Richardson
CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
- Location
- Yes
It was a bit of a stretch for Starfleet. And later on, it only really breaks because they keep fucking with it instead of following the instructions.
Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete)
- Thread starter Derek M
- Start date
- Crossover
It was a bit of a stretch for Starfleet. And later on, it only really breaks because they keep fucking with it instead of following the instructions.
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
The key thing about tinkers and tinker-tech is that tinkers do not fully understand the tech they produce and their shards actively 'cheat' to allow them to create and shape materials far beyond the level that could actually be achieved using the tools they have available; this is why tinker-tech is never inherently reproducible for anyone other than the tinker or Dragon, who has a specialized thinker power dedicated to reverse engineering tinker-tech.
Federation tech on the other hand is fully known and understood by the Federation; they know how it works and why it works, it's backed up by perfectly understandable and teachable theory and most importantly it can be (and regularly is) further improved by the people with sufficient understanding of it.
Federation tech is so far above and beyond anything a tinker could do that the mere knowledge of its existence would cause every tinker on the planet to turn fluorescent green with envy. Hell, a Tricorder could probably scan a piece of tinker-tech so precisely that the scans could be used to accurately figure out and reproduce it's method of function, and a Replicator should easily be able to reproduce whatever cheating the shard did to the materials.
The Holodeck is one of the few pieces of Federation tech that is demonstrably completely reliable and safe when not fucked with, so of course they keep fucking with it.
That said, even when the Holodeck goes off the rails (because some smart cookie decided to dump the transporter buffer straight into the main computer core) the consequences tend to be much less catastrophic and more easily recoverable than when other pieces of Federation tech go off the rails.
Of course, the fact that the Federation has an apparently schizophrenic attitude towards developing new technology (while we're building our first ever prototype cloaking device, instead of just building a standard cloak prototype, let's see if we can make the cloaking device phase us out of reality so that we can fly through planets while invisible!) very much does not help, as half of the tech on their ships is so bleeding edge and untested that even the people who theoretically understand what it's doing don't really understand what it's doing. This is incredibly annoying for anyone fighting the Federation, as their ships have an alarming habit of just suddenly doing something utterly impossible without warning, randomly screwing someone over in the process.
Federation tech on the other hand is fully known and understood by the Federation; they know how it works and why it works, it's backed up by perfectly understandable and teachable theory and most importantly it can be (and regularly is) further improved by the people with sufficient understanding of it.
Federation tech is so far above and beyond anything a tinker could do that the mere knowledge of its existence would cause every tinker on the planet to turn fluorescent green with envy. Hell, a Tricorder could probably scan a piece of tinker-tech so precisely that the scans could be used to accurately figure out and reproduce it's method of function, and a Replicator should easily be able to reproduce whatever cheating the shard did to the materials.
The Holodeck is one of the few pieces of Federation tech that is demonstrably completely reliable and safe when not fucked with, so of course they keep fucking with it.
That said, even when the Holodeck goes off the rails (because some smart cookie decided to dump the transporter buffer straight into the main computer core) the consequences tend to be much less catastrophic and more easily recoverable than when other pieces of Federation tech go off the rails.
Of course, the fact that the Federation has an apparently schizophrenic attitude towards developing new technology (while we're building our first ever prototype cloaking device, instead of just building a standard cloak prototype, let's see if we can make the cloaking device phase us out of reality so that we can fly through planets while invisible!) very much does not help, as half of the tech on their ships is so bleeding edge and untested that even the people who theoretically understand what it's doing don't really understand what it's doing. This is incredibly annoying for anyone fighting the Federation, as their ships have an alarming habit of just suddenly doing something utterly impossible without warning, randomly screwing someone over in the process.
