kitsune
Captain
Please don't use gay as an offensive term
Things I Hate About Star Trek
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Please don't use gay as an offensive term
sorreh. I use it quite liberally since I really don't...care. Since I'm gay and like, not offended by it.
Anyway, Red Squad was a bad idea. Would have loved the coup to be done by Thirty-One which, if I may add, was a terrific addition to the Trek universe.
For all we know Leyton might have been in 31
Well, actually no... but according to Memory Alpha, in the episode "The Drumhead", Admiral Norah Satie stated the loss at Wolf 359 as 39 starships and nearly 11,000 lives. I'm not sure how many starships were in service, but that seems like a very large number. All taken out by one Borg cube. Given that kind of scale, Voyager shouldn't have been able to take on the Borg as they did, even with Seven's enhancements. Power is power. "You can't fight the laws of physics," as Scotty so aptly said.
I'd be much obliged... but I don't have a blog.I like your ideas and wish to subscribe
I still say the Wolf 359 squadron was just the "Home Fleet." When your major antagonist has cloaked starships, it would be idiotic not to keep at least a few dozen ships parked in orbit around your capital.
How much sense that makes when there surely must be similar defense forces above Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, Delta, Coridan, and other nearby worlds is debatable, but perhaps it was presumed that one ship couldn't possibly destroy the entire Earth fleet. Really, in retrospect, we can definitively say that even hundreds more ships wouldn't have made any difference anyway--perhaps those ships simply weren't able to converge at Wolf 359 in time to intercept the cube, and by the time they would have gotten there it was obvious to everyone that continued conventional warfare against the Borg was, well, futile.
The upshot is Earth doesn't have a defense force except the damaged/refitting Enterprise until ships can be released from other, less urgent duties.
How much sense that makes when there surely must be similar defense forces above Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, Delta, Coridan, and other nearby worlds is debatable, but perhaps it was presumed that one ship couldn't possibly destroy the entire Earth fleet. Really, in retrospect, we can definitively say that even hundreds more ships wouldn't have made any difference anyway--perhaps those ships simply weren't able to converge at Wolf 359 in time to intercept the cube, and by the time they would have gotten there it was obvious to everyone that continued conventional warfare against the Borg was, well, futile.
The upshot is Earth doesn't have a defense force except the damaged/refitting Enterprise until ships can be released from other, less urgent duties.
Please don't use gay as an offensive term
Wow.... that's a first.
I'd like to add my own request as long as we're searching for nurturing on the internet:
Please refrain from making fun of short people. I'm 5'8, it's NOT a personal choice, I was just born this way! I find it deeply offensive when short people are ridiculed for just being who they are. We're just trying to live our lives, it's hard enough without you cruel bigots making fun of us!
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kitsune
Captain
Evidence in favor of a small fleet:
- Everyone reacted to Wolf359 as if it was a major loss (although admittedly, 39 ships and 11,000 lives could be considered a major loss for a single engagement under any circumstances).
- Large range of ship registry numbers
- Cmdr. Shelby said they'd have the fleet back up in a year (implying Starfleet had tremendous ship-building resources, given the 7-year or 13-year building cycle for the Enterprise-D [The TNG tech manual's construction chronology is frustratingly ambiguous regarding how long it took to build her]). If at the maximum rate of production Starfleet can build 40 ships in one year, and Starfleet is by this time over 200 years old, that gives us an absolute upper limit of 8,000 ships, but the actual figure should be much less because this capacity clearly didn't exist back in the NX-class days, and many ships have been lost or decommissioned, and even the top-of-the-line Galaxy class ships only have a service expectancy of 100 years).
- Huge numbers of ships shown during the Dominion War, far more than could have been built since the battle at Wolf 359.
- Given how far away from home Starfleet's ships have been seen to operate, can we really believe that half the fleet was only a couple days away from Earth?
kitsune
Captain
Your mother's pregnancy and labor must've been painful
Your mother's pregnancy and labor must've been painful
LoL, touche
Mine would be:
-- Technobabble. Really really gets in the way of storytelling. It's good to have characters use/talk about tech of the time period, but when the whole resolution of the episode is down to 'realigning the flux capacitor of the warp core on a remodulating frequency' they might as well just go 'magicy wagicy oooh look, disaster averted!'. It's lazy. DS9, for me, is the best Trek show because it used much less of this than TNG or VOY. The early Trek movies too benefit from less of it.
