Turning (as I so often do) to Niven's Known Space, initial settlement was by one-way STL craft. Generations passed before the outsiders sold the Mayor of We Made It a hyperdrive shunt; people had already begun to adapt to their environments in that time. We Made It, the second planet of Procyon B, was lower-gravity than Earth, with a climate that forced everyone to live underground for half the local year (or risk being blown away by surface winds in excess of 200 kph), and crashlanders (as those born there were known) tended to be much taller than human norm, around 6'5" to 7' on average, and frequently albino (a mutation that conferred little difficulty in their buried habitats). Jinx, a moon of a gas giant around Sirius A, had a surface gravity of about 1.5g; Jinxians tended to be short, squat, immensely strong, and shorter-lived than average due to heart issues. After hyperdrive became available, Jinxians really enjoyed visiting other human worlds. The mutations occurring on other human-settled worlds were less dramatic, although the people of Gummidgy did have to take melanin supplements that rendered most of them almost blue-black (their star had a very high UV output).
Given the apparent ease with which Klingons use genetic enhancement (even accepting a treatment devised by an alien species!), and the fact that the Klingons we see here are separatist fanatics who believe offers of peace are an existential threat, it doesn't seem terribly improbable to me that during a period of internecine warfare such as that described by T'kuvma in his initial monologue, the Houses might have developed along completely separate lines, possibly intentionally. (TNG implied that different Houses might have their own fleets, and STO expands on this with a raid on the world owned by the House of Torg.) This could well result in dramatically different physical appearances; by the time of TOS, the front presented to the Federation appears to be the classic "Puerto Ricans in gold lame" look, although in TMP nobody seemed particularly surprised by the lobster-headed guys in the security footage, so perhaps the variances were known by the Federation even then.
One thing to realize here is... This is the first time in the entire existence of Star Trek Online that there is actually a live series in existence alongside the game.
Crazy that we never had that before.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Okay, you're correct that Kirk was trying to save Spock and McCoy. However, you cant make statements like "everyone else was painted in as unflattering light as possible" when you're talking about whether a character is reasonable or unreasonable. Which side the movie wants us to take is irrelevant to whether or not an action makes sense.
But now that you have brought up the meta components, it strikes me that you're right: the movie does take great pains to depict these characters as wrong when the Enterprise crew are right, and it stinks of bad writing. In order to paint the Enterprise crew as sympathetic despite committing an actual crime, the writers dumb down the other Starfleet personnel. Morrow and the Excelsior captain are idiots for no real reason except to make Kirk et. al. look better. Why doesn't Morrow look up katras? Are they nigh-mythical? Does he think Vulcan mysticism is a bunch of spiritual mumbo-jumbo? Is making snap judgements in his character? "Well, uh, no, uh, he, er, HE JUST DOESN'T, OKAY?!"
And I mean, why is the Excelsior captain such an obnoxious prick who apparently has no redeeming qualities? Surely Starfleet would pick an accomplished commander for their newest and most ambitious starship. "Well, he, uh... uh... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH *runs away*"
I mean, this is the same writer/director pair that gave us the trope namer for Space Whale Aesop.
Though again, Morrow has a good in-universe reason not to send warships to Genesis. The planet is a political powder keg and he doesn't want the Federation to come off as being aggressive. It may not have been the right choice, but it makes sense based on Federation philosophy.
Morrow's actual mistakes, namely not looking up katras* and not expecting the Klingons to come snooping, are not some integral part of his character (if indeed he actually has any character. He probably exists entirely to cause problems for Kirk et. al.)
*And remember that until Sarek came around, Kirk had no idea that this "resurrection through katra" thing existed either, despite having a vulcan best friend for decades. You'd think that after all those near-deaths, Spock would have taken Kirk aside and said "Hey Jim, let me show you a trick in case I kick the bucket again."
tl;dr The only reason Morrow et. al. are written so stupid is to make Kirk et. al. look better when they do something stupid and of questionable legality.
Vulcans of that era are pretty secretive about a lot of their culture, from katras to pon farr. 24th century characters only seem to know about it because Kirk got tangled up in it by Spock. I'd wager Admiral Morrow simply thought the whole katra thing was just a religious ritual, not that there was actual space magic involved. (Come on, let's face it, that entire plot was fantasy with spaceships. And people say Star Trek is harder sci-fi than Star Wars...)
