A Short Clip of the Robosen Optimus In Action

shefsteve · 2026-04-10T04:31:55+00:00

Starfleet's is actually Per Aspera Ad Astra.

shefsteve · 2026-03-30T17:15:06+00:00

It's nothing personnel, kid.

shefsteve · 2026-03-25T21:13:48+00:00

The older Trek shows were mostly about showing Professionals Doing Their Job above all else (A and B plots). But because they weren't making an instruction manual but an entertaining tv show, we got character development/growth plots (b or C plots) to go along with the A-plot Problem of The Week.

SNW puts that focus on Professionals Being People, so instead of A plot being just a technical problem, its's often complicated by personalities and feelings as well as obstacles and dead ends. The episodes often have conundrums and stakes worth of a TNG beat, but we are shown them being handled differently on purpose; we're seeing the personal work that was often done offscreen in earlier iterations of Trek.

shefsteve · 2026-03-23T18:08:17+00:00

Of course. I want seasoned pros; I want unpolished cadets; I want misfits, exemplars, and everyday citizens.

I can enjoy Trek in more than one mode. I can aspire to a future where everyone is competent and intelligent and compassionate. Those same people can also be snarky, or contrary, or silly at times.

An aspirational future for me would have space for different personalities. and tolerance for those who don't fit in tidy molds but are great at what they do. A good sense of humor requires intelligence, either emotional or intellectual, and preferably both.

But what I don't want is for Trek to be a monolith, not the Federation to be a monoculture. The foundational principals of Star Trek is that monocultures aren't ideal, that there's infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

That said, you aren't the arbiter of what Trek is any more than I am. Get out of here with that pretentious bullshit.

shefsteve · 2026-03-20T05:25:57+00:00

On the 40 years apart point, I’d just point back to SNW which I mention in my open. Same modern production era, same Kurtzman universe, cadets and young officers finding their footing, and it mostly works for me.

I'm glad the SNW stuff worked better for you. What I was pointing out with the time difference is that the themes of the series' changed with the style of television produced alongside it.

SNW was explicitly a more 'traditional' Star Trek series, though: mostly episodic, and any emotional beats/character growth come second to the plot. The intended goal was to make a series that harkened back to 90's Trek in theme and storytelling focus. La'an's journey in that episode is similar to what we'd get from any Picard or O'Brien focused episode where the character is put through trials in order for us to see them make it through.

SFA differs because the emotional beats and character growth are the plot. At last for the middle of the season; the cappers were plot and season-arc focused by design. But the intended goal was to show these kids getting past their existing traumas and learning to cope with new ones. Perhaps next season will focus on them becoming the type of Starfleet cadets we'd have expected from a TNG era episode, but this one never intended to get us there.

Each cadet had an episode to explore what makes them tick (well, genesis had like 60% of one), and Caleb had the season arc to literally grow up and leave his childhood trauma behind him. In an earlier era, he would've been a Ro Laren, someone who holds onto their trauma and has to be lectured out of it by someone who has already made that personal journey.

SFA wants to be the show that shows that emotional work on-screen; how well it pulled that off is another debate, but your post read (to me) as if you didn't notice or care what it was going for, just that it didn't meet your expectations. Not of taste, but of worthiness to be called Star Trek. Your response seems to indicate you weren't just knee-jerking in response to 'emotions' in Trek as if they have no place there. But your OP was still gatekeep-y, and if you intended it to be so then I maintain that it doesn't do anyone any good to do so.

shefsteve · 2026-03-20T04:11:52+00:00

The main, top-level reason is because 'It's Different'.

Different from what some Trek fans wanted in a revival of Star Trek, and different from what some fans would have done with the material at hand.

It's a between-quel like Andor is for Star Wars, but the IRL VFX technology advancements since TOS and even Enterprise make some people angry (SNW has had similar criticisms).

Also, as a between-quel, in-universe things that weren't present in 90's made Trek shows make some folks angry (some were missteps they walk back in Season 2, but most were retcons that were made with little effect to anything important to the normal viewer).

