Star Trek: the Teeming Millions edition

Cafe Society
61

From what i’ve seen, it’s pretty hard to avoid the “pervious” posts on the Dope. :wink:
I’ve had an idea how to solve a few of the 3-ship problems; how about starting off with a single ship along the lines of the Prometheus, with it’s Multi-Vector Attack Mode (or whatever it was called). In the first…episode? It could split to fight off a foe, and be damaged to such a degree that it can’t reform? Going back to Starfleet and repairing is not an option, since they’re already on the other side of the wormhole, and besides, they don’t have the resources to fix this one ship that can, just about, stay disconnected for a long period of time, when there are other problems that need their attention.

Straight away this would give you “focused” ships; a bridge section (which has…well, the bridge, and most crew quarters and amenities), the engine section (engineering, obviously, and possibly the main computers; i’m not sure how the ships are set out) and a third section (pretty much just weapons on a maneuvarable craft, fulfils the Defiant role).

You’d also be able to get a lot of plot from the fact that the ship/s need a lot of repairs to continue to operate seperately, and also you’d have the Captain be forced to appoint sub-captains from his staff to command the other sections. Plus you could always have a point where the ships ARE able to re-form and the crews are finding it difficult to re-integrate under a different regime.

62

No offense to **BMalion **but in addition to the points Fish brought up, I can’t help but envision a ship full of T’Pols, Neelixes, Worfs, and Odos with the Peace Corps in space idea. The mirror on humanity thing is starting to become a little played out and is too easy to abuse.

A good idea and one I originally thought to propose but it begins to become problematic from a storyline perspective. That’s 25 to 30 characters to create and give unique personalities to.

NCC-4242 would be a movie era ship, probably an Excelsior or something similar. Kirk’s *Enterprise *was 1701, Sulu’s *Excelsior *was 2000, Sisko’s *Defiant *was 74205, and Janeway’s *Voyager *was 74656. If you want the reference to Adams – which I like and would like to see – you will need to make it 54242, 64242, or 74242 for it to fit in continuity.

And on preview: I love that idea, Revenant Threshold but it would probably need to be some [invented] ship other than the Prometheus since it’s so thoroughly a battleship.

63

Well, this is assuming we’re going with a defiant at all. I’m looking at it from strickly a military point of view(and despite what some in the show and movies have said, Starfleet is either military or the most heavily armed civilian organization since the US postal service:D), how to best protect the fleet if they do get into a battle situation.

64

Roddenberry was a pacifist loon in his later years and it’s best to ignore most everything he said past about '89 or so.

If we continue with the taskforce idea, we could always replace the Defiant with a Prometheus if you really want to beef up the security. Its overall strength index is actually slightly lower than the Defiant Class (1 340 to 1 551) when a single ship but it jumps up to 2 060 when in multivector assault mode. That’s two Galaxies (or 1.5 Defiants) in one ship and knocks the character count down to a more manageable number as well.

65

Didn’t he fly heavy bombers in combat? I’d be inclined to excuse any latter pacifism in someone with cajones big enough to do that.

…although the worst thing about the STNG ep where the crawdads that crawl inside you were taking over the Federation was Picard regretting he had to kill something or the overly long sentences Riker spoke. ^ :dubious: ^

66

Aww, shucks! :slight_smile:

Well, I’m pretty sure in the episode, at least, that the Prometheus was a prototype…and that it was able to be overrun by romulans probably didn’t make it seem fantastic to the designers. It could have been re-designed during the Dominion War, I suppose. That all hinges on whether or not it’s a definite class, now, though, and from the way you’re talking about it it seems like it is.

67

He flew B-12 Bombers in the Pacific Theatre of WWII.

And pacifism’s fine – I’m not sure I could ever kill another human being unless it was kill-or-be-killed and I’m not sure how I would react to being drafted – but he carried it to extremes and just had very absurd ideas about the franchise in his later years. The whole “Starfleet is not a military organization!” being the most obvious but he also lobbied extensively to have a Klingons on the Grassy Knoll movie replace The Wrath of Khan. That’s even worse than the friggin’ God movie.

