Well finarvyn, Talking to us is one thing, but I have heard the amazing acidic vitriol that has been heaped upon the newer generation because they deign to like TNG, et al.
I’m running a TOS game, myself, and if I see a piece of technology that ought to have been available in the TOS era, I’ll make it available. I might change it up a bit, try to make a lower tech version of it or something If some enterprising (HA!) character wants to jury rig three tricorders and put them in a triangle for a makeshift pattern enhancer, Ima let 'em do it!
Holodecks are a bit much; I prefer to think that if TOS had anything like that it would only be a higher tech version of VR today, it may look totally real but it has no substance. Anything more in that TAS episode would have been add-ons by the “broken” computer, possibly using the transporter! I’d like to think that the logs and reports filed concerning this incident may have inspired the inventors of the TNG era’s holodeck!
Yup, that’s what I’ll do too.
I always disliked the treatment of the Gorn in STOnline, I dunno, maybe they needed more species to buff out the darkside, but I always thought that with Kirk’s actions, I figured the Gorn would be friendly to the Federation. (then again, they did just obliterate the colony on Cestus III… )
Specifically with holography in the 23rd century… Discovery’s take has never felt out of place. It’s not just the recreation room in TAS, but lots of little things alongside it.
Kirk and Spock seem familiar with holographic technology during TOS, commenting during one episode (which I can’t recall right at the moment - I want to say The Squire of Gothos, but I’m not 100%) on an illusory environment with no obvious means of projection. Earlier forms of the tech had been encountered as early as 2151, in the Enterprise episode Unexpected, developed by the Xyrillians (who showed the tech to Trip, and later provided a sample of it to the Klingons)… but even then, the idea of environment simulators wasn’t unknown - it was the sophistication of the Xyrillians’ version that was unusual.
Towards the end of the 23rd century, we know from a comment by Tuvok in the episode Flashback that holoimaging for still images existed during the time of Captain Sulu, but was lower-resolution than in Voyager’s time, to explain why Tuvok’s memories of Sulu doesn’t look quite like the holoimage of him at Starfleet HQ. Those, plus a few uses of holographic communications in the TOS movies show that the technology isn’t uncommon, but it may not be evenly distributed.
The holograms seen in Discovery fit that dynamic relatively well - we see holocommunicators in use on the Shenzhou and Discovery, but the holograms are clearly less sophisticated than those we see in TNG onwards; they’re translucent, incorporeal, a little indistinct, and they flicker occasionally, compared to the “look like the person is in the room and can be made corporeal” 24th century holograms. Even the holographic training area on the Discovery fits that - the physical environment is real, not simulated, we never see anything to suggest corporeal targets/foes, and it’s basically an interactive laser-tag gallery with 3d-projected enemies - a far cry from the detailed pseudorealistic simulations of a holodeck.
So, we have a sense of progression there. There’s room to move from that, to what we see in TNG, where holographic simulation isn’t new (Janeway states that she played earlier versions of some children’s holoprograms during her childhood, so the tech can’t be that new), but the versions on the Enterprise are either a new generation of the tech or it’s more advanced than is normally on a starship (or both), and the EMH seems to represent part of the next big leap in holotechnology.
Incidentally, the flickering, indistinct holograms of Discovery actually solve the problem that made holographic communications awkward to do in DS9: long dialogue scenes over viewscreens are often dull and lack tension, so they introduced holocomms to try and sidestep that, but they didn’t have any means to make it clear that it was a holographic projection and not just a person stood on the bridge - no easy visual shortcut that says “it’s a hologram”. The holograms seen in Discovery simultaneously achieve “looks obviously like a hologram” and “looks less sophisticated than the TNG holograms”, which satisfies me, at least.
Being able to envision ST as a future, to me, is based on the qualities that made the episodes and show great, not budget and believability of tech.
