You have the Preservers, the Hur'Q, the Tkon, the Iconians, the Borg, and the First Federation.
I would prefer to boil everything down the unexplained mysteries and lost civilizations and hard to explain things to an easily digestible mythos with those six at the core, with them all being clear allegories for current empires or aspects of the human condition, give or take.
The Preservers preserve and may have links to the Changelings. (Same basic makeup. Same actress played both the lead Founder and a Preserver. Genetic engineering. Easy for me to buy the Dominion as a corruption of the Preservers. Also, kinda interested in more exploration of the species the Founders used to create the Vorta and Jem'Hadar and whether that could be expanded in STO to include a new species or two in service of the Founders.)
The Hur'Q fight and conquer and have links to the Klingons. I can see them not only as the Klingons' oldest enemies but as the abusive galactic parents to the Klingons who started that cycle of violence.
The Tkon are largely unknown but I like the idea of them dealing with artificial life (Tkon, "Tech on") because it's a big part of Trek and one that quite apparently stretches back to very ancient times from what we saw on TOS and Voyager.
The Iconians are sort of spider-like. They lay traps. They prey. They destroy what they cannot control. They now have links to the Romulans.
The First Federation explore. I'd be somewhat tempted to link the Traveler's people in here. I would also be interested in the El Aureans being tied in here.
And the Borg? I guess I see them as the punk upstart kids who emerged from all of that. ("Nu uh. I'm nothing like you, Dad. I'm gonna grow up to be PERFECT!")
if you believe that the borg were around 200,000 years ago then there is a 400,000 year gap since the Tkon empire was extinct. during the same time the Borg came into existance on your belief of 200,000 years, the Iconians were also extinct around the same time. The Old Ones were never stated to be anything like iconians and Ruk was built only a few hundred years before the enterprise mission.
And I think in spite of the vast time spans, a simple history is a better history.
First, ignore all novels and particularly those published since around 2000. Please. For your own sanity and mine. :-) And I have friends who've written some. But... Trek novels operate on a very fanfic level and there's a reason why folks who did the shows used ideas from them sparingly. I'll be honest. I take them as a guilty pleasure and a few notches less seriously than the comic books or video games.
Second, it makes things simpler if you lump things together... and is closer how TV writers think than how novelists think. Nobody really knows how big the Tkon or Iconian Empires are. I'd rather assume they were big and make Trek history simpler by folding everything pre-Federation down to a handful of groups who interacted, with semi-recognizable names. Make it simple. Which clears up the galactic clutter so that there's room inside people's heads for new stuff.
You take the Comic Books and Video games more seriously than novels? you are aware that the proper trek novels have to be sent to CBS for approval and checking before they get published yeah? I doubt that your friends have had their fan fiction sent off to CBS and published right? are you aware that some of the novelists have actually written episodes for the series so know what they are doing?
Why would anyone want something simple? History is never simple let alone on a galactic scale, I prefer storylines to be complicated as you get more involved and can be suprised, but hey, if you like simple things i can see why you like the comics, I take it you'll be liking the upcoming Doctor who/TNG crossover comic and take that more seriously than the novels that have been written?
Simple is good if you don't want to think about what you see/read but I bet there are a hell of a lot more people out there who never want Trek to be simple and boring
You take the Comic Books and Video games more seriously than novels? you are aware that the proper trek novels have to be sent to CBS for approval and checking before they get published yeah?
So do action figures and comic books and everything else. The idea that the novels have some kind of special "approved" status is mostly a marketing myth used to sell more copies. Everything has to be approved and it's looked at in terms of branding implications.
I doubt that your friends have had their fan fiction sent off to CBS and published right? are you aware that some of the novelists have actually written episodes for the series so know what they are doing?
I have a few friends who've written for the novels, both folks I had repeated dealings with who later got published and novelists I've dealt with. I'm not even sure all of THEM would say they knew what they were doing and my definite impression is that the TV writers lean towards the opinion that many of them didn't always, more often than not.
Why would anyone want something simple? History is never simple let alone on a galactic scale, I prefer storylines to be complicated as you get more involved and can be suprised, but hey, if you like simple things i can see why you like the comics, I take it you'll be liking the upcoming Doctor who/TNG crossover comic and take that more seriously than the novels that have been written?
Simple is good if you don't want to think about what you see/read but I bet there are a hell of a lot more people out there who never want Trek to be simple and boring
I wouldn't confuse complexity with excitement. The two tend to be opposites. And while complexity can support depth, I'd say meaningful and deliberate depth is better. Simple things are often deeper than complex things.
And I'm not talking "Jack and Jill" level of simplicity. But six empires with various phases and involvements is enough to fill a couple of Tolkien novels. And Trek is VERY LIGHT pop sci-fi. Being as complex as Tolkien is plenty complex as a goal. Wanting more complexity than that is why guys like Ron D. Moore, established Trek writers (many of whom ARE novelists, just rarely for Trek), and a lot of the standard orthodox fanbase look at the novels and groan.
