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The Preservers, The Q and the Galactic Barrier
janewaywarrior
Member Posts: 93 Arc User
I would like to see Cryptic attempt to recreate the Galactic Barrier that surrounds the Milky Way... this is a phenomenon that is unique to our Galaxy alone as the Cealiar stated that this galaxy had sheltering forces that protected the inhabitants from the various forces of melovolance outside the Galaxy.
It has been speculated that the barrier was created by the Q and used by the Preservers both in a fight with evil forces. It would be nice to see it integrated into the game as below Eta Eradani Sector Block.
It has been speculated that the barrier was created by the Q and used by the Preservers both in a fight with evil forces. It would be nice to see it integrated into the game as below Eta Eradani Sector Block.
Post edited by janewaywarrior on
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Just take that episode for what it was worth. A really terrible, scientifically ridiculous first episode of a cornball science fiction show.
There have been over 700 episodes of Star Trek and 12 movies produced since that episode and not once was it ever expanded upon or referenced and with good cause.
I just imagine that it was some kind of localized phenomena that existed in the vicinity of Earth near the furthest radial distances of explored space.
Here is a Low Quality Map of the STO Galaxy I been working on Photoshop. What we know of STO is literally in a little dot at the center of the blue circles, below the Galactic Core.
And this map was created using canonical maps in conjuction with legitimate NASA maps.
This. I would strongly oppose any effort to include the galactic barrier in the game. It was a silly, half-baked concept to begin with, and giving it more validity would be a bad move.
Not to mention that some plotline about 'fighting evil forces' gets too close to Star Wars-like 'sci fi', with black-and-white absolutism. About the only thing you could truly consider 'evil' in the Star Trek universe are the Borg, and they're evil in a more 'soulless' way.
Its usually not good practice to criticize a concept that you, yourself may not understand. The Barrier has a nice sense of mystery to it and personally, it would make a nice change of pace instead of fighting the "declawed", overused Borg or pretending that the war with the Klingons is in the least threatening.
Oh and STO ruined the concept of Transwarp and made the whole warp scale look ridiculous.
The Borg are NOT evil, they are a better society then humanity in general. At least they do not complain constantly and pretend that your opinion matters.
OP - you start off with a decent suggestion about some added game play, that might actually be an interesting mission at some point in the future, and then come around 180 degrees to turn negative against Cryptic and their STO just to finish with a biting remark that could include yourself.
These forums are intended for the community to discuss, share and critique ideas and opinions from among ourselves. Try to keep that in mind when you share something that isn't so well received.
Nice map, just one little nit-pick. Are you sure that all four quadrants are centered on Sol? I know that Sol is on the border between the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, but it seems like everything I remember showed the "hub" of the quadrants being the galactic center.
Also as a completely unrelated aside, I always loved how all the "Alpha Quadrant" powers were actually in the Beta Quadrant. In fact, I think aside from Voyager most of Star Trek takes place in the Beta Quadrant.
Well...
The original series, Enterprise, and TNG mostly took place in the Beta Quadrant. Voyager was the Delta Quadrant, and DS9 was mostly the Alpha Quadrant and a bit of the Gamma Quadrant.
The problem is, that when I make suggestions.... I expect either...
A) To be ignored...
My opinion of Cryptic is so low, I do not think I could be anymore vexed by them. Love the game, hate the Devs
If you pay close attention to the stardates of certain episodes, and cross reference the Star Trek Star Charts, the Enterprise D spans over 1000 lightyears in mere weeks at times, zigzagging to alternate ends of explored space at a whim. Yeah, Geordie's a fine engineer, but he's not that good.
That having been said, I don't want Star Trek for matters of technical minutia. Use your imagination, and when all else fails, just shrug it off and say "Oh, I guess Q did it."
I disagree. I'm a believer in the improv approach of "Yes and..." in serial writing.
If something from the shows defies sense, you make sense of it or defy sense further but you don't shoot for more realism than the source material.
There's no such thing as scientifically ridiculous. You take the ridiculous, embrace it, and build on it.
I'm all for Space Lincoln, alien NORSE gods, space native americans and space cowboys, new age crystals that bestow psychic powers. I feel like to backpedal from that is to attempt to be really good space science fiction rather than be really good Star Trek. You need to fly in the face of science and reason at least as much as Trek does. Intentionally crank out some Brannon Braga time travel psychotic break episodes. More transporter accidents. Holodeck malfunctions.
A show or movie might be a place to subvert those trends but I feel like a game should reinfoce them, however silly. Better to be silly and Trek-y than serious an un-Trek-y.
I tend to think off it more of as sporadic natural phenomenon than an intentional barrier.
There are just too many holes in the 'canon' storyline to say otherwise.
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
Right on, right on, right on.
It technically would take the Enterprise years to go from one side of the Federation to another.
call it the galaxy's equivalent of the Van Allen belts.
Oh and it was Voy that REALLY messed up the warp scale....
My character Tsin'xing
In general, this is why I'd resist the charts and any sources or attempts at realism outside the shows. Focus on the plot elements, not the reference materials or even real science if real science contradicts the episodes. Trek has long since become a fantasy world. They tried to backpedal on that briefly and that gave us Season 1 of TNG. And further attempts at adhering to maps and reference materials gave us some of the more half baked aspects of Voyager, such as the 70 year travel time conceit when the other shows had routinely established you could ricochet all over the galaxy to move the story along and that limited travel time was pretty much a conceit for episodes where you needed a last minute reveal.
