Are you shitting me? "Imagine what the Ked Paddah are supposed to be. But then make them literally indistinguishable from humans"
1)
@AKuz ? Respectfully, at least three other people put a combined total of something like 50-100 hours into this idea. Can you just... not lead with instant hostility and savaging of everything they do? It's rude, and you'd hate it if someone did it to you. I know if someone did something like this to something I'd posted,
especially someone with a good reputation, I'd be sorely tempted to quietly withdraw the whole thing and forget I'd ever come up with it.
"This similarity makes it difficult for sensors, particularly obsolete Starfleet and civilian models, to accurately distinguish between the two at a distance."
I'm actually kinda angry about how lazy that is.
If you want Humans. Then declare them to be another preserver... preserve.
Or a another bunch of Human augments that got away or whatever.
You know, for all you know this IS a Preserver preserve of humans. We just made first contact with them, and they have excellent in-character reasons to be reticent about the history of their own species because their hat is not just 'cautious,' it is
space-PTSD survivors of a deluge of extinction-level events. The Ked Peddah are
naturally like this. For the 'Padani,' it's a cultural adaptation they needed in order to not die due to growing up in such a staggeringly rough neighborhood.
This is actually worse because you realized that it was a problem and put in the absolute minimal amount of work possible to distinguish them. Literally just "Even neanderthals are more distinguishable from bog standard Humans than these guys are"
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if
primitive, low-end scanners had trouble telling
homo erectus and humans apart at close range without good processing and a much more extensive biological database than we have on these people at first contact.
A lot of our species have extremely obvious features that make it easy to tell them from humans with a superficial scan. Romulans, Vulcans, and Amarki have copper-based blood. Tellarites are midgets. Rigellians are turtle-people. Caitians have tails, Indorians have significant extra skeletal features on their heads. Apiata have antennae and
I strongly suspect some other major anatomical features different from humans. Klingons have a host of anatomical differences and a body temperature that would be lethal in humans.
But Betazoids? Risans? If you told me it was hard for 23rd century sensors to tell them from humans at a glance without careful analysis, I'd believe you. They sure as hell
look human, especially Betazoids.
And far be it for me to interrupt the love in over the ships... But... those Nacelles can't see each other. You clearly have nacelles... but they can't see each other. I'll make allowances for alien designs, but if you're going to use nacelles... they need to see each other. Look at the Enterprise Vulcan Ring and it's open space.
Depends on how the pylons are configured, either each nacelle has no line of sight to the next one (if you assume that each complete nacelle structure is 'between' two solid wall-like pylons)... Or each nacelle has
intimate connection to the ones on either side (if you assume each pylon attaches in the center of a nacelle structure, the same way the pylons on the Connie,
Excelsior, and
Galaxy do).
Seriously, if you took a relatively small ship and wrapped six
Galaxy nacelles (which are relatively fat) around the ship on straight stick-out pylons, it would look a lot like this. Enough that you might just say 'fuck it' and put all six nacelles on a shared structure of girders and armor plate, since this might actually
save weight and increase strength compared to having six separate structures on pylons.
To me, it was immediately obvious that this was in fact six nacelles with external cladding protecting the space that forms the 'line of sight.' This could even serve some kind of useful function such as making the ship less sensitive to turbulence for all I know. It's hardly outside the range of normal Star Trek ship aesthetics; if you'd seen a ship designed like this on
Voyager you might never have even noticed it was breaking any important rules.
I'm sorry, but for a major Tier 1 power I'm not feeling it. They're like some generic Wongite "THIS IS HOW TREK SHOULD WORK" faction.
Well yes. A LOT of things would look that way if you didn't give them any time for development and operated on utterly minimalistic first impressions, then had a negative knee-jerk response and characterized them in the most uncharitable way possible.
That says more about the downside of that approach to reviewing the quality of content, than it does about the quality of the content itself. You can make anything look terrible if you approach it in a sufficiently prejudicial manner.
Please try to be fair.
Though to be fair, when the ISC was first introduced it caused me to go back over all my old stuff and iron out the genericness and give them firm hats that don't literally already belong to an encountered power. I actually went back to a people I decided had been a preserver Human group and rubber fore headed them.
That seems rather arbitrary. "Not special enough, MUST ADD MORE SPECIAL" is a dangerous game to play, because it can easily lead to fictional constructs collapsing under the weight of their own complications and contradictions. You may be able to get away with it, but it's one of the most common rookie mistakes to keep looking at something, saying it's too normal, and arbitrarily adding more random weird features for the sake of making it stop seeming 'mundane' to an overly jaded eye.
They are ruled by a Council, the Safe Ones! Who wear the brightest neon and bells on everything in very restrictive clothing, making it impossible for them to hide or defend themselves.
For all you know, that's true.
The point AKuz is making is that you don't have a story. You don't have characters. You have a character pitch.
Well gee, maybe that's because
we just made first contact with them.
I mean hell, imagine if the Cardassians had been anon_user's OC species. If you'd applied to them the same standards you're applying to the ISC, you'd be saying "dammit anon_user, all we know about these idiots is that they're tyrannical, they're long-winded, and they have spoons on their foreheads. If anon_user rolled out a thousand word analysis post detailing what Starfleet learned from first contact with the Cardassians, you'd be salty because it wasn't
TEN thousand words. Or because the Cardassians didn't magically open up and infodump everything about themselves and their history in one shot.
Or something.
If you're grimly determined to find faults, and to insult people because their freaking prologue doesn't give you everything you're looking for in the entire story from soup to nuts, go find something else to do other than trying to bully people for spending time and effort creating original content for a game.
