Star Dreck

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

I bet he liked to watch instead.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

You know, I've been thinking about whether or not to post this here or in your tabletop thread. But then I figured Star Trek is FUBAR enough that we probably won't have anything of interest to talk about anymore unless Georgie gets salty again or some new season/show is even more cringe than Discovery or Picard. So fuck it, I'll talk about the fluff here and the crunch in that other thread whenever I can be arsed to finish that up.

So yeah, Star Trek's pretty darn fucked, ain't it? But what if I tell you that there is a way to effectively go back in time and visit a different timeline? All without disruption the space-time continuum.

I present to you the wet dream of any abridged series creator: A commercial fanfic fork of a popular IP that is 100% legal.

Behold: The Star Fleet Universe


First conceived by Task Force Games and now owned by Amarillo Design Bureau in 1979, it was born from an odd little licensing deal that let the writers go wild with whatever Trek-related stuff was available at the time. This was just before the first movie, so all they had to go with was TOS, the cartoon (from which they mostly borrowed the Kzinti) and the Star Fleet Technical Manual for general setting and ship design stuff.

What followed were several deviations from what would later become the standard Trek lore, all because they got the license before most of this shit was standardized, because this fork of the setting was primarily intended for wargaming purposes, and because the writers thought stuff like redshirts and bridge crews beaming down on planets was a bit dumb:

• The setting makes much stronger use of navy ship classifications. The iconic Constitution-class is generally referred to as the "Federation Heavy Cruiser", for starters
• All ship combat is done under warp speed, whereas later Trek typically reserves this for chase scenes (at least as far as it's depicted on-screen).
• Phasers operate under hard sci-fi laser logic (aka they basically can't miss, but the damage potential drops fast the farther away the target is)
• Ship disruptors aren't just green phasers like in TNG and beyond. Instead they're the Klingons' answer to photon torpedoes, being overall weaker but quicker to reload
• What do Klingons use as their pimary beam weapon, then? Phasers. Almost everyone uses phasers, or beam weapons that are functionally identical to them.
• Drones aka futuristic guided missiles are a thing. Even the Constitution-class has them
• Also space fighters. Originally only one faction had them, but you know how things go when you shit out expansions for several decades...
• Federation space fighters are of course modeled - and named - after US jet fighters
• Ground warfare explicitly involves tanks (tracked and hovering) and marines in armor
• Several one-off races from TOS (well, mostly Orions, Gorn and Tholians) became major factions in the SFU
• And of course they invented a bunch more, because you can never have too many factions in your wargame (even if some of them only exist in-universe in combat simulators, or they have to come from a completely different galaxy)
• Yeah, the SFU includes multiple galaxies, at least some of which can serve as an alternate setting
• The Milky Way Galaxy on the other hand isn't quite as explored as in normal Trek, and everything is neatly divided between the core factions. The important part has to fit on the board of their obligatory grand strategy 4x board game, after all
• The license doesn't actually include the actual Enterprise crew, so they're only referenced indirectly
• The Enterprise itself is only mentioned in a list of Constitution-class ships
• Kirk is referenced in the first contact between Federation and Gorn, which involved "two young brash captains" (the other one of course being the Gorn captain)
• Despite bad first impressions (and Romulan scheming), Federation and Gorn would part on peaceful terms. Later the Gorn even joined the Federation's "Alliance" against the Klingon's "Coalition"
• The Federation and Klingons are - of course - the two major power blocs of the Milky Way Galaxy. If you're not from a different galaxy, you're generally on friendly terms with one of them
• Tholians come in two flavors: The regular Tholians are actually an expedition fleet from another galaxy, with infrastructure problems that forces them to use their small ship from TOS as essentially lego blocks to build larger vessels. Then there are the Neo-Tholians who come fresh from their home galaxy and actually have proper large ships.
• The setting has sort-of Borg in the form of the Andromedans, which are mysterious assholes from another galaxy whose true nature and motives are unkown because they only send ships with robotic crews and never explain shit
• Come to think of it, they're more like that Enterprise episode Silent Enemy, where some unkown alien ship just starts fucking with the Enterprise for no reason
• Occasionally they actually try to fill plot holes in TOS. Remember how there's one line in Balance of Power which suggests the Romulan Bird-of-Prey doesn't have a warp drive? In SFU they fixed this by explaining that there's a difference between normal warp drives and the tactical warp drives that are responsive enough for space combat
• A new reason as to why the Romulans got themselves Klingon D7 cruisers was of course to get their hands on those tactical warp drives (SFU Romulans are a bit backwater, essentially the Soviet China to the Soviet Russia that are the Klingons)
• The writers dabbled a bit into a post-TOS era with the X-ships, refits of existing ship designs with much more advanced technology. It's basically their attempt to sneak in the first Trek movies (which is why the X-refit of the D7 suddenly has photon torpedos even though SFU Klingons never used them before)
• They sadly put this future stuff on hiatus, but not before teasing the possibility of X-ships that aren't refits, but built from scratch. The next generation of X-ships, if you will
• They of course also provide prequel stuff in the form of "The Early Years", aka the dawn of the tactical warp drive. They also tried going even farther into the past back when combat was impulse-only, but they never managed to cobble together good rules for that
• Recent lore activity is focused on the "Omega Sector", a part of the Milky Way that is essentially the Delta Quadrant because it's its own setting too far away from the regular setting
• Strangely enough they never did anything with the Mirror Universe
• I probably don't even have to mention that SFU Klingons never stopped looking like they did in TOS

