Category: Star Trek Musings

The Star Fleet Death Probe

Last weekend, my brother and I played a scenario of the old starship wargame Star Fleet Battles involving something called the Death Probe.

The scenario plays out like this; the Death Probe is attacking a planet and the fleet of ships orbitting the planet has to destroy the probe before it’s too late. Big brother opted for three Romulan battle cruisers to defend the planet against the probe while I got to play the probe. This was determined on the simple basis that big brother was the planet-killer on the last monster scenario we played a couple weeks back.
One problem; according to the scenario, the planet was on one side of the board, the probe was a dozen or so hexes away, while the Romulan fleet started on the other side of the board. So while the Romulan fleet was making its way towards the home planet, I was already pelting away at it with full weapons.
The Death Probe is obstensibly a mobile starbase; its two main weapons are two Phaser-IVs (the most powerful phaser in SFB that’s normally found on starbases) and six photon torpedo launchers. It also has six standard phasers banks and two phaser-Gs (basically eight Phaser-IIIs) that can be fired in any direction. It can move up to speed 32 (speed determines how many moves you make per turn; 32 means I can move 32 times), repairs 20 points of damage, and has as much power needed for what it’s able to do.

The primary goal of the Death Probe is the destruction of the planet while the Romulan fleet’s goal is to destroy the probe before it kills the planet. For two turns, the Romulans are slowly making their way towards the planet while I’m pelting away at the planet. By turn #3, all three battlecruisers are lobbing plasma torpedoes at me, but the probe is so far off that the overall effectiveness of the torpedoes are considerably minimized (though still very damaging).
At one point, my brother decided to launch a squadron of shuttle craft to attack my probe while his cruisers kept a safe distance. Unfortunately for him, I had enough phasers to clear those shuttles away, but unfortunately for me, that meant fewer weapons to lay waste to the planet that turn.
After twelve turns, big bro’s Romulan fleet managed to destroy my Death Probe… but no before I was able to destroy one of his cruisers and do considerable damage to the planet. This was probably one of the more lengthy scenarios we’ve played thus far and was a nice diversion from the overall campaign that we’ve playing for months now.

Anyway, that’s just a fun little thing.

Discover The Predictability

“Oh look! That Chinese movie star is a Star Trek captain. I betcha she dies in a couple episodes.”

“Look, it’s that Ash Tyler fellow who’s been on a Klingun ship for seven months. I betcha he’s really that albino Klingun, VOQ… SON OF FOQ.”

“Wow, that Captain Lorca dude is a bit of a dick. I betcha he’s from that Mirror Universe with all the evil goatees and shit.”

“Holy fuck! Another universe! I betcha they’re in THAT universe. Wink wink. Hey, where’d my goatee go?”

“Oh boy! They have an Emperor! I betcha it’s that Chinese woman who they killed off twenty episodes ago!”

At this point, there’s no point in producing mystery boxes for Trekkies. They’ll figure out your end game before you do… poor JJ Abrams learned that lesson the hard way with the whole Khanberbatch mess years ago. Just give us a good story and a fun ride. That’ll more than suffice.

Oh, and ease off on the diversity pride here. We’ve already had captains who were colored and female years before it became the “fad” it is today. Your only real accomplishment is a tasteful same-sex relationship whose main contribution is that it’s given birth to the term “sperm drive.”

In fact… “I betcha they power the sperm drive with MORE SPERM! DERP!”

This has been a completely pointless and jovially silly musing.

The Deal With Tarantino And Star Trek Movie…

Source article here.

I’ll just leave this here for folks to read for themselves the current developments on this “great idea” film director Quentin Tarantino has for a Star Trek movie that people are considering. But for now, only two things come to mind.

Firstly, the idea of an R-rated Star Trek movie (that isn’t a porn parody or anything like that) is interesting and might be worth visiting. Whether it ends up being this “great idea” or not is an entirely different story, but it’s something different for Star Trek and something that could give the film franchise another boost, so to speak.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, if Tarantino persuades Paramount that they need to give Samuel L. Jackson a role in the movie, here’s hoping they give him a part more suited to his particular talents than George Lucas did with the incredibly lame Mace Windu. (No, fuck off with that expanded universe crap that makes him “badass” or anything. I wanted a Jedi that was loud, bolsterous, and swears a lot… that kind of SLJ character.)

