STAR TREK: A Long Road (Voyager Fix It Quest)

DragonCobolt · May 8, 2022

The Dragon: Once per episode, at the beginning of combat place an Advantage on the field representing a cunning tactic or strategy devised by Danara Pel.

NAME	USS Voyager	PROF.	MULTIROLE
CLASS	Sovereign Class Heavy Exploration Vessel	CONST	2371
SHIELDS	13/13	RESISTANCE	6	SCALE	6
POWER	13/13	CREW SUPPORT	6	SMALL CRAFT	5

		COMMS	ENGINES	STRUCTURE	COMPUTERS	SENSORS	WEAPONS
BREACHES		0/6	0/6	0/6	0/6	0/6	0/6
		9	11	10	11	9	10
COMMAND	3	12	14	13	14	12	13
CONNING	2	12	14	13	14	12	13
ENGINEERING	2	11	13	12	13	11	12
SECURITY	3	13	15	14	16	13	14
SCIENCE	2	11	13	12	13	11	12
MEDICINE	2	11	13	12	13	11	12

TALENTS	Command Ship: Can give advantages using Command within range to Away Missions or to supporting ships. EMH: Has an EMH! Improved Warp Drive: When going to warp, roll 1cd on an effect, regain the power point. Quantum Torpedoes: Can use Quantum Torpedoes! (60 total) Secondary Reactors: +5 to Power High Resolution Sensors: +1 momentum to out of combat sensor checks.
TRAITS	Federation Starship – A highly sophisticated and advanced vessel, with holodecks, replicators, and similar comforts, primarily designed to handle multiple operations. Highly sensitive and requiring constant maintenance, the vehicle is less rugged than other interstellar craft Maquis Crew - a good chunk of the crew are former Maquis troublemakers. Expect discipline problems and unorthodox plans.
WEAPONS	Phaser Arrays Power Cost: 1-3 \| Range: Medium \| Damage: 9cd [+1 per extra power spent] Can Use Spread: Hit +1 time at ½ damage per effect OR Area: hit +1 ship per effect within close range. Versatile 2: Gain 2 bonus momentum with a successful hit Photon Torpedoes Power Cost: 0 \| Range: Long \| Damage: 6cd High Yield: If it causes 1 breach, it causes +1 breach Quantum Torpedoes Power Cost: 0 \| Range: Long \| Damage: 7cd (Vicious 1 - +1 damage on effects) High Yield: If it causes 1 breach, it causes +1 breach Calibrations: Requires 1 minor action to calibrate Tractor Beam (Strength 5) Power Cost: 0 \| Range: Close \| Damage: None Effect: If successfully established, enemies face a diff 5 check to escape.

CREW COMPLIMENT (Base Stat: 9 | Base Skill: 2)
CO: Captain Katheryn Janeway (Skilled: Command, Science | Weakness: Combat)

SPECIAL ABILITY: "We Can Be Better" - if you succeed on any diplomatic check with Janeway, Get +1 momentum

XO: Commander D-91 (Skilled: Command | Weakness: Socialization)
HELM: Lt. Tom Paris (Skilled: Conn | Weakness: Not Being A Fucking Up)
TACTICAL: Ensign Harry Kimm (Skilled: Gunnery | Weakness: Harry Kim)
SECURITY: Lt. JG Amy Strong (Skilled: Personal Combat | Weakness: Lying)

MAQUIS HEADBREAKER: C'nola (Skilled: Combat, Sneaking and Scheming | Weakness: Emotional Wreck)

SCIENCE: Tuvok (Skilled: Science | Weakness: Emotionless)
COMMS: Lt. Bian T'are (Skilled: Communications | Weakness: Combat)
MEDICAL: The EMH (Skilled: Doctor | Weakness: Kind of a Dick)
ENGINEER: B'lanna Torres (Skilled: Engineering | Weakness: Also a dick)

SECONDARY CHARACTERS
Ensign Steve (Useless Security Goon)
Ensign Becky (plural fighter jock)
Petty Officer Third Class Jessie (Hard working engineer)
Crewman Billingsly (Dude, Billingsly!)
Crewman Chandra (Concerned Crewman)
Bifurcate (bidimensional robot girlfriend of Harry Kim)
Princess Lyan Positron (runaway daughter of magician most foul and girlfriend of Harry Kim)
Soria Flyte (Pegasus girl and girlfriend of Harry Kim)
Mirror Universe Trevor (he's fine!)