I think HAVING consistency in travel time or speed is much more the domain of the reference materials than the shows and would prefer STO to be more of an episode simulator (with all of the wonkiness and error and silliness that comes from a Hollywood screenwriter-wh-reads-pop-science approach to science) than attempt to impose realism on travel, physics, or the setting.
Basically, I don't think you need any more realism than you'd have in one of Shakespeare's plays. You know, the kind where Hamlet is a 7th century prince getting his bachelor's at Wittenberg at age 30 (or is it age 30?) and periodically playing hookey to hang out with Shakespeare's actors in England. What's important is that the central action of play makes sense and that the characters are strong and relatable.
And when dealing with things like the Great Barrier, go for full tilt levels of Doctor Who/Neil Gaiman poetry. Doctor Who doesn't eliminate the Eye of Harmony or the Vortex or bigger on the inside TARDIS. They make poetry out of it. And if it contradicts science, you say something like, "Well... It's very complicated. Oh. Look. Something shiny! Now, as I was saying the barrier at the galactic edge has been a graveyard for many ships, possessing psychic energy powerful enough to drive even the most stoic Rigellian into a mad frenzy of passion and lunacy. Some claim to hear nursery rhymes over the subspace bands when approaching it..."
And they frequently did it between episodes. :-)
The maps were a best guess attempt but Trek isn't hard sci-fi and you can't really impose hard realism.
Now, it probably should make you think about science. But it doesn't need realistic science to do that.
It's a world where Khan overthrew the world by 1996 and Ferengi crashed in Roswell and Leonardo Da Vinci was an immortal man named Flint. It's a fantasy world that resembles ours. I don't think it needs to be made more realistic any more than Lord of the Rings needs a Gilmore Girls series set in Middle Earth.
Technically, the writers were smart enough to never define how big the Federation was. I always imagined that the overwhelming majority of federation worlds were within about 100 light years of Earth, so travel time at high warp was a month at most with a tiny handful of Federation worlds being scattered at a much greater distance.
From TNG onward, they did a pretty good job (in terms of soft science fiction) of not making too many ridiculous scientific blunders and trying to keep things consistent. Unfortunately, TOS was the worst offender.
Also, the idea of a Galactic "termination shock" is somewhat scientifically implausible. There might be an average distance from the center of the galaxy where cosmic rays begin traveling slower than the speed of sound in space, but even if there is, it is almost certainly far, far outside the Galaxy's visible matter. Also, since most of the material out there would likely be dark matter, and since dark matter does not interact via the three forces of nature, the whole idea is very implausible.
I always wondered what a typical boring day is on a Starship....do they use the Captain's chair if nothing is going on..or does one just sit three till his/her shift is over ....what do they do while they are warping between planets... is it like a RV drive from New York to California
Back in the 50's and 60's when astronomers and cosmologists figured out that galaxies spin, they ran into a big honking problem of trying to explain why the stars weren't flung out across intergalactic space. There wasn't enough observable mass to account for the gravitational anchor and stars at the edge weren't supposed to be whizzing around at the same speed as a star near to the core.
So someone came up with a hypothetical solution to this problem --> a "galactic barrier" to explain this troubling phenomenon and to help keep those spinning galaxies intact.
The idea never caught on, except for one little TV show.
In the last few decades, we've made up something new!
It's called "dark matter"...but it might as well be magenta matter cuz' we haven't the slightest idea of what it is. But "dark" does give it a cool-sounding name.
That is your nerd thought for the day. Carry on.
If Cryptic can easily use a modified version of the 'salt vampire' from an early episode, they can do the same with an energy barrier that appeared several times (and not just early on)
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
Quadrants centered at SOL? :eek:
Are you looking at the Quadrant Lines I drew through the center of the galaxy, as per canon. Or are you looking at the original map that originated from NASA, which centers on Earth? :rolleyes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:236084main_MilkyWay-full-annotated.jpg
They very much could do a story around it and the Great Barrier as well.
I like the barrier ... just not in STO ...
Also the barrier is not all the way around the galaxy, it just ocupy's a bit of space
I hope STO get's better ...
The ST Destiny novels and STO are, for the most part, devergent timelines.
There are a whole lot of confliting reasons for the barrier and it's power. It was suggest in one novel (Q-squared) that the changes to The SS Valient and Gary Mitchel were the result of a VERY injured Q (the Q we all know and love) trying to make contact.
What's my position?
That people should know what they're screaming about!
(paraphrased from "The Newsroom)
It went from negative energy (as in a lack of energy, a void) to "negative" energy (as in a form of energy that's counter to "positive" energy, and could be countered) in just TOS alone.
Then didn't The Traveller take Ent-D out of the barrier? He can't be more powerful than the Q and 0...
My character Tsin'xing
0 is non-canon, as is the idea that Q couldn't penetrate the barrier.
But even then, somebody can be omnipotent and unable to influence anything yellow. That's how fantastic fiction works.