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
One thing to realize here is... This is the first time in the entire existence of Star Trek Online that there is actually a live series in existence alongside the game.
Crazy that we never had that before.
And how much it will affect STO. Besides the Discovery uniform, I suspect we will see at least one or two Discovery Lockboxes. Time will tell if we get any missions based on Discovery. We already have one mission based off of JJTrek.
One thing to realize here is... This is the first time in the entire existence of Star Trek Online that there is actually a live series in existence alongside the game.
Crazy that we never had that before.
And how much it will affect STO. Besides the Discovery uniform, I suspect we will see at least one or two Discovery Lockboxes. Time will tell if we get any missions based on Discovery. We already have one mission based off of JJTrek.
it's possible cryptic may need to go back and adjust some of the history dialogue for one or two of the missions since Discovery is now apart of that history.
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
STO was never canon, and non-canon works get jossed by the shows all the time. The ENT writers planned to incorporate some of Diane Duane's Vulcan/Romulan-centric novels into the Romulan War arc (the seasons that were cancelled) but they were going to have to do some serious surgery on them to fit ENT and Nemesis (for starters, the notion of the Remans being a different species from the Romulans, rather than an ethnic group, and the Romulans having developed warp drive before contact with Earth rather than after).
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
...(for starters, the notion of the Remans being a different species from the Romulans, rather than an ethnic group...
That's the easy bit. Ch'Havran was settled by the lesser-regarded ship-clans; it's not hard to imagine that part of the reason for the world's unwelcoming nature might well have been a heavy concentration of radioactives on the planet. (That would also explain why the Star Empire later employed the Havrannsu as mining slave labor - they needed the radioactives, and valued remotes more than their cousins.) A few centuries of radiation-induced mutation, and you have a population extremely visually distinct from their less-irradiated brethren.
I guess we could just handwave the warp-drive thing, same way we handwaved the Earth-Romulus War being fought by sublight ships with nuclear weapons...
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
the mines on remus are dilithium, not any type of radioactive material, though
Dilithium is known to exist in a gaseous phase since it is 2 Lithium atoms bonded together. So if you melt Lithium up to 1330 Celsium, then 1% of the Lithium is Dilithium and there is even some Trilithium and going all the way up to 6 Lithium atoms bonded together. Dilithium crystals, on the other hand, doesn't currently exist.
On a Star Trek related note, it is surprising how with the warp core running on matter-antimatter reactions, there is a lot of discussion about Dilithium which contains the matter-antimatter reaction and little about how antimatter is obtained. For TOS, TNG, and DS9, it could be simply explained through Antimatter Containment Storage and stocking up at the nearest starbase, but for Voyager it is a huge problem since not every civilization they encountered is capable of producing antimatter or willing to trade with them. A starship can't create its own antimatter for energy production since it is required to power the ship.
the mines on remus are dilithium, not any type of radioactive material, though
What's mined on ch'Havran in the 24th century is primarily dilithium. They probably don't need the radioactives so badly any more. However, it's not unreasonable to suppose that during the time that their technology level was reduced to prewarp levels, they did indeed require radioactives to power early fission and fusion reactors (and weapons, of course). So why not locate our hypothetical deposits on ch'Havran, both to explain why it was the less desirable of the two planets and to explain why the Havrannsu look similar but not identical to their Rihannsu cousins?
On a Star Trek related note, it is surprising how with the warp core running on matter-antimatter reactions, there is a lot of discussion about Dilithium which contains the matter-antimatter reaction and little about how antimatter is obtained. For TOS, TNG, and DS9, it could be simply explained through Antimatter Containment Storage and stocking up at the nearest starbase, but for Voyager it is a huge problem since not every civilization they encountered is capable of producing antimatter or willing to trade with them. A starship can't create its own antimatter for energy production since it is required to power the ship.
The official explanation, as I recall, is that the nacelles are used both to shape the warp field, and as particle colliders to produce the antimatter needed by the main reactor. (In a pinch, the systems can be run using the onboard fusion reactors, but apparently that limits the warp drive to around warp 2; greater velocities seem to need energies that the fusion reactors, even operating in concert, can't produce.)
There have been some references in various fictions to getting antimatter resupply at starbases, but if this were required, the Voyager would have had no hopes of ever making it home, 70 years at full warp or no. Their supplies would have run out long before that.
