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Story Moments that seemingly defy logic

faelon#8433 faelon Member Posts: 358 Arc User
Just something to think on. What are the moments in the story, great and not so great where it suddenly takes a left turn and seems to either defy logic, common sense, strategic thinking or in some cases sanity. And to limit the normal ranting lets put the most obvious example of "Why are we suddenly allied to J'ula for no bloody sane reason" off the table. We know that one is a hamfisted horror. I'm looking for some of the more subtle ones.

One example for me is at the heart of the Iconian War. As much as I love the shear desperate tension the storyline imparts, the various Alliance Leaders missed something really really big, that would have allowed them to literally roll up the Iconian's without them having any means to defend against it. The secret wasn't the Annorax and poking holes into time itself. Rather the Krenim had shown a much much better technology, that would have allowed us to defeat the Iconian's easily, without trying to rewrite history. Remember the technology to step outside of time to hide? That's a perfect cloak against the Iconian's. You could hide assassins', whole fleets, even planets. It negates their ability to jump anywhere as you can still move effectively faster. After the Players figured out how to kill an Iconian in Broken Circle, and the fact that we knew there were only 12, slipping out of phase and simply hunting them down would seem a cleaner option. Why mess around with time over centuries when you only need to mess with fractions of a second?

In the Delta Quadrant why did we not use Kobali Prime for Planetary Munitions testing? Failing that exactl why did we get involved in destroying or preventing the creating of a vacine that would prevent a Kobali from infecting you once you were dead? This would seem like a matter of personal choice. Kind of like deciding whether to sign up as an organ donor. Also that incredibly obnoxious Benzite Captain that keeps lecturing us about the Prime Directive. And We must respect the Kobali's funny ways of being a Zombie Plague. "Ummm No! 2 things Captain. Everytime I have encountered this mission, I have outranked you, Substantially. Enough that you should be saying "Yes Sir" and bringing me coffee. And then not say anything else unless or until I give you leave to spout your stupidity. And second everything you say about the Prime Directive is wrong. Very wrong. And you keep lecturing me, your commanding officer over it. But if you feel your career is too stress free and enjoy spending long patrols in Malon Space, you can bring it up with Admiral Tuvok. I'm sure he lives for these sorts of complaints about me. I know Admiral Quinn does"

In Sunrise we recover Kal Dano's Tox Uthat and turn the Lukari Star back on. Whereas the next day we once again recover it, then bury it in a cave on Risa, instead of you know, turning the Narkuhl's sun back on, after the Tholians turn it off. All of this leading to a confusing mess of petty species using time travel to TRIBBLE with each other.

It becomes rather clear that the "Starfleet Time Police From the FUTURE" are complete incompetent morons. Best practice Bring Grenades.

One more while not as bad as the above issues, is a minor flaw in the story that would create problems beyond In the Gamma Arc the jem'Hadar Will be cured of white. Great! But they have been biologically engineered to live on white. All their nutrients come from white. Is someone gonna magic them up a digestive system? Maybe try pouring some other goopy fluids inside them? Without the white they become H'urq with handguns.

Post edited by baddmoonrizin on

Comments

  • orangenee#2931 orangenee Member Posts: 837 Arc User
    Yay we saved the Hur'q, now we will never see nor hear from them again.

    Balls to Space Zombies. Cyclonic torpedo will take care of that garbage and that terrible Zombie Kim mission would never come to pass either.

    I believe the white "cure" was more removing the more severe withdrawal symptoms (turning into goo piles). Plus the allies can make more to feed any Jemmies knocking around in the other factions. That's about the most sense I can make of that.

    The Fek'hiri being Dominion products? What the jeff is Gre'thor about then?

    Ja'ulas Discovery arc. The missions either end of that arc don't really fit. Plus I was under the impression Mirror Tilly just cleared off elsewhere not back home like nothing happened at all.

    Daniel's face melt swap over.
  • faelon#8433 faelon Member Posts: 358 Arc User
    I believe the white "cure" was more removing the more severe withdrawal symptoms (turning into goo piles). Plus the allies can make more to feed any Jemmies knocking around in the other factions. That's about the most sense I can make of that.

    Y'know we probably shouldn't have destroyed that Ketrecel White Factory. It might have come in useful someday!
  • orangenee#2931 orangenee Member Posts: 837 Arc User
    I believe the white "cure" was more removing the more severe withdrawal symptoms (turning into goo piles). Plus the allies can make more to feed any Jemmies knocking around in the other factions. That's about the most sense I can make of that.

    Y'know we probably shouldn't have destroyed that Ketrecel White Factory. It might have come in useful someday!

