I’m not too interested in most of the new Star Wars stuff, but it’s still good special effects so I watch it while doing other things. But, I did really like Andor. It was a real departure from the typical Star Wars fare which is low on plot but loaded in special effects. For most of the new Star Wars stuff, you can tune it out and only pay attention when there’s a battle or something. But, Andor actually had a real plot with some actual twists… and good special effects.

Ok, but droids have those manipulator arms that go out that let them hack other systems. So, it doesn’t help much if your air-gapped system interacts with other networks.

But yeah, nothing really holds up to scrutiny if you dig too deep. Having said that, I think Star Trek (at least the modern version) does a bit better at it than Star Wars. Star Wars suffers from it being a 1977 movie where George Lucas just went with the “rule of cool” instead of worldbuilding. Star Trek (at least the modern version) seemed to think at least a bit beyond what they showed on screen.

That makes some sense, but it seems like a backward explanation for the bad worldbuilding.

Like, the lack of computer-aimed turrets. You might not want a completely AI powered ship, but this is more the difference between “cruise control” and manually controlling the vehicle. Not using computer-assist is basically risking your life. As we see in the movies, humans are pretty shit at using the turrets. Computer-assisted aim would mean the ship is much more likely to survive. And, if someone did manage to hack your turret, you could turn off the computer-assist like you’d turn off a malfunctioning cruise-control.

Also, if computer systems are hacked trivially by droids, why do they have hackable ports all over the star destroyer? Wouldn’t they only put them next to human-guarded posts?

In addition, airgapped systems are a simple way to deal with this sort of thing. Like, your refrigerator or dishwasher probably has microprocessors, but they’re not on the network, nor do they have a port you can plug into. Maybe there is one buried under a panel somewhere, but you don’t have to worry about them being hacked.

And yes, droids are treated like slaves in some ways, but in other ways they’re trusted to be bounty hunters, military troops, etc. If you trust / allow a droid to pilot a ship, why wouldn’t you trust a turret to be equipped with computer-assisted aiming?

Wesley.

I didn’t play it, so I don’t know, but I assume it’s the same. The only way to really play it again like it was then would be to have everyone else forget everything they’ve learned about MMOs for the last 24 years.

I just finished Dishonored 2 for the first time. I played it like 6 years ago, got to the second-last mission, and realized that even though I’d been playing ultra stealthy and non-violent, somehow someone I knocked out had died in an earlier mission, so I wasn’t going to get the stealth achievements so I shelved it.

This time, I’d forgotten enough so I started from the beginning again, remembered to keep checking the stats page to ensure I was fully stealthy, fully non-violent, and got to the end with the achievements.

The funny thing is that the game gives you so many ways to play – lots of gun upgrades, lots of ways of disposing of bodies, lots of health boosts and strength boosts. But, I play my way, and so both runs I did ultra stealthy, no killing. I’ve played almost the entire game twice, and have no idea what most of the powers are like because they’re oriented around combat / killing, not stealth.

Good one, especially if you can go into it blind, and not be tempted into looking up solutions online.

Shadow of the Colossus is a good one. Up until that point, I’d never played a game that felt like that. You didn’t feel like an awesome, powerful hero destroying monsters, instead you felt like you had to make a tough choice to destroy beautiful creatures.

I responded to another comment here about it. WoW and other MMOs would be my choice – but to make it any fun you’d have to rewind the whole world. Not only get rid of wowhead, wowwiki, raider.io etc., but get people to forget they ever existed, forget how to do data mining so effectively. Also get rid of streaming and video sharing services so that you had the chance of discovering things on your own. You wouldn’t be the first, but you wouldn’t know that.

I was just thinking that, but you’d have to rewind the whole world, not just your own experiences.

What made WoW amazing at the beginning was that it was new to everyone, not just you. MMOs in general were new. The Internet was relatively new. People didn’t know about data mining, and those who did weren’t used to being able to share everything they knew with every other player out there. Also, sharing video was brand new. YouTube itself launched in 2005, and Justin.tv (which became Twitch in 2011) would only launch in 2007. Theorycrafting didn’t really exist, so people just relied on their experiences and went with the bigger numbers, or sometimes ignored the numbers and went with the cooler looking weapon.

So, you were left with figuring out a lot of stuff on your own. Realm firsts were a big deal because it was mostly people on your own realm you interacted with, and you got to know them, and if another realm had done something first, you might not even have heard about it. If your realm had a certain way of handling a PvE fight, or a strategy for a certain battleground, it might just be a quirk of your realm. There was just a lot less information available outside the game, and so you had to figure things out inside the game.

