Star Trek: Picard

[The Predaking]

So I got to watch it last night.

Spoiler

Great show! More of Jack and Sydney, although she is kind of weirded out by his abilities, which seem to include reading her mind, and later on Quasi controlling her in battle. Which was very brutal, especially when the changling was just ramming her face into the force field.

Loved the Tuvok scene! His voice and mannerisms were a little weird though, like Tim Russ was playing him to be super old. It had me worried about him, but Russ in the Ready Room interview seemed fine and in good health.

I am a little confused on how all the Changlings appeared at the end of the episode to take the bridge as it seems that there were only the two of them on the turbolift. They seemed to pour out of the ready room, when I thought they were all trapped or dead elsewhere.

I really don't think that we are dealing with the Borg or the Founders as Vadic's boss. We are dealing with something super natural. That means of communication, and what Jacks is seeing and can do, that's way beyound the Borg or the Founders. My guess is that the BBEG wanted Picard's corpse to reanimate and use it themselves. He wants Jack crusher as he is responsible for his abilities and possible conception. I suspect he is like one of those beings in Star Trek 5, which would be a throwback that this team would give us.

What this all has to do with the planned attack, I couldn't say, other than BBEG wants a giant stage on which to act.

 

[TheSupernova]

Just out of curiosity, has anyone found that the Titan seems to have covered a lot of space in such a short time? I don't imagine the various points they've been at have been that close to each other...

Otherwise, I don't have a whole lot to say about this week's that hasn't been covered yet. Can't say I super enjoyed it. I do continue to enjoy how well the legacy characters have slipped back into their roles, though.

Spoiler

The whole Changeling Tuvok to Creepy Riker was really well done by both actors.

 

[Axaday]

They DID set a pretty short clock for the remainder of the season a few episodes back. But Titan-A cruises Warp 9.99. The fat one maxed out at 9.5. So we're going 4 times as fast as we used to, if that helps. It doesn't take a week to get to DS9 from Earth. Just almost 2 days.

 

[The Predaking]

Just out of curiosity, has anyone found that the Titan seems to have covered a lot of space in such a short time? I don't imagine the various points they've been at have been that close to each other...

I give them some credit on that, as they mention that they don't even have to let engineering know that they are going to warp 9.99, as its just such a routine thing now that ships can do. Back in the TNG Era, 9.5 was about all the enterprise D could muster, and it couldn't hold that indefinitely. Now, the difference between 9.5 and 9.9 is 4 times the speed. So them getting to Chintaka on the edges of Federation space, from wherever they moved Space dock too, would only take about a quarter of the time. Heck they managed to get from Earth to outside Federation space in a few hours in the first episode.

Also, the Federation does have working versions of Transwarp, so maybe the Titan has a slipstream drive?

 

[Copper Bezel]

Also, the Federation does have working versions of Transwarp, so maybe the Titan has a slipstream drive?

I could see slipstream being silently introduced as the new normal warp drive in the same way that the warp scales silently switched between the TOS and TNG eras, possibly due to the technology that may or may not have been introduced with the Excelsior and called "transwarp" at the time because anything that makes a quantum leap in warp technology is trans-warp.

I personally don't like this very much. I'd like there to have been a recognizable thing that distinguishes a slipstream drive from an ordinary warp drive.

The first slipstream ship we saw chronologically was the fake Dauntless, and in Prodigy they've built a real Dauntless. Initially slipstream was represented by a blue tunnel effect during warp travel, and the fake Dauntless has a funky grilled slit for a navigational deflector. The later real Dauntless retains this shape for the deflector. That could be notable, considering that the fake Dauntless has no visible Bussard collectors, and these have been added to the Starfleet design, so if the deflector was just weird alien stuff Starfleet could have changed it.

