Something worth mentioning was that the last major original story Cryptic had in mind was doing more Mirror stuff with Mirror Leeta and the Terrans, and that is/was supposed to be sometime after the KDF revamp. After that, they claimed to not have had any other major arcs planned; instead, they were pulling more content and elements from the current Trek shows; Disco, Picard, Lower Decks (so they have said), SNW (probably), Disco S31 (if the show happens), and Movie Universe (if the 4th Kelvin Movie finally happens; recent news claim they hashed out a new deal).
I expect that moving forward, much of the story arcs will be continuations of plot elements taken from the respective shows, and we will not likely see more Red vs Blue side-specific stories, nor more original stories like the so old it's been lightly hidden Breen or Drozana arcs.
A bigger issue in general is that in general, STO doesn't have the budget needed to even rebuild and overhaul the game engine heavily modified from Champions, or move everything over to a newer and more modern game engine, hence they keep breaking, ignoring, or just deleting old content they don't have enough time to work on (Exploration Clusters and Foundry notably, but also the old Red v Blue hard-code that prevents more than 2 true factions).
Thanks, I played FF XIV for awhile but not long enough to "live through" multiple expansions.
From what I recall those "106 quests" include a lot of fetch x brown sticks and kill x foozles in between the main quest parts, more like STO patrols than story episodes. That's not a criticism -- the SWTOR style class (job) stories were fun and the quality of the main quest stories were high. It does require more group play than STO though, since you must complete group raids to advance the story.
You're right that they tend to be a lot of go here, do this or go kill these guys and bring me back whatever I need situations.
However, the parts that advance the story are amazing. Honestly, the whole game is amazing since there's no feeling that I don't have anything to do in the game.
Al said in one instance he had a "few" more stories he wanted to tell, but in another he said he only had "one more arc" he wanted to get into before he was out of ideas. So the Terran arc was one of the last, but they may have had like 1-2 other ideas for after that.
Either way they were near/at the end of story ideas for STO.
Thanks for the minor correction and links. Nevertheless, it just homes in the fact that STO's content future is now more or less in step with current Trek shows, despite some player requests for more completely original content. Considering the relatively small team STO has, there's really not much room to detour, unless it was absolutely necessary (KDF revamp, though most of it was asset updates and old mission removals rather than an expanded story).
Controvertial idea, but... wouldn't the Iconians have left some Gateways in Andromeda? I know that the Herald Sphere had been in Andromeda. We could venture into a new galaxy and learn more about the Kelvans, who haven't been seen since TOS. They could also consider exploring beyond the path Voyager took home in Delta, and maybe expand beyond Dominion space in Gamma.
They could do a one off in Gamma about the NX-02 Columbia, they could set up a search for the Whale Probe, which they could tie into maybe the Xindi-Aquatics a bit...
Apparently the 'Gateways active in Andromeda' thing from SoI was supposed to mean the ones contained within the Sphere that jumped to Iconia at the end of Uneasy Selas according to a certain poster - which I don't agree with, since it's not backed up by dev statement or even common sense - there is NO way the Iconians only had those few gates in an entire GALAXY they had basically subjugated.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
I think the best solution is the addition of an interactive exploration system. We've only been begging them for it for a decade now....
I'm not against it, and I did have fun chasing down the remnants of the Third Borg Dynasty at least when half my away team didn't materialize inside a mountain or at the bottom of an unclimbable ravine. However, it took a couple of years of work after it was released for No Man's Sky to become decent, and it's still not considered exciting. With a small team, creating side games with any depth is unlikely to happen.
Thanks for the minor correction and links. Nevertheless, it just homes in the fact that STO's content future is now more or less in step with current Trek shows, despite some player requests for more completely original content. Considering the relatively small team STO has, there's really not much room to detour, unless it was absolutely necessary (KDF revamp, though most of it was asset updates and old mission removals rather than an expanded story).
It also makes sense if you think about it. Like, just between the Dominion story of DS9, and the TCW arc of ENT, you are looking at about 100 episodes, or 12% of all Trek episodes. And Cryptic has covered both of those story lines in STO very extensively. Then there are smaller storylines, or storyline like things, such as
The Borg stuff between TNG and VOY
The Klingon War and Control stories of S1 and 2 of DSC
The MU story between TOS and DS9
The Sons of Mogh storyline between TNG and DS9
Seska and the Kazon from VOY
The overarching storyline in ENT where Archer gets the founders of the Federation to make nice with/work together
That Cryptic has picked up in STO. Not to mention all the two parters, and one offs, Cryptic has also covered. If we count larger story arcs, STO has covered like 40%+ of all Trek episodes either directly, or indirectly. Most of the rest of Trek episodes Cryptic hasn't directly covered are bottle episodes that are so close ended there really isn't much of anything to cover in STO, since the plot was resolved with no loose ends as is.