Ship designs lovingly capture the feel of TOS (maybe except the Andromedans; they're sleek green saucers with their flat warp engines could also pass for TNG ships), but the new ships can feel a bit samey. Maybe the designers wanted to preserve the core design principles of each faction, or they just weren't all that creative.

• Basically every Federation cruiser is a Constitution-class with the warp drive arranged in a slightly different way. If you're lucky the saucer section might have a different shape (though this doesn't happen nearly as much as you'd think)
• Larger Federation ship types are pretty much just the Constituion-class with one or two additional warp drives slapped onto it
• Every Klingon ship is a variation on the D7. No, they can't use the Bird-of-Prey because that one didn't exist when they got the license
• Andromedans, as mentioned, just have green saucers as ships
• Tholians, as also mentioned, cobble together ships out of their iconic TOS ship. Even the Neo-Tholians prominently feature the TOS ship as their bridge section
• Romulans are strangely enough the most varied. They have their old Bird-of-Prey design, refitted Klingon designs, and an entirely new generation of ships that basically look like a space shuttle with warp engines and a more pronounced "head" to make it look more like a bird

[Kugelfisch]

Goes to show that limitations can make for better writing. That sounds like a pretty good version of Trek. Too bad the TV shows went to absolute shit.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Oh, and I totally forgot some of the stupid super weapons used in the SFU:

• Some factions like the Romulans and Klingons have mauler cannons, which is basically a Wave Motion Gun you build the rest of the ship around
• The Hydrans (who have 3 eyes, arms and probably dicks) have hellbore cannons, which is like a torpedo that envelops the entire shield of the target and attacks the weakest point
• Andromedans have a fucking truckload of special snowflake shit. They can teleport ships (both their own and the enemy's), instead of shields their ships can absorb enemy fire and turn it into energy (they're kinda fucked if that stuff overloads, though), and their primary beam weapon is a combination of a tractor and repulsor beam that literally shakes the target apart

EDIT: Oh, and then there was that one time the divergent timelines crossed: the Starfleet Command trilogy.
They were basically a realtime implementation of the Star Fleet Battles wargame, with factions and a geopolitical setup like the SFU, but ship designs much closer to regular Trek (mostly updating the Constitution-class to its movie refit and replacing SFU Federation ships with regular Trek equivalents like the Excelsior-class). It gets even weirder in the third and final entry because that one takes places in the TNG era (though this time much closer to regular Trek in terms of setting).

[Liar Revealed]

Shatner took his ex-wife back. I don't know if that's such a good idea.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/a ... in-64.html

[McGinnis]

Shatner took his ex-wife back. I don't know if that's such a good idea.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/a ... in-64.html

He's 91. Where the fuck is he going to find anybody else?

[ebin namefag]

Shatner took his ex-wife back.

From the grave?

[Complicity]

>Obscurus Takei's butthurt intensifies

[McGinnis]

Shatner took his ex-wife back.

From the grave?

I don't think his alcoholic third wife would count as an 'ex' wife

[Rushy]

Picard season 3 was alright (obviously much better than 1-2 lmfao), but overrated. Some of the nostalgia really hit, but I was disappointed that nostalgia was all they focused on. I feel like it would hold up way better if Plummer had been a brand new villain. The Borg and Jack's superpowers should've been cut entirely. And if they really were going to have the Borg, make it Locutus not Alice Krige. They kept fucking teasing Locutus without bringing him back.

EDIT: They get brownie points for undoing Q's death. Q should never die.