NCC-1000 Stts (FASA STCS)

[LUGTrekGM]

And, for the record, I am a fan of Phillip K. Dick.

Not all of it, but a lot of it.

I like stories where it is hard to define what is human, what is reality, where does consciousness begin and end.

But I am not going to put Transhuman Space-style biotechnology and all the rest of the metahuman issues that come with it into my own Star Trek Campaign.

Do we really want to put some kind of hacker/decker type onto a ship's bridge?

Do we really want to argue that transporters kill people, then create them from whole cloth, all the while ignoring the idea that as soon as a person-sized body is converted to energy, they are a multi-megaton explosion waiting to happen?

We could. Some might. Not here at my house.

I tell the story, the player role dice, and make the tough decisions, and we all cooperate, to share in the heroic episodes we make together.

I really want to see how the FASA STCS Mods work out for this NX Era. my players grew up with FASA, and it's development is significant to us, as a group.

[First of Two]

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/sc...s/daedalus.jpg
>OR, just maybe, the TOS Enterprise's look is SOLELY a function of the production >values and technical understanding of the 1960's.

True. Doesn't mean that every new 22nd or 23rd cen. de sign has to look
like some cgi toy becau se the budget's better.

Actually, yeah, it does.

The only reason the TOS Enterprise looks like the TOS Enterprise does is because that's the best guess of "the future" that the guys in 1960 could come up with. Sterile, smooth, white(ish).

A TOS Enterprise today, designed from scratch, would almost certainly look different. Probably more metallic, with stick-out greeblies and such.

The NX has many more obvious seams than the 1701. More primitive.

The NX is made of more metallic-looking substances than the space-age looking 1701. More primitive.

The NX's engines are attached in a way more consistent with 20th-Century ideas of force-distribution and transfer than the 'way-out-on-fragile-pylons- engines of the 1701. More primitive.

Forty years in the real world, where Trek is filmed, has advanced the state of the art so much they couldn't make the NX-01 look much more primitive without the show being even more campy.

[LUGTrekGM]

I'm all for more campy.

I love TOS today, watching it on G4 just as much as I did back in 1969.

Set it up like a blast from the past, Forbidden Planet style with even shorter dresses, helmets with radio antennas, heck yeah.

Halfway to Buck Rogers, I'd pay to watch it.

As long as the writing is good the damn props and graphics don't matter to me. At all.

Witness Phantom Menace > Graphics, weak story *thumbs down*.

For me, at least, Les Miserables, no graphics, lots of period props and costumes, great story > I love it.

Grapes of Wrath > No graphics, great story.

Armageddon > Lots of graphics, too loud soundtrack, flat story, > I hated it.

For me, if there is a story, yeah graphics are nice, but I can still sit and watch old Science Fiction Theater movies and enjoy them, despite crap models, no cgi, and 40 to 50 year old props.

The Matrix > Hated it.

Minority Report > Loved it.

Terminator > Loved it, but it was a really artful mix of graphics, models, and a great action story.

Star Trek V, The Final Frontier > Hated it. The story was just not there.

Wrath of Khan > Great story AND Graphics, too. But even if it had been done in say 1970, the story is there.

[First of Two]

That's probably one of the oddest rationalizations I've ever read. I've gotten a migraine just trying to wrap my brain around the use of Les Mis and Grapes of Wrath in a discussion about SF shows.

[FredRogers]Can we say "wholly different judgement criteria?"[/FredRogers]

"It has to have a good story!" and "Buck Rogers!" Used in the same speech.

Ow. Ow. OW.

[LUGTrekGM]

HALF-way to Buck Rogers. I mean, yeah, I concede the point.

Perhaps Flash Gordon would have been more apropos. Back in the day, I'm talking 35 years ago...F.G. was pretty spiffy, staying up most of the night for the next episode.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

'Forbidden Planet' doesn't have the slightest bit of camp in it. It's a better science fiction movie–and has even aged better–than '2001.'

But a ship 150 years pre next gen should not look like it's cousin.

What, so you think the NX-class looks like the Galaxy class or something?

[LUGTrekGM]

Akira was an Anime' show also, right?

