To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
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Sound the Godlike Energy Being alarm! This is not a drill, repeat this is not a drill.
And of all the Explorers, of course it was Thuir. The Explorer Corps Only Sensible Man is the only one for the job.
And of all the Explorers, of course it was Thuir. The Explorer Corps Only Sensible Man is the only one for the job.
Hm. Well, I think I can safely say this sounds like Q... Rather than Q, Q, or Q.
She clearly doesn't sound like any of the last three. Maybe Q if you stretch it, but I'm thinking it's Q.
She clearly doesn't sound like any of the last three. Maybe Q if you stretch it, but I'm thinking it's Q.
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- Location
- Patriarchova
Here's to hoping Thuir replies with "What, WE'RE the barbarians? Have you had a look at the rest of our neighborhood?"
- Location
- the Moon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Careful there, she may not like the way you pronounced her nameHm. Well, I think I can safely say this sounds like Q... Rather than Q, Q, or Q.
She clearly doesn't sound like any of the last three. Maybe Q if you stretch it, but I'm thinking it's Q.
- Location
- USA
I'm still not sure which Q we got here, though that is a plausible option.
Fair enough, though how does this explain Q messing with Sisko and Janeway?
Honestly, I am just curious what Q is trying to get out of Michel at this moment, aside from trying to have him defend humanity's history of bloodshed.
Her objection appears to be not that we're barbarians, but that we put on airs of not being barbarians.
Nash would be too busy trying to sleep with Q than trying to digest whatever moral lesson that Q was trying to impart.
Crazy speculation, but it could be Q as well.
I wouldn't take it as a given that Defiant are going to have an edge in torpedos -- bear in mind Defiant may have more torpedo tubes, but the Galaxy's neck one can fire like, five torpedos at a time.
Phaser output is kinda a wash. I feel like the Defiant wouldn't have the energy output to out-firepower the Galaxy's phaser arrays, on the other hand she is both overpowered and the cannons are of a different type. I'd guess close-in she's better? Which might explain why they have Defiants paired with an Akira in that one Voyager episode with the Prometheus.
- Location
- Patriarchova
"Okay, fine, we're assholes, can I go back to my ship now?"
"Sure. When the Borg come calling in a few years, you can tell your bosses whatever I wanted couldn't have been that important."
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I will note that in the battle against the Lakota, Sisko was not aboard, though in the TBG-verse I don't know whether or not that impacts whether his bonus applies. Also, the person actually in command was Worf, who's a pretty good tactical officer in his own right.
Yeah, but they're also designed to be used in large numbers. They're pared-down into the smallest, most compact, least science/presence hulls possible, precisely because that way you can build a lot of them to mob a Borg cube and pulverize it with sheer ridiculous massed barrages of torpedoes and pulse phasers.
There's no reason to assume one Defiant is actually intended to punch as hard as one Galaxy, given that you could build a lot of Defiants with the same amount of materials and crew. Basically, when they meet the Borg, the Federation finally encounters an enemy that 'lone ranger' tactics won't work against, because no ship they can build is individually a match for a cube. You're going to need to greatly outnumber Borg cubes to beat them at all, and you're going to take casualties fighting them, so you might as well make sure you do as much harm to the Borg as possible per ton of ship and per crewman you lose. You do that by building heavily armed, agile ships that do not spend much tonnage on the science/presence complex that normally matters to Starfleet.
I think you're getting this wrong.
I think the Excelsiors are being used to ferry around VIPs because they are explicitly considered second rate ships.* They are no longer prestigious. They are normal. I mean, they've got some history going, but they're not magic. It's not like our Constitution(s) get a Presence bonus just for being Connies, even though by your argument they should.
_____________
*That is in the Age of Sail sense, where "second rate" means "less powerful than the first rate." Not "lowly and irrelevant," just "less powerful."
Honestly I think it's just because (in canon TNG) the Excelsior production line was running for so long that the Excelsior-class is in effect the Federation's "cruiser." Imagine if you took our current fleets, and...
1) Replaced every Excelsior with an Ambassador or Galaxy.
2) Replaced every Centaur, Constellation, or Constitution with an Excelsior
3) Replaced every Miranda with a mix of older, obsolete-ish types (such as Constellations and, well, Mirandas).
That's what the TNG-era force mix looks like, basically. The Excelsiors are seen so often because they are the multirole utility ships the Federation uses for routine duties, the same way we use our Constellations and Centaurs.
