A. No it hasn't. Trek is born on the idea of boldy going where no one has gone before, not rehashing hanging plot threads.
B. See A, and who dislikes the Lukari/Deferi to the point that they wanted them out, replaced with some canon species?
C. Too late. Path to 2409 was broken by ST:P. Also, the fear of doing something because it might conflict with yet to be canon at some unknown future date is an idiotic reason to not do something.
D. No we aren't. Nor do we need to deal in the unknown. Example: Trill symbiotes are afflicted with a new disease and make the Trill go crazy. Now we have to fight Trill who have stolen FED ships and find the cure without wiping them out.
E? It wasn't a good idea then, and its not now. You can't keep making conflicts larger and larger, nor does every conflict need to be large scale, super high stakes in the first place.
I don't know anyone who hated the Lukari, they were well received and I think it's good that their saucer ship made a canon appearance in Discovery Season 3 before blowing up, Maybe the Borg could prove to be potential threat to the Federation again without that Borg Queen nonsense, I'm pretty sure the Borg would have easily defeated the Dominion if they were at full power during the Dominion war.
A. No it hasn't. Trek is born on the idea of boldy going where no one has gone before, not rehashing hanging plot threads.
Star Trek hasn't been that since TOS.
1. TNG was a show about diplomatic hand shaking with species already known to the Federation.
2. DS9 was a war story, with the primary species being Klingons, Cardassians, Ferengi, and Bajorans, all of which were previously known. And when it comes to the big new species, The Dominion came to the Federation. The Federation didn't boldly go to find them.
3. VOY wasn't in the Delta Quadrant to boldly go. In fact, the whole premise is that they wanted to boldly go BACK to the Federation. That they ran into new species in the process was an unavoidable side effect, and not their mission.
4. DSC S1-3 have all dealt with species/organizations known to the Federation beforehand.
5. PIC likewise was just about expanding upon already existing species/concepts in Trek canon. And not about boldly going.
6. LD is all about a second contact ship that Boldly goes.... to where a better ship has already gone.
The only other Trek show besides TOS that was about boldly going was Enterprise.... and even then that was just its first two seasons, which everyone hated. S3 was another large war plot akin to DS9, and S4 was them showing us how a bunch of the alliances and stuff we saw in TOS came about.
1. Are you joking? Cytherians? Crystaline Entity? Borg? Pakleds? Dyson Sphere? Iconia? Ent D was frequently encountering new species, new phenomena. They even gave Stewart nearly the same lines for the intro that Shatner had.
2. DS9 was a largely immobile station, which is why they went and got the Defiant to go and discover new species like the H'urq.
3. One of Janeway's common refrains was how they were explorers, and made numerous decisions to explore, not just avoid and keep speeding towards home.
4-5. Many people have complained about NuTrek and how it gets too far away from old Trek. Picard still gave us robocthulu.
6. LD is supposedly a parody. Enterprise S1-2 was not universally hated, nor did the Temporal Cold War have them dealing with old species, they were all new ones.
B. See A, and who dislikes the Lukari/Deferi to the point that they wanted them out, replaced with some canon species?
You must not have been there when the Deferi were introduced. The Deferi were so hated, and reviled, by the community when they were first introduced that its the reason why Cryptic spent YEARS before even attempting to introduce a wholly new species as a major narrative piece again. The Lukari were much better received, but we see how quickly they were wrapped up and moved on from because they didn't want a repeat of the Deferi situation.
Of course I was there. People weren't demanding the Deferi be gone, people just hated how badly they were written.
C. Too late. Path to 2409 was broken by ST:P. Also, the fear of doing something because it might conflict with yet to be canon at some unknown future date is an idiotic reason to not do something.
Cryptic broke the Path to 2409 themselves long before Picard came into the picture. And nothing about Picard actually interferes with any major plot point in STO proper. Cryptic just removed Icheb and Hugh, and claimed they fixed Mars in the decade between Picard and now.
As you point out, the conflict is minimal and can be largely ignored or hand waved, so whats the issue?
D. No we aren't. Nor do we need to deal in the unknown. Example: Trill symbiotes are afflicted with a new disease and make the Trill go crazy. Now we have to fight Trill who have stolen FED ships and find the cure without wiping them out.
So the handful of joined Trill in Starfleet manage to overpower crews of hundreds, and take over a handful of ships... that would be like a two mission story thats done in one release since the Alliance's forces wouldn't even need to destroy the ships, they would outnumber them 50 to 1.
Yes it would be quick, that's the whole point I make later, because we don't need galaxy spanning conflicts when you can deal with small ones that happen. And outnumbering them is irrelevant because the point is that its made artificially difficult by the desire to keep them alive so you can't just go in with overwhelming force. Regardless its an idea that took 2 minutes to think up, in two weeks or months I'm sure Cryptic can come up with something better.
E? It wasn't a good idea then, and its not now. You can't keep making conflicts larger and larger, nor does every conflict need to be large scale, super high stakes in the first place.
It kind of does, or else you remove any sort of reasonable threat or tension from the situation.
It would be like trying to make the next arc about the Orion Syndicate. Its like, we already have tech that beat the Borg, The Undine(who are stronger then the Borg), the Iconians(who are stronger then the Undine), and the Temporal Liberation Front(who beat an Iconian-Dominion Alliance in an alternate universe) whats the Orion Syndicate, or Gorn Rebels, going to do that would actually take more then just one mission or two to solve? That isn't a story arc, that's a stand alone mission for an anniversary release.
So you completely agree that these large conflicts are a serious problem in how they make the little stuff less palatable, and at the same time totally agree with the idea of having smaller conflicts that can be quickly resolved. Not everything needs to be yet another Iconian plot (or another Nemesis plot!) Why should I go patrol Ceti Alpha 4 when I've beaten the Borg, Undine, Iconians, H'urq, etc? Because its my job as a captain.
To be fair... all we had to work off of, at least from on screen, of the Ent-J was a wall display.
Okay - I hate to say it, but the nacelles/pylons on that wall display look better than the ones in game...maybe it's just me or the angle, but to me they really look a little bit more sturdy than what we ended up with. Of course I'm REALLY not a fan of the in-game ent-J so anything would be an improvement there.
You can add it to any list you like, but the fact remains that the term "jump the shark" has become somewhat wider ranging than the narrower definition you pretend is the only one.
Nope. You try this exact same argument every time you are caught, and multiple people have shown your simply using the terms wrong, and trying to cover for it. You simply don't know what any of these words mean.
A. I've seen people comparing Discovery S3 more positively then the previous season.
B. The show is still playing out exactly like the previous seasons did. Nothing about the way the stories, characters, or events, happen is any different then before. The only difference is the timeframe.
So its neither a change in direction, nor a generally negative one. So let me ask you... how IS it what they did at all?
As for the future thing being to clear the decks for the writers, so many people have complained about DSC being a prequel and were hammering the storylines pointing out the inconsistencies it has with other Treks (especially TOS) that the writers were undoubtedly getting hemmed in, especially with the ham-handed damage control from S1.
I doubt the writers cared due to the fact that 99% of the supposed inconsistencies have been proven to not be inconsistencies, and are just things made up because every Trek gets the same spiteful treatment its first 3 seasons.
In theory jumping to the far future would free them of those constraints and quell the nasty reviews to some extent, but the way they did it also cut out a lot of possible plotlines and the silly JJisms (like the burn) they continue to base the show on opens them to as much criticism as their original situation did. I do applaud their not jumping onto the same "the heroes have/are the mcguffin being pursued" thing like Dark Matter devolved into and Blake's 7 was for several seasons (or at least so far anyway, DSC S3 has barely started).
I would argue the opposite.
The far future as seen in ENT cut out a lot of possible plotlines, because Daniels' future suggests the Federation is such an all encompassing mega-entity(with even the Klingons part of the Federation) that there would be no logical opposing forces beyond those in the Temporal Cold War, and we already covered that plotline in Enterprise.
This is the same problem a post DS9/Nemesis setting has also. The Dominion War brought together all the major forces of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants together into one mega alliance to combat The Dominion. And the Ferengi, Cardassians, and Klingons, saw fundamental changes to their cultures that brought them more in-line, or favorable, to the Federation. By the end of the Dominion War there is no major political tension left, and no reason for any of the major powers to get back into it. And DS9 already had us kick the butt of The Dominion, the sole major power of the Gamma quadrant, and Voyager did the same with the Borg, the only true mega power of the Delta Quadrant. Trek's focus with prequel post VOY has generally been the result of there not being anywhere to really go forward as is.
The Burn opens up plotlines far beyond what a non-Burn timeframe would allow, because it resets the galactic culture clock, and allows them to reshape the galactic political stage into something work exploring, with various independent factions each carving out new territories, creating the political tension missing in any era from post DS9 to Daniel's time.
Its telling that both of the originally proposed post Nemesis series(Star Trek: Federation, and Star Trek: Final Frontier) both had the Federation collapse. One due to use of Omega to destroy warp travel across the galaxy(similar to The Burn), and another due to political stagnation and Earth centrism(something seen a bit in Picard)
You can scream its a "JJism" from now until hell freezes over, but this was an idea before JJ ever made his movies, because its the logical next step in a post DS9/Nemesis Trek setting.
This is the same problem other series like Fallout have. Between Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas, the NCR has grown to be such a large and powerful entity that there really isn't a storyline left to truly challenge them. Chris Avellone, one of the writers on New Vegas, has said his preferred ending to New Vegas is Ulysses using the nukes from the Lonesome Road DLC to nuke both the NCR and Legion into the dirt, so the series can have space to tell new stories.
Not to mention that old rumor that Andromeda was originally meant to be the future of Star Trek, but got changed. Even Gene foresaw the inevitable narrative end the Federation would cause, and had the idea to just nuke it and do it all over again.
