Bryan Fuller is Showrunner on New Trek Series

[Mudd]

How "explored the galaxy feels" is entirely a function of the story you're telling. Continuity with previous stories is trivial in this regard.

You're going to run into the same shit wherever you go in the "Universe" because it's the same writers and producers doing it.

 

[daedalus5]

YAY! I love Wonderfalls. Bryan Fuller and his history of modern Trek will hopefully do the new show justice.

 

[Kail]

Doug Drexler is over the moon on this on facebook - good enough for me.

I hope Doug gets on the team. He is truly one of us, a real fan of Star Trek.

 

[davejames]

Hardly "most." The territories we've seen are a tiny, tiny fraction of the respective quadrants. Look at the galaxy map from Star Trek Star Charts. You see that little silver dot marked "LOCAL SPACE (sphere 1,500 LY in diameter)"? That's the equivalent of the "Known Space" map from the rear foldouts of the book. That tiny dot contains the entire Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian, Tholian, Breen, and Ferengi territories with plenty of extra room besides. You can also see how tiny the space is between the Idran system and the Founder homeworld (and frankly I think the book greatly overestimates the scale of things in the Gamma Quadrant), and you can see the very narrow line representing Voyager's journey (and keep in mind that the ship actually skipped over most of that line thanks to various transwarp jumps and wormholes and the like, so it's really just a few short, scattered dashes along that line). All the exploration we've seen in all the Trek shows has covered only a few tiny specks of the galaxy. Even if you throw in the "Approximate Limit of Explored Space" outline around the UFP and its neighbors, I'd say the total explored volume adds up to less than 5% of the entire Milky Way. And that map is based on an old assumption about the galaxy's radius -- we now think the galactic disk might actually be 60% wider, meaning it would have over 2.5 times the total area. Which would mean the explored total would be less than 2% of the whole.

Well ok, things don't look so bad according to that chart. But most of the others I've seen over the years are more like these ones, where the territories seem a lot more expansive:
http://i.stack.imgur.com/LSznY.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Galactic_Quadrant_Star_Trek.png

And regardless, there's still a huge freakin universe out there to explore... where we don't have to have repeated runins with rogue Klingons or Borg or Vulcans all the time.

 

[Corran Horn]

And regardless, there's still a huge freakin universe out there to explore... where we don't have to have repeated runins with rogue Klingons or Borg or Vulcans all the time.

They thought that when TNG started...

 

[DaddlerTheDalek]

Bryan Fuller? Seems like a good choice to me.

 

[Christopher]

Well ok, things don't look so bad according to that chart. But most of the others I've seen over the years are more like these ones, where the territories seem a lot more expansive:
http://i.stack.imgur.com/LSznY.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Galactic_Quadrant_Star_Trek.png

Wow, those are both pretty disproportionate. The first one is pretty much absurd.

And regardless, there's still a huge freakin universe out there to explore... where we don't have to have repeated runins with rogue Klingons or Borg or Vulcans all the time.

Yeah, but there's plenty of room for that in the Milky Way alone.

The problem -- and those maps illustrate this quite well -- is that human beings have no ability to grasp just how immense the Milky Way is. We have no reference for it. We may have some idea of the difference in size between a city and a continent, or a city and the whole Earth (although most people's estimate of either of those is probably way off), but the difference in scale between a single star system and the entire galaxy is immensely greater.

One way to look at it is in terms of numbers. The galaxy has something like 4-500 billion stars. Even if the Federation could visit a new one every single day, it would take more than a billion years to visit every star in the galaxy. In three centuries at that rate, the most they could cover would be 0.002% of the galaxy. Even in that 4-5% covered in Star Charts, the vast majority of star systems would probably have never been visited by anything but unmanned probes at best.

Even if we conservatively assume that only, say, one star in a million has sentient life, that's still nearly half a million intelligent species, so if you could visit one per day, it would still take over 1,300 years to contact them all. And in Trek, sentient life seems to be far more common than that.

 

[thumbtack]

My sources tell me you're full of spaghetti.

I thought you were just 15 and not at all emotionally bound up in the old canon.

We could get more news fairly quickly now as hiring begins.

 

[LocutusCrusher]

Awesome news, I can't think of a better choice.

Time to dig up those Wonderfalls DVDs

Don't forget, he sent Vedek Winn over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

 

[Shalashaska]

I thought you were just 15 and not at all emotionally bound up in the old canon.

We could get more news fairly quickly now as hiring begins.

I can't be a fan of old things if I'm 15?

That's some fine logic.

 

[Goji]

I'm almost as big a fan of Pushing Daisies as I am TOS or DS9 (and way more than the other shows), so this is pretty much a dream come true for me. There are few people in the entertainment business today I have more faith in and respect for than Bryan Fuller.

