If Cryptic even try to say the Tutarians are the Sphere Builders then they have officially jumped the shark, because how could they exist in the previous timeline along with the Sphere Builders if they are the Sphere Builders.
This would only work if the timeline we were in before no had nothing to do with the temporal cold war nonsense from ENT which it clearly did given the numerous references to the Xindi events, Suliban Cabal and so on.
If this is truly the case, then this story is even worse than I initially thought.
And it still leaves two gaping plot holes, namely what happened to the Yamato, and how are the Borg still the exact same whimpering losers being kicked around by the Cooperative if they're supposed to be so much better now?
Option 2 - We started the mission in an alternate timeline, we finished in the original one.
1) False. You cannot have a predestination paradox in multiple timelines. That defeats the whole point.
2) False. As I said, the timeline we started the mission in has all the elements affected by the Sphere Builders. The only way this would've possibly worked is if there had been no mention of the temporal cold war until now.
Even then it would be a stretch to say that the Federation came out exactly the same given the heavy interference it caused.
Whilst I'll give you your point on the first, for the second I meant that from the moment you start the mission you're controlling a version of your character from an alternate universe ala Yesterdays Enterprise, you don't take control of the main timeline version of your character until the end when you arrive at the lab in the midst of the news that the temporally shielded computer has records that the weapon was fired twice.
An interesting idea, except for the whole Yamato thing (honestly mentioning that then dropping it is a pretty big deal) and how Noye (aka Sour Krenim Man) now has a beard to show things have totally changed yo when he didn't have one in Broken Circle.
He had the beard at the start of the ep and the end, plus it doesn't take long to grow a beard, a week or 2 of frantically working on this problem all waking hours would easily account for his beard growth.
He has a chin beard at the start, and a full facial beard at the end, clearly meant to imply a change.
Easily explained as not bothering to take care of his appearance because of his wife not existing and him being too focused on his work to care.
Like I said, growing a beard isn't hard, hell, I get that level of growth after a mere week of not shaving.
Do you honestly think Cryptic would change an npc detail just for that? Come on.
Given that he had 2 new models just for this episode, yes, yes I do.
My honest opinion, just demolish the damn time erase ship and go ask the Guardian of Forever what the best course of action is there to change the Iconians minds about war and talk of peace between everyone.
Oh, wait.....that's too simple of a solution. Nevermind.
so somehow a time traveling species failed to see the present? not surprising considering the new Terminator and Jurassic Park movies. Inspiration maybe?
IDK - I liked the one element where they showed that Holodeck simulations mean NOTHING (and this was one time where the Holodeck got it 100% wrong in a major way...from Oh look, D'Tan is still fighting the good fight and the Iconians haven't 'noticed us yet - to hey the Borg assimilated Romulus and most of known space 20 years before the date of the simulation in question.
As for this not being scientifically accurate; aside from the occasional descriptions and depictions of known stellar phenomena Star Trek HAS NEVER been hard science fiction - EVER. So they handwaved to conclude a story -- yeah in 49 years of story telling, Star Trek has never done that before...oh, wait...
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Anyone else pick up on the Hur'q reference in this mission?
What did they say exactly about them again? That simply deleting the Iconians would prevent the Hur'q from gaining warp tech, which would in turn prevent the Klngons from getting it?
Are the Hur'q Iconian servitors then? Would make sense given that the Klingon story arc, and delta recruit event, suggested both the Hur'q and the Iconians were behind the Fek'Ihri's return....
And the Iconain computers in Sphere of Influence said the Iconians had agents in the gamma qaud making sure the dominion didn't find more portals......
Yup, the Hur'q do indeed seem to be Iconian servants.
I enjoyed the first part and reading the dialogue a lot, even listening to it, thze voice actors were quite good on this (although the replay value of that part is dubious of course). The actual combat seemed kind of watered down to me compared to previous episodes.
Also the temporal annihilation of a Borg transwarp conduit almost completely restoring the original timeline is a little far fetched in my opinion. The changes should be much more severe. If the Borg are still a lot more powerful than before yet trapped in the Delta Quadrant, indigenous species should definitly feel the effect. I doubt the the Delta alliance would still consist of the same species if it existed at all in this timeline.
I agree completely, however, it is par for the course considering Star Trek. There is no reason for O'Brien to even exist, let alone live on Terok Nor, or Kirk and Spock serving on the same ship
4. I don't think Borg dream, do they? Dreaming would require a subconscious and a collective consciousness is already about as "sub" as consciousness gets.
Well, there was Unimatrix Zero. Kind of dreaming I'd say.
either we built the ship incorrectly, or our version of the ship was also sabotaged.
Probably the first one. We didn't build the original ship but a new one after some old blueprints. There's no surprise to me when there are minor changes in the construction which, especially in the context of this episode, can lead to major conse
Easily explained as not bothering to take care of his appearance because of his wife not existing and him being too focused on his work to care.