I don't want to start in on this as a big debate as I know your mind is not going to be shifted on any of this BUT:
If you can't see S3 as a big shift in direction from S2 of Discovery then you must be watching a different show...seriously Som...come on...even if it's not viewed as a negative direction (I don't like Discovery but I do like that they've gone somewhere where it's not messing with any of the established shows etc. so they can do whatever they want) surely you can admit it is a change in direction for them. I'd say even more so than S1 to S2.
99% of the inconsistencies have been explained away in your head, not for everyone. That's fine - no one says you have to have issues with it and can't be happy but lots of people (including myself) have shown inconsistencies that have not been explained beyond "hand waving it away". I know you won't budge on that but I'm not here to convince you, just to remind you that there aren't that many people who believe in the 99% explained that you quote.
Considering how little of the galaxy has actually been explored (including a trip across the Delta quadrant AND a 2000 year old empire from the gamma quadrant) - if they can't find something else out there then they're just not trying. Not to mention the TONS of material that could be explored via the other cultures around (just what are the Tholians so paranoid of...something coming? It was explored in the miniatures game...could do worse to explore something like it here), Extra galactic - we have it right from TOS, hell the Sheliak could make a great enemy since we know so little of them (I explained how they could easily become a bigger enemy months ago when we were talking about future plots). The Dominion is 2,000 years old but seem to have entirely expanded from their homeworld towards the wormhole and everything along the way...why didn't they go the other way? Is there some other threat out there that held them in check that was never discussed?(of course they would never keep secrets would they? *cough* Hurq *cough*).
The Burn is...interesting...I'm a bit leery of where they go with it but am willing to give it a chance to see.
I don't think he means "JJism" in terms of the story being told as opposed to the style of the storytelling...I could be wrong but I think you're reading him wrong on that one.
What I originally read of Andromeda was it was another idea he had penned in the 60s (70s?) and was not a direction for TOS.
Star Trek is FICTION. They can make it up. All this nonsense about them having no loose ends to tie up from canon ST products is irrelevant.
Except
A. That's been the point of the game since it came out.
B. People play STO to see things from the Star Trek TV shows and movies, not for whatever wholly made up nonsense someone just threw into the Trek universe out of nowhere.
C. Cryptic wants to avoid stepping on the toes of official Trek, so they aren't just going to go "well theres a giant alien empire in this part of the galaxy no one has heard of!" in case official Star Trek goes "actually there is this other thing entirely here"
D. Between known local space in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants, The Dominion's territory in the Gamma Quadrant, and the known empires of the Delta quadrant, we are looking at something like 60% of the galaxy being known.
If they have any problem, its that their ideas are too big. Saving entire quadrants or universes? WTF. Scale that nonsense down.
That's not that uncommon, even for Trek. The Dominion War was a war between the major powers of like 40-45% of the galaxy's total space.
B: J'ula and the Hurq were shown in the shows? I missed those episodes. When was the Klingon civil war that was brought about over the mycelial weapon? Also...the mycelial weapon. I could go on but I won't drag it out.
STO - DOES and HAS to explore outside the shows otherwise you're playing nothing but copies of the shows episodes. You know that so don't be petty about saying that it's just about things from the shows and movies, you know it has to expand on those and move beyond them.
C: If cryptic wants to introduce another antagonist somewhere they can...but since it would have to be approved of by CBS it really wouldn't be much of an issue for the future would it? As long as they're careful about it.
There used to be mentions of another race out beyond the Klingons that tended to keep them in check from expanding in other directions...that could be explored, same for the Romulans. There's the Tholians, the Sheliak, what's beyond them?
There is no shortage of enemies that could be explored it they wanted to.
40% of the GALAXY is a big space you know. Not to mention multiple extra-galactic threats possible.
And as for anther point you mentioned in another message - no not every threat has to be galaxy spanning threats or end of the universe etc.
Smaller storylines are completely possible and generally a lot easier to deal with since it gets a bit boring when every new threat is bigger than the last. To be honest I'm already bored with the current episodes just because there are endless waves of Mokai ships that we've already killed. Why is this J'ula even a threat? We beat the Iconians we could have killed her off at any time but they storied her into an ongoing threat that keeps coming back until she's suddenly a good guy...I'm on Xbox so I can only dread the upcoming episodes.
1. Are you? Bandi, Ligonians, Anticans, Selay, Haven Natives, Jarada, Angel 1 Natives, Bynar, Mordanites, Zaldans, Klingons, Minosians, Romulans, and this is just some of S1 of TNG. Most of the alien species seen in every season of TNG were species that had been known to the Federation for years, if not decades, previously. Meeting new alien species tended to be the minority. And it generally wasn't part of their actual mission, but by accident of passing nearby. Even "new" species like the Ferengi tended to not actually be new. The Federation just didn't know they had encountered them already.
2. The Hur'q weren't a new species. The Klingons knew about them 1,000 years ago, and in the Sword of Kahless episode they mention that Hur'q DNA was already known to the Federation. The Hur'q were a known, but presumed extinct, species for years before the episode they were first mentioned.
3. Voyager "explored" only as necessary to get resources to get home. If you look at the map of Voyager's journey from the Star Charts, they purposefully AVOIDED all major powers as much as possible, and went in as much of a straight line as possible. In fact, theres many episodes were Janeway shoots down the crew's desires to explore some weird thing, because it would put them X weeks off their course home. Because they weren't there to explore, nor was that their mission. In fact, here's a map of Voyager's years 1-3, and year 4, to show you how little they actually explored
4. They can complain all they want. TV was moving past the episodic mindset of TOS/TNG even back when TNG started airing. Which is why, once they got Gene out of the way, they started doing multi-episode story arcs. Then did DS9.
5. Lower Decks isn't a parody, its a comedy. ENT S1-2 are generally hated, much like S1-2 of TNG, DS9, and VOY. It was only when they got into the non episodic S3, with the giant time war/Xindi trying to desotry Earth, plot that ENT is generally considered to have gotten good. And S4 of ENT was filled with 3 parters, and 5 parter, narratives setting up things for how we see them in TOS.
Of course I was there. People weren't demanding the Deferi be gone, people just hated how badly they were written.
There were plenty of people asking for the Deferi to be straight up removed from the game.
As you point out, the conflict is minimal and can be largely ignored or hand waved, so whats the issue?
Conflict is minimal now, but you aren't going to go out of your way to do things that could generate more conflict.
Yes it would be quick, that's the whole point I make later, because we don't need galaxy spanning conflicts when you can deal with small ones that happen. And outnumbering them is irrelevant because the point is that its made artificially difficult by the desire to keep them alive so you can't just go in with overwhelming force. Regardless its an idea that took 2 minutes to think up, in two weeks or months I'm sure Cryptic can come up with something better.
So you completely agree that these large conflicts are a serious problem in how they make the little stuff less palatable, and at the same time totally agree with the idea of having smaller conflicts that can be quickly resolved. Not everything needs to be yet another Iconian plot (or another Nemesis plot!) Why should I go patrol Ceti Alpha 4 when I've beaten the Borg, Undine, Iconians, H'urq, etc? Because its my job as a captain.
No. There is a reason why television in general has moved past the "episode of the week" sort of storytelling we saw in TOS, and TNG. That being, most people don't like it. And there is a good reason why most people don't like it. Episodes of the week are too short to give the conflict, or characters involved, any sort of depth, or impact. Episodic storytelling is good for some "turn your brain off" popcorn entertainment, but you aren't going to get much out of it substantively outside of the rare really good one off episode.
This same applies to games. No one wants to play through a bunch of filler trash that amounts to nothing, and has no stakes. Even if the longer narratives didn't exist this would be a problem, just like it was a problem for TOS and TNG. Its also why, once they got Gene out of the picture in TNG, they started introducing more multi-episode story arcs. Then, when making DS9, they went full throttle with the over arching mega narratives. Even back then they knew it was bad.
What you are asking for is the Star Trek equivalent to a "go out and kill 30 bears and collect their pelts" quest in another MMO. That's not something you make a story mission out of, thats something you make a patrol out of(like the LoR patrol dealing with the Acamarians, or the DR patrol dealing with the APUs)
So lets get this straight. ST constantly revisits all these known species, despite the fact they are never seen, nor mentioned before, yet you claim simultaneously that STO can't dare to make up something new because it might MIGHT MAYBE, SOMEDAY, step on the toes of a future ST show that doesn't even do episodic, alien of the week content anymore.
In other words, If we take all your arguments to be valid, you are arguing for STO to die with no new content, and for no good reason.
So lets get this straight. ST constantly revisits all these known species, despite the fact they are never seen, nor mentioned before, yet you claim simultaneously that STO can't dare to make up something new because it might MIGHT MAYBE, SOMEDAY, step on the toes of a future ST show that doesn't even do episodic, alien of the week content anymore.
In other words, If we take all your arguments to be valid, you are arguing for STO to die with no new content, and for no good reason.
Star Trek's TV shows and movies are their own source, and can make up whatever they want. STO is a derivative product that has to follow canon whenever possible.
This isn't even a problem limited to STO. Several decades ago, CBS went to all the novel authors, and told them they had to follow screen canon when making the novelverse. They couldn't just make up things that contradicted the TV shows and movies anymore. This led to a problem for the novel writers because CBS demanded they use the Hobus Supernova from the 2009 Trek movie, but the novel writers legally couldn't because Pocket Book couldn't get a deal done with Bad Robot. It wasn't until like late 2018 that a deal got struck, which meant that for 9 years the novels couldn't move to, or past, the Hobus Supernova event, and they got stuck in the in-universe year leading up to it.
Just when they were about to finally move past Hobus, Picard came out, and contradicted everything the novelverse has set up. Several of the novel writers have suggested that, while CBS is letting them finish up the novel ideas they had, they plan to wrap up the current novelverse storyline, then dump the thing and start all over to fit into Picard. Because they legally have to.