The new shows being so large scope narrative based works in Cryptic's favor giving them far more substantial plot threads to pick on compared to many of the older show's episodes.
Controvertial idea, but... wouldn't the Iconians have left some Gateways in Andromeda? I know that the Herald Sphere had been in Andromeda. We could venture into a new galaxy and learn more about the Kelvans, who haven't been seen since TOS. They could also consider exploring beyond the path Voyager took home in Delta, and maybe expand beyond Dominion space in Gamma.
They could do a one off in Gamma about the NX-02 Columbia, they could set up a search for the Whale Probe, which they could tie into maybe the Xindi-Aquatics a bit...
The only gateways in Andromeda that we know of were on the Iconian Dyson Sphere, which teleported back to the Milky Way during the Iconian War. As far as we know there are no Gateways left in Andromeda.
The problem with expanding the Delta and Gamma Quadrants is that, in the Delta Quadrant, Voyager needled their way between the major powers of the region. Everything on either side of what we have is just more space controlled by the aliens we already encounter. In the Gamma Quadrant, the Dominion controls most of the quadrant as is. Even if Cryptic took the sector map size to the max of 8X8 sectors, they would still be within the area of space controlled by the Dominion as represented in the Star Trek Star Charts. There really isn't "beyond Dominion space" in the GQ, the only "beyond" is outside the quadrant.
I think the best solution is the addition of an interactive exploration system. We've only been begging them for it for a decade now....
I find it unlikely we will ever get one, no matter how much we ask.
The problem with an interactive exploration system for STO is that exploration in Star Trek isn't like No Man's Sky exploration, where you just go between worlds, collect resources, and build better ship upgrades, so you can go further and repeat the same. Exploration in Star Trek is very heavily based on complex diplomatic relations with new alien species. Procedural generation systems even today can only really achieve landscape generation. As seen in games like Minecraft, or No Man's Sky. Neither of those games really has a hard narrative aspect to it, because you can't procedurally generate a complex narrative(just look at how bad all those AI generated books are). The need to hand craft said narrative limits how much the developers can really put out, and limits how expansive any such "system" can be. At best we would just get another story arc like the Lukari one, but thats not really a system, its a one off narrative.
Just getting a No Man's Sky type exploration system would require Cryptic building an entire other game to bolt onto the game they have now. Trying to do Star Trek style exploration would not only require making a new game, it would require making a new game that achieves narrative procedural generation that no other game has ever come close too.
Its just not really feasible.
Prodigy may actually give us something in terms of more Delta Quadrant stuff. The starfleet vessel the alien teens find is IN the delta quadrant. One of the kids appears to be Talaxian, so it also fits in.
Prodigy may actually give us something in terms of more Delta Quadrant stuff. The starfleet vessel the alien teens find is IN the delta quadrant. One of the kids appears to be Talaxian, so it also fits in.
There is also the first 2.5 years, and last year, of Voyager's journey they haven't covered also.
I was just pointing out that going side to side, with what we have now regrading the Delta Quadrant, really isn't doable since its just more of what we already have.
Actually the Equinox episodes contradicts that notion. The USS Equinox started at the same spot in the Delta quadrant as Voyager and was aiming for the same destination (Federation space) so their courses could not have been wildly divergent (in fact, after five years of travel Voyager actually met up with Equinox), especially since the Equinox had barely started their journey when they encountered the Krowtonan Guard. And Equinox encountered at least one other spacegoing civilization, the Ponea, who the Voyager crew never heard of while travelling on almost the same course.
And yes, Delta has some large civilizations but in general it actually seems more granular with more small civilizations than the more familiar alpha/beta quadrants. Plus there are several very long jumps made by Voyager were little or nothing at all is known about what they bypassed.
As for Gamma quadrant, very little is actually know as fact about it. Explorers from DS9 did not go very far from the wormhole and Weyoun was a disinformation agent sent to deceive the Federation in preparation for the war they planned, the very definition of "unreliable narrator", so absolutely nothing he said about the Dominion or Gamma quadrant or any of its inhabitants can be trusted as true without outside verification such as scenes showing what he was talking about was actually the way he said.
Also, I doubt that the Iconians would not leave an escape route back to the Andromeda galaxy of some kind that did not depend on Dyson spheres spending a long time charging up with omega particles. It is reasonable that they might lock those routes off from others using them even if they have a gate (like the one on New Romulus or the ship gate in the next system over) though.
