Topic: George Lucas makes more changes to the StarWars films on BluRay

[Scyphi]

Heheh, you liked Voyager because the borg woman with the huge front suddenly showed up, lol.

Heavens, no. Actually the fact Seven turned up at the same time is more coincidence. It's just (having recently been rewatching Voyager lately) I noticed that some of my favorite episodes (can you say "Equinox"?) took place at or just after Seven's appearance on the show, and so logically, that's when the show really grabs my interest.

I think the book may not be completely official but it was written by the people that made the show.

No, it's not considered official per say, despite indeed being put together by members of the TNG crew, and as such, some Trek sources such as Memory Alpha (the site I keep linking to) does not consider it an official source for Trek data and typically doesn't refer to it in it's articles.

This does not mean I think the same, BTW, because I don't. Well, not really anyway. A better way to put it is that I'm willing to concede that the technical manual indeed has have some reliable data and can be a good reference for all-things Trek (for example, the information you quoted about phasers sounded spot on). My point is that not every Trekkie is going to think the same, so I've found it's generally a good practice to not be entirely dependent on it, and being open to consider other sources of information at the same time.

Trust me though that there are tonnes of bits stolen from anime in TNG. Ships, weapons allsorts...etc

All I've got to say to that is kudos for TNG for pulling that off. I seriously doubt later did as much, and all future Trek productions doing next to any at all, barring any unusually outstanding animes that might be produced in the future (admitted, though, I'm not holding my breath).

The viewscreen thing is open to interpretation. Just because there wasn't duplex communication doesn't mean that it didn't exist.

Exactly what I think.

I always took it that the Romulans didn't want to chat.

That too. They are notoriously non-chatty.

While we're on the subject, I realized another potential error one could pin Enterprise on, and that's the fact that in the same TOS episode in question, it is established that cloaking technology of any sort hadn't been encountered before nor was it even known of any working examples (at least it's strongly implied as such). Starfleet had even declared the technology completely infeasible due to power constraints, until the Romulans proved them wrong in that same episode with a small cloaked ship they use to stage a nearly one-man attack on the Federation. The issue with this is the fact that the crew of the NX-01 encounter cloaking technology actually quite repeatedly throughout the course of the show. In their defense, some of it can be easily explained away due to the involvement of the Temporal Cold War causing such technology to fall into the hands of certain races prematurely. But for others, they don't have this convenient little loophole, including their odd encounters with (surprise, surprise) the Romulans.

None of these are details I'm going to hold a grudge over, though, but it just goes to show that Enterprise was not as adherent to continuity as it might first appear.

Don't you think a ship like the Sulaco from Aliens with warp engines would have been better? It should have been huge with loads of support craft to compensate for the lack of transporters, rather than a smaller ship with only enough room for two tiny shuttles. It shoulda bristled with real-world weapons, firing swarms of missiles and clouds of bullets at the enemy.

Don't know, because I have no idea what said ship would be like. Sounds like it's more like a warship to me, and while Trek ships undoubtedly have teeth (some more than others), they generally weren't intended solely for battle, but rather more for exploration and trying to preserve the peace, kind of the opposite of war. So going around doing that in warships says to me that people shouldn't be taking them seriously when they claim they're trying to do these goals.

[Crash]

Equinox was a great double-parter.
Seven was really good in that one. "I am familiar with humour. Yours is crude and predictable." lol.
Their evil doctor was good in that eppy too. The Doc was the best character by a mile.
I did say that the quality was variable. I was thinking about the stupid episodes (there seemed to be a lot) where Seven went rogue cos her borgness took over again or she was gonna die unless ... someone changed her oil filter or whatever.

Your view of the Tech Manual and mine are the same. The DS9 manual is nearly as good but is littered with blatant inaccuracies in some places - especially where it starts talking about Starfleet ship classes like the Nebula Class etc.
Where it talks about the station and the Defiant, things seem to go a bit smoother.

The prototype cloaked ship is a bit of a problem in Enterprise. But the idea of cloaking devices is such a pull that no writer could be blamed for using it. The other thing is that when you think of Romulan ships the immediate thing you think of is cloaking devices.
It was an unfortunate but quite good cop-out in the Dominion War that the Dominion ships had little trouble triangulating cloaked ships' locations.

I still thought the Defiant was too small a ship to be taken seriously. I remember one episode where it was fighting alongside a (presumably) ancient Klingon Bird of Prey and the BOP took out a Dominion attacker with a couple of blasts from its twin disruptors and the Defiant had to fire a great, long cascade of shots from all four phasers to take out another. I suppose one Dominion ship could have been badly damaged already and the other in perfect condition but it looked a bit odd and unbalanced to me.

[Kaiaatzl]

I am now officially lost.
I haven't seen much of the old star trek but what I did see I liked.
And yeah.  Canada... stuff -- I'm sure everyone else here knows and I don't need to say it.
I saw the reboot and I loved it.  It's now on one of the bookshelves in my room (yeah I have a lot of bookshelves in my room).