And I think in spite of the vast time spans, a simple history is a better history.
I think it's too facile. It's a big galaxy, after all, and an even bigger universe, and both TOS and TNG did a respectable job at showing exactly that.
Not everything needs explaining; not everything needs to be neatly wrapped up in a tidy bundle. It's bad enough that Cryptic conflated the Preservers from "The Paradise Syndrome," who were apparently moving populations around within the past 10,000 years, with the unnamed aliens in "The Chase," who apparently did their genetic seeding 4-5 billion years ago.
Two drastically different time periods, two drastically different modi operandi, collapsed into one tidy package that, if you think about it, actually raises more questions than it answers - and kind of takes away the appeal of both (IMO of course).
Let's make it even tidier and say the Iconians are really just a splinter group of the Preservers, and the Borg are just an "oopsie" done by the Preserver equivalent of Wesley. Maybe Ruk was Preserver-Wesley's third-grade science project.
Your theory will have to be thrown out, due to all the inconsistencies which you'd have to twist around to make it all fit.
The T'kon existed nearly half a million years before the Iconians. Unless you think the Iconians existed before the T'kon rose and continued long after they were wiped out, which would be stretching credibility pretty thinly.
I don't see it as stretching credibility. You're not giving me any new information with the time tables. I figure that million year empires are not impossible or uncommon prior to the current order of things, given that the Borg have been around at least 200,000 years.
The "incompatibility" rests on a fairly legalistic view of the world. That involves a rigid "gospel" view of things that would deny any creative situating of events.
Also, the T'kon can't be the machine lifeforms which upgraded V'ger. Voyager 6 got transported to the other side of the galaxy (unless Spock was ridiculously wrong, even though he mindmelded with V'ger and learned some of its secrets). The T'kon empire existed in the Alpha and Beta quadrants, as did the Iconians.
Unless, as I said, the machine life persisted in some form and moved to the Delta Quadrant. I mean, my gosh, the El Aureans dealt with the Borg circa the 2290s and had been to earth in the 1890s.
Also if the T'kon grafted organic matter to themselves (which the Borg queen disproved by saying the Borg were originally completely organic), then did they lose the knowledge of transporting whole planets and stars around to different locations in the intervening thousands of centuries? Because if the Borg had that knowledge (being ex-T'kon) then it'd be a fair bet that they'd OWN the galaxy and everything in it by now. Heck, an Iconian Obex ship wouldn't stand a chance against a Borg probe if they were that advanced, let alone a Borg cube.
It depends on which perspective the Queen was viewing things from when she said "we were once like you." And my whole point is that the technology FAILED due to the Iconian computer virus so, yes, much of it was lost. It could be the basis for transwarp gateways, though.
My gosh, Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, and Ron Moore's approach to continuity must drive you batty (much less Abrams') if what I said here seems implausible. And if anything THEIR approach was probably too rigid for the health of the franchise. An over-reliance on complexity is what killed Trek after Enterprise and a return to simplicity is what allowed Orci and Kurtzman to make their vision appealing. All I'm suggesting is to strike a balance and make the larger continuity about as complex as Tolkien or maybe something that a single television series could cover effectively. I don't think something profoundly more complex than that is healthy or sustainable, nor is it true to how television writers and screenwriters would approach the material, looking for broad thematic hooks rather than filling pages with arcana.
And by and large, the stuff I'm talking about simplifying doesn't have any established canon.
I mean, my gosh, there are maybe two novels that deal extensively with the Iconians and don't mesh with STO. (One is even set in a parallel universe.) There are a handful of short stories that don't mesh with anything. And two episodes that do mesh with STO, with a bit of mashing down the edges and squinting.
Overall, I'd strongly discourage "Memory Beta" type thinking and encourage approaching this stuff the way a television writer with a research bible would, compromising between the material and the need to make something out of it.
Not everything needs explaining; not everything needs to be neatly wrapped up in a tidy bundle. It's bad enough that Cryptic conflated the Preservers from "The Paradise Syndrome," who were apparently moving populations around within the past 10,000 years, with the unnamed aliens in "The Chase," who apparently did their genetic seeding 4-5 billion years ago.
I think it's great that they did that. It's what the writer for "The Chase" had in mind. It got deleted not due to implausibility but because they didn't want to make a gratuitous TOS reference.
It's television writer thinking and how Trek should be managed.
Not as a grimoire full of obscura but as a coherent fable.
I think it's great that they did that. It's what the writer for "The Chase" had in mind. It got deleted not due to implausibility but because they didn't want to make a gratuitous TOS reference.
It's television writer thinking and how Trek should be managed.
Not as a grimoire full of obscura but as a coherent fable.
I'm glad it got deleted; whoever did so, IMO, had the right instinct.
And it's not a "grimoire full of obscura," but a view of the galaxy as a dynamic, living, evolving place. Interstellar civilizations rise and fall - or continue to rise to some sort of post-material ascension in the cases of the Organians, the Thasians, and presumably the Q (which, I'm guessing, you'd lump all together as one species).
