Firstly: Star Trek has always had weird and crazy Sci-Fi elements to it, like how in the Dominion War, Captain Sisko asked for a miracle from the aliens that live in the Wormhole and they "destroyed" an entire fleet of Dominion ships in a blink of an eye, or the dozens of God like beings that play around with the galaxy like a fidget spinner, or literally any of the Trek technology like the Universal Translator or the Transporter to name just two of the many examples, while Star Trek does include some realism, there's a reason it a Science Fiction show, and that's great, I personally like that Star Trek can come up with imaginative aliens, worlds, phenomenons and scenarios.
And secondly: not only do I like that the Burn was indeed cause by an unforeseeable accident rather than anything malicious, but that it seems to be building up to Captain Saru, Doctor Culber, and Adira Tal preventing the Burn from happening again through helping Su'Kal with facing his demons and bring him back to the real world, connecting with him on an emotional level rather than spouting technobabble at the problem, that's what I personally don't like which was a major issue in Star Trek Voyager, if Star Trek is going to have crazy science, don't spend half an episode trying to justify it with equally made up science sounding words, and then not show us the crazy science in action.
And the reveal of Su'Ka and his plight continues to play into season threes overall theme of reconnecting with people that are separated and bringing them together.
There's a word for crazy science and that is fantasy. I do not see any science whatsoever in this. And yes, Trek has gone well into fantasy before, including where the technobabble is often just trying to legitimize the fantasy, and usually to its detriment.
Science fiction isn't just about making stuff up, its about working out how it works, the systems involving it, the knock on effects of such systems and all of that. It is creating rules and exploring how things can be in a universe where those things are true. When you start ignoring rules and make stuff up to get around other rules, there isn't any more rhyme or reason to that universe.
Still I think some fantasy can work when well written and limited in its effect. Q, for example is clearly fantasy, but done in a way that often demanded the crew to deal with an unexpected situation rather than an impossible one.
And there is the difference between some space wizard doing hand waving and throwing a fireball at a bale of hay to intimidate some yokels and doing some hand waving and throwing a fireball to destroy a solar system. They are the same thing, aside from the magnitude of effect.
Some psychic wave that ruins dilithium all across the galaxy is ludicrous. Where is all that energy coming from, how is it being transmitted, how does it travel at incredible speed? If it were instead limited to near the planet? That's plausible without a deeper explanation.
Some psychic wave that ruins dilithium all across the galaxy is ludicrous. Where is all that energy coming from, how is it being transmitted, how does it travel at incredible speed? If it were instead limited to near the planet? That's plausible without a deeper explanation.
Where does the Traveler get the power to fling the ENT-D to the edge of the universe in a few seconds? How does he actually "focus thought into reality" to negate fundamental basic laws of nature? How does the barrier around the galaxy work? How is it able to alter humans, and seemingly only humans, into psychics on like god levels? How DO the various psychic powers we see in Trek actually work? Spock was able to feel the deaths of an entire crew of Vulcan many LY away almost instantly, in complete violation of the speed of light... how? How is it that people like Riker, or Wesley, were able to manipulate the god powers of people like Q, or the Traveler, without any fundamental changing on their human bodies? Star Trek, since S1E1 of TOS has worked on the phrase "it just works".
As for how the Burn wave moved so fast. Its mentioned Su'kal was mutated by subspace radiation, and we have seen things move as super fast speeds in subspace. That was the explanation for the Praxis explosion, and the Hobus supernova, moving as fast as they did.
The Traveler was able to manipulate the warp fields mentally somehow, the ship is what provided the power to create those fields just like it does on normal warp. In the TOS episode Is There in Truth No Beauty? an insane engineer threw the ship into a sort of hyperspace by changing the balance of the fields in a radical way, perhaps something like that happened with the Traveler's manipulations. Of course, the last time the Traveler showed up he implied that he could slip directly between worlds mentally or something along those lines so anything is possible I suppose.
Also, according to the official warp writeup, at warp ten (ignoring the lizard nonsense from Voyager) distance and speed have no meaning anymore and one would in theory just disappear from one place and instantly appear in another anywhere in the universe at the cost of relatively little energy but few if any have managed to produce that perfect warp field.
There are a lot of super-psi beings, Roddenberry had a thing for the idea that biological races, if they survive long enough eventually evolve into energy beings (sort of like Babylon5 in that respect) and they gain more power as they evolve. The Ocampans are a kind of transitional type, they have a solid humanoid larval form that does not last very long and when time is up for that form they either die, or ascend like Kes did if they develop that last necessary bit in time to transition to their energy form.
As for telepathy, traditionally it does not propagate at any speed, it acts more like quantum entanglement in that it happens on both "ends" simultaneously no matter what the distance is. The is how Uxbridge the Douwd killed every single Husnock in the galaxy at once with telepathic attacks for instance, no inverse square law to worry about, just process through a detect and kill list of (probably) billions in the blink of an eye.
The only way the Burn would make any sense at all is if dilithium kid individually targeted every crystal with some other psionic attack (sort of like pyrokinesis but molecular rather than heat similar to what Uxbridge did, and that is highly unlikely to say the very least.
Not only is the focused "kill them all" motivation not there like it was with Oxbridge, but also every other usage of physical-effecting psionics (besides the Q and Organian powers) is shown to be bound by physical laws like propagation speed (and in some cases, like Vorta telekinesis, it is quite slow. The Organians "cheated" that speed limit by being able to be in multiple locations at once and launching their attacks from those locations (the Organian leader was standing on Organia and both capital worlds, and was in energy form on the bridge of every ship in the battle that was just starting simultaneously for instance, a trick I don't think the kid could do).
Another problem with the Burn being a subspace phenomenon instead of a psionic one is that subspace propagation is not instantaneous, it is just not limited by the speed of light and the speed seems to have something to do with the power of the signal and/or the distance travelled (which is why it is so much faster to send communications when in range of the relay network than it is to send a tightbeam directly to the other party). If it propagated spherically then Starfleet would have been able to locate the center by looking at records of when the wave shell hit various locations. And it was travel that was crippled, not communication.
Some psychic wave that ruins dilithium all across the galaxy is ludicrous. Where is all that energy coming from, how is it being transmitted, how does it travel at incredible speed? If it were instead limited to near the planet? That's plausible without a deeper explanation.
Where does the Traveler get the power to fling the ENT-D to the edge of the universe in a few seconds? How does he actually "focus thought into reality" to negate fundamental basic laws of nature? How does the barrier around the galaxy work? How is it able to alter humans, and seemingly only humans, into psychics on like god levels? How DO the various psychic powers we see in Trek actually work? Spock was able to feel the deaths of an entire crew of Vulcan many LY away almost instantly, in complete violation of the speed of light... how? How is it that people like Riker, or Wesley, were able to manipulate the god powers of people like Q, or the Traveler, without any fundamental changing on their human bodies? Star Trek, since S1E1 of TOS has worked on the phrase "it just works".
We aren't talking about those things, many of which are as silly as the Burn, but we are talking about the magic of the Burn.
As for how the Burn wave moved so fast. Its mentioned Su'kal was mutated by subspace radiation, and we have seen things move as super fast speeds in subspace. That was the explanation for the Praxis explosion, and the Hobus supernova, moving as fast as they did.
So you think a child crying has the same level of energy as a star going supernova, or even comes close to a moon that is a major energy production center for an empire?
I really hope Tilly gets some redemption as they made several references to how easily Discovery was hijacked, with Osyraa outright mocking how easy it was. Sadly, I feel that even if she does get some redemption it'll be watered-down by Zora/the DOTs. Still, I'd have to say that the assessment of Tilly's performance has been a little unfair so far. I saw a comment elsewhere, following last week's episode: "Tilly, meanwhile, is a case study for excellent leadership: expecting a brand-new first officer to outsmart the galaxy’s Chartreuse Corlione in their first few minutes at the conn, ever? That’s a confirmation bias trap, that is. (Girls are bad at video games. Look, she’s been playing this game for a week and I just handed her a controller and put her against the top pro gamer in the world and she lost! Girls are bad at video games!)
