[PODCAST] Priority One Podcast 262 | Hugh Gotta Be Kidding Me

winters83 · March 2016

Greetings, Admirals! You’re listening to EPISODE 262 OF PRIORITY ONE PODCAST, your weekly report on all things Star Trek! This episode was made available for download or streaming on Monday, March 14th, 2016 at PriorityOnePodcast.com!

We’re getting back to formula this week and we start by Trekking Out some additional insight into the new Star Trek series coming out in January 2017, a very special guest has been added to the list for Star Trek Las Vegas, and for all you do-it-yourself’ers out there that like to tinker with gadgets, we’ve got an awesome project for you to work on this week! In STONews, Winters and Kenna will update you on the latest from the game. Then, Cookie and Elijah are back with their next On Screen review of TNG’s the Big Goodbye. Later, Henry give us his review of some amazing Star Trek-inspired fan creations.

As usual, before we wrap up the show, we’ll open hailing frequencies for your incoming messages.

TOPICS DISCUSSED

Priority One Podcast 2016 Listener Survey
Trek It Out

Star Trek Online News

Tracking the Devs

On Screen

The Big Goodbye (via Memory Alpha)

Fan Art Review

This week’s Community Questions:

Have you ever taken on a Star Trek-themed do-it-yourself project? If so, share it with us!
What do you think Star Trek Online could do to reinvigorate some of the older, tired queues?
How does material from the holodeck remain even AFTER you’re out of range of a holoemitter?
What would your ideal holodeck program include?

Let us know YOUR thoughts on this week’s episode by commenting below!

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sisteric · March 2016

Have you ever taken on a Star Trek-themed do-it-yourself project? If so, share it with us!
Nope. Don't have that kind of time these days.

What do you think Star Trek Online could do to reinvigorate some of the older, tired queues?
Up the rewards could be an option. Or better yet, have the least popular STF's (maybe 3 at a time) get double or triple rewards once every 20 Hrs for a week. Base the rotation on the previous 4 weeks get a good sampling to base which one is the least played.

How does material from the holodeck remain even AFTER you’re out of range of a holoemitter?
Holoemitters are just a kind of replicator. So just up the power used to force the object to permanence and now you have a real object, as if from a replicator. I have always viewed the Holoemitters, as they are used in the series, appear to be low powered replicators so has to create "real' objects but do not have permanence due to the energy is not used to "close" the creation and give it permanence.

What would your ideal holodeck program include?

A fantasy setting that allows me to play DnD style games as if I was the main character. I think it would be awesome to "cast spells" and fight "dragons" as something other than human. Talk about your emersion....lol

paxfederatica · March 2016

What do you think Star Trek Online could do to reinvigorate some of the older, tired queues?
I think Cryptic needs to bite the bullet and make solo versions of these queued events. How they'd work is that players would join PUG queues as they do now, but if their queue doesn't pop within, say, five minutes of the first person joining, everyone in the queue would be offered their own instance of the solo version instead, which they would have the option to accept or decline. The idea behind this is to encourage players who have given up on these events (because their queues never popped) to revisit them, by guaranteeing that they'll at least get a solo version within a reasonable amount of time. Then, of course, if enough players revisit these queues, they might actually start popping again.

In place of human-controlled teammates, solo versions of ground events would use the player's away team, while solo version of space events would add four random allied NPC ships fighting, and performing other tasks, alongside the player. The solo versions would reward the same as the regular PUG versions, and have the same cooldowns. (They may be slightly harder than the original PUG events they're based on, simply because computer-controlled teammates likely won't have all the gear, abilities or human ingenuity available to player characters. Therefore the solo versions may need to be nerfed slightly, or otherwise adjusted, to compensate for this.)

How does material from the holodeck remain even AFTER you’re out of range of a holoemitter?
Depends on the story needs of the writers for that week's episode.

That said, an interesting related question is whether the effects of holo-matter inside the holodeck can persist outside it. The holographic cigarettes smoked by Picard in this episode (and again in "Manhunt", the next time we see him in a Dixon Hill program) come to mind - do the various deleterious effects of smoking reverse themselves once Picard leaves the holodeck? (Or are Hill's holo-cigarettes covered by the holodeck's safety protocols?)

Re: Viruses and the Borg
Actually, in TNG "I, Borg" Picard's original plan was to infect Hugh with the equivalent of a computer virus - specifically, an M.C. Escher-style paradoxical image designed to "hang" the Borg Collective when they tried to analyze it. Guinan and Hugh talked Picard out of that idea; instead he sent Hugh back with his individuality intact - a whole different kind of "virus", but one Picard expected (correctly, as it turned out) would have a similar effect on the Collective.

danqueller · March 2016

Excellent show, as always. Priority One remains the number one podcast every week for me, and never disappoints!

What do you think Star Trek Online could do to reinvigorate some of the older, tired queues?

