> @jonsills said: > Retconning this would be simple enough - the 2410 launch was of the Yorktown refit, after the Odyssey-class was "compromised" as described. There you go.
The first appearance of Ent-F was in the final mission of the Lost Dominion arc. Prior to that Shon commanded the Defiant class Belfast. In the final mission of that arc Shon shows up in the Odyssey class Ent-F. Same ship shows up again in the Romulan patrols and some Dyson missions. It is not until after the Iconian arc that Ent-F is refitted to a Yorktown class.
> @jonsills said:
> Retconning this would be simple enough - the 2410 launch was of the Yorktown refit, after the Odyssey-class was "compromised" as described. There you go.
The first appearance of Ent-F was in the final mission of the Lost Dominion arc. Prior to that Shon commanded the Defiant class Belfast. In the final mission of that arc Shon shows up in the Odyssey class Ent-F. Same ship shows up again in the Romulan patrols and some Dyson missions. It is not until after the Iconian arc that Ent-F is refitted to a Yorktown class.
It's a retcon. That means the "history" is changed. And the Yorktown can look like an Oddy - check out USS Lorna Wing in my sig.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,595Community Moderator
We also have to consider that STO is not on screen alpha Canon. We have things in game still that conflict with what was shown on TV, such as the implied Data being alive to talk to Sela about Tasha Yar at the end of Survivors, Geordi being a Captain rather than a Commodore, two versions of Seven of Nine (which could be explained away via Butterfly), and the fact that in STO the Odyssey class was launched in 2409 rather than much sooner as implied on screen.
STO has tweaked some things to line up with canon, but the Devs have said that if anything deviates too much that it would significantly alter the game itself they would just branch STO off into its own timeline rather than remake the game to conform. But the fact STO has contributed to on screen alpha Canon is in itself an achievement, STO honestly was never going to be an alpha Canon source in itself as CBS could make things that contradict STO at any time.
So far there really hadn't been anything too drastic. The F's launch date is never uttered in a currently in-game mission and the person talking to Sela really could be anyone.
As far as I remember they only say "Enterprise" or "Voyager" in dialogue so I guess you could swap models out if absolutely needed. Treknobabble can explain away anything right?
I think what bothers me honestly is, while I know games are beta canon and always have been, STO was all we had for a while there, it was keeping the flame and giving us new content carrying on the stories and the characters and it has had influences on the shows and updated itself to keep in the line with them, I guess in a way I feel it's a bit disrespectful I suppose is the best word that someone can just disregard it so easily.
I'm being precious about it, I know, but it comes from a place of love. And before I can be misconstrued it does not at all mean that I'm going to hate on new content, my heart was a flutter all throughout today's new episode of Picard and I'm impatiently awaiting the return of Discovery, SNW and Lower Decks.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,595Community Moderator
Well... its implied that the Odyssey class in STO was launched in 2409 because we actually had an Anniversary Event involving it and the Bortasqu when they were first added into the game several years ago.
I remember that event, but I remember a lot of things that are sadly no longer in the game may they requiscat in all the pace, and removal tends to mean not canon. Although some removed missions remain canon in my heart but that is a brand new subject with a brand new tangent.
It is possible that the F was a prototype that for some reason was commissioned significantly earlier than the bulk of the class. That kind of thing has happened a few times in the real world.
Considering how many different classes share the Oddy base hull it is even quite possible that the F and the Odyssey were converted from an older class, with a different class name, that was upgraded to the point where the class was split off as a new class named after the ship that started that branch, but the tooling or whatever to produce new ones efficiently (and without the flaw that supposedly led to early decommissioning) enough to be acceptable to whatever budget office Starfleet has, took a while to develop.
That kind of thing makes sense with all of the sudden demands for large quantities of (probably cheaper and quicker to produce) ships due to war or whatever taking priority over development (and they do seem to have had a lot of trouble during that general period), and PIC probably actually shows that diversion of resources with that weird cookie-cutter fleet Riker showed up with in first season which apparently had a very short service life since that class seems to all but vanish within just a few years.
Germany's WWII aircraft carrier program is a classic example that kind of diversion in the real world, they started building the first (and only, none of its sister ships were ever started) ship in 1936 but had to shift to building more submarines so building it slowed to a crawl (and complete standstill quite often), then development of naval aircraft for it was put on hold in order to build more land-based planes for the blitz, and when they finally got to the point where they could launch the ship all the guns for it were pulled and used for shore defense and various other land based needs.
With all those delays it was never made fully operational and after the war the Russians analyzed it and then used it as a target dummy without it ever seeing combat, while in Trek (assuming the above scenario is true enough) the Oddys obviously avoided a similar ignominious fate but had rather a longish delay in the production models coming out instead.
Like I said, my head-retcon is that the 2409 event celebrated the Ent-F's relaunch after it finished its upgrades to Yorktown-class (as I recall, the first time she shows up to save the day she's already a Yorktown), allowing the Oddys to date back as far as needed to fit official canon.
As for Geordi being a captain now - Kirk was a Rear Admiral at the beginning of TMP, but took an official downgrade to Captain to command the Enterprise. By the time of TWoK, he was an Admiral again, but was demoted back to Captain and assigned command of the Ent-A after his court martial. No reason why Geordi might not have accepted an on-paper "demotion" to Captain so he could command the Challenger. (I mean, for a "captain", he's pretty sanguine about issuing orders to my admiral sometimes...)
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,595Community Moderator
We also have to consider that STO is not on screen alpha Canon. We have things in game still that conflict with what was shown on TV, such as the implied Data being alive to talk to Sela about Tasha Yar at the end of Survivors, Geordi being a Captain rather than a Commodore, two versions of Seven of Nine (which could be explained away via Butterfly), and the fact that in STO the Odyssey class was launched in 2409 rather than much sooner as implied on screen.
STO has tweaked some things to line up with canon, but the Devs have said that if anything deviates too much that it would significantly alter the game itself they would just branch STO off into its own timeline rather than remake the game to conform. But the fact STO has contributed to on screen alpha Canon is in itself an achievement, STO honestly was never going to be an alpha Canon source in itself as CBS could make things that contradict STO at any time.
I think this might be one of the instances where STO will deviate from Canon, because in game the Ent-F is actually a newer ship, launched in 2409. By decommissioning her before the start of the game... any kind of retcon like that would require a LOT of work to replace dialog and everything. And as we don't know what the next Enterprise in canon will look like... we'd just be faced with yet another deep cut retcon in the futue. So I'm predicting no actual change IN STO to accomodate this. STILL begs the question... what happened to Ent-E?
STO already has deviated with just more that what Picard has done to the history of the Odyssey Class 1701-F. In Picard S3 which takes place 7 or so years from the start of STO; Geordie LaForge is a Commodore (aka an Admiral level rank); but in this game in 2409 -2411, he's the Captain of the U.S.S Challenger.
And as for Worf, I have a feeling by the end of the first run streaming of Picard S3, hius history will be quite different than the history for him portrayed in STO.