She'll probably redeem herself somehow while the crew retake the ship, but the notion that her failure had anything to do with her gender is ludicrous. If the ease of Osyraa's takeover IS Tilly's fault it's because Saru made the monumental mistake of selecting an inexperienced Ensign to be his First Officer.
I really hope Tilly gets some redemption as they made several references to how easily Discovery was hijacked, with Osyraa outright mocking how easy it was. Sadly, I feel that even if she does get some redemption it'll be watered-down by Zora/the DOTs. Still, I'd have to say that the assessment of Tilly's performance has been a little unfair so far. I saw a comment elsewhere, following last week's episode: "Tilly, meanwhile, is a case study for excellent leadership: expecting a brand-new first officer to outsmart the galaxy’s Chartreuse Corlione in their first few minutes at the conn, ever? That’s a confirmation bias trap, that is. (Girls are bad at video games. Look, she’s been playing this game for a week and I just handed her a controller and put her against the top pro gamer in the world and she lost! Girls are bad at video games!)
She'll probably redeem herself somehow while the crew retake the ship, but the notion that her failure had anything to do with her gender is ludicrous. If the ease of Osyraa's takeover IS Tilly's fault it's because Saru made the monumental mistake of selecting an inexperienced Ensign to be his First Officer.
I think the point was missed there - the quote had nothing to do with gender; its simply pointing out the bias trap.
The "bias trap" has EVERYTHING to do with gender, and it does not apply at all in this situation because any failure on her part is simply due to inexperience and is the direct result of Saru making the unimaginably poor decision to put an unqualified ensign in the first officer position. People need to ease off on some of this TRIBBLE and stop reading too much into things, yes there are tropes and such that should be avoided if possible but sometimes the story simply goes where it naturally goes regardless of the character's gender or ethnicity. And as much as Tilly's leadership SHOULD be an utter failure because of how inexperienced she is, she'll probably end up being the hero of the finale somehow.
I've enjoyed season 3 overall, but Tilly as First Officer was one of the WORST writing decisions of the entire series. Either Nilsson should have gotten the job (along with a promotion to Lt Commander), or it should have been a new character from 32nd century Starfleet who is more familiar with the tech and politics of the time period. While I was happy to see him get the promotion, Saru really deserves to be relieved of command over this.
I fell off this particular roundabout when they had Burnham go off-track again saving Book. I was kinda happy they had Saru land some consequences on her, but was honestly pretty ticked when it looked like they were going to writers' fiat those consequences away.
I'll give the MU episodes a shot, as idiotic as I've found the 'biological differences' thing from the start, but...
This season started off so well, but so much of it from about halfway through feels... contrived and unearned. It's like the writers got halfway through the story and then realised they had no idea how to tie it off. Or someone at CBS saw the show was starting to find itself and went, "what?! Potential?! Nope, we can't be having that!"
I lost interest so hard I decided to spoil the ending for myself and... are you kidding me?! That's what we're going with?! Did you look at the Red Angel and Spock's Brain and think 'clearly, we need to go more absurd'?
I really hope Tilly gets some redemption as they made several references to how easily Discovery was hijacked, with Osyraa outright mocking how easy it was. Sadly, I feel that even if she does get some redemption it'll be watered-down by Zora/the DOTs. Still, I'd have to say that the assessment of Tilly's performance has been a little unfair so far. I saw a comment elsewhere, following last week's episode: "Tilly, meanwhile, is a case study for excellent leadership: expecting a brand-new first officer to outsmart the galaxy’s Chartreuse Corlione in their first few minutes at the conn, ever? That’s a confirmation bias trap, that is. (Girls are bad at video games. Look, she’s been playing this game for a week and I just handed her a controller and put her against the top pro gamer in the world and she lost! Girls are bad at video games!)
She'll probably redeem herself somehow while the crew retake the ship, but the notion that her failure had anything to do with her gender is ludicrous. If the ease of Osyraa's takeover IS Tilly's fault it's because Saru made the monumental mistake of selecting an inexperienced Ensign to be his First Officer.
No one can really tell why Osyraa had such an easy time overwhelming the Discovery crew. Can anyone point to a decision made by Tilly that would clearly be at fault?
I think the takeaway is really what Picard already told Data once: Sometimes you can do everything right and still fail. Sometimes the enemy is just too many steps ahead of you.
How we respond to failure can tell more about a leader than his failures alone could, that is bascially why the Academy has scenarios like the Kobayashi Maru scenario where "failure" is guaranteed.
Tilly didn't give in, or give up, after she failed. She and her bridge crew worked out a way to get out of their confinement and do something about it. She has also unexpected help (Micheal, Zora) now, but just as sometimes you can fail despite doing everything right, sometimes things go more right than you could have expected.
Enjoyed the dialogue between Admiral Vance and Osyraa - her goal was clearly to have the Chain to become part of the Federation's system, allowing her to subvert it from within. It was good to see it backfire on her the moment Vance suggested she'd have to give up her power and stand trial, forcing her to storm out of her own negotiation.
I am not really sure that osyraa really wants to subvert the Federation - I think on a fundamental level she still doesn't quite "get" the Federation. She knows it's something people love, she knows the Federation has a lot to offer to the Chain... But she doesn't get it. She truly believes it could work, but Vance realizes that the Federation would lose the one asset that it had maintained over all those centuries of negotiating in good faith and trying to act on solid moral grounds (not without its own challenges, but always with some Starfleet officers or Federation citizens moving ahead and stopping Badmirals and misguided Special Operatives before they ruin everything) - It's reputation, it's idealism. Without it, the Federation is just another galactic nation, no better than the Dominion (at least the one in the 24th century) or the Chain. With it, it's why people maintain hope in it even decades after its had achieved its Zenith and fell from greatness.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Another problem with the Burn being a subspace phenomenon instead of a psionic one is that subspace propagation is not instantaneous, it is just not limited by the speed of light and the speed seems to have something to do with the power of the signal and/or the distance travelled (which is why it is so much faster to send communications when in range of the relay network than it is to send a tightbeam directly to the other party). If it propagated spherically then Starfleet would have been able to locate the center by looking at records of when the wave shell hit various locations.
This right here just tells me you literally haven't watched the show, and are arguing in bad faith just for the sake of it.
It was an entire plot point for multiple episodes that the Burn wasn't instantaneous. There was an observable time delay of like one millionth of a millisecond that could be observed when looking at the blackboxes of several ships Burnham was able to find.
However, even with 3 blackboxes, she couldn't pin down the Burn's location in 3D space into a reasonable area. This is why she went to Ni'Var to get the SB-19 data, since the project involved hundreds of subspace sensors she could use the data from to narrow it down further.
And it was travel that was crippled, not communication.
Except this is wrong again. Its been mentioned, many times, that long range communications have been down for decades, if not longer, since they can't get people out to repair the subspace relays since the Burn.
The rest of your post is just the same blatant headcanon nonsense you typically post, and is worthless in actual discussion.
Like, I'm actually flummoxed, do you just not make any effort on purpose? Like, what sort of mindset do you have that you think the way you act is acceptable?
I made so secret of the fact that due to COVID lockdown I have not been where I can actually watch season three (I don't have a subscription to CBSAA and frankly from what I have seen of it so far there is nothing that would justify the expense) so I have been having to rely on reviews on the web.
And those reviews are tapering off quite a bit, the show does not generate the same buzz it did the first and second season (which is not a good sign, CBS seems to have succeeded in downgrading Star Trek to simple generic status with nothing to set it apart from Dark Matter, Killjoys, and the other short-run sci-fi series of the last few years). Without anything to set it apart (not even nostalgia for the most part) the kind of interest that spurs reviews and deeper analysis is not high anymore for the series, and those that are left are gradually getting less detailed (and tend to run more towards shallow rants instead of the wider spectrum there used to be).