    Well, the Alphas are a little uppity so probably best we did.
  • jonsillsjonsills Member Posts: 10,354 Arc User
    So, genociding the Kobali because you find their reproductive methods distasteful is fine with you? Are you from the Mirror Universe?
    Lorna-Wing-sig.png
  • phoenixc#0738 phoenixc Member Posts: 5,459 Arc User
    Dust to Dust is the worst designed mission I have played in the game, but that has nothing to do with the Kobali themselves but rather with the fact that they have an incredibly boring and pointless maze followed by a Qbert section that is very, very sensitive to latency problems.

    A lot of people rage against the other puzzles in it too, but I personally like those over the vomit-inducing squarewave and (worse yet) triangle things they use instead of situational puzzles in some other scenarios. The situational puzzles are one of the things that made Spectres so great for instance.

    Also, the idea of the mission makes perfect sense, they have even done stuff similar to that in the shows themselves. The premise does not defy logic, just the horrible implementation of the mechanics.

    The Kobali are a great way to have a character with a background in the Delta quadrant and still have an emotional tie to Starfleet (or one of the many Cardassian military orders) since ships have been disappearing for years and some of them could have gotten far enough to have been found drifting by the Kobali. That tie would seem to be even more likely since the only known Earth-human-based Kobali in VOY and STO were having Kyn'steya problems (though admittedly two is a very small sample).

    In theory, they could even look more human than Kobali if they use Inaprovaline or something similar. For instance, whatever the long-term cure for Tropolisine is (the short-term cure for Tropolisine poisoning is Inaprovaline) that made Archer IV colonizable by sometime in the 2200s could possibly have a long-term effect on the look of the new Kobali.

    I have to agree on the Iconian/Anorax thing and the weening Jem'Hadar off the Ketracel issues. While a new design of bioconstruct could solve the Ketracel problem, the new white-free design J'H would logically never have it in their systems in the first place to have to ween off of.

    The temporal cold war was a bit of a letdown to say the least, but so many people complained about the temporal missions that I suppose they probably just closed it out in the most expedient way possible instead of a more interesting treatment.

    I know the seeming heel-face turn J'Ula did might seem weird on the surface, but the misunderstood anti-hero trope is seen quite often in Trek. They really needed a few more missions to cover some unfortunate gaps but otherwise it was a classic Trek schtick.

    The Gorn were the biggest example of that in TOS (though there were others too). The Federation had inadvertently entered territory the Gorn claimed and placed an outpost on a world they were getting ready to colonize, the Gorn were fighting off what they thought was an alien invasion.




  • qultuqqultuq Member Posts: 988 Arc User
    edited June 2022
    > @orangenee#2931 said:
    >
    > Plus I was under the impression Mirror Tilly just cleared off elsewhere not back home like nothing happened at all.
    >

    Well she’s not back “home.” She is in the mirror universe but not the right time. And yeah, it still doesn’t make sense how she got there and how she managed to reintegrate into the contemporary Terran navy and maintain her rank. But we can likely assume she murdered whatever captain found her and commandeered their ship.
  • orangenee#2931 orangenee Member Posts: 837 Arc User
    jonsills wrote: »
    So, genociding the Kobali because you find their reproductive methods distasteful is fine with you? Are you from the Mirror Universe?

    Yep.

    Now I know you like to play contrarian in nearly every contentious topic but how would you feel if your recently departed family members got converted into things that look like "happy fun time" aids?

    Not to mention it was their fault they had to start doing it in the first place, grave robbers got hanged back when it was a profitable enterprise.
  • jonsillsjonsills Member Posts: 10,354 Arc User
    How would I feel? It wouldn't really bother me - I don't believe they have any particular use for their bodies once they're dead. Lots of folks these days go in for mulching and having the remains used to grow a tree; seems pretty philosophically similar to me. (Of course, the one that wants to use my dad is going to need a way to deal with the cancer that ravaged him. Wonder if he'd be billed as a "fixer-upper"?)

    Why, do you think they need them? 'Cause if people need their actual physical bodies come the Resurrection, there are going to be a lot of frustrated Christians who were cremated or died missing substantial portions of their anatomies...
    Lorna-Wing-sig.png
  • phoenixc#0738 phoenixc Member Posts: 5,459 Arc User
    edited June 2022
    jonsills wrote: »
    So, genociding the Kobali because you find their reproductive methods distasteful is fine with you? Are you from the Mirror Universe?

    Yep.

    Now I know you like to play contrarian in nearly every contentious topic but how would you feel if your recently departed family members got converted into things that look like "happy fun time" aids?

    Not to mention it was their fault they had to start doing it in the first place, grave robbers got hanged back when it was a profitable enterprise.