By best...you mean a completely unfeasible one? No man's sky, which is an ENTIRE game that was suppose to do this failed to do this in any meaningful way until YEARS of patching after the game was released.
Because another company was unable to get their game working properly has nothing to do with Cryptic or STO.
If someone gave Cryptic a few million in funding and a couple of years of development time, then sure it could be done.
It would never pay for itself as a sub-game of a F2P MMO, but it could be done.
Or if you just want to revisit the Third Borg Dynasty one last time, then one developer and less than a year would give you something very shallow, mildly erratic from the randomization, yet still repetitive. Like what we had before.
Actually the Equinox episodes contradicts that notion. The USS Equinox started at the same spot in the Delta quadrant as Voyager and was aiming for the same destination (Federation space) so their courses could not have been wildly divergent (in fact, after five years of travel Voyager actually met up with Equinox), especially since the Equinox had barely started their journey when they encountered the Krowtonan Guard. And Equinox encountered at least one other spacegoing civilization, the Ponea, who the Voyager crew never heard of while travelling on almost the same course.
It doesn't. In fact, the Star Trek Star Charts cover the start of the Equinox's journey, and the Krowtonan Guard existed in the area of space between the Haakonian Order, who had conquered Neelix's world of Talax(which Voyager' visited), and the Viidians(who Voyager ran into). It was right next to the area of space Voyager passed through, they just didn't meet them. After passing through the Krowtonan Guard space, the Equinox went off into Viidian space. The Ponea could have been just on the other side of Viidian space from the side Voyager traveled though.
And yes, Delta has some large civilizations but in general it actually seems more granular with more small civilizations than the more familiar alpha/beta quadrants. Plus there are several very long jumps made by Voyager were little or nothing at all is known about what they bypassed.
The Star Charts also disagree with this notion. In the Star Charts the Romulan Star Empire, one of the largest governments in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants(coming in at number 5 in terms of size), covered around 15 sectors(from a top down view at least) In the Delta Quadrant the Kazon, Viidians, Haakonians, Swarm, Alsuran, Krenim, B'omar, Hirogen, Malon, Turei, and Hierarchy, are all shown to control just as much, if not much larger areas of space. Many of them controlling more space then either the Tholians or Breen, who come in at number 3 and 4 in the Alpha/Beta quadrants in terms of size. Not to mention the Borg, who are the single largest space faring "species" in existence in Trek canon.
The Delta Quadrant tends to have more larger powers then the Alpha/Beta Quadrant does, owning to many of these civilizations having very long histories. While the Alpha and Beta Quadrant have a lot more one off, non-aligned, smaller species either just getting into warp, or that are still per-wrap. With most AQ/BQ species only being space faring for the last few hundred years, by comparison to the positively ancient species of the DQ.
As for Gamma quadrant, very little is actually know as fact about it. Explorers from DS9 did not go very far from the wormhole and Weyoun was a disinformation agent sent to deceive the Federation in preparation for the war they planned, the very definition of "unreliable narrator", so absolutely nothing he said about the Dominion or Gamma quadrant or any of its inhabitants can be trusted as true without outside verification such as scenes showing what he was talking about was actually the way he said.
This is just a cheap excuse to throw off anything that doesn't fit your narrative.
Even then, according to the Star Charts the First Founder homeworld was around 5,150LY from the GQ end of the Bajoran wormhole, the Second Founder Homeworld was 9,100+ LY from the Bajoran wormhole, and the borders of the Dominion itself were 13,500LY apart at their furthest points. This compared to the Federation which was only 8,000LY or so wide, and was the largest, and most dominant, force in the 20% of the galaxy it had explored. Along with the Klingons who were the only other power of comparable size/strength.
This not getting into I never mentioned Weyoun in the first place. We see from several GQ races that come to DS9, or that the crew encounters in the few times they go into the GQ, that all of them fear, or are lorded over by, the Dominion, despite most of them not actually being part of the Dominion.
If the Federation, being a peaceful, diplomatic, government, can become the dominant power in 20% of the galaxy in just 200+ years, something like the Dominion, a violent, militaristic, government, unafraid to just virus bomb entire planets to make an example of them, could take over the entire quadrant in 2,000 years isn't really a stretch, and is supported by what we see of the GQ species in DS9.
Also, I doubt that the Iconians would not leave an escape route back to the Andromeda galaxy of some kind that did not depend on Dyson spheres spending a long time charging up with omega particles. It is reasonable that they might lock those routes off from others using them even if they have a gate (like the one on New Romulus or the ship gate in the next system over) though.