So no, I was not "making up stuff" I just did not have a key piece of information (not that that piece makes any more sense than any of the other magic wand plot points have in this fairytale masquerading as sci-fi season). Really, if the Burn was a subspace event how could they possibly not know down the centimeter where it originated when it is established that the Federation (and presumably everyone else) keeps a close watch on subspace (like the Epsilon stations in TMP or Vulcan installation that was on P'Jem).
On top of that, if it was knocking out the relay network they would have thousands (maybe even hundreds of thousands) of datapoints to plot just by looking at the last time signature that got through from each (and if it wasn't then there would be an interference spike of some sort at least), not just three black boxes they could not find without a nine hundred year old ship and crew to point it out to them (seriously, can the future Starfleet personnel even find the toilet on their headquarters station?).
At the very least they could have narrowed it down close enough to go over the area inch by inch with fusion-pulse warp equipped ships like Cochrane built out of old army surplus parts or whatever in an old silo (or more realistically the slightly later YPS version the DY-500 ships had) in the time since the Burn (or for that matter with impulse drives after they reached the general area on whatever warp they had available). Also, every single planet (except for possibly agro colonies and of course low-tech protectorates) would have recorded the wavefront or whatever the idiotic thing was supposed to consist of.
And yes, I might be a bit too harsh since I have not seen any of the nuances that I would have seen watching the show myself, just the raw plots (which are very poor), but assuming that the writing quality is the same as the first two seasons I don't think so since their dialog is often worse than the raw plot in the preceding seasons and I don't see what else they have to work with to mitigate the plot problem except action movie eye candy and I doubt they could top the first two in that respect.
To be fair, maybe the performances can make up a little for it like they did to some degree in the first two seasons, but on a bare plot level the closest third season comes to mainline sci-fi is on a sort of Flash Gordon level, which is not very close.
I really hope Tilly gets some redemption as they made several references to how easily Discovery was hijacked, with Osyraa outright mocking how easy it was. Sadly, I feel that even if she does get some redemption it'll be watered-down by Zora/the DOTs. Still, I'd have to say that the assessment of Tilly's performance has been a little unfair so far. I saw a comment elsewhere, following last week's episode: "Tilly, meanwhile, is a case study for excellent leadership: expecting a brand-new first officer to outsmart the galaxy’s Chartreuse Corlione in their first few minutes at the conn, ever? That’s a confirmation bias trap, that is. (Girls are bad at video games. Look, she’s been playing this game for a week and I just handed her a controller and put her against the top pro gamer in the world and she lost! Girls are bad at video games!)
She'll probably redeem herself somehow while the crew retake the ship, but the notion that her failure had anything to do with her gender is ludicrous. If the ease of Osyraa's takeover IS Tilly's fault it's because Saru made the monumental mistake of selecting an inexperienced Ensign to be his First Officer.
No one can really tell why Osyraa had such an easy time overwhelming the Discovery crew. Can anyone point to a decision made by Tilly that would clearly be at fault?
To the viewer there was no obvious mistake, but Osyraa seemed to suggest that there was and it would also make sense for Vance to question whether the same thing would have happened with a more experienced officer giving orders.
So you think a child crying has the same level of energy as a star going supernova, or even comes close to a moon that is a major energy production center for an empire?
The fact that you rudico ad absurdum the whole premise of the Burn to just "he cried", ignoring everything else about the situation, and the planet hes on, really just goes to show you're not even trying.
You seem to forget hes on a planet made of dilthium, the galaxy wide standard for energy refinement and focusing. You know, the same thing that likely made the Praxis explosion so devastating.
Of course its absurd, nothing I know about the Burn has been shown to be believable or in line with anything in previous Trek. It literally does boil down to a child crying, and because he had some magic connection to dilithium on one planet, dilithium everywhere broke.
Please show me where Praxis was said to involve dilithium exploding.
Star Trek has been really clear about this, dilithium is not an energy source at all, which makes sense considering its used to prevent an out of control explosion in the M/AM reaction. Do you use dynamite to prevent an ammonium nitrate bomb from going off?
The closest it gets to that is being said to have piezoelectric properties, but that requires mechanical work done to convert into electrical energy, such as from tectonic forces, and that isn't going to be enough energy for Praxis and especially not the Burn. At no point, that I am aware, does any previous Trek suggest that dilithium is capable of the kind of power necessary to create the Burn, again because it is not a power source.
As I understand things, the Burn was almost instantaneous across the entire galaxy. That is beyond the speeds capable for any ship in Star Trek, outside of the magic episodes where they get the power to move that fast but never ever use it again, and certainly way beyond any natural phenomena. And because of that kind of speed, it requires an enormous power source, the kind we have not seen in Trek.
The Burn was infinitely more powerful than a supernova based on the speed it propagated, yet also didn't have any effect on anything besides dilithium. Do you grasp that? The Burn must be vastly more powerful than a massive star exploding, but precisely effects only one type of substance. And they want people to further believe it was caused by magnified psychic forces of a child crying because of a 1 in 1000000000000000 genetic mutation.
And just for arguments sake, if dilithium was a power source, why is the planet still there? You don't get something from nothing, not even in Star Trek. If dilithium's energy capabilities are what powered the Burn, then that dilithium should be utterly worthless now, burned out or destroyed based on the amount of energy required to make the Burn work the way it did. That probably would be bad for the planet.
I don't care if you like the Burn or not. By all means if you think its a great explanation, enjoy it. However, you cannot, in good faith, act as if there is no good reason for people to think this is the stupidest thing since cancer. Trying to silence someone's perspective by claiming the argument is disingenuous is despicable.
A. So you, once again, didn't even bother to look it up on the wiki, before you started talking about something, to make sure you got your facts straight?
B. I've seen more reviews on Discovery S3 then S1 or 2. Mainly because its pretty universally agreed S3 is much better, so people have more reason to review it.
C. The Epsilon stations in TMP were border communications monitoring stations, not subspace monitoring stations. The P'jem station was not only destroyed over a hundred years ago, but was a sensor station, not a subspace one. Neither of them would have done anything to track The Burn... but that would require you to know the canon to know that.
D. I don't know how you think communications relays work, but you aren't constantly pumping a signal, and getting one back from them. They work when you send a signal to them, or get one back. They wouldn't have had a datapoint on most, if any, of them, unless they were actively getting a transmission from them at the time.
E. There was no traceable physical wavefront for The Burn like there was for the Praxis explosion. The Burn just happened, seemingly everywhere across the galaxy at once. The time lag was millionths of a millisecond, even over a thousand LY away. Even if you had time stamps to look at, you would have to go so far down that you fall within the range of it not even being seen as anything more then normal variance error.
F. The Federation didn't have the resources to do such an expedition. Its mentioned that, after the Burn, the Federation collapsed from around 350 member worlds down to 38. And Earth, Vulcan, and Andoria, were not part of those 38. They only have a handful of ships left in the fleet, so few that planets like Vulcan, Earth, and Trill hadn't been visited in around 100 years, and there was all of two Starfleet ships in a 600LY range of a relay station operated by Sahil. Sahil himself is merely the son of a Starfleet officer who took over the station after his father died, and has never actually met anyone from the Federation in the 40 years hes been keeping the station even semi operable. Its been talked about across many episodes how, what few ships they do have, are either trying to counter the Emerald Chain, or going on 2+ month long missions to try to deliver supplies to what worlds they can. Admiral Vance himself admits the Federation has no idea how many of the former member worlds, or colonies, still consider themselves to be members of the Federation, and many deep space stations, like Deep Space 253, haven't been visited by Starfleet in over 80 years, because they are just too far away, and usable dilthium is just too rare, to make it feasible. All long range communications relays failed decades ago, if not during the Burn itself, making even contacting most of these places impossible, and no one has the time, or resources, to go around fixing them.
Discovery was only able to get to the nebula because of the spore drive, and the nebula itself is so dangerous that it drops even 32nd century shields in minutes. Discovery only got into a semi-safe spot in the nebula due to spore driving into it. Even if another ship somehow reached the outer edge of the nebula, none of them could go inside to find the actual source of the Burn.