I haven't played a meaningful amount of STO, but I'd thought that at the time they introduced slipstream as a ubiquitous state of the art drive, there was a loose convention of navigational deflectors that took the concave bit from the Voyager dish and turned it into a protrusive conical shape, sometimes attached to the rest of the hull on the top edge, so that the deflector's glowing bit became more band-like and there was a loose allusion to the cones of ramjet engines.

This is neither canon nor consistent to my understanding, just a shape the designers were playing around with for a while that marks a particular era of ship design. There's also plenty of ship stuff in STO that's definitely not canon because history didn't play out that way, like the collaborative Starfleet / Klingon / Romulan ship classes.

But by (I assume) coincidence, in the far future, the Discovery-A refit, which seemingly replaced the entirety of the warp drive while retaining the rough geometry of the ship for the sake of the spore drive, has thin blue bands for everything, and that means the Bussard collectors being a funky extension of what would otherwise be the warp coil glow, but it also includes the navigational deflector.

There is the ghost of a hint, through a mix of nudges seemingly deliberate and accidental, that thin blue band deflectors and slipstream are associated somehow. And the "ramjet cone" STO design cue is really appealing to me as a 25th C. design cue. I really-really want that to be a canon thing that slipstream capable ships integrate.

We haven't technically been told whether all these new ships are already using slipstream technology and still look mostly the same. It'd only take one offhand comment to do so and I won't be surprised if it happened. But the cone thing would be really, really cool....

 

[Axaday]

Star Trek has made a mess of terminology and I do with they hadn't. Whatever the experiment that Excelsior was running was, it can't have had anything to do with Borg Trans-Warp conduits. And we still have no development of what a Trans-Warp conduit is. When we first saw them, it wasn't clear whether the Borg used them or just Lore. But they seemed to be something he could summon at will. Voyager initially used it as something you could just use anywhere and then later decided they were just in certain places and Picard Season 1 agreed. Now we have no idea if the Borg made them or just discovered them and whether they are properties of space or constructed by someone. I do prefer what seems to have been eventually decided that you have to know where a Trans-Warp conduit already is to use one. I would prefer to eventually find out that the Borg didn't make any and they just took them over when they learned how to find and use one.

Oy, Quantum Slipstream? It really bugs me that what seemed to be an entirely different want to travel super fast was shown to Voyager and they could turn their ship into that with regedit. It seems like a name brand Deflector Dish can do just about anything if you have the program. But Voyager's problem then was in doing it safely and they eventually got it. A couple decades later and every starship seemingly built since then, it is difficult to imagine them not having Quantum Slipstream, but it is weird they haven't pointed it out to the audience.

 

[TheSupernova]

It seemed like the only thing holding the Quantum Slipstream back was how rare a certain material needed to power it was (citation required?). Voyager ran out, and it was practically impossible to find by Booker's era. Maybe it's just one of those things that stayed rare.

I do wish it had become a thing, though, by the 25th century.

 

[Copper Bezel]

That is true. Benamite, apparently. If slipstream is as fast as it was when it was the plot device of the week in Voyager, it's actually too fast to have anything to do with the new ship speeds in Picard, since it ostensibly knocked years off Voyager's travel time each time they tried it and decided it was a bad idea. They only would have had to try it and decide it was a bad idea a few more times to get home. The reference in Discovery also means it's completely separate from the warp drive, which I wasn't sure of, I thought it was used in conjunction with warp. They do have a working slipstream drive in Prodigy, but apparently the use in STO was more limited than I thought, just a handful of ships and then as a very limited use deal?

Star Trek is very loose with its use of plot devices to solve a given episode plot that would break the universe if they were reproducible. The fact that the Voyager crew could magic up a functioning slipstream with Voyager, but only for the scope of an episode, does imply that they should really be able to build a stable one if they're designing a ship from the ground up, but maybe it's better left alone. You'd have to ignore the magnitude of the speed increase for any travel times to remain nontrivial, and if you're ignoring that you might as well ignore the whole thing. All it gets you is another dumb magic crystal with a much less cool name than "dilithium", and if it's not necessary to use warp in conjunction with it, a bunch of ships clearly built around what's now a very weak auxiliary propulsion system. And then you get to add another .00009 to the warp factor I guess.

