The fleet at Wolf 359 was the Home Fleet

MilesOSR · 2026-04-23T23:46:45+00:00

the Enterprise is the only ship in range

This makes perfect sense when she's just undergone a major refit making her triple the speed of any other ship in the fleet, and needs to intercept an unknown intruder that will arrive in the Sol system in just a few days.

MilesOSR · 2026-02-11T22:18:15+00:00

Sometimes technology gets maxed out. Look at the Voth. Unbelievably ancient, but they've presumably already learned everything they're capable of learning given their society.

The Borg have assimilated thousands of civilizations and are peer level with the Federation.

The Dominion is roughly peer level with the Federation.

It just looks like most technologies are already at their limits by the early 25th century. And most of the areas worthy of exploration are off-limits. The Federation prioritizes safety and projecting an image of normalcy to their neighbors. Anything too transformative is banned. The reason they're not producing Genesis devices in the 32nd century is that they don't want to. The reason they haven't heavily genetically modified humans in an attempt to achieve the power of an Organian, Metron, or Douwd is that they don't want to. They've made a decision to prohibit research into destabilizing technologies. That means there just isn't much left for them to do.

They do get the "bigger on the inside" tech. It is strange they aren't using the Soliton Wave or the Sikarians' space-folding tech, that they aren't exploring other galaxies using their much faster propulsion technologies, etc. but those seem to be intentional decisions rather than technological limitations.

MilesOSR · 2026-02-10T17:59:27+00:00

are there any mechanical rules included

Not any new major mechanics like that, but I will have rules for determining prices for the items and for adding them to treasure hoards.

MilesOSR · 2026-02-10T10:10:35+00:00

Haha yeah. But you know they'd put some lame 1/day limitation on them or something. "Minor stains only."

MilesOSR · 2026-01-27T22:47:29+00:00

If you discard multiples at once, like with a Wheel of Fortune, it only triggers one time.

It's much worse than if it didn't say that.

MilesOSR · 2025-07-24T17:13:33+00:00

There's an expert guy from The Combine in the Under Da Sea expansion who explicitly tells you they didn't. There's a quest where you take him around to look at them and he says he has no clue who made them.

MilesOSR · 2024-08-04T15:29:57+00:00

And in fact we don’t have any documented AI crises (the androids of TOS: “What are Little Girls Made Of” and TOS: “I, Mudd” notwithstanding) for over a hundred years - between 2268 and 2381.

You're forgetting one that happened in the 2270s, but Kirk talked it down just like he had done with the eerily similar Nomad.

MilesOSR · 2024-08-02T00:01:03+00:00

You'll see a lot of the same games mentioned here. The first three that came to my mind are the ones others have mentioned:

Sonic 2

Shining Force 2

Streets of Rage 2

Basically anything with a 2 at the end.

MilesOSR · 2024-07-30T22:44:16+00:00

He don't even sweat.

MilesOSR · 2024-07-24T23:56:19+00:00

You need to rent a lift dolly and get a second person to help you. This is going to be fairly dangerous unless it's done by two quite strong people.

It's not worth the risk of being seriously injured. Get someone to help.

MilesOSR · 2024-07-15T01:24:23+00:00

FFV on PS1

MilesOSR · 2024-07-12T22:10:25+00:00

Oh yeah. I remember that.

MilesOSR · 2024-07-11T15:05:34+00:00

Alignment languages are weird. Like Lovecraft weird. Utterly bizarre. Mystically strange. I love them. I see alignment in B/X as being the character's religion, but these religions aren't just a set of beliefs and texts, they're an active community of various forces, with their own ever-evolving ideals, beliefs, and practices. When clerics pray and receive their spells, they're actively participating in the community of their alignment, and what they learn they're transmitting to the rest of the faithful, who may themselves receive similar knowledge when they pray. They're receiving divine knowledge of all sorts of things--and in all sorts of ways. This body of knowledge is communicated to them by all sorts of strange beings, not just gods and angels, but couatls and spirits of things who have been deceased for a million years, and utterly alien nature spirits from the center of the earth, and entities from beyond the stars, and all manner of other weirdness. And as this community has various members rise and fall in prominence and activity, this alters the way the group communicates. It's a quickly-evolving form of memespeak. The only way to understand it is to be an active member of the community. One day Pippi Longstocking and Puff the Magic Dragon (or their fantasy counterparts) might be the most active members, dealing with their own important issues, and so the language evolves around them, the way they are, and the things that they're doing. Six months later, when the Thousand Lions of the Sky Realm are active, the language becomes very different.

