Star Trek (VOY): Dreadnought

[FaxModem1]

It is a shame that Voyager didn't create a mini-flotilla that grew, like your fleet would in any campaign of Homeworld. The Val Jean surviving the pilot and having the Maquis working with Voyager when they have common interests would be interesting, and also have given us the chance to see a Maquis crew in action most of the time. Or that the Maquis crew wander off occasionally, not wanting to deal with Starfleet BS that they have no cause for. Maybe even a Maquis-ship story once in a while if they wanted to spread out scripts. Voyager is studying an anomaly and gaining resources, so the Val Jean is exploring the route ahead as a scout, and they rendevous in a couple weeks.

So, weird wacky story about Voyager running into a sentient cloud one week, then off set by the Maquis running from Vidian organ harvesters and telling Voyager's crew, "Nope, not that way." in the third week as they deal with the pleasure from telling stories planet, etc.

Then, as Linkara suggested, they acquire bits and pieces, little by little, as their fleet grows. Trabe refugee vessels, the Cardassian Dreadnought, Moral Vidians working on their own way to survive the Phage, etc. Have a week where the Phage is starting to make it impossible to keep the Vidian ships afloat, but no one wants to be on-board their ship, and no one wants them aboard either, etc.

But, sadly, that's not the direction they wanted. They wanted Space-Bonanza, a show where people could tune in at any time and find something comfortable to watch.

[Admiral X]

Well, yeah, because that was what they saw TNG as. They were trying desperately to copy TNG by doing the same things they thought made TNG successful, but it's like they didn't understand what made the writing good on that show and couldn't do it for themselves. Like they thought it was all space battles and aliens of the week.

[Deledrius]

Well, yeah, because that was what they saw TNG as. They were trying desperately to copy TNG by doing the same things they thought made TNG successful, but it's like they didn't understand what made the writing good on that show and couldn't do it for themselves. Like they thought it was all space battles and aliens of the week.

An impression shared, sadly, by many who have come on since, too. Star Trek Online, the JJ films, and the audience at large all feel that this is "essential" Trek. Even some comments from the execs at CBS working on Discovery seem to think so (with a dash of "all the timelines", despite that being a rare exception and not a rule).

[CrypticMirror]

He also made a Jedi joke... and following the latest episode of STD I really think it was in poor taste... fucking Myceleal network with it's fucking spores and it's fucking dark side and it's fucking force ghosts. AH well, at least STD makes us appreciate ENT and VOY episodes more. Episodes like this one were the certainty and arrogance of youth and fundamentalism is faced with the experience and growth that comes with living long enough to see the folly of your ways. Also: fuck Discovery.

I like your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. How do you feel about ORV instead of the STD?

[PerrySimm]

Even if they're supposedly Nazis in personality, there's like zero evidence of them having super advanced weaponry other than this one episode.

What else did the Cardassian break out? Their best frontline starships were horribly outclassed by Galaxy-class ships, and during the war, the Federation was producing a few Defiant class ships and even the Enterprise-E.

Three Galor-class or two Keldon-class ships could best a Galaxy-class ship - and the Galaxy-class was still an uncommon occurrence up until the war. During the war, Cardassia was split between its own fleet support needs and its role in the Dominion shipbuilding effort. Still a surprise not a lot of new types were seen, but perhaps excusable.

Whatever the reason, it can't be a lack of tech-tech abilities, though. The Obsidian Order did make the Quantum Stasis Generator doohickey that tortured Odo. In later episodes like "Nothing Human" and "Empok Nor", the Cardassians display that they are fully capable of conducting mad science.

Then on the other hand, you have the egotistical blowhards running the various squabbling Cardassian military orders. Case in point - "Dreadnought" aired the week after DS9's "Return to Grace" - the one where Gul Dukat lacked vision to the point of having difficulty accepting the idea of installing non-standard weaponry on a cargo ship!

[AlucardNoir]

He also made a Jedi joke... and following the latest episode of STD I really think it was in poor taste... fucking Myceleal network with it's fucking spores and it's fucking dark side and it's fucking force ghosts. AH well, at least STD makes us appreciate ENT and VOY episodes more. Episodes like this one were the certainty and arrogance of youth and fundamentalism is faced with the experience and growth that comes with living long enough to see the folly of your ways. Also: fuck Discovery.