At this point, STO is most definitely a non-canon, alternate timeline <--- And nothing at all wrong with that.
Pretty sure Commodore is the rank inbetween Captain and Admiral, Commodore is the Navy equivalent of a Brigadier so either Admiral or Captain could cover Commodore just fine without breaking Canon, it's not a big deal, just have to change some dialog and replace the word Captain with Commadore when referring to Geordi,
KDF Worf can be replaced by Rodek or any other House Mogh members,
As for Data anything related to Captain Data can now be transferred over to Brent Spiner's new character Attan Soong the human biological son of Noonian Soong.
Like I said, my head-retcon is that the 2409 event celebrated the Ent-F's relaunch after it finished its upgrades to Yorktown-class (as I recall, the first time she shows up to save the day she's already a Yorktown), allowing the Oddys to date back as far as needed to fit official canon.
As for Geordi being a captain now - Kirk was a Rear Admiral at the beginning of TMP, but took an official downgrade to Captain to command the Enterprise. By the time of TWoK, he was an Admiral again, but was demoted back to Captain and assigned command of the Ent-A after his court martial. No reason why Geordi might not have accepted an on-paper "demotion" to Captain so he could command the Challenger. (I mean, for a "captain", he's pretty sanguine about issuing orders to my admiral sometimes...)
Plenty of options, besides Geordi being Captain isn't even that big of a Demotion, it's just 1 rank lower than Commodore, mechanically Geordi can't be a Commodore ingame since that rank doesn't exist in STO, closest thing ingame would be either Captain or Lower Rear Admiral.
STO has tweaked some things to line up with canon, but the Devs have said that if anything deviates too much that it would significantly alter the game itself they would just branch STO off into its own timeline rather than remake the game to conform.
Did they say that? I would love to see confirmation of this, because current evidence is that they will try to jam STO into the prime universe however they can, despite it already being entirely incompatible. STO is already an alternate timeline, and Cryptic needs to just own that fact.
STO has tweaked some things to line up with canon, but the Devs have said that if anything deviates too much that it would significantly alter the game itself they would just branch STO off into its own timeline rather than remake the game to conform.
Did they say that? I would love to see confirmation of this, because current evidence is that they will try to jam STO into the prime universe however they can, despite it already being entirely incompatible. STO is already an alternate timeline, and Cryptic needs to just own that fact.
It is more a case of STO conforms to traditional Trek and NuTrek does not seem to bother with trying to keep up compatibility with traditional Trek. Objectively, NuTrek is more of an alternate timeline when it comes to right down to it, despite what CBS says their intentions are.
STO is flexible, their approach so far is almost an implied multiverse that glosses over the differences, so it would take quite a bit of discontinuity to force them into officially splitting it off from CBS Trek.
And yes, the devs did say that if worse comes to worse they will split off into their own continuity rather than gutting the game and starting over lore-wise.
STO has tweaked some things to line up with canon, but the Devs have said that if anything deviates too much that it would significantly alter the game itself they would just branch STO off into its own timeline rather than remake the game to conform.
Did they say that? I would love to see confirmation of this, because current evidence is that they will try to jam STO into the prime universe however they can, despite it already being entirely incompatible. STO is already an alternate timeline, and Cryptic needs to just own that fact.
After Icheb's death in Picard season 1, the Devs deleted his ingame model from the game itself, STO usually conforms with Canon,
Besides STO Worf is about to get the biggest recon in his entire existance, I guess we'll have to replace the KDF Worf with either Rodek or give Worf a Transporter Duplicate.
STO is flexible, their approach so far is almost an implied multiverse that glosses over the differences, so it would take quite a bit of discontinuity to force them into officially splitting it off from CBS Trek.
And yes, the devs did say that if worse comes to worse they will split off into their own continuity rather than gutting the game and starting over lore-wise.
I mean, it's hard to gloss over the differences from The Path to 2409, given that it used the Countdown (to the 2009 movie) comics as its story for what happened to Romulus, and the entire arc of AI rights through The Path being generally at odds with what we saw in Picard S1.
But as paradox says, we'll see what happens with Worf. Given that his appearance in STO is generally consistent with the story from The Path to 2409, I wonder if that'll finally be the sticking point. Or maybe the decommissioning of the F will finally be what allows STO to just give up and say 'yes, we're an alternate timeline, always have been.'
I guess I just don't see the need to try to force contradictory prime continuity into the established STO story, when there's a perfectly understandable reason (the fact that no new Trek was made for 10 years) that it's an alternate timeline.
I guess I just don't see the need to try to force contradictory prime continuity into the established STO story, when there's a perfectly understandable reason (the fact that no new Trek was made for 10 years) that it's an alternate timeline.
The point is that as long as it is possible to justify a link between STO and CBS Trek then the two will resonate with each other in the viewers'/players' minds and that is good for both in a business sense. Break that link and the synergistic effect ceases so both lose out to some degree.
I guess I just don't see the need to try to force contradictory prime continuity into the established STO story, when there's a perfectly understandable reason (the fact that no new Trek was made for 10 years) that it's an alternate timeline.
The point is that as long as it is possible to justify a link between STO and CBS Trek then the two will resonate with each other in the viewers'/players' minds and that is good for both in a business sense. Break that link and the synergistic effect ceases so both lose out to some degree.
I agree, I much prefer STO to take place in the Prime Timeline Canon universe instead of some AU, setting it in Alternate Universe takes away some of it's appeal, also if we do go down the AU route, then we should get a fully restored Romulus out of it, I'm not letting JJ leave his mark in 2 separate Trek Universes, blowing Romulus up in one universe was already bad enough.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,595Community Moderator
I agree, I much prefer STO to take place in the Prime Timeline Canon universe instead of some AU, setting it in Alternate Universe takes away some of it's appeal, also if we do go down the AU route, then we should get a fully restored Romulus out of it, I'm not letting JJ leave his mark in 2 separate Trek Universes, blowing Romulus up in one universe was already bad enough.
You're out of luck on that one as the destruction of Romulus was a key event that has a large impact on the game's story. Besides we've already deviated thanks to Picard s1. Data being dead dead, Hobus in STO vs probably the Romulus star in canon, uniforms, friendly Borg watching a transwarp gate ala s2 of Picard, Seven being in Starfleet...
If anything, STO is a parallel universe that closely aligns with Prime in terms of events. But not everything will be the same. That is the challenge of having an MMO set in a time period that is only now being covered by Canon. Do you expect the showrunners to conform to a pre-existing game?
I agree, I much prefer STO to take place in the Prime Timeline Canon universe instead of some AU, setting it in Alternate Universe takes away some of it's appeal, also if we do go down the AU route, then we should get a fully restored Romulus out of it, I'm not letting JJ leave his mark in 2 separate Trek Universes, blowing Romulus up in one universe was already bad enough.
You're out of luck on that one as the destruction of Romulus was a key event that has a large impact on the game's story. Besides we've already deviated thanks to Picard s1. Data being dead dead, Hobus in STO vs probably the Romulus star in canon, uniforms, friendly Borg watching a transwarp gate ala s2 of Picard, Seven being in Starfleet...
