Star Trek The General Star Trek Thread - From TOS to Corporate Schenanigans

Captain X said:

Kind of a bad example given how much of a meme easily destroyed Mirandas were on that show at that point. Actually one of my own annoyances with the show at that time was how shields didn't ever seem to be a thing during the Dominion War for any of the VFX shots, as if the artists forgot they were supposed to have them.

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I've never heard of that meme. At least in the circles I traveled in, Mirandas were quite well respected for being workhorses that were still competing with ships decades more advanced than they were, and holding together under fire that tended to vaporize lesser vessels. It was Galaxy classes we considered to be fragile soap bubbles for their supposed size and advancement, although the Breen ships got some mockery too for how ludicrously they tended to shatter from a single hit. Excelsiors seemed to generally perform impressively for being antiques too, though the one in the Examples below didn't fare well.


Probably also worth looking at the destruction of the USS Valiant for an important advantage to the outer-hull bridge:
If your bridge is on top of the ship at the outer hull, it's going to be significantly quicker for the bridge escape pods to evacuate when everything goes to pot, compared with a bridge buried deep inside the ship where the pods will have a longer travel time through tubes that may have been warped or jammed by damage already. Sucks for whoever is assigned deep in the bowels of the ship to be sure, but in the cold logic of that situation, saving the highly experienced bridge crew is going to be a priority.

I believe the stated in universe reason for putting the bridge is top is twofold:
1. Putting the bridge on top lets them design it as a replaceable module they can swap out for upgrades and refits. Precisely why starfleet values that capability so highly I don't understand, though out of universe it's so the production team can explain their habit of using different bridge sets for the same class of starship.
2. They decided to put sickbay in the center of the hull for maximum protection, and so the bridge can't go there since that space is full (implicitly, they also don't want to put the bridge anywhere near that area, to avoid drawing fire toward sickbay).

Based on point 2, I think starfleet envisioned the most likely result for a ship that's defeated in combat to be a badly mauled wreak, without it's weapons, shields or main power, but physically intact to the point that people can keep living on it for a while until they're rescued, and ships are designed around that rather than towards "the enemy will keep shooting our ships until they explode and kill everyone".

Captain X said:

Well, it's better than the current trend of nuTrek which literally turned the viewscreen into a windshield. Plus on real ships, the CIC is deep in the ship, and the bridge is just there to steer the ship with, with the commander actually being in the CIC and telling the bridge what to do.

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The bridge window is actually the only JJverse design feature that I like. It has no real downsides, you can still use holographic displays for ship to ship coms and all the stuff they used to use the viewscreen view, and it looks very cool.

The other issue with the "put the CIC in the smart spot" concept is you have to actually do something with that idea. Halo has the Covenant bury their CIC deep inside the hull for protection, while UNSC ships have theirs located at the top or front of the ship. In the course of about 20 years of games and fiction, that difference has never once mattered one bit.

Bear Ribs said:

Yeah, that's a bugaboo of mine too. When a weapon has already defeated the ship's shields and armor, it's unlikely twenty feet of air and a couple of layers of space!sheetrock wall are going to miraculously provide enough protection to matter. Most ships that don't have some kind of armor get cored by a direct hit if their shields are down, no chance being in the middle of the ship will provide any protection.

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It's not always quite that bad, ships can withstand a bit of a a beating without shields. First example is Voyager in Year of Hell, where they fought an enemy with weapons that could completely bypass thier shields. Yeah, it was a constant one sided ass-kicking, but they survived repeated direct hits, and the ship was still functional even when it looked like this:


(granted, they would have died well before that point if they weren't able to run away, and patch up the worst damage, but it's still impressive how much damage they could take and still keep flying).

Battlegrinder said:

(granted, they would have died well before that point if they weren't able to run away, and patch up the worst damage, but it's still impressive how much damage they could take and still keep flying).

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Damage severity in ST is driven by the plot.

In one episode the ship could look like it's been shoved through a meatgrinder while everyone is ok and all systems remain operational. In another some spilled coffee in engineering means "all hands, abandon ship".

Hyperbole, I know, but you get the idea.

Captain X said:

Actually one of my own annoyances with the show at that time was how shields didn't ever seem to be a thing during the Dominion War for any of the VFX shots, as if the artists forgot they were supposed to have them.

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I was under the impression that Dominion ships were so ridiculously powerful that their weapons could blast through shields. The season 2 finale that introduced the Dominion showed them curbstomping a galaxy class and breaching DS9.

Val the Moofia Boss said:

I was under the impression that Dominion ships were so ridiculously powerful that their weapons could blast through shields. The season 2 finale that introduced the Dominion showed them curbstomping a galaxy class and breaching DS9.

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Initially, federation ships couldn't block dominion weapons, though not because of their sheer power, it was more that they were sufficiently weird the federation shields weren't capable of stopping them at the time, but they did eventually develop a means to do (someone once noted that the UFP tends to be a bit Borg like in that respect, they often can't deal with newly encountered weapons, but they always devise a way to do so in time).

