Uhhh...the Aceton Assimilators were specifically designed to convert drained power to deadly radiation - if the Enterprise had gone to warp, assuming they even could, the radiation burst in the few seconds between the warp bubble formation and actually entering subspace would probably have been akin to flying through the relativistic jet of a supermassive black hole.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
The Third engine is a Protostar. Essentially the USS Protostar is carrying a Baby star in main engineering. Or as Dal said "Our warp drive has one heck of a kick"
The Computer calls it "Protowarp"
Now, that sounds fun. It reminds me how hundreds of thousands of years ago, the Hirogen were building communication stations around baby black holes.
NO, no, no, no, no, NO. Nothing is sillier than a Spore Drive, which completely turns what Star Trek created on its head, aka Warp. A Protostar BOOSTING power is very different to an entirely and unpleasant new form of propulsion, with something running through the universe that absolutely no one ever knew existed before.
The Romulans had artificial quantum singularities as warp cores. The Hirogen collected micro black holes, so capturing a star? I think that's genius and really fits well.
Predictable characters...they're more rounded, developed and interesting than any I've seen in Disco and JJ-Verse.
Ooh and leave Hologram Janeway alone. I tell you...Kate wouldn't have agreed to anything she didn't think was a fit for her or Janeway. It works.
I'm dying for the Protostar to hit STO, because it's the most exciting Trek I've seen in years. This latest episode was fantastic, with character development, an exciting plot, great visuals and maybe I'm alone in this...but it really did it for me :-)
BBEG may have more reason than we know to want the Protostar - when he thought he saw it on Murder Planet, he whispered, "Salvation."
And I'm not entirely sure Holo-Janeway is being ignorant - she seems to me to have caught on to the fact that these kids are too young and in at least two cases the wrong species to be Starfleet cadets, but her programming calls for her to guide them into being the best Starfleet cadets she can anyway. And given factors such as Dal's distrust of authority, pretending to go along with them is probably the best way to fulfill her program.
Looks to me that Holo-Janeway is aware the crew isn't a group of cadets and she's just rolling with it so they can bring the Protostar back to Starfleet.
Looks to me that Holo-Janeway is aware the crew isn't a group of cadets and she's just rolling with it so they can bring the Protostar back to Starfleet.
I'm not sure about that...she didn't have the Protostar Drive in her database, genuinely seems concerned about her crew and clearly have the ability to fly the ship herself. She could just take off in the ship herself if she wanted to. I spy an EMH like development with her.
Looks to me that Holo-Janeway is aware the crew isn't a group of cadets and she's just rolling with it so they can bring the Protostar back to Starfleet.
I'm not sure about that...she didn't have the Protostar Drive in her database, genuinely seems concerned about her crew and clearly have the ability to fly the ship herself. She could just take off in the ship herself if she wanted to. I spy an EMH like development with her.
NO, no, no, no, no, NO. Nothing is sillier than a Spore Drive, which completely turns what Star Trek created on its head, aka Warp. A Protostar BOOSTING power is very different to an entirely and unpleasant new form of propulsion, with something running through the universe that absolutely no one ever knew existed before.
Scientifically speaking, a protostar makes very little sense compared to a micro black hole.
Hypothetically speaking, youc an compress pretty much any amount of matter to a density that it will collapse in on itself. And thanks to Hawking radiation, you can even explain why it might be a powerful energy source (though it likely wouldn't work as a long-terms table power source and instead explode after a while - if you're lucky, after a few months or years instead of seconds.)
However, a protostar is a star that has already formed, but is still collecting mass from the surrounding nebula and basically hasn't reached its full eventual mass yet. It might be young, and light, but it's still absolutely massive object compared to a ship like the Protostar. You can't contain it inside the ship, and you need crazy amounts of energy to move it around.
If it is for some reason a "micro-star" than that, you really just have a fusion reactor, which we know isn't delivering enough power for fast warp speeds, otherwise we would not bother with warp cores.
It is about as sensible as spores that are connected to subspace, and about as close to science as the idea that Spock can watch his homeworld collapse with the naked eye in the sky of the planet in a different star system.
But Star Trek has a few of such things (like its Lego genetics), so it's not that big of a deal. Fans allow it when they want to, and don't if they don't want to.
---
I liked the last two episodes, they glued the protagonists together. I was worried they would drag this out for too long.