Only he does not know his wife doesn't exist since she never existed and he doesn't know about her. That we, the players, remember a species being removed from the universe is one thing. In universe nobody knows yet, one thing New-Timeline-Nog still has to find out when comparing the data.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
My honest opinion, just demolish the damn time erase ship and go ask the Guardian of Forever what the best course of action is there to change the Iconians minds about war and talk of peace between everyone.
Oh, wait.....that's too simple of a solution. Nevermind.
Dealing with the Guardian means an annoying non-answer that will only make sense with foresight.
The sheer level of incompetence in the writing for this episode was... most impressive.
I can forgive the predictability of it, of course, and I can forgive introducing a character just to immediately kill them off... but the sheer level of plot hole the story left behind is gigantic.
I would submit that if you write a story about butterfly effects you should actually understand butterfly effects.
I can buy the Iconian delay somehow suping up the Borg, fine. But how in the holy mother of frak did erasing a transwarp conduit restore everything the way it was?
Did they not double check their own writing? Is the Yamato still out there now?
Now yes, this might all be answered cleverly in the next episode. But I somehow doubt it.
The only thing that saves this poor showing is that for one brief moment I was in a timeline where the JJverse didn't exist. And that was glorious.
Seems to me that if one is looking for quality verse, one should be readng something from Asimov, H.G. Wells or thier ilk.
Not mucking around in an online MMO expecting some kind of excellance.
<shrug>
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
I enjoyed it as a change from the previous episode which I did not care for. I agree that we are heading for the creation of the sphere builders. As a big Enterprise fan I look forward to that. The sphere builders were a nicely sinister villain that got left incomplete by the show. I think they're an excellent choice for 11.
The also very much resemble The Preservers.
If the Iconians were the first race the Preservers created, perhaps the Sphere Builders were the second...?
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Leave time travel alone. Why don't people listen? It's not like other sci fi stuff where you can just fill in the holes with technobabble. You actually need to have a strong since of causality and paradox or your story will be filled with holes making it look like a 5 year olds attempt at replicating Herman Melville. I am pleased Cryptic (potentially) found a way to wipe their hands clean of a plot element that was never going to work in the first place.
And let's be clear here - the Krenim weapon was never and will never be the solution. It's creator couldn't manipulate it precisely without destroying himself, how is it that someone else would? I mean it doesn't even seem in this FE that they have created anything close to the testing mechanisms that Annorax had. And let's not forget: "Time has emotion, color and vengeance." or something to that affect being said by Annorax. The moment it was decided to pick an asteroid as the incursion point I know ish was going to hit the fan. That was the first mistake Chakotay made that would have wiped out 8000 civilizations. Say what you will about JJ but he chose a clean closed ended loop with his use of time travel - a blackhole is created from an exploding star and something called "red matter" that sends two ships through to an alternate timeline leaving the other one behind never to be touched.
I'm just at the point I can't wait for this whole thing to be over however silly things get.
Easily explained as not bothering to take care of his appearance because of his wife not existing and him being too focused on his work to care.
Only he does not know his wife doesn't exist since she never existed and he doesn't know about her. That we, the players, remember a species being removed from the universe is one thing. In universe nobody knows yet, one thing New-Timeline-Nog still has to find out when comparing the data.
I meant that he didn't care about his appearance, not about the fact his wife doesn't exist anymore.
Regarding the capabilities of the holodeck...
The timeline simulation was not created by the holodeck, the timeline monitoring tech of the Krenim did that.
They just took advantage of the holodeck as a visual interface, the krenim computer feeding sim data, getting feedback from the holodeck interactions of our character to finetune the information and adjusting the simulation simultaneously.
The spherebuilders were not erased from the timeline, they fled into that subspace realm when the Borg attacked them, ending up trapped.
In that state they became immune to any changes in the timeline in our reality existing outside of it.
That part actually works really well.
The timeline changes back in Enterprise did not destroy or erase them either, just having them retreat into their realm again.
The only part I missed was when they got trapped there.
I can only assume that they retroactively converted the Delphic Expanse back in time to be ready by the time history had caught up with them becoming trapped in the first place, meaning now.
But the Delphic Expanse plan and the Time War... excuse me, the Temporal Cold War. was thwarted, so they probably will have to come up with a new plan.
If Cryptic even try to say the Tutarians are the Sphere Builders then they have officially jumped the shark, because how could they exist in the previous timeline along with the Sphere Builders if they are the Sphere Builders.
This would only work if the timeline we were in before no had nothing to do with the temporal cold war nonsense from ENT which it clearly did given the numerous references to the Xindi events, Suliban Cabal and so on.
If this is truly the case, then this story is even worse than I initially thought.