Cryptic themselves have mentioned how CBS wants all the extended universe stuff to mesh together(not necessary be 100% canon with each other), and all be able to flow with the TV shows, so that, no matter what media you enjoy Trek on, its all able to be quasi canon. This is why we have seen several things from the IDW comics(J'ula, the Somerville, the Terran Galaxy Dred) have made their way into STO, and why some things from STO(Odyssey, and one of the Romulan ships), have made their way into IDW's comics, including the official "Picard Countdown" prequel comic series to the Picard show.
CBS' bad management and inability to keep their canon straight and allow offshoot products to play nice with it is a separate issue. If CBS is going to kill STO because they are too incompetent to allow their derivative products to make stuff up where there is no canon source, then there's nothing anyone can do.
Pick a point in space with no known planet/star. Poof! New species, new content. Its that simple. If CBS won't allow that, then STO is dead and there's nothing anyone can do.
If you can't see S3 as a big shift in direction from S2 of Discovery then you must be watching a different show
A change in direction would require a change in how the characters are portrayed, how the story is progressed, how its filmed, etc. etc. Discovery S3 looks, and plays out, exactly like something you would have seen in Discovery S1/2. The only difference is the timeframe they are set in, and better writing.
but lots of people (including myself) have shown inconsistencies that have not been explained beyond "hand waving it away".
Such as?
Considering how little of the galaxy has actually been explored
In early TNG they mentioned that the Federation has explored 19% of the galaxy. Going from the launch of the NX01 in 2151, all the way to that point in TNG(2365), that equals 1% every 11.2 years. In the 44 years since then, to the beginning of STO, they would have added another 4% to that. So by 2409 the Federation would have explored roughly 23% of the galaxy around Earth, in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants.
But the opening of the Bajoran wormhole, and meeting the Dominion, who is stated to control most of the quadrant, as well as the decades of peace following the treaty of Bajor, and the Dominion now being part of the Alliance, would about double that given the Dominion's near total control over the quadrant, and the Federation getting access to all their star charts and w/e.
And then there is the Borg, who themselves control a massive amount of space in the Delta Quadrant, and Voyager's path needling through the various galactic powers in that area, without actually passing through them. Somewhere around 2/3rds of the galaxy is known to the Federation in STO's time.
That's not a little, thats a majority.
just what are the Tholians so paranoid of...something coming?
STO already explained what the Tholians are so paranoid of. This was a major story beat in Agents of Yesterday. The Na'Kuhl went back in time and attacked a Tholian Hive queen, and her colony, and tried to frame it on the Federation. Since then, the Tholians have hated time travel, and have attempted to stop time travel so it doesn't happen to them again. This is why the Tholians were studying Iconian tech on Nukara, and New Romulus(the Iconian War being what led to the development of time travel and the Temporal War), as well as the Mirror Universe ship on Nukara(Mirror Leeta being part of the Temporal Liberation Front), and why they were at the Temporal Accords protesting they didn't go far enough in banning time travel, and why they attempted to kill the temporal duplicate of T'nae in the "Survivor" mission. The Tholians are paranoid of time travel, having been victims of it already.
hell the Sheliak could make a great enemy since we know so little of them (I explained how they could easily become a bigger enemy months ago when we were talking about future plots).
That's not really the Sheliak's MO though. While the Sheliak dislike the Federation, when they encountered a colony on a world that belong to them, instead of just blowing it up(which they could have easily done and gotten away with since the Federation didn't even know they were there) they went out of their way to contact the Federation to deal with the matter diplomatically. And while Picard outmaneuvered them, and got this three weeks to evac the colony, it was in full accordance with the treaty, and the Sheliak went "ok" and just left. The Sheliak aren't like the Tzenkethi who would just go around and start blowing up planets.
The Dominion is 2,000 years old but seem to have entirely expanded from their homeworld towards the wormhole and everything along the way...why didn't they go the other way?
The original Dominion homeworld was hidden in a nebula near the galactic rim, and they had expanded from their homeworld to the rim. They expanded to the wormhole because there wasn't anything more to expand to in the other direction.
Sorry, I'm terrible with the whole online thing so not sure how to stick text in between the quotes.
That is very much not true Som. A change in direction can be as simple as a drastic change in story direction. We've gone from fighting for the Federation against different enemies to the distant far future where there is essentially no Federation and they have to find a way to survive or rebuild the Federation - that represents a change in direction for the storyline.
2/3's of the Galaxy is a majority, but considering what they've found in that, it still leaves a HUGE portion of the galaxy to be explored. Seriously, think about this, there is a ton of stuff unexplored in that 2/3rds, now think what is in the entirely unexplored 1/3rd? To put it another way...that's approximately 33 thousand million stars. I think they could find something out there if they wanted to.
Yes they are paranoid about time travel...but they seem to have a lot more issues than just that. They are an extremely xenophobic paranoid race. Time travel is a big thing, but who's to say there aren't other issues? They seem to be almost extra dimensional (existing simultaneously through multiple timelines I think it was suggested? or at least a hive mind across those other dimensions?), there's much that could be done there as well.
For the Sheliak - it's their very nature that could make them so difficult to deal with. They're obviously quite powerful as they seemed somewhat nervous standing off against their ship in the episode. It wouldn't take much to manipulate such a xenophobic by-the-book race into a war by a faction like the Terrans. They are human and have ships all but identical to the Federation, they could easily manipulate things behind the scenes with some attacks here and there to break the treaty and bring about a war. Our job could be fighting to hold back the Sheliak and protect colonists while also picking up clues about how the war started and eventually finding evidence that would allow for another attempt at peace with them. I had suggested this before - five minutes of thought on a race encountered in a single TNG episode and we have a small war arc with lots of intrigue involving the Terrans. There's no reason that they can't come up with a lot more ideas if they wanted to.
The Dominion...there are lots of places to expand to, no reason someone couldn't have been on one side of them hemming them in. Perhaps a faction in between them and the Delta quadrant? Again - considering that it's the devs (story writers etc. - you know what I mean) job to come up with ideas for the game, if we can develop some interesting ideas in 5 minutes they have no excuses for running out of ideas.
As for the inconsistencies - we've hashed that out so many times I'm not going to go over them again...we point out the inconsistencies, you hand wave them away or type up "might be" reasons that to you make absolute sense because you want to believe in it, but don't hold any water with any of us and in the end we just go around and around...what's the point in typing those same arguments over and over again?
EDIT - meant 33 THOUSAND million stars, not 33 hundred million stars.
If you can't see S3 as a big shift in direction from S2 of Discovery then you must be watching a different show
A change in direction would require a change in how the characters are portrayed, how the story is progressed, how its filmed, etc. etc. Discovery S3 looks, and plays out, exactly like something you would have seen in Discovery S1/2. The only difference is the timeframe they are set in, and better writing.
but lots of people (including myself) have shown inconsistencies that have not been explained beyond "hand waving it away".
Such as?
Considering how little of the galaxy has actually been explored
In early TNG they mentioned that the Federation has explored 19% of the galaxy. Going from the launch of the NX01 in 2151, all the way to that point in TNG(2365), that equals 1% every 11.2 years. In the 44 years since then, to the beginning of STO, they would have added another 4% to that. So by 2409 the Federation would have explored roughly 23% of the galaxy around Earth, in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants.
But the opening of the Bajoran wormhole, and meeting the Dominion, who is stated to control most of the quadrant, as well as the decades of peace following the treaty of Bajor, and the Dominion now being part of the Alliance, would about double that given the Dominion's near total control over the quadrant, and the Federation getting access to all their star charts and w/e.
And then there is the Borg, who themselves control a massive amount of space in the Delta Quadrant, and Voyager's path needling through the various galactic powers in that area, without actually passing through them. Somewhere around 2/3rds of the galaxy is known to the Federation in STO's time.
That's not a little, thats a majority.
just what are the Tholians so paranoid of...something coming?
STO already explained what the Tholians are so paranoid of. This was a major story beat in Agents of Yesterday. The Na'Kuhl went back in time and attacked a Tholian Hive queen, and her colony, and tried to frame it on the Federation. Since then, the Tholians have hated time travel, and have attempted to stop time travel so it doesn't happen to them again. This is why the Tholians were studying Iconian tech on Nukara, and New Romulus(the Iconian War being what led to the development of time travel and the Temporal War), as well as the Mirror Universe ship on Nukara(Mirror Leeta being part of the Temporal Liberation Front), and why they were at the Temporal Accords protesting they didn't go far enough in banning time travel, and why they attempted to kill the temporal duplicate of T'nae in the "Survivor" mission. The Tholians are paranoid of time travel, having been victims of it already.
hell the Sheliak could make a great enemy since we know so little of them (I explained how they could easily become a bigger enemy months ago when we were talking about future plots).
That's not really the Sheliak's MO though. While the Sheliak dislike the Federation, when they encountered a colony on a world that belong to them, instead of just blowing it up(which they could have easily done and gotten away with since the Federation didn't even know they were there) they went out of their way to contact the Federation to deal with the matter diplomatically. And while Picard outmaneuvered them, and got this three weeks to evac the colony, it was in full accordance with the treaty, and the Sheliak went "ok" and just left. The Sheliak aren't like the Tzenkethi who would just go around and start blowing up planets.
The Dominion is 2,000 years old but seem to have entirely expanded from their homeworld towards the wormhole and everything along the way...why didn't they go the other way?
The original Dominion homeworld was hidden in a nebula near the galactic rim, and they had expanded from their homeworld to the rim. They expanded to the wormhole because there wasn't anything more to expand to in the other direction.
There are about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy (though the estimations vary that one is about average and also round enough to be easy to use), there is no way the Federation has visited 160 billion of them to make that 40%. The Federation and other major interstellar civilizations are like swiss cheese, and even that is vastly overstating the density. In TNG they found new civilizations within Federation borders a number of times, and even a Dyson sphere no one knew about, and that was near a well travelled route no less.
Even your proposed 23% estimate would be 92 billion stars which is still impossible with a fleet of only a few thousand ships (not all of which are even explorers anyway). Most likely that figure has to do with long range scans and poking around at the more interesting places the scans turn up along with the random trails left by exploration ships.
