Revisiting Discovery, and Strange New Worlds

dataweaver42

I am not a fan of Discovery; but I'm loving Strange New Worlds so far. I'd love to see the "Discovery Federation" Faction retooled to serve as a "Strange New Worlds" Faction, including making the Enterprise's outfits and races such as the Aenar available from the start. (Personally, I'd also like to see the Andorians and Tellarites added to the starting races. I know I can make them using the generic Alien entry; and I'm thankful that option is available. But it's not the same.)

At the same time, I do understand that Discovery has its fans; and I wouldn't be averse to a new "32nd century Federation" faction being introduced to cater to them.

rattler2

The problem with that is that it would basically mean eliminating three entire story arcs that is integral to not only the DSC Feds, but the entire game's story because of J'ula. Remove Age of Discovery arc, and you'll have to remove both the J'ula's Discovery and the Klingon Civil War arcs as well because without J'ula, those followup arcs make no sense.

Frankly, for all intents and purposes Strange New Worlds and Discovery are in the same era. And a 32c Federation wouldn't make sense because time travel is banned in the 32nd Century so going back in time to the 25th makes no sense.
I would not object to having the SNW uniforms, in fact as teh costume fiend that I am I would LOVE to have them, and having the option for DSC Andorians and Tellarites is kinda overdue. I can understand some issues trying to integrate DSC Andorians with the existing TOS and ENT style if they were trying to roll them all together. If they can't I suppose they could do what they did with the DSC Klingons and make a subspecies option.

spiritborn

There's also 2 lore issues that rattler didn't mention, while accidental time travel from 32nd century is possible, you run head long into the issue you essentially did the Star Trek equivalent of a modern military commander with all the modern tech and all the knowledge of future events end up in the high middle ages the disruption to the timeline would be astronomical (noted that those 32c ships players use don't exist in STO lore and as far the story is concerned you're flying a 25c ship).

For person travelling from mid or late 23c to 25c there's no issue as long as that person doesn't travel back to 23c as there's not really anything they could disrupt in 2410s as far as the timeline is concerned as any events they'd have knowledge have already happened.

This brings into the second issue both the AoD and AoY arcs happen during events where your ship disappearing without a trace (as far as observers in the 2200s see it) with all hands lost isn't that odd. Your AoD ship disappears during the Battle for Starbase 1 so it's most likely assumed you and your crew were among of the countless Starfleet officers lost during the Klingon war, as for the AoY arc as far as Starfleet HQ knows your ship was lost with all hands in a battle with the Klingons and even if Starfleet was able to investigate the scene later it's probably hard for them to say which burnt out piece of hull plating belonged to which ship so there's no reason to investigate further.

However Strange New Worlds happens during peacetime or at least close enough to peacetime that a ship disappearing especially one filled with cadets would be Big Deal with a capital "b" so it would be much harder for your captain to be "lost to time" only to show up in 25c without anyone asking questions no one wants to answer, remember that our 23c characters (be they DSC or TOS) are suppose to pretend to be normal 25c captains in public.

darkbladejk

barring something extreme we've yet to see in Strange New Worlds, it's the same era. the only thing you might hope for is perhaps them adding some extra missions you can do from that era such as "historical simulations" which is how we got Battle at Binary Stars. I'm not the biggest fan of Discovery either for a multitude of reasons but I don't think you quite grasp how much work it would take to retool the entire subfaction. I see this as alot of work for very little benefit.

bltrrn

There's a lot more room for additional DSC-era aesthetic options...SNW, Klingon, Terran, 32ndC., all have a way to go towards accessibility. I've my issues with all four, but design isn't one of them, it's a good alternative option to TOS stuff.

phoenixc

If anything, if they did make an SNW subfaction it could probably use a slightly altered clone of the TOS tutorial similar to the way the DSC one uses the 2409 one as a basis. The devs probably would consider it too much work though so it will probably never happen.