#star trek worldbuilding

[lightningarmour]

Star Trek the next-er generation part 1: The Romulan officer.

The destruction of Romulus, I think would be a pretty big deal. Season 1 of Picard did really try to address it as such, but it was a terribly written show and the result is a confused mess. We're led to understand that there was a massive crisis of evacuating Romulans which the federation pulled out of part way through. There's this like, refugee camp or something where former senators have become pirates because the government fell or something? Picard has like, Romulan immigrants working as his servants. But then you still have like, some sort of authority overseeing the Borg Cube reclamation, and some kind of deep state doing espionage and shit, so like, is the empire in ruins, or still able to maintain stability?

Of course, Picard is so uninterested in examining this aspect of the setting, and the people writing it are more concerned with plagiarizing the plot of Mass Effect 3 to bother making it coherent.

So for my purposes, I'm ignoring or at least stepping over some elements of Picard. Now, presumably, the "Romulan Star Empire" would encompass many worlds and possibly species aside from just Romulans and Remans. So even if the homeworld and, again presumably, the home solar system of the empire is destroyed, there are a lot of planets under the control of the empire. Who knows precisely why then, they had to rely so heavily on assistance from the Federation when their star went supernova, you'd think and empire would have plenty of ships and resources. But, nonetheless, evacuating an entire solar system, of probably trillions of people, would be an enormous undertaking, so sure, the Federation would probably be happy to help. Especially if we look at the events of Nemesis, which ends with the opening up of relations between Romulus and the Federation.

I also think that it's not beyond reason that this would cause political chaos and upheaval. Suddenly the seat of the empire has to be moved, a mass amount of resources are being shifted towards relocating entire worlds, the empire is vulnerable. Outside forces could see it as a prime opportunity to attack. Klingons, Cardassians? Hell, even the Breen? On top of that, maybe there are some populations of alien subjects who think, hey, it's our best chance in a century to declare our sovereignty against our imperial overlords.

And of course, not everyone could have made it out alive. A catastrophe like an exploding sun? No way they successfully get everyone out. So faith in the leadership is in question, maybe the Senate itself suffers losses. It's a moment of change, and a few ambitious people could decide it's their moment to seize power.

One way or another, the Romulan Star Empire is not going to continue existing in the same capacity it did before now. A quick glance at memory alpha says that the version of the government that existed as of Picard is the "Romulan Free State" which gets it's legitimacy from the Tal-Shiar, and their economy is entirely based on selling borg technology they salvage from the derelict Cube, which, like, idk, sure I guess. It's a far cry from an Empire though, so what about all the rest of the territory? The people? The military?

I think maybe you see something like an era of warlords competing for control of the former Romulan territories. A few senators, maybe a few generals each declare themselves the new Praetor, and now begins a period of little republics and fiefdoms popping up. Infighting. Something like the Romulan Free State can exist and maintain enough control over a portion of space to be considered legitimate, but there are other claimants.

Meanwhile there's no way this "free state" can possibly still represent the entirety of the former populace of Romulus and it's territories. So there's probably a significant number of refugees with no home left, and no capable government to care for them. So of course the Federation would allow romulans to settle in Federation space.

Problem is, the Federation has spent the past like, 200 years not exactly presenting the Romulan empire as a welcome presence inside the Federation. So this functions as a very thinly veiled metaphor for the current IRL "refugee crisis." Romulans fleeing the fracturing empire are allowed to settle in the Federation, but maybe not always in the greatest of conditions, and not all Federation citizens are welcoming of them. There's also the Remans to consider. They were already a slave-race who tried doing an overthrow of Romulan society and failed. They'd probably try making another play at power.

Incredibly long story short, though, this leads me to the first major addition to a new Star Trek show. Much like The Original Series presented a grand vision of a wonderful future where Americans and Soviets could live and work together in harmony, TNG gave us a leap forward by having the first Klingon in Starfleet. DS9 continued this tradition with Nog becoming the first Ferengi to enter Starfleet Academy. Star Trek is all about people putting aside their differences and working together for a brighter future, so the next logical approach to this idea would be to introduce a Romulan crew member.