We have no idea how long it takes for a Dyson Sphere to charge up enough to teleport itself. The only one we really see the workings of is the Solanae Sphere, which is explicitly stated to be partially broken, and unused due to accidents during its construction.
Star Charts is pretty good for a third party set of 2D maps of a 3D space, but as third party they didn't have much if any special insight into what was supposed to be there, they had to work it all out from clues in the shows just like the fan maps and whatnot. On top of that, the 2D nature of the maps severely limited what they can do with them.
And then there is the fact that at those distances the shows could not have happened the way they they did because of trip times. For instance, a bunch of D'deridex class ships skipping off to bomb the founder's homeworld could make the 5,150LY distance the map claims for the closer of the two in about two years (being generous here, warp 9.6 tears up their engines quickly but I put in 9.5), but the Galors top out at warp 8 so it would take them at least five years (and it would have taken a runabout 24 years to get there). Now, unless the Prophets were pulling some time tricks I just didn't see that kind of passage of time in The Die is Cast.
Obviously the map is wrong about the distances from the wormhole exit. In fact everything is too big because they are trying to fill up the galactic map with nations like the world map of today is and that just does not work for the technology they use in the show.
Take the Federation for example. The 8000 lightyear figure comes from Picard's answer to Lilly's question about how many worlds there are in the Federation
LILY: How many planets are in this Federation?
PICARD: Over one hundred and fifty ...spread across eight thousand light years.
but that figure might not refer to a solid diameter, in fact the majority of the evidence points to the main part of the Federation being much smaller than that. Picard may have been referring to the limits of Federation exploration or at least a fuzzy far less dense frontier shell surrounding the Federation core. And it is possible that greatest distance that separates any of those Federation satellite territories is a line 8,000 lightyears long.
According to Memory Alpha about Cestus III:
In the mid-23rd century, Cestus III was on the frontier of Federation space, in a region bordering the territory of the United Federation of Planets and Gorn Hegemony, and near space claimed by the Metrons. A century later, this planet was considered to be "on the other side of the Federation" from Deep Space 9, approximately two weeks from the Bajoran system by subspace message and eight weeks at the SS Xhosa's maximum warp. (TOS: "Arena"; DS9: "Family Business", "The Way of the Warrior")
In the TOS warp formula scale subspace radio at the signal strength the relays were capable of at the time was about warp 15 (TOS scale) and if you plug that along with the travel times to Cestus III (in the part that I highlighted) the distance comes out to be about 200 ly, not 8,000. And apparently the writers were systematically using that 200 ly distance because it is corroborated by the second part of the quote (which came from a different episode) assuming that the Xhosa could make warp 8.6 (TNG scale) since 200 ly would indeed take eight weeks of travel time. And Cassidy Yates did mention that her ship could outrun a Galor but not by much (in this case about half a warp factor).
In Trials and Tribble-ations they actually come out and say (indirectly) that it is about 200 ly across because they say they jumped about 200 light years between where they started off (near Cardassia) to station K-7 which was on the Klingon border pretty much directly across the Federation from Cardassia.
Another factor is that Voyager was only finished at Mars three months before they set out from DS9 to catch Chakotay's ship. And it is unlikely that they meant it was built at some remote branch of the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards somewhere in the west of the Federation either since the first scene after the hook showed Janeway recruiting Paris in Nova Scotia on Earth. At Voyager's stated top speed of warp 9.975 it would have taken twice as long as that (about six months) just to reach DS9 if it was indeed 4,000 ly away, and to top it off Paris did not travel with Voyager to the station so he probably took something slower (whatever ship that shuttle was launched from).
On the other hand, if DS9 is only about a hundred lightyears from Earth it would take Voyager a mere three days to reach it and the Xhosa about a month, which means Paris probably came by way of a military ship when he met up with the Voyager already docked at DS9, (a Galaxy could have made it in a week or two for example, and the shuttle they approached the station in was one of the more common ones on a Galaxy class iirc).
In the older TOS era star maps the Federation was usually depicted as a 200 lightyear sphere, and except for a few outliers most of the figures for trip times and distances they give actually support the idea that the Federation is not much bigger than that. And a lot of the dialog shows that the writers in that and the later series were using that figure in most of the scripts (at least in the various series, the Trek movies usually didn't bother with much research at all as the movie division executives tended to look down their noses at anything as common and lowly as mere TV).
Even the map in Keiko O'Brian's classroom supports that to a large degree. Despite a lot of errors many of the distances between known real stars do match up (more or less) and the addition of labels reveals that the map from Conspiracy that many thought was just the Federation is instead the Federation and all of its neighbors together. The whole thing at its widest was just over 10,000 lightyears across, so if the Federation was 8000 across all by itself (which is not what that map shows) all their neighbors would have to have tiny territories in comparison.