Most likely the vast bulk of the Federation is unvisited frontier between little knots of Fed-inhabited worlds. Most of the member worlds seem to have nearby colonies and that configuration makes the most sense since the early warp drives that are a minimum requirement for full membership are rarely that fast.
The RSE is likely to be quite a bit denser because of the very long time they had whatever FTL drives that Scotty could not find on the warbird but were probably not very fast considering the Romulans vastly underestimated the Enterprise's speed, and the Klingon empire is probably somewhere between the two in density, though both are still probably rather wispy.
As for the Dominion, there is actually no hard data on it since almost everything "known" about it came from Weyoun who is an unreliable witness considering his job was misleading the Federation about the Dominion. In fact, he slipped up on the age of the Dominion since at one point he says "the Dominion has endured two thousand years" which would put its founding in the fourth century by the Earth calendar, but later on claimed that "the Dominion has never surrendered in battle since its founding 10,000 years ago."
The quotes themselves are from Memory Alpha but others have noted the little clues in dialog and body language that Weyoun often lied, a fact that both Combs and one of the producers (I forget which at the moment) confirm, in fact Combs called Weyoun the Dominion's James Bond.
In fact, both DS9 itself and STO show that the world the Great Link is on is not that far from the wormhole since it does not take long to get to it via ordinary Starfleet ships. Also, the fact that the Dominion was mainly concerned with keeping order and eliminating possible threats to the Link they probably did not explore or expand very fast.
Your criteria for what constitutes a change in direction are a nice bit of cherrypicking and misdirection.
You seem to have ignored the fact that the setting and the way the characters fit into it has completely changed. They started out as active Starfleet service personnel on Starfleet business, presumably with friends, family, and loved ones in the Federation that they were protecting with their service, but that changed in S3 to a whole ship full of Buck Rodgers style living anachronisms on a sentient ship with possibly a hint of "chosen one" myth thrown in. They started out integrated with the environment and in season three are very much outsiders. And that is just the most obvious change of direction.
As for "better writing" that is entirely subjective, you may see it as better while a lot of other people see it just as shallow as previous seasons and quite a bit less believable and more handwavy so far.
As for the Tholians and time travel, saying they are paranoid of time travel just does not wash since they instigate a lot of it themselves such as the Defiant grab, the Azure nebula thing, the bit with the Tox Utat which would be too much coincidence without them using time travel of some sort themselves, etc. What might be true is that they could be paranoid about OTHERS having it, which could explain their stance at the temporal accords assuming their goals using time travel were met by then.
As for the idea that all Trek takes a season or two to find their footing, that is a myth. TOS was on track by the second pilot, TAS was on track from the beginning. The movie era was more complicated, Roddenberry was notorious for that quirk of having to first write and produce one offbeat intellectual script before getting on track, and when it happened again true to form in TMP the movie division more or less ignored him from then on, though he still had some effect when he went ballistic over things like Meyer wanting to have Savik be the traitor in The Undiscovered Country since Paramount was mindful of his effect on fans.
The first one to actually take longer than that was TNG, and it was only ONE season, not two, the turning point was actually Conspiracy, the twenty fourth episode of the first season. The second season, the one where Riker first wore the beard, was well received for the most part, which is where the "growing the beard" trope came from.
And the problem with TNG first season was a combination of having to shift concepts at the last possible moment so the scripts were rushed combined with the incredibly toxic and chaotic environment of the writer's room due to Maizlish's interference with the scripts (and mistreating the writers), falsely claiming that the changes were decreed by Roddenberry.
In fact Where No One Has Gone Before was even just a hasty adaptation of the the story from The Wounded Sky in the same manner that The Slaver Weapon in TAS was a very quick several hours rewrite of The Soft Weapon, and a number of others were old TOS scripts reworked (sometimes rather radically, though it is still quicker than developing a new story from scratch) for TNG the same way.
Voyager and Enterprise both continued the last minute shift thing though in different ways. VOY would have been darker than DS9 and featured more survival and two hostile crews having to work together stories but Berman vetoed the idea before anything but the pilot was shot, opting for the safer TNG formula with a few adjustments, along with the weird idea that all the human characters had to be dull and boring to make the aliens seem quirkier. Like TNG s1 proved, rushed scripts are a bad idea.
The sudden (though less pervasive) switch in ENT wasn't Berman's fault though, that came from higher up. The original idea was to use a somewhat sleeker version of the Daedalus or one of the other early designs, and keep the weapons to plasma guns and nuclear missiles. I think the transporter was supposed to be in experimental use like they showed in the show that aired, but I have not been able to find the interview that talked about that part again and I have run out of time to search atm.
Some Paramount execs wanted the show to use the Akira straight out of First Contact and all the typical Trek stuff even though the setting predated most of it. Berman and Drexler talked them into allowing him to run up a new version of the ship based on the Akira instead of the exact ship type from the movie and they finally agreed, though they still had to introduce the rest of the stuff like phase pistols and whatnot early which is what angered many of the core fans.
DS9 was up to speed very quickly, that you say it took a season for it to get good makes me think that you just don't like the general scene-setting that goes on though much of the first season of a show, which is probably why you also insist that TNG s2 was bad. Some people complain about Babylon5 the same way, that the first season was garbage when in reality they just did not like anything but the arc episodes and the first season had more random ones than the other seasons in order to set the stage for the war gradually and more deeply.
You must be kidding about Star Wars extended universe being "unsupervised", it was the most well organized mass shared universe of them all until Disney decided they did not want to bother with it. Leland Chee was tasked with keeping it all sorted out and while I do not agree with all of his decisions (some of them made for quite convoluted histories) he did an excellent job overall.
Disney decided they did not want to bother with it for the same reason Cryptic cannot use ships created by non-Cryptic employees. They just cannot spend time and money negotiating with every individual who owns the rights to that kind of content. The authors guaranteed their stories would never be used the moment they wrote them... They all became intellectual property belonging to the individual creators. Not even Lucasfilm could have used any of it...
CM
"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science." - Edwin Hubble
CBS' bad management and inability to keep their canon straight and allow offshoot products to play nice with it is a separate issue. If CBS is going to kill STO because they are too incompetent to allow their derivative products to make stuff up where there is no canon source, then there's nothing anyone can do.
Pick a point in space with no known planet/star. Poof! New species, new content. Its that simple. If CBS won't allow that, then STO is dead and there's nothing anyone can do.
This has nothing to do with bad management on CBS's part. If anything, its good management that they aren't allowing a problem like what happened with Star Wars extended universe due to little to no oversight.
Also, Star Trek already has like over 1,000 canon species covering everything from space elves, to giant crystalline space spiders. There is little Star Trek hasn't done, and typically its done it at least twice. Adding more species won't do anything but widen a pool thats already wide as an ocean, but typically only as deep as a puddle outside a relative handful of core species. That doesn't make for good narrative, and generally why STO has avoided making up new species in favor of using/expanding upon existing ones.
There was no problem with SW EU until Disney made one. And its not like CBS can even manage proper canon well. Romulans now don't like AI, despite scenes in TNG that explicitly dispute that. Who can properly go off canon when they are willing to change it at the drop of a hat because of bad writing?
But you still fail to acknowledge the fact that what I said here is strictly true. An iron fisted grip on derivative products, refusing to allow them to explore strange new worlds on their own, will kill the ability of those products to exist. If you can't make stuff up, then your universe is dead.
What Phoenix said is right about the size of the Galaxy, and the utter impossibility of the Federation to have explored a significant amount. If we say the Galaxy has 100 billion stars, then to explore 23% of it, and just assume that stars are all there is to explore, then the Federation would have to have explored 23 billion stars.
If you wanted to visit every one of those 23 billion stars in a year, you'd have to visit ~14.5 million stars per day. If you spend every day visiting different stars for 300 years, you'd have to see ~210000 stars per day to end up at 23 billion. If you have 50000 ships each doing that instead, then each of those ships have to visit more than 4 stars per day to actually reach that 23 billion number in 300 years. Even that is still impossible by ST standards, assumes zero barriers to your exploration, and what actual exploration is even going to get done that way?
That still totally ignores things that aren't stars like rogue planets, nebula, the various planets orbiting stars, and other odd cosmic phenomena, especially those that take a long time to study/recognize, like say the H'urq. There is plenty of space in the galaxy, even the "known" space of the Federation for all kinds of things.
There was no problem with SW EU until Disney made one.
The SW EU was a giant cluster*** of tiered levels of canons, contradictory stories, people headcanoning their preferred things over others, and a whole mess of other problems.
And? There is no way around that without absurd top down approval of everything which severely limits the breadth of your IP.
And its not like CBS can even manage proper canon well. Romulans now don't like AI, despite scenes in TNG that explicitly dispute that. Who can properly go off canon when they are willing to change it at the drop of a hat because of bad writing?
The Zhat Vash hate AI. Not all Romulans. And even if you equate it to all Romulans, there would still be people in the field studying it as a means to learn more about their enemy.
The Romulans destroyed an entire planet in another empire because it had simple robots on it and you think they allow AI in their own empire?
But you still fail to acknowledge the fact that what I said here is strictly true. An iron fisted grip on derivative products, refusing to allow them to explore strange new worlds on their own, will kill the ability of those products to exist. If you can't make stuff up, then your universe is dead.
Making sure the extended universe follows canon isn't an iron fisted grip, Its basic product management. You can still make up many new stories using existing canon. Hell, STO has done nothing but that for the last nearly 11 years, and they still have like 2-3 more big stories they can do. Which would be another 3-4 more years. 14 years for an extended universe isn't bad run. Not to mention the novels which have done the same for like 20.
They don't follow canon! They are making stuff up all the time of a handful of brief mentions of things. Look at the H'urq and Iconians. Virtually everything in game related to those two is not canon. They took a name of a species and a few details the shows offered and ran wild with it. There is little difference in just making up a new species, planet, whatever.
and the utter impossibility of the Federation to have explored a significant amount.