At this point if we were to make a show that was set in real-time since 2009, it's been about 15 years since Romulus' star exploded. The idea I had for a character would be a former member of whatever the Romulan equivalent of Starfleet is, the military I guess. A scientist. Specializing in something like weird space anomalies and shit. Someone who's passion for their work would supersede their loyalty to whatever shadow of it's former glory the empire descends into. Over the past decade, the imperial remnant has had to divert all it's resources to try and maintain stability and fighting insurrection and attacks on it's borders, and yadda yadda. They're not doing much space exploration and stuff these days, so our young(relative to romulan lifespans, which are apparently similar to that of Vulcans) Romulan scientist decides that if she wants to pursue her career as a scientist, the best place to do it is in Starfleet.

So she goes to San Francisco, enrols in Stafleet Academy and comes out as the first Romulan officer in Starfleet history. Of course, this is not without it's speed bumps and road blocks. Rumors follow her throughout her time at the academy. That she's a spy, a Tal-Shiar agent, etc. Remember Commodore Oh? We're just asking for trouble letting a Romulan in, yadda yadda. She tries her best to acclimate to Earth/Federation society and customs to appear less threatening, but a part of her certainly resents the stigma she and other Romulans now living in the Federation face.

And given her career history, she of course excels in the academy, and is granted an express promotion to reflect her experience in her field, and she is assigned to Starfleet's newest and most advanced research vessel, the USS Revelation or Evolution or what the fuck ever. Something that evokes a sense of progress and reaching towards the future, like the statue of Zephram Cochrane. Fuck it, have it be the USS Excelsior NCC-2000-D or the newest Reliant or something.

Our Romulan science officer needs to report for mandatory psychological evaluation, and in doing so is going to encounter first hand one of the features of this swanky new science ship.

To be continued....?

[kimberlychapman]

Indeed, and some of us take those TNG Tech Manual documents and apply them to the Sternbach blueprints and make ourselves excessively detailed ship maps so we can better-than-canon-accurately number all the rooms we invent for our fic.

[image: Detailed deck labelling for the Enterprise D.]

This is my main blueprint for writing the SpaceDad Stories. I bought the Sternbach blueprint box and photographed them so I could markup my own digital versions while preserving the paper ones. I used Preview to draw pleasingly rainbow lines by decks so it's easier for my eye to follow all the way along. And yes, they extend to the fore in a separate graphic but I rarely use that one.

I also took a screencap from a digital version of the Tech Manual (I have the paper version from when it was newly released, I am that old of a nerd) and used multiple Preview windows to line them up, then drew these grey dash lines over the drive section to label the drive's sectors on here.

I can then refer to whatever deck I need in the rest of the blueprints and use the Tech Manual's descriptions to suss out a logical room number.

For instance my OC's room is on this deck, so I have done extensive work here, including defining turbolift stop numbers by the same numbering system:

[image: Detail and notes for Deck 31 of the Enterprise D.]

So this way I can describe that anyone visiting Anna in her lab or her quarters can get oft the turbolift and the door is more or less right across the hall. This also lets me define other parameters of those rooms in a consistent way.

What happens if I want a room that isn't on the blueprints? I fanfic it...that is, I make it up. But I edit the blueprints (again, in Preview, I don't have the money or spoons for fancy editing software) so that I know where things are, thus allowing my writing to be incredibly consistent. In Book Four, which I am currently writing (but I've been ill a lot so it's taking forever), a lot of time is spent on this deck so while I defined some of these spaces in Book Three, I rely on my edited blueprints more heavily in Book Four, actually describing what the characters see in the rooms because I have it right there in my blueprint notes:

[image: Deck 39 of the Enteprise D with edits and notes.]

Mack is another OC, another survivor of the same colony Tasha Yar escaped from. In fact Tasha helped her escape and brought her aboard as cargo crew, and as a friend of Tasha's the senior officers are very protective of her. I wrote her before Prodigy was on the air, but her trauma is a lot like Rok-Tahk's, only more grown-up, CW CW CW.

Anyway, in one of the earlier books I needed my main OC Anna to use industrial replicators, and there aren't any on the blueprints, so I defined this space as Mack's bay where she oversees those and other cargo issues. So I drew in a wall's worth of large replicators that can "print" flooring sheets for Jefferies tubes because that's what Anna was experimenting with at the time.