Oh, one more thing… this would be a perfect opportunity to bring back Bill Shatner to play a role, whose sole purpose for existing is to get killed. You can even call the movie Star Trek: Kill Bill.

I don’t know. Just a thought… but let’s see where this goes. If it goes anywhere at all.

A Bit Of A Conundrum Tonight

On the one hand, there’s the latest WWE PPV featuring Bork Lazer defending the Red Toy Belt against Brauny Man Strawman in what looks to be three minutes of interesting stuff paired up with two minutes of lazy-ass suplexes as well as the long-awaited encounter between Roman Reigns and John Cena in WWE’s latest attempt to get people to care about Roman Reigns as “da big dawg, yo.”

On the other hand, the new Star Trek: Discovery is debuting tonight and despite my less than excited lack of anticipation, it’s still new Star Trek.

Such a difficult decision indeed…

Except it’s not…

Because one will be on the WWE Network.

The other will be on CraveTV… or CBS Access if you’re American.

Oh well… I guess the answer is obvious.

Back to Quarth!

COMIC REVIEW – Star Trek: Deviations (IDW, 2017)

IDW is at it, again.

They’re doing another round of their Deviations event – one-shots of various licensed properties being subjected to “What If?” scenarios. We’ve sampled a couple of these last year and this year… well, there was only one that piqued my interest and that was the Star Trek one. Took me a little longer to gather my thoughts on this one because… well, let’s be honest here. I’ve read three of these Deviations so far and we’re one for three at the moment.

Yeah, this isn’t very good, either… but this time, the blame falls on the premise, which seems to be all over the place.

The premise of this Deviation seems fascinating on paper; what if, instead of the Vulcans, it was the Romulans who were Earth’s first encounter with extraterrestrials. It’s an idea that has potential to be explored and possibly spin off an interesting alternate take on Star Trek lore before we get to the eventual “everyone dies” ending that a lot of these things fall back on because we’re uncreative hacks or something.

So what happens when the Romulans land on Earth before the Vulcans? They turn the planet into a Romulan colony and enslave the human race. Jump ahead to the 24th century and an eyepatched Will Riker leads a ragtag band of freedom fighters (who, coincidentally or conveniently, happen to be some of the old TNG crew in similar altered states or worse) to find a man who may or may not know the location of a Federation base… wait, what? A Federation base? How could there be a Federation base if the Romulans enslaved the human race shortly after Zefram Cochrane’s warp flight? If the humans never had a chance to develop space flight, how could there be a Federation? Hell, that Delta on the cover shouldn’t even be there if that were the case.

So IDW either lied about the deviation or nobody had a fucking clue. I’m leaning more towards the former because IDW has been doing Star Trek comics for years now and they’re usually on the ball with this stuff. I’d have to assume that, at some point, the Federation and the Romulans got into a war, the Romulans won, took control of Earth and enslaved the humans. That would make more sense and less questions would be brought up that we’d never get answers to. Approaching the story from THAT context rather than the premise it was sold on… eh, it’s not so bad.

For what it’s worth, it’s a fast-paced piece of business that doesn’t waste time on exposition since we don’t have time to waste in a one-shot book. The action bits are well-done and it was interesting to see the different takes on these familiar TNG characters. Would it have been nice to get more emphasis on the main players and how things have changed? Sure, but given what’s there… it was fine.

It’s just unfortunate that for all the good bits that this issue offered, I am left with more questions regarding anachronistic aspects of the story, including the final big reveal, which – had this been following the original premise of the series – should not exist in the first place. I don’t know… this feels like a sampler of a much larger story and if there’s more to come, I’d look forward to reading it.

As a one-shot, however, Star Trek: Deviations leaves much to be desired.