What will never work for me is when the shows main conflict is how Geordi is having a hard time making a new friend. No amount of high budget computer graphics is gonna help with that. I find a lot (not all) of ST after TOS is ripe with that level of drama.
Space Seed
Amok Time
Errand of Mercy
I’d put those three episodes up against the entire Trek library of shows with their higher budgets made after TOS. The stuff in those episodes and those like it are what make me want to believe in that universe. There is little suspension of disbelief because I’ve been pulled in by the story. Good lighting for mood helps as well, something that seems to have been lost.
Just another perspective on the subject. To each their own, of course.
Good stories are not the problem. And these three you have mentioned are some of the best of Star trek in general.
A certain type of fans are the problem. Fans who dislike (or even hate) one (or more) of the later Star Trek series and use even the most absurd argument to prove that this series is not part of the prime timeline or canon.
As long as you are not some one who says that only their definition of canon is the only true definition and DIS (and perhaps some of ther other Star Trekexcept TOS) is not part of it, we can be friends. Good-antured ribbing or even prefering TOS to any of the other series is not a problem.
I prefer DS9 which BTW was not well received by some fans at the time because it was too dark for them and took place on a space station instead of exploring the unkown. But now DS9 is considered being one of the best Star Trek series. I remember that there were fans who did not consider TNG being Star Trek because it lacked all their old heroes. I also remember that some fans disliked VOY, not because of the female captain (that was never a problem) but because they are not exploring the unknown but running away from it. Even the dislike ENT received in the beginning was nothing compared to the hatred DIS still receives after two successfull seasons! Some one wrote in a German forum in a topic about the new Star Wars movies that these but also DIS and other shows, movies and even video games have become victims of the toxic and overexcited sociopolitical infighting in the US.
I like ENT quite a bit. It’s my favourite after TOS. I have to pick and choose from TNG and DS9. There are some very excellent episodes from TNG. Yesterday’s Enterprise comes to mind.
I don’t disagree with any of that. The stories you mention are great stories - though we are stuck with needing to reconcile the contradictory ideas of “Star Trek is our future” and “genetic supermen conquered huge swathes of the world in the early 1990s and were shot into space in 1996” that Space Seed gave us.
But that’s a matter of the content of the stories. Set design, production design, makeup, prosthetics, props, costuming… those are all presentation matters, and my previous point was directed mainly at those who declare that they cannot accept Discovery because it doesn’t look like TOS - a matter of presentation.
For me, the quality of those stories is sufficient that I can will myself to overlook the constraints and difficulties of the presentation imposed by how and when they were made - the same kinds of constraints and difficulties that eventually resulted in the aesthetic changes seen in TMP, which took advantage of better technology and bigger budgets and which, if some accounts are to be believed, was intended to serve as a soft reboot of the franchise (with the TMP novelisation implying that the show was a set of embellished accounts of some of the missions the Enterprise went on; those events happened, just not 100% as depicted in the episodes). Things like the Klingons gaining their now-familiar ridges came about because of a sense of “now we can do things that we couldn’t afford to before”. I regard Discovery’s aesthetic changes in the same light: they can do things now that would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago, because there’s tools and money available for a big franchise like this that weren’t available to TV shows in decades past (which was part of the reason Star Trek had moved to movies in the first place).
I agree totally – some fans hating on other fans (or their favorite series) is pointless. I can like one better without hating another, and I would hope that other fans would be mature enough to do this as well.
Canon is such an odd thing, anyway. Back in the 1970’s I ran a Star Trek campaign using OD&D rules. I built my “canon” on what I could recall about the TV shows (no VCR yet) and what I could read from the James Blish adaptations (often without any real resemblance to the actual shows) and some Franz Joseph stuff like the Technical Manual and the Blueprints. Then I found “World of Star Trek” and “Making of Star Trek” and they had some behind-the-scenes stuff and I had to decide how official this stuff was, anyway. Then the old Bantam novels. What do I count as legit or not? My point is that I had to look at things and judge for myself how internally consistent things could be, and how much I trusted a particular source and that defined my “canon” for Star Trek. This might or might not have matched anyone else’s choices, but that didn’t matter for my campaign.