Star Trek has never cared about possibility. The crews frequently runs into being that can only be described as magical, and even back in TOS Spock was shown to have The Force when he "felt" the death of an entire crew of Vulcans from lightyears away.
Not to mention this ignores that, sure, you can make up new things. But with how extensive Star Trek already is, pretty much anything "new" you can think of is just a rehash of something that already exist in canon. And when you can widen the pool, or add depth to the pool thats already there, the latter is always preferable.
Even by the end of TNG's 7th season the writers admitted they were pretty much out of ideas, and the dip in quality in S7 reflects this. DS9 took a completely different approach to Trek, by adding depth to existing species like the Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Bajorans, Ferengi, and Trill, instead of constantly trying to make up new things all the time. Voyager went back to the TNG style, and a good deal of its episodes are just TOS/TNG episodes, but they painted the aliens a different color, and gave them a different name. And VOY's fairly poor quality is reflective of them being out of ideas, but still trying to force it. ENT had the same problem its first two seasons, but then immediately got better when they picked one group of races, the Xindi, to focused on for the entire season, and then spent pretty much all of S4 just expanding on existing Trek canon by showing us how everything we saw in TOS came about. And all you have to do it look at the existing Trek shows and see what path they took, an expansion of existing ideas, rather then just trying to make up new aliens all the time.
Even STO's biggest "new" species, the Lukari and Kentari, are just the Vulcans and Romulans 2.0, and their whole storyline is just "reunification 2.0". There's nothing added to the Trek universe by creating them, and the whole storyline would have been more impactful if it was the Vulcans and Romulans, and we got actual progression on the reunification plotline of theirs.
Where are you arguing against what I said anywhere here? ST makes stuff up, so too should Cryptic. Filling in the blanks about how the Prime Directive came into existence is no different from filling in a part of space that is supposedly explored.
Where are you arguing against what I said anywhere here? ST makes stuff up, so too should Cryptic. Filling in the blanks about how the Prime Directive came into existence is no different from filling in a part of space that is supposedly explored.
Its completely different. One is taking something that already exist and adding more depth to it, and the other is making something else up entirely and widening the pool.
I'm really not sure why this is so hard to grasp. They are literally nothing alike from a narrative standpoint.
Now, this is the issue. You can't seem to see that it is possible to add breadth and depth at the same time, especially so if the issue is they're out of other ideas as it is. And that's pretty much the entire reason for fiction, making something up and making it interesting, which is what cryptic does.
No the Iconians are not consistent with canon, because canon does very little to describe them. They are made up as much as most of the enemies in STO are. And limiting yourself to something previously mentioned in canon means you will run out of things to do inevitably.
The Romulans destroyed an entire planet in another empire because it had simple robots on it and you think they allow AI in their own empire?
The Zhat Vash did, not all Romulans. Next you will be saying "well Section 31 tried to use a virus to kill all the Founders, so obviously the Federation would do something similar on its worlds!"
There are lines in ST:P directly pointing out the lack of AI in Romulan society. The show went on to explain why, because of the ZV and their psychotic vision which causes them to murder robots (despite directly contradicting every episode of TNG where Data was involved with Roms in some way, who was far more advanced than the later Mars robots, as well as Voyager when 2 holodocs were not remotely alarming to the Romulans who were trying to capture the Prometheus, rather than destroy it.
No, ST:P made it clear the Romulans did not allow AI tech and they would destroy stupid robots, glass an entire planet on the chance they could become sentient someday, maybe. Would they do it to their own planets? Why wouldn't they? They know the risk of AI. And actually if S31 thought a Federation world was a risk to the entire Federation, yes they probably would destroy it with a virus or something else.
By "explored" they probably mean "closely mapped". In one of the TOS episodes they had just finished a six-month long slog of running a grid pattern sweeping with their long range sensors for a close map. And as for the idea that Starfleet has visited everything of interest, the Jenolan Dyson Sphere begs to differ. And the sphere was not even on the frontier, it was inside Federation territory back when Scotty was headed out to Norpin, a colony world (which would have been far enough in from the edge of the frontier to be safe to colonize).
The Enterprise-D crew discovered a few other things deep in Federation territory too though the sphere is biggest (figuratively and literally). And yes, we are never explicitly told in dialog that the Federation territory is not fully explored, but we are shown that it is not fully explored often enough.
And there are real world examples of the same kind of thing, for instance there are still places in South America (and other places) were no explorers have been yet, though the planet has been fully mapped from orbit and aircraft, people going in on the ground (the equivalent of actually visiting a star system in Star Trek) often find new and unexpected things.
As for the time it took for the various series to get to the "good" point, the fact that you and a number of others did not like TNG second season is entirely subjective. Yes, people wrote in complaints but on the other hand the second season was well enough received by a large enough part of the viewers that "Growing The Beard" was an instantly recognizable trope meaning the point were a struggling start to a series ends and it gets good.
Many even consider that TNG reached that point two episodes before the beard but while Trek fans at conventions would understand "exploding head" to mean the same as "growing the beard" (and either agree or not) it never made it to popular parlance like the beard trope did.
Technically, while the fourth and fifth seasons of TNG were the most watched, the first and second season both beat out all the seasons after that peak save two.
And as I said before, the inconsistencies in Weyoun's dialog were not "flubs", they were part of the foreshadowing for the upcoming war, a subtle hint for the notoriously detail-oriented Trek fans that not all was as it seemed. Kurtzman's mistake is in following the weird idea that has been steadily gaining ground in Hollywood that all viewers are idiots (like the Lost In Space movie producers thought the viewers would not understand helicopter-like movements and so made the Jupiter 2 a Star Wars style "airplane in space") and would not notice anything subtle.
The change in the direction of third season DSC is obvious to a lot of people, but some simply do not see it. Nothing wrong with not seeing it, it is a matter of differing perception and opinion and not everyone watches for the same reasons, but that does not mean that S3 is not a shark jump in the opinion of those who do see it as a change in direction.
This screencap shows two sides of the RSE behind Picard's head:
It also shows Sol and Vulcan and the distance to 40 Eridani is approximately 16 lightyears from Sol so that can be used to scale direct-line measurements between stars on the chart.
Going by that, Romulus/Remus is approx. 63 ly from SOL, less than half the distance between the RSE capital and the far edge of the empire.
The map is a little misleading though, since if you go from Ciden (on the neutral zone border in line with Picard's eye) to Rebena Te Ra (behind him over his shoulder in line with his ear) the distance is approx. 173 ly but the empire is not a simple solid shape, it looks more like the stomach illustration in a Pepto-Bismol commercial or a sort of fat comma lying on its back with the Guardian Republic nestled in just "north" of the RSE's "southeast" border (using north, south, east, west as if it was an ordinary terrestrial map with the top as "north") and being slowly encircled by the RSE.
And that is just on a single X,Y plane, the galactic disk is thought to be about a kiloparsec thick at that point so they can be quite large on the Z axis without looking like it on the map.
As for the Dominion, they never actually give it a size in DS9. However, considering the time constraints with the Section 31 plague the founder's world is not months away and travelled off-camera, it has to be a reasonable distance from the Gamma end of the wormhole to reach in a few days or a week or so at the very most.
It is true that the Tholians may be more into cross-time travel than forward-and-back (and there is a fanon notion about them being naturally cross-dimensional that is neither supported nor ruled out in canon material) but they had to have some way of coordinating their efforts in the time-hopping Tox Utat arc of the game just to be in position to do what they do. And in the show they had to have been doing more than just trying to drag Defiant across into the mirror or they could have placed something in a test location and dragged the mirror version of it though instead of fishing for a Defiant that did not exist yet. Even if they do not physically travel back and forth along the same timeline they obviously have some way of sending messages from the future.
Roddenberry gets dumped on a lot, it has gotten to be fashionable in Trek circles even, but the truth is that while he certainly had flaws and insecurities that made him difficult to work with, especially in later years, not everything that is blamed on him is true. Chaos on the Bridge gives a good overview though it was even more screwed up in the first season than that if you dig deeper, and the worst part of the mess was Maizlish, not Roddenberry (though a lot of people erroneously took Maizlish's word that it was Roddenberry and he was just the messenger).
The Star Wars EU was actually quite well managed, authors had little problem finding stories to tell that fit in with the existing canon structure, and you need a structure like that in order to manage the largest shared world writing framework to date. And Fox is right, an iron fisted approach to managing a shared world story framework is the quickest way to wreck it, it requires finesse, not the overbearing alpha-dog approach.
Also, the Lukari and Kentari are nothing like the Vulcans and Romulans besides both being single societies in the past but now split into nearly opposite views. The themes are entirely different between the two pairs, and that is the important part the stories revolve around.
When making TMP did Gene and CO just make it look like TOS? Hell no, they tossed all of TOS's art style, and design, right out the window. Why? Because they had the money for it, and because it was never important. The way TOS looked was due to budget, not some grand design on THIS is how things should look in this era/the future.
Any future Trek shows SHOULD ignore the visual designings of TOS, in order to create a more accurate representation of what the future would look like.
If cbs thought for a minute they could make money on it, they would CGI the hell out of the interior shots of TOS to make control panels look more in line wtih DSC. all the jujubees gone and a cgi computer interface. all the video screens replaced by cgi/3d visuals. pretty much like the did with jjprise's bridge, but with cgi replacing the actual images. but it would cost far more than they would make, so they won't
Probably a combination of recreating TOS environments whenever something TOS came up in TNG, DS9, and Enterprise, and the whole idea of "We KNOW what the tech looked like in that time period. It looked like this. That doesn't look like this, therefor ITS WRONG!"