A&B. Wikis usually take at least a few weeks to update to the latest information, and I am not used to using them a lot for debates on forums since very few of the more serious ones accept them as a valid source as people can go and change them to make a point and it often takes a while for that tampering to be fixed.
However, I do use Memory Alpha here sometimes since everyone else seems to, and looking at it today I notice that it now does have mention of the blackboxes as of 23 November 2020. It did not have that mention when I read the entry earlier that month and I was not aware that anything had been added to it (while I get email notices of changes to Terminator pages and a few others I do not get them for Memory Alpha since I am not involved with that one).
I probably should have looked it up anyway, but the comment I was making was long, had a lot of different points, and I have been too busy to spend as much time with it as I would have liked so I missed that particular one. And what I said was accurate up until Scavengers.
As for the reviews, there is indeed a greater proliferation if you count all the copy-paste ones that are the result of CBS-Viacom trying to drum up interest, but I don't. The more in-depth analytic reviews are the ones that are tapering off, probably because season three does not offer anything substantially different from the other super-soft generic sci-fantasy series currently or recently on like Dark Matter, Killjoys, Pandora, and the rest (and many of them do it better though DSC was a good enough generic show at least in the first two seasons).
C. Yes, the Epsilon stations were border communications stations, for SUBSPACE communications. If anything happens in subspace they would have detected it and recorded the data. While everyone on the stations probably died when supplies ran out Trek has already established that records and devices usually survive a very long time on their own.
D. The technobabble of some of the later series obviously assumes they work more like cell phone towers than Ham relays since they mention getting time signals off of one at one point. Obviously that was not always the case from a show production standpoint and I am certain that Roddenberry was thinking more along the lines of Ham repeaters, but whatever the in-universe case is they did indeed work more like a formal cell network by late TNG and DS9 than simple independent repeaters.
E. There was no physical wavefront to the Praxis explosion either (except perhaps near Qo'noS but we were not shown that in the movie), what was shown was the SUBSPACE wavefront superimposed over the visible starfield. A physical wavefront is limited by the physical laws of the universe, if what hit the Excelsior was physical it would have taken years or decades to get there at the very least. Theoretically, the reason it tossed around Sulu's ship like that was because even at impulse the warp engines are idling since it takes quite a while to bring them up from cold, and that is enough for them to have an interaction with subspace.
Also, if the propagation speed was as fast as DSC says it would indicate a literally incredible amount of power behind it since dialog in several of the series infers that subspace transmission speed is dependent upon the power of the signal. Subspace radio in TOS travelled at about warp 15 oldscale (about 9.7 newscale) with the power of a battlecruiser behind it, and while they obviously made some improvements by TNG I doubt it was too much faster than that, probably somewhere in the 9.9s.
F. The Federation didn't have many resources left, but since their days were numbered without warp drive it would have been one of their top priorities to try and get warp back. The fact that apparently it wasn't is one of the suspension-of-disbelief breaking fubars Kurtzman's bunch made in S3.
The fate of the deep space stations is actually obvious, except for a few that for some unexplained political sleight of hand are in star systems like DS9 is, the people on them would all be dead or possibly in cryosleep since the typical deep space is placed exactly where the name implies, deep space, and therefore highly dependent upon outside supplies that stopped coming a century ago from the S3 point of view.
Of course, it is vaguely possible that some of them survived by building fusion pulse warp drive evacuation ships if they were in range of a habitable planet since those drives are buildable using 21st century war surplus parts on a planet without dilithium (assuming that the station didn't just blow up immediately from all the matter-antimatter explosions from ships and long range shuttles docked at them or possibly even from their own reactors).
In fact, there would be little chance that the high-tech industrial worlds like Earth would have survived with dozens of warp core breaches within a mile or so of the planet surface from all the ships in orbit, and to add insult to injury all of the warp capable shuttles that were powered up at the time.
As typical for Kurtzman (and JJ Abrams for that matter) he never thought all the ramifications through.
As for relay traffic, you are talking about a catastrophic event that covered such a wide area that at least some of those were inner worlds connecting relays so there would have been heavy enough traffic to use the timestamps to realize it was not an instant effect, but rather a wavefront phenomenon, and to narrow down the center of that waveform to a reasonable search area. But considerations like that interfere with the arbitrary magic style DSC uses for things like that so of course no one but the heroes can possibly think of it and by then have to chase down blackboxes probably because the locals just trashed the old data as useless old messages.
And if the only way in to where the Burn happened is a spore jump, then how did the kid's parents get there in the first place?
Oh, and your answer of what to mine for energy is wrong. Dilithium is the safest and most efficient way to regulate matter-antimatter reactions, it is not itself the power source itself, it is the regulator. In todays terms they are the equivalent of reactor control rods, not fuel rods, and you can stack as many together as you want, they cannot go critical and explode. Voyager indirectly gave a reasonable explanation for what might have happened when it was revealed that dilitlhium and trilithium are usually found together and trilithium is toxic, unstable, and explosive, three things that fit the damage on Qo'noS exactly.
Actually, canon says the power source is matter/antimatter and the dilithium is the regulator that safely transfers that power to the ship. They react to and can amplify other power sources around them (even store a little bit) and when doing so appear on sensors as a power source, but they don't actually generate any of their own. For that you need something that is not so overwhelmingly stable, like trilithium.
Actually, canon says the power source is matter/antimatter and the dilithium is the regulator that safely transfers that power to the ship. They react to and can amplify other power sources around them (even store a little bit) and when doing so appear on sensors as a power source, but they don't actually generate any of their own. For that you need something that is not so overwhelmingly stable, like trilithium.
Did you read the linked article? It says "Housed in a dilithium crystal converter assembly, the crystals were used as a power source as well as a regulator."
Yes, I did read it, I also saw that episode (The Alternative Factor) where that came from, and those paddle-cut dilthium crystals shown in that link are in a charging station, being charged like a NiCad battery or supercapacitor. They do not generate power on their own, they can only store it and mix it with other sources to amplify it, and its matrix is stable enough to handle matter/antimatter reactions and convert them to an energy that the ship can use.
According to dialog that charging station provided crystals for the phasers, and could be used in the engines with a different frame inserted into the core, but they apparently only experimented with doing so for a short time because they only showed the paddle style in two episodes and were right back to the quartz-shaped ones after that.
And they did not use them in the phaser system long either, since in TAS the Terratins shredded all the dilithium onboard with their spiroid epsilon wave cannon and the heroes fired the phasers without any trouble after that.
Yes, I did read it, I also saw that episode (The Alternative Factor) where that came from, and those paddle-cut dilthium crystals shown in that link are in a charging station, being charged like a NiCad battery or supercapacitor. They do not generate power on their own, they can only store it and mix it with other sources to amplify it, and its matrix is stable enough to handle matter/antimatter reactions and convert them to an energy that the ship can use.
According to dialog that charging station provided crystals for the phasers, and could be used in the engines with a different frame inserted into the core, but they apparently only experimented with doing so for a short time because they only showed the paddle style in two episodes and were right back to the quartz-shaped ones after that.
And they did not use them in the phaser system long either, since in TAS the Terratins shredded all the dilithium onboard with their spiroid epsilon wave cannon and the heroes fired the phasers without any trouble after that.
Right so, they can be used to power something.
(Which is what @phoenixc#0738 said in the first place...)
They react to and can amplify other power sources around them (even store a little bit) and when doing so appear on sensors as a power source, but they don't actually generate any of their own.
Yes, I did read it, I also saw that episode (The Alternative Factor) where that came from, and those paddle-cut dilthium crystals shown in that link are in a charging station, being charged like a NiCad battery or supercapacitor. They do not generate power on their own, they can only store it and mix it with other sources to amplify it, and its matrix is stable enough to handle matter/antimatter reactions and convert them to an energy that the ship can use.