Just think of local "space" from Enterprise through TNG - it's chock-full of independent species and governments existing around and within Federation territory (not to mention the Federation members themselves - who, at one point, must have been independent). That's not a "grimoire of obscura;" that's a big, vibrant galaxy with huge potential for cooperation and cross-fertilization... or mutual destruction.
Why would the past galaxy have been any different? Why wouldn't it have been a patchwork of cooperating, competing, and isolated civilizations in various states of ascendancy or decay? Half a dozen huge empires running everything through all perpetuity up until relatively recently might make everything pleasingly simple - but in my mind, it's extremely dull.
I'm glad it got deleted; whoever did so, IMO, had the right instinct.
And it's not a "grimoire full of obscura," but a view of the galaxy as a dynamic, living, evolving place. Interstellar civilizations rise and fall - or continue to rise to some sort of post-material ascension in the cases of the Organians, the Thasians, and presumably the Q (which, I'm guessing, you'd lump all together as one species).
Just think of local "space" from Enterprise through TNG - it's chock-full of independent species and governments existing around and within Federation territory (not to mention the Federation members themselves - who, at one point, must have been independent). That's not a "grimoire of obscura;" that's a big, vibrant galaxy with huge potential for cooperation and cross-fertilization... or mutual destruction.
Why would the past galaxy have been any different? Why wouldn't it have been a patchwork of cooperating, competing, and isolated civilizations in various states of ascendancy or decay? Half a dozen huge empires running everything through all perpetuity up until relatively recently might make everything pleasingly simple - but in my mind, it's extremely dull.
The details you describe are world by world and the worlds are designed to be morality plays with teachable truths. We're talking big empires and big empires have big lessons.
That's how the present of Star Trek is constructed. Why should the past be any different?
The details you describe are world by world and the worlds are designed to be morality plays with teachable truths. We're talking big empires and big empires have big lessons.
That's how the present of Star Trek is constructed. Why should the past be any different?
I think you may be in danger of contradicting your own notion of "TV writing." TOS and TNG were all about world-by-world morality plays with teachable truths. The "big empires" were remote and nebulous - unless the plot of this week's episode involved empires at war. The galaxy was much more vast, varied, strange, and enduring than any petty, transient "empire" that existed within it, a point that IMO Q hammered home in "All Good Things."
For me, and I suspect for many others, Star Trek was all about exploration on several levels, about pushing the boundaries of human and personal knowledge and capability. That's what made the franchise, AFAIC. But if everything is explained in as compact and as simplified a way as you seem to want it to be, then what's left to explore?
Leave a mystery or two, or at least the potential for one. Let us explore the past, or at least wonder about it, rather than explain it all away with simple answers. The Borg specifically don't need a nice pat origin - and TBH I don't think Cryptic could do it justice anyway.
The Borg Queen speaks of perfection, how many times has the Borg goofed :
Lost Hue
Lost a entire cube to Lore due to Hue's new individual emotions. Surely hey must have had a way to locate and stamp out those feelings. Every Borg drone loses them, or at least suppress them.
Lost Seven of Nine
Lost Picard as Locutus
Lost Data, the Enterprise-E and the chance to change history in their favor.
Future Admiral Janeway infected them with a virus.
Peace.
I would like to point out that many times the Borg have stated their aim is for perfection, (so would prove they aren't there yet) as such they can be beaten and aren't infallible
There is no denying the linage from an artistic point of view. Clearly, the STO design team drew directly from TMP's V'ger when making the Unimatrix ships.
The question now is which is the chicken, and which is the egg, in the STO-verse at least.
I suppose it boils down to how dark they want to get... If all V'ger says is true, then would Ilia Probe (or Decker?) be the fist "Borg?" After all, V'ger learns it needs carbon-based life to continue... and V'ger was programmed to gather info and absorb it... could not the new directive be "assimilate culture and lifeforms?" Anything is possible of course, but some connection has clearly been made by the team at Cryptic, under CBS's approval mind you, between V'ger's design and the Unimatrices.
Wampaq@Jnoh, Fleet Leader: ..Bloodbath and Beyond[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]'Iw HaH je Hoch! ALL HOLDINGS FINISHED! - Starbase 5-5-5-5 || Embassy 3-3-3 || Mine 3-3-3 || Spire 3-3-3 A laid back KDF fleet welcoming independent, casual, & part-time players and groups. Roms & alts welcome. Send in-game mail to Wampaq@Jnoh, visit our recruitment thread and FB page for more info.
If the Unimatrix ship is in fact inspired by V'ger, that's too bad. I don't know the original ship designers' ideas, but to me the cube and sphere hearken to Greek notions of perfect shapes (e.g. Platonic solids, all of which can be inscribed and circumscribed by a sphere). The V'ger-ish design definitely breaks this.
I would genuinely hate to see a connection between V'ger and the Borg. The canonical similarities are superficial at best, and I always liked the idea of a "pure" machine sentience out there that might be incapable of recognizing organic life as intelligent.