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Richardson
CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
- Location
- Yes
In short, as a reminder:
And I can find no fault with this. They're literally a race of madmen with an unstable annihilation bomb as their primary power supply. And then they decided to overclock that sumbitch. You'd think they wouldn't find ways to be even more bullshit. You'd really fucking think they would. There's a reason why effectively the scale jumps from their madness, to the CULTURE, TO THE TIMELORDS. And in 600-800 years, they cut out the middleman and make the TIMELORDS SIT UP. Their solution to 'alien probe asking for whales' is "Fuck it, we're taking this Kia of Prey back in time and stealing a pair". The Varga is going to make Miles sit up, sure. But mostly because it's a Q-ish level being (emphasis on 'ish') attached to a human. Beyond that, yawn, been there, taunted it before.
- Location
- Ylisse
The best thing I have seen about the Federation is that in that universe things like Back to the Future and other mad science are seen as historically accurate rather than fiction by the rest of the universe just based on how the Federation acts.
- Location
- Austin, Texas
Somehow this brought to mind this headcanon I saw on Tumblr years ago. https://www.tor.com/2016/10/17/the-answer-to-why-humans-are-so-central-in-star-trek/
Richardson
CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
- Location
- Yes
You've both been Pegasus'd.
Oh, and as further proof, as is now apparently mostly canonical, the federation manages to finally make their own time-drive in 2411, less than 35 years after the last currently shown screen appearance. Because they got into a pissing match with a K3 civilization, tried to use a time-gun to undo them, realized that wasn't going to work, and turned their retgone gun into a time drive to go back to when the K3 civ got kicked off their original homeworld (because they pissed off and frightened all their neighbors with their own prime directive) and realized that they were the assholes. Said incident proceeded to cause their version of The Great Timewar a month later from their point of view, when a future-tech 'turn suns back on' device got turned into a starkiller, pissed off one of the primary factions of that war (because their sun got killed), and because the chief scientist working on their retgone gun had his wife retgone'd from a "Fuck it, we're doing this live" test of the gun gone horribly wrong. That the klingons went "Whoa, hang on here". Like... the escalation is nearly Hebert-like.
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
Yuuup. The best part about that bit of headcanon is not that it's hilarious, it's that it's scarily accurate to what is actually depicted on-screen throughout the entire series. The 'sun torus' sequence of events described isn't an actual Star Trek plot, but it does match all the correct themes and story structure to be a Star Trek plot. That could have happened in a Star Trek episode or two and no-one would bat an eyelid because it would all fit right in, the Federation really is that unhinged when it comes to performing SCIENCE!
In fact, I suspect that the Federation has forgotten how to do normal science entirely, they kept getting such good results from SCIENCE! that they ended up systematically replacing all of their research personnel with Doc Brown.
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- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
One of the problem with the Federation, and many of their allies, is that there are actually not that many people who seem to really understand their own tech. There are a lot of people who nearly understand it, but they have... worrying gaps... in that knowledge.
And not a one of them has ever read a safety standard they agreed with.
Which explains an awful lot about Starfleet and their amazing ability to get out of bizarre situations, that they have mostly got themselves into in the first place. A lot of this is basically an accident because someone didn't read the instructions and installed the plasma conduit upside down, possibly due to it making a more interesting sound that way up...
And they're absolutely terrible at taking an idea to the logical conclusion, often coming up with something neat then getting distracted by something shinier before working out all the bugs.
Taylor and the Varga would find this annoying
They would find the Fed's constant fucking around with time travel in a half understood way positively mad, even by their own standards. And would probably point out, somewhat forcefully, that just because their universe seemed to allow it far past the bounds of sanity, this wouldn't be the case everywhere, so they should knock it off right the hell now before someone really scary turned up for a word or two...
And not a one of them has ever read a safety standard they agreed with.
Which explains an awful lot about Starfleet and their amazing ability to get out of bizarre situations, that they have mostly got themselves into in the first place. A lot of this is basically an accident because someone didn't read the instructions and installed the plasma conduit upside down, possibly due to it making a more interesting sound that way up...