[closes eyes]
Look. We're suffering from a massive terminology problem.
There is a type of ship we use, that are definitely heavier and stronger than any escort of their generation, but are too light to perform five-year missions. What do we call them?
I've been calling them "cruisers." So have a lot of people. Whether the ship is technically classified as an explorer or a cruiser is frankly immaterial. So by the standards of a future Federation that's using 4-5 megaton explorers as the big, hefty, frontline vessels... an Excelsior is a cruiser to them, just as a Constitution is a cruiser to us now. Whether we call it an explorer or not is, again, immaterial.
So do you have a suggestion, pray tell, as to how I can make it clear and unambiguous when I am speaking about escorts/cruisers/explorers in the mechanical sense of the word? And when I am speaking of the ships in the roles we elect to use them in. Such that an explorer may do the work of a medium cruiser as anchor of a sector fleet while larger ships do the exploring? Or an escort like the Centaur-A may do the work of a light multirole cruiser until something better comes along?
- Location
- madison
the constant flirting and attempts at seduction would cramp Qs style.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
...Oh lordy.
Did Michel Thuir, Patron Saint of Redshirts, just encounter a Q?
Also, what are we going to call this particular Q, who is apparently not 'our' (John de Lancie) Q?
Furthermore, um... It is probably just as well that Nash didn't meet this Q? I genuinely do not know. What happens if Nash encounters a female Q?
- Location
- Patriarchova
I doubt it would have taken a female humanoid form with Nash.
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
The Q become federation Affiliates and the Cardassians weep.
Absolutely no one is saying that we should use the Excelsior in the role of 5YM Explorer Corps once its replacement is available in the numbers necessary to fill our 5YM. So you're making a nothing argument.
- Location
- madison
it occurs to me that given we've made a point of making sure Starfleet is less of a human run show Q messing with Starfleet due to humans have a barbarous past is even more bullshit.
- Location
- Patriarchova
My headcanon has long been that the Q aren't one species, but rather a collection of Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence races. This handily explains the disappearance of the Preservers et al., and seems to be what Q was hinting at to Picard at the end of "All Good Things."
In this case, we would be their affiliates, and eventually we could aspire to membership.
It's not immaterial; it has severe game mechanical effects. By the time we complete Lone Ranger, ships classified as 'explorers' are counted at -2C for combat cap and get +2 to Response to events. That is a big deal. The technical classification is incredibly important.
Which is evidence that a second-rate Explorer is *not* a cruiser to people in universe. An Explorer, even a second-rate Explorer, is expected to have much higher Science and Presence stats in relation to its combat than a Cruiser is. Look at the canon Cruiser list and note how none of them have a Science higher than 4 (and in a more advanced model the Science goes back down to 3!).
"Explorer" and "Cruiser" are Terms of Art in this quest that have specific technical meanings and will be treated differently. Even thirty years from now, a second-rate Explorer like the Excelsior will still be send on different missions than a common cruiser. Missions where you need that extra Presence and especially that extra Science. It's not good to confuse the two.
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Q would never devote much attention to Nash because they are ultimately a big fan of humanity and don't want it destroyed.
Look, even as a male dealing with a decidedly uptight straight human male, de Lancie Q put on the tsundere act for humanity and couldn't resist messing with Picard's head a few times with things like showing up in his freaking bed. Said Q clearly has a fetish, sexual or not, and Janeway was proof of that to the point you've got a transdimensional energy being leering at what is essentially a bug to them and involving them in things that they really don't have business getting involved in.
And clearly as distasteful as de Lancie Q is to some of the other Q, there is at least one other Q that checks in on them every century or so and frankly is fully capable of getting a bit jealous. That would not end well. At all.
I suspect, also, that Andorians just don't do it for Q like humans do.
Look, even as a male dealing with a decidedly uptight straight human male, de Lancie Q put on the tsundere act for humanity and couldn't resist messing with Picard's head a few times with things like showing up in his freaking bed. Said Q clearly has a fetish, sexual or not, and Janeway was proof of that to the point you've got a transdimensional energy being leering at what is essentially a bug to them and involving them in things that they really don't have business getting involved in.
And clearly as distasteful as de Lancie Q is to some of the other Q, there is at least one other Q that checks in on them every century or so and frankly is fully capable of getting a bit jealous. That would not end well. At all.
I suspect, also, that Andorians just don't do it for Q like humans do.
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Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Damn it, why couldn't she have picked Nash?
- Location
- madison
for exactly the reason you wanted her to.