If STO officially makes the connection, it'll feel like another all-too-convenient conflation of two very different ideas.
There shouldn't be a connection between V'Ger and the Borg. V'Ger was created by intelligent machines, not intelligent biomechanical beings. V'Gers creators didn't sound as if they'd allow any kind of organics in their designs.
You realize Gene Roddenberry himself hinted there could be a connection between V'ger and the Borg.
There is a problem with your story, the conduit just outside of Earth is nothing more than an exit appiture. It only goes 1 way. Therefore Voyager 6 could not have fallen through it.
Here is my theory. Why cant they both be right. As stated in the Destiny novels, which i loved btw, the Caleiar were thrown back in time, damaged and eventually assimilated primitive speices, creating the Borg. in TMP spock does make mention of a planet populated by machines, this could be the Borg home world. The Borg/Caliear assimilate it and discover its origin, then send it back to earth as a probe to gather inteligence for their imminent invasion and assimilation of Earth. Thus would also explain why the Cube in J25 (Q who) was so far away from the delta quadrent. Also, as far as people theory about the 5th season of Ent. Yes I do recall reading something in regards to an origin episode surrounding the Borg that they encountered, however this would not necessarily be the origin of the Borg themselves, because in that very same episode, the Borg had assimilated, or attempted to assimilate, Dr. Phlox. Who could hear everything that was being transmitted between the the 24th century borg and the present borg. V'ger, would then have been verified by the borg to have been constructed in that same location and sent back to gather more information for the Cube, which later appeared in J25, BoBW, and First Contact. There, all possible origin theory's surrounding the borg have been wrapped up into one nice little basket TOGETHER, not individually. It is logical to assume that both the V'ger theory and the Destiny novels are correct.
Again, I explained that the Transwarp Conduit was different because when Voyager 6 went through, it was before the Borg took control. And after they did, it became a 1-way exit. (Not to mention how many other wormholes were discovered near Earth in Star Trek? Surely the Federation would've stumbled on that "black hole" outside the Solar System in over 300 years since they discovered warp flight?)
And I don't want to accept the Caeliar or the Destiny explaination, it was a BAD story.
BTW, Cube in J25 supposed to be investigating the transmission from Earth from those Borg survivors from First Contact. Thats why it was so far from Borg Space.
Magically happened to be hiding - Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Remember they weren't in Federation space when the Columbia encountered them as there was no Federation.
The original system of the Caelier was in the Beta Quadrant between Earth and Romulus, it is very easy to believe that due to their advanced state they could have hidden from the fledgling local powers.
After the destruction of Erigol the remaining Caelier that survived were transported thousands of Light Years away and centuries into the past, hence why it took so long for a Federation starship to come across New Erigol
I'm sorry, but thats exactly why I hate Destiny. They just magically are and conveniently being the origin of the Borg and it's destruction.
In Q-Who, the Borg are stated to be at least 200,000 years old. The 13th century thing is a retcon.
Not a Retcon. In Voyager the Vaadwuar commented that the Borg was in control of a handful of systems in 1484. So if they were around for 200,000 years, then they were planetary bound for tens of thousands of years.
having a leader and a hive mind does not contradict. It actually makes perfect sense. Only thing is, that the leader is not commanding them at all, they do it by instinct. In an ant hive the queen is not the leader, nobody is. the queen is simply another servant to the hive.
the borg "queen" states her purpose to picard. she brings order to chaos, whatever that may mean.
imho, the borg origin story may be a way for cryptic to do some really epic storytelling. i really hope, that if they get permission to do it, they don't TRIBBLE it up with some half finished story missions. The jem'hadar mission was not bad, but the borg deserve something twice or tripple as big and awesome.
Silly concept regarding the Breen? really? I like the fact the Breen have been fleshed out a lot and some of the contradictions in Start Trek Canon have been explained
1. The Breen homeworld is 'actually quite comfortable' as quoted by Weyoun, yet according to some Cardassians the Breen Homeworld is an icy wasteland.
2. No-one has ever seen what a Breen looks like, yet Kira managed to get a Breen suit from killing one-
Yes, "really".
That's why I wrote what I did.
I don't like it.
The way the Breen have been "fleshed out" makes me facepalm, as does the concept between the powers involved in creating the actual Typhon Pact. Contrary to popular belief, you can be a Trek fan and not like every aspect about it. The novels are a prime example: I think most have stories which are so ridiculous or outrageous, they come across like fanfics, and if I don't like the concept or the direction the author takes the story and characters, I'll certainly say as much.
having a leader and a hive mind does not contradict. It actually makes perfect sense. Only thing is, that the leader is not commanding them at all, they do it by instinct. In an ant hive the queen is not the leader, nobody is. the queen is simply another servant to the hive.
the borg "queen" states her purpose to picard. she brings order to chaos, whatever that may mean.