And they're absolutely terrible at taking an idea to the logical conclusion, often coming up with something neat then getting distracted by something shinier before working out all the bugs.
Taylor and the Varga would find this annoying
They would find the Fed's constant fucking around with time travel in a half understood way positively mad, even by their own standards. And would probably point out, somewhat forcefully, that just because their universe seemed to allow it far past the bounds of sanity, this wouldn't be the case everywhere, so they should knock it off right the hell now before someone really scary turned up for a word or two...
Richardson
CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
- Location
- Yes
The best part is that they're all apparently at least partially The Family packaged. They're all absurdly smarter than us to an unreal degree. They're teaching kids about points on how wormholes work in detail in the 2370s when they're still in middle school. Their tactical officers can create novel ways to modify sensors. Let's not even get started on fucking Paris. Laforge went from HELM to CHIEF ENGINEER in one go, etc. Kahn--a full-on The Family package effectively--was beaten with a bit of struggle by a 'bog-standard' human in a fist-fight (A brute 3 going mano-a-mano with maybe a brute 1 and getting solidly trounced with a melee weapon) in addition to the whole 'read the manual and learned how to fly a starship' bullshit. Picard manages to accidentally create, THEN SOLVE a paradox the hard way. The various absurdities with the obscene level of omnidisciplinarianism in Starfleet, etc.
I mean, that's primarily why I suggested the Varga-help that I did. Because the biggest thing that the Varga (and Taylor) can supply is exotic materials that Starfleet engineering can't yet supply, and folding space on itself until it cries.
And you know the scary thing? Given they already make teeny warp fields so they can effectively FTL compute, I wouldn't put it past Miles to be able to completely and totally understand Family math and build generators to manipulate space using it. And again, he's not actually the federation's best. He's ENLISTED. Like...
Starfleet engineering is BULLSHIT. (What? Clock's not here to say it yet.) That one Vorta is probably not wrong when he says that a SF engineer could make a replicator out of a random rock lying around.
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
Well, Earth did go through the Eugenics Wars. And while geneering was banned for awhile as a consequence, it's entirely probable that by that point the majority of the Human species had already been geneered for superior brainmeats. It would, after all, only have taken one of those genetic engineers deciding to design and release a retrovirus that would slowly and subtly guide and improve Human development from generation to generation to affect the entire species within relatively short order, and once done that sort of thing can't really be undone even if you notice it.
Multiple scary someones already showed up for a word or two, they didn't have any more luck in avoiding getting randomly screwed over by Federation SCIENCE! than the less scary people did. Even the Q ended up with a healthy respect for the Federation, despite being the closest thing to literal gods that exists within the setting.
It's not like the Federation hasn't suffered the consequences of their institutional mad science, they just have a history of getting out of those consequences with even more mad science.
Multiple scary someones already showed up for a word or two, they didn't have any more luck in avoiding getting randomly screwed over by Federation SCIENCE! than the less scary people did. Even the Q ended up with a healthy respect for the Federation, despite being the closest thing to literal gods that exists within the setting.
It's not like the Federation hasn't suffered the consequences of their institutional mad science, they just have a history of getting out of those consequences with even more mad science.
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Richardson
CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
- Location
- Yes
As I pointed out, already happened and got a K3 (Kardashev 3) civilization on their ass. Because they decided to try and get out of having said civilization get on their ass by going back to said civilization's darkest hour and finish the job. Thankfully, they had a doctor moment, did the opposite, and brought back proof which got them back off the Milky Way's ass. And they've basically hit every single time-whibble you can think of, and many more never-mores you can't. And, apparently, way more than just the hero ships run into timey-whimey wibbly balls of madness. It's just that 99% of the poor victims ret-gone themselves by accident, hence why the federation is so commonly disturbingly empty. They keep building, and keep missing that ships keep going missing...
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Which is indeed one of the perils of time travel...