Rick Sternbach has even talked about the Federation having distant colonies that act as local hubs in their area, like Deneb, Antares, and Rigel in a way that implies that it was the territorial model that they used on the shows. While that does not directly give information on the total size of the Federation it does suggest that Federation territory is not a solid monolithic block, but rather like an archipelago of archipelagos with a dense core of around 200 ly or so surrounded by smaller chains of inhabited star systems. If so, it is a situation like the old British Empire where they had holdings all over the world but did not own everything in between.
Star Charts is pretty good for a third party set of 2D maps of a 3D space, but as third party they didn't have much if any special insight into what was supposed to be there, they had to work it all out from clues in the shows just like the fan maps and whatnot. On top of that, the 2D nature of the maps severely limited what they can do with them.
The Star Charts have been used in the Kelvin movies, Discovery, and Picard, and have become defacto canon at this point. They aren't really third party anymore. Especially not since Discovery S3 has a giant projection of all four quadrant maps from the Star Charts in Federation HQ as the central holographic map used.
The problem with the rest of your post is that Star Trek has never been consistent in regards to warp speeds, and things like distances.
At the beginning of Voyager they say it would take their ship, which can go warp 9.975, 75 years to go the 75,000LY needed to reach Earth. Which implies that it takes a year to go 1,000 LY.
In the TNG episode "Q Who?", when Q Transports the ENT-D to the J-25 system to encounter the Borg, Data states it would take 2 years, 7 months, and 3 days, to get to the closest Federation starbase, which was 7,000 LY away. At the time, the Galaxy class was only rated to go warp 9.3 in normal operation, with warp 9.6 being sustainable for a few hours.
By TNG math it should only have taken Voyager only around 20 years to get back, not 75. And that being if they just went warp 9.6. Much less if they used their full speed of warp 9.975.
Yet in TNG they also go to Malcor III, a planet stated to be 2,000 LY from Earth, which would take them around around 9 months to reach by "Q Who" math. Yet they get there and back to Federation space in a month going by the stardates of the episodes before and after it. If they can go 2,000LY in a month, it should have only taken Voyager 3.12 years to get back at warp 9.3/9.6. Less if they went full speed as much as possible.
We also know from early TNG that the Federation has explored 19% of the galaxy, which would be a circle with a radius of 21,794LY. And they frequently mention being on the edge of explored space. Meaning they can go from the core of the Federation, to that far out, in little time.
This is further supported by maps seen in the shows. In Voyager and Insurrection there is a map seen on a PADD which included its own LY scale on it. This map puts the Romulan Star Empire at around like 6-7K LY alone. This idea of 19% of the galaxy being explored adds up if you consider the Federation to be 8K LY across, and its larger neighbors like the Romulans, Klingons, and Tholians, of comparable sizes.
As for some of the starts you list. Deneb is a real world star projects to be 2,615±215 ly away from Earth, and the Federation was going there back in the TOS era with warp 7 ships. Yet for Voyager that should have taken 2+ years at warp 9.975.
And yes, the Federation doesn't own the space between all its systems, no one argued that.
Actually, they haven't been inconsistent with speed as much as they have been a little shaky on distance, and even then they are often close enough.
I have already given examples of where the official warp factor formulas work out, and in trying to argue against my point you have given several examples that show they were in fact using the TNG era formula in TNG.
And yes, the Voyager trip time was exaggerated for dramatic effect, but slower is not as bad as too fast since the figure stated in the pilot was probably an assumed lower average speed taking into account having to refuel, maintenance downtime, and other assumed snags that would keep the Voyager from going top speed all the way.
The Q Who figures are not too far off assuming Data rounded the distance up to the nearest thousand and the writer used the flank speed thinking it was max cruise. For instance, they could travel 7000 ly in that time at an average speed of warp 9.54 or if it was actually 6750 ly they could make it travelling at 9.52. It is certainly close enough (even with mixing up flank and max cruise) to make it unlikely that the writer just pulled random numbers out of their backside.
And those numbers again prove that the Dominion capital is much too far from the wormhole on that map if the events of The Die is Cast is to play out the way it was shown in DS9, (and the distance to the second capital was over twice what it was to the first). Thousands of lightyears is just too ridiculously high for the established technology to handle in the time periods shown in DS9.