Up until that Voyager episode (forget which one - couldn't care enough to look it up), I considered the Borg Queen as sort of a version 2.0 of Locutus, being developed while Picard was captive, and with the same purpose in mind; i.e., to give target species a "face" to talk to, instead of a disembodied voice or a mindless drone.
In other words, she was never a leader and was never meant to be one. She was just a point-of-contact for as yet unassimilated species. Locutus was just the prototype and/or proof of concept.
But then that Voyager episode comes along and blows that theory out of the water. :mad: Another reason to hate Voyager, I guess...
Fairly sure the STO-verse bought in to the V'ger story, either V'ger causing the Borg or vice versa. The "proof" is in the Unimatrix boss ship design:
The "proof" is nothing more than the game designers deciding to go along with the author(s) of the V'Ger-Borg marriage and adding it to the game. Neither stories or characters require the other for a crutch, and IMO, the attempt to link the two is lame.
The entities which rebuilt V'Ger were "living machines." They saw organics as an infestation, i.e. something which interfered with machines doing things on their own. V'Ger was going to remove the infestation on Earth.
Not communicate.
Not assimilate.
REMOVE, as in ELIMINATE.
I know a few people want to perpetuate the link between V'Ger's rebuilders and the Borg, but it doesn't jive at all without the help of continuous retconning and ignoring the obvious differences in intent between two completely different concepts of "races."
having a leader and a hive mind does not contradict. It actually makes perfect sense. Only thing is, that the leader is not commanding them at all, they do it by instinct. In an ant hive the queen is not the leader, nobody is. the queen is simply another servant to the hive.
the borg "queen" states her purpose to picard. she brings order to chaos, whatever that may mean.
imho, the borg origin story may be a way for cryptic to do some really epic storytelling. i really hope, that if they get permission to do it, they don't TRIBBLE it up with some half finished story missions. The jem'hadar mission was not bad, but the borg deserve something twice or tripple as big and awesome.
If they could ever muster up the skill they had behind the Romulan based FEs theyd have a pretty good shot at giving this game some amazing storylines.
honestly, the V'ger-borg connection in STO can be explained easily... the borg found the race of living machines and assimilated it. thus giving the "b'ger" ship design.
the original machine race itself might not have been all that advanced, which would make them being assimilated by the borg in more recent times pluasible. to the machine race might have fallen victim to some natural disaster and 'died off', leaving remains for the Borg to recover and assimilate into their techbase.
Voyager 6 has been implied to have been thrown backwards in time, so it had hundreds (if no time travel) if not thousands or millions of years to accumulate knowledge. given the amount of knowledge hinted at in the film, including "whole galaxies" being stored there, the higher time periods seem most likely. as it accumulated knowledge, it would logically enhance itself, so the ship that arrived at earth might have had core elements from the machine race, but probably was not a sample of its technology.
of course, we know that the borg existed as far back at AD 1400 (VOY: Dragons Teeth), which means that the post-merging voyager could not be the origin of the borg (frankly, the borg with the technlogy of V'ger would be an utter nightmare, the entire galaxy would have been wiped out really fast), and since V'ger didn't understand carbon based life was worth dealing with in any fashion other than extermination (the way we view bacteria), it couldn't have made the borg before going to earth. yet the borg exist a thousand or more years before V'ger figured out that "carbon units" are worth something.
and if the machine race had thought organic life was valuable, why wouldn't they have taught that to V'ger when they uplifted it with its ship-body? and unlike v'ger, the machine race would have little reason to doubt their assumptions. so obviously the machine race is unlikely to have been the origin of the borg.
which doesn't leave many options, and of those options the idea that makes the most sense is the machine race was conquered or destroyed by the borg, and their 'technological distinctiveness' added to the borgs.
"Tiny little dots far, far away. Our eyes drawn to the twinkle of a hundred billion galaxies. Giving life to illusion, illusion to life. Something upon which to hang our hopes."
- Tobias LeConte - Dream Weaver - seaQuest DSV
in their original appearances in TNG, the borg reproduced by cloning or other such artificial gestation. Assimilation meant that the technology and knowledge of other races would be added to the borg's. Picard being made a borg was apparently intended to be a somewhat unique thing, done to give the borg a mouthpeice that could serve as an 'ambassador' of sorts to races that maintained individuality.
IIRC, First Contact introduced the idea of the borg converting existing people into more borg. voyager just took the idea and ran with it. certainly the idea that the borg assimilate individuals helps explain what they did with the people of all the worlds they conquer.
presumably the idea that they use an artificial gestation system to grow new drones that have never known life outside of the collective would help not only explain how they keep their population expanding at the same rate they build new ships and unimatrix complexes, but also why borg like Hugh and the ones from [TNG: Descent pt 1 and 2] didn't just revert to their pre-assimilation identities the way the stranded borg in the Voy episodes did.
"Tiny little dots far, far away. Our eyes drawn to the twinkle of a hundred billion galaxies. Giving life to illusion, illusion to life. Something upon which to hang our hopes."