According to dialog that charging station provided crystals for the phasers, and could be used in the engines with a different frame inserted into the core, but they apparently only experimented with doing so for a short time because they only showed the paddle style in two episodes and were right back to the quartz-shaped ones after that.
And they did not use them in the phaser system long either, since in TAS the Terratins shredded all the dilithium onboard with their spiroid epsilon wave cannon and the heroes fired the phasers without any trouble after that.
Right so, they can be used to power something.
(Which is what @phoenixc#0738 said in the first place...)
They react to and can amplify other power sources around them (even store a little bit) and when doing so appear on sensors as a power source, but they don't actually generate any of their own.
And the Burn altered their crystalline structure such that they could no longer regulate energy flows through them (not unlike the decaying dilithium Scotty had to deal with aboard the Bounty in STIV). So any ship using dilithium to regulate massive energy flows like a matter/antimatter reaction (which honestly would have been most of the ships in the galaxy) suddenly found said flows being unregulated.
Kaboom.
(Or if you're using an artificially-generated singularity to derive power from exploiting the potential energy of its near-infinite gravity well, either it undergoes spontaneous Hawking decay and floods the ship with lethal radiation before suddenly vanishing, possibly explosively, or its mass is sufficient that it sucks the ship and all aboard into its tiny little event horizon and then just sits there, being an itty-bitty hazard to navigation.)
I still think it would have been more interesting if Discovery's travel through time was responsible for the Burn. With the rest of the galaxy eventually learning that Discovery was responsible. Far better than it being a child's temper tantrum.
Yes, dilithium seems to be able to act like a battery or a capacitor, but doesn't generate energy, only stores or converts it. The point of that being that Dilithium has very little energy in itself to be released, and that energy first has to come from something else, which means there had to first be a power source that isn't dilithium.
Of course its absurd, nothing I know about the Burn has been shown to be believable or in line with anything in previous Trek. It literally does boil down to a child crying, and because he had some magic connection to dilithium on one planet, dilithium everywhere broke.
So Q doesn't exist then?
What does Q have to do with anything here? There is no Q involved in the burn.
Please show me where Praxis was said to involve dilithium exploding.
Praxis was stated to be the Klingon's primary energy production facility. Dilithium is used to refine energy in Star Trek. And Praxis' destruction was explicitly stated to be caused by over mining. What do you mine for energy in Star Trek? Dilthium.
So you're imagining that Praxis had anything to do with dilithium, got it. And mining for dilithium for energy is like suggesting we mine iron for energy because its used heavily in internal combustion engines.
Star Trek has been really clear about this, dilithium is not an energy source at all, which makes sense considering its used to prevent an out of control explosion in the M/AM reaction. Do you use dynamite to prevent an ammonium nitrate bomb from going off?
The closest it gets to that is being said to have piezoelectric properties, but that requires mechanical work done to convert into electrical energy, such as from tectonic forces, and that isn't going to be enough energy for Praxis and especially not the Burn. At no point, that I am aware, does any previous Trek suggest that dilithium is capable of the kind of power necessary to create the Burn, again because it is not a power source.
No one said it was, this is you just straw manning again. Dilthium is used as a energy refinement tool. It takes the raw energy of matter/anti-matter drives, and focuses it, and refines it, into a more usable format. It literally takes energy, and makes it better. Hence its ability to take otherwise mild tectonic movement, and magnify it to the point of destroying planets in its raw form.
Oh okay, because you keep using the word to mean things it doesn't mean, its a strawman. Where did the energy come from then? A child crying. There is not enough energy there to do a damn thing. Yet you claim dilithium is somehow responsible for blowing up Praxis despite not being an energy source. Where did that energy come from?
No, dilithium regulates the M/AM reaction so it doesn't get out of control. It is used because it has little to no reaction with antimatter.
I have zero idea what you mean by taking energy and making it better. That is a nonsense statement. I'll assume you mean converting raw thermal energy into electrical and mechanical energy, such as most power plants do with steam turbines, but that is definitely not what dilithium is for because there is no real indication that the M/AM reaction is used to deform the dilthium to generate piezo-electric energy or charge it so dilithium crystals can be installed in other parts of the ship.
But that is the thing iron does in an internal combustion engine, taking that thermal reaction of burning gas/diesel/whatever and turning it into mechanical power. So... yeah, we must mine iron for energy!
As I understand things, the Burn was almost instantaneous across the entire galaxy. That is beyond the speeds capable for any ship in Star Trek, outside of the magic episodes where they get the power to move that fast but never ever use it again, and certainly way beyond any natural phenomena. And because of that kind of speed, it requires an enormous power source, the kind we have not seen in Trek.
The Burn was infinitely more powerful than a supernova based on the speed it propagated, yet also didn't have any effect on anything besides dilithium. Do you grasp that? The Burn must be vastly more powerful than a massive star exploding, but precisely effects only one type of substance. And they want people to further believe it was caused by magnified psychic forces of a child crying because of a 1 in 1000000000000000 genetic mutation.
It was nearly instantaneous because it moved through subspace. The same reason why the Praxis explosion made it to the Excelsior at all, and the same reason why the Hobus supernova was so deadly. Speed limits don't matter in subspace, hence things like Transwarp where the USS Voyager jumped tens of thousands of LY in minutes.
You just said speed doesn't matter, but Voyager jumped a finite distance in a finite time. Voyager sends a message to earth via subspace communications but it doesn't get there instantly, so why not? Warp drives create a subspace bubble around a ship, allowing a ship to go certain, non-infinite speeds through subspace, but speed doesn't matter in subspace? Praxis and Hobus novas propagated through subspace at a finite speed but speed doesn't matter? Praxis and Hobus were also both far slower than the Burn.
And again the inverse square law was utterly ignored. At some distance from the dilithium planet, the burn should have lost enough energy to do anything, just like the wave caused by a drop of water doesn't go on forever. Instead as far as I understand the explanation, the Burn must be continuing to affect dilithium throughout the universe as time goes on and that wavefront expands.
But in general what makes something faster? Yes, more power.
And just for arguments sake, if dilithium was a power source, why is the planet still there? You don't get something from nothing, not even in Star Trek. If dilithium's energy capabilities are what powered the Burn, then that dilithium should be utterly worthless now, burned out or destroyed based on the amount of energy required to make the Burn work the way it did. That probably would be bad for the planet.
Well, again, no one said dilthium was the power source. That's just your straw man.
If dilithium is what took a crying child's mild amount of psychic distress and turned it into a massive galaxy wide destructive event, then where did that power come from? Yes the dilithium, there's no other possible source. If dilithium wasn't the power source then the burn could never have happened because a crying child can't emit that kind of energy (*most parents dispute this. Joke.)
If you're otherwise suggesting that the child's psychic distress was the power source, then you're suggesting a 9v battery can put out the same kind of power as a nuclear power plant if only there was something to take the energy and "make it better."
I don't care if you like the Burn or not. By all means if you think its a great explanation, enjoy it. However, you cannot, in good faith, act as if there is no good reason for people to think this is the stupidest thing since cancer. Trying to silence someone's perspective by claiming the argument is disingenuous is despicable.
What is despicable is someone who knowingly, and intentionally, both lies, and chooses not to do even basic research, on something they are talking about, simply because they don't like the show its from, as a means to try to make it out to be worse then it actually is.
No one says you have to like Discovery, but your reaching more then the people who were complaining in S1 that Burnham being a mutineer broke canon because Spock said it never happened, despite the fact Spock himself had done it earlier in TOS.
I don't like or dislike the show. Nothing I've said has anything to do with the show as a whole. That, as you would say, is a strawman. I dislike the explanation of the Burn, that is what we are talking about here. And no where have I lied, you're just pulling that out of your apple.
Yes, dilithium seems to be able to act like a battery or a capacitor, but doesn't generate energy, only stores or converts it. The point of that being that Dilithium has very little energy in itself to be released, and that energy first has to come from something else, which means there had to first be a power source that isn't dilithium.