[NUMBERZero]

Shhhhhhh. The Trekkies are having at it.

[Scyphi]

I was thinking about the stupid episodes (there seemed to be a lot) where Seven went rogue cos her borgness took over again or she was gonna die unless ... someone changed her oil filter or whatever.

I'm guessing you're referring to episodes such as "Retrospect" and "The Raven", if so, then I guess I see your point. While I liked some of the episodes, some of the others (like the two I list above) didn't work as great as they could've.

As for DS9, that's probably my least favorite of the Trek series. I just didn't like the overall feel of it, and it left no real lasting impact on me that much save the Dominion War (which, like it or not, is too pivotal to Trek canon to ignore) and the episode "Trials and Tribble-ations".

I give the Defiant credit for the fact that it is such a resilient little ship.

[Crash]

Well, where everything in TNG was five-finger discounted from Japan, DS9 was all thieved from Babylon 5.
That's especially apparent at the start of the show before writers began to expand their horizons a bit. The problem was that the Star Trek people had barely any idea at that stage how to do a mainly action show at the expense of exploration and only in the last seasons did that all become credible for me after they introduced CGI.

The other strange thing was how the Dominion were a completely intractible enemy at first. Even their small ships were a nightmare and after a while they were little more than cannon fodder.

I think if I'd been in charge of designing the Defiant I would have gone back as they did to making it a more manageable size but I would have made it no smaller than a Miranda Class or Constitution Class. Then I would have had the warp core running horizontally through the ship to give it more power (as the runabouts and shuttles do) and I would have been very tempted to make it a dual-warp-core starship.
I think I would have kept the look about the same though.

I was interested that a lot of designs for Voyager were closely based on the Defiant and the Oberth Class. Sternbach's original one was like a giant runabout with a saucer section. It was appalling but it nearly went through. Infact you can see how the final version was influenced by it in places.

[Scyphi]

Yet, funnily enough, they ended up with the really beautiful and thoroughly planned out design we know today. The only real issue I can think of that anybody has with Voyager's design is it's moving warp nacelles, which even the in-show explanation for didn't even make any sense, and after awhile, it seemed like everybody just wanted to avoid the subject, because you saw them even portraying those nacelles moving less and less in later seasons.

I think the reason they went for the Defiant's small size was because the show was supposed to be about the station, DS9, and not the ship, so they purposely tried to keep it, and it's role, small as a kind of failsafe to keep it from becoming too dominant in the show. But that's just speculation, and even if I'm right, whether or not they succeeded is quite debatable.

[Crash]

I think you might be right. Originally the Defiant was only going to be a pumped-up little runabout with extra weapons until somebody must have realised how futile an idea that was.

I think the moving nacelles on Voyager was a slight ... holdover from the original runabout-like design because, like you might expect, the engines were going to sit either side of the ship's engineering section and so they were, still on the finished version (except that they flipped up for Warp speed).
I didn't really mind the idea to be honest.
The shape of the saucer was retained from the original design but the bridge module is basically a bit from the top of the upscaled-runabout engineering hull shifted forwards onto the saucer (which looks ugly to me now that I see that it was shoehorned in).

The sad thing is that, if you look at the bottom of Voyager's saucer, there is a support craft called the Aeroshuttle set into the hull. It was never used at all in the series, even though it appears in the show's writers' bible, which even ventures to tell you quite a bit about it.
You can see what the thing was supposed to look like if you Google-Image "Aeroshuttle".
So, instead they made the Delta Flyer, which while cool was too small to contain the escape pod (which they showed in one episode) and was too big to comfortably enter the shuttlebay.
The other thing is that the Master Systems Display on Voyager's bridge clearly shows a backup warp core at the back of the saucer section. This is another sweet idea that was never exploited.

[Scyphi]

Oh, I know all about the Aeroshuttle. According to the article on Memory Alpha, the reason it was nixed was because the idea was similar enough to the idea of the captain's yacht (presented in Star Trek: Insurrection) that Rick Berman didn't want Voyager's Aeroshuttle potentially trumping the movie's captain's yacht, so the idea never officially took off, despite being fairly far in their plans for it.

So instead, they did indeed later make the Delta Flyer to pretty much exploit the original idea (it's stated that had the Aeroshuttle gone through, they probably would have never come up with the Delta Flyer) and I think that worked out pretty good for them in the end. Though, I would like a floorplan of the flyer, as it's interior doesn't seem to match it's exterior very well. That beyond it's weird windshield, and the fact that it apparently and completely replaced Voyager's original shuttles though, I always liked the flyer.

As for the various unused ideas, lots of shows have such unused ideas in the end, Trek and other sci-fi related shows especially, or ideas they initially started out thinking it was a good idea, but later discovering it didn't actually work as well as they expected. Sometimes it's fun to consider the 'what-ifs' about how those unrealized ideas might have worked out, but one also just has to accept sometimes that it just wasn't meant to be, for whatever reason.