A friend of mine (hunter, naturally) didn’t know about equipping new gear until he hit level 30 or so. There was no armory page to inspect him, no gear score, no typical DPS expectations for a level 30 toon. It took one of us randomly right-clicking on his dude when he was next to us to notice all his gear was greys, and to ask him about it in voice chat (Teamspeak? Roger Wilco?) to find out he’d just been stuffing his new greens in his bag and forgetting about them.

Now, people just don’t play MMOs the same way. Devs know that everything they add will be datamined and everyone will know the new stuff as soon as it’s available in the game. There’s one well known strategy for every boss. There’s one well known talent build. If you choose to go in and face a raid boss blind, it’s because you chose to do that, and chose not to watch the hours and hours of boss kill videos there are from the competitive guilds that killed the bosses in beta.

I just want to see how happy and relaxed Ensign Picard is. No critical decisions to make. Able to make friends among the crew without his rank getting in the way.

We get to see Captain Picard in Ensign Picard’s body, but we never get to see the slacker who has big dreams but doesn’t bother to push himself.

Sure, but that explanation isn’t interesting.

would get dumped with tons of heat and current under battleshort conditions

But, why? If it were part of the engine, or a pump, or a transformer, or something that requires a lot of power that would be one thing. But, there’s no reason that the consoles should be part of a circuit that draws a lot of power or heat or anything.

Filling it full of rocks makes sense if soaking power was an issue, but this is just a basic UI element.

Ok, how about this: it’s critical that consoles like security, navigation, steering, etc. always be available. Because of that, they can’t risk any downtime in a battle, so they need to be able to self-repair. Their solution to this is to embed replicator technology into each console, so that any damage can be instantly fixed. Unfortunately, replicators need to be able to draw huge amounts of power / energy, which means the consoles need access to a lot of power. That’s why when they get damaged there can be a big explosion, but also why they’re never broken in those explosions. They self-repair so that someone can take over the console and immediately start using it again. Maybe it also explains the rocks – raw material for the replicators to use when repairing.

That’s true. In modern times if your phone or tablet touchscreen breaks with enough explosive force to knock you over and require medical intervention, that phone or tablet is toast and probably won’t work ever again.

On Star Trek, after a console explodes, the person who was using it is helped away and someone just slips into their seat and keeps using that same console without issue. Maybe the downside to extremely robust electronics is that they’re prone to explosions. Like, you get the world’s most robust, bulletproof mechanical keyboard, but the downside is that it requires a 240v high-power power supply. For… reasons.

This is one of the better explanations for the exploding consoles I’ve seen. It still doesn’t justify them, but at least it’s something.

The main issue is that there’s no reason that consoles should explode. These are effectively touchscreens. If you push a touchscreen beyond its operational parameters, it should glitch, it should have trouble recognizing inputs, but it shouldn’t blow up. If it was pushed beyond what was safe it should either break or be annoying to use. Not dangerous.

Even with 21st century technology, a touch-screen type thing basically sips power. Smart phones can sometimes explode, but that’s only because they contain a relatively huge battery. These things are hooked into the ship’s power so they should only be drawing a few watts.

Still, if we combine your suggestion about battleshorts with the idea that for some ridiculous reason they run everything on the ship on plasma that comes directly from the warp core, then maybe…

This is exactly what the TNG episode “Lower Decks” was about

Yeah, but there isn’t much they can do in one episode. The fact that they created a whole series based on that one episode shows they understand the potential. That episode was great in that it showed that the lower-ranked people didn’t know what was going on, and they shared rumours. But, what I’d like to see is that concept in a 8-10 episode series. Maybe go longer if it turns out people like it.

Like, I’ve always been annoyed by the idea that, even back to TOS episodes, it’s the ship’s highest ranking officers who beam down to every dangerous situation. They could either do a serious retcon and say “well actually, redshirts are always sent down first to secure the beam-in site, we just never see them”. Or, due to some disaster with an away mission, it could be a new directive that redshirts are sent in first before the higher-ranking officers are allowed to beam in.

And honestly I think star trek forgot that NCOs existed

For a show that’s 100% based on a military-like crew, they’re really bad with ranks. In the actual military, the non-commissioned members completely outnumber the commissioned ones. In addition, the non-commissioned officers, like Petty Officer, Chief Petty Officer (O’Brien), etc. are all very experienced. While a second lieutenant outranks even the highest ranked NCOs, only an idiot 2LT disregards what the senior NCOs say. Senior NCOs have been in the military for decades and have been in leadership positions for years. 2LTs have virtually no experience, especially leadership experience.

The one thing they got right with Chief O’Brien is that he was fairly old on TNG. Colm Meaney was in his 30s on TNG, which would be young for a chief, but possible. But, to have a rank like “chief” you’d expect someone to spend some time as a rank lower than chief, and they basically never mention anybody lower ranked than that, let alone show a young Star Fleet member who isn’t a young officer.