If anything, STO is a parallel universe that closely aligns with Prime in terms of events. But not everything will be the same. That is the challenge of having an MMO set in a time period that is only now being covered by Canon. Do you expect the showrunners to conform to a pre-existing game?
The current showrunners don't even conform to pre-existing series, so obviously not
Seriously though, the overall shape of events is reasonably the same between the game and the shows, and all the time travel makes changes in detail believable enough.
In the case of Schrödinger's Data, the discrepancies did not originate with the game, they go back to the last episode of TNG so it is show vs. show, not show vs. game.
The supernova is a classic paradox echo, in a previous iteration Hobus happened but something changed which prevented Hobus itself from blowing in the new iteration, so the paradox pressure diverted to the next candidate to keep the shape of events the same and the "Romulan star" went nova instead. Paradox would prevent saving Romulus, as was shown in the mission Butterfly that if you stop the nova entirely and save the planet itself the people on the planet are still lost to a different disaster (the paradox generated by the people is apparently greater than that generated by the nova itself).
All the other stuff is of lesser consequence since the new queen made sure to stay hidden and work behind the scenes (possibly deliberately trying to keep the paradox of her actions to a minimum until her target mission came around), uniform changes and whatnot are trivial (and Starfleet seems to be a collective fashionista and changes uniforms more often than their underwear anyway), and Seven probably shapes events in pretty much the same pattern whether she is in Starfleet or the Rangers.
I agree, I much prefer STO to take place in the Prime Timeline Canon universe instead of some AU, setting it in Alternate Universe takes away some of it's appeal, also if we do go down the AU route, then we should get a fully restored Romulus out of it, I'm not letting JJ leave his mark in 2 separate Trek Universes, blowing Romulus up in one universe was already bad enough.
You're out of luck on that one as the destruction of Romulus was a key event that has a large impact on the game's story. Besides we've already deviated thanks to Picard s1. Data being dead dead, Hobus in STO vs probably the Romulus star in canon, uniforms, friendly Borg watching a transwarp gate ala s2 of Picard, Seven being in Starfleet...
If anything, STO is a parallel universe that closely aligns with Prime in terms of events. But not everything will be the same. That is the challenge of having an MMO set in a time period that is only now being covered by Canon. Do you expect the showrunners to conform to a pre-existing game?
The current showrunners don't even conform to pre-existing series, so obviously not
Seriously though, the overall shape of events is reasonably the same between the game and the shows, and all the time travel makes changes in detail believable enough.
In the case of Schrödinger's Data, the discrepancies did not originate with the game, they go back to the last episode of TNG so it is show vs. show, not show vs. game.
The supernova is a classic paradox echo, in a previous iteration Hobus happened but something changed which prevented Hobus itself from blowing in the new iteration, so the paradox pressure diverted to the next candidate to keep the shape of events the same and the "Romulan star" went nova instead. Paradox would prevent saving Romulus, as was shown in the mission Butterfly that if you stop the nova entirely and save the planet itself the people on the planet are still lost to a different disaster (the paradox generated by the people is apparently greater than that generated by the nova itself).
All the other stuff is of lesser consequence since the new queen made sure to stay hidden and work behind the scenes (possibly deliberately trying to keep the paradox of her actions to a minimum until her target mission came around), uniform changes and whatnot are trivial (and Starfleet seems to be a collective fashionista and changes uniforms more often than their underwear anyway), and Seven probably shapes events in pretty much the same pattern whether she is in Starfleet or the Rangers.
Huh? TNG didn't bother to conform to A LOT of what occurred in the original Star Trek series, or TOS Feature films; but I never saw TNG being claimed as 'not canon' in 1987 onwards by Star Trek fans. Hell, Berman Era Trek (like all Star Trek before and after it) is VERY INTERNALLY INCONSITENT because in the end, if a piece of previous canon contradicted what they wanted to do in a story - said story they are telling at the time always precedence.
In fact the most consistent thing about the Star Trek Franchise over it's 59 year history (I'm including the fact it was pitched to NBC first in 1964) is the fact that ALL versions have been internally inconsistent.
The fact is: What's canon in Star Trek is what the Production Teams doing a show at the time put on the TV or Movie screen.
EVERYTHING ELSE be it Novels, Comics, Video Games (which is what Star Trek is), etc. are non or soft canon. Elements from these sources can become canon (as many ship designs from STO now have because the current Trek production Teams have used and shown them on the TV screen in Picard.)
But the overall storyline of STO has never been Star Trek Canon; except for any elements the current Star Trek Production team decides to use.
Sorry sir STO (except what the current production Teams decide to cherry pick and put into their series) isn't canon.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
I agree, I much prefer STO to take place in the Prime Timeline Canon universe instead of some AU, setting it in Alternate Universe takes away some of it's appeal, also if we do go down the AU route, then we should get a fully restored Romulus out of it, I'm not letting JJ leave his mark in 2 separate Trek Universes, blowing Romulus up in one universe was already bad enough.
You're out of luck on that one as the destruction of Romulus was a key event that has a large impact on the game's story. Besides we've already deviated thanks to Picard s1. Data being dead dead, Hobus in STO vs probably the Romulus star in canon, uniforms, friendly Borg watching a transwarp gate ala s2 of Picard, Seven being in Starfleet...
If anything, STO is a parallel universe that closely aligns with Prime in terms of events. But not everything will be the same. That is the challenge of having an MMO set in a time period that is only now being covered by Canon. Do you expect the showrunners to conform to a pre-existing game?
The current showrunners don't even conform to pre-existing series, so obviously not
Seriously though, the overall shape of events is reasonably the same between the game and the shows, and all the time travel makes changes in detail believable enough.
In the case of Schrödinger's Data, the discrepancies did not originate with the game, they go back to the last episode of TNG so it is show vs. show, not show vs. game.
The supernova is a classic paradox echo, in a previous iteration Hobus happened but something changed which prevented Hobus itself from blowing in the new iteration, so the paradox pressure diverted to the next candidate to keep the shape of events the same and the "Romulan star" went nova instead. Paradox would prevent saving Romulus, as was shown in the mission Butterfly that if you stop the nova entirely and save the planet itself the people on the planet are still lost to a different disaster (the paradox generated by the people is apparently greater than that generated by the nova itself).
All the other stuff is of lesser consequence since the new queen made sure to stay hidden and work behind the scenes (possibly deliberately trying to keep the paradox of her actions to a minimum until her target mission came around), uniform changes and whatnot are trivial (and Starfleet seems to be a collective fashionista and changes uniforms more often than their underwear anyway), and Seven probably shapes events in pretty much the same pattern whether she is in Starfleet or the Rangers.
Huh? TNG didn't bother to conform to A LOT of what occurred in the original Star Trek series, or TOS Feature films; but I never saw TNG being claimed as 'not canon' in 1987 onwards by Star Trek fans. Hell, Berman Era Trek (like all Star Trek before and after it) is VERY INTERNALLY INCONSITENT because in the end, if a piece of previous canon contradicted what they wanted to do in a story - said story they are telling at the time always precedence.