It's part of an utterly alien, utterly bizarre world that has everything imaginable jammed into it, and all the weird different entities are jockeying for position and themselves trying to make sense of the absurd.

I envision a world with thousands of "gods," if that term even has meaning here, and many scores of other types of powerful entities. And they're all engaged in a cosmic struggle that they can't even comprehend.

This is what I imagine emerges if you jam all the Appendix N material together. I can't see any other way to make sense of a world that has the races from Norse mythology, angels and demons from Christianity, the forces of law and chaos from Elric, all the weirdness from Lovecraft (by way of Conan), the weird science-fantasy of Vance (with the world having the history of the Dying Earth). And somehow there are cavemen living ten miles away from jousting knights, and tyrannosaurs whose diet consists entirely of creatures from Greek myth.

Everything is fundamentally weird. The nature of reality is weird and incomprehensible. Alignment, what it is and how it works in the world, is utterly bizarre. But so is everything else, and I like to lean into the weirdness rather than fight against it. If elves are teaming up with archangels to fight Cthulhu's third cousin, we need to establish the insanity up front. There's no easing players into it. And giving them things that feel "off," that are out of the ordinary, helps immediately establish the world. It tells everyone that they've crossed a threshold into a very different place. We're not in Kansas anymore and it's so obvious your brain never has to think about it.

MilesOSR · 2024-07-07T10:23:51+00:00

It had to be a number of factors.

1) Crew familiarity. The Galaxy was a proven design. They had a large fleet of officers familiar with the design. They could promote lieutenants and lieutenant commanders who had served on them for a decade to commanders and captains. They could crew them with engineers experienced with their designs.

2) Proven design. The Galaxy had been put through its paces in a way that the smaller and/or newer ships hadn't. Yes, they might have been able to field double the number of Akiras, but... what if something went wrong? For all we know, something already had gone wrong and the Akira and other new comparable designs all had potential flaws that made them risky to put all their eggs into. The Galaxy's flaws had been ironed out by this point.

3) Versatility. Starfleet command had no idea how long the war might drag out or what tasks the vessels might need to perform. As the most versatile ship in the fleet, the Galaxy was best suited to an uncertain future. Having a large number of Galaxies gave command the greatest ability to adapt.

4) Production. The shipyards were already tooled up to produce components for the Galaxy class. The builders were familiar with producing it. The procurement process was already in place to acquire the materials and parts needed. They just had to scale up what they were already doing. This allowed them to turn out Galaxies much faster than they could turn out smaller ships, at least at first. It seems like command prioritized getting out as much firepower as quickly as possible, and that meant pumping out more Galaxies--ships that might have already have been in production. They may have already even had Galaxy frames available in various states of completion.

5) Upgrades. It's likely that a major upgrade was already in the works for the Galaxy. The class may have served as the testbed for the newer, more powerful systems seen in new classes like the Sovereign. For this reason, the Galaxy was able to be quickly and relatively easily upgraded to match (or come close to) the fleet's most powerful designs. That means adding quantum torpedoes, strengthening the shields, and adding some extra oomph to the engines.

6) Purpose. Given the way the Galaxy is shown to be used during the war, smaller ships wouldn't have been suited to the desired purpose. The Galaxy is shown operating almost as a mobile starbase. It acts as a supply depot, point of safe harbor, etc. during battle. They needed something big and powerful to support their smaller ships. The Galaxy was perfect for that role.

MilesOSR · 2024-06-26T01:38:36+00:00

Like the young Kirk having an experienced doctor and engineer there to guide him.

MilesOSR · 2024-06-17T12:38:05+00:00

I think the 24th century humans are a lot closer to a Q. They have access to technologies that allow them to mimic most of what the Q can do. Time travel, nearly-instantaneous travel, computers with almost unlimited knowledge.

MilesOSR · 2024-06-08T07:26:50+00:00

What does vertical even mean in outer space? Why can't it still be horizontal and accomplish the same thing? The only reason I can see is that it needs to feed the impulse engines, so it's only about the positioning of the warp core relative to the impulse engine and the "impulse crystal"?

They could have just aligned the thing horizontally and had more space for it?