In reality, some of the Star Trek bridge crew should be enlisted members. The helmsman should be a low-ranked non-commissioned member who steers the “boat” and follows orders. There’s no need to waste an officer-ranked person on that role. The head of security should be a petty officer / chief / master chief. And the red-shirt security goons should definitely be non-commissioned members.

Now, there could be some kind of fantasy that by the time of Star Trek a lot of the menial work that non-commissioned members used to do has been automated away. You could also say that with the Utopian society, everybody can get educated for free without issue, so it makes sense that virtually everyone who joins Star Fleet joins as an officer, and there are very few non-commissioned members. You could even pretend that non-commissioned members go up ranks in training, and that by the time you’re out of the Star Fleet non-commissioned boot camp, you’re already ranked Chief. It seems weird to have an non-commissioned core where “Chief” is the lowest rank, but whatever. Maybe Chief is for people who hate school and don’t want to go through multiple years of school, and just want to get into Star Fleet right away.

On the other hand, you could pretend that there are all kinds of non-commissioned members in Star Trek, but we just never see them. You could open up a whole new universe of content focused on those non-commissioned members. The stories from Star Trek TOS were often likened to cowboy stories, where a small band of people goes around solving problems. That’s the more common format even for military shows. Military shows often focus on elite units (SEAL teams, CIA groups) or doctors (MASH, Combat Hospital, 68 Whiskey). In those shows the unit gets an order, knows why they’re doing it, and is fully responsible for planning and executing. But, you could also do something more like Band of Brothers where the focus is on people at the bottom of the rank structure following orders, sometimes dumb orders or orders they don’t understand.

I think there’s a lot of potential for a Star Trek show that has more of a Band of Brothers style – people in awful situations bonding through it, following orders they don’t like. Star Trek’s universe comes with the perfect kinds of tensions for that. The Prime Directive is often ignored or bent, but imagine a group of people suffering because they’re trying very hard to survive while not interfering. Or Star Trek’s utopian ideals vs. the reality on the ground.

Some of the best episodes of Strange New Worlds were when Nurse Chapel and Doctor M’Benga were fighting either in flashback-land or in the present. I’d love to see a series set in one of the many wars that are mentioned in passing.

Anyhow, I think there’s potential. It’s a big enough universe that there’s room for a series without any captains or high-ranking officers.

It annoys me that they gave Chief O’Brien Lieutenant’s pips.

This makes me wish even more for a Star Trek spinoff about the lowest-ranked people on a starship.

Even aside from its cartoonish style and stories, the characters in Lower Decks are too high ranking and too involved. They’re ensigns, and they often interact with the captain. They’re almost never in the dark about what’s happening, and often they’re instigating things.

What I want to see are the non-commissioned people, like Chief O’Brien in his TNG days. It would be really interesting to see things from the PoV of a character who had no say in what was happening, who didn’t really know what was happening except in rumours, and the only time they heard from the top-ranking officers was in ship-wide announcements and so-on.

I’d especially like to see a security team of literal red-shirts beaming down to a hostile planet. Not as part of a standard away team involving the highest ranking officers on the ship. I want a squad of NCOs who are expendable to go down to secure a site so that it’s safe enough that the first officer and doctor can beam down. So many of Star Trek’s episodes are about politics, espionage, secret deals, etc. I’d love to see things from the PoV of a red-shirt security NCO who isn’t cleared to know any of that, but is just told to beam down and secure the landing zone / beam-in zone. Or, better yet, is part of a team that’s sent out in a shuttlecraft weeks ahead, and has to set up a stealthy observation post and camp out, waiting for the Enterprise to arrive. I want NCOs in dirty work gear, not clean uniforms, camping out on a lonely planet not because they’re stranded, just because they have orders to set up the site and wait for the ship.

I can understand that impression from watching him as an actor, and watching him as himself doing guest appearances, or talk shows, or stuff like Critical Role. He has a vibe that he’s trying too hard sometimes. Where other people are (or seem) relaxed and naturally charming, it seems like it’s an effort for him.

On the other hand, I’ve read some of the books he has written, and I get a very different vibe from that. He’s a really good writer who is really honest about his life so far He doesn’t seem at all snooty or stuck-up in his writing. He seems humble and someone who has had some really great breaks in life, but also had to deal with some pretty awful shit. He also has a great sense of humour in his writing.

It’s entirely possible you (or I) wouldn’t get along with him in person. But, maybe that trying-too-hard thing wears off after he gets to know someone better. But, from reading his books I think he’s a good guy and I hope he has success in his life.

Yeah, what’s the deal with that. Yes, the two sound similar, but saying “I’m bias” is like saying “I’m anger” instead of “I’m angry” or “I’m sadness” instead of “I’m sad”.