I like how Discovery did the consoles because not only is it supposed to look advanced compared to what we have today, it feels like a natural evolution from Ent through to TNG. They still have the toggle switches and physical buttons here and there like were seen in TOS, but they did away with the jellybean buttons and lack of displays for data in favor of touchscreens, which we also saw on the Enterprise-A. Discovery's systems look like something that would evolve more naturally into what we see aboard Ent-A, and it looks functional.
I could never figure out how they can control a starship with the jellybean buttons. Its just a box of buttons. No displays or anything to provide data for the user. I give TMP era a pass because they DO have displays and stuff to help with displaying data, but TOS... there's nothing. And a lot of wasted space on the consoles.
I know there was talk behind the scenes of some kind of holographic interface in those blank areas, but it never made it on screen. While Spock had something to display data, Sulu didn't, and he's the helmsman. You kinda need that data to help navigate. And that pop up thing wasn't always there. Just his set of jellybeans.
Not hating on it. Just... that's how I feel about the consoles themselves.
the navy actually studied the curved control panels to see if it could improve reaction times on combat related consoles.
and sulu had one of those display things that popped out of the console, and he had that display console between him and the navigator
@somtaawkhar i'm a little confused. Are you positing that STO can no longer create its own new content because it might clash with future canon? If thats the case, shouldn't they be retroactively removing all the iconian content for example? or maybe i'm just not getting it. not trying to start TRIBBLE, i just don't understand what you are saying.
Now, this is the issue. You can't seem to see that it is possible to add breadth and depth at the same time
You literally can't. That isn't how anything works, anywhere. Adding breadth involves constantly adding new things to the universe. If you are doing this, you don't have the time to give anything you add depth, since you are always rushing off to the next new thing. All you have to do is look at 99% of the things introduced in any long running franchise, be it the official, or extended universes. Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, major comic labels like D.C., and Marvel. Outside of a relative handful of concepts, the ones constantly reused, the vast majority of their universes has no depth because they simply don't have to time to give any of it any real depth due to constantly chasing the next new thing.
Wrong. Lukari. They made them up and every new mission they show up in, a little more depth is added. Where are you getting this weird idea you can't add breadth and depth?
No the Iconians are not consistent with canon, because canon does very little to describe them.
That isn't what consistency with canon means. Canon states that the Iconians were demons of air and darkness, who used their gateway technology to conquer the galaxy, and destroy all those who opposed them, until the races of the galaxy untied to destroy them. The episode ends with Picard speculating that may have been historical revisionism from races who were jealous of the Iconian's technology. And thats exactly what the Iconian story is in STO. STO is entirely consistent with Trek canon, and nothing that happens in STO in regards to them wouldn't fit in with Trek canon.
No, STO is not at all consistent with Trek canon on the Iconians. We go back in time and see the Iconians are not the conquring demons of air and darkness, they only became that after they were destroyed.
There are lines in ST:P directly pointing out the lack of AI in Romulan society.
sigh.... lacking AI in their society doesn't mean they wouldn't have people studying it to learn how to fight it/destroy it. That isn't what that combination of words even means.
If something is banned, how do you study it? You can't. This is why so little is actually known about banned drugs, because people can't study them because they are illegal. No one is making AI's to study. No one is putting AIs in widespread use to see where they can go wrong, because they are banned. They can't be doing that, especially not in an authoritarian state like the RSE. Your idea is a fantasy, its like Luddites operating supercomputers so they know where to smash them and break them easier. No they just smash them.
(despite directly contradicting every episode of TNG where Data was involved with Roms in some way, who was far more advanced than the later Mars robots, as well as Voyager when 2 holodocs were not remotely alarming to the Romulans who were trying to capture the Prometheus, rather than destroy it.
Normal Romulans are not the Zhat Vash. Why is this so hard for you to grasp? Do you not understand how organizations work? Do you think that because McDonalds exists in the U.S. that everyone works for McDonalds?
No, ST:P made it clear the Romulans did not allow AI tech and they would destroy stupid robots, glass an entire planet on the chance they could become sentient someday, maybe. Would they do it to their own planets? Why wouldn't they? They know the risk of AI. And actually if S31 thought a Federation world was a risk to the entire Federation, yes they probably would destroy it with a virus or something else.
And, again. THE ZHAT VASH ARE NOT ALL ROMULANS.
Why are you coming up with absurdity to try and counter argue? The ZV were an extension of the RSE government. Their mission was to stamp out AI. It was explicitly stated, i think in EP 1, that Rom society lacks AI. Thus, normal people don't have it, can't get it, because ZV will crush them like the anti-robot gestapo they are.
Remember they believe AI will destroy the universe. Little Timmy doing basic AI experiments in the shuttle garage on the family shuttle is going to wake up with a bag over his head one day and marched out to be re-educated, and the shuttle destroyed, overtly or covertly as soon as the ZV find out. You can't have the populace experimenting on AI, no you indoctrinate them to believe it is dangerous, to the point where its actually little Timmy's parents or friends that turn him in to the ZV.
That is how authoritarian states work, the populace is turned against itself to report each other to the state and they do so for their own safety, even if they know the state is spouting BS. Thus there can't be citizens working with AI in Rom society even covertly, not for long anyway.
Comments
I don't know anyone who hated the Lukari, they were well received and I think it's good that their saucer ship made a canon appearance in Discovery Season 3 before blowing up, Maybe the Borg could prove to be potential threat to the Federation again without that Borg Queen nonsense, I'm pretty sure the Borg would have easily defeated the Dominion if they were at full power during the Dominion war.
1. Are you joking? Cytherians? Crystaline Entity? Borg? Pakleds? Dyson Sphere? Iconia? Ent D was frequently encountering new species, new phenomena. They even gave Stewart nearly the same lines for the intro that Shatner had.
2. DS9 was a largely immobile station, which is why they went and got the Defiant to go and discover new species like the H'urq.
3. One of Janeway's common refrains was how they were explorers, and made numerous decisions to explore, not just avoid and keep speeding towards home.
4-5. Many people have complained about NuTrek and how it gets too far away from old Trek. Picard still gave us robocthulu.
6. LD is supposedly a parody. Enterprise S1-2 was not universally hated, nor did the Temporal Cold War have them dealing with old species, they were all new ones.
Of course I was there. People weren't demanding the Deferi be gone, people just hated how badly they were written.
As you point out, the conflict is minimal and can be largely ignored or hand waved, so whats the issue?
Yes it would be quick, that's the whole point I make later, because we don't need galaxy spanning conflicts when you can deal with small ones that happen. And outnumbering them is irrelevant because the point is that its made artificially difficult by the desire to keep them alive so you can't just go in with overwhelming force. Regardless its an idea that took 2 minutes to think up, in two weeks or months I'm sure Cryptic can come up with something better.
So you completely agree that these large conflicts are a serious problem in how they make the little stuff less palatable, and at the same time totally agree with the idea of having smaller conflicts that can be quickly resolved. Not everything needs to be yet another Iconian plot (or another Nemesis plot!) Why should I go patrol Ceti Alpha 4 when I've beaten the Borg, Undine, Iconians, H'urq, etc? Because its my job as a captain.
Okay - I hate to say it, but the nacelles/pylons on that wall display look better than the ones in game...maybe it's just me or the angle, but to me they really look a little bit more sturdy than what we ended up with. Of course I'm REALLY not a fan of the in-game ent-J so anything would be an improvement there.
I don't want to start in on this as a big debate as I know your mind is not going to be shifted on any of this BUT:
If you can't see S3 as a big shift in direction from S2 of Discovery then you must be watching a different show...seriously Som...come on...even if it's not viewed as a negative direction (I don't like Discovery but I do like that they've gone somewhere where it's not messing with any of the established shows etc. so they can do whatever they want) surely you can admit it is a change in direction for them. I'd say even more so than S1 to S2.
99% of the inconsistencies have been explained away in your head, not for everyone. That's fine - no one says you have to have issues with it and can't be happy but lots of people (including myself) have shown inconsistencies that have not been explained beyond "hand waving it away". I know you won't budge on that but I'm not here to convince you, just to remind you that there aren't that many people who believe in the 99% explained that you quote.
Considering how little of the galaxy has actually been explored (including a trip across the Delta quadrant AND a 2000 year old empire from the gamma quadrant) - if they can't find something else out there then they're just not trying. Not to mention the TONS of material that could be explored via the other cultures around (just what are the Tholians so paranoid of...something coming? It was explored in the miniatures game...could do worse to explore something like it here), Extra galactic - we have it right from TOS, hell the Sheliak could make a great enemy since we know so little of them (I explained how they could easily become a bigger enemy months ago when we were talking about future plots). The Dominion is 2,000 years old but seem to have entirely expanded from their homeworld towards the wormhole and everything along the way...why didn't they go the other way? Is there some other threat out there that held them in check that was never discussed?(of course they would never keep secrets would they? *cough* Hurq *cough*).
The Burn is...interesting...I'm a bit leery of where they go with it but am willing to give it a chance to see.
I don't think he means "JJism" in terms of the story being told as opposed to the style of the storytelling...I could be wrong but I think you're reading him wrong on that one.
What I originally read of Andromeda was it was another idea he had penned in the 60s (70s?) and was not a direction for TOS.
B: J'ula and the Hurq were shown in the shows? I missed those episodes. When was the Klingon civil war that was brought about over the mycelial weapon? Also...the mycelial weapon. I could go on but I won't drag it out.
STO - DOES and HAS to explore outside the shows otherwise you're playing nothing but copies of the shows episodes. You know that so don't be petty about saying that it's just about things from the shows and movies, you know it has to expand on those and move beyond them.
C: If cryptic wants to introduce another antagonist somewhere they can...but since it would have to be approved of by CBS it really wouldn't be much of an issue for the future would it? As long as they're careful about it.
There used to be mentions of another race out beyond the Klingons that tended to keep them in check from expanding in other directions...that could be explored, same for the Romulans. There's the Tholians, the Sheliak, what's beyond them?
There is no shortage of enemies that could be explored it they wanted to.
