something they choose to watch.
what star trek represents to the right is that man can pull himself up and challenge anything, he's not dependent on the system. whether you agree or not, that message can be seen.
what star trek represents to the right is that man can pull himself up and challenge anything, he's not dependent on the system. whether you agree or not, that message can be seen.
Eh, except every one of those "can do anything" people, individually or as a whole, are supported by a whole system of those socialist bugaboos like completely free education, free housing, free food, free healthcare, not letting corporations run shit or ruin shit, and so on. Even Kirk doesn't claw his way up to captaincy from living in the gutter or any of that, he gets there by being raised in Federation society and supporting Federation ideas. For fuck's sake, even the ToS was adamant that humanity had outgrown money, and you can't have capitalism if there is no capital!
Yeah, humanity can achieve more than what we are now, but that also definitely means getting past all this super-capitalist shit that is literally killing the planet while subjecting billions to unneeded misery.
What the Right thinks is Star Trek is actually over in the other dimension with extra-sexy Kira, evil facial hair, and maintaining command through torture and murder.
EDIT: Though that Tweet embedded in sad insanity did yield this fantastic gem:
(Another clear parallel to The Culture, here, where ECM aside their fleet is largely disarmed but can self-refit to blow up a planet within a week or two of necessary.
(Do Not Fuck With The Culture.)
the Effector on a GSV can melt the surface of a planet from light years away, the culture is really laughably advanced
The Culture: when they turn the radio all the way up, it's a death star
I really wonder if any tv show could capture space combat in the culture and make it entertaining like the books do. The obvious answer would be veeeerrryyyy sloooowww motttioon
override367 on
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 2021
The key to capturing the Culture on-screen would be very much what the books do: leave out most of the "action" with the ships and stick to characters because ship action happens so fast that humans wouldn't perceive it anyway. One of the only sequences I think they could actually show a shipmind in combat would the one from Matter where the Shellworld has cut the ship off from the Grid, forcing it into extended combat with the fleets inside the world. With access to the Grid, it could normally handily win; without the Grid, it's forced into prolonged battle at visible speeds. Far more interesting to me would be the cosmic-scale architecture anyway.
But otherwise, I wouldn't involved Minds as more than characters, really. Them operating at full capacity as warships just doesn't work in terms of scale and scope. Even with being able to teleport people incredible distances, they can move so fast that they can skip through a whole solar system in a fraction of a second, thus making a high-speed flyby while picking somebody a bit of a trick because. You'd need really advanced tech to even know it passed through, nevermind seeing the ship.
There's also one good scene in Surface Detail where a human passenger on a Culture warship thinks they are watching the combat unfold, until the Mind comments that the next bit is their favourite part and it turns out the entire encounter happens in a fraction of a second. By and large though, the stories would have to focus on things other than space combat and merely have any space combat be something more recreational (see the destruction of the smatter infection in Surface Detail) or something that is a once in a season event where you really pull out all the stops and have to make sure you figure out how to present the encounter.
They get much better as you read on, the universe gets filled out more and more in every book.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
I've said this before and I'll say it again. Player of Games needs to be adapted into a movie or miniseries. It manages to showcase the sheer overwhelming advanced technology on a budget.
The key to capturing the Culture on-screen would be very much what the books do: leave out most of the "action" with the ships and stick to characters because ship action happens so fast that humans wouldn't perceive it anyway. One of the only sequences I think they could actually show a shipmind in combat would the one from Matter where the Shellworld has cut the ship off from the Grid, forcing it into extended combat with the fleets inside the world. With access to the Grid, it could normally handily win; without the Grid, it's forced into prolonged battle at visible speeds. Far more interesting to me would be the cosmic-scale architecture anyway.
But otherwise, I wouldn't involved Minds as more than characters, really. Them operating at full capacity as warships just doesn't work in terms of scale and scope. Even with being able to teleport people incredible distances, they can move so fast that they can skip through a whole solar system in a fraction of a second, thus making a high-speed flyby while picking somebody a bit of a trick because. You'd need really advanced tech to even know it passed through, nevermind seeing the ship.
It could be fun to see a culture story solely from a human perspective. The Minds would come over like described.. "close to gods, and on the far side."
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
I've only read the first book which was a little slow so I haven't gotten around to the others. Which is why my eyes glaze over and I skip past all the posts that mention them. (This isn't me asking for spoiler tags - given how old the books are it really shouldn't be expected.) But the more you guys talk about them the higher they move up in my ginormous reading backlog.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
I've only read the first book which was a little slow so I haven't gotten around to the others. Which is why my eyes glaze over and I skip past all the posts that mention them. (This isn't me asking for spoiler tags - given how old the books are it really shouldn't be expected.) But the more you guys talk about them the higher they move up in my ginormous reading backlog.