In fact the most consistent thing about the Star Trek Franchise over it's 59 year history (I'm including the fact it was pitched to NBC first in 1964) is the fact that ALL versions have been internally inconsistent.
The fact is: What's canon in Star Trek is what the Production Teams doing a show at the time put on the TV or Movie screen.
EVERYTHING ELSE be it Novels, Comics, Video Games (which is what Star Trek is), etc. are non or soft canon. Elements from these sources can become canon (as many ship designs from STO now have because the current Trek production Teams have used and shown them on the TV screen in Picard.)
But the overall storyline of STO has never been Star Trek Canon; except for any elements the current Star Trek Production team decides to use.
Sorry sir STO (except what the current production Teams decide to cherry pick and put into their series) isn't canon.
Who said STO was canon? And I did not say anything about TNG not being canon either.
I was talking about the differences between traditional Trek shows and NuTrek shows and giving examples of how STO's following traditional continuity before the current Treks is not a problem because those discrepancies between traditional and NuTrek already exist without STO's input, and for which the only sensible explanation for those discrepancies between shows is paradox from all the time travel they do in the shows.
And yes, no third-party content is canon unless it appears later in the official shows. That is a good thing too since the official Trek lore of the shows is complicated enough by Paramount Pictures trying to ape Star Wars in the movie era and other nonsense, followed by NuTrek and its track record of non-compliance with all the earlier series.
The Berman era shows explained the changes in various ways, including time travel paradox (like for instance the Temporal Cold War stuff). In fact, if you listen to the dialog in ENT and VOY (and to some degree TNG) that deal with time travel, they point out that the general shape of events tends to be the same and is not always easy to change, (though at times they show it to be too simple to do so for the purposes of an episode's plot) despite details changing with each intervention.
If my mentioning Butterfly was confusing I apologize, but I used it only to illustrate the concept of paradox pressure in general using a reference that people playing this game would be familiar with and not trying to assert that STO has the power to set canon. In fact, if you analyze the mission plot Butterfly was not introducing any new concepts, it was just following the concepts already in Trek to weave an original scenario around.
As for internal consistency, the various Treks are more consistent than a lot of people think (though that is too long a discussion to rehash here) and most of those inconsistencies did not change canon, they were one-off bits of nonsense like the "you cannot turn in warp" BS that was only ever in one episode of VOY because the plot depended on it and was never seen again. A lot of what people point to as "retcons" is simply fleshing out the gray areas (like the different ways Kirk would identify the ship at various times in the first season of TOS).
But internal consistency of each particular series is not the issue here anyway, it is about the gap in the shows in which STO was doing their own thing before NuTrek came out and how likely it is that NuTrek will do something that STO cannot adapt to. And my point is, any way you look at it NuTrek would have to make some really radical changes to do anything that STO would not be able to explain away using already existing concepts like paradox from the various series (including NuTreks themselves) so it is not very likely that STO will have to use the last resort of declaring itself a divergent timeline.
I agree, I much prefer STO to take place in the Prime Timeline Canon universe instead of some AU, setting it in Alternate Universe takes away some of it's appeal, also if we do go down the AU route, then we should get a fully restored Romulus out of it, I'm not letting JJ leave his mark in 2 separate Trek Universes, blowing Romulus up in one universe was already bad enough.
You're out of luck on that one as the destruction of Romulus was a key event that has a large impact on the game's story. Besides we've already deviated thanks to Picard s1. Data being dead dead, Hobus in STO vs probably the Romulus star in canon, uniforms, friendly Borg watching a transwarp gate ala s2 of Picard, Seven being in Starfleet...
If anything, STO is a parallel universe that closely aligns with Prime in terms of events. But not everything will be the same. That is the challenge of having an MMO set in a time period that is only now being covered by Canon. Do you expect the showrunners to conform to a pre-existing game?
The current showrunners don't even conform to pre-existing series, so obviously not
Seriously though, the overall shape of events is reasonably the same between the game and the shows, and all the time travel makes changes in detail believable enough.
In the case of Schrödinger's Data, the discrepancies did not originate with the game, they go back to the last episode of TNG so it is show vs. show, not show vs. game.
The supernova is a classic paradox echo, in a previous iteration Hobus happened but something changed which prevented Hobus itself from blowing in the new iteration, so the paradox pressure diverted to the next candidate to keep the shape of events the same and the "Romulan star" went nova instead. Paradox would prevent saving Romulus, as was shown in the mission Butterfly that if you stop the nova entirely and save the planet itself the people on the planet are still lost to a different disaster (the paradox generated by the people is apparently greater than that generated by the nova itself).
All the other stuff is of lesser consequence since the new queen made sure to stay hidden and work behind the scenes (possibly deliberately trying to keep the paradox of her actions to a minimum until her target mission came around), uniform changes and whatnot are trivial (and Starfleet seems to be a collective fashionista and changes uniforms more often than their underwear anyway), and Seven probably shapes events in pretty much the same pattern whether she is in Starfleet or the Rangers.
Huh? TNG didn't bother to conform to A LOT of what occurred in the original Star Trek series, or TOS Feature films; but I never saw TNG being claimed as 'not canon' in 1987 onwards by Star Trek fans. Hell, Berman Era Trek (like all Star Trek before and after it) is VERY INTERNALLY INCONSITENT because in the end, if a piece of previous canon contradicted what they wanted to do in a story - said story they are telling at the time always precedence.
In fact the most consistent thing about the Star Trek Franchise over it's 59 year history (I'm including the fact it was pitched to NBC first in 1964) is the fact that ALL versions have been internally inconsistent.
The fact is: What's canon in Star Trek is what the Production Teams doing a show at the time put on the TV or Movie screen.
EVERYTHING ELSE be it Novels, Comics, Video Games (which is what Star Trek is), etc. are non or soft canon. Elements from these sources can become canon (as many ship designs from STO now have because the current Trek production Teams have used and shown them on the TV screen in Picard.)
But the overall storyline of STO has never been Star Trek Canon; except for any elements the current Star Trek Production team decides to use.
Sorry sir STO (except what the current production Teams decide to cherry pick and put into their series) isn't canon.
Well said. But actually, there was a lot of resistance to TNG when it first debuted. Much like people do with the newer Trek shows now. It took a while for TNG to become loved. 30 years from now a new generation will be nostalgic for Discovery and resistant to whatever the current Trek is. *queues up Circle of Life*
Who said STO was canon? And I did not say anything about TNG not being canon either.
I was talking about the differences between traditional Trek shows and NuTrek shows and giving examples of how STO's following traditional continuity before the current Treks is not a problem because those discrepancies between traditional and NuTrek already exist without STO's input, and for which the only sensible explanation for those discrepancies between shows is paradox from all the time travel they do in the shows.
