test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
TOS Caitains??
kursed
Member Posts: 125 Arc User
So considering we first see caitians in the TOS series why can we not have TOS caitian characters? I still think they should require unlocking via the zen store.
Star trek 4 during Kirk's trial
Star trek VI again...
lieutenant M'ress from the Animated TOS Series.
note i'm only speaking of TOS caitians so lower decks which i'm pretty sure is TNG does not count...
Star trek 4 during Kirk's trial Star trek VI again...lieutenant M'ress from the Animated TOS Series.
note i'm only speaking of TOS caitians so lower decks which i'm pretty sure is TNG does not count...
Nobody here, but us blue kittens.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
There is a possiblity that through the Captain Alteration Token we may be able to backdoor 2409 species options into TOS, but that is still kinda whiteboard stuff far as I am aware. There was talk at least.
Because they weren't introduced in TOS itself. They were introduced in TAS, then in the movies.
When the TOS Feds were introduced, they focused on the four founding members of the Federation as playable races, and stuck with pure TOS asthetics.
I too would like to see more TOS races available in the TOS character generator. We should at least be able to make any of the races from Journey to Babel, which would even be possible with minimal coding by including a subset of the Alien tab stuff from the 2409 generator) though including anything that is reasonable for the time (like aliens from ENT that are known Federation members by the mid 2200s) would be the best.
Before the recruitments became a standard thing, I made a lot of the unavailable TOS races in the 2409 generator and put that they were whatever TOS race they were in the background, but that was rather annoying trying to warp the TNG spandex monstrosities into something vaguely resembling TOS uniforms and other irritations, like how all TOS style ships except the Pioneer were locked behind unscalable paywalls back then.
That is especially disappointing when most TOS races were done with greasepaint, wildly different foundation tones from what the actors would normally use, and wigs and almost no latex, so simply adding a few colors for skin, hair, and giving the height slider more range would take care of like 90% of them.
As for TAS Caitians, one big difference between them and the movie era versions is that the TAS ones sort of had "anime face" if you look closely at the frames, rather than true cat heads on human bodies like the current STO ones. The difference is that instead of a true muzzle they have a sort of muzzle-like protrusion, but it is smaller and flatter than a real animal muzzle and the head shape is more human overall, sort of like the characters in the old kids show Zoobilee Zoo.
It would be interesting to have them like that for the Temporal Recruit Caitians, but I am not sure the extra head modeling (and possibly animations) would be worth the effort since they already have the anamorphs, and more people seem to prefer the anamorphs anyway. Personally I go the other way though, I would not only like to see the M'ress type Caitians, I would really like an option to use neko style Caitians as well, which is what the twins Kirk was in bed with were supposed to be (though they never made the ears for them since Abrams told them to leave them and the eyes off for some unknown reason, though some behind the scenes sources said he was worried that the scene would be banned as "animalism" if they were too catlike).
Unfortunately, the neko style ones are extremely unlikely since nekos nowadays seem to be getting the hate that the anamorph furrys used to get in Second Life about a decade and a half ago (I never really understood why so many people had/have that hate reaction, but that is beside the point).
Just because a species was seen in TOS doesn't mean their people joined the Federation, after all. The Iotians, for instance (although I still want to see a followup on what happened to their society - they almost certainly didn't turn into a mini-Fed because nobody left behind any literature on how the Federation works, but the idea of a 1920s-Chicago-gangster culture with 23rd-century technology is either horrifying or hilarious).
I mean, consider the limitations on Andorian hairstyles which have to leave room for their antenna...
Most races in the area the Federation claimed at the time were inhabited by Humans and Vulcans, some with adaptive changes or whatever, and that was implied to be because of a combination of the ancient war between Sargon's (originally dialog identified them as Humans, but NBC forced them to change it so it is only implied in the final script) and Henoch's (Vulcanoid) peoples, as refugees from that war sought places to settle far from the destruction, along with the Preservers moving people from pre-space populations around to lower the chance of something wiping out an entire race. Radically different humanoids (and nonhumanoids) were relatively rare. A partial listing:
The four original signatories (plus all of them are mentioned as having multiple colonies):- Humans. Humans from Earth and its colonies were known in TOS as Terrans (not just the mirror ones the way it is used now) and "Earther" was in insulting slur.
- Vulcans. Also, there are other Vulcanoids mentioned from time to time but it is unclear whether they are Federation members or not.
- Andorians and Aenar.
- Tellarites.
The episode Journey to Babel introduced a few new alien races. When Coridon applied for full Federation membership least nine parties had some kind of direct stake in Coridon and were involved in the negotiations, most were presumably humans from different homeworlds and were mostly different in culture rather than physically, but three (or four if you include information from the spinoff series) were distinctly different species:- Ithenites. Very small people with a metallic bronze-gold coloration to their hair and skin (and they wore fez hats, which for some reason people seem to remember most about them.)
