How time travel has "traditionally worked" in Star Trek has been based on the needs of the story, rather than anything coherent. The ripple effects in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" affected only things that were in Da Future; in "City On the Edge of Forever", they affected everything except Our Heroes standing near the Guardian; in "Assignment: Earth" we were introduced to what may have been a predestination paradox; in STIV nobody ever asked what changes Our Heroes wrought in Earth's history by kidnapping Gillian (not to mention the whales, although since they were supposed to be extinct by the mid-21st Century, I suppose that didn't have that much of an impact, unless those missing whales were what tipped the balance in the first place).
The less said about VOY, the better - they couldn't even keep the effects of warp drive straight, much less any more exotic technologies.
So in that instance, the Delta Recruit stories fit perfectly into the Trek tradition. They were barely coherent, and made no sense at all in any overarching narrative. And nothing you discovered had anything to do with the way the Iconians were eventually defeated, so it wasn't even really part of the total continuity.
Also Sisko himself disproves the idea that Gabriel Bell "always" looked like Sisko: he recognized the actual Bell from historical images of his original timeline, and mentioned that Starfleet (and presumably DTI) weren't going to be happy about the change.
"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"
Also Sisko himself disproves the idea that Gabriel Bell "always" looked like Sisko: he recognized the actual Bell from historical images of his original timeline, and mentioned that Starfleet (and presumably DTI) weren't going to be happy about the change.
But the whole point of Sisko being able to take Bell's place was that Sisko looked like Bell to begin with, so much so that he could do so without anyone noticing. Not to mention, Sisko is from 2371, while bell died in 2024, he was looking at an over 300 year old picture that had survived World War 3, so yeah, I doubt it was really clear.
Hell, the actor who played Bell was literally Brook's stunt double, photo double, and stand in, on DS9, which is part of the whole reason the whole thing worked in-episode. He wouldn't be able to tell either way.
You are going through some serious mental gymnastics to keep your "all of Star Trek is a predestined time loop" theory intact.
This is Bell, whose face Sisko knew well enough from his Earth history hobby to recognize during an interaction that lasted all of a few seconds:
This is Sisko impersonating Bell towards the end of part one.
They have significantly different hairstyles, noses, ears, cheeks, hell, they aren't even wearing the same clothes. Sure, Avery Brooks and John Bennett look similar enough you couldn't tell them apart for a blurry split-second action shot on NTSC TV film, but when the camera is actually focused on them? Not so much.
The whole point of the episode was that the Defiant crew traveling back in time and interfering in the past event dramatically altered their own present: as a result of there being no Bell Riots in the way they happened historically, Earth is reduced back to barbarism by World War III instead of being damaged but recoverable, the Federation doesn't form, and the Alpha Centauri system is a Romulan colony, and we know this because the Defiant is for whatever handwavium reason unaffected by it and can see the effects. Making sure that the riots go down in as close to their OTL fashion as possible reverts the timeline to its original form. The End. It's exactly what happened with Edith Keeler in "The City on the Edge of Forever".
This is statistically the most common way time travel and timeline changes have worked in canon; STO's obsession with stable time loops is the outlier of the data set rather than the average.
"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"
> @somtaawkhar said: > Except all those other examples I listed earlier which didn't work that way.
"Statistically". "Most". "Common". ¿Comprende usted ingles? Oder würdest du es vorziehen, dass ich es auf Deutsch sage?
> Also, you are assuming that the image Sisko saw of Bell was of Bell in that exact moment he replaced him, and not a picture of him from before that.
No, I'm observing that Sisko recognized Bell from historical photos he'd seen in the past, regardless of when said photos were taken, and assuming that at that time he would have thought something was weird if Bell v1.0 looked like his clone, as indeed he did at the end of part two when he saw a picture of Bell v2.0, i.e. himself, in the new version of history he'd created.
"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"
Going back to the Hur'Q, i think there is an iconian connection.
In one of the old blogs surrounding the Iconian war a new apex predator was mentioned.
The whole Fek'Ihri Invasion, which was supposed to be based upon the Hur'Q was supposed to be an Iconian plot to destabilize the Klingon empire.
Hence it makes sense that the iconians could have planted the Hur'Q seeds, but that the Iconian war simply came too soon for them to be included.
In the Butterfly mission, Nog mentions that simply removing the Iconians from history would be bad for a number of reasons, one of these being that doing so would mean the Hur'q wouldn't get warp drive, and thus, never attack the Klingons, and thus, the Klingons would never become the warrior race the are now. This sets off a large chain of events where the Vulcan Empire has conquered most of the Alpha and Beta quadrants, and is in a life or death struggle with The Dominion.
While its never explicitly stated if the Iconians gave warp drive to the Hur'q directly, or if the Hur'q simply learned how to make warp drives from studying Iconian relics on their homeworld, or some nearby world, there is an established connection between them already in-game.
Good catch my dude. I totally forgot that bit.
Another is the aesthetic connection between Fek'lhri and Herald tech. Fek stuff is not as good, but it has a lot of odd similarities.
