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How do you headcanon?
ravenechoseven
Member Posts: 4 Arc User
Everyone headcanons somehow. In every game there is some detail, large or small, that just doesn't quite fit how you think the game should be or how how you picture your character reacting. So I'm curious how others headcanon certain aspects of STO. I'm talking about actual powers, features, etc. here. I would love to see what kind of explanations we can come up with for oddities and such in the game.
I'll lead off with a one of mine.
Grenades: It bothered me at first that grenade powers meant an endless supply of grenades and there was a cooldown to use them. Headcanon explanation: Grenade kits are composed of a set of specialized replicators. Each is designed to reproduce a single item- the grenade in question (photon, plasma, etc.). These contain only memory for that grenade and a specialized power cell. This device self recharges after each use and due to the nature of the grenade requires a brief period of time for this recharge.
Please keep this related to powers, stories, and other ingame features. Please no troll posts on Cryptic, PWE, bugs (unless it is really creative with an ingame headcanon workaround), financial issues (Zen store stuff or lock boxes), etc.
This is for fun, lets keep it that way.
Proceed with headcanoning (Hey, I think its a new word!)
I'll lead off with a one of mine.
Grenades: It bothered me at first that grenade powers meant an endless supply of grenades and there was a cooldown to use them. Headcanon explanation: Grenade kits are composed of a set of specialized replicators. Each is designed to reproduce a single item- the grenade in question (photon, plasma, etc.). These contain only memory for that grenade and a specialized power cell. This device self recharges after each use and due to the nature of the grenade requires a brief period of time for this recharge.
Please keep this related to powers, stories, and other ingame features. Please no troll posts on Cryptic, PWE, bugs (unless it is really creative with an ingame headcanon workaround), financial issues (Zen store stuff or lock boxes), etc.
This is for fun, lets keep it that way.
Proceed with headcanoning (Hey, I think its a new word!)
Trekking online since January 2010!
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Post edited by ravenechoseven on
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I would make sense why each "death" means a longer respawn timer.
Motion accelerator is just a small box on your belt kit that beams Pure Adrenaline straight into your heart. It explains how it breaks out of holds and makes you run faster for a minute or so and the only reason you can't use it to self revive it that you're out cold and can't push the button.
I don't have an explanation for getting vaporized, just can't figure that one out.
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Your explanation is not as far-fetched as it might seem.
The TNG episode "Quality of Life" shows the Exocomps, which have the ability to use a mini-replicator to produce tools depending on the job.
So in this context your idea works just as well, only with...well grenades.
This way, at least in my head, i'm only carrying one weapon which actually would fit better into canon than a pulsewave would since the Phasers are already highly adjustable. Both guns come with a standard shot and higher energy shot, so in all actuality, it would fit perfectly that they are the same gun, just set to different settings.
I like that. Maybe a small, self contained warp core (roughly room sized, with a one time use before replenishment). I always used the idea of like a subspace jump myself.
Actually, that is one of the inspirations for my explanation.
You are definitely in the right place.
Keep the Headcanon's rolling folks! Here a little later I'll see about moving some of these to the first post, maybe even start a webpage for collection (with proper acknowledgements of course). Even better, maybe we can get Cryptic to throw this into someplace on the official site (or at least a special sticky thread).
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My rationale here is that the Dominion War didn't see starships extensively refitting in the field to adapt to changing threats. The standard equipment loadout for my ship and officers is free, provided by Starfleet. However, I've discarded all of that stuff, and have instead equipped myself with adaptive shields, better balanced and more powerful weapons, salvaged Borg equipment, and all sorts of advanced systems, even a handful of alien weapons.
In DS9, the only such modification the crew made was adding ablative armor to the Defiant without informing Command.
Realistically, even though it is stated that "money" doesn't exist in the future, there still has to be an economy of some sort. No society can exist without an economy. Star Trek never really goes into great detail on UFP economics, so some type of energy rationing is quite plausible. That it was never mentioned during the Dominion War doesn't mean it didn't exist either.
As to the "war" with the Klingons, I've always viewed as a "warm war," (as opposed to a cold war or a hot, all out war). Open warfare exists between the two, but neither side has initiated any major engagements or made major advances due to the lack of clear advantage and the pressure of other conflicts. I've always been a big proponent of the early content being reworked and future conflicts being created into a cold war, with quasi-wars and border skirmishes being the explanation of limited engagements. Rouge elements, navigational errors, and accidents are commonly used and plausible explanations for why battles happen (and fit the common "its not our fault, we don't want to fight you" theme of governments unready or unwilling to commit to full scale war).