    It is really not that different from what happened in the ENT third season episode Extinction except that normal brain activity stops before anything happens in the case of Kobali, which brings up the question of whether the Kobali is actually a continuation of the original person in an altered body or someone entirely new that (in the case of kyn'steya) simply has enough of the previous person's memories to think they are the same person (similar to the confusion Ezri Dax had when joined without the usual training).

    Either way, they are resurrected as fully functional beings, not raised as mindless automations under the control of someone or something else, like a zombie. The trope is seen in a lot of stories in a number of genres.

    The most often of course is in comics, characters like Catwoman and Electra die a lot and come back from it for instance. In the case of the Catwomen:
    • the silver-age Selena Kyle was in a plane crash with no survivors but woke up from it with new life (which would include Julie Newmar's and probably Lee Meriwether's versions from the '60s TV show) and they often died at the end of the episode only to reappear later whole and healthy.
    • Selena Kyle from Batman Returns (and the 2002 Birds of Prey) was pushed out of a skyscraper window and fell to her death before being resurrected by a horde of cats and either dies outright or avoids death via the most outrageously improbable circumstances nine times in the movie.
    • Patience Philips drowns in polluted water and like Selena Kyle is resurrected by a horde of cats acting under Bast's directive and gains enhanced abilities.

    And there are many, many other examples in the comic genre.

    Then there are the vampires that were so popular (sparkles or no sparkles) about a decade or so ago in the historical and urban fantasy genres, and science fiction has many examples of resurrected or transformed heroes. In fact, the episode Extinction could have been inspired by Andre Norton's novels Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus where something vaguely similar happens. And Avatar is another good example of that transformation trope, along with stories like Quantum Leap, Heven Can Wait and a few 'avenging angel' style stories that have varying blends of the resurrection and transformation themes.

    Stories like that draw on that uncanny-valley-like situation to add an edge of horror/tension to the story which is definitely off-putting to a small segment of readers/viewers but the concepts are valid and interesting enough to make them worthwhile to write for the majority.
  • captainbrian11captainbrian11 Member Posts: 733 Arc User
    Yay we saved the Hur'q, now we will never see nor hear from them again.

    Balls to Space Zombies. Cyclonic torpedo will take care of that garbage and that terrible Zombie Kim mission would never come to pass either.

    I believe the white "cure" was more removing the more severe withdrawal symptoms (turning into goo piles). Plus the allies can make more to feed any Jemmies knocking around in the other factions. That's about the most sense I can make of that.

    The Fek'hiri being Dominion products? What the jeff is Gre'thor about then?

    Ja'ulas Discovery arc. The missions either end of that arc don't really fit. Plus I was under the impression Mirror Tilly just cleared off elsewhere not back home like nothing happened at all.

    Daniel's face melt swap over.


    I know this going to come as a suprise to you but warhammer 40k and star trek are not the same IP
  • thay8472thay8472 Member Posts: 6,100 Arc User
    jonsills wrote: »
    So, genociding the Kobali because you find their reproductive methods distasteful is fine with you? Are you from the Mirror Universe?

    I'm fine with that.
    2gdi5w4mrudm.png
    Typhoon Class please!
  • vetteguy904vetteguy904 Member Posts: 3,843 Arc User
    having to answer up to far junior officers (even before we got flag ranks) at launch you were a captain when you got to DS9 for the cardassian arc.. and you are taking orders for a commander. thats all through the storylines. the biggest one that pisses me off is in khitomer discord when you are suddenly the bad guy and Shon says get out of here I'll take the heat.

    Seriously dude? all you have done is lucked out to command Enterprise. meanwhile I'm the fasted rising officer to reach flag rank saved the galaxy more than a few times, faced down the Borg, and you think i can't take the heat???? TRIBBLE YOU, Shon
    Spock.jpg

  • orangenee#2931 orangenee Member Posts: 837 Arc User
    Yay we saved the Hur'q, now we will never see nor hear from them again.

    Balls to Space Zombies. Cyclonic torpedo will take care of that garbage and that terrible Zombie Kim mission would never come to pass either.

    I believe the white "cure" was more removing the more severe withdrawal symptoms (turning into goo piles). Plus the allies can make more to feed any Jemmies knocking around in the other factions. That's about the most sense I can make of that.

    The Fek'hiri being Dominion products? What the jeff is Gre'thor about then?

    Ja'ulas Discovery arc. The missions either end of that arc don't really fit. Plus I was under the impression Mirror Tilly just cleared off elsewhere not back home like nothing happened at all.

    Daniel's face melt swap over.