I Would like something a bit different in terms of gameplay/story. I always thought that it would be fun to play through like the ENT Expanse season in your own instanced little map (scaled down a bit) with the addition of mini games for repairing your ship, re supplying, sending people on missions etc. It would have a lot of combat as ENT did but the key thing would be for it to have multiple ways to do it (You could blast you way through, science it, explore it, stealth it or any number of combinations of it). It would take some work for some of the tech but a lot of it is there already.
The actual story could be anything (I like the idea of exploring the area the borg came from, because it would have possibly tough fights and the risk of crew or the ship being heavily damaged or assimilated)
It would be like your own season of star trek because you would solve it your way .
I Would like something a bit different in terms of gameplay/story. I always thought that it would be fun to play through like the ENT Expanse season in your own instanced little map (scaled down a bit) with the addition of mini games for repairing your ship, re supplying, sending people on missions etc. It would have a lot of combat as ENT did but the key thing would be for it to have multiple ways to do it (You could blast you way through, science it, explore it, stealth it or any number of combinations of it). It would take some work for some of the tech but a lot of it is there already.
The actual story could be anything (I like the idea of exploring the area the borg came from, because it would have possibly tough fights and the risk of crew or the ship being heavily damaged or assimilated)
It would be like your own season of star trek because you would solve it your way .
That sounds like it'd be a ridiculous amount of work to write. Which is the core problem with multiple story paths, you have to spend several times as much effort writing as you would for a single path.
I Would like something a bit different in terms of gameplay/story. I always thought that it would be fun to play through like the ENT Expanse season in your own instanced little map (scaled down a bit) with the addition of mini games for repairing your ship, re supplying, sending people on missions etc. It would have a lot of combat as ENT did but the key thing would be for it to have multiple ways to do it (You could blast you way through, science it, explore it, stealth it or any number of combinations of it). It would take some work for some of the tech but a lot of it is there already.
The actual story could be anything (I like the idea of exploring the area the borg came from, because it would have possibly tough fights and the risk of crew or the ship being heavily damaged or assimilated)
It would be like your own season of star trek because you would solve it your way .
That sounds like it'd be a ridiculous amount of work to write. Which is the core problem with multiple story paths, you have to spend several times as much effort writing as you would for a single path.
I agree that is the main problem with it, you might be able to do it on a smaller scale but not to the scale of a season.
1. "You are".
2. No, there were several mission variants, several of which involved space combat. And you either know that and play dumb... or you are not playing.
Warping in to kill 5 things is no different them beaming down to kill five things.
The fact you are this desperate, and hanging on semantics, is really sad.
Well, there was also the "warp in and scan five things" version.
All joking aside, yeah, the "exploration" content was lousy (not to mention, sanity-checked even worse than some of the storyline missions *cough* Borg Third Dynasty *cough cough*). And in any case, exploration was never anything more than a story hook for episodes, i.e. the thing they were doing to get them to the actual plot, in the TV series.
"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"
Hey, now, let's have some respect! My toaster's great-great-grandfather died to defend the galaxy in the Third Borg Dynasty Wars!
Seriously, though, those were indeed the Exploration Cluster missions - warp in and scan/kill five things, or beam down and scan/kill five things. And half the time on those planetside missions, in my experience, the opposition appeared below the surface of the planet - so they could shoot at us just fine, but we couldn't shoot back at them because the ground stopped our weapons.
1. "You are".
2. No, there were several mission variants, several of which involved space combat. And you either know that and play dumb... or you are not playing.
Warping in to kill 5 things is no different them beaming down to kill five things.
The fact you are this desperate, and hanging on semantics, is really sad.
Well, there was also the "warp in and scan five things" version.
All joking aside, yeah, the "exploration" content was lousy (not to mention, sanity-checked even worse than some of the storyline missions *cough* Borg Third Dynasty *cough cough*). And in any case, exploration was never anything more than a story hook for episodes, i.e. the thing they were doing to get them to the actual plot, in the TV series.
I think the fact they were lousy was the reason they got removed. It sucks that at the same time that it got removed, diplomacy for delivering goods to a civilization and First Contact missions were removed as well (even though the latter was broken).
Foundry authors to an extent can replicate these missions, but in the long run, there's only so much that they can really provide with the given stuff.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,596Community Moderator
I think another stated reason for removing the clusters was players got lost in them and had a hard time leaving.
Some things in the exploration clusters were silly indeed (ok, most were besides being a bit primitive). But it was random content, unpredictable to some extent and it would be nice if we had more of that.
I remember how it was a welcome change to the same episodes or the same predictable STFs in which nothing was ever different from the previous run.
We have some STFs with a bit more variety within them (like Undine Assault) nowadays and the devs have done a great job at creating missions that require the players to do more different stuff. But the randomisation in missions like Undine Assault is still very limited and the different tasks in other STFs like Counterpoint or Gravity Kills are, in the end, always the same tasks.