And it still leaves two gaping plot holes, namely what happened to the Yamato, and how are the Borg still the exact same whimpering losers being kicked around by the Cooperative if they're supposed to be so much better now?
Option 2 - We started the mission in an alternate timeline, we finished in the original one.
1) False. You cannot have a predestination paradox in multiple timelines. That defeats the whole point.
2) False. As I said, the timeline we started the mission in has all the elements affected by the Sphere Builders. The only way this would've possibly worked is if there had been no mention of the temporal cold war until now.
Even then it would be a stretch to say that the Federation came out exactly the same given the heavy interference it caused.
Whilst I'll give you your point on the first, for the second I meant that from the moment you start the mission you're controlling a version of your character from an alternate universe ala Yesterdays Enterprise, you don't take control of the main timeline version of your character until the end when you arrive at the lab in the midst of the news that the temporally shielded computer has records that the weapon was fired twice.
An interesting idea, except for the whole Yamato thing (honestly mentioning that then dropping it is a pretty big deal) and how Noye (aka Sour Krenim Man) now has a beard to show things have totally changed yo when he didn't have one in Broken Circle.
He had the beard at the start of the ep and the end, plus it doesn't take long to grow a beard, a week or 2 of frantically working on this problem all waking hours would easily account for his beard growth.
He has a chin beard at the start, and a full facial beard at the end, clearly meant to imply a change.
Easily explained as not bothering to take care of his appearance because of his wife not existing and him being too focused on his work to care.
Like I said, growing a beard isn't hard, hell, I get that level of growth after a mere week of not shaving.
Do you honestly think Cryptic would change an npc detail just for that? Come on.
Given that he had 2 new models just for this episode, yes, yes I do.
He has two models to demonstrate the timeline change!
And if he didn't care about his appearance because he had no wife here, then he wouldn't care about his appearance because he had no wife in Broken Circle.
If Cryptic even try to say the Tutarians are the Sphere Builders then they have officially jumped the shark, because how could they exist in the previous timeline along with the Sphere Builders if they are the Sphere Builders.
This would only work if the timeline we were in before no had nothing to do with the temporal cold war nonsense from ENT which it clearly did given the numerous references to the Xindi events, Suliban Cabal and so on.
If this is truly the case, then this story is even worse than I initially thought.
And it still leaves two gaping plot holes, namely what happened to the Yamato, and how are the Borg still the exact same whimpering losers being kicked around by the Cooperative if they're supposed to be so much better now?
Option 2 - We started the mission in an alternate timeline, we finished in the original one.
1) False. You cannot have a predestination paradox in multiple timelines. That defeats the whole point.
2) False. As I said, the timeline we started the mission in has all the elements affected by the Sphere Builders. The only way this would've possibly worked is if there had been no mention of the temporal cold war until now.
Even then it would be a stretch to say that the Federation came out exactly the same given the heavy interference it caused.
Whilst I'll give you your point on the first, for the second I meant that from the moment you start the mission you're controlling a version of your character from an alternate universe ala Yesterdays Enterprise, you don't take control of the main timeline version of your character until the end when you arrive at the lab in the midst of the news that the temporally shielded computer has records that the weapon was fired twice.
An interesting idea, except for the whole Yamato thing (honestly mentioning that then dropping it is a pretty big deal) and how Noye (aka Sour Krenim Man) now has a beard to show things have totally changed yo when he didn't have one in Broken Circle.
He had the beard at the start of the ep and the end, plus it doesn't take long to grow a beard, a week or 2 of frantically working on this problem all waking hours would easily account for his beard growth.
He has a chin beard at the start, and a full facial beard at the end, clearly meant to imply a change.
Easily explained as not bothering to take care of his appearance because of his wife not existing and him being too focused on his work to care.
Like I said, growing a beard isn't hard, hell, I get that level of growth after a mere week of not shaving.
Do you honestly think Cryptic would change an npc detail just for that? Come on.
Given that he had 2 new models just for this episode, yes, yes I do.
He has two models to demonstrate the timeline change!
And if he didn't care about his appearance because he had no wife here, then he wouldn't care about his appearance because he had no wife in Broken Circle.
He wasn't busy working on a life or death project in broken circle either though.
If Cryptic even try to say the Tutarians are the Sphere Builders then they have officially jumped the shark, because how could they exist in the previous timeline along with the Sphere Builders if they are the Sphere Builders.
This would only work if the timeline we were in before no had nothing to do with the temporal cold war nonsense from ENT which it clearly did given the numerous references to the Xindi events, Suliban Cabal and so on.
If this is truly the case, then this story is even worse than I initially thought.
And it still leaves two gaping plot holes, namely what happened to the Yamato, and how are the Borg still the exact same whimpering losers being kicked around by the Cooperative if they're supposed to be so much better now?
Option 2 - We started the mission in an alternate timeline, we finished in the original one.