It seems obvious that the Protostar is not just some tech gizmo that the Diviner wants for personal glory or power. But what is it really? Maybe he just wants to fly to his home? Or do his people need something on the ship to be saved? It is kinda odd that it's only him and his daughter that we've seen of his people so far, so that gives me the idea they are seperated from the rest.
Or his his name a hint? He has "divined" a future and the Protostar his the way to avert something bad from happening, or to ensure that something good happens? (Maybe his people need a new sun, and the Protostar inside the ship could be it?)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,595Community Moderator
Uhhh...the Aceton Assimilators were specifically designed to convert drained power to deadly radiation - if the Enterprise had gone to warp, assuming they even could, the radiation burst in the few seconds between the warp bubble formation and actually entering subspace would probably have been akin to flying through the relativistic jet of a supermassive black hole.
That was actually referencing the season finale of Lower Decks. Not TNG.
Well, Ex-SQUEEZE-me! The only power-draining asteroid field I - and many other people - are familiar with is the Menthar booby trap...someone should've clarified that.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,595Community Moderator
They kinda did by mentioning stripping off the hull plating. They didn't do that in TNG. And I'm pretty sure they would have mentioned Aceton Assimilators if any were involved.
I mean, I enjoy Discovery too, for the most part, but the fact that I like it doesn't mean that I don't think that Burham's superhero complex is insufferable at this point.
For what it's worth, the Federation president agrees with you. Looks like her martyr complex is going to get her booted out of the center seat when Saru returns.
I mean, I enjoy Discovery too, for the most part, but the fact that I like it doesn't mean that I don't think that Burham's superhero complex is insufferable at this point.
For what it's worth, the Federation president agrees with you. Looks like her martyr complex is going to get her booted out of the center seat when Saru returns.
Ooh...I'm suddenly predicting her quitting Starfleet and her and Booker going off on his ship, obviously joining up with the Discovery to join the day when the ship is going to be destroyed without her help.
Odd, as I'm predicting that when Saru returns, she's going to return to being an insubordinate subordinate, which is where she shines. She's just not adept at command. Perhaps someday she will be, but that day is not today, which is why I'm looking forward to Saru's return.
(And no, it's not accepting that you can't win 'em all - Jim Kirk was a notable failure in that regard. It's that she insists on putting herself in harm's way, when there are probably at least twenty or thirty crewmembers with more EVA experience than her. As the president noted, in times of crisis there can be a fine line between a pendulum and a wrecking ball.)
Odd, as I'm predicting that when Saru returns, she's going to return to being an insubordinate subordinate, which is where she shines. She's just not adept at command. Perhaps someday she will be, but that day is not today, which is why I'm looking forward to Saru's return.
(And no, it's not accepting that you can't win 'em all - Jim Kirk was a notable failure in that regard. It's that she insists on putting herself in harm's way, when there are probably at least twenty or thirty crewmembers with more EVA experience than her. As the president noted, in times of crisis there can be a fine line between a pendulum and a wrecking ball.)
That's where things become a bit contradictory. I mean, she was identified as not being ready to be Discovery's XO, and was duly demoted from that position. With that in mind, and the short space of time between, what the heck made them think she was ready to be Captain?! I mean, yeah Saru went on leave... but was the best choice they had really someone who was deemed to be unfit to be the ship's XO?!
With the episode's name and everything that happened...I was seriously expecting it to end as everything having been a holodeck programme, with this as a "Kobayashi Maru" test of her worthiness to be a captain.
So...what empire was that supposed to be from, then? There are precious few that have artificial stars aboard their ships - in fact, I can only think of one, and that's the Protoss from Starcraft...but not only is that artificial star used for power generation and not any special type of FTL drive, it's also only a thing aboard their last remaining Arkship.
I was meaning they got inspiration from the Romulan Star Empire. Who use artifical quantum singularity technology. Essentially a black hole. Someone in Starfleet may have gone "Huh, wonder if we can use a actual star to power a ships propulsion system"
I thought the "Empire" that was mentioned earlier was the one from Star Wars, the pre-Disney ship fusion reactors were often described as a "miniature sun". And those fusion reactors are extremely sophisticated if their fuel really is "deuterium diesel" (which is heavily hinted at in the prequel movies and some of the novels) since the fact that they are deliberately feeding the reactors deuterium and carbon it implies that they use a multi-shell fusion process and that they somehow solved the neutrino loss problem so the carbon end actually produces power.