I do the same thing nowadays. I like the TOS-era map from Federation Space but not the updated one from Federation & Empire. I like the Technical Manual for starship design but not the direction that the movie ships went. It really doesn’t matter much to me what others consider “official” because I pick my favorite parts of each and go with it.
Funny fact: In the 1980s Paramount considered FASA’s Star Trek RPG as canon, so that they forced the authors of Star Trek novels to use it as source. Until TNG came out and FASA lost the licence …
I run a TOS era game and I pick and choose what makes it in to the “history” of my universe.
I like several things that happened in Enterprise but not all of it (Andorian antennae are NOT flexible!), heck, I’ve even tossed out episodes of TOS (Way to Eden?), or altered them to better reflect how it should be (Turnabout Intruder).
In theory… there are more. See, the Broken Bow encounter in Enterprise was no the original story of First Contact with the Klingons, which involved the U.S.S. Ranger and them being captured and this gave the Klingons Warp Drive through reverse engineering and was a founding reason for the Prime Directive. The explanation for the Klingon being on Earth was due to the Temporal Cold War. And all that then followed… no problem, nice easy way to explain the change in what was accepted canon if not Screen Canon at the time. This relates though to the Design of the NX-01 Enterprise which was very aesthetically different from the actual CANON ships shown in models and such from the previous TV shows. Except that change is explained by the movie FIRST CONTACT because Cochrane saw the ENTERPRISE E in orbit you will recall from the telescope… and nobody made any effort to clean that up, meaning he probably contributed those design ideas to the Warp 5 Project people (established that Archer and his father had interacted directly with Cochrane) and that is why the NX look instead of the Daedalus class look which was previously established in the display models. This would also provide explanation why Archer was never mentioned and the NX Enterprise wasn’t on the shelf of previous Enterprises but the naval vessel and space shuttle were aboard the Enterprise.
If this were the case than Prime Timeline is: TOS – TNG – DS9 – Voyager (but not end game because in Prime Timeline it took 70 years as per Old Janeway before time travel). Also Generations and First Contact and Insurrection, but not Nemesis because that has Younger Janeway as an Admiral.
Then you have First Contact Cochrane sees Enterprise E – Enterprise – (Maybe Discovery) – Nemesis – Star Trek Kelvinverse destruction of Romulus and the fun of the Temporal Cold War timeline. Some may call that New Prime, YMMV.
And then you have the Kelvin-verse Timeline which does include Archer…
And then you have Discovery Timeline which does include Archer and MAY or MAY NOT tie into New Prime but because it has Archer does not tie into Original Prime, and it may be part of the Kelvin-verse Timeline rather than either Primes…
Or we can just accept that while making prequel series was a really bad idea and most of us would have preferred they just go forward from Voyager’s return – wink nod Archer and Discovery were always part of the history they just weren’t mentioned before and there is just Prime and Kelvin… Whatever is easiest to spin your stories. Cheers.
Every single time travel episode starts a new timeline! So with a lot of timetravel episodes it is impossible to tell what is part of the original timeline and what is a result of a timetravel event.
Thank you for this. I’ve really only ever watched TNG and the Abrams films so I am just now starting to look into the timelines as I plan to run this game. This is much much appreciated.
Yep, sure do. And that there are references to a frightfully large number of them in non-classified documents.
I worked in the National Archives system. I’m also aware that the rule is 10 years after last date of service… and most of the “secrets” of WW II are actually no longer classified, because the RRS hit, and most of them were declassified in the late 90’s (96-98).
By the way, the records for the Roswell incident? Misfiled in the records of the Army Air Corps, at Archives 2 (Bethesda), at least in 1997, per the non-classified finding aid.
Most of those “secrets” were declassified. Many more have leaked.
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