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I guess I mostly think of Frakes as the director of the TNG episode, "Sub Rosa".
$150 for Data, you don’t want to know how much it cost to get Lore.
And even then, there wasn’t much gayness to his acting.
Care to elaborate?
Yeah, I can’t wrap my head around it either. Easily the worst, most self indulgent season of Trek in my opinion.
But it had the TNG crew back aboard the Enterprise D so for a lot of people it’s hitting the nostalgia button.
I'll speak to the Admin if you're volunteering to mod.
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“You can use logic to justify almost anything. That's its power - and its flaw.” -Captain Janeway
(startrek.website)
Not my original content.
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The fact that Trepanation For Thou Also? III came before II or I is really a bold move on their part
(i.imgur.com)
Not my OC, but too good not to share.
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Star Trek: Away Missions - First impressions
(startrek.website)
Yesterday a friend and I got together to play board games, including and we both got our first opportunity to play the Star Trek: Away Missions tactical miniatures board game published by Gale Force 9.
So, let's talk about it!
Concept:
Away Missions is a tactical miniatures game, themed around dustbuster clubs being sent into the wreckage in the aftermath of the Battle of Wolf 359, to recover intel. The base game comes with a Starfleet away team made up of Riker, Shelby, Data, and Worf, and Locutus' Borg Unimatrix featuring Locutus himself and five drones.
There are also four expansions currently:
• Gowon and three other Klingon warriors
• Sela and four person Romulan infiltration team
• The Duras sisters with three other Klingons
• Picard, Doctor Crusher, Troi, Geordi, and Wesley
Each dustbuster club has it's own unique set of core missions to choose from, and then each faction has additional missions that can be performed during the game as well.
Components:
• The assimilated elephant in the room for a lot of people is probably going to be the miniatures. The design of them is very stylized and cartoonish; large heads and chucky bodies. Personally I like them the design, but I've seen plenty of people talking about the game saying that the miniatures are too great a stumbling block for them. To each their own.
I do think the miniature design makes the characters fairly distinctive. They come unpainted, but for the Starfleet characters at least, it would have been very difficult to confuse which one was which. Despite each sculpt having a unique pose and details, the Borg drones are a bit more difficult to tell apart. Each miniature has the character's name in raised letters on the back, but it isn't the easiest thing to read.
• In addition to miniatures, each character had a cardboard sheet representing their abilities, including little holes to accommodate the health pegs. These seem pretty good, if perhaps a bit larger than necessary. The modular board for the game already takes up quite a bit of table real estate, so it would be nice if if these character sheets were a bit smaller.
• The plastic health pegs I mentioned are fine, and kind of a neat weigh to implement health tracking in the game. The only complaint would be that while the rules do talk about playing up to four players, there's not enough pegs to accommodate that many characters. The expansion boxes don't come with extra pegs for the new characters, either.
• The various cardboard tokens are...fine. I like that they're not inexplicably in the shape of Starfleet deltas or what have you like some other Trek board games, but most of them are just a bit of cardboard with a word on it. Purely functional, and it would nice to have it spiced up a little bit.
• Each faction has two decks of cards: missions and support. The card backs for the decks feature of their faction's emblem, so you can place them beside one another to make the whole. That's neat. The cards are readable and the language on all the ones I looked at was fairly clear. I've never been a fan of using stills from movie or television show as art in a game, but I understand why game publishers do it with licenced products.
• The board is modular and double sided, so you can get different configurations of either a Starfleet ship or a Borg cube to run around on. Everything looks good, though by its nature, the details on the cube do seem to blend together.
Rules:
So, full disclosure, I forgot to put the rulebook back in the box after scanning through them, and thus when we got to play, we were using the quickstart document, and an online pdf on my phone. That meant a lot of encountering a situation and trying to look it up on a tiny screen, so I know we made mistakes while playing. Probably more than usual for a first time game.
The quickstart document is not, in my opinion, sufficient for learning the game. There is important information left out, and I think that a condensed version of the rules should at least have the basics of play.
The full rulebook wastes a bunch of space with three pages of fiction setting up the backstory of how an engineer on the USS Ahwahnee developed some weapons modifications to fight the Borg at Wolf 359, but she was killed by a hull breach before she was able to implement them. I suppose it's nice to get a bit of a backstory, but for this sort of game, it really doesn't seem necessary.
Anyways, the full rules seem pretty well laid out. There was never a moment where I had a question that I couldn't find the answer to.
Gameplay:
• It's a tactical miniatures game, so that means moving figures around the board and getting into fights. Though something I liked about this game is that combat was not the primary driver, at least not for the core missions we choose. I, as the Starfleet player, was trying to repair the ship, and my Borg opponent was attempting to assimilate it, and we got points for actions that furthered those goals.