The official explanation, as I recall, is that the nacelles are used both to shape the warp field, and as particle colliders to produce the antimatter needed by the main reactor. (In a pinch, the systems can be run using the onboard fusion reactors, but apparently that limits the warp drive to around warp 2; greater velocities seem to need energies that the fusion reactors, even operating in concert, can't produce.)
There have been some references in various fictions to getting antimatter resupply at starbases, but if this were required, the Voyager would have had no hopes of ever making it home, 70 years at full warp or no. Their supplies would have run out long before that.
I'm not so sure that Voyager would have trouble finding civilizations that would be willing to barter antimatter. Warp Drives are pretty much the cornerstone of interstellar civilization, so it stands to reason that a good portion of the civilizations Voyager met would have some form of antimatter production. The only question after that is what Voyager has to barter with. Janeway was unwilling to part with most Federation technologies so that leaves mostly the various types of art or basic scientific data like star charts. If worse came to worse Voyager could take a little time and go out asteroid mining or chartering themselves as a part time freighter.
The official explanation, as I recall, is that the nacelles are used both to shape the warp field, and as particle colliders to produce the antimatter needed by the main reactor. (In a pinch, the systems can be run using the onboard fusion reactors, but apparently that limits the warp drive to around warp 2; greater velocities seem to need energies that the fusion reactors, even operating in concert, can't produce.)
There have been some references in various fictions to getting antimatter resupply at starbases, but if this were required, the Voyager would have had no hopes of ever making it home, 70 years at full warp or no. Their supplies would have run out long before that.
I'm not so sure that Voyager would have trouble finding civilizations that would be willing to barter antimatter. Warp Drives are pretty much the cornerstone of interstellar civilization, so it stands to reason that a good portion of the civilizations Voyager met would have some form of antimatter production. The only question after that is what Voyager has to barter with. Janeway was unwilling to part with most Federation technologies so that leaves mostly the various types of art or basic scientific data like star charts. If worse came to worse Voyager could take a little time and go out asteroid mining or chartering themselves as a part time freighter.
However, when they made the initial estimate of a minimum 70-year trip time, they had no idea whether they'd even find anyone along the way who so much as knew what antimatter was, much less whether they'd be able to sell it in job lots. (The sum total of antimatter produced to date in all of Earth's laboratories is on the order of 20 nanograms.)
If they set off with some confidence that they'd be able to do more than merely strand themselves in interstellar space, they must have had a way to produce more antimatter. And as we've been assured a number of times that (for unexplained reasons) the replicator can't replicate antimatter, they must have had some other way to produce it. There simply isn't enough antimatter in our part of the universe to scoop up appreciable amounts with the Bussard fields (were there that much free antihydrogen, the resultant explosion would have been rather noticeable, even from our side of the galaxy).
The TNG Technical Manual suggests that anti-matter can be created artificially. It is rather energy-efficient compared to anything we can do today, but you still lose energy. The reason you do it anyway is because warp drives need a ton of energy at once, and fusion reactors can't give you enough (for noteworthy warp speeds).
So basically you would need to spend 24 days creating antimatter for an hour of warp travel. (Or whatever, numbers are made up, of course).
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Well, you lose energy no matter what you do - even the science of the Federation hasn't overthrown the laws of thermodynamics. Here in the 21st century, we produce antimatter by firing a stream of particles into an appropriate mass - for instance, positrons can be made by firing a laser into a block of gold. (The hard part, especially when antihydrogen is made, is containing it - hydrogen has a neutral charge, so a magnetic field won't contain it.) There are more efficient methods being discussed currently; most of them are still at the level of theory rather than practice, though.
Presumably a Starfleet ship carries one of those more-efficient methods around with it, probably powered by one or more fusion reactors (I seem to recall a mention of Voyager having at least two of these).
Unless the Federation has some magic device that can turn matter into antimatter, creating antimatter is an extremely energy intensive process. So the Federation likely has antimatter generation facilities which allow starships to fuel up whenever they dock at a space station. The Federation could just use solar energy for creating massive amounts of antimatter provided they have enough satellites.
A fusion reactor could create antimatter, but only in emergency situations or if they need a special type of antimatter that is not used in the warp drive. If the fusion reactor is creating all the necessary antimatter for the warp drive, then it is more efficient to use the fusion reactor instead of matter-antimatter reactions.