According to the technobabble the Romulan singularity powerplants don't seem to work by black hole fuzzyness, they seem to be more like a crude early form of ZPM (from Stargate) instead. I suspect that the old Romulan FTL drive that Scotty could not recognize as a form of warp drive was in fact something similar to the shipboard FTL drive in Mass Effect using some cross-dimensional trick of the singularity to drain away or otherwise circumvent the Einsteinian pseudomass problem and push past the speed of light.
I am not sure what the protostar drive is supposed to be, so far there has not been enough said about it to make a guess as to which theories it might be based on. Maybe more will be said later in the series that can shed enough light on how it works.
The spore drive itself not too crazy, in fact the superstring-riding FTL idea has been out for a long time, and it was already used in a series made from a Roddenberry pitch: Andromeda. How the fungus that apparently infests the strings allows access to them has never been more than pure handwavum unfortunately (Kurtzman admits that Star Trek is too intellectual for his tastes already so that is not surprising), which is one of the things the oldschool Trek fans that got into analyzing the technology find so unsatisfying about the DSC series).
You know, you keep pulling out this claim that "Kurtzman/Akiva/insert-showrunner-here dislikes Trek/says it's too intellectual". I have yet to see a source for this claim cited.
So...what empire was that supposed to be from, then? There are precious few that have artificial stars aboard their ships - in fact, I can only think of one, and that's the Protoss from Starcraft...but not only is that artificial star used for power generation and not any special type of FTL drive, it's also only a thing aboard their last remaining Arkship.
I was meaning they got inspiration from the Romulan Star Empire. Who use artifical quantum singularity technology. Essentially a black hole. Someone in Starfleet may have gone "Huh, wonder if we can use a actual star to power a ships propulsion system"
I thought the "Empire" that was mentioned earlier was the one from Star Wars, the pre-Disney ship fusion reactors were often described as a "miniature sun". And those fusion reactors are extremely sophisticated if their fuel really is "deuterium diesel" (which is heavily hinted at in the prequel movies and some of the novels) since the fact that they are deliberately feeding the reactors deuterium and carbon it implies that they use a multi-shell fusion process and that they somehow solved the neutrino loss problem so the carbon end actually produces power.
According to the technobabble the Romulan singularity powerplants don't seem to work by black hole fuzzyness, they seem to be more like a crude early form of ZPM (from Stargate) instead. I suspect that the old Romulan FTL drive that Scotty could not recognize as a form of warp drive was in fact something similar to the shipboard FTL drive in Mass Effect using some cross-dimensional trick of the singularity to drain away or otherwise circumvent the Einsteinian pseudomass problem and push past the speed of light.
I am not sure what the protostar drive is supposed to be, so far there has not been enough said about it to make a guess as to which theories it might be based on. Maybe more will be said later in the series that can shed enough light on how it works.
The spore drive itself not too crazy, in fact the superstring-riding FTL idea has been out for a long time, and it was already used in a series made from a Roddenberry pitch: Andromeda. How the fungus that apparently infests the strings allows access to them has never been more than pure handwavum unfortunately (Kurtzman admits that Star Trek is too intellectual for his tastes already so that is not surprising), which is one of the things the oldschool Trek fans that got into analyzing the technology find so unsatisfying about the DSC series).
I think the thing for me is the idea that the Mycelial Network is a real physical thing that exists in the universe...but no one else has found out about it and uses it. Not even in the 1000-years after Starfleet created it and out of the billions of different civilisations, so much older than the Federation...absolutely no one else discovered it.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
Just like Genesis...all the millions of empires in the Milky Way and humans are the only ones to invent a transformative protomatter matrix?
And apparently, not all humans...just those who worked on the project. No one else in Humanity ever discovered it and that sticks in my craw. If it exists, then it should be possible to be discovered and not just by one or two people out of trillions.
The same goes for Omega. The Federation found out about it, but supressed knowledge of its existence. The Borg found out about it through assimilating 13 different species. Then there was the species that Voyager encountered and enacted the Directive.
If something exists, then what on earth are the statistics for just one person out of everyone else in the universe discovering it?
It's actually worse than Omega, because the Mycelial Network exists everywhere...it's always there, not hidden away in a hard to find mineral ore.