- Tobias LeConte - Dream Weaver - seaQuest DSV
I imagine that the Borg started off as a race's desire for perfection through cybernetics. Their cybernetic technology only went so far so they had to obtain other culture's technology. Not sure how assimilating technology turned into assimilating everything about a culture.
Comments
You have the Preservers, the Hur'Q, the Tkon, the Iconians, the Borg, and the First Federation.
I would prefer to boil everything down the unexplained mysteries and lost civilizations and hard to explain things to an easily digestible mythos with those six at the core, with them all being clear allegories for current empires or aspects of the human condition, give or take.
The Preservers preserve and may have links to the Changelings. (Same basic makeup. Same actress played both the lead Founder and a Preserver. Genetic engineering. Easy for me to buy the Dominion as a corruption of the Preservers. Also, kinda interested in more exploration of the species the Founders used to create the Vorta and Jem'Hadar and whether that could be expanded in STO to include a new species or two in service of the Founders.)
The Hur'Q fight and conquer and have links to the Klingons. I can see them not only as the Klingons' oldest enemies but as the abusive galactic parents to the Klingons who started that cycle of violence.
The Tkon are largely unknown but I like the idea of them dealing with artificial life (Tkon, "Tech on") because it's a big part of Trek and one that quite apparently stretches back to very ancient times from what we saw on TOS and Voyager.
The Iconians are sort of spider-like. They lay traps. They prey. They destroy what they cannot control. They now have links to the Romulans.
The First Federation explore. I'd be somewhat tempted to link the Traveler's people in here. I would also be interested in the El Aureans being tied in here.
And the Borg? I guess I see them as the punk upstart kids who emerged from all of that. ("Nu uh. I'm nothing like you, Dad. I'm gonna grow up to be PERFECT!")
And I think in spite of the vast time spans, a simple history is a better history.
You take the Comic Books and Video games more seriously than novels? you are aware that the proper trek novels have to be sent to CBS for approval and checking before they get published yeah? I doubt that your friends have had their fan fiction sent off to CBS and published right? are you aware that some of the novelists have actually written episodes for the series so know what they are doing?
Why would anyone want something simple? History is never simple let alone on a galactic scale, I prefer storylines to be complicated as you get more involved and can be suprised, but hey, if you like simple things i can see why you like the comics, I take it you'll be liking the upcoming Doctor who/TNG crossover comic and take that more seriously than the novels that have been written?
Simple is good if you don't want to think about what you see/read but I bet there are a hell of a lot more people out there who never want Trek to be simple and boring
So do action figures and comic books and everything else. The idea that the novels have some kind of special "approved" status is mostly a marketing myth used to sell more copies. Everything has to be approved and it's looked at in terms of branding implications.
I have a few friends who've written for the novels, both folks I had repeated dealings with who later got published and novelists I've dealt with. I'm not even sure all of THEM would say they knew what they were doing and my definite impression is that the TV writers lean towards the opinion that many of them didn't always, more often than not.
I wouldn't confuse complexity with excitement. The two tend to be opposites. And while complexity can support depth, I'd say meaningful and deliberate depth is better. Simple things are often deeper than complex things.
And I'm not talking "Jack and Jill" level of simplicity. But six empires with various phases and involvements is enough to fill a couple of Tolkien novels. And Trek is VERY LIGHT pop sci-fi. Being as complex as Tolkien is plenty complex as a goal. Wanting more complexity than that is why guys like Ron D. Moore, established Trek writers (many of whom ARE novelists, just rarely for Trek), and a lot of the standard orthodox fanbase look at the novels and groan.
Not everything needs explaining; not everything needs to be neatly wrapped up in a tidy bundle. It's bad enough that Cryptic conflated the Preservers from "The Paradise Syndrome," who were apparently moving populations around within the past 10,000 years, with the unnamed aliens in "The Chase," who apparently did their genetic seeding 4-5 billion years ago.
Two drastically different time periods, two drastically different modi operandi, collapsed into one tidy package that, if you think about it, actually raises more questions than it answers - and kind of takes away the appeal of both (IMO of course).
Let's make it even tidier and say the Iconians are really just a splinter group of the Preservers, and the Borg are just an "oopsie" done by the Preserver equivalent of Wesley. Maybe Ruk was Preserver-Wesley's third-grade science project.
Sorry to end mid-rant, but I'm late for work...
I don't see it as stretching credibility. You're not giving me any new information with the time tables. I figure that million year empires are not impossible or uncommon prior to the current order of things, given that the Borg have been around at least 200,000 years.
The "incompatibility" rests on a fairly legalistic view of the world. That involves a rigid "gospel" view of things that would deny any creative situating of events.
Unless, as I said, the machine life persisted in some form and moved to the Delta Quadrant. I mean, my gosh, the El Aureans dealt with the Borg circa the 2290s and had been to earth in the 1890s.
It depends on which perspective the Queen was viewing things from when she said "we were once like you." And my whole point is that the technology FAILED due to the Iconian computer virus so, yes, much of it was lost. It could be the basis for transwarp gateways, though.