There is no "special type" of antimatter - it's simply matter with the electromagnetic charges reversed. The antiparticle of an electron is a positron, the antiparticle of a proton is an antiproton, and so forth. The magic happens when antimatter contacts normal matter - that's when E=mc^2 becomes more than an abstraction, as this tells you how much energy is released by the mutual annihilation of the matter and antimatter. That's why the power output of the warp reactor, using a matter/antimatter reaction, is so much greater than the power available through a mere fusion reaction, which releases only a fraction of that potential energy.
With our technology, we create antimatter by hitting masses of dense matter with particulate energy; for instance, a high-powered laser hitting a block of gold can release antiprotons, which your amazing future technology aboard your starship can presumably capture and store. Antimatter is also created in nature, via radioactive decay - the potassium in a banana regularly emits tiny numbers of positron through that very process. It doesn't cause us great distress because a single positron has a mass so tiny it can only be expressed in electron-volts, so the energy release when one hits an electron can be ignored.
I'm assuming that sometime between now and the development of warp drive, we develop some more compact method of antimatter production than a modern cyclotron...
There is no "special type" of antimatter - it's simply matter with the electromagnetic charges reversed. The antiparticle of an electron is a positron, the antiparticle of a proton is an antiproton, and so forth. The magic happens when antimatter contacts normal matter - that's when E=mc^2 becomes more than an abstraction, as this tells you how much energy is released by the mutual annihilation of the matter and antimatter. That's why the power output of the warp reactor, using a matter/antimatter reaction, is so much greater than the power available through a mere fusion reaction, which releases only a fraction of that potential energy.
With our technology, we create antimatter by hitting masses of dense matter with particulate energy; for instance, a high-powered laser hitting a block of gold can release antiprotons, which your amazing future technology aboard your starship can presumably capture and store. Antimatter is also created in nature, via radioactive decay - the potassium in a banana regularly emits tiny numbers of positron through that very process. It doesn't cause us great distress because a single positron has a mass so tiny it can only be expressed in electron-volts, so the energy release when one hits an electron can be ignored.
I'm assuming that sometime between now and the development of warp drive, we develop some more compact method of antimatter production than a modern cyclotron...
By special type of antimatter, I meant antimatter that is not commonly used like in the warp drive. So if the warp drive uses antiprotons for its matter-antimatter reaction, then they could create antideuterium (1 antiproton, 1 antineutron, and 1 positron) for whatever reason. It is a special type of antimatter for their purposes since it is rarely created. Anti-water or Anti-heavy water should be possible, but extremely wasteful and pointless. Would be interesting if Anti-water has the same melting and boiling points as water and heavy water, but more interesting if they don't.
Even if we can build a compact method of antimatter production before the development of some FTL system, then it will still require a ton of energy to operate. By the time we develop a FTL system, we might find something much better than antimatter. Antimatter would still have uses in that situation, but not for energy production. Matter-energy conversion would be better than antimatter for energy production since we could get rid of any garbage or hazardous waste. Casimir plates are another possibility since we would be harnessing vacuum energy.
Comments
Given the apparent ease with which Klingons use genetic enhancement (even accepting a treatment devised by an alien species!), and the fact that the Klingons we see here are separatist fanatics who believe offers of peace are an existential threat, it doesn't seem terribly improbable to me that during a period of internecine warfare such as that described by T'kuvma in his initial monologue, the Houses might have developed along completely separate lines, possibly intentionally. (TNG implied that different Houses might have their own fleets, and STO expands on this with a raid on the world owned by the House of Torg.) This could well result in dramatically different physical appearances; by the time of TOS, the front presented to the Federation appears to be the classic "Puerto Ricans in gold lame" look, although in TMP nobody seemed particularly surprised by the lobster-headed guys in the security footage, so perhaps the variances were known by the Federation even then.
Crazy that we never had that before.
Vulcans of that era are pretty secretive about a lot of their culture, from katras to pon farr. 24th century characters only seem to know about it because Kirk got tangled up in it by Spock. I'd wager Admiral Morrow simply thought the whole katra thing was just a religious ritual, not that there was actual space magic involved. (Come on, let's face it, that entire plot was fantasy with spaceships. And people say Star Trek is harder sci-fi than Star Wars...)
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
And how much it will affect STO. Besides the Discovery uniform, I suspect we will see at least one or two Discovery Lockboxes. Time will tell if we get any missions based on Discovery. We already have one mission based off of JJTrek.
it's possible cryptic may need to go back and adjust some of the history dialogue for one or two of the missions since Discovery is now apart of that history.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Discovery is my ex-girlfriend.