    I know this going to come as a suprise to you but warhammer 40k and star trek are not the same IP

    It should be. Purge the Xenos!!! Especially space zombies.

    Zombies have no business getting involved with space travel.
  • jonsillsjonsills Member Posts: 10,354 Arc User
    Vetteguy, in a military situation you take orders from whoever has been appointed to give those orders, acting with authority from your superiors. (Never forget the time I got to watch two E-5s hold a Major at gunpoint because he thought he could order his way past them at a security checkpoint.) There isn't always a senior officer available to hold down a desk, after all, so the C-in-C (in our case, Commander Starfleet) issues the orders for some luckless LCDR to hand out to some Captains and such.

    And "meteoric rise through the ranks" can sometimes be greeted with suspicion. Were you so successful because you were in fact colluding with the enemy, taking what appeared to be strategic targets that were truly no longer necessary to their interests? It's been known to happen...
    Lorna-Wing-sig.png
  • faelon#8433 faelon Member Posts: 358 Arc User
    qultuq wrote: »
    > @orangenee#2931 said:
    >
    > Plus I was under the impression Mirror Tilly just cleared off elsewhere not back home like nothing happened at all.
    >

    Well she’s not back “home.” She is in the mirror universe but not the right time. And yeah, it still doesn’t make sense how she got there and how she managed to reintegrate into the contemporary Terran navy and maintain her rank. But we can likely assume she murdered whatever captain found her and commandeered their ship.

    This actually gets explained if you bother to pay attention to her dialog in The Calling. When she used Pahvo to seemingly beam away from us in our earlier encounter, she instead ended up on Mirror Pahvo, but 25th century Mirror Pahvo. But she knew how to control and weaponize Pahvo from what she learned on our Pahvo. So when the next ship of Terran's showed up she had them at her mercy, and was able to impress the Emperor by gifting him the Weaponized planet. Thus getting her her rank back and a ship.
  • qultuqqultuq Member Posts: 988 Arc User
    edited June 2022
    > @faelon#8433 said:
    > This actually gets explained if you bother to pay attention to her dialog in The Calling. When she used Pahvo to seemingly beam away from us in our earlier encounter, she instead ended up on Mirror Pahvo, but 25th century Mirror Pahvo. But she knew how to control and weaponize Pahvo from what she learned on our Pahvo. So when the next ship of Terran's showed up she had them at her mercy, and was able to impress the Emperor by gifting him the Weaponized planet. Thus getting her her rank back and a ship.

    Cool. I haven’t played that yet. I have been using the Kumarke grind to get the Terran knife on all my toons. I have been spending the rest of the event just turning in the mission. I wouldn’t mind picking up the Andorran Usan-tor on a few toons. Has anyone tried them? Do they handle like the plasma mek’leth and furiadon fangs?
    Post edited by qultuq on
  • phoenixc#0738 phoenixc Member Posts: 5,459 Arc User
    The Usan-tor seems to be more like the furiadon fangs and J'Ula's mek'leths rather than Aakar's (which seem to use the really old animations and either lack a closer entirely or it just does not work well), though they do not seem to be quite as smooth as the fangs or J'Ula's mek'leths either. Your best bet would probably be to get one pair and try them to see if they work well for you before deciding whether to outfit all your toons with them.
  • spiritbornspiritborn Member Posts: 4,248 Arc User
    jonsills wrote: »
    Vetteguy, in a military situation you take orders from whoever has been appointed to give those orders, acting with authority from your superiors. (Never forget the time I got to watch two E-5s hold a Major at gunpoint because he thought he could order his way past them at a security checkpoint.) There isn't always a senior officer available to hold down a desk, after all, so the C-in-C (in our case, Commander Starfleet) issues the orders for some luckless LCDR to hand out to some Captains and such.

    And "meteoric rise through the ranks" can sometimes be greeted with suspicion. Were you so successful because you were in fact colluding with the enemy, taking what appeared to be strategic targets that were truly no longer necessary to their interests? It's been known to happen...

    Yeah when I was doing my service I had in theory the authority to deny access (aka order them to not enter) even to flag officers due the position I had (I was combination of a receptionist and a guard) and I never made it past private. Granted I never met any generals or admirals during my service but I was reminded several times that I was not allowed to let anyone in without them telling why they were visiting where I was serving and they couldn't order me to ignore that duty.

    As for the Khitomer Discord part I took as "lay low so you can't make this worse" this is a case where experience trumps rank and we have had our rank for what 2 years at most.

    Shon has been a captain for our whole Starfleet career (or at least that's implied, seeing as his command of the Belfast isn't considered to be fresh command) and if the information in the wiki is be believed has been in Starfleet since 2389 meaning they have a lot more diplomatic experience then we do, something that's needed to handle to the volatile situation and not escalating it into another Klingon Empire/UFP war.