NAME	MRSS Val Jean	PROF.	TACOPS
CLASS	Keldon Class Heavy Cruiser	CONST	2370
SHIELDS	12/12	RESISTANCE	5	SCALE	4
POWER	7/7	CREW SUPPORT	4	SMALL CRAFT	3

		COMMS	ENGINES	STRUCTURE	COMPUTERS	SENSORS	WEAPONS
BREACHES		0/4	0/4	0/4	0/4	0/4	0/4
		9	9	9	8	7	10
COMMAND	3	12	12	12	11	10	13
CONNING	2	11	11	11	10	9	12
ENGINEERING	2	11	11	11	10	9	12
SECURITY	3	12	12	12	11	10	13
SCIENCE	1	10	10	10	9	8	11
MEDICINE	2	11	11	11	10	9	12

TALENTS	Electronic Warfare Suite: Whenever making a Jamming or Intercept communications check, can spend 2 momentum to select +1 target (repeatable.) Fast Targeting Systems: No +1 diff for called shots Improved Hull Integrity: +1 Resistance Cloaking Device: Spend 3 power, and make a Control+Engineering + Engines + Security check with a diff of 2. If successful, gain the Cloaked Trait (impossible to detect, cannot attack, shields are down.) It takes a minor action to decloak.
TRAITS	Cardassian Ship – Durable, uncomfortable, close, cramped and cheap. Thinks creature comforts are for other people and technical sophistication is for people who haven't spent decades starving to death. The fact that the starving could have been avoided if the government were less...you know, monstrous doesn't seem to have occurred to that many of them. Okampan Crew – the crew are bright, perky, cheerful, and incredibly psychically powerful. Individually, they're all better than Vulcans, and as a gestalt? Who knows!
WEAPONS	Phaser Arrays Power Cost: 1-3 \| Range: Medium \| Damage: 7-9cd (Spread: Hit +1 time at ½ damage per effect OR Area) Versatile 2: Gain X bonus momentum with a successful hit Disruptor Banks Range: Medium \| Damage: 8-10cd (Vicious 1: Each effect adds +1 damage) Tractor Beam (Strength 3)

CREW COMPLIMENT (Base Stat: 8 | Base Skill: 1)
CO: Lt. Commander Brian Wacoche (Skilled: Commando Tactics | Weakness: Independent)
TACTICAL: Seska (Skilled: Being Seska | Weakness: Everything Else)
CONN: R'lash skilled: Piloting | Weakness: Romulan Fuckup)
ESPIONAGE: Kes (Skilled: Commando Tactics | Weakness: Naive)

Crewman Stadi - Age 23, Betazoid, born Beta Colony-5 to Zani and Talwyn of the House of Riis, survived by her sisters Tari and Batri.
R'mor - age 182, Vulcan, burn on Romulus to R'tan and Leslali, survived by his twelve nieces and nephews across the Empire

Revan4221X · May 15, 2022

SweetJackal said:
Of the 7 seasons of Voyager, this path would share about the first 3 seasons before trekking into new content.

Actually yeah this is a good point, technically if we don't pick the "Joke Option" we will still have the chance to go the other way depending on how things go, until we reach a certain threshold of course.

Skippy · May 15, 2022

Spart117MC said:
You're thinking about the Defiant. While the Sovereign featured originally in First Contact there's nothing to say she was built to fight Borg, whereas Sisko's baby explicitly was.

I definitely recall something along the lines of Starfleet's new fleet concept being Sovreigns as battleships/command ships, supported by entire squadrons of Defiants, when they were in "Oh shit we could be a few years from an all-out Borg invasion.". Then again, I think that is quite probably fanon?

The point remains, it's our state-of-the-art exploration cruiser with a lot of new tech in it, with some of its design undoubtedly informed by experiences of the Enterprise-D fighting the Borg.

DragonCobolt said:
Oh, they WILL assimilate your ship, immediately, if they notice you.

But again, a single ship is, from their perspective, like bacteria. They do not care.