That's what I meant. If the Akira Class as NX Cousin was from DS9, my apologies to all who might have been misled, when I loosely tossed out "next gen".

NX from Enterprise certainly did not fall anywhere in between TOS Enterprise and Cochrane's ship. Seems to me that would be the path of development.

[BouncyCaitian]

Enterprise-D = connie class with a glandular problem

[LUGTrekGM]

I mean, I can see the progression in the ship classes.

Galaxy Class is founded in Excelsior, more or less.

Then from there, the ships become more elongated, narrow profile, moving from saucer section to that kind of oblate tranguloid, with the Defiant as a notable exception.

Working backward through the history, saucer sections become that sort of globe, a la Daedalus.

So NX looks more advanced than the TOS Enterprise. I think it was a mistake. At least the NX Crew uniforms show a progression from a semi NASA / Navy coveralls.

And big levers would have been cool.

An Abacus? Eh, a bit much.

[First of Two]

Working backward through the history, saucer sections become that sort of globe, a la Daedalus.

But there was no backward "history," just a few models of a single ship, and a lot of fanon. A single ship with a spherical hull design (based on a design which would have been TOS in the first place) does not a long, proud lineage make.

And it's important to note that the only other example of a spherical hull is...
the "25 years in the future" USS Pasteur!

Hm.

In the 1960's - 1970's, we had the Apollo Command Module.
In the 1970's - 2000's, we have the Space Shuttle.
In the 2010's we're gonna have... The Crew Excursion Vehicle.

Now, what's the CEV going to look like, more advanced than the Space Shuttle, or less? One guess only, please.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

Akira was an Anime' show also, right?

That's what I meant. If the Akira Class as NX Cousin was from DS9, my apologies to all who might have been misled, when I loosely tossed out "next gen".

NX from Enterprise certainly did not fall anywhere in between TOS Enterprise and Cochrane's ship. Seems to me that would be the path of development.

You just seem to pointing out the Daedalus or whatever and saying 'nuh-uh!' a lot. The aesthetic decisions that point out certain things as looking more 'primitive' or not aren't universal, especially when we're dealing with fictional technological progression as imagined by almost fifty years of designers. Look at anything from the 60s and anything from the 00s and tell me that they would share a common aesthetic understanding of what 'primitive' in this case would be.

[TFVanguard]

I had several problems with the NX-01 design, aside from the obvious lifting from the Akira.

First: The warp engines were very next-gen style, down to the blue piping, layout, etc. The weren't the warp engines that you would expect for a ship 80 years prior to TOS, to be sure.

Second: Seams. Guys, we're hundreds of feet away from these ships in most camera shots.. we're NOT going to clearly see millimeter-wide seams that far out and they're at MOST going to look like a discoloration. To get seams like we see on the NX-01, they would have to be about two-feet wide.

Third: Gunmetal texture. Sorry, but that wasn't convincing. It wasn't a BAD idea, but it just didn't look right. It needed to be less harsh, I think, less 'glossy' all around. I know they wanted a 'cruder' look, but that didn't pull it off.

I think we should all take the NX-01 for what it was, a VFX head's lazy approach to getting a new ship on the screen with minimal effort... and treat it as such.

[Meteo]

>The NX's engines are attached in a way more consistent with 20th-Century ideas of >force-distribution and transfer than the 'way-out-on-fragile-pylons- engines of the >1701. More primitive.

The pylons end up too streamlined looking, not just durable.

And LUGTrekGM and VanguardTF are both right in several ways.

I thank both of you for helping me out.

I'll stat the Daedalus in a little while, so you can check it out.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

I think we should all take the NX-01 for what it was, a VFX head's lazy approach to getting a new ship on the screen with minimal effort... and treat it as such.

Now people are just being pissy.

[TFVanguard]

Now people are just being pissy.

I wasn't being pissy, I was being matter of fact. When you look at the ship, you realize that it's a barely-modified Akira with altered nacelles and a new texture map for the surface. That's it. The VFX artists admitted openly that the version we got was NEVER meant to be the final, but that the 'powers that be' rushed it into production.