    By having us flee and lay low Shon can investigate the accusations more freely then he could if we proceeded to try throw our rep around and possibly shooting anyone who tried to arrest us. Sure we had the capacity to do so but it wouldn't have helped anyone and would have been very illogical. When we flee and lay low, Starfleet can just say "they couldn't find us" while dismantling the accusation (that wasn't that great to begin with).
  • vetteguy904vetteguy904 Member Posts: 3,843 Arc User
    spiritborn wrote: »
    jonsills wrote: »
    Vetteguy, in a military situation you take orders from whoever has been appointed to give those orders, acting with authority from your superiors. (Never forget the time I got to watch two E-5s hold a Major at gunpoint because he thought he could order his way past them at a security checkpoint.) There isn't always a senior officer available to hold down a desk, after all, so the C-in-C (in our case, Commander Starfleet) issues the orders for some luckless LCDR to hand out to some Captains and such.

    And "meteoric rise through the ranks" can sometimes be greeted with suspicion. Were you so successful because you were in fact colluding with the enemy, taking what appeared to be strategic targets that were truly no longer necessary to their interests? It's been known to happen...

    Yeah when I was doing my service I had in theory the authority to deny access (aka order them to not enter) even to flag officers due the position I had (I was combination of a receptionist and a guard) and I never made it past private. Granted I never met any generals or admirals during my service but I was reminded several times that I was not allowed to let anyone in without them telling why they were visiting where I was serving and they couldn't order me to ignore that duty.

    As for the Khitomer Discord part I took as "lay low so you can't make this worse" this is a case where experience trumps rank and we have had our rank for what 2 years at most.

    Shon has been a captain for our whole Starfleet career (or at least that's implied, seeing as his command of the Belfast isn't considered to be fresh command) and if the information in the wiki is be believed has been in Starfleet since 2389 meaning they have a lot more diplomatic experience then we do, something that's needed to handle to the volatile situation and not escalating it into another Klingon Empire/UFP war.

    By having us flee and lay low Shon can investigate the accusations more freely then he could if we proceeded to try throw our rep around and possibly shooting anyone who tried to arrest us. Sure we had the capacity to do so but it wouldn't have helped anyone and would have been very illogical. When we flee and lay low, Starfleet can just say "they couldn't find us" while dismantling the accusation (that wasn't that great to begin with).

    Nice try. A watch stander which you both are trying to describe is not the same as the events in game. Orders are not cut by junior officers. In a squadron of naval vessels, the commanding officer is always senior. their orders are dispatched by yet more senior. I was Officer of the deck in port, and underway, junior Officer of the deck. although the OOD is the direct representative of the CO, that position does NOT have the authority to issue orders outside of the scope of duties, in other words I did not have the authority to launch harpoons at a tanker ship.

    Really do try to understand how military authority works before you try strawman arguments
    Spock.jpg

  • qultuqqultuq Member Posts: 988 Arc User
    > @phoenixc#0738 said:
    > The Usan-tor seems to be more like the furiadon fangs and J'Ula's mek'leths rather than Aakar's (which seem to use the really old animations and either lack a closer entirely or it just does not work well), though they do not seem to be quite as smooth as the fangs or J'Ula's mek'leths either. Your best bet would probably be to get one pair and try them to see if they work well for you before deciding whether to outfit all your toons with them.

    Thanks! I still haven’t played that episode. I want to pick up some usan-tor before the impending Year of Andorians when we finally get our usan fights on the frosty cliffs of Andor.
  • fleetcaptain5#1134 fleetcaptain5 Member Posts: 4,754 Arc User
    The problem with slipping out of time to assassinate the Iconians is that they have servants who have no problem with temporal mechanics.

    Solanae, Vaadwaur and Elachi would have no problem going into an out-of-phase time thing or whatever it exactly was.

    Besides, we don't know how portable or mobile that technology was. It could well be that they needed a huge facility for it on Kyana - that colony had existed for centuries already and the necessary infrastructure might have been just as old and entirely integrated into the settlement.


    There is, I believe, another example to be found in the Iconian war arc though. We concluded (in Butterfly) that we didn't want to erase objects from time because it was too dangerous. But then we travel back with the intention of killing off the Iconians.
    It's different in the sense that they would still have existed prior to us wiping them out, but the consequences of erasing their entire 200.000 year life that they lived (were supposed to have lived) after that would still remain.