-- Voyager. Pretty much everything about it sucks arse - except The EMH. Primarily the way they took a good premise and did NOTHING with it, created a crew of loyal officers and separatists with potential for gallons of conflict and did NOTHING with it, the way they turned the Borg from the terrifying menaces of early TNG and made them into campy/humanised annoyances (I'm looking at you, Borg children!!), the way they ended the show with a finale half-set in a future that won't exist and then didn't even have the decency to show us what happened ONCE they got home, the way Chakotay had NO STORYLINE after Season Two, the way they turned it into the Janeway/Seven show for the last FOUR SEASONS.
...
I could go on all day. It's shit. Let's leave it there.
-- Romance. They only ever get it right when it's built up naturally. Worf/Dax worked well because it wasn't forced and they were good, well-written characters. Ditto Tom/B'Elanna and Odo/Kira (though they only JUST get away with it). We cared. We don't care when a Mirror Bareil turns up and smarms his way into Kira's bed or a Trill ambassador has Deanna's knickers off by Act Two. No. Just stop now.
-- Technobabble. Really really gets in the way of storytelling. It's good to have characters use/talk about tech of the time period, but when the whole resolution of the episode is down to 'realigning the flux capacitor of the warp core on a remodulating frequency' they might as well just go 'magicy wagicy oooh look, disaster averted!'. It's lazy. DS9, for me, is the best Trek show because it used much less of this than TNG or VOY. The early Trek movies too benefit from less of it.
-- Voyager. Pretty much everything about it sucks arse - except The EMH. Primarily the way they took a good premise and did NOTHING with it, created a crew of loyal officers and separatists with potential for gallons of conflict and did NOTHING with it, the way they turned the Borg from the terrifying menaces of early TNG and made them into campy/humanised annoyances (I'm looking at you, Borg children!!), the way they ended the show with a finale half-set in a future that won't exist and then didn't even have the decency to show us what happened ONCE they got home, the way Chakotay had NO STORYLINE after Season Two, the way they turned it into the Janeway/Seven show for the last FOUR SEASONS.
...
I could go on all day. It's shit. Let's leave it there.
-- Romance. They only ever get it right when it's built up naturally. Worf/Dax worked well because it wasn't forced and they were good, well-written characters. Ditto Tom/B'Elanna and Odo/Kira (though they only JUST get away with it). We cared. We don't care when a Mirror Bareil turns up and smarms his way into Kira's bed or a Trill ambassador has Deanna's knickers off by Act Two. No. Just stop now.
Very good points, Kitsune. Yes, from the reactions and statements given from various officers, it sounded to me like a huge portion of the fleet came to converge on Wolf 359 and all were decimated. One of the bigger concerns was loss of life--officer/crew talent that takes many years to replace. I've always been curious as to how large the Federation has been at various points in time. The writers and producers have kept that very ambiguous... probably for good reason (fear of another aspect that may be portrayed inconsistently). Registry numbers aren't necessarily sequential... part of the reason being that you don't want to tip off the enemy on how many ships you might have. Choose a large number and it's anybody's guess.
The Federation does seem capable of rapidly building ships, but of course you then need people to staff them. Then there is the overhead in operations. Sure, you could always send "excess" ships and crew off to exploration... but I'll bet that there's also the issue of materials conservation. City construction probably demands a lot of the base raw materials used in starships. Anyway, my statement of "half the fleet" was quoted to infer an exaggeration. It would be interesting to draw upon comparisons to reality... how many destroyers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines does the United States have? I'll bet some of that information can be found around the Internet.
kitsune
Captain
And here I assumed it was quoted to imply an on-screen quote.
I don't know how often she did it, but I got a little upset whenever Janeway bitched about not having coffee.
Just to nitpick - it was Crusher who was being schlupped by a Trill for half of a TNG episode. And while your examples of bad romances are good, I think you're forgetting quite a few that were done well, particularly some of the Picard ones, such as Picard and the stellar cartography commander (can't spell her name) and Picard with Vash. There was a nice, but short little love story between Captain Kirk and Edith Keeler as well, and I dug what was done with Sisko and Kassidy Yates. I wouldn't say Star Trek was generally bad at romance, there were just a few very memorable examples of bad romance, like those ones you mentioned.
kitsune
Captain
Neela or Nella Daren, depending on who you ask.
kitsune
Captain
One thing that bugs me is the stardate system. One stardate unit is a day, but 1,000 equal a year? Stardate 47988 (from AGT) implies the "stardate epoch" was almost 48 years prior, so would Picard's day of birth be a negative stardate? And it's impossible to reconcile TNG stardates with TOS stardates...
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