The reason is actually fairly simple: Over millennia, the borg response has been honed and they know that assimilation is...kind of destructive. It's fast, yes. It's efficient, yes. But it also has failure rates. A species that makes Sovereigns is worth assimilating - but a single Sovereign is not worth noticing unless it draws attention and causes damage because assimilation processes are destructive.

Like, they're more likely to get a charred wreck and a few hints of technology than the actual technology.

This does mean that, knowing this, you do have an...interesting bargaining chip. If you can find out how to make a galactic sized brain even notice you're talking.

I guess then the crucial point is how easily "noticeable" a single ship at warp is... which is always kind of vague in Star Trek.

This is a semi-related point, but one Conversation I expect we're going to have soon is whether to copy the cloaking technology on the Val Jean and put it on Voyager. Obviously, huge political/legal clusterfuck if that gets home, and Seska might literally scuttle the ship rather than allow it unless we can get her approval, but for a ship in our situation, it would be immensely useful in avoiding threats.

Bernkastel · May 15, 2022

The middle route is something I could go for, but I'd need a good idea of how much repositioning of canon/canon inspired stuff might be done and how much "fix voyager" content would still be possible. If we can get a good chunk or even all the good possibilities from canon material, that's the big issue gone. Plus, going towards a "end up in not fully explored dominion space, possibly while they're still hostile" situation as a finale could be interesting.

DragonCobolt · May 15, 2022

Skippy said:
guess then the crucial point is how easily "noticeable" a single ship at warp is... which is always kind of vague in Star Trek.

For normal people, easy!

For Borg? Again, I'm not using the bacteria scale lightly, most of their attention is on planets and solar systems that they're engineering into megastructures.

Scrivener · May 15, 2022

[X] The Middle Path (aka the "I too Like Babylon 5" route]

samdamandias · May 15, 2022

[X] The Long Way (aka the standard Voyager "Canon")

CyberEnby said:
as long as I got to make Neat Stuff and put it on the Cool Spaceship.

So, ah, It's my understanding that will take significant rules tweaks.

SAD doesn't like change that persists between episodes.

open_sketch said:
also three uuuh when is the dominion war…

Right about the time we'd hit Dominion space.

On the far side of the wormholeWith probably a year of solid running to reach it.

DragonCobolt said:
A species that makes Sovereigns is worth assimilating - but a single Sovereign is not worth noticing unless it draws attention and causes damage because assimilation processes are destructive.

Or... have one drone on that ship observe passively.

You assimilate the ship, you get a few shinies. You carefully watch the ship, you find out so much more.

Yes, I do subscribe to the hypothesis that the Borg could defeat and assimilate the Federation, but instead choose to keep poking the Federation with a stick because the Federation always comes up with such interesting ideas.

Spoit · May 15, 2022

[X] The Short Way (aka the "Fucking Seriously? Star Trek V?" Route)
[X] The Middle Path (aka the "I too Like Babylon 5" route]

Revan4221X · May 15, 2022

On the topic of the Borg, their Hive Mind is…weird. It kinda has to be in order to function across lightyears. It's not a psychic thing, I think, but instead is technological. Their ability to transmit information is far greater than anything the Federation has, but just how great? There is always going to be some lag between cubes light years apart. Seconds? Minutes? Days? Not even getting into cross quadrant communications. On some level Borg Cubes, Drones and what have you have to have some basic OS that functions separately from the collective in order to account for the lag. And we know there is lag as many times people talk about cutting off communications from the wider collective so they don't share information.

So staying under the radar of the Collective itself does make sense if it's not really keeping track of every minute detail a sensor or cube picks up, that due to lag will also be out of date. Sure the collective could calculate trajectory and shit but that's processing power that is not being put to use on everything else.

I wouldn't really call them a Hive Mind honestly. The Collective is just a massive sharing of information, not a giant singular mind controlling everything.

Gawain · May 15, 2022

[X] The Long Way (aka the standard Voyager "Canon")

Skippy · May 15, 2022

DragonCobolt said:
For normal people, easy!

For Borg? Again, I'm not using the bacteria scale lightly, most of their attention is on planets and solar systems that they're engineering into megastructures.

I guess that sort of blends into the way the Borg are written in Trek overall, which is necessary for most plots involving them, but I find slightly uninteresting. A post-singularity mega-civilisation should not in principle be less capable of noticing a single ship, just because they are also doing things at a bigger scale.