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Actually, you do see modifications to the ships going on all the time in the each series, from little tweaks to the engines for more power/efficiency to better torpedo yields. Really, the idea of adapting technology for use on the ships was a prevalent theme in later seasons of Voyager and a frequent theme in Enterprise.
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Even Voyager did not come close to that, the one major weapon they were going to install never happened, their new shields were time-traveled back off the ship, and their Borg technology ended up being relegated for life support of their liberated Borg crewmember. And they still suffered resource shortages when the writers cared enough to remember their own logic.
Very true... but then that is what this thread is all about! Headcanoning our way through the things that might not otherwise make sense. There are so many creative people out there, both working for Cryptic and just playing the game, I'm sure we can find a plausible, if somewhat incredible, explanation for almost anything!
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Surely the concept of economy becomes redundant once resource scarcity is no longer an issue? Something has value because one party wants it and another party has it, if both parties can freely acquire as much of it as they want/need whenever it suits them the economy of the thing in question ceases to exist.
This would explain why Voyager had replicator rations, but the Enterprise did not.
Except this abundance is not present in everything in Star Trek. Numerous materials cannot be replicated, but must be manufactured from raw materials, which must be mined or grown or otherwise collected.
There is only so much France to go around for men with English accents to own vinyards, Bajor only has so many sprawling luxury estates for retiring Starfleet captains, there is only one Starry Night and replicator copies are considered worthless. Also, nearly every Federation civilian we see shares a distaste for replicated food and we don't see replicators in private houses on Earth - a sizable chunk of the population lives in real, grown food.
The Most Toys and In the Cards are two of the better examples, but there's many others, of items for which there is demand and desire, but which cannot be freely and infinitely created or which lose that desire when they are.
Most of that's civilian side, though, the game is from the military side. A great many of the exotic materials our ships are made from and consume are not replicated. The whole system gives us ships for free with standard issue equipment, but allows us to refit those ships very close to the level of completely rebuilding them, replacing every major system and altering their configuration or function, even replace them entirely with new ships, but holds the captain responsible for covering any additional materials needed. This also contributes to a scarcity of labor, creating value between manpower and materials. And that's all it takes to create an economy - and in the absence of money, we use the materials themselves.
2. As a toon climbs the ranks and gets new ships, they are merely reassigned to a new ship, and the old one is given to a new talented lower-rank person. That is, until they become an admiral. All the ships in your stable are your assigned fleet; whatever you aren't flying now is off doffing or whatever.
3. Doffs are part of your "office" staff, and boffs are your personal staff. When you dismiss a boff after they are Commanders, they are getting assigned their own ship (perhaps one of the ones in your fleet!).
4. The things about death with ships is the same as above. Land deaths are prevented by site-to-site transporters, placed in a safe place, which will be used when none of the away party is conscious, or someone otherwise initiates them. They are picked back up by the ship after the mission is over.
5. The lower-tier ships are not really much worse than the higher-tier ships; it's just that the crews and captains are more experienced, and can therefore bring out more from what they are given (this explains level scaling).
6. The game story takes place over years, not the less-than-a-year that Cryptic is pushing on us. Most of the time is spent doing relatively boring patrols (not the Patrol Missions the Feds have, more like the exploration sector missions). Your captain is still going through the ranks at Ludicrous Speed - because your career makes Picard's look boring and uneventful in comparison - but it isn't completely unrealistic in a wartime scenario.
7. On some toons (mostly the feds) a ship isn't counted as "destroyed" unless it drops something. The others just warp away when it gets too hot for them. Same thing for enemy troops.
8. The Klink-Fed war is not a hot, major shooting war like the Dominion War, but more along the lines of the TOS-era relations - still can talk to each other, but they will also shoot at each other if they cross into the other's space, and the Klingons will be jerks and do whatever they want.