1) False. You cannot have a predestination paradox in multiple timelines. That defeats the whole point.
2) False. As I said, the timeline we started the mission in has all the elements affected by the Sphere Builders. The only way this would've possibly worked is if there had been no mention of the temporal cold war until now.
Even then it would be a stretch to say that the Federation came out exactly the same given the heavy interference it caused.
Whilst I'll give you your point on the first, for the second I meant that from the moment you start the mission you're controlling a version of your character from an alternate universe ala Yesterdays Enterprise, you don't take control of the main timeline version of your character until the end when you arrive at the lab in the midst of the news that the temporally shielded computer has records that the weapon was fired twice.
An interesting idea, except for the whole Yamato thing (honestly mentioning that then dropping it is a pretty big deal) and how Noye (aka Sour Krenim Man) now has a beard to show things have totally changed yo when he didn't have one in Broken Circle.
He had the beard at the start of the ep and the end, plus it doesn't take long to grow a beard, a week or 2 of frantically working on this problem all waking hours would easily account for his beard growth.
He has a chin beard at the start, and a full facial beard at the end, clearly meant to imply a change.
Easily explained as not bothering to take care of his appearance because of his wife not existing and him being too focused on his work to care.
Like I said, growing a beard isn't hard, hell, I get that level of growth after a mere week of not shaving.
Do you honestly think Cryptic would change an npc detail just for that? Come on.
Given that he had 2 new models just for this episode, yes, yes I do.
He has two models to demonstrate the timeline change!
And if he didn't care about his appearance because he had no wife here, then he wouldn't care about his appearance because he had no wife in Broken Circle.
He wasn't busy working on a life or death project in broken circle either though.
Erm. Yes he was. Really you're just grasping at straws now.
Erm. Yes he was. Really you're just grasping at straws now.
Sorry, got my missions mixed up, either way we don't know how long it's been since Broken Circle, if it's been a week or more then it is entirely plausible that he got lost in his work after the loss of nearly 50% of the alliance fleet and just couldn't find enough reason to waste time on the upkeep of his facial hair.
Erm. Yes he was. Really you're just grasping at straws now.
Sorry, got my missions mixed up, either way we don't know how long it's been since Broken Circle, if it's been a week or more then it is entirely plausible that he got lost in his work after the loss of nearly 50% of the alliance fleet and just couldn't find enough reason to waste time on the upkeep of his facial hair.
This is the same developer who kept Seven looking as she did 30 years ago, catsuit and all.
So which is more likely, Cryptic suddenly factor in the passage of time for their npcs, or they wanted a quick and handy way to show that omg this is a different timeline.
It was not as bad as the OP's opinion, but it was very underwhelming. It was more of a that's it, especially with the "star", the KIS Annorax. The Butterfly Effect should have been played out rather than holo-simmed. You can tell this is just a filler episode and you can almost see that they are getting bored with the present season with wanting it to wrap up it as soon as possible.
Noye doesn't just have a beard, he also has scars on his neck now in this timeline. Hmmm... Facial hair. Scars. OMG! We've created the Mirror Universe!
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I very much doubt any of the "Cryptic doesn't like the new season anymore and want to wrap it up quickly now" works. These episodes, with voice acting and everything, take some time and the scripts will have been more or less finished months ago, so there's no reaction to lukewarm receptions of other episodes involved here.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
I very much doubt any of the "Cryptic doesn't like the new season anymore and want to wrap it up quickly now" works. These episodes, with voice acting and everything, take some time and the scripts will have been more or less finished months ago, so there's no reaction to lukewarm receptions of other episodes involved here.
Probably over a year ago, actually. From what I understand, it is far cheaper to get voice actors to go over all the lines at once rather than bring them in every few months to give a few lines.
Consider Broken Circle had Seven giving us one little line, and the last we see her is sometime in the Delta arc I think. They didn't bring her back for one line, so I would lean on her having said that line back when she did the other stuff for Delta.
I agree the new episode was full of plot holes. Since the transwarp conduit would have been installed only after Romulus was assimilated, removing the transwarp conduit from time would not in any way prevent Romulus from being assimilated. Nor would that have anything at all to do with whether or not that species managed to hold off the Borg since they were on the other end of the delta quadrant. Using technology isn't a coinflip. If they had the technology and used it then it would have worked. Since they had the technology and used it then it must work and that woman should still be there.
And the writers apparently never actually watched the Voyager episode that inspired these events because the shields don't work the way they did in the in game episode. During the Voyager episode, the when the Krenim removed some object from the time stream, a temporal wave shot out from that point which altered the entire timeline permanently. If you had the correct shield modification up, you would avoid the effects of this wave and remain unchanged. Once the wave had passed and changed time, you no longer needed the shield to be up to avoid the effects. Time was already permanently altered and you had already permanently escaped the effects of the wave. In the Voyager episode, the majority of the crew abandons the ship in escape pods and they remain unaltered, meaning that the time shielding is only needed to avoid the wave when it passes.