Well, to be fair, the concept of 'physics as biology' might not actually occur to a lot of species - they made it sound like that was a pretty 'out there' concept...even though it's basically the same thing as saying that, at the subatomic level and lower, there is no distinction between organic and non-organic matter...which is why the whole Thalaron radiation thing is so stupid...if it works on the subatomic level, it shouldn't ONLY be affecting organic material.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
Well, to be fair, the concept of 'physics as biology' might not actually occur to a lot of species - they made it sound like that was a pretty 'out there' concept...even though it's basically the same thing as saying that, at the subatomic level and lower, there is no distinction between organic and non-organic matter...which is why the whole Thalaron radiation thing is so stupid...if it works on the subatomic level, it shouldn't ONLY be affecting organic material.
Although for any species who uses biological ships...the Breen were always suppose to have them, the species who created Tinman, Species 8472 even, surely the development and evolving their technology would have stumbled across it.
I also find it strange that sensors wouldn't be able to detect it and then someone would explore further.
It's like the Vaudwaar's subspace tunnels...they occurred naturally, but the Vaudwaar found them and then later, other species did too.
If the Network had been artificially created and belonged to Discovery, then fine...but it's up for grabs to anyone and everyone in the entire universe.
Anyone else who discovered the mycelial network also quickly found that it was only good for instantaneous travel of maybe a few hundred kilometers. I mean, what are the odds that a giant space tardigrade happens along at the exact moment you're looking, and you can figure out how to enslave it for navigation? Even in DSC, that only happened to the Glenn.
Anyone else who discovered the mycelial network also quickly found that it was only good for instantaneous travel of maybe a few hundred kilometers. I mean, what are the odds that a giant space tardigrade happens along at the exact moment you're looking, and you can figure out how to enslave it for navigation? Even in DSC, that only happened to the Glenn.
I think the moment when they were torturing that poor Tardigrade is when I gave up on Disco. The TRIBBLE was the icing on the cake, but the animal cruelty just drew a line in the sand for me.
It's the consistently dark themes, just for dark themes' sake.
Anyone else who discovered the mycelial network also quickly found that it was only good for instantaneous travel of maybe a few hundred kilometers. I mean, what are the odds that a giant space tardigrade happens along at the exact moment you're looking, and you can figure out how to enslave it for navigation? Even in DSC, that only happened to the Glenn.
I think the moment when they were torturing that poor Tardigrade is when I gave up on Disco. The TRIBBLE was the icing on the cake, but the animal cruelty just drew a line in the sand for me.
It's the consistently dark themes, just for dark themes' sake.
It doesn't help that the Discovery's crew found a way to alter a volunteer's DNA, and freed the tardigrade-oid? Either way, that's a more-than-adequate explanation of why nobody else in the galaxy uses the mycelial network for travel - it only works under a very specific, rather weird set of circumstances.
Anyone else who discovered the mycelial network also quickly found that it was only good for instantaneous travel of maybe a few hundred kilometers. I mean, what are the odds that a giant space tardigrade happens along at the exact moment you're looking, and you can figure out how to enslave it for navigation? Even in DSC, that only happened to the Glenn.
I think the moment when they were torturing that poor Tardigrade is when I gave up on Disco. The TRIBBLE was the icing on the cake, but the animal cruelty just drew a line in the sand for me.
It's the consistently dark themes, just for dark themes' sake.
I'll agree that was hard to watch. However, it was NOTHING compared to what the writers of 'Picard' did with Icheb.
I actually kept my mum from watching that episode. Agonizingly slowly pulling his eye out and cutting off his Borg optic nerve? It was so totally uncalled for.
Again, I think that's why I'm loving Prodigy so much...it doesn't have to be DARK with torture, just drama. We've had a betrayed daughter, stolen children condemned to prison and it's genuinely engaging. I'm honestly not stoked about Chakotay of all people coming into the series, but based on how the series has been written so far...I want to say that I'm open to however they do it.
The dynamic though, the intricacies of the plot and also, the wholesome is refreshing. I'm 39, but I don't want to want vivisection and if that's all that's on offer for my "age range"...I'll stick to the kids show, thank you.
It doesn't help that the Discovery's crew found a way to alter a volunteer's DNA, and freed the tardigrade-oid? Either way, that's a more-than-adequate explanation of why nobody else in the galaxy uses the mycelial network for travel - it only works under a very specific, rather weird set of circumstances.
As I recall, they mention in DSC that they checked every known species in the Federation's database and only humans proved DNA compatible with the tardifrade DNA.
It doesn't help that the Discovery's crew found a way to alter a volunteer's DNA, and freed the tardigrade-oid? Either way, that's a more-than-adequate explanation of why nobody else in the galaxy uses the mycelial network for travel - it only works under a very specific, rather weird set of circumstances.