• The line of sight rules for the game are somewhat simplified compared to other tactical miniatures games I've played, in that if a character can see into a room where an opponent character is, they can see the opponent character. You can't get cover from being positioned behind a corner or anything like that.
• There is a "take cover" action though, so it's not as though characters need to be standing in the clear for anyone to assault them (though we never actually used the action); it's just not a function of the miniature positioning.
• We played with the pre-built starter decks, but both the decks you have for your away team are customizable. I didn't cycle cards a lot even though you can always discard unwanted cars a the start of a round.
• Attacks and skill tests to complete objectives are done with dice pools of d6s. For attacks and opposed skill tests, both players involved roll dice and compare values in descending order. If one player is rolling more dice than the other, all dice that don't have something to compare against don't count, and that's disappointing.
• The game comes with a cardboard tacker to arrange the dice for comparison, and it seems somewhat extraneous. We stopped using it because we're adults who can compare results on a die without needing to line them up in a bit of cardboard.
• The game lasts for three rounds, and then it's done. Which is not particularly climatic if I'm being honest. Both players compare the number points they've scored between mission cards and their core mission, and who ever has the most points wins, even if all their characters have been incapacitated.
Conclusion:
I enjoyed the game quite a lot once we started to find a rhythm to the gameplay. I'm very curious to get the other away teams on the board, especially the Duras Sisters.
I also might attempt my first foray into mini-painting with these figures. Probably gonna start with the Borgs.
Components: 9/10
Rules: 7/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Overall: 8/10
I feel like there's a difference between a worker robot deciding it doesn't want to live or die at the command of its humanoid creators, or a collections of nanites establishing an emergent intelligence, and a Federation Starship locking out its crew of 1,014 people and seeking out a white dwarf star like a salmon swimming upstream so it could give birth to an entirely new lifeform.
Even setting aside the ethical implications of using a ship capable of such a thing as transport, and putting into dangerous combat situations, is Starfleet prepared for similar events to happen on all their ships? What happened to the emergent lifeform after it left the Enterprise? Is it still out there? Why did it look like a screen saver from 1992?
But the crew of the Enterprise are fundamentally uncurious about the wider implications of the event.
"Amazing, isn't it captain? An entirely new lifeform brought into being by the very ship we sail through the stars."
"Quite so, Number One. Tell me, what's our next stop?"
"We're going to rendezvous with the USS Hood to pick up lieutenant Ro; she just finished her advanced tactical training."
"Excellent! We'll have to throw her a 'Welcome Back' party in Ten Forward."
When you go to someone's house, do you shit on their floor if there isn't a cross stitch hanging by the door that says "Please don't shit on our floor."
We shouldn't need rules, because everyone here is an adult and the expectation is they will conduct themselves as such.
Beyond that it says right on the tin, "Star Trek memes and shitposts," so if it's not Star Trek related (and the bar for that is incredibly low) or it's not a meme or shitpost, then there's no reason for it to be here.
JJ’s Trek films and Kelvin timeline would inject a cancer throughout Paramount’s Trek productions, namely Discovery.
JFC, this is pathetic.
Disco might not be to everyone's taste, but to claim it's a "cancer" is a tad bit dramatic, isn't it. Especially when the writer goes on to praise most of the series which we never would have had if not for the success of Disco.
Not to mention the childish oversimplification of the spore drive, which has been explained on screen. Sci-fi fans really out here still complaining about "magic" mushrooms facilitating travel, but perfectly cool when it's crystals like dilithium.
They probably wouldn’t want to wear the Cayuga jackets; those are collectors items, now!
I very much enjoyed that in season one, each Klingon house had their own uniform, and customs. In the TNG era there is a uniformity to the Klingons, which flattens them to monoculture. Even the simple touches of having House Mo’Kai engage in facial scarification, or House Kor wear war paint implies an expansion to their culture that makes me far more interested in them.
Also, I’ve always enjoyed the scheming Klingons, like the ones we see in TOS, or the Duras Sisters, so Kol really appealed to me as an antagonist.
The new prosthetic seemed like a natural progression of what we saw from TOS, to TMP, to “The Search for Spock” and TNG. I do think the decision to make them all bald in season one was a miss, but it’s otherwise a good design that effectively communicates the ferocity the species is supposed to have.
I wonder if they wanted them to all be bald if it wouldn’t have made more sense to have T’Kuvma’s followers be bald, and the others that arrive after he lights the beacon engage in tonsure once T’Kuvma becomes a martyr.
Oh, and the elongated craniums on the women was also an odd choice that I’m glad was walked back for season two.
I'm not sure I follow the central thesis of what you're trying to articulate here.
Are you saying that the way the ships function is similar to the government model you've assigned them? Or that most of the cultures the ships encounter follow those models?
Are you able to give some actual examples from the shows demonstrating that the comparison holds true over the multiple seasons each iteration of Trek had, or anything at all to support your claim?
I'm genuinely not. Say what you mean, champ.