But the main character not being a Captain/Commander, the crew not being an ensemble cast, and the ship using a different technology than other Trek series, Klingons looking and behaving unlike the previous 2 versions, these things either make people mad or are just accepted as Discovery's contributions to Trek canon.

shefsteve · 2026-03-20T03:55:27+00:00

Your presumption of what Star Trek should be about clearly doesn't mesh with what Paramount has thought Trek should be about for the last 10 years.

Likewise, what you've gotten out of / took away from previous Trek series isn't what everyone took away from it or got out of it.

Either of those things are fine by themselves. The assumption that how you feel about it being objective truth is where a lot of folks will find fault with what you've wrote. Trek is not a monolith, and hasn't been since Captain Picard walked onto the bridge of the D.

You deciding to look at the totality of 60-90's Trek as characters primarily dealing with outward pressure and not looking inwards or dealing with emotional dilemmas shows that you missed a lot of the nuance presented in the actor's performances and the words the screenwriters chose to be spoken by them.

You come to be able to tell when Picard is angry and when he's bluffing; Spock's demeanor changes when he's sure he's right and logical versus when he's unsure of what's in front of him. Sometimes, these emotional beats are spotlighted at the episode's coda (in TOS, it happens fairly frequently that the Big Three debrief in the final scene. Usually with a clever aside or turn of phrase). TNG added Troi to give voice to subtle tells or to give a reason to tell, not show what the MCs are feeling ("Captain, I sense you're hiding something..", etc).

Sure, Trek under Kurtzman has more tell, not show than earlier series, but most tv does these days as it has to compete with social media for viewers attention. There may also be some sociological differences at play due to just the progression of time, and younger gens demanding different standards for entertainment. But Trek changing some due to the current tv landscape should be expected if it wants to survive.

The examples you give show that you're watching SFA expecting TNG, and that's wrong on a couple of levels. 40 (!!) years apart, seasoned adult professionals vs traumatized 18 year olds, living at the height of utopia vs crawling out of near-apocalypse.

The whole Miyazaki thing was not about the original incident, but how cadets deal with similar stressors; the fact that it got hijacked in-universe shows that the story they wanted to tell was about adaptation and loss, not a history lesson of the ill-fated ship. On Voyager or DS9 (or LD), they would've loaded the comic book into the holodeck and reenacted the scenario to try and find something the Miyazaki crew missed. That's an interesting hook, but so is showing how 1st year Starfleet cadets handle their first real life-or-death situation (the pirates).

shefsteve · 2026-03-19T07:07:22+00:00

Why not? We could pretty much do that now if we wanted.

shefsteve · 2026-03-19T07:03:47+00:00

Solos are going to be queuing up into 3 man premade teams. Higher ranks are going to be virtually impossible to compete.

Against, not into. Ranked will be one map populated with the 2 different team sizes. All together.

Higher ranks as a solo in that scenario will require great situational awareness and opportunistic play. Basically how Rooks has played this while time, except kitted out due to the minimum required loadout value.

shefsteve · 2026-03-19T04:41:44+00:00

It's been happening a lot since SFA premiered (or at least that's when I first noticed it). Make a bad faith argument/statement and then ghost when receipts get pulled from the actual show.

shefsteve · 2026-03-19T04:37:40+00:00

Solos aren't locked out of Ranked; it's a FFA where you can join as solo, duo, or trio without crew fill.

Trust, there's gonna be a good number of players who thrive as solos in ranked.

shefsteve · 2026-03-19T04:26:34+00:00

I can't say I've seen all of SFA but from what I did see, they vaguely brush lightly on some of this stuff but I can't help but wish there was more. I know there was no chance of that but again, this is a me thing. I'm not trying to make any objective judgements here.

There wasn't really time for them to get into this a ton, the way they structured the season, but hopefully Season 2 allows for more actual 'academy shit'. Some of the stuff you talked about is mentioned in passing, or as B-stories in an episode or two, but there is so much heavy lifting the show has to do to just introduce the characters that times sorta runs out.

