FASA in the ENTERPRISE era

[whoman69]

OH, COME ON! The names are tip-offs... or should be! Like they are MEANT to be different technologies? The writers are not very cunning, and Phase Cannons were insisted upon by UPN execs, who wanted familiar trek tech to be used so that the fans wouldn't be confused... so they partially caused the bastardization of an otherwise possibly okay or mediocre prequel.

Also, 2150s. And you don't know what happened to the Defiant while it was in the interphase rift.

If it walk like a duck and talks like a duck...
The writers and producers of Enterprise made a choice. They wanted to prequel but did not want to come up with new things and felt they could rewrite canon where needed. They were totally wrong in thinking that way and it was a huge reason the show went from 12 million viewers for the opening, to just over a million for the rest of the show's run. They lost the majority of their loyal base by ignoring not only what was already set on TOS, but confirmed on other Star Trek series as well. I don't buy the argument that they had been painted into a corner and only had certain storylines they could follow. There was plenty of material they could have touched on. The show could have been about space pioneers but instead turned out to be a crew from Earth trying to prove they could make it out there.

[Meteo]

If it walk like a duck and talks like a duck...
The writers and producers of Enterprise made a choice. They wanted to prequel but did not want to come up with new things and felt they could rewrite canon where needed. They were totally wrong in thinking that way and it was a huge reason the show went from 12 million viewers for the opening, to just over a million for the rest of the show's run. They lost the majority of their loyal base by ignoring not only what was already set on TOS, but confirmed on other Star Trek series as well. I don't buy the argument that they had been painted into a corner and only had certain storylines they could follow. There was plenty of material they could have touched on. The show could have been about space pioneers but instead turned out to be a crew from Earth trying to prove they could make it out there.

And I think UPN had a say too, the Enterprise was described as having lasers in the series bible, and Braga apparently didn't want a transporter. So, while these two would have had retarded stories on the show themselves, UPN probably contributed to the bullshit by having them use normal tech with or without dumb name changes.

[tonyg]

I don't think it was UPN, since all the contintuity crap were there from the start. IMO it just seemed that the production staff believed that they could rewrite the whole cannon, and screw the fans. T'Pol was going to be T'Pau originally, until the negative feeback from the fans got the prducers to change the name.

THere was a big shift in how Paramount viewed the Trek fanbase after the shows are movies earned some mainstream success. It shows up in all the interviews.TNG cast members went from statments like "We hope the fans will come to accept us." to "THe fans only make up a relatively small percantage of our audicence".

PAramount has been disregarding that "small percentage" for quite awhile now. What I don't think they realtized was that it was that "small pencentage" of fans who were resposbile for getting the getting other people to watch the show. When I was young, that was how it worked in my house. Back in the old days when we had one TV, someone who had a favorite show generally got to watch it, and so everyone else in the house ended up watching it, as it was the only thing on. After awhile, they might get drawn into a show and enjoy it. These days there is less fighting over the TV (well, I guess people fight over the HDTV now), but people still talk to friends and get them to watch shows, or NOT watch shows. Usually, when a fan of something tells me NOT to watch that show anymore becuase it has "gone down the tubes", I ususally beleive the fan.

ENterpise was so frustrating as a series becuase it seemed like the were going out of thier way to alienate the fanbase. Why do a Trek prequel if you are not going to stick to the the history? Why change stuff? It would have been easier to just do a new SF setting.

I just think they wrre trying to reinvent TOS and didn't care to much about the fans or continutity.

[Meteo]

And what about the lasers in the Enterprise bible? and Braga didn't even want transporters originally.

And the NX had it's design hastilly picked out, which is why it's the Akiraprise, although the other designs looked rather streamlined and advanced too.

[Meteo]

Yup. I think what they really wanted to do was try and recapute the sprit of the orginial pilot episode, "The Cage". Had they set the series in the 2250s or so, and used something like the USS RANGER, the tech would have matched up well.

With a 2150s setting, they really needed to downgrade the tech. For most things it wouldn't have been to difficult. Lasers instead of Phasers, and rockets/missiles with a variety of warheads, including a tactical nuke.

The big problem, as always would be the Warp Drive. With the distances between star systems so vast, a spacefaring culture sort of needs a sustained TOS WF5 just to get around without spending months or years in transit. IF the NX class has WF 3 or so, it would have made sense, eras wise, but not story wise.

One reason why I am thinking of a "time dilation" effect is to match up with the "tme barrier" common from "The Cage". It seems very much like the "sound barrier" from the early days of the Jet Age. Perhaps at a certain point the warp curve acts up. This could be tied into the reasons behind the MCU scale. Maybe after a certain point the energy curve and time dilation kick in to make higher warp speeds seem slower than lower ones. Theoretically, that is what would happen to a ship traveling at high sublight speeds. If I recall the formula correctly, a ship traveling faster than .7c would seem slower than one traveling at a lower velocity, due to time dilation.

We could just assume that the cap is somewhere past WF5, and that it is yet to be discovered in the NX era. Even the WF 6 ships might not notice it right away, since they probably don't use a sustained speed at that value. Maybe sometime in the 2170s ships start to show up a few hours or days "late" and the people started to notice that something was wrong.

For instance, if we go with WF6 as the "barrier" we could use a fomula like:

Warp Efficiency = (6/WF)^3.

At that point, a ship ends of traveling at an effective speed of 216c regardless of WF.

Oh yeah, I ought to use that for my fanfic. Interesting.

[JackPhoton]

Clip

In FASA Trek terms, the NX class is a bit of a bother since there is only so low you can go on the FASA scale. Basically a GM would need to design new tables for the older tech, but keep the values inferior enough to TOS stuff.

I've been asked why play the old system when the new ones are out there? It's all about era appropriate. FASA rules cannot work outside of the Cage/TUC era. Even then, the rules are tugging at the seams. When the TNG supplement came out with the 1701-D stats blowing ship combat off the maps, new branch/positions twisting character generation around added to different dice methods for rolling each attribute in a given race much less between races, the whole system was falling apart as was. To try and hammer it into eras even further afield like Enterprise or even DS9 just a few years later than TNG makes things spin.

Technology. A phaser pistol stuns, kills, disintigrates. Where do you go from there over a century of development? Stronger power packs is about it. Ranges are inherent to pistol/rifle configurations so each has effective max ranges that tech cannot help. Stun is stun, heavy stun more so. A new, Super-Heavy Stun setting? "Double-extra kill"? Disinta-grinta-minta-grate setting?

Enterprise tech in FASA rules is utter weak. 1701-D and later outright devastates.

As to other systems, they are all designed around different eras in a different gaming era with a new gen of game developers and mindsets.

FASA captured TOS/TAS like no other. That it was schizophrenically split into movie era insides with TOS cover art on the outside spoke to the underlying schism at the heart of 1st/2nd edition revision and where Fantasimulations were coming from as opposed to where FASA was now then taking it.

[Meteo]

Necro Post, or Radically LSD Trippy Boon-Fogging in a Quantum Tunnel, Batman.

Also, the show itself was similarly schizophrenically buillshittingly, variable in distances and warp speeds, no real discernable pattern, due to Berman's Cluelessness and Braga's inability to graduate 2nd Grade anything.

ANd Mainstream attempts to be hip with the youth and be TOS, by guys who hated TOS.

This could just be viewed as Temporal Cold War stupidity that went on 8 years, 26 monthes, up the Scroat-Toastingly bad Boondoggle.

Scrap ENT and go with DAE, EVERYTHING MADE by EVERYONE before 9/11, and the beloved president of Berman and Brage, George, W. Bush!!!