Like, we use the analogy to a human and bacteria, but a human being does not have eyes and independent brains in every one of their cells. (I mean, actually we kind of do if we're analogising chemical sensors/the nucleus, and also the human body very much does notice bacteria if it is going somewhere it should not be, but you get what I mean.) The merely local processing abilities of like, a single cube/sphere should be enough to recognise "single ship at warp, potentially interesting, eat", and act on it. This does not need to break the "hive mind" writing of the Borg, because even individual ants can act on initiative if something potentially edible is going near a hive. You could write basically a flowchart that would handle a situations like this, without giving individual nodes too much autonomy.

This sort of goes into a general thing, where when SF writers are trying to write nonhuman minds, generally they just act like a human mind, but wearing a funny hat, and kind of worse than us at thinking about some general class of situations or problems. So Vulcans find it very hard to conceive that other people will not act as rationally as they do, the Borg cannot notice things they should very obviously be able to notice, etc.. There are solutions you can invoke for any of these individually with some inventiveness - Vulcan logic allows for quick decisions under pressure, but tends to impair empathy - the Borg hivemind's architecture does not scale terribly well, making attention a scarce resource, and it is afraid to modify itself because this will lead to instability -but the pattern of always needing explanations remains.

Admittedly, I think this is understandable because it's actually quite hard to try and imagine how a nonhuman mind would operate, especially if their minds work better than ours for some classes of problems - basically only some Hard SF writers even try, and I'm not sure how many succeed. For a series like Star Trek, which is more about being accessible to a wide audience whilst grappling with idealistic themes, I'm not even sure it would be a good choice. But despite that, I am still left occasionally wanting to see Star Trek as written by Peter Watts. 😅

Sorry, this is kind of a big digression and does not really have a lot to do with the Quest lol

DragonCobolt · May 15, 2022

No, you're not getting it: It's not that they can't detect you, it's that they don't care.

buli-buli · May 15, 2022

[X] The Middle Path (aka the "I too Like Babylon 5" route]

NavySeel · May 15, 2022

[x] The Long Way (aka the standard Voyager "Canon")
Hard to do a Fixit if you're just flat out avoiding all the things that need fixing.

Skippy · May 15, 2022

DragonCobolt said:
No, you're not getting it: It's not that they can't detect you, it's that they don't care.

Well sure, but this is kind of going back to what I'm talking about in terms of anthropomorphising/writing nonhuman superintelligences as flawed versions of humans. Like, an ant swarm does not have to care very much about an individual morsel of food to eat it, if one of its columns comes across one on the forest floor. It does not even need to have an internal cognitive process that maps very well onto "care".

All it needs to do is look at the relative weight of getting something out of the morsel, minus the relative weight of expending too many resources, and if the answer is a positive number, it eats. The fact that the morsel may be inconsequentially tiny compared to other things taking up the lion's share of its attention does not really change that calculus - it's not a human mind, with limited attention.

Anyway, I really enjoy how you're writing the quest, and don't want this extended digression to detract from that or give the position I'm unhappy about something I'm not.

Derpmind · May 15, 2022

NavySeel said:
[x] The Long Way (aka the standard Voyager "Canon")
Hard to do a Fixit if you're just flat out avoiding all the things that need fixing.

Borg space does need a lot of percussive maintenance. :thonk:

Breadnaugt · May 15, 2022

[X] The Short Way (aka the "Fucking Seriously? Star Trek V?" Route)

Based on this helpful map KarmaA posted, the route towards the galactic core is basically the same direction anyway, allowing the quest to use existing material at least until The Void, when the course would diverge.

I don't see a down side. The characters sure as hell aren't going to chicken out over the idea of confronting a mid-tier (at best) semi-corporeal entity.

Source 2700x2700px 3.43 MB

Derek58 · May 15, 2022

[X] The Middle Path (aka the "I too Like Babylon 5" route]

I do like B5!

Derpmind · May 15, 2022

Adhoc vote count started by Derpmind on May 15, 2022 at 1:50 PM, finished with 48 posts and 26 votes.