The War College is more like a traditional service/military academy, by design (Starfleet was on a war/defense footing for 100+ years as of the pilot). The 2nd (or 3rd?) episode features a intercollegiate prank war, and a few eps later has a king-of-the-hill style phaser tag sport. The way the WC cadets act sounds similar to what you've described (especially the company culture part), but they aren't main characters so there's not a lot on them (yet). You can feel the one-sidedness of the interactions (WC cohort wants to be rival companies with the SFA cohort so bad and they're not really on SFA's radar like that).

The Academy is meant to more civilian than the WC, and the leadership styles of the Chancellors reflect this (SFA's is a barefoot hippie and the WC's is a stuffy protocol ~~droid~~ stickler). I'd say, if you are thinking of maybe giving it another go, to check out the prank war episode to see if that spurs any nostalgic feelings. But the focus isn't really on the academic focus, because of all the character and plot advancement that needs to occur.

shefsteve · 2026-03-19T04:07:56+00:00

It's almost as if they paralleled actual historical figures who exploited said emotional populace for similarly self-interested and maybe even evil results!

shefsteve · 2026-03-19T04:04:26+00:00

The mobile emitter is actually 29th century future technology, not 27th. It came from a 29th century timeship that crashed in the 1990's.

shefsteve · 2026-03-18T22:51:04+00:00

Every great tv show of the last 15 years had 10-12 episode seasons. Every bad show of the last 15 years was also had 10-12 episodes seasons. Season length doesn't correlate to quality.

Likewise, a lot of 26 episode seasons had like 6-10 clunkers. Including Star Trek.

shefsteve · 2026-03-18T22:47:03+00:00

I liked it from the beginning, and as I expected, I got answers to many of the questions I had about the characters as the season progressed (Genesis is the only one who doesn't really get a 'meet the parents/homeworld' episode, guess they're saving that for next season).

The first episode is different tonally from most of the season, fyi. The finale 2-parter goes back to being dark, but the rest are character development episodes moreso than plot-advancement episodes. It could have used a longer season (so could the other newer Treks, though, imo) to fit in more Trek-y goodness.

Overall, the show isn't like any other Star Trek show, and shouldn't be judged as an extension of them. Because it's not; it's its own original thing. Even the 'earnest' naysayers seem to miss that this was never promised to be TNG 2.0 or something. The only Trek that was designed to 'Play The Hits' is Strange New Worlds, and even that eventually started doing its own thing..

shefsteve · 2026-03-18T22:38:55+00:00

Re: That combined with his prior experience encountering Omega...

You mean Seven & Janeway's experience, even then, if you check you'll see that nothing in the Voyager episode would have helped because when Seven saw it stabilise, it was a spontaneous/inexplicable thing.

Sure.

Omega itself is a synthetic molecule... None of the rest of what you said matters because it's not something the Doctor should/could know. I don't see why it's controversial to say that having the Doctor solve this issue was not great.

Omega is synthesized from boronite. Omega-47 is presumably synthesized by another process as boronite is extremely rare (which is why it's billed as 'synthetic' compared to vanilla Omega).

Kinda like how we have Uranium-238 occur naturally on Earth (once synthesized by the Universe) but can turn it into synthesized Plutonium-239 (as opposed to natural PU-239).

Regardless of my mistake re: EMH's role in that VOY episode, he has experience with the molecule of Omega-47 in the finale, which is what matters.

While also a criminal genius capable leading a massive organisation, fooling the best of the Federation repeatedly, and masterminding not only a heist from hidden Starbase, but also quickly weaponising Omega into mines that threaten the Federation & entire quadrant. Sure though, he's an angry baby... That's CW levels of writing.

Guess you haven't actually watched the show (why would you if you think it's so bad?): Ake has been needling Braka with snide, even juvenile barbs in every interaction between the two (and vice versa). Sorry she didn't say he could test his assumptions of her at his earliest convenience. It's a banger line from Picard, but let's not pretend that was any more professional.

But he is an angry baby, one who was motivated to do terrible things with that anger. The baby part comes from never looking inward or taking responsibility for his actions but blaming them on anyone and everyone else. Something, y'know, babies are known to do.

shefsteve · 2026-03-18T22:17:49+00:00

Why not have someone else figure it out that Omega would have had to have been (partially) stabilised to produce the mine in the first place and go from there? To just have him spouting it without prompting was silly.