Dude was kray-zee.

Yeah, it was a prototype but so was the *Defiant *and numerous Defiants have been seen since it was introduced in DS9 S3. As for hijackings, that seems to be a routine starship hazard. Think about how many times the E-D was overran and it was the flagship of the fleet.

68

Good point. Come to think of it, the E’s didn’t really seem all that rugged, or impregnable, or high-tech, at times…makes you wonder what happened to all the other ships, which presumably broke down, were captured, were destroyed by a computer virus, and had their crews go insane every few weeks.

69

Hijack: If you like reading Trek fiction, I suggest you pick up all the novels you can by Peter David. He has a really irreverent sense of humor about the franchise and has given a number of reasons why so much always seems to happen to the Enterprises, my favorite being that an energy being (possibly Trelane or even Q) just loves fucking with them and does everything s/he/it can to frustrate or exasperate the crews.

There’s also a passage from one of his New Frontier novels where Admiral Jellico is talking about how no one really believes anything Kirk ever reported and that all the flag officers would know when his most recent logs had been transmitted back to HQ because of the howls of laughter that could be heard from down the halls.

Man, I love Peter David.

70

Some small contributions-

Love Fish’s idea of telling stories from the POV of mid-level people and having the captains be mainly out of view. We, the viewers, need to figure out what big events are occurring each week based on rumors and orders that we get down from above. And perhaps the captains are not always so heroic or fair, and the midshipman, while not mutinous, not always so unswervingly loyal. Some grousing is realistic.

I also like the idea of a multi-species group of ships interacting with some regularity. I’d love to see it explore individual species with more depth and variety than the near monlithic cartoon versions they often became. Each species surely had multiple ethnicities and subcultures and types. Some exploration of the tendency to squabble amongst ourselves but unite against the other species and the flotilla to unite some in other dire straits. The different ships having to earn each others trust and not being so sure that the others are worthy of the trust that the captains are apparently granting them.

We are in space that was under Dominion rule for years. There will be species that are now suddenly free, but not prepared for it. The advantage of an iron rule under a dominating power is that a peace among various fractions is imposed, eliminate the dominating oppressor and their wars can break back out. The Dominion were responding to real chaos around them in there quest for imposing stability at all costs. Think of the break-up of the Soviet empire. Factions will be vieing for power. Having our flotilla caught up in the middle of these re-erupting old tribal/ethnic/inter-planetary/inter-system tensions without really understanding the histories and cultures involved can be a major source of plot lines. The tendency will be to side with those that seem more like human cultures, but sometimes that will lead to awful results.

Do not like the hunter/hunted fugitive concept. It would get old fast. But its the EP’s show.

No time travel.

71

I’m not sure anybody else is sold on that contribution of mine, DSeid, but thanks.

And just to plug it once more, the concept of following mid-level or junior officers throughout the plot is it simulates the relative command structure of previous shows.

Let me 'splain. (No, there is too much, let me sum up.)

In TNG, Picard was the captain of the flagship. But there were courts calling for his crew (Measure of a Man, The Drumhead), assignments to be done (Chain of Command), unpleasant orders to be followed (The Pegasus), emergency rescue missions (Thine Own Self), and dicta to be obeyed (the Prime Directive, for one, but others too).

Give us a relatively autonomous mini-fleet and where does the conflict come from? Well, there’s nobody looking over their shoulder, so if you wanna disobey the Prime Directive, I won’t tell if you won’t. And… well, nobody to call them with a distress signal so Starfleet can send them halfway across the quadrant (“only ship in the sector, my ass, we passed two on the way here”) to rescue some high grand alderman poobah on Megecklatrop XIII with a hangnail. Therefore all the interesting conflict will come from a) the other ships, b) disagreeing crew, and c) space monsters.

Significantly, the command officers of the mini-flotilla will have few if any conflicts between duty and personal vision and friendship and honor and stuff. If they break the rules out in No-Man’s Land, who’s gonna report it? What’re they gonna do, send a ship out here into non-Federation space and arrest us?