I didn't think the first book was very good. The 2nd book, Player of Games is a LOT better.
I've only read the first book which was a little slow so I haven't gotten around to the others. Which is why my eyes glaze over and I skip past all the posts that mention them. (This isn't me asking for spoiler tags - given how old the books are it really shouldn't be expected.) But the more you guys talk about them the higher they move up in my ginormous reading backlog.
I didn't think the first book was very good. The 2nd book, Player of Games is a LOT better.
The first book is a strange one. It describes the culture like.. If you want to cut out a form out of paper, and you do it, and then you have those cutoff pieces you don't need? That. The culture is the big thing in the middle of it all, but the description is mostly about the things it isn't.
I grew to like this book very much, but it's just a piece in the puzzle formed by the other books that end up showing kind of a picture of the culture when you read them.
And appreciating the piece is much more work before you know how you like the whole picture, I think
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Yeah it felt very...setup-y. Also the language used to describe people and places was always a little more vague than I preferred - it felt like I was often left filling in the blanks a little too much, which made characters and settings more like amorphous blobs with one or two meaningful traits than fully-fleshed out ideas. But I am perhaps too-used to George R.R. Martin's style of describing the fat dripping off of the capon nowadays.
That being said everyone seems to agree the series gets significantly better later on, to the extent that I've seen folks recommend skipping the first book altogether - much like skipping the first season of TNG.
I started with it and liked it, but I already had 2 more books ready and just continued on after. Maybe I wouldn't have as much if I had stopped after it for a while, I don't know.
The books aren't really chronological, only "consider phlebas" should be read before "look to windward".
"The Player of Games" is probably the most accessible of the books and might be a good start
It's also the next book in publication order, so if you started with consider phlebas, it would be the next one anyways
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Which is Lower Decks in a nutshell.
It wasn't until I finally watched Balance of Terror that I fundamentally understood the appeal of Star Trek ship battles; this intense submarine-inspired combat, where every hit matters and the pace of the fight is a drawn out battle of wits between the two crews. To this day I think the only time (I've seen) that they've capably recreated what they did with Balance of Terror was in Wrath of Khan, and even that didn't feel quite as fleshed out as a battle, ultimately being reduced to a vehicle for expressing things about the characters (which is good, and the model that Star Trek generally tries to follow with good battles).
There are some exciting to watch ship battles in DS9, but those are when they started investing a lot more in CGI, and honestly tend to be exciting because they show the Defiant whipping around larger ships/DS9 like the millennium falcon flying around star destroyers, etc.
I always wondered what "rerouting power" was supposed to accomplish after hull plating had already failed. I kind of assumed that if hull plating was down, that more or less meant it was already blown to bits. I mean these aren't shields where you can just allocate more energy to maintain field integrity.
Tachyons
And I mean they literally pour it. There's just some ensign with a bucket full of energy watching all the power slop out from a hit, then they fill it back up. Rerouting power means he just borrows another ensign's bucket and dumps that power in the tank instead.
The Expanse was brought up earlier and I feel like that show does space battles well, in the sense that they're brutal and don't last long because stuff blows up easily. But that doesn't really cater well to a show that is ostensibly character driven so /shrug.
TNG had some especially wonderful moments about this, such as when the shields went down three times in a single scene...
I always disliked how inconsistently the Galaxy class was portrayed. It was at once both constantly played up as a titan among starships but was also always one hit away from exploding from an attack by <rando alien of the week>
I feel like the Expanse is fairly character driven!
I don't want to compare how competent The Expanse is to TNG in terms of the spaceshippy FX and combat bits that appeal to my inner 12 year old - that would be insane, it's 3 decades newer in its effects. I do think it's fair to compare it to Discovery or Picard and easily see some areas where those shows get it wrong!
Like, does anyone think the final scene of Picard wouldn't have been better with one starfleet ship and one romulan ship?
But BloodySloth has the right of it, for TNG the space battles were simply there for the story. If TNG was a tabletop game, the DM doesn't have a set of complex rules for space combat because its an afterthought, people just say what they wanna do and the DM wings it
Like that time they got attacked by two ferengi-piloted birds of prey, who were firing pulse phaser bolts like machine-guns. And in response the Enterprise fires one of those a single, long-buildup phaser beam shots from the saucer, and it just gentle caresses one ferengi ship, and that was their one and only offensive move.
13yo me was like... "That sucks."