9. RR toons are basically mercs and privateers, especially once you finish the Romulan story arc.
10. Starfleet lets its admirals do pretty much whatever they want. As long as you go on some Headquarters-assigned mission or tour every so often, they don't care that you are getting your Ferengi on otherwise
How often do you swap out mk 2 stuff for mk 12? Usually it's pretty minor improvements - a coupler percentage points more damage, a slight increase in shield strength, etc. That's very Trek. Even parts swapping was pretty minor - Voyager even stuck a transwarp coil in like an add-on, for goodness sake! And how often did we see the deflector dish modified to do just about everything? I see weapons slotting as merely allocating existing weapons in different ways, or different ammo loadouts. The phaser array was modified to do tachyon damage, etc.
Evidence:
1: Ships like the Galaxy have huge crew contingents of about 1000 man and more, but the TnG series established that most of these are civilians, family members of crewmen, even children. When the timeline was altered due to the Enterprise C being pulled out and the Fed was actively at war with the Klingons in the show, the crew of the Enterprise was drastically lower and the ship still able to operate fully.
It is doubtful both factions will send Civilians and children to their death and their presence on these ships would be pretty much dead weight in a spacefight, even if all of them are trained soldiers.
2: Crew drops like flies if the ship does as much as turn too fast. Beam, canon and torpedo hits frequently Kill huge chunks of your crew, yet, after a while they are all back and alive. Why do they die so easily if not through power fluctuations in the photonic projector? Sure, consoles on the enterprise had the habit of exploding a lot when the outer hull was hit, but they would never take out dozens of crew the way it happens here and none of the people taken out by an exploding console just got up and resumed working after a few minutes.
3. Even if your crew counter reaches zero, your captain, your boffs and your duty officers remain miraculously unharmed. Sure, your captain and Bridge officers are the main chars and have Plot armor, but the duty officers are pretty much redshirts with a few exceptions and die a lot on missions, yet, they survive every spacebattle even when the entire rest of the crew is dead. Starfleet and the KDF obviously take great care to ensure their actual living personal remains alive.
4. Your ship still flies even with zero crew alive, showing that it's operated by your Bridge crew and duty officers, the 1000 Photonic extra personal just helps with repairs and fights off boarding parties.
Now how to explain how my 30 crew Bird of prey is able to hold 300+ Duty and 20 bridge officers... hmh....
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That's a hell of a lot of speculation. The only concrete facts that you've presented (as in based on canon appearance) are that real estate is limited, and "The Most Toys" and "In The Cards" both involve collectible items. However, neither of those episodes concerned economy within the Federation, and "The Most Toys" didn't involve economic transaction at all, it was about theft/kidnap (depending on your view of Data... I see it as kidnap).
New advanced transporters make a copy of your pattern/you each time you use them, if you get vaporized they can use your pattern to beam "you" down again, respawn timer takes longer as each time they use your copy pattern it degrades a little more.
The Most Toys did discus the value of the items, and In The Cards was actually a dig at Roddeberry to begin with - a demonstration of why the Federation needs an economy. The items being sold included centuries old treasures of Earth, Vulcan, and other Federation worlds, many of the bidders were of Federation member races, and yet the entire transaction was being conducted outside the Federation's authority and under a veil of anonymity and proxy using Ferengi currency. This is the result of Star Trek accepting its own claim: The cultural treasures of our world trapped forever on an alien black market like stolen artwork or the last unaccounted-for Stradivarius, which will probably never resurface in legitimate sale and instead spend the rest of its existence occasionally selling through shady unlisted auctions for gold bullion.
1. Name the ships, don't use Assimilated Carrier or any other generics.
2. Fix the ship registries, like the Reuben James isn't NCC-1701 and the Nebula can't be the 62101 due to other Nebulas with lower registries.
3. Need more different styles of freighters - more human, klingon, vulcan, and so on
4. Need more sector hubs even they are small stations especially for the sectors with none in them - some of the planets in those sectors are major planets in the show (like Bolarus)
5. More backstory instead of here's a new zone- why are the Tholians messing up New Romulus even though its all Elachi/Tal Shiar prior or why are they at Nukara.
6. The KDF invaded and blockaded numerous UFP planets, yet the UFP hasn't really done anything in return. Its not really a stalemate, if the KDF are blockading planets like P'Jem or operating freely around Andor, Risa, and other UFP planets.
7. Class history info on the select a ship, so as players we can choose, hey a notable ship of the Celestial-class, the USS Endurance led the UFP fleet in the defense of Solaris Prime against the KDF 8th Fleet or the IKS Nimeve, a Koro'tinga-class cruiser discovered and conquered the Gorn colony of S'stask.