From this then there were 2 major problems with the ingame episode:
1) We did not need to keep the shields up to avoid the effects of the time wave because we already avoided the effects of the time wave by having the shields up when the time wave passed. This is the same thing as traveling back in time. Traveling back in time does not cause you to become your younger self, you simply travel back in time as you are at the moment you started traveling back in time at.
During the episode, Voyager's shields are knocked offline, however Voyager doesn't "reintegrate" into a new timeline because that isn't how time travel works. Voyager avoided the initial time wave and that time wave was the only thing which could alter the state of anything caught in the wave. Once the wave passes, there is nothing which is capable of altering a thing's state in that manner.
2) Every ship in the Federation fleet, Klingon fleet and Romulan ship is capable of creating a time shield. During the Voyager episode, the crew creates a modification to their shields to protect their ship from chroniton based torpedoes. This modification has the effect of protecting Voyager's crew from the effects of the time wave. Janeway then shares this modification with other species to form a small fleet of ships who are each protected by their own time shields. Voyager, a ship with 40 year old technology was able to modify its shields to avoid the effects of the time wave. Therefore every ship in STO's present fleets could easily protect itself from the time wave by making the same simple shield modification. Therefore, every Romulan, Federation and Klingon ship and planet would have been instructed to throw up a time shield to prevent being affected by the resultant time wave. It was completely stupid to limit the number of ships using a time shield to 3 because that isn't a logical progression of the plot
3) Another HUGE problem was the rush to use the ship to alter time willy nilly. No one even bothered actually considering the implications of using the device. I believe the in game episode literally had them saying they were going to use it because they wanted to try it and see what would happen. That isn't how the Federation, Romulans or Klingons operate when it comes to time travel. They are much more careful about doing anything which would effect the timeline. Because everyone who would be affected by the change in the timeline will have effectively died, using that weapon would be considered committing genocide on a universal scale, that's the entire reason why the temporal prime directive exists in the first place and why time travel is not permitted for any reason.
You don't think that the Federation would have loved to go back in time and blowup the Borg before the Borg rose to power? Of course they want to as that would produce a hugely beneficial and positive change to the entire galaxy. But they don't because such a change to the timeline would effectively kill every single living being in the universe which presently exists and which would come to exist in the future by replacing every living thing with a completely different living thing. I realize this requires a bit of existential philosophy to understand (The friend you meet in the cafe is not the friend you wanted to meet. The friend you wanted to meet was the friend from 2 hours ago who you invited to lunch, not the friend who had lived for an additional 2 hours after being invited to lunch).
Using the device would literally be a last ditch effort because every other option had been exhausted and everyone was going to die whether they used the device or not and using it was the only way of preserving a mirror image version of the galaxy.
I also really hate the Mary Sue Ferengi captain and can't wait for him to get killed off.
So I liked it, the holodeck simulation FX was cool. I follow the time changes to a point, but found myself disappointed that we actually did all that work and changed nothing at all in the end, except that race we never heard of and had 3 lines of dialogue LOL! , essentially making the episode pointless. It was still good to play though, 3 stars from me
2) Every ship in the Federation fleet, Klingon fleet and Romulan ship is capable of creating a time shield. During the Voyager episode, the crew creates a modification to their shields to protect their ship from chroniton based torpedoes. This modification has the effect of protecting Voyager's crew from the effects of the time wave. Janeway then shares this modification with other species to form a small fleet of ships who are each protected by their own time shields. Voyager, a ship with 40 year old technology was able to modify its shields to avoid the effects of the time wave. Therefore every ship in STO's present fleets could easily protect itself from the time wave by making the same simple shield modification. Therefore, every Romulan, Federation and Klingon ship and planet would have been instructed to throw up a time shield to prevent being affected by the resultant time wave. It was completely stupid to limit the number of ships using a time shield to 3 because that isn't a logical progression of the plot
You're forgetting that in STO Chroniton based tech only slows down NPC ships by about 20%
1. It was inside time. It just had shields that allowed the inhabitants to remember things that had never happened.
You need to watch "Year of Hell" again... Annorax (and Janeway, I believe) said that the ship was out of phase with time, which is how it would not be affected by conventional weapons.
While that was a joke, and a fever dream happens BEFORE you die (or in this case, get assimilated)... I kindly point to Unimatrix Zero. [/quote]
This was TRIBBLE even in the Voyager episode. If the timeship was out of phase with time, then the timeship would not be advancing with time. It would be outside of time and space completely. Meaning that it would effectively only have a single point of interaction with the spacetime, that being the moment when it left spacetime. If you are advancing with space time, then you are part of spacetime. You can't both advance with spacetime and be outside spacetime. While time inside the ship could still advance even if the ship itself was outside spacetime, the ship itself would no longer be part of spacetime. However since the timeship itself was advancing with time, then the timeship was not outside of spacetime and must therefore be capable of being affected by anything within spacetime. Therefore the timeship was capable of being affected by conventional weapons. In fact the ship was affected by conventional weapons during the second part of the two part episode, however the weapons weren't effective.