DS9 did b) to death, which is why Voyager sucked so much, because it’d already been done. c) has been done to death in TNG and TOS. (And again, the dead space monsters were flogged in Voyager.) a) is interesting, but not enough to build an entire season on.

In my opinion, setting the story around some mid-level crew gives the viewer that same place in the hierarchy: not too high up the food chain, not too far down.

As Kirk said, never let them promote you to Admiral. If you ask me, that was the writers talking.

72

I really like the idea of the of a small exploration fleet. I really don’t care what vessels you choose. Make up new ones if need be. Make sure one or two of the can land. This would make sampling and terrestrial exploration easier. I’m tired of every thing being done with sensors from orbit. Such a ship would act as a command post for longer duration missions on some planets. Kind of like an interstellar R.V.

I think the dynamic should be team based.

The diplomatic corps
The techs
The medical team
The cartography team
The Security force
The ships’ ops team

You get the idea.

Problems will be solved over time. The solutions will involve hard work and research. There will very few stand alone episodes. **STORIES WILL BE CHARACTER DRIVEN. ** Mistakes will be made. There is already a rich universe and back story here. No spontaneous explanations for things will be made. (" Captain, isn’t that a legendary dinglefob, said to grant who ever holds it the power of clairvoyance?") The dialogue will not be forced.

73

I understand why you might say this, but writing a continuous, serialized show is more difficult and much slower. It’s still worth doing, but consider two things:

The one-off single-episode plots are sometimes among the very best (“Darmok,” “Chain of Command,” “Cause and Effect” from TNG), and they have the benefit that you can assign five writers each to create one and they can work simultaneously without consulting with the others.

Though it is possible to have one overarching main theme for the season, I figure it’s best to intertwine three or more separate threads. You could have one team of writers working on the “Data becomes more human-like” episodes, which depend on their own internal continuity, and the “Worf complains about some damn dishonor thing with the homeworld” bit, and the “battle against the Borg continues,” and so on.

Each thread can be worked on simultaneously because there’s no effective overlap.

74

I’m liking the idea of a series told from a mid-level crew viewpoint. Not sure how well if at all it would tie in with the multiple ships scenario, and if it did the other-ships part of it might have to be more background than the central storytelling point that it’s being worked up to be elsewhere here. But I like this POV because it would involve such a shift from how other trek series would tell their stories.

As far as the senior crew being more background, I like this but I think we should have at least one character or so that is part of that upper level that we are well acquainted with. For example if one of our mid-levels was a medical officer, we could get a taste of what’s going on ‘upstairs’ from his/her regular interaction with the chief medical officer. While the senior crew would be supporting characters, we could keep most of them very borderline as characters apart from one or two larger supporting roles as above.

One aspect that I would love to see eventually explored under this framework would be the idea of a mutiny, from the mid-level point of view, with many unsure of the entire picture. This would be facilitated by the gamma quadrant setting, in the way that there’s no one else to turn to except yourselves in some situations. It wouldn’t have to be a simple case of ‘the jerkoff captain and his croneys have been up to bad news long enough and we’re sick of it’ or your standard ‘alien parasites have taken over the top dogs’. It could be more a case of a gradual noticing of corruption or certain tendencies among much of the senior crew with others of them on ‘our side’, and even some of our main characters reluctant to jump on board or even firmly against the idea.

One would need to avoid such a setting becoming more of a soap-opera among these crewmembers going about their jobs, and still give us the sense of exploration and adventure in discovering the wonders of the galaxy outside the ship. Though if it was played right, you could make alien races and adventures even more intriguing by not having to give us the entire story on them since it isn’t shown from the point of view of the ‘people in the know’.

What would otherwise be a whole episode’s worth of going about explaining things about some alien race and their situation-of-the-week could now be explored from the view of the rank-and-file crew that try talking to them in the mess hall; or that are caught up in their hallway hijinks; or the security guy that has to deal with them going nuts in their quarters (while not knowing completely why). I also like the idea of away missions where the redshirt is the one we know and care about. The inevitable death of a redshirt on one of these away missions could actually mean something, and you could finally let the occasional bridge officer get killed when they do something ridiculous.