Aisling Navarro (and the whole Navarro family) is another OC, her family being introduced more in Book Four, and she has a habit of taking vulnerable young women under her wing, hence her lunch room down near where Mack is. In her group is canonical character Ensign Tyler, whom Memory Beta gives a first name of Andrea in some semi-canon works. Given that Book Three covered "Phantasms" you can expect some discussion of Tyler's crush on La Forge in that lunch room in Book Four.

So yeah, to answer the OP way up there...the crew know their way around, and so do us hardcore fic writers. :D

star_trek_empty_corridors

[prokopetz]

The thing I enjoy about Lower Decks is that, up until now, the wiki curators who are determined to shoehorn every piece of Star Trek lore into a single coherent universe mostly only had to do bullshit worldbuilding gymnastics to make that work when dealing with the Original Series, a couple of the more egregious Star Trek: Voyager episodes, and some of the novels, and in a pinch they could get away with declaring the novels "secondary canon" – but now Lower Decks is throwing them multiple unhinged curveballs in every single episode, and the wiki articles are getting interesting again.

[thelongestway]

A crazy theory just coalesced about Star Trek holodecks. Why does every ship have them? Why are they some of the last things to go down, if they need so much power and are purely recreational? Why do they malfunction so often? I submit to you that holodecks essentially fulfill the function of a top-end graphics card on modern-day PCs. Yes, they run games for pleasure. But also they are very good for running a bunch of complex calculations, especially involving the simulation of space and laws of physics. And this has a bunch of utility uses. Y'know how graphics cards are used for stuff like protein folding or, more annoyingly, bitcoin mining? This, but in Star Trek.

So here's my little bit of crazy world building: holodecks function as reserve processing units. In normal operation, they handle scientific sims, like we often see in the shows (and a bit of fun for the crew). But in combat, they handle some of the heavy-duty calculations for things like autofiring beam banks or shield redistribution, which is why people don't usually redistribute power from them immediately. Your holodecks go down, you do a lot more by hand. And sometimes you get edge scenarios such as storing physical bodies in their RAM. Most crews fiddle with and overclock theirs, which is why there are so many bugs. But everyone swears by them anyway.

[devotedlittlefreak]

I often see Ezri described as a rich kid. And it's true, but it's more interesting than that!

Because she also grew up outside of Federation space ! She grew up in the Sappora system, which is independent, but under Orion Syndicate influence. Her parents owned one of the largest mining operations here.

While her childhood was materially comfortable, it's not clear that she grew up in a post-scarcity world. Sappora VII seems pretty polluted because of the mining, and the working conditions are hard for her parent's employees.

So while she grew up in the same level of comfortability as Jadzia or Ben (maybe a bit less so because of the pollution?), she really is issued of the bourgeoisie. Her parents are land owners, exploitators. Her social position doesn't exist as such in the Federation (there's an intelligentsia there, but not a bourgeoisie).

And she chose to leave her world for one who chose radically different policies. (I've seen a few people describe the Federation as "not socialist, just post-scarcity", but Cardassians and Romulans seem to have very equivalent technological capabilities. Egalitarianism was a choice, and the federation can be called socialist imo. Not much of a hot take on tumblr, lmao)

I'm not saying that it was virtuous of her to leave (although it's always a hard choice to get away from one's family.) but it's interesting that she made that choice. And I think it's far less trivial than "Ezri's a rich kid" that she was written like that

[qussymagnet]

Thinking about this again, and in particular thinking about how this applies to the combination of science and artistry. When coding, there can be multiple solutions to get the same result. Some are elegant. Some are not the most efficient, but effective. Some are building a solution with legacy code that is difficult to troubleshoot and buggy.

Imagine an engineer troubleshooting a replicator on some random outpost or colony. First they have to discern the coding language. Perhaps the common language utilized is different depending on culture.

For example, Starfleet engineers use something like Fleet Standard 92.0516 (it's always being updated with pages of documentation). It is frowned upon to utilize anything non-standard and deviations are often automatically flagged, rewritten, quarantined, or removed in subsequent updates (like how Discord kicks BetterDiscord every time it updates and you lose everything you modified without warning until you re-install).