I had to give this one some thought, both because of the number of queues in the game and how players at different points of character progression are likely to be in those queues that open up at different levels and storyline completions. The one thing that occurred to me was to have a week-long 'Featured Theme', where queues dealing with a particular part of the story within STO (i.e Borg queues, Tholian queues, Dyson queues, ect.) would receive a bonus of 1.5 times the normal rewards for the first completion daily, and a 1.1 multiplier for subsequent completions. As this would rotate across all the queues week-by-week, as well as set a tone for gameplay that week, it would both help the less-played queues by encouraging players to play all the queues of the weekly theme and give a platform for players to notice the queues they may have forgotten were even in the game. The amount of reward bonus might be open for discussion, with whatever would be attractive but not destabilizing to the game economy being optimal.

How does material from the holodeck remain after you’re out of range of the holodeck?

While it is almost certain this was one of those 'oops' moments all performance media writers get, I'd say it could be due to a similar way the holodeck has different effects on people dependent on if the safety systems are engaged or not. Presumably, there are different types of effects that the holodeck uses, one class that can cause physical injury and the other that does not. In a similar way, it is possible that 'simple' matter such as lipstick can persist outside the holodeck because the material is simple and non-reactive (requiring considerably less power to form and therefore possibly being 'actual' matter unless removed by the holodeck systems prior to exiting).

More complex and reactive matter (such as a machine, person, or even a simple picture) might require magnitudes more power to build using the holodeck systems and only be held in a 'temporary' state with photonic forcefields filling in for the vast majority of matter and existing as a whole object only as long as the holodeck systems maintain them. Once away from the holodeck/emitters, such matter would lose organization and dissolve. This would also aid in the functioning of the safety protocols on the holodeck by having the vast majority of hazards disappear if the holodeck were somehow to suffer a malfunction (something that obviously would ruin a lot of scriptwriters' ideas, so not surprising this would be a less-than-popular feature with writers needing to have ways to insert drama into the holodeck).

Sorry if this isn't 'official' source answer, but I honestly don't think there is one, especially when it's likely different writers had different ideas about how the holodeck equipment actually worked.

About the Borg and Villain Decay:

The Borg actually started out as just about the most frightening and alien of the 'bad guys' in Star Trek. They were the nightmare humans still don't like to think about, the walking image of the Human race so lost into its own technology that they lose everything that makes us Human, becoming something both unable to be understood and utterly removed from anything any other race (almost all of which are just aspects of ourselves) share. The final horror, that of the loss of our very identity as individuals and minds that know ourselves as ourselves, was what made the Collective so utterly alien as to be truly the one foe in Star Trek that could not be negotiated with.

In the initial introduction of the Borg, Q stated it best that the Borg didn't think in terms any other race would understand, seeing only technology as having value, and only as something to be consumed. Further, they did not display any morality, but only the complete removal of any considerations except a machine-like purpose to take what technology other races could offer by whatever means were most efficient. They were not so much 'bad guys' as a force of nature, or a machine that is simply performing its task without regard to what that task might do.

All of this meant the Borg, on top of being the most frightening enemy introduced into Trek, was also the one the viewers had the most trouble understanding, and this meant even the writers of the show probably couldn't understand them enough to write the kind of story they wanted.

Thus, the Borg Queen was invented. She gave the Borg an understandable place by being an individual who acted as the writers understood 'villains' acted, and thus the audience could now treat the Borg as just another type of Klingon or Romulan, even going so far as to make the Borg fit the model of a hive of bees so the audience could find a reference point to fit them into a nice, neat place in the universe they knew. The Borg went from being the Great Unknown, the alien so removed from Humanity that it is impossible to understand, to a known character type that could have the easy label of 'evil' placed upon them, and the writers could inject normal human mannerisms and values into their actions. Their goals went from a mindless acquisition of technology and subjugation of other races in order to service their system to a quest for racial perfection ( a very Human goal ).

So, yes. The Borg which we first encountered were far, far more intimidating, relentless, and incomprehensible, and a far greater 'villain' than the Borg as they became as the series and movies progressed, eventually becoming just another 'evil' empire out to dominate the galaxy for their personal edification. For a last comparison, watch the scene in the initial encounter with the Borg in Engineering aboard the Enterprise-D, and look at how the second Borg regards the humans as he works the console after having deflected the phaser attack, the utter disregard of them, and ask if anything the Borg Queen ever did was as chilling as that one look from a single Borg that showed just how inhuman a race had been encountered.

And, lastly (if you like rock music), you might check out the song 'Evil Devolution' by Ayreon. It is part of another story ('Into The Electric Castle'), of course, but it fits so well with the subject of the Borg, I had to mention it.

Whew! See what a single episode of Priority One can do? Thanks for all of the work you guys do every week!!

[PODCAST] Priority One Podcast 262 | Hugh Gotta Be Kidding Me

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