To be fair, two points stand out:
1) This was a rehash of the Constitution class problem
2) This was the entire reason for the Defiant and Sovereign class ships later on in the series. (Per plot, the real reason obviously being rule of cool). In an escalating threat environment, Federation needed more battle capable ships.
Later dominion war refits/builds of the galaxy class saw most of the components needed for the non-war functions removed and more fighting capability added per canon, as in more shield generators, more torpedo launch tubes and storage space, and more phaser strips.
It's kind of why fighting a war with the federation in setting was always a dicey proposition - their non-war spaceships were absolutely more than capable of holding their own against the dedicated warships of the other big players, and that was without switching to a full war footing.
So any war against the federation you didn't win decisively fast would be less and less likely to be won as it turned into a stalemate, as the federation very much was capable of ripping out those recreational facilities and replacing them with armament, and so for progressively more dangerous.
And that's without the power of federation technobabble / prophets disappearing a whole fleet
(Do Not Fuck With The Culture.)
Even worse if your opponent is the culture, because they don't give much shit about planets - They're all living on movable structures.
Idrian War spoiler
The Idrian-Culture war might have been equivtech, but it was a foregone conclusion in my mind that the culture would've won it.
Even if the idrians somehow captured a culture Mind and were able to reverse engineer it, it's not like they would've been able to harness it- Much more likely it would've played along and fucked them over
yeah... but that was a Bullshit fake ship made by a Q like entity with no-clip and other Hacks, the point was that the encounter made no sense.
Posted on the official account
I think my favorite part of this is the endless word vomit from people decrying Star Trek as having "fallen" to the Left.
How the fuck do you miss at any point that Star Trek is a massively anti-capitalist far-Left civilization? It's literally been that way from the start!
I mean, these are the people who watched Kirk defeat multiple gods and watched Let this be your last battlefield, and said "well, there's no political message whatsoever in this show."
I'm impressed, in a weird way. Watching Star Trek and missing the whole point of it at the same time is an incredible feat of dissonance. I honestly don't get how a person can fail so utterly to understand something they choose to watch.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
Eh, except every one of those "can do anything" people, individually or as a whole, are supported by a whole system of those socialist bugaboos like completely free education, free housing, free food, free healthcare, not letting corporations run shit or ruin shit, and so on. Even Kirk doesn't claw his way up to captaincy from living in the gutter or any of that, he gets there by being raised in Federation society and supporting Federation ideas. For fuck's sake, even the ToS was adamant that humanity had outgrown money, and you can't have capitalism if there is no capital!
Yeah, humanity can achieve more than what we are now, but that also definitely means getting past all this super-capitalist shit that is literally killing the planet while subjecting billions to unneeded misery.
What the Right thinks is Star Trek is actually over in the other dimension with extra-sexy Kira, evil facial hair, and maintaining command through torture and murder.
EDIT: Though that Tweet embedded in sad insanity did yield this fantastic gem:
the Effector on a GSV can melt the surface of a planet from light years away, the culture is really laughably advanced
The Culture: when they turn the radio all the way up, it's a death star
I really wonder if any tv show could capture space combat in the culture and make it entertaining like the books do. The obvious answer would be veeeerrryyyy sloooowww motttioon
But otherwise, I wouldn't involved Minds as more than characters, really. Them operating at full capacity as warships just doesn't work in terms of scale and scope. Even with being able to teleport people incredible distances, they can move so fast that they can skip through a whole solar system in a fraction of a second, thus making a high-speed flyby while picking somebody a bit of a trick because. You'd need really advanced tech to even know it passed through, nevermind seeing the ship.
It could be fun to see a culture story solely from a human perspective. The Minds would come over like described.. "close to gods, and on the far side."
I didn't think the first book was very good. The 2nd book, Player of Games is a LOT better.
The first book is a strange one. It describes the culture like.. If you want to cut out a form out of paper, and you do it, and then you have those cutoff pieces you don't need? That. The culture is the big thing in the middle of it all, but the description is mostly about the things it isn't.
I grew to like this book very much, but it's just a piece in the puzzle formed by the other books that end up showing kind of a picture of the culture when you read them.
And appreciating the piece is much more work before you know how you like the whole picture, I think
That being said everyone seems to agree the series gets significantly better later on, to the extent that I've seen folks recommend skipping the first book altogether - much like skipping the first season of TNG.
The books aren't really chronological, only "consider phlebas" should be read before "look to windward".
"The Player of Games" is probably the most accessible of the books and might be a good start
It's also the next book in publication order, so if you started with consider phlebas, it would be the next one anyways