And yes, no third-party content is canon unless it appears later in the official shows. That is a good thing too since the official Trek lore of the shows is complicated enough by Paramount Pictures trying to ape Star Wars in the movie era and other nonsense, followed by NuTrek and its track record of non-compliance with all the earlier series.
The Berman era shows explained the changes in various ways, including time travel paradox (like for instance the Temporal Cold War stuff). In fact, if you listen to the dialog in ENT and VOY (and to some degree TNG) that deal with time travel, they point out that the general shape of events tends to be the same and is not always easy to change, (though at times they show it to be too simple to do so for the purposes of an episode's plot) despite details changing with each intervention.
If my mentioning Butterfly was confusing I apologize, but I used it only to illustrate the concept of paradox pressure in general using a reference that people playing this game would be familiar with and not trying to assert that STO has the power to set canon. In fact, if you analyze the mission plot Butterfly was not introducing any new concepts, it was just following the concepts already in Trek to weave an original scenario around.
As for internal consistency, the various Treks are more consistent than a lot of people think (though that is too long a discussion to rehash here) and most of those inconsistencies did not change canon, they were one-off bits of nonsense like the "you cannot turn in warp" BS that was only ever in one episode of VOY because the plot depended on it and was never seen again. A lot of what people point to as "retcons" is simply fleshing out the gray areas (like the different ways Kirk would identify the ship at various times in the first season of TOS).
But internal consistency of each particular series is not the issue here anyway, it is about the gap in the shows in which STO was doing their own thing before NuTrek came out and how likely it is that NuTrek will do something that STO cannot adapt to. And my point is, any way you look at it NuTrek would have to make some really radical changes to do anything that STO would not be able to explain away using already existing concepts like paradox from the various series (including NuTreks themselves) so it is not very likely that STO will have to use the last resort of declaring itself a divergent timeline.
I mean even the Prime Timeline been affected by time travel, in ENT Daniels points out that the Xindi attack on Earth wasn't supposed to happen.
Some of these nitpicks don't actually make sense. "The Romulan star", for instance - that means a star in space claimed by the Romulan Star Empire went supernova. It doesn't have to have been Eisn. That would be like someone blowing up Olympia, WA, the headline reading "Capital of US State Destroyed", and folks leaping to the conclusion that since the US is a nation-state in its own right, the headline must therefore be referring to the city of Washington, DC.
Pretty sure Commodore is the rank inbetween Captain and Admiral, Commodore is the Navy equivalent of a Brigadier so either Admiral or Captain could cover Commodore just fine without breaking Canon, it's not a big deal, just have to change some dialog and replace the word Captain with Commadore when referring to Geordi
Commodore is a 1-star flag officer. In US parlance, the name of the rank was changed to 'Rear Admiral Lower Half' and the old 2-star Rear Admiral became the 'upper half'. Regardless, a commodore is a higher rank than a naval captain. Also, the commander of a ship has the title of 'Captain', no matter the actual rank. An O2, (Lieutenant Junior Grade) is 'Captain' if they are the designated commanding officer of the ship. There is no disconnect from having a rank of commodore or admiral and a title of 'Captain' when in command of a ship.
I agree, I much prefer STO to take place in the Prime Timeline Canon universe instead of some AU, setting it in Alternate Universe takes away some of it's appeal, also if we do go down the AU route, then we should get a fully restored Romulus out of it, I'm not letting JJ leave his mark in 2 separate Trek Universes, blowing Romulus up in one universe was already bad enough.
You're out of luck on that one as the destruction of Romulus was a key event that has a large impact on the game's story. Besides we've already deviated thanks to Picard s1. Data being dead dead, Hobus in STO vs probably the Romulus star in canon, uniforms, friendly Borg watching a transwarp gate ala s2 of Picard, Seven being in Starfleet...
If anything, STO is a parallel universe that closely aligns with Prime in terms of events. But not everything will be the same. That is the challenge of having an MMO set in a time period that is only now being covered by Canon. Do you expect the showrunners to conform to a pre-existing game?
The current showrunners don't even conform to pre-existing series, so obviously not
Seriously though, the overall shape of events is reasonably the same between the game and the shows, and all the time travel makes changes in detail believable enough.
In the case of Schrödinger's Data, the discrepancies did not originate with the game, they go back to the last episode of TNG so it is show vs. show, not show vs. game.
The supernova is a classic paradox echo, in a previous iteration Hobus happened but something changed which prevented Hobus itself from blowing in the new iteration, so the paradox pressure diverted to the next candidate to keep the shape of events the same and the "Romulan star" went nova instead. Paradox would prevent saving Romulus, as was shown in the mission Butterfly that if you stop the nova entirely and save the planet itself the people on the planet are still lost to a different disaster (the paradox generated by the people is apparently greater than that generated by the nova itself).
All the other stuff is of lesser consequence since the new queen made sure to stay hidden and work behind the scenes (possibly deliberately trying to keep the paradox of her actions to a minimum until her target mission came around), uniform changes and whatnot are trivial (and Starfleet seems to be a collective fashionista and changes uniforms more often than their underwear anyway), and Seven probably shapes events in pretty much the same pattern whether she is in Starfleet or the Rangers.
Huh? TNG didn't bother to conform to A LOT of what occurred in the original Star Trek series, or TOS Feature films; but I never saw TNG being claimed as 'not canon' in 1987 onwards by Star Trek fans. Hell, Berman Era Trek (like all Star Trek before and after it) is VERY INTERNALLY INCONSITENT because in the end, if a piece of previous canon contradicted what they wanted to do in a story - said story they are telling at the time always precedence.
In fact the most consistent thing about the Star Trek Franchise over it's 59 year history (I'm including the fact it was pitched to NBC first in 1964) is the fact that ALL versions have been internally inconsistent.
The fact is: What's canon in Star Trek is what the Production Teams doing a show at the time put on the TV or Movie screen.
EVERYTHING ELSE be it Novels, Comics, Video Games (which is what Star Trek is), etc. are non or soft canon. Elements from these sources can become canon (as many ship designs from STO now have because the current Trek production Teams have used and shown them on the TV screen in Picard.)
But the overall storyline of STO has never been Star Trek Canon; except for any elements the current Star Trek Production team decides to use.
Sorry sir STO (except what the current production Teams decide to cherry pick and put into their series) isn't canon.
Well said. But actually, there was a lot of resistance to TNG when it first debuted. Much like people do with the newer Trek shows now. It took a while for TNG to become loved. 30 years from now a new generation will be nostalgic for Discovery and resistant to whatever the current Trek is. *queues up Circle of Life*
TNG was a weird case for a number of reasons, so it was a rough start. A lot of the problems started well before the series was even greenlighted because of things like backlash against the 1960s "hippie" and Mod culture and aesthetics, changes in the way Hollywood viewed sci-fi in general (moving from a futuristic to a "realist" model), the fact that Paramount Pictures wanted to coattail Star Wars, and other factors including the really weird phenomena of "TOS contempt" that has been the subject of so many psychology and entertainment theory papers over the years.