I understand that. All I was pointing out was canon says dilithium could be used to power stuff, regardless of where the power that charged it came from originally.
I still think it would have been more interesting if Discovery's travel through time was responsible for the Burn. With the rest of the galaxy eventually learning that Discovery was responsible. Far better than it being a child's temper tantrum.
I agree. An already ludicrous story element was made even more absurd by making all the dilithium in the galaxy go boom boom because a child got frightened. It seems to me you can clearly see the distinction between writers here. The show looks to have some that are very talented, like those who wrote the negotiation scene between Admiral Vance and Osyraa and the sub-moronic hack who came up with the idea for the burn. Almost appears like they had someone who knew what they were doing write a few key scenes for the season then brought in the Z-team to fill in the rest.
Most likely it is the other way around since the worst offenses are in the main season-arc core story itself and that is usually written at the top, or in some shows written by committee but overshadowed heavily by the showrunners. After that, the story is broken up into chunks and passed down to regular writer's room where there may be some actually competent writers doing the detail writing embroidering that badly flawed arc story with good scenes here and there.
Most likely it is the other way around since the worst offenses are in the main season-arc core story itself and that is usually written at the top...
Well, IMDb lists Sean Cochran as the 'Executive Story Editor' for most of the Season, so the 'top' is either him or Kurtzman (or both). As much as it pains me to defend Kurtzman, Cochran does only have writing credits on Star Trek DSC and Short Treks, whereas Kurtzman has been Producer on a lot of films and series that actually turned out sorta good (like TASM2, barring Sony's interference). Another possibility is there's just a void of talent in that writing room and the ace writing has been one of those two times a day.
Not saying Kurtzman is blameless - he's the executive producer. As Ronald Reagan once said, "the buck stops with [him]."
Comments
There's a word for crazy science and that is fantasy. I do not see any science whatsoever in this. And yes, Trek has gone well into fantasy before, including where the technobabble is often just trying to legitimize the fantasy, and usually to its detriment.
Science fiction isn't just about making stuff up, its about working out how it works, the systems involving it, the knock on effects of such systems and all of that. It is creating rules and exploring how things can be in a universe where those things are true. When you start ignoring rules and make stuff up to get around other rules, there isn't any more rhyme or reason to that universe.
Still I think some fantasy can work when well written and limited in its effect. Q, for example is clearly fantasy, but done in a way that often demanded the crew to deal with an unexpected situation rather than an impossible one.
And there is the difference between some space wizard doing hand waving and throwing a fireball at a bale of hay to intimidate some yokels and doing some hand waving and throwing a fireball to destroy a solar system. They are the same thing, aside from the magnitude of effect.
Some psychic wave that ruins dilithium all across the galaxy is ludicrous. Where is all that energy coming from, how is it being transmitted, how does it travel at incredible speed? If it were instead limited to near the planet? That's plausible without a deeper explanation.
The Traveler was able to manipulate the warp fields mentally somehow, the ship is what provided the power to create those fields just like it does on normal warp. In the TOS episode Is There in Truth No Beauty? an insane engineer threw the ship into a sort of hyperspace by changing the balance of the fields in a radical way, perhaps something like that happened with the Traveler's manipulations. Of course, the last time the Traveler showed up he implied that he could slip directly between worlds mentally or something along those lines so anything is possible I suppose.
Also, according to the official warp writeup, at warp ten (ignoring the lizard nonsense from Voyager) distance and speed have no meaning anymore and one would in theory just disappear from one place and instantly appear in another anywhere in the universe at the cost of relatively little energy but few if any have managed to produce that perfect warp field.
There are a lot of super-psi beings, Roddenberry had a thing for the idea that biological races, if they survive long enough eventually evolve into energy beings (sort of like Babylon5 in that respect) and they gain more power as they evolve. The Ocampans are a kind of transitional type, they have a solid humanoid larval form that does not last very long and when time is up for that form they either die, or ascend like Kes did if they develop that last necessary bit in time to transition to their energy form.
As for telepathy, traditionally it does not propagate at any speed, it acts more like quantum entanglement in that it happens on both "ends" simultaneously no matter what the distance is. The is how Uxbridge the Douwd killed every single Husnock in the galaxy at once with telepathic attacks for instance, no inverse square law to worry about, just process through a detect and kill list of (probably) billions in the blink of an eye.
The only way the Burn would make any sense at all is if dilithium kid individually targeted every crystal with some other psionic attack (sort of like pyrokinesis but molecular rather than heat similar to what Uxbridge did, and that is highly unlikely to say the very least.
Not only is the focused "kill them all" motivation not there like it was with Oxbridge, but also every other usage of physical-effecting psionics (besides the Q and Organian powers) is shown to be bound by physical laws like propagation speed (and in some cases, like Vorta telekinesis, it is quite slow. The Organians "cheated" that speed limit by being able to be in multiple locations at once and launching their attacks from those locations (the Organian leader was standing on Organia and both capital worlds, and was in energy form on the bridge of every ship in the battle that was just starting simultaneously for instance, a trick I don't think the kid could do).
Another problem with the Burn being a subspace phenomenon instead of a psionic one is that subspace propagation is not instantaneous, it is just not limited by the speed of light and the speed seems to have something to do with the power of the signal and/or the distance travelled (which is why it is so much faster to send communications when in range of the relay network than it is to send a tightbeam directly to the other party). If it propagated spherically then Starfleet would have been able to locate the center by looking at records of when the wave shell hit various locations. And it was travel that was crippled, not communication.
We aren't talking about those things, many of which are as silly as the Burn, but we are talking about the magic of the Burn.
So you think a child crying has the same level of energy as a star going supernova, or even comes close to a moon that is a major energy production center for an empire?
She'll probably redeem herself somehow while the crew retake the ship, but the notion that her failure had anything to do with her gender is ludicrous. If the ease of Osyraa's takeover IS Tilly's fault it's because Saru made the monumental mistake of selecting an inexperienced Ensign to be his First Officer.
The "bias trap" has EVERYTHING to do with gender, and it does not apply at all in this situation because any failure on her part is simply due to inexperience and is the direct result of Saru making the unimaginably poor decision to put an unqualified ensign in the first officer position. People need to ease off on some of this TRIBBLE and stop reading too much into things, yes there are tropes and such that should be avoided if possible but sometimes the story simply goes where it naturally goes regardless of the character's gender or ethnicity. And as much as Tilly's leadership SHOULD be an utter failure because of how inexperienced she is, she'll probably end up being the hero of the finale somehow.
I've enjoyed season 3 overall, but Tilly as First Officer was one of the WORST writing decisions of the entire series. Either Nilsson should have gotten the job (along with a promotion to Lt Commander), or it should have been a new character from 32nd century Starfleet who is more familiar with the tech and politics of the time period. While I was happy to see him get the promotion, Saru really deserves to be relieved of command over this.
I fell off this particular roundabout when they had Burnham go off-track again saving Book. I was kinda happy they had Saru land some consequences on her, but was honestly pretty ticked when it looked like they were going to writers' fiat those consequences away.
I'll give the MU episodes a shot, as idiotic as I've found the 'biological differences' thing from the start, but...
This season started off so well, but so much of it from about halfway through feels... contrived and unearned. It's like the writers got halfway through the story and then realised they had no idea how to tie it off. Or someone at CBS saw the show was starting to find itself and went, "what?! Potential?! Nope, we can't be having that!"
I lost interest so hard I decided to spoil the ending for myself and... are you kidding me?! That's what we're going with?! Did you look at the Red Angel and Spock's Brain and think 'clearly, we need to go more absurd'?
Bat Credit Card!
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
I think the takeaway is really what Picard already told Data once: Sometimes you can do everything right and still fail. Sometimes the enemy is just too many steps ahead of you.
How we respond to failure can tell more about a leader than his failures alone could, that is bascially why the Academy has scenarios like the Kobayashi Maru scenario where "failure" is guaranteed.