As I recall, they mention in DSC that they checked every known species in the Federation's database and only humans proved DNA compatible with the tardifrade DNA.
That wouldn't mean much considering how many humans are out there who are not native to Earth in the first place or were transplanted sometimes great distances from Earth in the past.
On the other hand, the discovery of what the spores could do was an accident that depends on some quirk of the equipment along with a rather unusual-minded researcher recognizing something odd was going on, all of those factors lining up just right like that at the right place and right time is extremely unlikely to say the least.
That actually makes me think getting a spore drive in Stellaris' New Horizons (and its breakaway mod, New Civilizations) is a fair bit too easy...the tech needed for it should probably be way rarer than it currently is - like as rare as getting the (now fixed) Horizon Signal event chain to trigger - and should also require Paul Stamets as a heroic scientist slotted in your physics research slot to even get it to be a possible option at all.
Hell, they could even make it a whole event thing the way acquiring Dark Matter tech is in the Ancient Cache of Technologies mod.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
Comments
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Now, that sounds fun. It reminds me how hundreds of thousands of years ago, the Hirogen were building communication stations around baby black holes.
The Romulans had artificial quantum singularities as warp cores. The Hirogen collected micro black holes, so capturing a star? I think that's genius and really fits well.
Predictable characters...they're more rounded, developed and interesting than any I've seen in Disco and JJ-Verse.
Ooh and leave Hologram Janeway alone. I tell you...Kate wouldn't have agreed to anything she didn't think was a fit for her or Janeway. It works.
I'm dying for the Protostar to hit STO, because it's the most exciting Trek I've seen in years. This latest episode was fantastic, with character development, an exciting plot, great visuals and maybe I'm alone in this...but it really did it for me :-)
And I'm not entirely sure Holo-Janeway is being ignorant - she seems to me to have caught on to the fact that these kids are too young and in at least two cases the wrong species to be Starfleet cadets, but her programming calls for her to guide them into being the best Starfleet cadets she can anyway. And given factors such as Dal's distrust of authority, pretending to go along with them is probably the best way to fulfill her program.
I'm not sure about that...she didn't have the Protostar Drive in her database, genuinely seems concerned about her crew and clearly have the ability to fly the ship herself. She could just take off in the ship herself if she wanted to. I spy an EMH like development with her.
Hypothetically speaking, youc an compress pretty much any amount of matter to a density that it will collapse in on itself. And thanks to Hawking radiation, you can even explain why it might be a powerful energy source (though it likely wouldn't work as a long-terms table power source and instead explode after a while - if you're lucky, after a few months or years instead of seconds.)
However, a protostar is a star that has already formed, but is still collecting mass from the surrounding nebula and basically hasn't reached its full eventual mass yet. It might be young, and light, but it's still absolutely massive object compared to a ship like the Protostar. You can't contain it inside the ship, and you need crazy amounts of energy to move it around.
If it is for some reason a "micro-star" than that, you really just have a fusion reactor, which we know isn't delivering enough power for fast warp speeds, otherwise we would not bother with warp cores.
It is about as sensible as spores that are connected to subspace, and about as close to science as the idea that Spock can watch his homeworld collapse with the naked eye in the sky of the planet in a different star system.
But Star Trek has a few of such things (like its Lego genetics), so it's not that big of a deal. Fans allow it when they want to, and don't if they don't want to.
---
I liked the last two episodes, they glued the protagonists together. I was worried they would drag this out for too long.
It seems obvious that the Protostar is not just some tech gizmo that the Diviner wants for personal glory or power. But what is it really? Maybe he just wants to fly to his home? Or do his people need something on the ship to be saved? It is kinda odd that it's only him and his daughter that we've seen of his people so far, so that gives me the idea they are seperated from the rest.
Or his his name a hint? He has "divined" a future and the Protostar his the way to avert something bad from happening, or to ensure that something good happens? (Maybe his people need a new sun, and the Protostar inside the ship could be it?)
That was actually referencing the season finale of Lower Decks. Not TNG.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Ooh...I'm suddenly predicting her quitting Starfleet and her and Booker going off on his ship, obviously joining up with the Discovery to join the day when the ship is going to be destroyed without her help.