My gosh, Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, and Ron Moore's approach to continuity must drive you batty (much less Abrams') if what I said here seems implausible. And if anything THEIR approach was probably too rigid for the health of the franchise. An over-reliance on complexity is what killed Trek after Enterprise and a return to simplicity is what allowed Orci and Kurtzman to make their vision appealing. All I'm suggesting is to strike a balance and make the larger continuity about as complex as Tolkien or maybe something that a single television series could cover effectively. I don't think something profoundly more complex than that is healthy or sustainable, nor is it true to how television writers and screenwriters would approach the material, looking for broad thematic hooks rather than filling pages with arcana.
And by and large, the stuff I'm talking about simplifying doesn't have any established canon.
I mean, my gosh, there are maybe two novels that deal extensively with the Iconians and don't mesh with STO. (One is even set in a parallel universe.) There are a handful of short stories that don't mesh with anything. And two episodes that do mesh with STO, with a bit of mashing down the edges and squinting.
Overall, I'd strongly discourage "Memory Beta" type thinking and encourage approaching this stuff the way a television writer with a research bible would, compromising between the material and the need to make something out of it.
I think it's great that they did that. It's what the writer for "The Chase" had in mind. It got deleted not due to implausibility but because they didn't want to make a gratuitous TOS reference.
It's television writer thinking and how Trek should be managed.
Not as a grimoire full of obscura but as a coherent fable.
And it's not a "grimoire full of obscura," but a view of the galaxy as a dynamic, living, evolving place. Interstellar civilizations rise and fall - or continue to rise to some sort of post-material ascension in the cases of the Organians, the Thasians, and presumably the Q (which, I'm guessing, you'd lump all together as one species).
Just think of local "space" from Enterprise through TNG - it's chock-full of independent species and governments existing around and within Federation territory (not to mention the Federation members themselves - who, at one point, must have been independent). That's not a "grimoire of obscura;" that's a big, vibrant galaxy with huge potential for cooperation and cross-fertilization... or mutual destruction.
Why would the past galaxy have been any different? Why wouldn't it have been a patchwork of cooperating, competing, and isolated civilizations in various states of ascendancy or decay? Half a dozen huge empires running everything through all perpetuity up until relatively recently might make everything pleasingly simple - but in my mind, it's extremely dull.
The details you describe are world by world and the worlds are designed to be morality plays with teachable truths. We're talking big empires and big empires have big lessons.
That's how the present of Star Trek is constructed. Why should the past be any different?
For me, and I suspect for many others, Star Trek was all about exploration on several levels, about pushing the boundaries of human and personal knowledge and capability. That's what made the franchise, AFAIC. But if everything is explained in as compact and as simplified a way as you seem to want it to be, then what's left to explore?
Leave a mystery or two, or at least the potential for one. Let us explore the past, or at least wonder about it, rather than explain it all away with simple answers. The Borg specifically don't need a nice pat origin - and TBH I don't think Cryptic could do it justice anyway.
V'ger:
http://www.startrek.com/database_article/vger
http://images.wikia.com/memoryalpha/en/images/4/4c/Vger_ship.jpg
http://doorq.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/vger.jpg
STO Unimatrix:
http://www.stowiki.org/File:Unimatrix_0047_Command_Ship.png
There is no denying the linage from an artistic point of view. Clearly, the STO design team drew directly from TMP's V'ger when making the Unimatrix ships.
The question now is which is the chicken, and which is the egg, in the STO-verse at least.
I suppose it boils down to how dark they want to get... If all V'ger says is true, then would Ilia Probe (or Decker?) be the fist "Borg?" After all, V'ger learns it needs carbon-based life to continue... and V'ger was programmed to gather info and absorb it... could not the new directive be "assimilate culture and lifeforms?" Anything is possible of course, but some connection has clearly been made by the team at Cryptic, under CBS's approval mind you, between V'ger's design and the Unimatrices.
ALL HOLDINGS FINISHED! - Starbase 5-5-5-5 || Embassy 3-3-3 || Mine 3-3-3 || Spire 3-3-3
A laid back KDF fleet welcoming independent, casual, & part-time players and groups. Roms & alts welcome.
Send in-game mail to Wampaq@Jnoh, visit our recruitment thread and FB page for more info.
I would genuinely hate to see a connection between V'ger and the Borg. The canonical similarities are superficial at best, and I always liked the idea of a "pure" machine sentience out there that might be incapable of recognizing organic life as intelligent.
If STO officially makes the connection, it'll feel like another all-too-convenient conflation of two very different ideas.
http://cyberspace5.net/agentrichard07/voy-origin.htm
Could have been a fun episode.
You realize Gene Roddenberry himself hinted there could be a connection between V'ger and the Borg.
Again, I explained that the Transwarp Conduit was different because when Voyager 6 went through, it was before the Borg took control. And after they did, it became a 1-way exit. (Not to mention how many other wormholes were discovered near Earth in Star Trek? Surely the Federation would've stumbled on that "black hole" outside the Solar System in over 300 years since they discovered warp flight?)