A lot of the problems though were just because the first season of TNG sucked for most of the episodes because the writers were not allowed to do their thing in peace. A lot of that came from Roddenberry's troll of a lawyer making the environment extremely toxic and actually tampering with scripts (they held the record for writer's room toxicity until the 2002 Birds of Prey came out).
On top of that toxicity the writers were rushed because shortly before filming was to start the executives decided to abandon the really weird Starfleet/civilian parallel setup the show was based around (no one got that format right until the Japanese did it with the Macross colony shows a few years later) and double down on the dull "space procedural" stuff (though they retained the A-plot/B-plot format from it, just changing the focus so both pointed to the Starfleet side most of the time). They ended up racing to completely overhaul scripts to fit the change of format and quickly write new ones to replace the unsalvageable ones and cut a lot of corners in the process.
By the end of the first season the entire writing staff had left in disgust and the second season had to start with all new writers who had to make a cold start and took the usual amount of time to find their footing (the troll was banished after the writer's guild started investigating complaints from the first season writers which helped a lot) so most of the usual first season rough edges were there in second season TNG too.
With all that is it unsurprising that many of the original fans were not exactly ecstatic about TNG at first. Personally, I still rate it rather low on the list of Trek shows, and I know quite a few other Trek fans do the same (just look at the threads about series preferences in this forum to see that in fact).
Some of these nitpicks don't actually make sense. "The Romulan star", for instance - that means a star in space claimed by the Romulan Star Empire went supernova. It doesn't have to have been Eisn. That would be like someone blowing up Olympia, WA, the headline reading "Capital of US State Destroyed", and folks leaping to the conclusion that since the US is a nation-state in its own right, the headline must therefore be referring to the city of Washington, DC.
True. As far as I know of, they never really nailed down where exactly Hobus was so it could have been the closest star to the Romulan capital star system.
Even better would have been if PIC had simplified it to the star that went nova being a distant binary partner of the Romulan capital's star, some of those orbit each other at a distance of several light-months or even a lightyear or so. At several light months distance it would have given the Federation enough time to do that rescue ship program (and the equally ill-fated red matter fix attempt earlier in the same timeframe) without having to resort to the fantasy nonsense of FTL supernovas.
The binary star thing, if they had done it, would not mean that STO would have been canonshafted either, there could have been the subspace disturbance that the STO missions depend on since, iirc, there was little or nothing in the dialog about the subspace element itself actually destroying material objects like planets. It could very well have caused its own havoc with technological stuff in the area as the wavefront propagated for instance.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,595Community Moderator
Outside of comics and STO, they never actually identified WHICH star it was in canon. In '09 Spock only said that it was a star that went nova. In Picard, they did identify it as a Romulan star. It was only in the comics that they actually gave the star a name. And since the Countdown comic has been contradicted... we still don't have an actual name for the star that went nova.
All we know for sure is that it was at least close enough to hit Romulus, and it is POSSIBLE that it threatened a large section of the quadrant somehow.
Commodore is a 1-star flag officer. In US parlance, the name of the rank was changed to 'Rear Admiral Lower Half' and the old 2-star Rear Admiral became the 'upper half'. Regardless, a commodore is a higher rank than a naval captain.
Yes and no.
Historically, commodore wasn't an actual rank, but a job description.
It referred to a captain of a ship given command of a group of ships, typically called a squadron, for a certain amount of time or a certain mission.
During that time/mission he outranks the captains of the other ships in his squadron, but does not outrank the captain of a ship that is not part of his squadron.
Later some Navies (e.g. the british Royal Navy) have adopted commodore as an actual rank between Captain and Rear admiral.
AFAIK there is no clear evidence of how this is handled in Starfleet.
Commodore is a 1-star flag officer. In US parlance, the name of the rank was changed to 'Rear Admiral Lower Half' and the old 2-star Rear Admiral became the 'upper half'. Regardless, a commodore is a higher rank than a naval captain.
Yes and no.
Historically, commodore wasn't an actual rank, but a job description.
It referred to a captain of a ship given command of a group of ships, typically called a squadron, for a certain amount of time or a certain mission.
During that time/mission he outranks the captains of the other ships in his squadron, but does not outrank the captain of a ship that is not part of his squadron.
Later some Navies (e.g. the british Royal Navy) have adopted commodore as an actual rank between Captain and Rear admiral.
AFAIK there is no clear evidence of how this is handled in Starfleet.
There are actually quite a few clues scattered around in throwaway dialog and bits of protocol shown that point to Starfleet using something more like the usage of the term that Ironphoenix mentioned, and its later change into the upper and lower nonsense.
For one, in the 2260s (at least) they are shown to make a distinction between Commodore (which is at least implied to be a flag rank) and "Fleet Captain", the latter of which seems to operate as a situational "first among equals" non-flag rank role title the way Realdarklord describes. Another one is that Commodore had a permanent rank insignia of its own, whereas if the officer was just another captain filling a larger than normal role they would probably have captain's rings. Instead, Commodore used the "thick ring" style like admiral ranks instead of the solid-or-broken equal-width cuff rings of non-flag rank officers.
In PIC, all known flag ranks are denoted by a silver trapezoid frame around rank pips while non-flag officer ranks just have the bare pips, and if you look closely at Commodore Oh's rank insignia it is one pip with a trapezoid frame around it, which also points to it being a flag rank rather than just an expanded captain role.
It is probable that the term 'Rear Admiral Lower Half' and Commodore are used interchangeably informally.
What if the whole Changeling thing actually makes STO's plot make a little more sense. They deal with Changeling infiltrators and then a couple of years later the Klingons get 8472'd but Starfleet are like nah we dealt with this problem already. Makes more sense than the current one where the Federations seem like douchebags.
Comments
> Retconning this would be simple enough - the 2410 launch was of the Yorktown refit, after the Odyssey-class was "compromised" as described. There you go.
The first appearance of Ent-F was in the final mission of the Lost Dominion arc. Prior to that Shon commanded the Defiant class Belfast. In the final mission of that arc Shon shows up in the Odyssey class Ent-F. Same ship shows up again in the Romulan patrols and some Dyson missions. It is not until after the Iconian arc that Ent-F is refitted to a Yorktown class.
STO has tweaked some things to line up with canon, but the Devs have said that if anything deviates too much that it would significantly alter the game itself they would just branch STO off into its own timeline rather than remake the game to conform. But the fact STO has contributed to on screen alpha Canon is in itself an achievement, STO honestly was never going to be an alpha Canon source in itself as CBS could make things that contradict STO at any time.
As far as I remember they only say "Enterprise" or "Voyager" in dialogue so I guess you could swap models out if absolutely needed. Treknobabble can explain away anything right?
I think what bothers me honestly is, while I know games are beta canon and always have been, STO was all we had for a while there, it was keeping the flame and giving us new content carrying on the stories and the characters and it has had influences on the shows and updated itself to keep in the line with them, I guess in a way I feel it's a bit disrespectful I suppose is the best word that someone can just disregard it so easily.