Hell, I'm still miffed his Munsters reboot didn't go to series.

 

[AviTrek]

Well ok, things don't look so bad according to that chart. But most of the others I've seen over the years are more like these ones, where the territories seem a lot more expansive:
http://i.stack.imgur.com/LSznY.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Galactic_Quadrant_Star_Trek.png

And regardless, there's still a huge freakin universe out there to explore... where we don't have to have repeated runins with rogue Klingons or Borg or Vulcans all the time.

But that's the ratings stunt that the writers fall back on. There is no reason why we need to keep running into Klingons or Borg in the Milky Way, but when the writers get lazy and want to create excitement, they roll them out. If you arbitrarily moved the series to another galaxy then when the writers get lazy they create a technobabble anomaly and still give you a Borg cube. There is nothing fundamentally different about 1 fictional point on a map than another fictional point. You're not exploring a new region, you're seeing what a writer made up about a planet that could be anywhere.

 

[Shalashaska]

For any of you who STILL weren't sold on this decision...

 

[davejames]

But that's the ratings stunt that the writers fall back on. There is no reason why we need to keep running into Klingons or Borg in the Milky Way, but when the writers get lazy and want to create excitement, they roll them out. If you arbitrarily moved the series to another galaxy then when the writers get lazy they create a technobabble anomaly and still give you a Borg cube. There is nothing fundamentally different about 1 fictional point on a map than another fictional point. You're not exploring a new region, you're seeing what a writer made up about a planet that could be anywhere.

Yeah that's definitely a possibility, and I realize writers could still come up with lots of great Trek stories set in our galaxy... I just think it'd be nice to get as far away from the safety of the Federation and all the existing aliens and conflicts and continuity as possible.

I've always loved that palpable sense of mystery and isolation you felt when the TNG crew traveled to another galaxy in Where No One Has Gone Before-- where you truly felt the crew was on their own in scary and completely uncharted space-- and would just love to see a Trek series that captured that feeling in every episode.

(VOY managed to capture that feeling fairly well in it's early episodes... but we all know what eventually happened with that show. Lol)

 

[Mudd]

I'm not nearly as interested in the fact that Fuller is a trekkie as I am in the TV work he's done in the last few years that I liked.

 

[Christopher]

Yeah that's definitely a possibility, and I realize writers could still come up with lots of great Trek stories set in our galaxy... I just think it'd be nice to get as far away from the safety of the Federation and all the existing aliens and conflicts and continuity as possible.

But that's just it -- our galaxy is so incomprehensibly huge that it's entirely possible to get far away from any known territory without leaving the Milky Way. The idea that the galaxy could ever be cramped is rooted in a fundamental inability to grasp just how huge it is. No offense -- it's just not something the human mind is equipped to comprehend, because it's so far beyond the scale of anything in our life experience.

Besides, what difference does it make, when the writers of the shows pay so little attention to astronomy? Heck, Voyager's last couple of seasons should've been set on the edge of the Central Bulge, and half the sky should've been filled with a nearly unbroken wall of starlight, but they just portrayed the same old boring starscapes they'd used everywhere else in the "galaxy." The actual geography of things didn't matter to them. They could've just as easily have set Voyager in the Small Magellanic Cloud as in the "Delta Quadrant," and it would've made no narrative difference.

 

[davejames]

Again, I understand how incomprehensibly vast our actual galaxy is, but in the Trek version of that galaxy it often hasn't felt nearly as vast (at least in the way writers of the past have portrayed it). Especially when they can seemingly warp from the far end of the quadrant back to Earth in the space of a commercial break, or have the entire fleet fly to their rescue the following day, or talk in real time to people on far distant planets, etc.

And of course if we get another 24th or 25th century show set in that original prime universe, the technology to do those things would have likely improved even more by then.

 

[Tai]

I liked a lot of what Bryan Fuller had done in Trek. I heard Hannibal had some excellent episodes. I also believes this is strong evidence that the show will be set in the prime universe.

 

[Christopher]

Again, I understand how incomprehensibly vast our actual galaxy is, but in the Trek version of that galaxy it often hasn't felt nearly as vast (at least in the way writers of the past have portrayed it). Especially when they can seemingly warp from the far end of the quadrant back to Earth in the space of a commercial break, or have the entire fleet fly to their rescue the following day, or talk in real time to people on far distant planets, etc.

They've never been to the far end of the quadrant, though. The far end of the Federation, sure, but that's like the difference between a trip from Times Square to Hell's Kitchen and a trip from Times Square to Nome, Alaska.

 

[Mudd]

I liked a lot of what Bryan Fuller had done in Trek. I heard Hannibal had some excellent episodes. I also believes this is strong evidence that the show will be set in the prime universe.

Clearly, because Hannibal and Pushing Daisies were set in the oldTrek universe.