I like your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. How do you feel about ORV instead of the STD?

The Orville? it has unfortunately gotten better. I say unfortunately because, for me at least, the Orville isn't great, it's not good and it's not bad.. it just is. The Orville is the dumb man's TNG. Even when it tries it still falls short because of the jokes it tries to pull. It doesn't have the necessary budget to pull off a TNG like experience, not yet anyways. And sometimes it just fails.

To give some concrete examples, in the first episode we have a time speed manipulation ray and it gets used in a rather cartoonish fashion. In an SF show I would expect such a ray to be used somewhat realistically, say you were to put your hand under such a ray, what would happen? your wrist would explode. Why? because suddenly all the blood that was coming from your hand back to your body through the wrist and arm would be accelerated by several orders of magnitude. Similarly all the blood that was already in the wrist going from your heart to your hand would be sucked dry with the power of a vacuum. And all this because time would move at an accelerated pace for your hand and blood would move from one speed to the other at the threshold of the ray.

Or take the Bortas has a baby girl episode were the crew keeps giving him examples of strong females of OTHER SPECIES. And then they precede to do the exact same thing in court. That is one of the best and most memorable episodes... and yet the crew behaves like MORONS (written all with capital letters on purpose). Bortas was a different species then them, not from a different country. A good episode, and yet so deeply flawed.

Or take the Krill ship infiltration episode... that was bad in so many ways. The crew is once again stupid and doesn't actually prepare for their mission - choosing names on the way? Once on the alien ship they behave like cartoon characters - I know, I know, MacFarlane is the man behind Family Guy, American Dad and the like but that's not an excuse. Farscape had a cartoon based episode that took liberties with many of the Roadrunner cartoons but it showed it's inspiration and didn't attempt to bring the cartoons to life. ORV on the other hand... and the worst part of this is that if the rest of the show were actually as constantly goofy as that series was we'd all praise that episode for breaking the mold and actually giving us character growth and memorable scenes. But the rest of the series only tries to be goofy and funny... and fails repeatedly.

Or the ancient alien ship episode, such a good episode with such a great ending... and yet it felt more like a Twilight zone/Outer limits knock off then 21st century TV episode. It felt rough, unpolished, like something you'd expect from a made for TV anthology series.

TL;DR If you weren't trolling and really wanted to know my thought on ORV, it's a rough, uncut diamond ... that someone dropped in dogshit.

[CrypticMirror]

He also made a Jedi joke... and following the latest episode of STD I really think it was in poor taste... fucking Myceleal network with it's fucking spores and it's fucking dark side and it's fucking force ghosts. AH well, at least STD makes us appreciate ENT and VOY episodes more. Episodes like this one were the certainty and arrogance of youth and fundamentalism is faced with the experience and growth that comes with living long enough to see the folly of your ways. Also: fuck Discovery.

I like your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. How do you feel about ORV instead of the STD?

The Orville? it has unfortunately gotten better. I say unfortunately because, for me at least, the Orville isn't great, it's not good and it's not bad.. it just is. The Orville is the dumb man's TNG. Even when it tries it still falls short because of the jokes it tries to pull. It doesn't have the necessary budget to pull off a TNG like experience, not yet anyways. And sometimes it just fails.

To give some concrete examples, in the first episode we have a time speed manipulation ray and it gets used in a rather cartoonish fashion. In an SF show I would expect such a ray to be used somewhat realistically, say you were to put your hand under such a ray, what would happen? your wrist would explode. Why? because suddenly all the blood that was coming from your hand back to your body through the wrist and arm would be accelerated by several orders of magnitude. Similarly all the blood that was already in the wrist going from your heart to your hand would be sucked dry with the power of a vacuum. And all this because time would move at an accelerated pace for your hand and blood would move from one speed to the other at the threshold of the ray.

Or take the Bortas has a baby girl episode were the crew keeps giving him examples of strong females of OTHER SPECIES. And then they precede to do the exact same thing in court. That is one of the best and most memorable episodes... and yet the crew behaves like MORONS (written all with capital letters on purpose). Bortas was a different species then them, not from a different country. A good episode, and yet so deeply flawed.