I'm being precious about it, I know, but it comes from a place of love. And before I can be misconstrued it does not at all mean that I'm going to hate on new content, my heart was a flutter all throughout today's new episode of Picard and I'm impatiently awaiting the return of Discovery, SNW and Lower Decks.
Considering how many different classes share the Oddy base hull it is even quite possible that the F and the Odyssey were converted from an older class, with a different class name, that was upgraded to the point where the class was split off as a new class named after the ship that started that branch, but the tooling or whatever to produce new ones efficiently (and without the flaw that supposedly led to early decommissioning) enough to be acceptable to whatever budget office Starfleet has, took a while to develop.
That kind of thing makes sense with all of the sudden demands for large quantities of (probably cheaper and quicker to produce) ships due to war or whatever taking priority over development (and they do seem to have had a lot of trouble during that general period), and PIC probably actually shows that diversion of resources with that weird cookie-cutter fleet Riker showed up with in first season which apparently had a very short service life since that class seems to all but vanish within just a few years.
Germany's WWII aircraft carrier program is a classic example that kind of diversion in the real world, they started building the first (and only, none of its sister ships were ever started) ship in 1936 but had to shift to building more submarines so building it slowed to a crawl (and complete standstill quite often), then development of naval aircraft for it was put on hold in order to build more land-based planes for the blitz, and when they finally got to the point where they could launch the ship all the guns for it were pulled and used for shore defense and various other land based needs.
With all those delays it was never made fully operational and after the war the Russians analyzed it and then used it as a target dummy without it ever seeing combat, while in Trek (assuming the above scenario is true enough) the Oddys obviously avoided a similar ignominious fate but had rather a longish delay in the production models coming out instead.
As for Geordi being a captain now - Kirk was a Rear Admiral at the beginning of TMP, but took an official downgrade to Captain to command the Enterprise. By the time of TWoK, he was an Admiral again, but was demoted back to Captain and assigned command of the Ent-A after his court martial. No reason why Geordi might not have accepted an on-paper "demotion" to Captain so he could command the Challenger. (I mean, for a "captain", he's pretty sanguine about issuing orders to my admiral sometimes...)
Same can be said of Captain Kim.
Plenty of options, besides Geordi being Captain isn't even that big of a Demotion, it's just 1 rank lower than Commodore, mechanically Geordi can't be a Commodore ingame since that rank doesn't exist in STO, closest thing ingame would be either Captain or Lower Rear Admiral.
Did they say that? I would love to see confirmation of this, because current evidence is that they will try to jam STO into the prime universe however they can, despite it already being entirely incompatible. STO is already an alternate timeline, and Cryptic needs to just own that fact.
It is more a case of STO conforms to traditional Trek and NuTrek does not seem to bother with trying to keep up compatibility with traditional Trek. Objectively, NuTrek is more of an alternate timeline when it comes to right down to it, despite what CBS says their intentions are.
STO is flexible, their approach so far is almost an implied multiverse that glosses over the differences, so it would take quite a bit of discontinuity to force them into officially splitting it off from CBS Trek.
And yes, the devs did say that if worse comes to worse they will split off into their own continuity rather than gutting the game and starting over lore-wise.
After Icheb's death in Picard season 1, the Devs deleted his ingame model from the game itself, STO usually conforms with Canon,
Besides STO Worf is about to get the biggest recon in his entire existance, I guess we'll have to replace the KDF Worf with either Rodek or give Worf a Transporter Duplicate.
I mean, it's hard to gloss over the differences from The Path to 2409, given that it used the Countdown (to the 2009 movie) comics as its story for what happened to Romulus, and the entire arc of AI rights through The Path being generally at odds with what we saw in Picard S1.
But as paradox says, we'll see what happens with Worf. Given that his appearance in STO is generally consistent with the story from The Path to 2409, I wonder if that'll finally be the sticking point. Or maybe the decommissioning of the F will finally be what allows STO to just give up and say 'yes, we're an alternate timeline, always have been.'
I guess I just don't see the need to try to force contradictory prime continuity into the established STO story, when there's a perfectly understandable reason (the fact that no new Trek was made for 10 years) that it's an alternate timeline.
The point is that as long as it is possible to justify a link between STO and CBS Trek then the two will resonate with each other in the viewers'/players' minds and that is good for both in a business sense. Break that link and the synergistic effect ceases so both lose out to some degree.
I agree, I much prefer STO to take place in the Prime Timeline Canon universe instead of some AU, setting it in Alternate Universe takes away some of it's appeal, also if we do go down the AU route, then we should get a fully restored Romulus out of it, I'm not letting JJ leave his mark in 2 separate Trek Universes, blowing Romulus up in one universe was already bad enough.
You're out of luck on that one as the destruction of Romulus was a key event that has a large impact on the game's story. Besides we've already deviated thanks to Picard s1. Data being dead dead, Hobus in STO vs probably the Romulus star in canon, uniforms, friendly Borg watching a transwarp gate ala s2 of Picard, Seven being in Starfleet...
If anything, STO is a parallel universe that closely aligns with Prime in terms of events. But not everything will be the same. That is the challenge of having an MMO set in a time period that is only now being covered by Canon. Do you expect the showrunners to conform to a pre-existing game?
The current showrunners don't even conform to pre-existing series, so obviously not
Seriously though, the overall shape of events is reasonably the same between the game and the shows, and all the time travel makes changes in detail believable enough.
Huh? TNG didn't bother to conform to A LOT of what occurred in the original Star Trek series, or TOS Feature films; but I never saw TNG being claimed as 'not canon' in 1987 onwards by Star Trek fans. Hell, Berman Era Trek (like all Star Trek before and after it) is VERY INTERNALLY INCONSITENT because in the end, if a piece of previous canon contradicted what they wanted to do in a story - said story they are telling at the time always precedence.
In fact the most consistent thing about the Star Trek Franchise over it's 59 year history (I'm including the fact it was pitched to NBC first in 1964) is the fact that ALL versions have been internally inconsistent.
The fact is: What's canon in Star Trek is what the Production Teams doing a show at the time put on the TV or Movie screen.
EVERYTHING ELSE be it Novels, Comics, Video Games (which is what Star Trek is), etc. are non or soft canon. Elements from these sources can become canon (as many ship designs from STO now have because the current Trek production Teams have used and shown them on the TV screen in Picard.)
But the overall storyline of STO has never been Star Trek Canon; except for any elements the current Star Trek Production team decides to use.
Sorry sir STO (except what the current production Teams decide to cherry pick and put into their series) isn't canon.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Who said STO was canon? And I did not say anything about TNG not being canon either.
I was talking about the differences between traditional Trek shows and NuTrek shows and giving examples of how STO's following traditional continuity before the current Treks is not a problem because those discrepancies between traditional and NuTrek already exist without STO's input, and for which the only sensible explanation for those discrepancies between shows is paradox from all the time travel they do in the shows.
And yes, no third-party content is canon unless it appears later in the official shows. That is a good thing too since the official Trek lore of the shows is complicated enough by Paramount Pictures trying to ape Star Wars in the movie era and other nonsense, followed by NuTrek and its track record of non-compliance with all the earlier series.