75

You know, what if the senior officers are all absent? Maybe the ship was attacked, and the attackers manage to kill/capture the senior staff, and the fleet is having to make do with the lower ranks. Some of the crew would be all for going to rescue what’s left of the senior staff, some would be against it. There’d be opposing groups of lower ranked people with conflicting agendas… How’s that for character driven?

76

Senior officers absent… permanently? I dunno, it seems as if we’d be in the same relative position in the power hierarchy as if we’d focused on the captains in the first place: officers with semi-autonomy cut off from their command structure, arguing over what to do.

Absent for an episode or two? Sure, I could dig it.

I don’t see that there’s anything inherently bad about “soap opera” plots involving the crew as long as they were the “B” stories and not the “A” stories. (And more than just romance, too, one would hope: arguments, fights, lies, etc.) After all, changing relationships are part of making persistent, serialized stories and not one-offs.

My only worry is that relationships would develop too quickly and require more attention to continuity: wait, is it episode #19 or #29 that X and Y split up?

Firefly managed to handle soap-opera changes of relationship quite well in addition to pushing real stories. Things didn’t change hugely from show to show and relationship subplots were always in service to the A story then being told. (A good example is “War Stories.”)

77

Just a recap of what’s been put forward that I find interesting:
Mid-level crew focus – I like this if we don’t leave the senior staff out of it – they need to be present and they will be there for every important mission 2-3 officers + specialists + red shirts they’re gonna be there and they need to be continuing characters.

Good Will Ship – it is the kind of thing a government might think to try and as long as there is some support in the form of other ships or another ship, it isn’t safe.

Rotating Focus from ship to ship on a per episode basis (like the rotating character idea from the old Mystery Movies) – It is my idea and I can live with it if no one likes it. It gives us the ability to use different crews as guest stars and gives us a look at how different captians and their crews work (alone and as part of a team).

The Communists are gone, so we can kill each other now thing – A totalitarian government leaves and the conflicting factions take up arms against each other again. It would belike trying to set up shop in Iraq right now --dangerous --something Trek has trouble conveying in general.

78

My understanding was that the Defiant was what you get if you take a Galaxy-class ship and strip out everything but the weapons, the shields, the engines, and the minimum crew needed to fly the beast. And has the advantage of being more maneuverable. As others have posted it’s battle-rated as effectively tougher than a Galaxy-class ship.

79

No, defiants are the deep space equivilent of attack submarines. They are designed from the “ground” up to be ships of battle. The set designers had mentioned that in an interview I read ages ago. They made the corridors look like submarine corridors, with exposed piping, and passges too narrow for two people to pass without brushing eachother, etc. A galaxy class star ship is somewhere between a battle ship, and a cruise ship.

80

Yeah, the Defiant is a pure attack vessel; medical bay limited to “battlefield” medecine, no science-based systems or sensors, huge amounts of torpedos, limited crew space - they’re in bunks, in shared rooms. It’s just a highly manueverable weapons platform, really.

If we’re going with the mid-level crew idea, i’d like to see a bit more of the administration process. I don’t mean like, an episode of Mr. Spock fills out the Enterprise tax forms, but just a bit more of an idea of how Starfleet works; more of an idea on how often and quick promotion is, how frequently crew get shuffled round ships, whether crewmembers can change their “speciality” ( security, command, etc.). A look at the mid-level crew would get us a look at how things are done instead of it just being ordered; how often is it that the Captain or high up staff order some unorthodox maneuver or rigging of the onboard equipment, only for the crewmember in charge of this to complain that it’ll NEVER WORK!.

How about for the multi-alien crew, Starfleet having no ships to spare, and so having to send out an offered Klingon ship, with onboard advisors as to how the ship works? Or even a Romulan ship (though I can’t see them making this offer).