    Another example, not really of logic-defying writing but of one-sided propaganda, are the episodes with the temporal agents. Those episodes really bother me.
    [4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother

    [3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
  • fleetcaptain5#1134 fleetcaptain5 Member Posts: 4,754 Arc User
    J'ula's story in general and us helping her to kill the Klingon head of state (!) is probably the worst of all. Imagine being a KDF officer helping to kill Quinn or Okeg and all members of the Alliance being perfectly fine with it, acting as if nothing has happened. Sure, they're Klingons and they settle their difference through combat, it's normal for them - but that's them; we as Starfleet officers or Romulans shouldn't get involved in that.

    The political ramifications are entirely ignored, but that is too much a thing in Star Trek in general imo. Very often the writers (not just of this game) seem to forget that there is an entire political order, economy, civil society... Basically an entire civilisation in the Federation that isn't part of of Starfleet and a... society in the Empire that's more than just the KDF.


    Likewise, I believe Trek in general to be too technology-centric. It's the technology as an easy fix thing: We have J'Ula, but also Vaadwaur and even Starfleet itself as examples of 'if you just have technology, you can fix anything, become a major threat' and so on (see also the easy reverse engineering of the strangest of technologies like in the reputations or certain ships). Whereas in reality, that technology would require a broad training program, probably years of gaining experience and simply enough people to operate it.
    [4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother

    [3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
  • fleetcaptain5#1134 fleetcaptain5 Member Posts: 4,754 Arc User
    Just to add a bit more on the temporal agents:
    In Sunrise we recover Kal Dano's Tox Uthat and turn the Lukari Star back on. Whereas the next day we once again recover it, then bury it in a cave on Risa, instead of you know, turning the Narkuhl's sun back on, after the Tholians turn it off. All of this leading to a confusing mess of petty species using time travel to TRIBBLE with each other.

    Well, either they're incompetent, or they're perfectly fine with pretending to be neutral guardians of the timeline and then constantly showing they're not.

    Braxton is the worst example with his A leads to B leads to C, when it's actually him causing C and then A and B (travelling back in time, involving Voyager whose hull then ends up near an explosion in the Sol system in the far future).

    Daniels or whoever it was in that episode does the same thing. For some reason we can't just destroy the Tox Uthat before it is ever used because that would be interfering with the timeline's 'natural' progression - but then we basically get to see that this entire timeline is the consequence of time travel and interference.


    The temporal agents are either among the most arrogant beings in the universe, or the most incompetent ones. Either they are aware that they just follow their own preferences which they then call 'the natural flow of time' or they truly believe they can understand what that is when they actually don't understand it at all.
    [4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother

    [3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
  • fleetcaptain5#1134 fleetcaptain5 Member Posts: 4,754 Arc User
    edited July 2022
    having to answer up to far junior officers (even before we got flag ranks) at launch you were a captain when you got to DS9 for the cardassian arc.. and you are taking orders for a commander. thats all through the storylines. the biggest one that pisses me off is in khitomer discord when you are suddenly the bad guy and Shon says get out of here I'll take the heat.

    Seriously dude? all you have done is lucked out to command Enterprise. meanwhile I'm the fasted rising officer to reach flag rank saved the galaxy more than a few times, faced down the Borg, and you think i can't take the heat???? TRIBBLE YOU, Shon

    Didn't he also say that because our characters were set up and make to look like they were involved in an attack on civilians?

    If Starfleet had arrived, you'd either have to
    - surrender and be punished for a crime you didn't commit
    - open fire against Starfleet ships, making the accusations more realistic and potentially killing your own people
    - flee anyway

    To me it seems that Shon was just helping you to get out of a nasty situation that - without him covering for you - would have become even more nasty in the worst case scenario, or have the same end result in the best.


    (Or at least that's what I'm thinking, I don't fully remember when what happened in that arc.)
    Post edited by fleetcaptain5#1134 on
    [4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother

    [3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
  • darkbladejkdarkbladejk Member Posts: 3,698 Community Moderator
    Just saying, the federation isn't exactly squeaky clean like people want to believe. Sisko himself showed that with In The Pale Moonlight when he faked evidence of a Dominion invasion and had Garrak murder a Romulan senator to draw them into the war. We can debate whether the Dominion would have invaded Romulan space anyways among several other issues it raises, but that's besides the point. The Federation is willing to do some underhanded stuff when it benefits them, or at the very least turn the other way when it benefits them. Considering the Federation was basically a galactic superpower for a time, they're not going to want to give that up. If they can steer events towards them being a galactic superpower, they're going to do it. To them the natural flow of time is going to be the history that leads to their existence and what benefits them. No empire is going to want events of history to be changed so they never existed or were weakened. If anything they're going to steer events towards them being even stronger if they can.