- Violaceans. Unsurprisingly, they are the ones with the violet skin tone. Behind the scenes info is that they can calm people around them, similar (though in some ways opposite) to the Orion lust pheromone schtick.
- Zambeans. Simply called "giants" on the call sheets for the episode, they are tall enough to have to duck to get through standard Starfleet doorways.
- Coridanites were mentioned but not shown in TOS, and according to mentions in the spinoffs the planet was admitted to the Federation at the conference the Enterprise was transporting those delegates to. Also, from TNG and ENT it turns out there are two species native to Coridon, one of them relatively human looking except for rough scaly skin, the other looking like they have a facehugger from Alien stuck on their face for a face.
The Way to Eden adds two more alien races:- Tiburonians. They have extreme gender dimorphism with the males being almost completely hareless and the females having huge "fright wig" manes of hair and their eyebrows are very heavy with hair about six inches long or more.
- Catullans. They look human except for TNG-Klingon-pattern hair and eyebrows (the only example has florescent blue hair). Like the Coridanites, they were in the process of joining the Federation in 2269.
TAS had too many aliens to list offhand, and most of them were not positively identifies as Federation citizens or not (or were shown in Starfleet uniform with no information about them whatsoever), but an interesting (though probably impossible to implement in STO) case are the Aurelians/Skorr and the wingless Novolare subset of both that is first seen in Lower Decks. Aurelians and Skorr, despite an avian ancestry instead of feline, are like the Caitians and Ferisans in STO in that they are branches of the same base race, and LD has added that they have a wingless subset (which a third-party book calls the Novolare). The Aurelians are the branch that are Federation members and the stockier, shorter-necked Skorr are not. LD shows Novolare in Starfleet and calls them Aurelians so it is safe to assume they are from that branch.There are probably more that I don't remember at the moment too.
If they let you make felinoids in aliengen, then they should give us that nice reptillian/saurian tail Mr Starfleet Alien Ground Captain NPC has had for years... T_T
Not sure about the lizard tail, but the cat tail is usable on the human models as an old bug showed, and it would be a nice addition to the aliengen tab along with the cat ears in order to make the "neko twins" version of Caitians (ironically, it would probably not be possible to put both the anamorph and neko variants in the same tab because of the underlying model differences).
Well... the fact that Caitians don't have the same hair options as, say... Humans... kinda leads me to believe there are some differences between Caitian and basic Humanoid head geometry. We see this difference a bit more prominently with Klingons. TOS style Klingons have access to far more hair options than TNG Klingons because of differing head geometry thanks to the forehead ridges on TNG Klingons. You can't put, say... Dr. Crusher's hairstyle on a TNG Klingon with the forehead ridges, but you can on a TOS style Klingon.
We look at Nausicaans, they don't have the same hair options as humanoids.
I think Cardassians have fewer options than most humanoids because of the head geometry. While they do share some hairstyles (I believe) its obvious they don't quite fit.
You can't just copy/paste a hairstyle from one model to another when the geometry is different in some way. Not without obvious issues. Most of the Humanoids that do share the same geometry have a lot of the same features in the same places. Humans, Andorians (although they have added antennae), Vulcans, Orions, Romulans... they all have the same head shape. Tellarites are a bit bigger. And then we have the wacky capabilities of the Alien gen characters, but they are working off the Humanoid head model geometry.
The fact remains though, that Caitians are different in some way. We'd probably need a Character Artist to weigh in on it specifically, but as of right now... all we can say is that its most likely something about Caitians that make most humanoid hairstyles incompatible.
But yeah, I know caitians and ferasans have different head shapes, but I still hope they could tweak some existing hairstyles (like the newer versions of old hairstyles) and make them available.
I also forgot, as of Lower Decks, they've shown caitians can have a lot more color pattern variety. Like T'ana's calico coloration. Wish we could get that (and consistently appearing pattern options in character editing) here.
However, it is a horrendous painstaking pain in the posterior to do so. I suppose there might be new tools to make that kind of thing easier (I haven't done mesh in Second Life for about six years at least now and have not kept up with modeling program news as much as I would have liked), but Cryptic did the original character models for STO well before anything like that which kind of restricts what they can do without having to rebuild all the current accessory meshes.
And considering the ridiculously short deadline Cryptic had to work with I suspect they wouldn't have had time to mess with that compatibility issue, even if they thought it might be something people would want sometime down the road.
Yeah... There's a reason it's been taking SE's team for FFXIV so long to implement both genders of the newest races and then start getting headgear set up for them. Those exact issues. >_<