One could also ask where was 27th century Starfleet during all of this? They only seem to show up after the problem has already been fixed and they are no longer needed anyways. I'm guessing the federation of the 27th century is severely underfunded.
And what about the Q? Why are they sitting around on their lazy asses and letting the Iconians have their way with the galaxy? Actually, why aren't the Iconians being more aggressive? None of the episodes actually portray the Iconians as a tangible threat, they are portrayed more as Sir Evil Villain whose only evil act aspires to sitting in their lair and twirling their evil moustaches all day.
I don't even understand what the Iconians motivation is. They want their world back, but they don't want to replicate some robots to clean the world up for them? They seem to have an extremely elaborate plan entailing the enslavement of every single species simply to have their planet cleaned for them? That's just silly. They could have accomplished the same exact task already by simply using holograms or robots.
And what was up with that impossibly huge fleet they never use? If the episode where we see the Iconians fleet is accurate, then the Iconians would need to have many powers of ten of ships if there were so many ships that they completely blotted out the sun like that. The Iconians already have the sheer numbers to simply send an impossibly huge invading fleet to every single planet right now. So what are they waiting for? If they had a proper motivation then I'd be able to answer this question.
While I am on the subject, why did M'tex (or whatever her name) kill herself? She decided that she'd rather just keep depleting her energy by making portals that went back to the same ship until she died from sheer exhaustion rather than making one portal to go get reinforcements and then coming back with reinforcements? That's just dumb.
As I said, I did enjoy the episode, I just think there are some fundamental problems with how the Iconians are being presented and with some general plot holes as per above.
If this is setting the game up for the Temporal Cold War storyline...why, gods, why? That storyline was so lame the first show runner to inherit it shot it in the head.
Oh, and I would have...well, I wouldn't have done a storyline with time travel in the first place, but if I was somehow roped into it, I would have had one of the researchers say something like "unfortunately 98% of our simulations end with the Borg overrunning the galaxy". Just to highlight what a low-probability scenario their defeat was.
What made it a bad plot line was the entire season of 'what if they couldnt turn around and resupply' arc. They had to spend so much time fixing things or finding a way around things that they ended up putting everyone to sleep with very little movement on the actual plot line. I remember thinking to myself that I just wish theyd find what they were looking for already.
What made it a bad plot line was the entire season of 'what if they couldnt turn around and resupply' arc. They had to spend so much time fixing things or finding a way around things that they ended up putting everyone to sleep with very little movement on the actual plot line. I remember thinking to myself that I just wish theyd find what they were looking for already.
Actually the Xindi arc was not really part of the Temporal Cold War arc. The Sphere Builders were a completely different faction. Mysterious Future Guy only showed up to get Archer involved; the next time the TCW resurfaces is in the next season's opener when it gets taken to the woodshed.
FWIW, I liked the Xindi arc; it was where those two cursed idiots started to step back and Coto turned the show around.
@Venture-1. @Venture from City of Heroes if you remember that. Yes, that Venture. Yes, I probably trashed your MA arc. You'll have to be specific; for me it was Tuesday.
Anyone made a post about the fact that Starfleet atleast should know that Clauda looks like the Spherebuilders at the missions start already, or am i the first?
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Given that he had 2 new models just for this episode, yes, yes I do.
Just get Aunt Kathy to ask Q Jr to fix it.
As for this not being scientifically accurate; aside from the occasional descriptions and depictions of known stellar phenomena Star Trek HAS NEVER been hard science fiction - EVER. So they handwaved to conclude a story -- yeah in 49 years of story telling, Star Trek has never done that before...oh, wait...
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A few annotations:
I agree completely, however, it is par for the course considering Star Trek. There is no reason for O'Brien to even exist, let alone live on Terok Nor, or Kirk and Spock serving on the same ship
Well, there was Unimatrix Zero. Kind of dreaming I'd say.
Probably the first one. We didn't build the original ship but a new one after some old blueprints. There's no surprise to me when there are minor changes in the construction which, especially in the context of this episode, can lead to major conse
Only he does not know his wife doesn't exist since she never existed and he doesn't know about her. That we, the players, remember a species being removed from the universe is one thing. In universe nobody knows yet, one thing New-Timeline-Nog still has to find out when comparing the data.
Dealing with the Guardian means an annoying non-answer that will only make sense with foresight.
Seems to me that if one is looking for quality verse, one should be readng something from Asimov, H.G. Wells or thier ilk.
Not mucking around in an online MMO expecting some kind of excellance.