How is the distance of Malcor III from Earth supposed to prove anything? Yes, it is 2000 ly from Earth and it would take close to a year to travel the distance at a Galaxy-class ship's maximum cruising speed but the episodes on either side of it don't say anything about being anywhere near earth. In fact, the closest episode that happens on Earth to First Contact is Family (s4e2) which takes place on November 28, 2366 while First Contact (s4e15) takes place sometime between June 3, 2367 and July 16, 2367.
The time span is in the area of 230 days from Earth which again is a little short (they could almost make it if they travelled at flank the entire way) but more importantly they are separated from Earth by 13 episodes which is a long string of stardates to keep track of over months of production time so minor errors are bound to happen.
As for how much of the galaxy is "explored", it is impossible for the Federation to have actually visited all of the star systems without Starfleet having billions of ships to do it with, which means that most of that area is probably just long range scanned, not actually explored in person. In fact some of it is probably starmaps done by others and traded to the Federation in exchange for something. Even using the old TOS 200 ly sphere figure for the Federation there would be over 14,600 stars in it. That would take quite a while to explore even without pushing out to other hubs.
As for Deneb, not only is it one of the outliers, it is not clear which one they visited in TOS since Star Trek calls both Alpha Cygni (2,600 ly distant) and Beta Ceti (96.3 ly) "Deneb". The Beta Ceti one is well within reasonable range of a TOS ship (about 28 days). Even Alpha Cygni is not too distant for the "archipelago of archipelagoes" model of the Federation at about seven and a half years since a ship probably would not make the trip in one go, most of the activity out that way would be based around the regional hub (probably Alpha Cygni itself) with only subspace radio making the full trip to and from Earth.
Most of the maps shown on the show severely disagree with each other so they can be discounted for the most part. In fact, about the only two that actually agreed with each other is the one first seen in Conspiracy and then a more detailed version was seen in DS9, and with those the detail showed that the assumption that the map in Conspiracy only showed the Federation was false, it in fact showed all of known space at the time.
Also, a lot of people seem to think that in Where No Man Has Gone Before the Enterprise went out to the rim of the galactic disk when instead it went straight "up" to the closest flat edge of the disk, a distance of a little under 500 ly (which is still an outlier unless that one mission took around three years, but they do have some errors like that, especially since a lot of those distances were not known with any accuracy at the time the show was made)
Comments
I expect that moving forward, much of the story arcs will be continuations of plot elements taken from the respective shows, and we will not likely see more Red vs Blue side-specific stories, nor more original stories like the so old it's been lightly hidden Breen or Drozana arcs.
A bigger issue in general is that in general, STO doesn't have the budget needed to even rebuild and overhaul the game engine heavily modified from Champions, or move everything over to a newer and more modern game engine, hence they keep breaking, ignoring, or just deleting old content they don't have enough time to work on (Exploration Clusters and Foundry notably, but also the old Red v Blue hard-code that prevents more than 2 true factions).
You're right that they tend to be a lot of go here, do this or go kill these guys and bring me back whatever I need situations.
However, the parts that advance the story are amazing. Honestly, the whole game is amazing since there's no feeling that I don't have anything to do in the game.
Thanks for the minor correction and links. Nevertheless, it just homes in the fact that STO's content future is now more or less in step with current Trek shows, despite some player requests for more completely original content. Considering the relatively small team STO has, there's really not much room to detour, unless it was absolutely necessary (KDF revamp, though most of it was asset updates and old mission removals rather than an expanded story).
They could do a one off in Gamma about the NX-02 Columbia, they could set up a search for the Whale Probe, which they could tie into maybe the Xindi-Aquatics a bit...
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
I'm not against it, and I did have fun chasing down the remnants of the Third Borg Dynasty at least when half my away team didn't materialize inside a mountain or at the bottom of an unclimbable ravine. However, it took a couple of years of work after it was released for No Man's Sky to become decent, and it's still not considered exciting. With a small team, creating side games with any depth is unlikely to happen.
Prodigy may actually give us something in terms of more Delta Quadrant stuff. The starfleet vessel the alien teens find is IN the delta quadrant. One of the kids appears to be Talaxian, so it also fits in.
Actually the Equinox episodes contradicts that notion. The USS Equinox started at the same spot in the Delta quadrant as Voyager and was aiming for the same destination (Federation space) so their courses could not have been wildly divergent (in fact, after five years of travel Voyager actually met up with Equinox), especially since the Equinox had barely started their journey when they encountered the Krowtonan Guard. And Equinox encountered at least one other spacegoing civilization, the Ponea, who the Voyager crew never heard of while travelling on almost the same course.