Remember, kids. Existence is both important and fragile. Don't risk it.
Say No to temporal adventuring.
You know it makes sense.
Remember, kids. Existence is both important and fragile. Don't risk it.
Say No to temporal adventuring.
You know it makes sense.
- Location
- Earth
Also: differences large enough to cause you to go extinct may not cause e.g. your bacteria to go extinct.
(See the closest analog we have to "physical laws changing", namely deuterium poisoning. The LD50 of heavy water is silly-high - a nontrivial percentage of the hydrogen in your body must be deuterium before you die. Plenty of bacteria can limp along in heavy water... humans and other higher organisms are (barely) too fragile.)
(This could make a setting for a short story. Someone comes through from a parallel universe, grows sick and dies due to something similar to the above. Pretty soon everyone starts growing sick and dying... turns out it's unrelated to the original person dying, but was something they brought with them that no-one has immunity to.)
- Location
- Launceston, Tasmania
No one reads the manuals and Saurial is always complaining...
- Location
- Launceston, Tasmania
So in other words, the entire human race in the ST verse are sparks that make Agatha hang her head in shame...
Girl Genius
- Location
- Oregon, USA
Might just be close enough that they can't be sure that a variable like 'elapsed time' or 'interactions with other dimensions' or something isn't throwing off their numbers. Especially when they don't seem to have a large enough sample size to get a firm grasp regarding which parts of the data they get reference whichever unknown variables are part of the dimensional vector.
Really, finding out what's different might also help them narrow down which bits of data point at different vague details, and thus increase their chances of getting one of them home.
- Location
- Canada
You have broken the cardinal rule of fanfiction.
Extra dimensional tomfoolery doesn't excuse it either.
- Location
- Maryland
I blame Robert Heinlein and The Number of the Beast.
- Location
- Canada
*dramatic pointing* Excuses!
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Transfictionality - it can really mess you up...
You might want to check-out The Incomplete Enchanter, which is from the first half of the 20thC, well before 'Number of the Beast' - it's old enough I believe it's not in copyright, so there's legal copies online. Characters going to worlds which are fictional...
Mutual fictionality can be fun... I've not seen a Worm fanfic that has anyone but Self Inserts, of Choose Your Own Adventure types, having read the Worm webstory... I think I saw a SG: SG1 and BtVS cross where they were mutually fictional...
There's the interesting question of authors tapping other worlds for ideas, or, infinite universes, so anything will be real somewhere, among other ideas...
One fun question is whether the fiction, say a tv show, is portraying the real other world (rendering it, with actors), or the actors match the appearance of the people in the real other world. I've seen this done both ways... Then, there's whether the sFX budget of the fiction is good enough.
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
- Pronouns
- It/They
I have considered at times making a self insert where the SI's world is fictional in the world they ended up in, but that has the problem of giving a lot of real world details of yourself in the explanatory method usually employed to a fictional character to prove you know too much about them.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
If you build the 'SI' character as from a RW setting, then you're giving their details, not yours... It's quite possible to do this, and it can organically develop, over time.
The trick is to imply that there's more available detail - more than could ever be wanted, some of it possibly rather embarrassing, without you actually having to create this detail.
An important thing to remember is that the RW can have things in it that would destroy the credibility of fiction... So, some seriously weird bits to make it more 'Real World' may be desirable.
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- Location
- Maryland, USA
... One fun question is whether the fiction, say a tv show, is portraying the real other world (rendering it, with actors), or the actors match the appearance of the people in the real other world. I've seen this done both ways... Then, there's whether the sFX budget of the fiction is good enough.
Galaxy Quest!
One of my favorite movies.
Lycanthromancer
The Arcane Fuzz
- Location
- USA
I find myself entirely unsurprised, really.
- Location
- Maryland
Guy: Is there air here? You don't know!
Saurial: Didn't know, didn't care. Now I know. You can take your helmet off unless it makes you feel better to wear it, though.