Or take the Krill ship infiltration episode... that was bad in so many ways. The crew is once again stupid and doesn't actually prepare for their mission - choosing names on the way? Once on the alien ship they behave like cartoon characters - I know, I know, MacFarlane is the man behind Family Guy, American Dad and the like but that's not an excuse. Farscape had a cartoon based episode that took liberties with many of the Roadrunner cartoons but it showed it's inspiration and didn't attempt to bring the cartoons to life. ORV on the other hand... and the worst part of this is that if the rest of the show were actually as constantly goofy as that series was we'd all praise that episode for breaking the mold and actually giving us character growth and memorable scenes. But the rest of the series only tries to be goofy and funny... and fails repeatedly.

Or the ancient alien ship episode, such a good episode with such a great ending... and yet it felt more like a Twilight zone/Outer limits knock off then 21st century TV episode. It felt rough, unpolished, like something you'd expect from a made for TV anthology series.

TL;DR If you weren't trolling and really wanted to know my thought on ORV, it's a rough, uncut diamond ... that someone dropped in dogshit.

It is a little harsher than I'd be, but I admit I do like comedy-dramas so am more forgiving of the necessary compromises of that genre, but I understand where you are coming from. I still think it does better than STD at being Star Trek though. So does S1 ENT though, and that is not good.

[Aotrs Commander]

Ah, Dreadnought. I remember this episode not so much for the episode itself, but for the effect it had on my local wargames group. A chap there used to run his own homebrew Star Trek games, using the Micro Machines models. This is going back... Ooh, a good number of years, in the days before stuff like Memory Alpha was a thing (turn of the millenium or before), so the ship stats were somewhat guesstimates. Anyway the Cardassians had started out really, really bad, but had improved slightly. And then this episode gave us the Dreadnought. Which was (in this game at least) the Cardassian equiivlent of the British K- class submarines.

And all the Cardassian ships started carrying them. And BOY, were they hilarious... If you weren't playing Cardassian. They were a defensive liability. If you didn't launch them, there was a nasty tendacy for them to take a critical hit and explode (in the same way the photon torpodoes did but worse), but because they were dreadnoughts, they had an area effect... Which would often destroy the ship next to them. As so we created the phenominon known as the Cardassian Wave, where a single ship would lead to a string of destroyed vessels - usually all Cardassian.

So, of course, you, as the Cardassian wanted them off your ship as soon as possible. But first you had to program them with their target - and, in the fashion of the episode, the AI was paranoid and obstreperous - and didn't always target what you wanted...

It was, then, with sad inevitability, the first casualty of a fired Dreadnought missile... Was a Cardassian ship it had decided was the enemy.

In the end, the Cardassian players (unable to just not carry them - which, to be fair, is the sort of thing you'd get, whereby the politicians would sya "no, you must all have them!") would try and shove them out without turning them on or simialr shenaigans.

It, was, as I say, good times, so long as you didn't happen to be playing a Cardassian.


(In fairness, it should be noted that thos game was a multi-player one and not taken too seriously (good job, since it relied a bit too much on randomisation and that could sometimes ruin the game.)

[Archanubis]

I did not remember that Torres said it was a "kinetic" detonator that failed, which suggests it needed to physically hit the target to go off, but somehow that did not damage the Cardassian berserker (which would have been a better name than "Dreadnought" but they probably did not want to get into a copyright dispute with Saberhagen).

Why would it? "Berserker's" a term that's been around since the days of the Vikings, if not longer. I'm sure Paramount's lawyers could have argued fair use or whatever.

It's just such a pity how the status quo was God so much on Voyager. I could see Voyager doing a Battlestar Galactica-style thing of leading a ragtag group of ships across the quadrant, some staying and some going occasionally - refugees, resource issues, a mini-Federation heading towards a place some called home and others wanted to make home.

I always got the feeling the shadow of TNG was always hanging over the shows that came after it.

[TGLS]

Why would it? "Berserker's" a term that's been around since the days of the Vikings, if not longer. I'm sure Paramount's lawyers could have argued fair use or whatever.

"Alien" dates back to the Romans, and you'll really have it if name your story/movie/game that. Never underestimate copyright/trademark law.