Knights & Knaves Alehouse

[SPOCK]Starfleet intelligence reports Federation now using Klingon design.[/SPOCK]

It's looking damned, fucking grim.

Star Trek Discovery in Trouble? Rumor Rundown

Just stop. No more Star Trek. Quit while it's behind. Cherish the good memories.

TRP wrote:Just stop. No more Star Trek. Quit while it's behind. Cherish the good memories.

+1

Unfortunately, it will be milked for every fake copper cent before they're done with it.

Steampunk isn't my cup of tea, but it doesn't usually annoy me. Steampunk Star Trek annoys me.

Leather? Check.
Sepia? Check.
Bronze-appearing equipment? Check.
This set would look more appropriate in a show based on Space 1889.

It really looks like they're picking their wardrobe out of the discards pile for the various Stargate shows and some babylon-5 cast offs.

Also, denim + brass/bronze = appeal to arguably the worst (most annoying) fanbase outside of anime: Firefly fans.

Times like this make me glad the only Star Trek I know is the original series.

chainsaw wrote:Times like this make me glad the only Star Trek I know is the original series.

QFT.
Though I did enjoy a bunch of The Next Generation episodes. And watched some (very few) episodes of the rest of those series.

For me, Star Trek consists of the following, in order:

1. the 79 episodes from the 1960s (This is the main course.)
2. the first six Star Trek movies, featuring the crew from 1. above (This is dessert.)
3. Star Trek: Beyond (This is the after-dinner mint.)

The only type of forthcoming Star Trek shows I have any interest in are big-screen movies set in the same time-frame as Star Trek: Beyond (i. e., in the last 2 years of the Enterprise's 5-year mission). Although nobody will ever hold a candle to Shatner, Nimoy, and all the rest, I like the idea of using new actors to play the roles of Kirk, Spock, etc. Think of it like James Bond. Sean Connery is untouchable, but not ageless and immortal. Therefore other actors have had to step into the shoes of Bond.

I'd say there's plenty of ST novels to enjoy that deal with the "Five year mission" phase of the original series...well, there are, but they're written by the same kind of hack that write TNG, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise and well now I guess Discovery, so while you might think "Aha, I'm going to read about good ol' Kirk and Spock and McCoy and Scotty and...", what you're gonna read is the old crew acting as milquetoast as the crews in the other show.

Well, there’s TAS, they had a few episodes that caught my imagination (Yesteryear, The Lorelei Signal, The Slaver Weapon).

I’m very skeptical about novels, but I used to be very skeptical about SW novels and it turns out some of them are really great.

The ST novel The Final Reflection is supposed to be the best, but, I dunno, I’m not super interested in getting into Klingon sociology. I hear good things about Memory Prime and Prime Directive; might be worth a shot. Anyone have any knowledge or opinions?

There was a pretty good ST novel, The Kobayashi Maru that came out in the 80s that is an anthology of short stories with a framing device of the crew of a shuttle (Kirk, Sulu, Chekhov, and Scott) hitting a gravitic mine and having to find a way out of the minefield they'd stumbled in to, and all of them relating their own "Kobayashi Maru" exams.

(spoilers)

Briefly, Sulu's story is the "typical" K-M scenario. Except he refuses to enter the Neutral Zone. The result is some of the simulated crew and actual class members begin to try to "take a vote". His second in command (a fellow classmate) stands up for Sulu and says that the ship is not a democracy and there is no "vote" and asks if "Commander Sulu" would like her to arrest them all for mutiny. A parallel story at the same time is that Sulu's 120 year old grandfather has decided to stop all cancer treatments which leaves Sulu despondent, and he almost misses his own exams until the classmate who role-plays his 2nd essentially explains the importance of setting aside personal feelings in the face of "unwinnable" scenarios...

Chekhov's exam is that he and his classmates are sent to a semi-decommissioned space station in orbit around the Moon. While on the shuttle going there, they're told that one of the people in the class is a traitor/spy/saboteur - but not who. They're all given phasers locked on a "hard stun" setting (which apparently in addition to stunning really hurts a whole bunch so they have to be careful about being trigger happy). With most of the class laser-tagged off and removed from the station it's down to Chekhov and a small group. Chekhov collects their phasers and creates a kind of "suicide vest" out of them with a single dead-man switch. Anyone who jumps him will get "killed". He and his remaining classmates wind up in an observation room together and discussion about who the actual "killer" is gets heated, and someone points out that only a killer would rig up a suicide bomb, so they all rush him and...well, you can imagine what happened. EDIT: Forgot, that was not his first/only test. The actual K-M test for him, he moved in, evacuated the crew of the K-M, then set it to self destruct (to take out the Klingons and cover their escape) but the force of the explosion due to the ore it was carrying caught not only the Klingons and the K-M but the fleeing Federation ship (his) too...