    On principle I agree with the time cops that people shouldn't be messing with time willy nilly and trying to play God so to speak. One of the whole questions being asked in the final mission of the Iconian arc was "do you have a right to execute people for crimes they've yet to commit." The ultimate conclusion that our character comes to and that Kagran comes to, even if you want to say we were forced into that conclusion, is that no we don't have a right to punish people for crimes they've yet to commit. Picard touches on this in the episode A Matter of Time in TNG. When he talks with Rasmussen in the ready room he says "your past is my future and as far as I'm concerned it hasn't been written yet." When discussing the fate of the colony he also talks about how one version of history or another will weave forward depending on what they do there that day, the one he (Rasmussen) knows, or a different one and asks the question "who is to say which is better." The chief thing Picard was getting at was that until that history is actually written down there's still a chance to change it. Such as if one wished to go back in time and kill Kahn or other choice of madman from history, our past is his future and until it's written for him, he still has a chance to change. Some people may think I'm reaching but that's what I got out of the temporal stuff anyways.

    Now while I agree on principle, and the time cops say they believe in not interfering with the "natural flow of time" and "not trying to play God", their actions show that they don't always practice what they preach. Ultimately they're just as biased as anyone else and aren't above turning the other way when it benefits them. Most people are going to have a bias to what benefits them most if they're being honest with themselves. The question is whether they're going to let said bias dominate their actions. The time cops are unquestionably biased in my book. At the same time I would also say they don't understand temporal mechanics and manipulations as much as they might wish us to believe they do. The federation can be extremely arrogant and prideful despite saying they're not.
    "Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again." - Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek Generations

    Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
  • spiritbornspiritborn Member Posts: 4,248 Arc User
    spiritborn wrote: »
    jonsills wrote: »
    Vetteguy, in a military situation you take orders from whoever has been appointed to give those orders, acting with authority from your superiors. (Never forget the time I got to watch two E-5s hold a Major at gunpoint because he thought he could order his way past them at a security checkpoint.) There isn't always a senior officer available to hold down a desk, after all, so the C-in-C (in our case, Commander Starfleet) issues the orders for some luckless LCDR to hand out to some Captains and such.

    And "meteoric rise through the ranks" can sometimes be greeted with suspicion. Were you so successful because you were in fact colluding with the enemy, taking what appeared to be strategic targets that were truly no longer necessary to their interests? It's been known to happen...

    Yeah when I was doing my service I had in theory the authority to deny access (aka order them to not enter) even to flag officers due the position I had (I was combination of a receptionist and a guard) and I never made it past private. Granted I never met any generals or admirals during my service but I was reminded several times that I was not allowed to let anyone in without them telling why they were visiting where I was serving and they couldn't order me to ignore that duty.

    As for the Khitomer Discord part I took as "lay low so you can't make this worse" this is a case where experience trumps rank and we have had our rank for what 2 years at most.

    Shon has been a captain for our whole Starfleet career (or at least that's implied, seeing as his command of the Belfast isn't considered to be fresh command) and if the information in the wiki is be believed has been in Starfleet since 2389 meaning they have a lot more diplomatic experience then we do, something that's needed to handle to the volatile situation and not escalating it into another Klingon Empire/UFP war.

    By having us flee and lay low Shon can investigate the accusations more freely then he could if we proceeded to try throw our rep around and possibly shooting anyone who tried to arrest us. Sure we had the capacity to do so but it wouldn't have helped anyone and would have been very illogical. When we flee and lay low, Starfleet can just say "they couldn't find us" while dismantling the accusation (that wasn't that great to begin with).

    Nice try. A watch stander which you both are trying to describe is not the same as the events in game. Orders are not cut by junior officers. In a squadron of naval vessels, the commanding officer is always senior. their orders are dispatched by yet more senior. I was Officer of the deck in port, and underway, junior Officer of the deck. although the OOD is the direct representative of the CO, that position does NOT have the authority to issue orders outside of the scope of duties, in other words I did not have the authority to launch harpoons at a tanker ship.

    Really do try to understand how military authority works before you try strawman arguments

    There's just one minor issue there, thanks to J'mpok accusation you had no authority what so ever, as others have pointed out there's no way you could legally commanded Shon to do anything. Remember that J'mpok just accused us of using the a WMD on a civilian target, Shon doesn't have the authority to dismiss such accusation just be we say "we didn't do it", even if he think the accusation is of suspect merit.