Tilly didn't give in, or give up, after she failed. She and her bridge crew worked out a way to get out of their confinement and do something about it. She has also unexpected help (Micheal, Zora) now, but just as sometimes you can fail despite doing everything right, sometimes things go more right than you could have expected.
I am not really sure that osyraa really wants to subvert the Federation - I think on a fundamental level she still doesn't quite "get" the Federation. She knows it's something people love, she knows the Federation has a lot to offer to the Chain... But she doesn't get it. She truly believes it could work, but Vance realizes that the Federation would lose the one asset that it had maintained over all those centuries of negotiating in good faith and trying to act on solid moral grounds (not without its own challenges, but always with some Starfleet officers or Federation citizens moving ahead and stopping Badmirals and misguided Special Operatives before they ruin everything) - It's reputation, it's idealism. Without it, the Federation is just another galactic nation, no better than the Dominion (at least the one in the 24th century) or the Chain. With it, it's why people maintain hope in it even decades after its had achieved its Zenith and fell from greatness.
I made so secret of the fact that due to COVID lockdown I have not been where I can actually watch season three (I don't have a subscription to CBSAA and frankly from what I have seen of it so far there is nothing that would justify the expense) so I have been having to rely on reviews on the web.
And those reviews are tapering off quite a bit, the show does not generate the same buzz it did the first and second season (which is not a good sign, CBS seems to have succeeded in downgrading Star Trek to simple generic status with nothing to set it apart from Dark Matter, Killjoys, and the other short-run sci-fi series of the last few years). Without anything to set it apart (not even nostalgia for the most part) the kind of interest that spurs reviews and deeper analysis is not high anymore for the series, and those that are left are gradually getting less detailed (and tend to run more towards shallow rants instead of the wider spectrum there used to be).
So no, I was not "making up stuff" I just did not have a key piece of information (not that that piece makes any more sense than any of the other magic wand plot points have in this fairytale masquerading as sci-fi season). Really, if the Burn was a subspace event how could they possibly not know down the centimeter where it originated when it is established that the Federation (and presumably everyone else) keeps a close watch on subspace (like the Epsilon stations in TMP or Vulcan installation that was on P'Jem).
On top of that, if it was knocking out the relay network they would have thousands (maybe even hundreds of thousands) of datapoints to plot just by looking at the last time signature that got through from each (and if it wasn't then there would be an interference spike of some sort at least), not just three black boxes they could not find without a nine hundred year old ship and crew to point it out to them (seriously, can the future Starfleet personnel even find the toilet on their headquarters station?).
At the very least they could have narrowed it down close enough to go over the area inch by inch with fusion-pulse warp equipped ships like Cochrane built out of old army surplus parts or whatever in an old silo (or more realistically the slightly later YPS version the DY-500 ships had) in the time since the Burn (or for that matter with impulse drives after they reached the general area on whatever warp they had available). Also, every single planet (except for possibly agro colonies and of course low-tech protectorates) would have recorded the wavefront or whatever the idiotic thing was supposed to consist of.
And yes, I might be a bit too harsh since I have not seen any of the nuances that I would have seen watching the show myself, just the raw plots (which are very poor), but assuming that the writing quality is the same as the first two seasons I don't think so since their dialog is often worse than the raw plot in the preceding seasons and I don't see what else they have to work with to mitigate the plot problem except action movie eye candy and I doubt they could top the first two in that respect.
To be fair, maybe the performances can make up a little for it like they did to some degree in the first two seasons, but on a bare plot level the closest third season comes to mainline sci-fi is on a sort of Flash Gordon level, which is not very close.
To the viewer there was no obvious mistake, but Osyraa seemed to suggest that there was and it would also make sense for Vance to question whether the same thing would have happened with a more experienced officer giving orders.
Of course its absurd, nothing I know about the Burn has been shown to be believable or in line with anything in previous Trek. It literally does boil down to a child crying, and because he had some magic connection to dilithium on one planet, dilithium everywhere broke.
Please show me where Praxis was said to involve dilithium exploding.
Star Trek has been really clear about this, dilithium is not an energy source at all, which makes sense considering its used to prevent an out of control explosion in the M/AM reaction. Do you use dynamite to prevent an ammonium nitrate bomb from going off?
The closest it gets to that is being said to have piezoelectric properties, but that requires mechanical work done to convert into electrical energy, such as from tectonic forces, and that isn't going to be enough energy for Praxis and especially not the Burn. At no point, that I am aware, does any previous Trek suggest that dilithium is capable of the kind of power necessary to create the Burn, again because it is not a power source.
As I understand things, the Burn was almost instantaneous across the entire galaxy. That is beyond the speeds capable for any ship in Star Trek, outside of the magic episodes where they get the power to move that fast but never ever use it again, and certainly way beyond any natural phenomena. And because of that kind of speed, it requires an enormous power source, the kind we have not seen in Trek.
The Burn was infinitely more powerful than a supernova based on the speed it propagated, yet also didn't have any effect on anything besides dilithium. Do you grasp that? The Burn must be vastly more powerful than a massive star exploding, but precisely effects only one type of substance. And they want people to further believe it was caused by magnified psychic forces of a child crying because of a 1 in 1000000000000000 genetic mutation.
And just for arguments sake, if dilithium was a power source, why is the planet still there? You don't get something from nothing, not even in Star Trek. If dilithium's energy capabilities are what powered the Burn, then that dilithium should be utterly worthless now, burned out or destroyed based on the amount of energy required to make the Burn work the way it did. That probably would be bad for the planet.
I don't care if you like the Burn or not. By all means if you think its a great explanation, enjoy it. However, you cannot, in good faith, act as if there is no good reason for people to think this is the stupidest thing since cancer. Trying to silence someone's perspective by claiming the argument is disingenuous is despicable.
A&B. Wikis usually take at least a few weeks to update to the latest information, and I am not used to using them a lot for debates on forums since very few of the more serious ones accept them as a valid source as people can go and change them to make a point and it often takes a while for that tampering to be fixed.
However, I do use Memory Alpha here sometimes since everyone else seems to, and looking at it today I notice that it now does have mention of the blackboxes as of 23 November 2020. It did not have that mention when I read the entry earlier that month and I was not aware that anything had been added to it (while I get email notices of changes to Terminator pages and a few others I do not get them for Memory Alpha since I am not involved with that one).
I probably should have looked it up anyway, but the comment I was making was long, had a lot of different points, and I have been too busy to spend as much time with it as I would have liked so I missed that particular one. And what I said was accurate up until Scavengers.
As for the reviews, there is indeed a greater proliferation if you count all the copy-paste ones that are the result of CBS-Viacom trying to drum up interest, but I don't. The more in-depth analytic reviews are the ones that are tapering off, probably because season three does not offer anything substantially different from the other super-soft generic sci-fantasy series currently or recently on like Dark Matter, Killjoys, Pandora, and the rest (and many of them do it better though DSC was a good enough generic show at least in the first two seasons).
C. Yes, the Epsilon stations were border communications stations, for SUBSPACE communications. If anything happens in subspace they would have detected it and recorded the data. While everyone on the stations probably died when supplies ran out Trek has already established that records and devices usually survive a very long time on their own.
D. The technobabble of some of the later series obviously assumes they work more like cell phone towers than Ham relays since they mention getting time signals off of one at one point. Obviously that was not always the case from a show production standpoint and I am certain that Roddenberry was thinking more along the lines of Ham repeaters, but whatever the in-universe case is they did indeed work more like a formal cell network by late TNG and DS9 than simple independent repeaters.
E. There was no physical wavefront to the Praxis explosion either (except perhaps near Qo'noS but we were not shown that in the movie), what was shown was the SUBSPACE wavefront superimposed over the visible starfield. A physical wavefront is limited by the physical laws of the universe, if what hit the Excelsior was physical it would have taken years or decades to get there at the very least. Theoretically, the reason it tossed around Sulu's ship like that was because even at impulse the warp engines are idling since it takes quite a while to bring them up from cold, and that is enough for them to have an interaction with subspace.
