[read read read]
Oww, poor
S'harien... and we're seeing it underlined that this is partly the TOS era, because the only group of people who died almost as fast as redshirts on
Star Trek in those days were the poor goldshirts.
@OneirosTheWriter, you say "Total Impact for the Year is 27" in the log post. Is impact due to our policies and rules of engagement normally assessed yearly or quarterly? Because last quarter it was something like 20, wasn't it?
Also, who would you pick as an actor to play this Q? Inquiring minds would like to know!
Wasn't a civilian target, dude.
I do hope you understand that Q doesn't really care about distinctions like that very much. They are omnipotent and omniscient beings;
the galaxy's most warlike soldier poses no more threat to them than the galaxy's most warlike termite.
They do not understand fear, and your arguments about civilian and non-civilian targets are made from the basis of being able to feel meaningful fear. Fear of intruders, fear of invaders. That is not something that a Q is going to comprehend or recognize as meaningful. From their point of view, no evolved being, nothing even slightly more advanced than an animal, would be motivated by such reasoning.
I'm not saying they're right or wrong. But that is how the Q, by all appearances, think.
Wonder if our Biophage containment protocols would work against Borg Assimilation.
In the sense that vaporizing any one Borg stops it from assimilating things? Sure. In the sense that containment tight enough to confine biophage samples would stop Borg nanites?
Maaybe. The Borg nanites are probably less voracious than biophage and maybe less... omnivorous... but they are also a lot more adaptable. Hard to say.
Also, those Syndicate slavers Saavik and the S'harien took out had some balls...
Ovaries. They're Orions, remember? The girls are almost certainly in charge of the expedition.
Oh, oh, we're at the switch between warp calculations, aren't we?
I knew bookmarking this would come in handy some day:
Mental Exercise -- Refactoring Warp Factors
Ugh. The new system is
terrible, because there's no actual math behind the exponential increase of speed as warp factor goes from 9 to 10. It was just a random
thing someone hand-sketched on a graph.
It makes a lot more sense to just have warp factors increase smoothly, using a consistent formula (either TOS or TNG, I don't care). But with no special magic number at 10, and if that means that the
Enterprise-D has a top speed of Warp 11 or whatever,
so what? So I for one favor NOT switching from the old system.
Plus that way we get to deliver a massive middle finger in the direction of
Threshold, and how can that ever, ever be a bad thing?
Saavik is really starting to come into focus as the risk-taker among the Explorer Captains. She always has some crazy gambit to try and pull off to turn a bad situation on its head.
She doesn't believe in no-win situations.
Ah Straak, you did your best but I have a feeling that was a very hard DC indeed on that first contact roll. Too bad we don't still have T'Lorel and her FC reroll ability on the Sarek. At least no harm was done.
True. Also, this is the plot of like four
Star Trek episodes, so I wouldn't be surprised if we were "fated" to fail this contact and the real challenge was surviving the hull test.
It's strange, but of everything that happened in the update the Cheron making Blooded status makes me smile the most. They deserve it with all the stuff they've handled ever since coming to the CBZ. The crew of that little relic, the spirit of the 23rd century still flickering and alive in the 24th century. Their Explorer may be outdated, but it's still an Explorer damn it, still the pride of Starfleet.
Yay!
[waves little flag]
Nice on the impact! And wow, even for an Excelsior three-on-one is a tough fight. Lucky they got the BoP right away. Still, with Explorer crew rare as they are even 1 point of Officer casualties really hurt.
All true. Nitpicking, though... under our 'official' rules, Birds-of-Prey have extremely low stats (as in, one in all categories), in keeping with them being ships so small they can land in a small public park and be operated by like six people in
Star Trek IV.
I considered making Michel fight the battle of Waterloo but I figured it would be too large a digression
Also, knowing Thuir, he probably would have managed to win through some obvious-in-hindsight and extremely sensible maneuver that Napoleon was too busy having hemorrhoids to think of.
But you know very well we won't do that.
Keeping matters to the realm of the possible, a border zone would keep raiders out of our colonies unless they get past the border patrol fleet first.
Thing is, one way or another I don't think we'll be fighting the Sydraxians five years from now, we certainly won't be fighting them in ten. It'll get resolved sooner or later, now that they've forced the matter, by aggressively attacking our space rather than just sulking in the corner. A border zone is a permanent investment of political will, one that is likely to disappear or be folded into another sector at some point in the near future. I'd much rather spend the political will on something lasting like a budget increase or Betazoid counselors- or for that matter, on
ships.
[snip pic]
My attempt at what the Constitution-B might look like. The general idea that they would be using proven off the shelf technology from the Excelsior and Centaur programs to update the design.
I like it, though in my heart I will always imagine ConnieBees looking like their TOS and movie incarnations, with the differences being "under the hood."
If all of those admirals were just taking whatever 'second rate' ships were available, then why were they all Excelsiors? Where were the Ambassadors, the Renaissances, etc.?
The
Ambassadors were probably still out performing exploratory/response missions as the largest most capable ships Starfleet had aside from the brand new
Nebulas and
Galaxies.
The
Ambassadors were probably not made in large quantity to begin with since we never see many of them for any reason. The
Renaissance-class as we know it is a beta canon design that doesn't physically appear in TNG at all- there were no models for the ship, and minimal evidence from the shows it ever existed. Most of the other "et cetera" options like the
Constellation and
Miranda that they actually had models for WERE used in roles like that.
Look, I don't want to rain on your parade here and I appreciate the
Excelsiors strongly, I just think that you're building a large castle in the air out of limited evidence.