And yes, Delta has some large civilizations but in general it actually seems more granular with more small civilizations than the more familiar alpha/beta quadrants. Plus there are several very long jumps made by Voyager were little or nothing at all is known about what they bypassed.
As for Gamma quadrant, very little is actually know as fact about it. Explorers from DS9 did not go very far from the wormhole and Weyoun was a disinformation agent sent to deceive the Federation in preparation for the war they planned, the very definition of "unreliable narrator", so absolutely nothing he said about the Dominion or Gamma quadrant or any of its inhabitants can be trusted as true without outside verification such as scenes showing what he was talking about was actually the way he said.
Also, I doubt that the Iconians would not leave an escape route back to the Andromeda galaxy of some kind that did not depend on Dyson spheres spending a long time charging up with omega particles. It is reasonable that they might lock those routes off from others using them even if they have a gate (like the one on New Romulus or the ship gate in the next system over) though.
If someone gave Cryptic a few million in funding and a couple of years of development time, then sure it could be done.
It would never pay for itself as a sub-game of a F2P MMO, but it could be done.
Or if you just want to revisit the Third Borg Dynasty one last time, then one developer and less than a year would give you something very shallow, mildly erratic from the randomization, yet still repetitive. Like what we had before.
Star Charts is pretty good for a third party set of 2D maps of a 3D space, but as third party they didn't have much if any special insight into what was supposed to be there, they had to work it all out from clues in the shows just like the fan maps and whatnot. On top of that, the 2D nature of the maps severely limited what they can do with them.
And then there is the fact that at those distances the shows could not have happened the way they they did because of trip times. For instance, a bunch of D'deridex class ships skipping off to bomb the founder's homeworld could make the 5,150LY distance the map claims for the closer of the two in about two years (being generous here, warp 9.6 tears up their engines quickly but I put in 9.5), but the Galors top out at warp 8 so it would take them at least five years (and it would have taken a runabout 24 years to get there). Now, unless the Prophets were pulling some time tricks I just didn't see that kind of passage of time in The Die is Cast.
Obviously the map is wrong about the distances from the wormhole exit. In fact everything is too big because they are trying to fill up the galactic map with nations like the world map of today is and that just does not work for the technology they use in the show.
Take the Federation for example. The 8000 lightyear figure comes from Picard's answer to Lilly's question about how many worlds there are in the Federation but that figure might not refer to a solid diameter, in fact the majority of the evidence points to the main part of the Federation being much smaller than that. Picard may have been referring to the limits of Federation exploration or at least a fuzzy far less dense frontier shell surrounding the Federation core. And it is possible that greatest distance that separates any of those Federation satellite territories is a line 8,000 lightyears long.
According to Memory Alpha about Cestus III:
In the TOS warp formula scale subspace radio at the signal strength the relays were capable of at the time was about warp 15 (TOS scale) and if you plug that along with the travel times to Cestus III (in the part that I highlighted) the distance comes out to be about 200 ly, not 8,000. And apparently the writers were systematically using that 200 ly distance because it is corroborated by the second part of the quote (which came from a different episode) assuming that the Xhosa could make warp 8.6 (TNG scale) since 200 ly would indeed take eight weeks of travel time. And Cassidy Yates did mention that her ship could outrun a Galor but not by much (in this case about half a warp factor).
In Trials and Tribble-ations they actually come out and say (indirectly) that it is about 200 ly across because they say they jumped about 200 light years between where they started off (near Cardassia) to station K-7 which was on the Klingon border pretty much directly across the Federation from Cardassia.
Another factor is that Voyager was only finished at Mars three months before they set out from DS9 to catch Chakotay's ship. And it is unlikely that they meant it was built at some remote branch of the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards somewhere in the west of the Federation either since the first scene after the hook showed Janeway recruiting Paris in Nova Scotia on Earth. At Voyager's stated top speed of warp 9.975 it would have taken twice as long as that (about six months) just to reach DS9 if it was indeed 4,000 ly away, and to top it off Paris did not travel with Voyager to the station so he probably took something slower (whatever ship that shuttle was launched from).
On the other hand, if DS9 is only about a hundred lightyears from Earth it would take Voyager a mere three days to reach it and the Xhosa about a month, which means Paris probably came by way of a military ship when he met up with the Voyager already docked at DS9, (a Galaxy could have made it in a week or two for example, and the shuttle they approached the station in was one of the more common ones on a Galaxy class iirc).
In the older TOS era star maps the Federation was usually depicted as a 200 lightyear sphere, and except for a few outliers most of the figures for trip times and distances they give actually support the idea that the Federation is not much bigger than that. And a lot of the dialog shows that the writers in that and the later series were using that figure in most of the scripts (at least in the various series, the Trek movies usually didn't bother with much research at all as the movie division executives tended to look down their noses at anything as common and lowly as mere TV).