(And no, it's not accepting that you can't win 'em all - Jim Kirk was a notable failure in that regard. It's that she insists on putting herself in harm's way, when there are probably at least twenty or thirty crewmembers with more EVA experience than her. As the president noted, in times of crisis there can be a fine line between a pendulum and a wrecking ball.)
With the episode's name and everything that happened...I was seriously expecting it to end as everything having been a holodeck programme, with this as a "Kobayashi Maru" test of her worthiness to be a captain.
I thought the "Empire" that was mentioned earlier was the one from Star Wars, the pre-Disney ship fusion reactors were often described as a "miniature sun". And those fusion reactors are extremely sophisticated if their fuel really is "deuterium diesel" (which is heavily hinted at in the prequel movies and some of the novels) since the fact that they are deliberately feeding the reactors deuterium and carbon it implies that they use a multi-shell fusion process and that they somehow solved the neutrino loss problem so the carbon end actually produces power.
According to the technobabble the Romulan singularity powerplants don't seem to work by black hole fuzzyness, they seem to be more like a crude early form of ZPM (from Stargate) instead. I suspect that the old Romulan FTL drive that Scotty could not recognize as a form of warp drive was in fact something similar to the shipboard FTL drive in Mass Effect using some cross-dimensional trick of the singularity to drain away or otherwise circumvent the Einsteinian pseudomass problem and push past the speed of light.
I am not sure what the protostar drive is supposed to be, so far there has not been enough said about it to make a guess as to which theories it might be based on. Maybe more will be said later in the series that can shed enough light on how it works.
The spore drive itself not too crazy, in fact the superstring-riding FTL idea has been out for a long time, and it was already used in a series made from a Roddenberry pitch: Andromeda. How the fungus that apparently infests the strings allows access to them has never been more than pure handwavum unfortunately (Kurtzman admits that Star Trek is too intellectual for his tastes already so that is not surprising), which is one of the things the oldschool Trek fans that got into analyzing the technology find so unsatisfying about the DSC series).
I think the thing for me is the idea that the Mycelial Network is a real physical thing that exists in the universe...but no one else has found out about it and uses it. Not even in the 1000-years after Starfleet created it and out of the billions of different civilisations, so much older than the Federation...absolutely no one else discovered it.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
And apparently, not all humans...just those who worked on the project. No one else in Humanity ever discovered it and that sticks in my craw. If it exists, then it should be possible to be discovered and not just by one or two people out of trillions.
If something exists, then what on earth are the statistics for just one person out of everyone else in the universe discovering it?
It's actually worse than Omega, because the Mycelial Network exists everywhere...it's always there, not hidden away in a hard to find mineral ore.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Although for any species who uses biological ships...the Breen were always suppose to have them, the species who created Tinman, Species 8472 even, surely the development and evolving their technology would have stumbled across it.
I also find it strange that sensors wouldn't be able to detect it and then someone would explore further.
It's like the Vaudwaar's subspace tunnels...they occurred naturally, but the Vaudwaar found them and then later, other species did too.
If the Network had been artificially created and belonged to Discovery, then fine...but it's up for grabs to anyone and everyone in the entire universe.
I think the moment when they were torturing that poor Tardigrade is when I gave up on Disco. The TRIBBLE was the icing on the cake, but the animal cruelty just drew a line in the sand for me.
It's the consistently dark themes, just for dark themes' sake.
I actually kept my mum from watching that episode. Agonizingly slowly pulling his eye out and cutting off his Borg optic nerve? It was so totally uncalled for.
Again, I think that's why I'm loving Prodigy so much...it doesn't have to be DARK with torture, just drama. We've had a betrayed daughter, stolen children condemned to prison and it's genuinely engaging. I'm honestly not stoked about Chakotay of all people coming into the series, but based on how the series has been written so far...I want to say that I'm open to however they do it.
The dynamic though, the intricacies of the plot and also, the wholesome is refreshing. I'm 39, but I don't want to want vivisection and if that's all that's on offer for my "age range"...I'll stick to the kids show, thank you.
That wouldn't mean much considering how many humans are out there who are not native to Earth in the first place or were transplanted sometimes great distances from Earth in the past.
On the other hand, the discovery of what the spores could do was an accident that depends on some quirk of the equipment along with a rather unusual-minded researcher recognizing something odd was going on, all of those factors lining up just right like that at the right place and right time is extremely unlikely to say the least.
Hell, they could even make it a whole event thing the way acquiring Dark Matter tech is in the Ancient Cache of Technologies mod.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"