<shrug>
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Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
The also very much resemble The Preservers.
If the Iconians were the first race the Preservers created, perhaps the Sphere Builders were the second...?
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
And let's be clear here - the Krenim weapon was never and will never be the solution. It's creator couldn't manipulate it precisely without destroying himself, how is it that someone else would? I mean it doesn't even seem in this FE that they have created anything close to the testing mechanisms that Annorax had. And let's not forget: "Time has emotion, color and vengeance." or something to that affect being said by Annorax. The moment it was decided to pick an asteroid as the incursion point I know ish was going to hit the fan. That was the first mistake Chakotay made that would have wiped out 8000 civilizations. Say what you will about JJ but he chose a clean closed ended loop with his use of time travel - a blackhole is created from an exploding star and something called "red matter" that sends two ships through to an alternate timeline leaving the other one behind never to be touched.
I'm just at the point I can't wait for this whole thing to be over however silly things get.
I meant that he didn't care about his appearance, not about the fact his wife doesn't exist anymore.
The timeline simulation was not created by the holodeck, the timeline monitoring tech of the Krenim did that.
They just took advantage of the holodeck as a visual interface, the krenim computer feeding sim data, getting feedback from the holodeck interactions of our character to finetune the information and adjusting the simulation simultaneously.
The spherebuilders were not erased from the timeline, they fled into that subspace realm when the Borg attacked them, ending up trapped.
In that state they became immune to any changes in the timeline in our reality existing outside of it.
That part actually works really well.
The timeline changes back in Enterprise did not destroy or erase them either, just having them retreat into their realm again.
The only part I missed was when they got trapped there.
I can only assume that they retroactively converted the Delphic Expanse back in time to be ready by the time history had caught up with them becoming trapped in the first place, meaning now.
But the Delphic Expanse plan and the Time War... excuse me, the Temporal Cold War. was thwarted, so they probably will have to come up with a new plan.
it all works surprisingly well.
He has two models to demonstrate the timeline change!
And if he didn't care about his appearance because he had no wife here, then he wouldn't care about his appearance because he had no wife in Broken Circle.
He wasn't busy working on a life or death project in broken circle either though.
Erm. Yes he was. Really you're just grasping at straws now.
Sorry, got my missions mixed up, either way we don't know how long it's been since Broken Circle, if it's been a week or more then it is entirely plausible that he got lost in his work after the loss of nearly 50% of the alliance fleet and just couldn't find enough reason to waste time on the upkeep of his facial hair.
This is the same developer who kept Seven looking as she did 30 years ago, catsuit and all.
So which is more likely, Cryptic suddenly factor in the passage of time for their npcs, or they wanted a quick and handy way to show that omg this is a different timeline.
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Probably over a year ago, actually. From what I understand, it is far cheaper to get voice actors to go over all the lines at once rather than bring them in every few months to give a few lines.
Consider Broken Circle had Seven giving us one little line, and the last we see her is sometime in the Delta arc I think. They didn't bring her back for one line, so I would lean on her having said that line back when she did the other stuff for Delta.
And the writers apparently never actually watched the Voyager episode that inspired these events because the shields don't work the way they did in the in game episode. During the Voyager episode, the when the Krenim removed some object from the time stream, a temporal wave shot out from that point which altered the entire timeline permanently. If you had the correct shield modification up, you would avoid the effects of this wave and remain unchanged. Once the wave had passed and changed time, you no longer needed the shield to be up to avoid the effects. Time was already permanently altered and you had already permanently escaped the effects of the wave. In the Voyager episode, the majority of the crew abandons the ship in escape pods and they remain unaltered, meaning that the time shielding is only needed to avoid the wave when it passes.
From this then there were 2 major problems with the ingame episode:
1) We did not need to keep the shields up to avoid the effects of the time wave because we already avoided the effects of the time wave by having the shields up when the time wave passed. This is the same thing as traveling back in time. Traveling back in time does not cause you to become your younger self, you simply travel back in time as you are at the moment you started traveling back in time at.
During the episode, Voyager's shields are knocked offline, however Voyager doesn't "reintegrate" into a new timeline because that isn't how time travel works. Voyager avoided the initial time wave and that time wave was the only thing which could alter the state of anything caught in the wave. Once the wave passes, there is nothing which is capable of altering a thing's state in that manner.