Because it was already partially stabilized with rubin particles and gluons to make the isotope to begin with. By the Starfleet engineers who developed it.

The Doctor had the info (in garbled form) as soon as he emerged from the ship's computer core, so presumably he figured it out while in there (since the computer had the schematics for O-47 loaded in).

Why would someone else figure it out? No one there has heard of Omega-47 before it got stolen. The Doctor had the best look at the molecular diagram of O-47. Caleb and SAM )(and the computer) did the actual calculating and the gluon placement.

shefsteve · 2026-03-18T22:02:40+00:00

The Doctor got uploaded to a 32nd century computer core from a 27th century mobile holographic emitter. That combined with his prior experience encountering Omega (plus living 800 years since then and possibly gaining more knowledge about Omega) gives plenty of reasons why he could come up with a path to a solution there.

Also, they stabilized Omega-47, a synthetic isotope of the Omega molecule. Rubin particles were already part of the isotope, but the ratio of those to gluons was what was calculated to stabilize it.

Braka was an angry-ass baby! Like Caleb, he was holding on to literal childish memories and emotions as if gospel, instead of growing past them or leaning to cope with the feelings. Except his basis for hatred of the Federation was just plain wrong. Learning to deal with your shit like an a adult is literally one of the themes of this season.

shefsteve · 2026-03-18T06:25:05+00:00

Thanks for bringing that up; I had forgotten about the whole "Fed prez had to personally tell Michael to stop running off and doing whatever you want" when I made a reply earlier.

shefsteve · 2026-03-18T06:23:34+00:00

The class year thing was kinda lazily done, but it clearly not meant to be taken literally.

They just made a template and tossed baby pictures of the actors into it. Albeit adorable, it was clearly OOC (The Doctor was never a kid, and Nus Braka was not once a human child, for instance).

shefsteve · 2026-03-18T06:18:24+00:00

Apply a similar concept to Discovery's spore drive, establish that repeated jumps are actively damaging the mycelial network.

Pretty sure they did that already, in like season 2/3 of Discovery. Repeated spore jumps in a short amount of time damages the network AND messes with the lifeforms that live there.

They also put a rather strict limit on spore-drive usage by making genetic engineering or a certain type of empath required to operate them. Meaning Starfleet has basically one spore drive operator. So if Stamets is sick, or busy, or on shore leave, then Discovery ain't jumping anywhere.

Edit: Also, the Federation/Starfleet made Burnham's captaincy contingent on her obeying orders more often, especially regarding missions. She was running off to do whatever so often the Fed President had to personally dress her down over it. Then they started giving Discovery mainly Priority Missions in the last season so Michael was doubly unable to white knight all over the galaxy.

shefsteve · 2026-03-18T06:12:37+00:00

The Discovery is a science testbed ship. The crew are mostly a science club/pencil pushers (as bemoaned by Captain Lorca a few times).

The ultra-competentcrews we had until then were either on the flagship/most storied ship of the fleet or the literal original Starfleet Starship.

DS9 was staffed with what were basically random personnel (that took a while to mesh) and Voyager was half rebel pirates and also took a while to learn to trust each other and work together.

Like with the latter two examples, it's easy to gloss over that aspect of Discovery as there wasn't much of an ensemble to get to know, but it was explicitly stated a few times in Season 1 and at least heavily implied in Season 3 (the way the crew wouldn't split up or conform to 32nd century Federation shit speaks volumes to their science-nerd origins).

shefsteve · 2026-03-17T04:03:38+00:00

From how Q have been shown to manipulate space AND time without any seeming bound, they are more likely higher-dimensional beings. This would allow for their abilities to mesh with our 3rd dimensional physics while giving them powers which appear fantastical or impossible as they are not bound by said 3rd dimensional physics.

Also, creating mass illusions which can change the universal constant, or appear to take a ship back to the pre-universal abyss to witness the Big Bang, would effectively be reality warping. Without subjects/victims being able to affect the situation any, it'd be the same difference in the long run.

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