So yeah screw that actually. I still like the deflector cone thing though.

 

[Kalidor]

The galaxy would be a lot less mysterious if you could go anywhere within a few hours or days.

They'd need to rewrite the whole premise by visiting other galaxies

 

[TheSupernova]

That's what I'd expect progress in the Star Trek universe to be like - the ability to go further than ever and see things not even imagined. More or less what Q was talking about when he sent the Enterprise to face the Borg.

 

[The Predaking]

That was still in the Milky Way galaxy though.

 

[ZacWilliam1]

Lower Decks is the most fun Star Trek maybe ever. I'd rather it be canon than anything else after TNG.

Strange New Worlds is exactly what I want live action Star Trek to be, Period.

Prodigy was a really fun, well made, family/Kid-aimed Trek show.

Those three together could happily cary the franchise for me for well into the forseable future.


-ZacWilliam, only seen the first ep of Picard S3 so far, but I liked it. Just have to get time for me and the wife to sit down for more.

 

[Cybersnark]

Spoiler

I am betting that we see Harry Kim as captain of the Enterprise F. I know he was a captain in the alternate future about this time, so it would work, and give our forever ensign his just rewards. And if we get to see the Enterprise F, who else should be captain? Only Kim, Sisko, Paris, or Chakotay would do for it.

I'm holding out for Captain Jae, paying off 33 years of character setup.

 

[PrimalxConvoy]

Star Trek: Picard Borrowed This Iconic Transformers Shot for the USS Titan's Intro.

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard Season 3, Episode 6, "The Bounty".

Spoiler

Star Trek: Picard borrowed an iconic shot from Transformers: The Movie for a major moment involving the USS Titan, according to showrunner Terry Matalas.

Matalas revealed Star Trek: Picard Season 3's debt to Transformers: The Movie on Twitter. Retweeting a clip of Unicron passing between two suns (one blue, one red) taken from the 1986 animated movie, Matalas noted that it inspired a similar shot of the Titan in front of a sun in Episode 6, "The Bounty."...

(Full article: - https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/s...rs-shot-for-the-uss-titan-s-intro/ar-AA19ak67]

Personally, I don't buy this. There were about two shots of the Titan, basically static, in front of a star. It doesn't recreate the camera pan, nor the orange/red and blue "flames" of the star in TFTM either.

 

[Axaday]

Only a Transformers fan would see a spaceship fly by a star and think it was copied from Transformers the Movie.

 

[Dake]

I agree that it's wrong on most every level but the most basic, but the guy said it was their intent so...

 

[Copper Bezel]

Someone not watching Picard shared a version of this story to a Discord server I'm on last week. All very disappointing for them. Raised the question of whether Star Trek has ever had a non-action space shot that went as hard as that one from TFTM, though I think a couple of moments from openings and from TMP qualify.

I agree that it's wrong on most every level but the most basic, but the guy said it was their intent so...

And the tweet is what occasioned the story, but I still don't think that's quite right. This is a little uncharitable toward the MSN writer, but all Matalas said was that the scene in TFTM inspired him. (Maybe it just inspired him to include a red giant in a scene. Maybe he meant something else. Who knows.) He didn't say that he'd made any attempt to recreate it. Nothing was "borrowed" here. So the article title at least is wrong on every level.

We know what it looks like when this show borrows a scene, they did it with that Fallout opening. = P

 

[The Predaking]

I'm holding out for Captain Jae, paying off 33 years of character setup.

There was another woman that was on the bridge after Weasley left. She was the main bridge officer for several episodes sitting right next to Data. That would be a nice call back.

 

[Axaday]

Probably everyone who ever served on the Enterprise is a Captain by now. Probably the majority of the fleet is captained by people who served on the Enterprise-D under Picard. Why wouldn't they all command something?

 

[Axaday]

Weasley