"Too big to fail"? To paraphrase Admiral Clancy, that's some hubris.
Sept 8 trailer
- Thread starter Khan 2.0
- Start date
The problem is Replicators.
By even just the 26th century, to actually wipe out the Federation you would have to completely destroy every Shuttlecraft, Starship, Spacestation, Planetary Facility, and Person in it.
Anything less would just be a 20 to 40 or so year hiccup for even just one survivor to rebuild.
We'll see what the nature of The Burn is. Send a system-wide virus through the Federation, cause everything to shut down or malfunction at once, and then you're in some serious shit. Especially if you can't get anything to work again. Then the enemy catches you unguarded. They're probably unguarded anyway because most of Starfleet by the 31st or 32nd Century would think, "What can possibly happen?"
The Federation was already complacent in the 24th Century. Add 700 more years of that onto the mentality they already had, and it's the perfect set-up for the right enemy to strike if they know what they're doing.
Speculating in the dark. Maybe what causes The Burn is something else.
Except no virus would get everything.
There would be inactive stuff in mothballs they could pull out and start a tiny bit set back with.
Or stuff owned by people that isn't connected to whatever network.
Or stuff in other galaxies.
Or stuff in other times.
Unless the average citizen didn't care enough to keep up, leaving Starfleet to try to maintain protection until their numbers are dwindled and they can no longer protect the Federation.
CAN'T WAIT!
And it looks like they're still using the spore drive. There was a brief shot of the ship making a jump.
I didn't really see any other ships in the clip, so if "The Burn" is something like the Omega particle from VOY making warp drive impossible, maybe that's why the Federation mostly collapsed (aside from worlds that are reachable without warp), so the spore drive would be invaluable. It might be why Burnham says "The Federation isn't just about ships..."
While I didn't think the Omega episode from VOY was that great, it would still be a way to connect the future cataclysm to something we previously know of. Or it could be something totally different, of course.
And it looks like they're still using the spore drive. There was a brief shot of the ship making a jump.
I didn't really see any other ships in the clip, so if "The Burn" is something like the Omega particle from VOY making warp drive impossible, maybe that's why the Federation mostly collapsed (aside from worlds that are reachable without warp), so the spore drive would be invaluable. It might be why Burnham says "The Federation isn't just about ships..."
While I didn't think the Omega episode from VOY was that great, it would still be a way to connect the future cataclysm to something we previously know of. Or it could be something totally different, of course.
Warp Drive isn't the only way to travel Faster Then Light in Star Trek.
So if Warp travel somehow got wiped out they would just switch to one of the others.
That assumes that there are people who remember how to use the other technological options.
Again, if the catastrophe is big enough, knock out enough rungs of information, then it doesn't matter who knows what if they can't communicate that to someone else.
Again, if the catastrophe is big enough, knock out enough rungs of information, then it doesn't matter who knows what if they can't communicate that to someone else.
Except not, because information is everywhere.
And there are backups to backups to backups to backups.
You'd need political unity to achieve what's basically rebooting the entire galaxy from a backup. Even if there are replicators or much of the infrastructure remains, you need to take it into account that galactic civilization in Star Trek truly depends on two things - physical FTL travel and real-time FTL communication. Take any of those two away and the Federation collapses in a matter of weeks because of the sheer impossibility of maintaining any semblance of day-to-day operations..
I say we should wait until we learned what the Burn actually is. But I don't suppose it's merely a galaxy-wide communications blackout that lasts for a few weeks or something. It might go on for years if not decades, and would probably disrupt key functions of the Federation for that time. Without FTL communications, messages would travel decades, maybe centuries between planets, which effectively spells the end of any interstellar-scale civilization. The same would be true for any starships as well; it would be impossible to send them any orders in any realistic time frame. And without FTL travel? Why should Betazed or Andor listen to whatever some stuck-up Admiral in San Francisco says when their ability to enforce any kind of authority is decades to centuries of impulse travel away?
The problem is, Omega molecules, which some are suspecting to be the reason for the burn, do not wipe warp travel out. They destroy subspace itself. Any kind of drive that utilizes subspace would be rendered useless. And it's never as simple as just switching to a different kind of propulsion. If all traces of oil were suddenly removed from Earth, would people just collectively shrug and switch to electric engines and society would go on unchanged? If warp drives became useless, all kinds of non-subspace-based drives that have only been developed by aliens halfway across the galaxy and never documented, or have only existed as dangerous prototypes, would have to be developed independently by the various people that are currently unable to reach one another, not to mention they'd have to be lucky enough to have all the required materials at their disposal. Not every colony has industrial replicators and infinite replicator matter to use. It would still lead to decades of chaos and a political collapse.
Then again, I suppose Discovery would only care about subspace travel becoming impossible in this scenario. But why should they take the others into account? Those propulsion systems would've revolutionized FTL travel in their own time... if only the writers of TNG and Voyager hadn't forgotten all about them by the next episode. If those two series never reused them, why should Discovery be required to?
So you attack the system and those who guard it. Basically, like the virus that infected the Great Link or the Borg. Get in to the system and destroy it from within. Combined with a complacent populous and you'll undo civilization.
Then it would just be an alternate timeline. The Burnhamverse.
It 's fiction. Something teched the tech and now they are teched.
Was coming here to share that!
Discovery Season 3 by Ian McLean, on Flickr
Last time we saw a bearded Andorian was this "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" makeup test. The Andorian ambassador who wore this makeup, wig and costume in the actual movie was clean-shaven.
Andorian ambassador makeup test by Ian McLean, on Flickr
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