The Konen searched the minds of the galaxy, looking from race to race for the strongest, most deadly ship designs. Unfortunately for them, the Ferengi are the best at bullshitting, even inside their own heads.
Weren't Ferengi Telepathy resistant?
Unfortunately for them, the Ferengi are the best at bullshitting, even inside their own heads.
Yes, and now we know WHY the Ferengi are telepathy-resistant.
Inside a Ferengi's brain, everything the Ferengi owns,
including ideas, is incredibly valuable. Everything the Ferengi hopes to acquire is incredibly valuable,
and rightfully theirs. Everything the Ferengi does not own, and isn't interested in, is worthless dross. Those grapes were probably sour anyway, right?
So while it's not hard to read a Ferengi's emotions (since they have poor emotional control), actually getting unbiased
facts out of their brain is hard because you have to swim through a sea of "mine is the best, biggest" nonsense.
Like I said, I'm not sure at all about this design for the Whisper, and the ferengi resemblance is one of the reasons. What do you guys think?
I like it. Among other things because twenty years of dealing with the Konen may give us a healthier respect for "similarly designed" Ferengi warships when we eventually encounter them.
Ferengi were originally supposed to be kind of intimidating. Predatory mercantile instincts, with a distinct emphasis on the 'predation.' Guys who'd shoot their way into trading rights if you didn't let them in, or fight to contest ownership of a valued prize. This became forgotten when they were adopted as lovably unlovable types with a zillion foibles on
Deep Space Nine, but originally their first-class heavy ships were supposed to be able to go toe-to-toe with a
Galaxy. Hard to imagine the Ferengi as we now think of them building ships comparable to a
D'Deridex, isn't it?
Most sensible explanation is that, like the Cardassians, the Ferengi have had dealings with telepaths before, and developed techniques for resisting telepathy (for the cardassians, it was to fight telepaths. For the ferengi, it was to haggle with them). Hence, there are individual ferengi who have had the anti-psi training, and other individuals who have not.
Seems likely. Telepathy doesn't have to be bad for business, but it's
incredibly bad for the way the Ferengi usually do business.
Besides the Andorians (4 genders) and Apiata (Queen, Drone, maybe additional) are all the other members and affiliates male/female races?
Yes; as is the case in canon Star Trek, gender-binary species are pretty much the norm. There are a few exceptions in canon, one at least, but we only see them as one-offs.
Oh and for the Apiata which ones would be joining Starfleet?
Queens almost certainly
wouldn't join Starfleet. A queen's job description involves running a colony, but also (and this is important)
mothering the colony. As in, literally, being the biological mother of the individuals in that colony.
Every Apiata 'queen' (the biological sex) who doesn't reside in a colony as its 'queen' (the social role) represents an entire Apiata community that will just... never exist. Or a community that with literally wither away into nothingness and die out due to no new babies being born. A highly localized act of pre-emptive ethnic cleansing, you might say.
Individual drones or workers leaving their home colonies doesn't necessarily cause a problem for those who stay behind. Queens doing so very much does. The best case would be a 'younger daughter' queen whose older sister is going to step into the Queen Mother's shoes... But there would normally be an expectation that such young queens would found new colonies and live among them, possibly taking some of the workers and drones from the mother colony to help get things set up.
So I don't expect to see Apiata queens in Starfleet. The gender roles in Apiata society, which have very compelling biological basis, may be a hell of a lot more
empowering to queens... But they're in many ways even more restrictive on queens than they are on drones and workers.
Workers, not drones. Drones are a separate gender.
I can't find the post, but
@Iron Wolf has a great omake where an Apiata officer talks about it.
Right. Apiata have three sexes: queens who produce ova, drones who bear embryos to term, and workers who are sterile and have only vestigial reproductive tracts.
Superficially they all seem present as (more or less) female(ish) by the standards of most humanoid species, so "bee girls" isn't an unreasonable description, but it's a bit tricky to parse. The trickiness cuts both ways, too- for example, my one Apiata character (this has never come up and the two may well never meet) thinks of Nash (an Andorian zhen) as a
drone. And the family life of most humanoid species just confuses the hell out of her because "sexuality" in general is not a thing for 90% of her species and "family" means your moms plus like 100 sisters (and aunts and nieces from the previous and next generation). Having
lots and lots of really tiny family units is just... eye-wateringly strange, and the fact that she can't even remotely comprehend how to handle this is a major contributing factor to her social anxiety not really having gotten better.
Poor Dizzy.
Incidentally, Izzidierra, that queen who had a loopy crush on Nash for years, may have been thinking of Nash as a drone too... which might just explain a lot about her behavior towards Nash.
You see "defective" workers in non-command regular and EC roles and you see queens in EC command.
Apatia queens are pretty bullshit leadership-wise. Those O-1 entries on a Queenship? That means they've got one or two, maybe three queens running an Excelsior-scale platform.
As others have noted, I wouldn't chalk this up to Apiata queens having superior leadership skills. I'd chalk it up to Apiata workers being really, really good followers- and adaptable enough to make good middle management; see "Ozzira" for reference.
That doesn't explain why they didn't appear before ratification when we were explicitly doing disaffected workers, nor does it explain why they always qualify for EC and not the regular fleet.
Honestly I think that was just an effect of the first generation of Apiata
worker recruits who'd actually made it through Starfleet Academy as officer candidates and who'd "connected" well enough with Starfleet culture to make it in the officer track.
Honestly, while your interpretation may be correct as a representation of what Oneiros has been thinking... if so, I disagree with Oneiros. Simply because I see no reason that Apiata queens would
all make super-duper naval officers. It doesn't make sense; they show no signs of being more intelligent, organized, or otherwise superior beings compared to the common run of galactic sapients.
Well that's the question. Are we assuming that the Queen in command is the mother of the entire crew? I actually think that's unlikely. Workers have their individual talents and skills just like everyone else, so every large enterprise (such as a starship crew) can't be made up of literally only one colony of queen-mother and children.
I think one of the big breakthroughs that allowed the Apiata to advance to interstellar civilization is that they found ways to allow Workers to be ordered around by the queens of other colonies. Once they're able to shift workers around like that, they can achieve the necessary degree of labor flexibility to run an interstellar civilization. So most workers have Queen-I-work-for and also Queen-my-mother (that they are genetically predisposed to obey). Then they also have "High Queens" who have political rank and whom they also have an obligation to obey.
Nested hierarchies of queens probably play a large role in this, as do contract labor arrangements, and I suspect the process started some time in their Iron Age, maybe even the Neolithic. I would further speculate that
all Apiata queens exude a level of 'obey me' pheromones and instincts that trigger
all Apiata workers to a degree of compliance and deference... It's just that any given Apiata worker imprints especially hard on their own queen.
Also, nice avatar picture.
As for the EC offiers, maybe that's made of of especially adventurous Queens who are willing to leave most of their children behind and go off and have spacefaring adventures with only a few of their actual family around them.
I wouldn't assume that we get more queens than we do workers who just happen to actually be officer material. Workers outnumber queens huge-to-one, there would be intense social pressure on queens to stay around and keep having babies*, and we KNOW that some Apiata workers are competent to manage other workers, even large numbers thereof.
*(until/unless queens hit a menopause-equivalent, at least)