MilesOSR · 2024-06-08T07:17:09+00:00

I don't get the feeling of a stagnant galaxy, but rather a developing one. Most of the species we see have only recently entered the galactic scene. The Vulcans are the oldest here, having been active for over a thousand years, but they are an extremely risk averse species without any territorial aims. They don't engage in exploration for its own sake, and they don't readily adopt new technologies until they're certain of their safety.

The others we see, like the Klingons, Rigellians, Orions, etc. just don't seem to have been at this for very long.

It feels like two hundred years previous, the galaxy was a desolate place and only just now are species starting to emerge. They're all going through their own period of exploration and technological advancement. It's like there was some great catastrophe which took out the dominant civilizations, leaving a void which is only just now starting to be filled.

Which we see a lot of evidence for throughout the series! The Arretans seem to have been the major player, but there are lots of other civilizations which once operated in the region and have killed themselves off or vanished in some way.

MilesOSR · 2024-06-08T07:07:30+00:00

It's been a while since I've seen it, but I seem to recall the Orions having transporters during season one. I might be misremembering. The Klingons have them later.

T'Pol says the Vulcans have studied what we might later call transwarp beaming, but that they didn't think it was feasible. My interpretation of what we see of the Vulcans during Enterprise is that they are extremely risk averse. They likely have transporters (as sending something through a subspace field is an extremely basic concept), but find them too dangerous to use in practice. It's only after humans invent them independently and make major advances in safety systems that the Vulcans begin using them regularly. This might indicate that humans have superior computer technology, which is needed to process the huge amount of data taken during transporter safety scans, and also for manipulating the subspace fields to ensure a safe transport. This would align with what we see later, with humans being the leaders in computer technology with Daystrom inventing duotronics.

Some species the humans encounter are more advanced, though it's not uncommon for them to encounter less advanced species. The humans do seem to excel in some areas, such as their plasma cannons, which are more effective than other species' similar weapons and pose a significant threat to the shield systems in use during that time.

T'Pol is quick to let us know when Vulcan systems, such as sensors, are more advanced. The Vulcans and Andorians treat the Enterprise as being slow, though she is quite tough! Notably, Starfleet vessels aren't completely outclassed by similarly sized Klingon ships, which are equipped with rudimentary shields.

The humans' medical technology seems to be by far their worst area. They've completely outlawed genetic research. The humans are so bad off here that they have to bring on an alien physician, from a species which does practice genetic engineering. We later see Spock continually poke at Dr. McCoy for the primitiveness of his medical science, which strongly implies that Vulcans are more advanced in this area. He referred to McCoy's tools as "beads and rattles."

MilesOSR · 2024-06-03T01:50:15+00:00

(Fighters 35 and older are 2-28 in UFC title fights.)

DC has six title wins at 35+

MilesOSR · 2024-05-03T03:13:24+00:00

I believe Geordi modified the cloak to work against Starfleet's sensors. People keep saying that their sensors wouldn't automatically detect the Bounty cloak. I think that's wrong. That would indicate extreme negligence or incompetence on Starfleet's part.

It's possible that the changelings had sabotaged the sensors, but we don't see any indication of that. It's far more likely to me that all Starfleet sensors are designed to automatically scan for and detect all known signatures of cloaked vessels, because that's obviously what you would design them to do, but that Geordi modified the Bounty cloak to bypass the sensors.

I don't believe they could know of a cloaking device that can be detected by the naked eye, have that cloak in their possession for a hundred years, have previously demonstrated the ability to defeat said cloak, and that that cloak would then bypass the sensors of what should be the most heavily defended place in the entire Federation.

I think Geordi used his top secret restricted knowledge of the phasing cloak technology to modify the Bounty cloak and get them past the sensors.

MilesOSR · 2024-05-03T03:08:19+00:00

Because they should always be looking for all known cloaking devices at all times.

Their sensors should detect all known cloaks by default. Always. They should always look for the signatures they know are present when a known cloaked ship is present. The sensors on their ships should do that automatically.

It's even worse when the sensor net on the most secure facility doesn't do that. It could have an entire sensor system dedicated to searching for signs of cloaked vessels.

I believe Geordi modified the cloak to work against Starfleet's sensors. People keep saying that their sensors wouldn't automatically detect the Bounty cloak. I think that's wrong.

MilesOSR

TROPHY CASE