Also, if the propagation speed was as fast as DSC says it would indicate a literally incredible amount of power behind it since dialog in several of the series infers that subspace transmission speed is dependent upon the power of the signal. Subspace radio in TOS travelled at about warp 15 oldscale (about 9.7 newscale) with the power of a battlecruiser behind it, and while they obviously made some improvements by TNG I doubt it was too much faster than that, probably somewhere in the 9.9s.
F. The Federation didn't have many resources left, but since their days were numbered without warp drive it would have been one of their top priorities to try and get warp back. The fact that apparently it wasn't is one of the suspension-of-disbelief breaking fubars Kurtzman's bunch made in S3.
The fate of the deep space stations is actually obvious, except for a few that for some unexplained political sleight of hand are in star systems like DS9 is, the people on them would all be dead or possibly in cryosleep since the typical deep space is placed exactly where the name implies, deep space, and therefore highly dependent upon outside supplies that stopped coming a century ago from the S3 point of view.
Of course, it is vaguely possible that some of them survived by building fusion pulse warp drive evacuation ships if they were in range of a habitable planet since those drives are buildable using 21st century war surplus parts on a planet without dilithium (assuming that the station didn't just blow up immediately from all the matter-antimatter explosions from ships and long range shuttles docked at them or possibly even from their own reactors).
In fact, there would be little chance that the high-tech industrial worlds like Earth would have survived with dozens of warp core breaches within a mile or so of the planet surface from all the ships in orbit, and to add insult to injury all of the warp capable shuttles that were powered up at the time.
As typical for Kurtzman (and JJ Abrams for that matter) he never thought all the ramifications through.
As for relay traffic, you are talking about a catastrophic event that covered such a wide area that at least some of those were inner worlds connecting relays so there would have been heavy enough traffic to use the timestamps to realize it was not an instant effect, but rather a wavefront phenomenon, and to narrow down the center of that waveform to a reasonable search area. But considerations like that interfere with the arbitrary magic style DSC uses for things like that so of course no one but the heroes can possibly think of it and by then have to chase down blackboxes probably because the locals just trashed the old data as useless old messages.
And if the only way in to where the Burn happened is a spore jump, then how did the kid's parents get there in the first place?
Oh, and your answer of what to mine for energy is wrong. Dilithium is the safest and most efficient way to regulate matter-antimatter reactions, it is not itself the power source itself, it is the regulator. In todays terms they are the equivalent of reactor control rods, not fuel rods, and you can stack as many together as you want, they cannot go critical and explode. Voyager indirectly gave a reasonable explanation for what might have happened when it was revealed that dilitlhium and trilithium are usually found together and trilithium is toxic, unstable, and explosive, three things that fit the damage on Qo'noS exactly.
Actually, canon says the power source is matter/antimatter and the dilithium is the regulator that safely transfers that power to the ship. They react to and can amplify other power sources around them (even store a little bit) and when doing so appear on sensors as a power source, but they don't actually generate any of their own. For that you need something that is not so overwhelmingly stable, like trilithium.
Yes, I did read it, I also saw that episode (The Alternative Factor) where that came from, and those paddle-cut dilthium crystals shown in that link are in a charging station, being charged like a NiCad battery or supercapacitor. They do not generate power on their own, they can only store it and mix it with other sources to amplify it, and its matrix is stable enough to handle matter/antimatter reactions and convert them to an energy that the ship can use.
According to dialog that charging station provided crystals for the phasers, and could be used in the engines with a different frame inserted into the core, but they apparently only experimented with doing so for a short time because they only showed the paddle style in two episodes and were right back to the quartz-shaped ones after that.
And they did not use them in the phaser system long either, since in TAS the Terratins shredded all the dilithium onboard with their spiroid epsilon wave cannon and the heroes fired the phasers without any trouble after that.
(Which is what @phoenixc#0738 said in the first place...)
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
Kaboom.
(Or if you're using an artificially-generated singularity to derive power from exploiting the potential energy of its near-infinite gravity well, either it undergoes spontaneous Hawking decay and floods the ship with lethal radiation before suddenly vanishing, possibly explosively, or its mass is sufficient that it sucks the ship and all aboard into its tiny little event horizon and then just sits there, being an itty-bitty hazard to navigation.)
Yes, dilithium seems to be able to act like a battery or a capacitor, but doesn't generate energy, only stores or converts it. The point of that being that Dilithium has very little energy in itself to be released, and that energy first has to come from something else, which means there had to first be a power source that isn't dilithium.
What does Q have to do with anything here? There is no Q involved in the burn.
So you're imagining that Praxis had anything to do with dilithium, got it. And mining for dilithium for energy is like suggesting we mine iron for energy because its used heavily in internal combustion engines.
Oh okay, because you keep using the word to mean things it doesn't mean, its a strawman. Where did the energy come from then? A child crying. There is not enough energy there to do a damn thing. Yet you claim dilithium is somehow responsible for blowing up Praxis despite not being an energy source. Where did that energy come from?
No, dilithium regulates the M/AM reaction so it doesn't get out of control. It is used because it has little to no reaction with antimatter.
I have zero idea what you mean by taking energy and making it better. That is a nonsense statement. I'll assume you mean converting raw thermal energy into electrical and mechanical energy, such as most power plants do with steam turbines, but that is definitely not what dilithium is for because there is no real indication that the M/AM reaction is used to deform the dilthium to generate piezo-electric energy or charge it so dilithium crystals can be installed in other parts of the ship.
But that is the thing iron does in an internal combustion engine, taking that thermal reaction of burning gas/diesel/whatever and turning it into mechanical power. So... yeah, we must mine iron for energy!
You just said speed doesn't matter, but Voyager jumped a finite distance in a finite time. Voyager sends a message to earth via subspace communications but it doesn't get there instantly, so why not? Warp drives create a subspace bubble around a ship, allowing a ship to go certain, non-infinite speeds through subspace, but speed doesn't matter in subspace? Praxis and Hobus novas propagated through subspace at a finite speed but speed doesn't matter? Praxis and Hobus were also both far slower than the Burn.
And again the inverse square law was utterly ignored. At some distance from the dilithium planet, the burn should have lost enough energy to do anything, just like the wave caused by a drop of water doesn't go on forever. Instead as far as I understand the explanation, the Burn must be continuing to affect dilithium throughout the universe as time goes on and that wavefront expands.
But in general what makes something faster? Yes, more power.
If dilithium is what took a crying child's mild amount of psychic distress and turned it into a massive galaxy wide destructive event, then where did that power come from? Yes the dilithium, there's no other possible source. If dilithium wasn't the power source then the burn could never have happened because a crying child can't emit that kind of energy (*most parents dispute this. Joke.)
If you're otherwise suggesting that the child's psychic distress was the power source, then you're suggesting a 9v battery can put out the same kind of power as a nuclear power plant if only there was something to take the energy and "make it better."
I don't like or dislike the show. Nothing I've said has anything to do with the show as a whole. That, as you would say, is a strawman. I dislike the explanation of the Burn, that is what we are talking about here. And no where have I lied, you're just pulling that out of your apple.
Most likely it is the other way around since the worst offenses are in the main season-arc core story itself and that is usually written at the top, or in some shows written by committee but overshadowed heavily by the showrunners. After that, the story is broken up into chunks and passed down to regular writer's room where there may be some actually competent writers doing the detail writing embroidering that badly flawed arc story with good scenes here and there.
Well, IMDb lists Sean Cochran as the 'Executive Story Editor' for most of the Season, so the 'top' is either him or Kurtzman (or both). As much as it pains me to defend Kurtzman, Cochran does only have writing credits on Star Trek DSC and Short Treks, whereas Kurtzman has been Producer on a lot of films and series that actually turned out sorta good (like TASM2, barring Sony's interference). Another possibility is there's just a void of talent in that writing room and the ace writing has been one of those two times a day.
Not saying Kurtzman is blameless - he's the executive producer. As Ronald Reagan once said, "the buck stops with [him]."
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood