Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 182: 'Tangent Vectors Maxed' has been published on Holosuite Media, you can download and stream it from:
http://bit.ly/1fPt2Op
In this week's episode, Captain MidNite Shadow leads the crew of the USS Tribble with another new panelist, Doc, who joins Dragon and StooDogg and the usual crew into discussions about all the Star Trek Online and Star Trek news that has been released this week!
In this week's episode the Tribbles crew discuss:
- R&D Weekend,
- Social media event for a mega-bonus weekend,
- United Federation of Planets' interview with Stephen Ricossa,
- the new Role Playing Blog,
- STO Release Notes,
- "Butterfly" Review (part 2!),
- Sneak peak at the final episode of the Iconian war,
- Star Trek Renegades,
- Star Trek: Anthology,
- Star Trek Beyond,
- Red Shirt Diaries,
- Trekyards,
- and more!
Comments
Do you participate actively in some of the current event's forms of Social Media?
- "regional borg":
I can see why they would do that. It's basically more efficient to keep using the old technology and tactics (which were tailor-made for that exact technology), albeit in a borgified variant, and let the old stuff slowly fade out. I mean, those ships are probably still usable and when you assimilate a civilization, would you throw away all their old stuff and pull new borg ships/technology just out of thin air?
- "cloaking borg":
That's a different topic. The assimilated klingon ships sunseahl mentioned would be "regional borg" in my opinion. But in Butterfly we got borg ships decloaking. Not assimilated romulan ships. I would understand those, but we are supposed to believe that because the borg assimilated Romulus in this timeline they would magically use cloak on actual borg ships.
We never had any indication the borg were interested in cloaking technology at all. And let's be real, they could have just assimilated a few klingon ships or romulan ships or something to figure out how cloak works and upgrade the whole borg fleet to have cloak and assimilate earth and the federation and then conquer the rest of the alpha and beta quadrants...
So the desire to get cloak does not mean they have to assimilate Romulus (or Qo'nos for that matter). They could get cloak in so many other ways, which leads me to believe that these borg (!) ships just got cloak to hammer it in that Romulus got assimilated.
- Now the "borg need cloak now to fight the federation"...
Uhm. Sure. They could have also tried something equally innovative: Send an invasion fleet to earth that consists of more than a single cube... Like they did at... uhm... I don't know... Vega colony?
- And the "vengeful borg":
Well, if the borg were "angered" by the fact that the romulans investigated and stripped borg ships of any useful technology... wouldn't they be way more agitated by the federation in general and Warlord Janeway in particular? Why target the mosquito when someone just stabbed you in the chest?
- Writing klingons:
Oh boy... uhm... let me start by saying that the "crazy klingon" that sacrificed his life against the doomsday machine... his name was K'Valk. (spelling?) And technically we've known Guroth longer (two missions and two (?) warblogs...) than we've known K'Valk. Still K'Valk got the better background. We saw his dilemma. We saw his epic sendoff. We acknowledged his sacrifice. I REMEMBER HIS NAME!
With Guroth... we know pretty much nothing about him, we only learned that it was Guroth if we did actually read the debriefing dialogue and Captain Paris does not even acknowledge what just happened when he gives the order to continue the attack. Like nothing ever happened.
See the difference?
- Tales of the war #19:
Like I already said during the show, the nurse is a klingon. It's stated in the blog. She does not want to "kill the wounded" because that's better than having them live to fight another day. She wants them to die because it was a glorious battle and if they die now they will go to Sto-vo-kor. Like the doctor (who seems to be some kind of alien/non-klingon) alludes to, klingons have this really weird appreciation for death and this nurse is the rule rather than the exception.
Btw. when Qo'nos is under attack, Cryptic hates klingons and depicts them as victims and [insert rant about bad marketing]. When ESD gets attacked and severely damaged, let's just poke fun at it. And ignore the fact that New Romulus got attacked at least twice now (ingame). Once again I seem to be missing something.
And since Pulaski came up during that part of the conversation... Sure, the writers were bad at writing for Pulaski, but would you really argue that Troi or Dr. Crusher had "good" stories? Some of them may have been decent, but is there any particular Troi/Crusher story you would call actually good?
- Gorn featured episode series:
Okay, sunseahl, you got me there. I remember some brouhaha about some Undine Terradome STF-thingy. I even remember something about some "Children of Khan" STF-series or was it a featured episode series or something like that, but I just cannot remember ever hearing about a Gorn featured episode series.
- Playable species:
Again like I said during the show, Undine basically got the same issue as Tholians: Animation. Playable Tholians have been "ruled out" because Cryptic would need to create a bunch of new animations for them. Animation time is not free. And I think it was stoodog who was about "Undine want to kill everything.". Well, the borg/undine story arc (even the old one) was pretty clear about the why. You may call their reaction exaggerated, but there is a reason for this whole "kill everything"...
Now playable borg... That can of worms... "real" borg, collective borg do not make sense as a playable species. Or even a playable faction.
Liberated borg/cooperative borg... is that really what people are asking for, when they want to play "borg"? I'm not sure.
Besides, liberated borg are ingame already as a lifetimer perk. If they opened it up to the public, would you want to see a "replacement perk" for lifetimers?
And yes, CaptainGeko mentioned that they were working on a cooperative faction for Delta Rising. He even talked about a new movement system for their ships. So cooperative ships would have been able to just hover up and down like an elevator. But that got scrapped for some reason. Why? Well, get him on the show and ask him yourselves.
Playable dominion... the dominion is a faction, not a species. If you talk about a playable dominion species, you're doing it wrong. The dominion consists of more than one species. And I don't see playable founders/changelings/shapeshifters ever. Playable Vorta? Maybe, although they are not engineered to be warriors, which leaves us with playable Jem'Hadar. Now if there were "independant" Jem'Hadar that were for some reason or another not addicted to Ketracel White... I could see them as a playable KDF species. In fact they would fit in there like a charm.
A playable dominion faction... well, sunseahl said it (and like I said a few shows ago) all of their ships did end up in lockboxes already. So yeah, that's really unlikely.
Playable Cardassians... I want them. And I want them either like romulans (choose Fed or KDF) or just as a playable Fed species. I mean, ingame they do have a cardassian defense force, but it's stated pretty clearly that those are just a glorified police force/border patrol instead of a true military force. They depend on federation protection since the dominion war. So playable Cardassians for the Federation and playable Jem'Hadar for the KDF... would be fine by me. What's your opinion?
- The K'Vort:
Okay, I'm gonna help you here, sunseahl. Playable ships in STO that in my opinion are at least as silly as a K'Vort:
T5/T6/Fleet Excelsior
Mirror/Fleet heavy cruisers
T5/Fleet K'Tinga
T5/Fleet B'Rel
My suspension of disbelief basically ends with the Ambassador/Kamarag-era. Btw. I left out the Kumari/D'Kyr/T'Varo because... I did not watch Enterprise so I don't feel qualified to judge them. If those were authentic... yeah, their T5/Fleet variants would easily take the cake here.
Btw. of the ships I mentioned as being silly. I blame CBS for the Excelsior, K'Tinga and B'Rel. Because they just had to Scrooge it up and reuse all those old ship models they still had, which were just gathering dust somewhere.
When it comes to galactic issues the Klingons always seem to be the butt of the revenge factor, Just look at the number of times all the big players have been invaded
-Number of Earth Invasions: 1(Undine, soon to be 2)
-Number of Mol'Rihan Invasions: 2 (Elachi/Heralds)
-Number of Qo'nos Invasions: 4 (Fek'iri, Undine, Herald Space/Herald Ground)
I discount both the Elachi and Fek'iri invasions as "galactic issues" because those were factional foes. This still leaves 3 separate instances of "invasion" on Qo'nos and of all the goings on in our slice of the galaxy it seems like the Klingons are the only ones getting things done. If that's the case, yea, sure, it's by all rights that Qo'nos is invaded.
-It was the Klingons that found out the Undine before the Federation faced it and even asked nicely(via Worf) to take the Undine seriously.(which the Federation Vulcanly said, "lol wat? Na Brah.")
-During this whole Iconain war, each time the mention of intelligence gathering has been brought up it was the Klingons who had it(What? Klingons as big intel gatherers? How "silly"/un-canon is THAT?!?!)
It just seems over and over that when there's a major threat to the Alpha/Beta quadrants the Klingons are always the first to know it's going on and then Qo'nos gets invaded...
Well, considering how the Fek'ihri arc ended, I am honestly not sure whether all that stuff actually happened or whether my character was experiencing a bloodwine-induced hallucination. Maybe I should replay that story arc.
But to the attempted Elachi invasion of New Romulus... uhm... not really. You may call them factional foes because at that time we don't know where they fit in, but since it turns out they are a servitor race it was (like the Undine "story arc", just more directly orchestrated by the Iconians) a prelude to the Iconian war. So by association it is a galactic issue.
And yes, the klingons get depicted as being right. They are the ones who figured out that the Undine were behind stuff. (They could not have known that the Iconians were behind the Undine being behind all those events...)
But don't forget the way the klingons went about it when you played the federation "klingon war" story arc.
"You got a foul shapeshifter on board your vessel! Turn over the so-called vulcan ambassador right now!"
"Okay, do you have any proof for that statement? I mean, we're the Federation, and you're accusing an ambassador, so you should know by now that we would ask for evidence."
"You don't trust my word? What an insult! Attack!"
I mean, that is very klingon, but I think the KDF really needs to make "Diplomacy 101" a mandatory course for its captains.
Then I remembered something you asked (and I answered) during the show:
No, the maquis does not exist anymore. We saw its dying breath on DS9. Eddington (who was in Federation custody at that time) offered Sisko something... Some maquis secrets or something like that? Anyways, it turned out that he was using Sisko to get to the last maquis hideouts to evacuate the few survivors that were still left.
What happened to the maquis? We get told that when the cardassians allied with the dominion the Jem'Hadar went out into the badlands and basically just annihilated the maquis.
So, a few former maquis members might still be alive, but the maquis as an organisation and with it all its bases/hideouts ceased existing during the dominion war.
And now to marketing... uhm... let me preface this by saying I don't blame Trendy (or Smirk before that). But I got the impression that when BranFlakes left, Smirk (and now Trendy) seemed to be on a much shorter leash. I mean, BranFlakes made the job look almost easy whereas Trendy seems to be seriously overworked.
The giveaways went from "One week full of fun with items worth over 7000 Zen!" (I liked that teaser because it got people to speculate about what they might be getting.) to "Hey, there's this giveaway and it's awesome and here is what you will get during this week!" (which I still enjoyed very much, because while I like a teaser here and there, I do not actually like surprises that much) to "Here, three day giveaway, one item a day and no ship and it's free, so you will still enjoy it, right?" (Yes, the New Dawn giveaway gave us the whole weekend to claim the last item.)
So, yes, it's still free and I welcome free stuff, but to me there's a difference between a uniform I might not have bought or a RnD pack I would definitely never have bought.
And now let's tie the datamining discussion into this... There's a WoW fansite (let's call it... MMO-C
To which Blizzard's CMs respond with "datamining is not an exact science" or "yeah, that stuff is in the game files, but some stuff has been in there for years now so it might not come to pass" or "those numbers are still being tweaked, so it's too early to freak out yet" or "you should take datamined stuff with a grain of salt".
Which is a longwinded way to say that it keeps those people, who are interested in those sneak peaks, engaged with the game. So you can actually use datamaining to your advantage. Throw stuff out there way before it would hit the PTR, get the community's reaction, take credit for the good stuff, blame the dataminers for "misunderstandings" and move on. But whoever is in charge of this at Perfect World seems to be unable or unwilling to see the possibilities.
I figured you might bring up the Klingon war at some point. And it's hilarious that you mention it. Did the Klingons ever invade ESD/Earth? Nope. and as for the Vulcan ambassador. The klingons provided proof beforehand(via Path to 2409) that there was Undine infiltration. The Feds have this biomass-ejecting system of "Picarding-it-up." That is to say that since TNG the Feds have gone: "We need proof and because we need proof we wont do anything even as earth starts crumbling for some unknown, unexplained reason. For every torpedo there must be 20 hours of discussion and for every phaser burst there must be 15 minutes of diplomacy."
Honestly that's why I'd rather play Rommy or Klingon at this point... but now.... Oohhh boy the Feddy's have suddenly and violently swung the pendulum in the opposing direction. They've taken to the warpath with the Krenim device, haven't they? Pushing for incursions to erase the Iconians or our knowledge of them....
As for the Fek'iri arc, the end was rather trippy, yes... but you DID fend of a Fek'iri invasion from the first mission of the whole arc.
I asked if the Maquis were really all destroyed because Thomas(Riker 2) stole the Defiant in DS9.... And in the current Cardassian arc you meet his son who is trying to recover supplies stolen by the Cardys. If, like Voyager mentioned, all but a few in prisons/Voy crew were wiped out does that mean Thomas was imprisoned cause I don't think he was... maybe i'm wrong though....
Since f2pdrakon went through all the important stuff, let me just say this...
What the klingons are doing in that episode is nothing less than a witch hunt based on speculation. If I was the captain of that federation ship I would not have handed over any federation citizen based on mere speculation either.
I would not have handed over anybody at all, but if the klingons had backed up their claim with evidence, I would have had a security team take the suspect to the brig and then turn him over to the next starbase for investigations. If their claim had been reasonable at all, I might have had a security detail observe him (discreetly), but handing him over willy-nilly?
No way. Even though it turns out the klingons were right afterwards.
I'd like to remind you of the DS9 episode "Apocalypse Rising". Odo had been led to believe that Gowron was a changeling infiltrator. So Sisko, O'Brien, "solid Odo" and... uhm... who was the fourth... infiltrated Ty'Gokor to expose Gowron. In the end it turned out that Martok had been replaced by a changeling.
But I digress, if the federation had just hailed the klingons like:
"Hey guys, we kinda believe that your chancellor has been replaced by a changeling and it would be nice if you could turn him over. We have no evidence whatsoever, so just trust us on this one, kk?"
Are you really trying to make me believe the klingons would have turned over Gowron in that situation? Really?
There is a reason basic civil/human rights exist. That is non-negotiable to me. I will not turn this into a political discussion, because there is nothing to discuss for me. Watch the TNG episode "The Drumhead". I don't think I can say it better than Picard did in that episode.
the 4th was Worf.
I can Quote Path to 2409 too... Volume and Chapter. The actual Gorn/Klingon war didn't start until after the discovery of the infiltration. Until then it was all border skirmishes with no deceleration of war.
The proof. No matter what anyone says the Gorn/Klingon "war(as in a declaration there of)" was after they found the infiltration.
It was after this that Worf and a BUNCH of Federations players pleaded with the Federation Council
The Klingons had the proof they were there, no accusations. It's only logical that after such they found a way to detect. And as for the furtherence there of.... the "end" of the war was rather peaceful.
Again.. the Klingons proved both that the threat was real and present. It also took disregarding everything else to show it to the quadrants. Which is a shame. It means the Klingons have been pretty damned honest the whole time and even with that leeway they were still met with suspicion and mistrust.
As for the bombs it was determined to be Klingon in origin....
BOTH believe by extremists.
The first opposed to Martok's rule
Why the second when J'mpok already had BOTH the council AND the support of House Duras? we don't know.
We only know it was linked to a convict from BOTH the Klingons and the Federation, Toral.
"Where is the evidence" that the Klingons didn't take it seriously? Was it the massive subspace transmission that had them decapitating the Undine heads of state? Was it when everyday Klingons jumped on a guy who, in a drunken stupor, remarked about being Undine? Or was it when J'mpok decided that he'd had it with the TRIBBLE the Undine-infiltrated Gorn had played and decided that he must take the Hegemony's hierarchy on after asking for federation assistance?
The whole thing with Gorn itself never started over land. if you think that, GET OUT. YES Martok's Qo'nos retook Khitomer, a world the ROMULANS took from them, in blood. And YES J'mpok, AFTER the Gorn thing, war-hawked the claim to the star cluster... but the "Gorn thing" started here:
The evidence is the body of the damned Undine! The continuation of this was Ja'rod captaining the Kang and running silent for YEARS as it investigated the Undine Infiltration and the Gorn Hegemony only popping up to have House Duras pledge loyalty to J'mpok, runnign silent again, Then to deliver the information about the deeper infiltration.
You wanna talk about proof? fine talk about proof and evidence and all of that... Now I want the proof that Scenario A of Butterfly could even happen AT ALL. STO is littered with bad writing all around.
I definitely agree that Path to 2409 needs an update but that's as likely to happen as a K'vort class... updating it is "Silly."