[Crash]

The Aeroshuttle explains the fairly modest shuttle capability of the Voayger ship. I think Rosenzweig's idea that the Aeroshuttle wasn't fitted for Voyager's Badlands mission is highly credible and the best possible explanation.
Mentioning its absence in the episode where they were designing the Delta Flyer would have made sense but it would also have complicated matters unnecessarily for non-die-hard fans of the show for its absence to have been mentioned for the first time out of the air. Hardly anyone would have understood what the Aeroshuttle was or known any of its intended backstory or purpose.

I like the Delta Flyer well enough but Bonchune's model of the Aeroshuttle is more elegant and ... 'realistic' in a way to me.

Berman was an idiot in many regards. Many fans hate him for having tried to efface the original series and remodeling the franchise so that TNG-onwards and Enterprise were the only elements of the franchise. That's why they felt they had to kill Kirk in Generations. It was viewed by a lot of people as a symbolic thing, not just a plot element.

Personally, I don't place all the blame at Berman's door. He made some sucky decisions of his own but Paramount also made it clear that either he put their terrible ideas into effect or they would find someone who would. They also made the TNG movies on an absolute shoestring. You can tell that from the quality or absence thereof of the CGI in those movies; especially Insurrection.
I mean, they were almost TV movie quality in terms of the budget. The amount of money as a percentage of total budget of those films that went on Patrick Stewart's salary was staggering.

Interesting how Voyager was going to be an enlarged Runabout and the Aeroshuttle was going to be a Runabout with wings ... Sternbach must have had some kind of God-damn wet dream fixation on the Danube class Runabout. I mean it was a nice enough design but ... really.
His blog isn't too bad actually. Doug Drexler's blog, on the other hand, is a bit nauseating. He really is about as far up his own ass as Voyager was away from Earth when it started its journey home. That's certainly how he comes across to me.

[Scyphi]

I totally agree about the TNG movies being less-than-spectacular. Generations was really the only movie of the TNG movies that I really liked. After that they just got worse and worse until you got Nemesis, which for me, is probably the one Trek movie I'd rather pretend never happened.

Though maybe I'm not being fair with it, because I never did watch Nemesis all the way through.

...

Nah.

[Crash]

For Nemesis they should have put in a director with some experience of Star Trek. Bits of it were fine and it had plenty of action.
Insurrection was okay because it was effectively a feature-length TNG episode. It seemed to have gone back to its roots in a way but there were some lacklustre bits.

I think we've seen the end of Star Trek on TV because the finances and the people don't exist currently to make a better series than what we've already had.
After the TNG-era and also the new Battlestar Galactica people expect amazing sets and visuals and the trekkies demand a very tight and faithful tie-in with what's gone before and the finances and the devotion needed to make that happen aren't going to come together.

Producers just want guaranteed viewer numbers for the least amount of effort. Same with the games industry. That's why every game released at the minute (like Gears of War 3) is just a suped-up Doom clone that they know people will buy and they know that they don't have to take any risks by making something substantially different or novel.

[Scyphi]

Nemesis had a poor plot from what I saw of it, and even the good parts all felt...done before. I saw the final battle portion of the movie, and all throughout that, I couldn't help but draw parallels to the fight to past Trek productions. From the top of my head, I can draw parallels to The Wrath of Khan, The Undiscovered Country, The Search For Spock, and Voyager's "Year of Hell Part II" episode, and there were probably more. It didn't help any that both the acting and the music were lackluster, or just plain lacking all together. Special effects weren't bad, but all felt more just for show than anything else.

As for Trek not appearing on TV again, don't be so sure of that. Rumor is that there's a new Trek series pitch in the works and it already sounds very promising. No word on whether or not Paramount's game for it, though, but I'd imagine that after Abram's success with Star Trek XI, they'd at least be open to it. Guess we'll have to see.

You're right about producers just wanting guaranteed viewers with minimum effort, though. That shows quite plainly with today's TV market. There are so many bad shows out there that really have no place to have the success they do that it's really kind of pathetic... 

[Crash]

Yeah, the acting btw Picard and mini-Picard was awkward and duff and the whole wedding at the start was awkward.
The film was meant to replicate Wrath of Khan which is why Data had to buy the farm place of Spock.
I love the phaser effects in that film.

Most series today are madcap, half-cocked ideas that only last a season or two when the ill-conceived ideas fail to grasp peoples' imagination.

[Scyphi]

...or in the case of some, the audience in question fail to see it's potential and shun it, like the ill-fated Stargate Universe (yeah, I'm still bitter over that).

If they really meant to replicate Wrath of Khan with Nemesis then they failed epically. Nemesis doesn't deserve to be compared to the greatness that is The Wrath of Khan, that much I can say without any hesitation.