And as for anther point you mentioned in another message - no not every threat has to be galaxy spanning threats or end of the universe etc.
Smaller storylines are completely possible and generally a lot easier to deal with since it gets a bit boring when every new threat is bigger than the last. To be honest I'm already bored with the current episodes just because there are endless waves of Mokai ships that we've already killed. Why is this J'ula even a threat? We beat the Iconians we could have killed her off at any time but they storied her into an ongoing threat that keeps coming back until she's suddenly a good guy...I'm on Xbox so I can only dread the upcoming episodes.
So lets get this straight. ST constantly revisits all these known species, despite the fact they are never seen, nor mentioned before, yet you claim simultaneously that STO can't dare to make up something new because it might MIGHT MAYBE, SOMEDAY, step on the toes of a future ST show that doesn't even do episodic, alien of the week content anymore.
In other words, If we take all your arguments to be valid, you are arguing for STO to die with no new content, and for no good reason.
CBS' bad management and inability to keep their canon straight and allow offshoot products to play nice with it is a separate issue. If CBS is going to kill STO because they are too incompetent to allow their derivative products to make stuff up where there is no canon source, then there's nothing anyone can do.
Pick a point in space with no known planet/star. Poof! New species, new content. Its that simple. If CBS won't allow that, then STO is dead and there's nothing anyone can do.
Sorry, I'm terrible with the whole online thing so not sure how to stick text in between the quotes.
That is very much not true Som. A change in direction can be as simple as a drastic change in story direction. We've gone from fighting for the Federation against different enemies to the distant far future where there is essentially no Federation and they have to find a way to survive or rebuild the Federation - that represents a change in direction for the storyline.
2/3's of the Galaxy is a majority, but considering what they've found in that, it still leaves a HUGE portion of the galaxy to be explored. Seriously, think about this, there is a ton of stuff unexplored in that 2/3rds, now think what is in the entirely unexplored 1/3rd? To put it another way...that's approximately 33 thousand million stars. I think they could find something out there if they wanted to.
Yes they are paranoid about time travel...but they seem to have a lot more issues than just that. They are an extremely xenophobic paranoid race. Time travel is a big thing, but who's to say there aren't other issues? They seem to be almost extra dimensional (existing simultaneously through multiple timelines I think it was suggested? or at least a hive mind across those other dimensions?), there's much that could be done there as well.
For the Sheliak - it's their very nature that could make them so difficult to deal with. They're obviously quite powerful as they seemed somewhat nervous standing off against their ship in the episode. It wouldn't take much to manipulate such a xenophobic by-the-book race into a war by a faction like the Terrans. They are human and have ships all but identical to the Federation, they could easily manipulate things behind the scenes with some attacks here and there to break the treaty and bring about a war. Our job could be fighting to hold back the Sheliak and protect colonists while also picking up clues about how the war started and eventually finding evidence that would allow for another attempt at peace with them. I had suggested this before - five minutes of thought on a race encountered in a single TNG episode and we have a small war arc with lots of intrigue involving the Terrans. There's no reason that they can't come up with a lot more ideas if they wanted to.
The Dominion...there are lots of places to expand to, no reason someone couldn't have been on one side of them hemming them in. Perhaps a faction in between them and the Delta quadrant? Again - considering that it's the devs (story writers etc. - you know what I mean) job to come up with ideas for the game, if we can develop some interesting ideas in 5 minutes they have no excuses for running out of ideas.
As for the inconsistencies - we've hashed that out so many times I'm not going to go over them again...we point out the inconsistencies, you hand wave them away or type up "might be" reasons that to you make absolute sense because you want to believe in it, but don't hold any water with any of us and in the end we just go around and around...what's the point in typing those same arguments over and over again?
EDIT - meant 33 THOUSAND million stars, not 33 hundred million stars.
There are about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy (though the estimations vary that one is about average and also round enough to be easy to use), there is no way the Federation has visited 160 billion of them to make that 40%. The Federation and other major interstellar civilizations are like swiss cheese, and even that is vastly overstating the density. In TNG they found new civilizations within Federation borders a number of times, and even a Dyson sphere no one knew about, and that was near a well travelled route no less.
Even your proposed 23% estimate would be 92 billion stars which is still impossible with a fleet of only a few thousand ships (not all of which are even explorers anyway). Most likely that figure has to do with long range scans and poking around at the more interesting places the scans turn up along with the random trails left by exploration ships.
Most likely the vast bulk of the Federation is unvisited frontier between little knots of Fed-inhabited worlds. Most of the member worlds seem to have nearby colonies and that configuration makes the most sense since the early warp drives that are a minimum requirement for full membership are rarely that fast.
The RSE is likely to be quite a bit denser because of the very long time they had whatever FTL drives that Scotty could not find on the warbird but were probably not very fast considering the Romulans vastly underestimated the Enterprise's speed, and the Klingon empire is probably somewhere between the two in density, though both are still probably rather wispy.
As for the Dominion, there is actually no hard data on it since almost everything "known" about it came from Weyoun who is an unreliable witness considering his job was misleading the Federation about the Dominion. In fact, he slipped up on the age of the Dominion since at one point he says "the Dominion has endured two thousand years" which would put its founding in the fourth century by the Earth calendar, but later on claimed that "the Dominion has never surrendered in battle since its founding 10,000 years ago."
The quotes themselves are from Memory Alpha but others have noted the little clues in dialog and body language that Weyoun often lied, a fact that both Combs and one of the producers (I forget which at the moment) confirm, in fact Combs called Weyoun the Dominion's James Bond.
In fact, both DS9 itself and STO show that the world the Great Link is on is not that far from the wormhole since it does not take long to get to it via ordinary Starfleet ships. Also, the fact that the Dominion was mainly concerned with keeping order and eliminating possible threats to the Link they probably did not explore or expand very fast.
Your criteria for what constitutes a change in direction are a nice bit of cherrypicking and misdirection.
You seem to have ignored the fact that the setting and the way the characters fit into it has completely changed. They started out as active Starfleet service personnel on Starfleet business, presumably with friends, family, and loved ones in the Federation that they were protecting with their service, but that changed in S3 to a whole ship full of Buck Rodgers style living anachronisms on a sentient ship with possibly a hint of "chosen one" myth thrown in. They started out integrated with the environment and in season three are very much outsiders. And that is just the most obvious change of direction.
As for "better writing" that is entirely subjective, you may see it as better while a lot of other people see it just as shallow as previous seasons and quite a bit less believable and more handwavy so far.
As for the Tholians and time travel, saying they are paranoid of time travel just does not wash since they instigate a lot of it themselves such as the Defiant grab, the Azure nebula thing, the bit with the Tox Utat which would be too much coincidence without them using time travel of some sort themselves, etc. What might be true is that they could be paranoid about OTHERS having it, which could explain their stance at the temporal accords assuming their goals using time travel were met by then.
As for the idea that all Trek takes a season or two to find their footing, that is a myth. TOS was on track by the second pilot, TAS was on track from the beginning. The movie era was more complicated, Roddenberry was notorious for that quirk of having to first write and produce one offbeat intellectual script before getting on track, and when it happened again true to form in TMP the movie division more or less ignored him from then on, though he still had some effect when he went ballistic over things like Meyer wanting to have Savik be the traitor in The Undiscovered Country since Paramount was mindful of his effect on fans.
The first one to actually take longer than that was TNG, and it was only ONE season, not two, the turning point was actually Conspiracy, the twenty fourth episode of the first season. The second season, the one where Riker first wore the beard, was well received for the most part, which is where the "growing the beard" trope came from.
And the problem with TNG first season was a combination of having to shift concepts at the last possible moment so the scripts were rushed combined with the incredibly toxic and chaotic environment of the writer's room due to Maizlish's interference with the scripts (and mistreating the writers), falsely claiming that the changes were decreed by Roddenberry.
In fact Where No One Has Gone Before was even just a hasty adaptation of the the story from The Wounded Sky in the same manner that The Slaver Weapon in TAS was a very quick several hours rewrite of The Soft Weapon, and a number of others were old TOS scripts reworked (sometimes rather radically, though it is still quicker than developing a new story from scratch) for TNG the same way.
Voyager and Enterprise both continued the last minute shift thing though in different ways. VOY would have been darker than DS9 and featured more survival and two hostile crews having to work together stories but Berman vetoed the idea before anything but the pilot was shot, opting for the safer TNG formula with a few adjustments, along with the weird idea that all the human characters had to be dull and boring to make the aliens seem quirkier. Like TNG s1 proved, rushed scripts are a bad idea.
The sudden (though less pervasive) switch in ENT wasn't Berman's fault though, that came from higher up. The original idea was to use a somewhat sleeker version of the Daedalus or one of the other early designs, and keep the weapons to plasma guns and nuclear missiles. I think the transporter was supposed to be in experimental use like they showed in the show that aired, but I have not been able to find the interview that talked about that part again and I have run out of time to search atm.
Some Paramount execs wanted the show to use the Akira straight out of First Contact and all the typical Trek stuff even though the setting predated most of it. Berman and Drexler talked them into allowing him to run up a new version of the ship based on the Akira instead of the exact ship type from the movie and they finally agreed, though they still had to introduce the rest of the stuff like phase pistols and whatnot early which is what angered many of the core fans.
DS9 was up to speed very quickly, that you say it took a season for it to get good makes me think that you just don't like the general scene-setting that goes on though much of the first season of a show, which is probably why you also insist that TNG s2 was bad. Some people complain about Babylon5 the same way, that the first season was garbage when in reality they just did not like anything but the arc episodes and the first season had more random ones than the other seasons in order to set the stage for the war gradually and more deeply.
You must be kidding about Star Wars extended universe being "unsupervised", it was the most well organized mass shared universe of them all until Disney decided they did not want to bother with it. Leland Chee was tasked with keeping it all sorted out and while I do not agree with all of his decisions (some of them made for quite convoluted histories) he did an excellent job overall.