I guess we could just handwave the warp-drive thing, same way we handwaved the Earth-Romulus War being fought by sublight ships with nuclear weapons...
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Dilithium is known to exist in a gaseous phase since it is 2 Lithium atoms bonded together. So if you melt Lithium up to 1330 Celsium, then 1% of the Lithium is Dilithium and there is even some Trilithium and going all the way up to 6 Lithium atoms bonded together. Dilithium crystals, on the other hand, doesn't currently exist.
On a Star Trek related note, it is surprising how with the warp core running on matter-antimatter reactions, there is a lot of discussion about Dilithium which contains the matter-antimatter reaction and little about how antimatter is obtained. For TOS, TNG, and DS9, it could be simply explained through Antimatter Containment Storage and stocking up at the nearest starbase, but for Voyager it is a huge problem since not every civilization they encountered is capable of producing antimatter or willing to trade with them. A starship can't create its own antimatter for energy production since it is required to power the ship.
The official explanation, as I recall, is that the nacelles are used both to shape the warp field, and as particle colliders to produce the antimatter needed by the main reactor. (In a pinch, the systems can be run using the onboard fusion reactors, but apparently that limits the warp drive to around warp 2; greater velocities seem to need energies that the fusion reactors, even operating in concert, can't produce.)
There have been some references in various fictions to getting antimatter resupply at starbases, but if this were required, the Voyager would have had no hopes of ever making it home, 70 years at full warp or no. Their supplies would have run out long before that.
I'm not so sure that Voyager would have trouble finding civilizations that would be willing to barter antimatter. Warp Drives are pretty much the cornerstone of interstellar civilization, so it stands to reason that a good portion of the civilizations Voyager met would have some form of antimatter production. The only question after that is what Voyager has to barter with. Janeway was unwilling to part with most Federation technologies so that leaves mostly the various types of art or basic scientific data like star charts. If worse came to worse Voyager could take a little time and go out asteroid mining or chartering themselves as a part time freighter.
If they set off with some confidence that they'd be able to do more than merely strand themselves in interstellar space, they must have had a way to produce more antimatter. And as we've been assured a number of times that (for unexplained reasons) the replicator can't replicate antimatter, they must have had some other way to produce it. There simply isn't enough antimatter in our part of the universe to scoop up appreciable amounts with the Bussard fields (were there that much free antihydrogen, the resultant explosion would have been rather noticeable, even from our side of the galaxy).
So basically you would need to spend 24 days creating antimatter for an hour of warp travel. (Or whatever, numbers are made up, of course).
Presumably a Starfleet ship carries one of those more-efficient methods around with it, probably powered by one or more fusion reactors (I seem to recall a mention of Voyager having at least two of these).
A fusion reactor could create antimatter, but only in emergency situations or if they need a special type of antimatter that is not used in the warp drive. If the fusion reactor is creating all the necessary antimatter for the warp drive, then it is more efficient to use the fusion reactor instead of matter-antimatter reactions.
With our technology, we create antimatter by hitting masses of dense matter with particulate energy; for instance, a high-powered laser hitting a block of gold can release antiprotons, which your amazing future technology aboard your starship can presumably capture and store. Antimatter is also created in nature, via radioactive decay - the potassium in a banana regularly emits tiny numbers of positron through that very process. It doesn't cause us great distress because a single positron has a mass so tiny it can only be expressed in electron-volts, so the energy release when one hits an electron can be ignored.
I'm assuming that sometime between now and the development of warp drive, we develop some more compact method of antimatter production than a modern cyclotron...
By special type of antimatter, I meant antimatter that is not commonly used like in the warp drive. So if the warp drive uses antiprotons for its matter-antimatter reaction, then they could create antideuterium (1 antiproton, 1 antineutron, and 1 positron) for whatever reason. It is a special type of antimatter for their purposes since it is rarely created. Anti-water or Anti-heavy water should be possible, but extremely wasteful and pointless. Would be interesting if Anti-water has the same melting and boiling points as water and heavy water, but more interesting if they don't.
Even if we can build a compact method of antimatter production before the development of some FTL system, then it will still require a ton of energy to operate. By the time we develop a FTL system, we might find something much better than antimatter. Antimatter would still have uses in that situation, but not for energy production. Matter-energy conversion would be better than antimatter for energy production since we could get rid of any garbage or hazardous waste. Casimir plates are another possibility since we would be harnessing vacuum energy.