    You either stand down and be assassinated or summarily judged for a crime you didn't commit (as you can be damn sure J'mpok would do everything to make you didn't get a fair trial).
    Fire on the ships present thus confirming J'mpok's accusation (and lore wise your ship can't go against the full might of the Alliance)
    Do what Shon advised us to do anyway and flee and lay low.
  • jonsillsjonsills Member Posts: 10,354 Arc User
    edited July 2022
    There's one question whose answer could clear up the question of whether restarting the Na'khul's star would have been a good thing:

    What's the outcome in the universe where that happens? What role might the Na'khul play in a universe where their star still exists?

    I mean, lots of people agree that the Silly Mustache Man in WW2 Germany was bad and should have been avoided - except in his novel The Iron Dream (purportedly a sci-fi novel by a version of SMM who went to New York to pursue his dream of being a painter, started doing covers for the pulps, and wound up as a pulp writer himself), Norman Spinrad envisioned the world where the book was published, one where the Stalinist Soviet Union was taking over the world by force and the last two holdouts were the United States and the Empire of Japan. Who can say whether the Na'khul being saved might not have resulted in an even worse outcome to, say, the Dominion War or the Tzenkethi attacks on worlds with hidden Hur'q eggs?
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  • phoenixc#0738 phoenixc Member Posts: 5,459 Arc User
    J'ula's story in general and us helping her to kill the Klingon head of state (!) is probably the worst of all. Imagine being a KDF officer helping to kill Quinn or Okeg and all members of the Alliance being perfectly fine with it, acting as if nothing has happened. Sure, they're Klingons and they settle their difference through combat, it's normal for them - but that's them; we as Starfleet officers or Romulans shouldn't get involved in that.

    The political ramifications are entirely ignored, but that is too much a thing in Star Trek in general imo. Very often the writers (not just of this game) seem to forget that there is an entire political order, economy, civil society... Basically an entire civilisation in the Federation that isn't part of of Starfleet and a... society in the Empire that's more than just the KDF.


    Likewise, I believe Trek in general to be too technology-centric. It's the technology as an easy fix thing: We have J'Ula, but also Vaadwaur and even Starfleet itself as examples of 'if you just have technology, you can fix anything, become a major threat' and so on (see also the easy reverse engineering of the strangest of technologies like in the reputations or certain ships). Whereas in reality, that technology would require a broad training program, probably years of gaining experience and simply enough people to operate it.

    The main problem with J'Ula's story is that it had such an epic scope but not enough episodes to really support it. All we got to see firsthand in the game were the action highlights, and only a little bit of the organizational maneuverings were touched upon and those were mainly in out-of-game story fragments published on the STO website with nothing permanently pointing to them, along with a few bits of dialog in the game itself that a lot of people seem to just key through without reading (I always read it the first few times through to get the feel of the story and only start keying past them after it gets stale).

    There really should be something like a "Lore" tab in the mission floater (and even better that tab and some kind of indicator that there is supporting lore in the missions themselves, sort of a "there is a file on the computer in your ready room that gives additional information on this" reminder) that points to those out-of-game bits so you can get a better sense of those stories in the game that have the supplementary info.

    This part new players probably wouldn't know so I put it in a spoiler box just in case:
    Anyway, it makes more sense if you realize that J'Ula gets to the "present" of the game the same time you do, apparently finds J'mpok's TRIBBLE vibe and highly questionable actions unacceptable early on, and then spends the time the players go through three wars (Klingon/Fed, Iconian, and Hur'q) getting her rebel faction together and equipped, along with conducting intelligence ops.

    She supposedly spent enough time to confirm the corruption of J'mpok's government beyond a reasonable doubt, so it really isn't the same as if KDF characters helped a Federation rebel organization go after Quinn and Okeg since, unlike J'mpok with his many scandals (and technically being a usurper since Martok is alive) that are public knowledge by then, they are presented as being reasonably straightforward and honorable.

    Also, the first time you meet up with J'Ula she is presented as a hero who happens to be on the other side of the conflict. It isn't until later that Aakar's constant whispering manipulation gets her thinking tied up in knots that she starts looking like an actual villian until the PC and the Witch gain enough traction to get her to pull her head out of her aft quarters.

    That campaign really needs a few more episodes (especially during the "underground PC" stage), and maybe some cameos in earlier episodes, to really do justice to the complexity of the overall plot.

    As for the technology-makes-anything-possible-thing, it has always been one of the main pillars of Star Trek, and so is the strange ability to quickly figure out how to use alien tech without training. It is not the most realistic thing for sure, but Trek at least started off as soft sci-fi, not hard sci-fi, so it is focused on the people/society/philosophical questions and the tech gets mostly glossed over. And, of course, most of the Kelvin and CBS stuff (with the possible exception of SNW) is space opera instead of soft sci-fi and that tends to approach technology with even more handwavum than soft sci-fi does.
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