And I don't want to accept the Caeliar or the Destiny explaination, it was a BAD story.
BTW, Cube in J25 supposed to be investigating the transmission from Earth from those Borg survivors from First Contact. Thats why it was so far from Borg Space.
I'm sorry, but thats exactly why I hate Destiny. They just magically are and conveniently being the origin of the Borg and it's destruction.
Not a Retcon. In Voyager the Vaadwuar commented that the Borg was in control of a handful of systems in 1484. So if they were around for 200,000 years, then they were planetary bound for tens of thousands of years.
the borg "queen" states her purpose to picard. she brings order to chaos, whatever that may mean.
imho, the borg origin story may be a way for cryptic to do some really epic storytelling. i really hope, that if they get permission to do it, they don't TRIBBLE it up with some half finished story missions. The jem'hadar mission was not bad, but the borg deserve something twice or tripple as big and awesome.
leave some mystery.
That's why I wrote what I did.
I don't like it.
The way the Breen have been "fleshed out" makes me facepalm, as does the concept between the powers involved in creating the actual Typhon Pact. Contrary to popular belief, you can be a Trek fan and not like every aspect about it. The novels are a prime example: I think most have stories which are so ridiculous or outrageous, they come across like fanfics, and if I don't like the concept or the direction the author takes the story and characters, I'll certainly say as much.
Exactly this.
In other words, she was never a leader and was never meant to be one. She was just a point-of-contact for as yet unassimilated species. Locutus was just the prototype and/or proof of concept.
But then that Voyager episode comes along and blows that theory out of the water. :mad: Another reason to hate Voyager, I guess...
The entities which rebuilt V'Ger were "living machines." They saw organics as an infestation, i.e. something which interfered with machines doing things on their own. V'Ger was going to remove the infestation on Earth.
Not communicate.
Not assimilate.
REMOVE, as in ELIMINATE.
I know a few people want to perpetuate the link between V'Ger's rebuilders and the Borg, but it doesn't jive at all without the help of continuous retconning and ignoring the obvious differences in intent between two completely different concepts of "races."
:rolleyes:
If they could ever muster up the skill they had behind the Romulan based FEs theyd have a pretty good shot at giving this game some amazing storylines.
the original machine race itself might not have been all that advanced, which would make them being assimilated by the borg in more recent times pluasible. to the machine race might have fallen victim to some natural disaster and 'died off', leaving remains for the Borg to recover and assimilate into their techbase.
Voyager 6 has been implied to have been thrown backwards in time, so it had hundreds (if no time travel) if not thousands or millions of years to accumulate knowledge. given the amount of knowledge hinted at in the film, including "whole galaxies" being stored there, the higher time periods seem most likely. as it accumulated knowledge, it would logically enhance itself, so the ship that arrived at earth might have had core elements from the machine race, but probably was not a sample of its technology.
of course, we know that the borg existed as far back at AD 1400 (VOY: Dragons Teeth), which means that the post-merging voyager could not be the origin of the borg (frankly, the borg with the technlogy of V'ger would be an utter nightmare, the entire galaxy would have been wiped out really fast), and since V'ger didn't understand carbon based life was worth dealing with in any fashion other than extermination (the way we view bacteria), it couldn't have made the borg before going to earth. yet the borg exist a thousand or more years before V'ger figured out that "carbon units" are worth something.
and if the machine race had thought organic life was valuable, why wouldn't they have taught that to V'ger when they uplifted it with its ship-body? and unlike v'ger, the machine race would have little reason to doubt their assumptions. so obviously the machine race is unlikely to have been the origin of the borg.
which doesn't leave many options, and of those options the idea that makes the most sense is the machine race was conquered or destroyed by the borg, and their 'technological distinctiveness' added to the borgs.
"Tiny little dots far, far away. Our eyes drawn to the twinkle of a hundred billion galaxies. Giving life to illusion, illusion to life. Something upon which to hang our hopes."
- Tobias LeConte - Dream Weaver - seaQuest DSV
Maybe they were so covered with Technology that they effectively looked like living machines (like walking around in clunky medieval knight armor).
IIRC, First Contact introduced the idea of the borg converting existing people into more borg. voyager just took the idea and ran with it. certainly the idea that the borg assimilate individuals helps explain what they did with the people of all the worlds they conquer.
presumably the idea that they use an artificial gestation system to grow new drones that have never known life outside of the collective would help not only explain how they keep their population expanding at the same rate they build new ships and unimatrix complexes, but also why borg like Hugh and the ones from [TNG: Descent pt 1 and 2] didn't just revert to their pre-assimilation identities the way the stranded borg in the Voy episodes did.
"Tiny little dots far, far away. Our eyes drawn to the twinkle of a hundred billion galaxies. Giving life to illusion, illusion to life. Something upon which to hang our hopes."
- Tobias LeConte - Dream Weaver - seaQuest DSV