The reason ships in DS9 fleet battles didn't have visible shields was that DS9 fleet battles were made with very good CGI in the late 90s, a era when good CGI shots had a cost measured in bottle episodes per minute. Adding more effects to that would have blown the budget completely, so shields VFX got cut. But they absolutely still had shields, dialogue makes this clear.

The in universe rational for this has been people assuming the were using shields that hugged the hull very tightly rather than bubbly shields that are more common.

Val the Moofia Boss said:

I was under the impression that Dominion ships were so ridiculously powerful that their weapons could blast through shields. The season 2 finale that introduced the Dominion showed them curbstomping a galaxy class and breaching DS9.

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Even at that time, the VFX would still show the shields flaring up, even if the weapons were penetrating through them. But during the Dominion War, this was apparently no longer an issue, as the dialog always included reports on shield status (the typical "shields at X%"). Also, this lack of shield VFX on the CG models extended to all the other ships, including Cardassian and Dominion ships being fired upon by Federation and Klingon ships. The only time they ever had the traditional shield bubbles was for some Cardassian weapons platforms that needed to have some special mission done to disable them. Fandom tried to rationalize this by saying they were using "hull-hugging" shields rather than the traditional bubbles, but the thing is, while the VFX did not show shields in any form, they did always have little explosions from weapons impacting on the hulls of the ships being hit, thus giving the impression that the ships didn't have any shields at all. My own impression is that some art director somewhere thought it looked more visually exciting or something along those lines.

First footage of Star Trek: Resurgence just dropped:


The not-Nimoy voice actor does a pretty good job, overall, and it turns out Spock's kind of a big part of the story.

Here's a trailer for Strange New Worlds:


Let's see if it's any good or not.

Considering who's behind it, I'm going to guess probably not.

bullethead said:

Here's a trailer for Strange New Worlds:


Let's see if it's any good or not.

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More Bad Robot Trek.

bullethead said:

First footage of Star Trek: Resurgence just dropped:


The not-Nimoy voice actor does a pretty good job, overall, and it turns out Spock's kind of a big part of the story.

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Well, it sounds good to start with. "dicy diplomatic problem with notable but limited stakes" is a lot better than the past few shows have done where every season it's some new threat to the entire federation and/or all life as we know it, it's a very star trek like problem.

Battlegrinder said:

Well, it sounds good to start with. "dicy diplomatic problem with notable but limited stakes" is a lot better than the past few shows have done where every season it's some new threat to the entire federation and/or all life as we know it, it's a very star trek like problem.

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Graphics quality doesn't look all that good, tbh.
Although Trek's visuals just don't do it for me in video game format.

Agent23 said:

Graphics quality doesn't look all that good, tbh.
Although Trek's visuals just don't do it for me in video game format.

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The graphics seem fine. Yeah, they're not ultra 4k ray traced whatever, but they're more than enough to tell the story being told here, they don't need to be on par with a AAA game.

There are countless games with a high fidelity, photorealistic look, and few pull them off in a way that looks good (FFXV, DMCV).

Something with a distinctive artstyle would be more memorable. Why not a game that looks like Mitch O’Connell's art?

Battlegrinder said:

The graphics seem fine. Yeah, they're not ultra 4k ray traced whatever, but they're more than enough to tell the story being told here, they don't need to be on par with a AAA game.

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Dunno, FO4 and Cp2077 look better, IMHO.

Also,there is a bigger problem in that Trek sets just looked pretty dull and sterile to me, and when somebody tries to make, say a shooter in the Trek setting, like Elite Force, well, the weapons feel out of place.
I love trek, but the decor doesn't have that leaving, breathing feel to it, like everything is still in or just taken out of airtight plastic wrap.

Wesley is trash in the show, but W. R. Thompson's Debtor's Planet novel goes a long way to redeeming him as a charecter. Really, Debtor's Planet basically takes every stupid idea the writers had for the show*, playing them absolutely straight and redeeming them anyway with good writing.

* Ferengi as major villains, Wesley the boy genius writers' pet, a twentieth century billionaire getting defrosted and introduced to the communistic Federation, etc.

Bassoe said:

Wesley is trash in the show, but W. R. Thompson's Debtor's Planet novel goes a long way to redeeming him as a charecter. Really, Debtor's Planet basically takes every stupid idea the writers had for the show*, playing them absolutely straight and redeeming them anyway with good writing.

* Ferengi as major villains, Wesley the boy genius writers' pet, a twentieth century billionaire getting defrosted and introduced to the communistic Federation, etc.

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I recall that story, yeah it was a good one and the evil plan was surprisingly clever.

Some more Resurgence footage, this time featuring shuttlebays and engineering:

That ship design looks......familiar:



Graphics are definitely less polished in this bit than the previous one, not terrible but they visibly need work in a way the last one didn't.

A couple of those shots or where they had the character look seemed less like showing off the game and more showing off "hey look, we even got this or that inconsequential thing from the show down, look how exact our transporter effect is!"

And of course we get an EVA spacesuit bit. Anyone wanna bet they'll add an original twist by not having someone almost go flying off into into space for once?

Battlegrinder said:

That ship design looks......familiar

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You do know that the ship from the game is literally from DS9, right?




It literally predates the Axanar design by 20-some years.