12 people have voted
[x] The Long Way (aka the standard Voyager "Canon")
10 people have voted
[X] The Middle Path (aka the "I too Like Babylon 5" route]
- ThatGazzer
- QueenPally
- Model DC.14F
- SweetJackal
- Scrivener
- buli-buli
- Derek58
- Derpmind
- Spoit
- KRISF
6 people have voted
[X] The Short Way (aka the "Fucking Seriously? Star Trek V?" Route)
- Derpmind
- Spoit
- JNewbold54
- Skippy
- Parzival95
- Breadnaugt

Rivenscryr · May 15, 2022

[X] The Middle Path (aka the "I too Like Babylon 5" route]

sciencefiction · May 15, 2022

[X] The Long Way (aka the standard Voyager "Canon")

Also what happened to Val Jean are they keeping it? It doesn't make sense to abandon a second working Star Ship but it does mean that they might be short on crew to run both Voyager and the Val Jean.

RvengefuLobster · May 15, 2022

[X] The Long Way (aka the standard Voyager "Canon")

As a reader, I'm here for the long way cus I want to keep seeing Dragon improve core Voyager.

As a voter on the ship I'd probably vote for the short or middle way. I find it hard to imagine crew members would vote for seven decades of silent running that my children would be lucky to see the end of. Even if the Borg are a devil you know, they are also a devil that overrides your will and turns you into a part of their collective mind.

So it feels to me like there needs to be some narrative factor that comes along and says "that's a nice democratic solution your crew found there. It would be a shame if somethingccame along and forced your hand."

KarmaA · May 15, 2022

[X] The Short Way (aka the "Fucking Seriously? Star Trek V?" Route)
I don't see them not investigating this possibility. Even if it doesn't work out it's basically in the same direction. Who knows if the entity is still there, it's been a minute right?

[] The Long Way (aka the standard Voyager "Canon")
If that plan fails, you've really only lost a couple years of borg "safety" since either way you'll end up doing a lot of flying in unexplored space. Still down for Hirogen and 8472 encounters either way.

Spart117MC said:
You're thinking about the Defiant. While the Sovereign featured originally in First Contact there's nothing to say she was built to fight Borg, whereas Sisko's baby explicitly was.

You're right that it ain't specifically anti-borg but it is top of the line Fed tech. I could easily see the Borg snapping it up if they scanned it or it got their attention. As others have mentioned, the Borg probably wouldn't chase it very far but if Voyager got too close they'd nab it like a fly in a Venus flytrap. The only time they seem to ignore stuff is if it isn't shiny. Getting ahold of it's databanks would give them a lot of information to crunch on.

Spart117MC said:
Worse, we get tossed into the past and then the quest becomes the Discovery Fix It Quest.

I'd vote for Enterprise over that TBH, could tie in well with temporal Cold War storylines/characters.

CyberFemme · May 15, 2022

So, the thing is that people live a lot longer in ST? From a science standpoint, there's actually no reason they shouldn't have biological immortality yet. It might be a weird cultural holdover from the Eugenics Wars? But yeah, even with 70 years, I think that's basically enough to take them to retirement age or a bit beyond?

Or am I just projecting my own expectations about medical technology onto ST?

10ebbor10 · May 15, 2022

CyberEnby said:
So, the thing is that people live a lot longer in ST? From a science standpoint, there's actually no reason they shouldn't have biological immortality yet. It might be a weird cultural holdover from the Eugenics Wars? But yeah, even with 70 years, I think that's basically enough to take them to retirement age or a bit beyond?

Or am I just projecting my own expectations about medical technology onto ST?

Star Trek life expectancy in TOS was about 100, increasing to 120 by the time of Voyager.

Augmented humans can live far longer, but that is taboo after the eugenic wars.

Rivenscryr · May 15, 2022

sciencefiction said:
Also what happened to Val Jean are they keeping it? It doesn't make sense to abandon a second working Star Ship but it does mean that they might be short on crew to run both Voyager and the Val Jean.

Pretty sure the ship is still there. It would be a shame not to be able to have a cloak-capable starship (nominally under the control of the Cardassian Union Space Navy - and thus not under the terms of the Treaty of Algernon) to help scout areas out.

How'd we do for salvaging, if there was any debris or such post-battle?

STAR TREK: A Long Road (Voyager Fix It Quest)

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