Even the map in Keiko O'Brian's classroom supports that to a large degree. Despite a lot of errors many of the distances between known real stars do match up (more or less) and the addition of labels reveals that the map from Conspiracy that many thought was just the Federation is instead the Federation and all of its neighbors together. The whole thing at its widest was just over 10,000 lightyears across, so if the Federation was 8000 across all by itself (which is not what that map shows) all their neighbors would have to have tiny territories in comparison.
Rick Sternbach has even talked about the Federation having distant colonies that act as local hubs in their area, like Deneb, Antares, and Rigel in a way that implies that it was the territorial model that they used on the shows. While that does not directly give information on the total size of the Federation it does suggest that Federation territory is not a solid monolithic block, but rather like an archipelago of archipelagos with a dense core of around 200 ly or so surrounded by smaller chains of inhabited star systems. If so, it is a situation like the old British Empire where they had holdings all over the world but did not own everything in between.
Actually, they haven't been inconsistent with speed as much as they have been a little shaky on distance, and even then they are often close enough.
I have already given examples of where the official warp factor formulas work out, and in trying to argue against my point you have given several examples that show they were in fact using the TNG era formula in TNG.
And yes, the Voyager trip time was exaggerated for dramatic effect, but slower is not as bad as too fast since the figure stated in the pilot was probably an assumed lower average speed taking into account having to refuel, maintenance downtime, and other assumed snags that would keep the Voyager from going top speed all the way.
The Q Who figures are not too far off assuming Data rounded the distance up to the nearest thousand and the writer used the flank speed thinking it was max cruise. For instance, they could travel 7000 ly in that time at an average speed of warp 9.54 or if it was actually 6750 ly they could make it travelling at 9.52. It is certainly close enough (even with mixing up flank and max cruise) to make it unlikely that the writer just pulled random numbers out of their backside.
And those numbers again prove that the Dominion capital is much too far from the wormhole on that map if the events of
The Die is Cast is to play out the way it was shown in DS9, (and the distance to the second capital was over twice what it was to the first). Thousands of lightyears is just too ridiculously high for the established technology to handle in the time periods shown in DS9.
How is the distance of Malcor III from Earth supposed to prove anything? Yes, it is 2000 ly from Earth and it would take close to a year to travel the distance at a Galaxy-class ship's maximum cruising speed but the episodes on either side of it don't say anything about being anywhere near earth. In fact, the closest episode that happens on Earth to First Contact is Family (s4e2) which takes place on November 28, 2366 while First Contact (s4e15) takes place sometime between June 3, 2367 and July 16, 2367.
The time span is in the area of 230 days from Earth which again is a little short (they could almost make it if they travelled at flank the entire way) but more importantly they are separated from Earth by 13 episodes which is a long string of stardates to keep track of over months of production time so minor errors are bound to happen.
As for how much of the galaxy is "explored", it is impossible for the Federation to have actually visited all of the star systems without Starfleet having billions of ships to do it with, which means that most of that area is probably just long range scanned, not actually explored in person. In fact some of it is probably starmaps done by others and traded to the Federation in exchange for something. Even using the old TOS 200 ly sphere figure for the Federation there would be over 14,600 stars in it. That would take quite a while to explore even without pushing out to other hubs.
As for Deneb, not only is it one of the outliers, it is not clear which one they visited in TOS since Star Trek calls both Alpha Cygni (2,600 ly distant) and Beta Ceti (96.3 ly) "Deneb". The Beta Ceti one is well within reasonable range of a TOS ship (about 28 days). Even Alpha Cygni is not too distant for the "archipelago of archipelagoes" model of the Federation at about seven and a half years since a ship probably would not make the trip in one go, most of the activity out that way would be based around the regional hub (probably Alpha Cygni itself) with only subspace radio making the full trip to and from Earth.
Most of the maps shown on the show severely disagree with each other so they can be discounted for the most part. In fact, about the only two that actually agreed with each other is the one first seen in Conspiracy and then a more detailed version was seen in DS9, and with those the detail showed that the assumption that the map in Conspiracy only showed the Federation was false, it in fact showed all of known space at the time.
Also, a lot of people seem to think that in Where No Man Has Gone Before the Enterprise went out to the rim of the galactic disk when instead it went straight "up" to the closest flat edge of the disk, a distance of a little under 500 ly (which is still an outlier unless that one mission took around three years, but they do have some errors like that, especially since a lot of those distances were not known with any accuracy at the time the show was made)