The Berman era shows explained the changes in various ways, including time travel paradox (like for instance the Temporal Cold War stuff). In fact, if you listen to the dialog in ENT and VOY (and to some degree TNG) that deal with time travel, they point out that the general shape of events tends to be the same and is not always easy to change, (though at times they show it to be too simple to do so for the purposes of an episode's plot) despite details changing with each intervention.
If my mentioning Butterfly was confusing I apologize, but I used it only to illustrate the concept of paradox pressure in general using a reference that people playing this game would be familiar with and not trying to assert that STO has the power to set canon. In fact, if you analyze the mission plot Butterfly was not introducing any new concepts, it was just following the concepts already in Trek to weave an original scenario around.
As for internal consistency, the various Treks are more consistent than a lot of people think (though that is too long a discussion to rehash here) and most of those inconsistencies did not change canon, they were one-off bits of nonsense like the "you cannot turn in warp" BS that was only ever in one episode of VOY because the plot depended on it and was never seen again. A lot of what people point to as "retcons" is simply fleshing out the gray areas (like the different ways Kirk would identify the ship at various times in the first season of TOS).
But internal consistency of each particular series is not the issue here anyway, it is about the gap in the shows in which STO was doing their own thing before NuTrek came out and how likely it is that NuTrek will do something that STO cannot adapt to. And my point is, any way you look at it NuTrek would have to make some really radical changes to do anything that STO would not be able to explain away using already existing concepts like paradox from the various series (including NuTreks themselves) so it is not very likely that STO will have to use the last resort of declaring itself a divergent timeline.
Well said. But actually, there was a lot of resistance to TNG when it first debuted. Much like people do with the newer Trek shows now. It took a while for TNG to become loved. 30 years from now a new generation will be nostalgic for Discovery and resistant to whatever the current Trek is. *queues up Circle of Life*
I mean even the Prime Timeline been affected by time travel, in ENT Daniels points out that the Xindi attack on Earth wasn't supposed to happen.
Commodore is a 1-star flag officer. In US parlance, the name of the rank was changed to 'Rear Admiral Lower Half' and the old 2-star Rear Admiral became the 'upper half'. Regardless, a commodore is a higher rank than a naval captain. Also, the commander of a ship has the title of 'Captain', no matter the actual rank. An O2, (Lieutenant Junior Grade) is 'Captain' if they are the designated commanding officer of the ship. There is no disconnect from having a rank of commodore or admiral and a title of 'Captain' when in command of a ship.
TNG was a weird case for a number of reasons, so it was a rough start. A lot of the problems started well before the series was even greenlighted because of things like backlash against the 1960s "hippie" and Mod culture and aesthetics, changes in the way Hollywood viewed sci-fi in general (moving from a futuristic to a "realist" model), the fact that Paramount Pictures wanted to coattail Star Wars, and other factors including the really weird phenomena of "TOS contempt" that has been the subject of so many psychology and entertainment theory papers over the years.
A lot of the problems though were just because the first season of TNG sucked for most of the episodes because the writers were not allowed to do their thing in peace. A lot of that came from Roddenberry's troll of a lawyer making the environment extremely toxic and actually tampering with scripts (they held the record for writer's room toxicity until the 2002 Birds of Prey came out).
On top of that toxicity the writers were rushed because shortly before filming was to start the executives decided to abandon the really weird Starfleet/civilian parallel setup the show was based around (no one got that format right until the Japanese did it with the Macross colony shows a few years later) and double down on the dull "space procedural" stuff (though they retained the A-plot/B-plot format from it, just changing the focus so both pointed to the Starfleet side most of the time). They ended up racing to completely overhaul scripts to fit the change of format and quickly write new ones to replace the unsalvageable ones and cut a lot of corners in the process.
By the end of the first season the entire writing staff had left in disgust and the second season had to start with all new writers who had to make a cold start and took the usual amount of time to find their footing (the troll was banished after the writer's guild started investigating complaints from the first season writers which helped a lot) so most of the usual first season rough edges were there in second season TNG too.
With all that is it unsurprising that many of the original fans were not exactly ecstatic about TNG at first. Personally, I still rate it rather low on the list of Trek shows, and I know quite a few other Trek fans do the same (just look at the threads about series preferences in this forum to see that in fact).
True. As far as I know of, they never really nailed down where exactly Hobus was so it could have been the closest star to the Romulan capital star system.
Even better would have been if PIC had simplified it to the star that went nova being a distant binary partner of the Romulan capital's star, some of those orbit each other at a distance of several light-months or even a lightyear or so. At several light months distance it would have given the Federation enough time to do that rescue ship program (and the equally ill-fated red matter fix attempt earlier in the same timeframe) without having to resort to the fantasy nonsense of FTL supernovas.
The binary star thing, if they had done it, would not mean that STO would have been canonshafted either, there could have been the subspace disturbance that the STO missions depend on since, iirc, there was little or nothing in the dialog about the subspace element itself actually destroying material objects like planets. It could very well have caused its own havoc with technological stuff in the area as the wavefront propagated for instance.
All we know for sure is that it was at least close enough to hit Romulus, and it is POSSIBLE that it threatened a large section of the quadrant somehow.
Yes and no.
Historically, commodore wasn't an actual rank, but a job description.
It referred to a captain of a ship given command of a group of ships, typically called a squadron, for a certain amount of time or a certain mission.
During that time/mission he outranks the captains of the other ships in his squadron, but does not outrank the captain of a ship that is not part of his squadron.
Later some Navies (e.g. the british Royal Navy) have adopted commodore as an actual rank between Captain and Rear admiral.
AFAIK there is no clear evidence of how this is handled in Starfleet.
There are actually quite a few clues scattered around in throwaway dialog and bits of protocol shown that point to Starfleet using something more like the usage of the term that Ironphoenix mentioned, and its later change into the upper and lower nonsense.
For one, in the 2260s (at least) they are shown to make a distinction between Commodore (which is at least implied to be a flag rank) and "Fleet Captain", the latter of which seems to operate as a situational "first among equals" non-flag rank role title the way Realdarklord describes. Another one is that Commodore had a permanent rank insignia of its own, whereas if the officer was just another captain filling a larger than normal role they would probably have captain's rings. Instead, Commodore used the "thick ring" style like admiral ranks instead of the solid-or-broken equal-width cuff rings of non-flag rank officers.
In PIC, all known flag ranks are denoted by a silver trapezoid frame around rank pips while non-flag officer ranks just have the bare pips, and if you look closely at Commodore Oh's rank insignia it is one pip with a trapezoid frame around it, which also points to it being a flag rank rather than just an expanded captain role.
It is probable that the term 'Rear Admiral Lower Half' and Commodore are used interchangeably informally.
What if the whole Changeling thing actually makes STO's plot make a little more sense. They deal with Changeling infiltrators and then a couple of years later the Klingons get 8472'd but Starfleet are like nah we dealt with this problem already. Makes more sense than the current one where the Federations seem like douchebags.