CM
There was no problem with SW EU until Disney made one. And its not like CBS can even manage proper canon well. Romulans now don't like AI, despite scenes in TNG that explicitly dispute that. Who can properly go off canon when they are willing to change it at the drop of a hat because of bad writing?
But you still fail to acknowledge the fact that what I said here is strictly true. An iron fisted grip on derivative products, refusing to allow them to explore strange new worlds on their own, will kill the ability of those products to exist. If you can't make stuff up, then your universe is dead.
What Phoenix said is right about the size of the Galaxy, and the utter impossibility of the Federation to have explored a significant amount. If we say the Galaxy has 100 billion stars, then to explore 23% of it, and just assume that stars are all there is to explore, then the Federation would have to have explored 23 billion stars.
If you wanted to visit every one of those 23 billion stars in a year, you'd have to visit ~14.5 million stars per day. If you spend every day visiting different stars for 300 years, you'd have to see ~210000 stars per day to end up at 23 billion. If you have 50000 ships each doing that instead, then each of those ships have to visit more than 4 stars per day to actually reach that 23 billion number in 300 years. Even that is still impossible by ST standards, assumes zero barriers to your exploration, and what actual exploration is even going to get done that way?
That still totally ignores things that aren't stars like rogue planets, nebula, the various planets orbiting stars, and other odd cosmic phenomena, especially those that take a long time to study/recognize, like say the H'urq. There is plenty of space in the galaxy, even the "known" space of the Federation for all kinds of things.
And? There is no way around that without absurd top down approval of everything which severely limits the breadth of your IP.
The Romulans destroyed an entire planet in another empire because it had simple robots on it and you think they allow AI in their own empire?
They don't follow canon! They are making stuff up all the time of a handful of brief mentions of things. Look at the H'urq and Iconians. Virtually everything in game related to those two is not canon. They took a name of a species and a few details the shows offered and ran wild with it. There is little difference in just making up a new species, planet, whatever.
Where are you arguing against what I said anywhere here? ST makes stuff up, so too should Cryptic. Filling in the blanks about how the Prime Directive came into existence is no different from filling in a part of space that is supposedly explored.
Now, this is the issue. You can't seem to see that it is possible to add breadth and depth at the same time, especially so if the issue is they're out of other ideas as it is. And that's pretty much the entire reason for fiction, making something up and making it interesting, which is what cryptic does.
No the Iconians are not consistent with canon, because canon does very little to describe them. They are made up as much as most of the enemies in STO are. And limiting yourself to something previously mentioned in canon means you will run out of things to do inevitably.
There are lines in ST:P directly pointing out the lack of AI in Romulan society. The show went on to explain why, because of the ZV and their psychotic vision which causes them to murder robots (despite directly contradicting every episode of TNG where Data was involved with Roms in some way, who was far more advanced than the later Mars robots, as well as Voyager when 2 holodocs were not remotely alarming to the Romulans who were trying to capture the Prometheus, rather than destroy it.
No, ST:P made it clear the Romulans did not allow AI tech and they would destroy stupid robots, glass an entire planet on the chance they could become sentient someday, maybe. Would they do it to their own planets? Why wouldn't they? They know the risk of AI. And actually if S31 thought a Federation world was a risk to the entire Federation, yes they probably would destroy it with a virus or something else.
The Enterprise-D crew discovered a few other things deep in Federation territory too though the sphere is biggest (figuratively and literally). And yes, we are never explicitly told in dialog that the Federation territory is not fully explored, but we are shown that it is not fully explored often enough.
And there are real world examples of the same kind of thing, for instance there are still places in South America (and other places) were no explorers have been yet, though the planet has been fully mapped from orbit and aircraft, people going in on the ground (the equivalent of actually visiting a star system in Star Trek) often find new and unexpected things.
As for the time it took for the various series to get to the "good" point, the fact that you and a number of others did not like TNG second season is entirely subjective. Yes, people wrote in complaints but on the other hand the second season was well enough received by a large enough part of the viewers that "Growing The Beard" was an instantly recognizable trope meaning the point were a struggling start to a series ends and it gets good.
Many even consider that TNG reached that point two episodes before the beard but while Trek fans at conventions would understand "exploding head" to mean the same as "growing the beard" (and either agree or not) it never made it to popular parlance like the beard trope did.
Technically, while the fourth and fifth seasons of TNG were the most watched, the first and second season both beat out all the seasons after that peak save two.
And as I said before, the inconsistencies in Weyoun's dialog were not "flubs", they were part of the foreshadowing for the upcoming war, a subtle hint for the notoriously detail-oriented Trek fans that not all was as it seemed. Kurtzman's mistake is in following the weird idea that has been steadily gaining ground in Hollywood that all viewers are idiots (like the Lost In Space movie producers thought the viewers would not understand helicopter-like movements and so made the Jupiter 2 a Star Wars style "airplane in space") and would not notice anything subtle.
The change in the direction of third season DSC is obvious to a lot of people, but some simply do not see it. Nothing wrong with not seeing it, it is a matter of differing perception and opinion and not everyone watches for the same reasons, but that does not mean that S3 is not a shark jump in the opinion of those who do see it as a change in direction.
This screencap shows two sides of the RSE behind Picard's head:
It also shows Sol and Vulcan and the distance to 40 Eridani is approximately 16 lightyears from Sol so that can be used to scale direct-line measurements between stars on the chart.
Going by that, Romulus/Remus is approx. 63 ly from SOL, less than half the distance between the RSE capital and the far edge of the empire.
The map is a little misleading though, since if you go from Ciden (on the neutral zone border in line with Picard's eye) to Rebena Te Ra (behind him over his shoulder in line with his ear) the distance is approx. 173 ly but the empire is not a simple solid shape, it looks more like the stomach illustration in a Pepto-Bismol commercial or a sort of fat comma lying on its back with the Guardian Republic nestled in just "north" of the RSE's "southeast" border (using north, south, east, west as if it was an ordinary terrestrial map with the top as "north") and being slowly encircled by the RSE.
And that is just on a single X,Y plane, the galactic disk is thought to be about a kiloparsec thick at that point so they can be quite large on the Z axis without looking like it on the map.
As for the Dominion, they never actually give it a size in DS9. However, considering the time constraints with the Section 31 plague the founder's world is not months away and travelled off-camera, it has to be a reasonable distance from the Gamma end of the wormhole to reach in a few days or a week or so at the very most.
It is true that the Tholians may be more into cross-time travel than forward-and-back (and there is a fanon notion about them being naturally cross-dimensional that is neither supported nor ruled out in canon material) but they had to have some way of coordinating their efforts in the time-hopping Tox Utat arc of the game just to be in position to do what they do. And in the show they had to have been doing more than just trying to drag Defiant across into the mirror or they could have placed something in a test location and dragged the mirror version of it though instead of fishing for a Defiant that did not exist yet. Even if they do not physically travel back and forth along the same timeline they obviously have some way of sending messages from the future.
Roddenberry gets dumped on a lot, it has gotten to be fashionable in Trek circles even, but the truth is that while he certainly had flaws and insecurities that made him difficult to work with, especially in later years, not everything that is blamed on him is true. Chaos on the Bridge gives a good overview though it was even more screwed up in the first season than that if you dig deeper, and the worst part of the mess was Maizlish, not Roddenberry (though a lot of people erroneously took Maizlish's word that it was Roddenberry and he was just the messenger).
The Star Wars EU was actually quite well managed, authors had little problem finding stories to tell that fit in with the existing canon structure, and you need a structure like that in order to manage the largest shared world writing framework to date. And Fox is right, an iron fisted approach to managing a shared world story framework is the quickest way to wreck it, it requires finesse, not the overbearing alpha-dog approach.
Also, the Lukari and Kentari are nothing like the Vulcans and Romulans besides both being single societies in the past but now split into nearly opposite views. The themes are entirely different between the two pairs, and that is the important part the stories revolve around.
If cbs thought for a minute they could make money on it, they would CGI the hell out of the interior shots of TOS to make control panels look more in line wtih DSC. all the jujubees gone and a cgi computer interface. all the video screens replaced by cgi/3d visuals. pretty much like the did with jjprise's bridge, but with cgi replacing the actual images. but it would cost far more than they would make, so they won't
the navy actually studied the curved control panels to see if it could improve reaction times on combat related consoles.
and sulu had one of those display things that popped out of the console, and he had that display console between him and the navigator
Wrong. Lukari. They made them up and every new mission they show up in, a little more depth is added. Where are you getting this weird idea you can't add breadth and depth?
No, STO is not at all consistent with Trek canon on the Iconians. We go back in time and see the Iconians are not the conquring demons of air and darkness, they only became that after they were destroyed.
If something is banned, how do you study it? You can't. This is why so little is actually known about banned drugs, because people can't study them because they are illegal. No one is making AI's to study. No one is putting AIs in widespread use to see where they can go wrong, because they are banned. They can't be doing that, especially not in an authoritarian state like the RSE. Your idea is a fantasy, its like Luddites operating supercomputers so they know where to smash them and break them easier. No they just smash them.
Why are you coming up with absurdity to try and counter argue? The ZV were an extension of the RSE government. Their mission was to stamp out AI. It was explicitly stated, i think in EP 1, that Rom society lacks AI. Thus, normal people don't have it, can't get it, because ZV will crush them like the anti-robot gestapo they are.
Remember they believe AI will destroy the universe. Little Timmy doing basic AI experiments in the shuttle garage on the family shuttle is going to wake up with a bag over his head one day and marched out to be re-educated, and the shuttle destroyed, overtly or covertly as soon as the ZV find out. You can't have the populace experimenting on AI, no you indoctrinate them to believe it is dangerous, to the point where its actually little Timmy's parents or friends that turn him in to the ZV.
That is how authoritarian states work, the populace is turned against itself to report each other to the state and they do so for their own safety, even if they know the state is spouting BS. Thus there can't be citizens working with AI in Rom society even covertly, not for long anyway.