I think another stated reason for removing the clusters was players got lost in them and had a hard time leaving.
I admit once or twice that happened to me.
Yeah, I never understood that one: as I recall all you had to do to get out was click the "warp out" minimap button.
"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"
I think another stated reason for removing the clusters was players got lost in them and had a hard time leaving.
I admit once or twice that happened to me.
Yeah, I never understood that one: as I recall all you had to do to get out was click the "warp out" minimap button.
well, as you're playing through the story an NPC directs you to go there... but doesn't explain that there is no story connection whatsoever. When I first played around in Delta Volanis I hadn't figured that out yet.
Comments
The less said about VOY, the better - they couldn't even keep the effects of warp drive straight, much less any more exotic technologies.
So in that instance, the Delta Recruit stories fit perfectly into the Trek tradition. They were barely coherent, and made no sense at all in any overarching narrative. And nothing you discovered had anything to do with the way the Iconians were eventually defeated, so it wasn't even really part of the total continuity.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
This is Bell, whose face Sisko knew well enough from his Earth history hobby to recognize during an interaction that lasted all of a few seconds:
This is Sisko impersonating Bell towards the end of part one.
They have significantly different hairstyles, noses, ears, cheeks, hell, they aren't even wearing the same clothes. Sure, Avery Brooks and John Bennett look similar enough you couldn't tell them apart for a blurry split-second action shot on NTSC TV film, but when the camera is actually focused on them? Not so much.
The whole point of the episode was that the Defiant crew traveling back in time and interfering in the past event dramatically altered their own present: as a result of there being no Bell Riots in the way they happened historically, Earth is reduced back to barbarism by World War III instead of being damaged but recoverable, the Federation doesn't form, and the Alpha Centauri system is a Romulan colony, and we know this because the Defiant is for whatever handwavium reason unaffected by it and can see the effects. Making sure that the riots go down in as close to their OTL fashion as possible reverts the timeline to its original form. The End. It's exactly what happened with Edith Keeler in "The City on the Edge of Forever".
This is statistically the most common way time travel and timeline changes have worked in canon; STO's obsession with stable time loops is the outlier of the data set rather than the average.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
> Except all those other examples I listed earlier which didn't work that way.
"Statistically". "Most". "Common". ¿Comprende usted ingles? Oder würdest du es vorziehen, dass ich es auf Deutsch sage?
> Also, you are assuming that the image Sisko saw of Bell was of Bell in that exact moment he replaced him, and not a picture of him from before that.
No, I'm observing that Sisko recognized Bell from historical photos he'd seen in the past, regardless of when said photos were taken, and assuming that at that time he would have thought something was weird if Bell v1.0 looked like his clone, as indeed he did at the end of part two when he saw a picture of Bell v2.0, i.e. himself, in the new version of history he'd created.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
My character Tsin'xing
The actual story could be anything (I like the idea of exploring the area the borg came from, because it would have possibly tough fights and the risk of crew or the ship being heavily damaged or assimilated)
It would be like your own season of star trek because you would solve it your way .
My character Tsin'xing
I agree that is the main problem with it, you might be able to do it on a smaller scale but not to the scale of a season.
Neat idea, I vote for that.
Well, there was also the "warp in and scan five things" version.
All joking aside, yeah, the "exploration" content was lousy (not to mention, sanity-checked even worse than some of the storyline missions *cough* Borg Third Dynasty *cough cough*). And in any case, exploration was never anything more than a story hook for episodes, i.e. the thing they were doing to get them to the actual plot, in the TV series.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Couldn't resist.
Hail Tacofangs.
Seriously, though, those were indeed the Exploration Cluster missions - warp in and scan/kill five things, or beam down and scan/kill five things. And half the time on those planetside missions, in my experience, the opposition appeared below the surface of the planet - so they could shoot at us just fine, but we couldn't shoot back at them because the ground stopped our weapons.
I was happy to see those gone.
He was playing. The point he's making is that for the most part they weren't that fun to play.
I think the fact they were lousy was the reason they got removed. It sucks that at the same time that it got removed, diplomacy for delivering goods to a civilization and First Contact missions were removed as well (even though the latter was broken).
Foundry authors to an extent can replicate these missions, but in the long run, there's only so much that they can really provide with the given stuff.
I admit once or twice that happened to me.
I remember how it was a welcome change to the same episodes or the same predictable STFs in which nothing was ever different from the previous run.
We have some STFs with a bit more variety within them (like Undine Assault) nowadays and the devs have done a great job at creating missions that require the players to do more different stuff. But the randomisation in missions like Undine Assault is still very limited and the different tasks in other STFs like Counterpoint or Gravity Kills are, in the end, always the same tasks.
Yeah, I never understood that one: as I recall all you had to do to get out was click the "warp out" minimap button.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
if people can miss a whole wall of salad mixs at my job they can miss a little button next to the mini map.
if I stop posting it doesn't make you right it. just means I don't have enough rum to continue interacting with you.
My character Tsin'xing