2) Every ship in the Federation fleet, Klingon fleet and Romulan ship is capable of creating a time shield. During the Voyager episode, the crew creates a modification to their shields to protect their ship from chroniton based torpedoes. This modification has the effect of protecting Voyager's crew from the effects of the time wave. Janeway then shares this modification with other species to form a small fleet of ships who are each protected by their own time shields. Voyager, a ship with 40 year old technology was able to modify its shields to avoid the effects of the time wave. Therefore every ship in STO's present fleets could easily protect itself from the time wave by making the same simple shield modification. Therefore, every Romulan, Federation and Klingon ship and planet would have been instructed to throw up a time shield to prevent being affected by the resultant time wave. It was completely stupid to limit the number of ships using a time shield to 3 because that isn't a logical progression of the plot
3) Another HUGE problem was the rush to use the ship to alter time willy nilly. No one even bothered actually considering the implications of using the device. I believe the in game episode literally had them saying they were going to use it because they wanted to try it and see what would happen. That isn't how the Federation, Romulans or Klingons operate when it comes to time travel. They are much more careful about doing anything which would effect the timeline. Because everyone who would be affected by the change in the timeline will have effectively died, using that weapon would be considered committing genocide on a universal scale, that's the entire reason why the temporal prime directive exists in the first place and why time travel is not permitted for any reason.
You don't think that the Federation would have loved to go back in time and blowup the Borg before the Borg rose to power? Of course they want to as that would produce a hugely beneficial and positive change to the entire galaxy. But they don't because such a change to the timeline would effectively kill every single living being in the universe which presently exists and which would come to exist in the future by replacing every living thing with a completely different living thing. I realize this requires a bit of existential philosophy to understand (The friend you meet in the cafe is not the friend you wanted to meet. The friend you wanted to meet was the friend from 2 hours ago who you invited to lunch, not the friend who had lived for an additional 2 hours after being invited to lunch).
Using the device would literally be a last ditch effort because every other option had been exhausted and everyone was going to die whether they used the device or not and using it was the only way of preserving a mirror image version of the galaxy.
I also really hate the Mary Sue Ferengi captain and can't wait for him to get killed off.
Otherwise it was a really good episode.
You're forgetting that in STO Chroniton based tech only slows down NPC ships by about 20%
While that was a joke, and a fever dream happens BEFORE you die (or in this case, get assimilated)... I kindly point to Unimatrix Zero.
This was TRIBBLE even in the Voyager episode. If the timeship was out of phase with time, then the timeship would not be advancing with time. It would be outside of time and space completely. Meaning that it would effectively only have a single point of interaction with the spacetime, that being the moment when it left spacetime. If you are advancing with space time, then you are part of spacetime. You can't both advance with spacetime and be outside spacetime. While time inside the ship could still advance even if the ship itself was outside spacetime, the ship itself would no longer be part of spacetime. However since the timeship itself was advancing with time, then the timeship was not outside of spacetime and must therefore be capable of being affected by anything within spacetime. Therefore the timeship was capable of being affected by conventional weapons. In fact the ship was affected by conventional weapons during the second part of the two part episode, however the weapons weren't effective.
One could also ask where was 27th century Starfleet during all of this? They only seem to show up after the problem has already been fixed and they are no longer needed anyways. I'm guessing the federation of the 27th century is severely underfunded.
And what about the Q? Why are they sitting around on their lazy asses and letting the Iconians have their way with the galaxy? Actually, why aren't the Iconians being more aggressive? None of the episodes actually portray the Iconians as a tangible threat, they are portrayed more as Sir Evil Villain whose only evil act aspires to sitting in their lair and twirling their evil moustaches all day.
I don't even understand what the Iconians motivation is. They want their world back, but they don't want to replicate some robots to clean the world up for them? They seem to have an extremely elaborate plan entailing the enslavement of every single species simply to have their planet cleaned for them? That's just silly. They could have accomplished the same exact task already by simply using holograms or robots.
And what was up with that impossibly huge fleet they never use? If the episode where we see the Iconians fleet is accurate, then the Iconians would need to have many powers of ten of ships if there were so many ships that they completely blotted out the sun like that. The Iconians already have the sheer numbers to simply send an impossibly huge invading fleet to every single planet right now. So what are they waiting for? If they had a proper motivation then I'd be able to answer this question.
While I am on the subject, why did M'tex (or whatever her name) kill herself? She decided that she'd rather just keep depleting her energy by making portals that went back to the same ship until she died from sheer exhaustion rather than making one portal to go get reinforcements and then coming back with reinforcements? That's just dumb.
As I said, I did enjoy the episode, I just think there are some fundamental problems with how the Iconians are being presented and with some general plot holes as per above.
What made it a bad plot line was the entire season of 'what if they couldnt turn around and resupply' arc. They had to spend so much time fixing things or finding a way around things that they ended up putting everyone to sleep with very little movement on the actual plot line. I remember thinking to myself that I just wish theyd find what they were looking for already.
Actually the Xindi arc was not really part of the Temporal Cold War arc. The Sphere Builders were a completely different faction. Mysterious Future Guy only showed up to get Archer involved; the next time the TCW resurfaces is in the next season's opener when it gets taken to the woodshed.
FWIW, I liked the Xindi arc; it was where those two cursed idiots started to step back and Coto turned the show around.