Star Trek Thread: Nemesis 2: Nemeses, etc. (Part 1)

I did like how it got mentioned in DS9’s In Pale Moonlight, as a very highly controlled material that has huge ethical implications that are never specified. Made it cooler that this was the kind of technology that really rode the line with the Federation’s wariness of bio-engineering.

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I am not at all watching this show but isn’t this plot point just ripped straight off of BSG

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one of the reasons the galactica is able to fight back is because it and the viper mk iis are old enough that they dont have networked computers so the cylons cant do their little shutdown code on them. the newer fighters get retrofitted with the old avionics package so their computers dont become a liability. the one time they network their computers together the cylons basically instantly hack them and the ship almost gets fucked. hope this helps

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lol i was trying to remember the earliest incarnation of this trope because the one that came to mind was fast and furious 6, thank you

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was there an EMP in that one

yeah, the bad guy has little devices to kill engine computers (also a robot wars flipper on the front of an f1 car, very bri’ish) so they have to get all pre-computer euro models from a collector’s auction. good setup to get them all in cool 60s/70s stuff

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Alright… there’s this bit that I forgot to mention. It goes by really fast, but it just raises a ton of pretty insane questions about how transporters work in Star Trek.

(God bless Spiner for delivering this line with a straight face)

So the teleporter doesn’t actually like, disassemble you atom-by-atom and reassemble you, atom-by-atom. It instead creates a sort of flesh homunculus using a “racial baseline” to get it 90% of the way there, then plugs in your brain I guess and features

At least that’s what I can guess based on this line of dialogue here??

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i appreciate whatever FORTRAN-core programming language they got going on here

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I hadn’t seen a Star Trek show since decades ago when I’d occasionally see a random episode of Deep Space Nine.

But I watched The Orville slowly over the past couple years and I liked it, overall. That reminded me that I like Star Trek, at least in theory, and I wondered whether any of the more recent official Star Trek shows was as good as The Orville. It sounded like Strange New Worlds might be, so I watched some of that this weekend and I like it so far.

Despite how terrible everyone says Discovery is, I’m tempted to go back and see some of the second season after this, which I gather is where you find the tie-in stuff. But maybe I should just leave that alone. (A dark and edgy Star Trek sounds like fun, but not one with bad writing.)

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I was just watching the TNG episode where they beam down to the hermetically-sealed eugenics planet, and the eugenics traditionalist is all suspicious of the transporters because “How can we be sure they won’t mess up our perfect DNA?!” I guess that would’ve been a bad time to bring this up, huh?

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Ok look, I know that like, sticking to the continuity of individuals episodes isn’t really Trek’s jam but…

They literally establish that you can store giggabytes of data on robots the size of Dustmites.

processing power and data storage are not at a premium in the star trek universe

Also the pattern is established by the beam up, that’s a plot point in a billion episodes.

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This is some fucking Moffat Doctor Who shit

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Even from clips I could tell I liked new Beard Captain even if his personality/goals/character changed scene to scene and just felt like the one example of a million of Picard doing everyone dirty and then coasting by entirely because of performances.

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this is gonna suck shit but at least it’s been downgraded to tv movie for the time being

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It sounds like it’s describing a compression algorithm. As an analogy, the Brotli algorithm for compressing web text involves a predefined dictionary which among other things includes every HTML tag. But it’s also a strictly lossless algorithm and is capable of compressing any non-HTML data, just not as efficiently.

So it sounds to me like the scheme could still make perfect atom-by-atom copies of known species, but struggle with mutants or new aliens. Whether it winds up with an approximate homunculus or a perfect recreation in the latter cases depends on whether the compression is truly required to avoid a hard limit in data capacity, or just a nice-to-have.

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I have one episode left of Strange New Worlds, and it’s made me want to see more Star Trek. From the discussion in this thread and elsewhere, it sounds like it’s not worth bothering with Discovery at all, but that Picard season 3 might be a good next step, skipping the first two seasons.

Or I might revisit Deep Space Nine. I caught random episodes as a teenager but I never really followed the storyline. I’d have to use one of those episode skipping guides, since there’s no way I’d watch everything. (I sampled one of those AI upscales that are floating around, and it looked pretty good.)

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picard season 3, like. the one that’s currently airing? if you like what you’re hearing about that let me try to recall the various screenwriting crimes of discovery i’ve blotted out

revisiting ds9 after strange new worlds will probably feel kind of similar to watching ds9 on the heels of tng (good)

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the amount of pointless energy star trek has spent chasing wrath of khan, best of both worlds, and ds9 is staggeringly depressing at this point at least whenever they try to do voyage home again its a little bit cute

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TNG or Deep Space Nine, IMO. The original series is good imo but people seem to bounce off it a lot these days? Any of those three. Avoid the Picard shows they are jaw dropping bad and completely incomprehensible if you haven’t seen TNG anyway.

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I’ve seen a fair amount of TOS and TNG, though it’s been ages. So not even the latest Picard is any good, then?

I saw Star Trek 4 in the theater as a kid, and I liked that one enough to ask for the VHS for my birthday.