Kirk and Scott have the most fun stories: Kirk (unlike Chris Pine in the reboot) reprograms the simulator after losing time and again and demanding a re-try. Since it is a test of character rather than an actual "grade" they let him go through again and again. He tries various diplomatic approaches (all fail) tactical approaches (all fail) and strategic approaches (appeals to Star Fleet) which all fail. Finally he realizes the computer is "cheating" (he surmises that at least ONE method should have worked) so he cheats: he reprograms the Klingon AI to acknowledge him as "Admiral Kirk" and sails into the Neutral Zone, demands assistance from the materializing Klingon fleet (and we all know what happens after that).

Scott's K-M is pretty awesome: he basically gets tapped for command and is crushed. He comes from a hundreds-of-years-long line of ship engineers going back to British WWII wet navy. He can't bring himself to deliberately wash out but even his mediocre attempts to muddle through command school are enough to keep him afloat. Finally he receives cryptic emails on his student terminal telling him that in the upcoming K-M scenario to just do what he does best and everything else will be taken care of.

So, when Scotty enters the Neutral Zone as commander in the K-M test, the Klingons appear. He's gone in with full shields so the initial Klingon photon volley isn't enough to cripple him. He knows his own torpedoes and phasers won't penetrate the Klingon shields, because in close phalanx, Klingon ships use interlocking shields; both ships mutually strengthen each other's deflectors. However, previously he authored a theoretical paper that says a matter/antimatter explosion of x megatons at the exact point where the two shields "interlock" will not only drop both shields but leave enough power to cause catastrophic reactor failure in the Klingon ships. So, he orders engineering (all just computer AI) to siphon off antimatter into a magnetic container and beam it to the exact coordinates he was sending, then beam only the container back leaving a bunch of antimatter right where the Klingons will run into it at warp-whatever. The AI "crew" is incredulous, but they do it. And it works. Both Klingon ships die. Before too much longer, four D7's uncloak, and he does it again. All four go boom. Then eight, then sixteen, then he's overwhelmed. He claimed at the time that if he'd had a real engineering section to go to he could've managed the "battle" from there and kept going as long as the simulator kept going.

In the post-exam command board review, they ask him how he knew this would work and he admits that it theoretically will but in actuality would not. No-one knows why it doesn't work, but it should: on paper. So, the board finds him unfit for Captaincy but immediately promotes him to the head of his engineering school where he finishes with flying colors. It is implied that one of the admirals sitting on the Board was the one who told him to just "do what [he] knew best" in the K-M scenario.

All in all, as Star Trek books go, it's one of the most fun reads.

Thanks for reminding me of that book, Delver. I enjoyed it immensely as a kid and held it in high regard, as do you. If I'm remembering correctly, one thing that struck me was how the administrators of the test hit the kill switch on Scotty's K-M test after several waves of him obliterating obscene numbers of Klingon warships. It had gotten to a ridiculous level, so they just shut it down...incredulous and shaking their heads. It makes you think of Scotty in a whole new light.

One of those books you hate to put down when called to the dinner table...

Landifarne wrote:Thanks for reminding me of that book, Delver. I enjoyed it immensely as a kid and held it in high regard, as do you. If I'm remembering correctly, one thing that struck me was how the administrators of the test hit the kill switch on Scotty's K-M test after several waves of him obliterating obscene numbers of Klingon warships. It had gotten to a ridiculous level, so they just shut it down...incredulous and shaking their heads. It makes you think of Scotty in a whole new light.

One of those books you hate to put down when called to the dinner table...

Hell yeah. KM is a very, very good Trek book. Scotty defeating exponential numbers of Klingons...just...DAMN.

The news isn't getting any better on this.

http://tvweb.com/star-trek-discovery-pr ... rgoed-cbs/

Will I watch the premiere on CBS? Of course. It will be free, and hey, I might be surprised. Will I subscribe to the CBS streaming service if the premiere is actually good? That's highly unlikely. After browsing what's on the service, there's nothing else interesting there to me. So no. It's not worth it for just one show. Eventually, ST:Discovery will be available elsewhere, and I'll watch then if it's any good.

After recent events, I think it will be more successful than the World of Embryo.

Being proficient in hindsight, CBS should have shut their word holes longer, but they just had to announce it to the world when they didn't have the minor things sorted out. It is like a Kickstarter being announced for a book that hasn't been written yet.

Right now, I have Netflix and Sling and no cable TV (just Charter's Internet). My wife and I were talking about this a couple of months ago, where you could just nickle and dime yourself subscribing to all of these mini-online services to the point that you might as well pay for cable TV.