Bajoran resistance fighters utilize a patchwork of languages, including a native-to-Bajor programming language that is very simplistic and utilized a lot in programming automated processes in farming and low-orbit equipment (it would be equivalent to the software sophistication of our 1960's space agencies, think HAL/S and C++) as well as adapted Cardassian coding languages (powerful and efficient, but very easy to get locked out of or cause a cascade failure if you do the wrong thing), and some outdated Fleet Standard (reliable and offers a foundation from which to build more complex operations, but a bit overly complex and inefficient, and sometimes overwrites other "incompatibilities" that it detects).

And so on. And so this engineer needs to determine the language(s) utilized. And then, they need to determine what's wrong and why. Maybe it's simply out of date and needs updated. Maybe the Starfleet code is overwriting a local modification. Perhaps it's like DS9, with some Cardassian legacy code and Fleet Standard built on top of it. Or perhaps, the code wasn't well written and was patched together by an obvious novice. But, yet it works. (Think of Rom's spatula utilized as a conduit in the holosuite computers.) So the person is stumped on how to fix it and maybe has to call for backup until someone remembers that their cousin did something similar like this when they got in a pinch hijacking a patrol shuttle to break out of Duronom.

Imagine the code purists - many within Starfleet as well as the Cardassian and Romulan militaries - who consider anything hobbled together or outdated as embarrassing, impure, or clunky. When it comes to replicators, some swear that they can taste the difference. Imagine the code artists who claim that their elegant filing and artful loops create a delicate and more refined result that "tastes just like the real thing", and either only work on projects for themselves and friends, or charge a premium for their services. Imagine the reality competition shows where people are challenged to program a replicator to make gourmet meals utilizing uncommon, outdated, or unstable equipment and praised for unconventionally effective solutions. And imagine the scenes in a Cutthroat Kitchen style show where the little dumbwaiter opens to reveal an isolinear chip containing up-to-date Fleet Standard that will decimate anything you've put together once it's installed.

I think one (among many) bonkers things about the replicators in Trek is that we're never shown anyone programming the patterns to be replicated. I want to know what's the future version of solidworks and what the hell a molecular slicer (ie the program that tells the replicator what to generate where, given a design) would even look like. And I assume everyone that works on a starship on an engineering/scientific capacity can use both in their sleep. On second thought though slicing an object at the atomic level is such an impossible amount of data to even compute, it's no wonder we mostly see characters make use of pre-programmed patterns even outside of food replicators

[spocks-kaathyra]

thoughts about the Cardassian writing system

I've thinking about the Cardassian script as shown on screen and in beta canon and such and like. Is it just me or would it be very difficult to write by hand?? Like.

I traced some of this image for a recent drawing I did and like. The varying line thicknesses?? The little rectangular holes?? It's not at all intuitive to write by hand. Even if you imagine, like, a different writing implement—I suppose a chisel-tip pen would work better—it still seems like it wasn't meant to be handwritten. Which has a few possible explanations.

Like, maybe it's just a fancy font for computers, and handwritten text looks a little different. Times New Roman isn't very easily written by hand either, right? Maybe the line thickness differences are just decorative, and it's totally possible to convey the same orthographic information with the two line thicknesses of a chisel-tip pen, or with no variation in line thickness at all.

A more interesting explanation, though, and the one I thought of first, is that this writing system was never designed to be handwritten. This is a writing system developed in Cardassia's digital age. Maybe the original Cardassian script didn’t digitize well, so they invented a new one specifically for digital use? Like, when they invented coding, they realized that their writing system didn’t work very well for that purpose. I know next to nothing about coding, but I cannot imagine doing it using Chinese characters. So maybe they came up with a new writing system that worked well for that purpose, and when computer use became widespread, they stuck with it. 

Or maybe the script was invented for political reasons! Maybe Cardassia was already fairly technologically advanced when the Cardassian Union was formed, and, to reinforce a cohesive national identity, they developed a new standardized national writing system. Like, y'know, the First Emperor of Qin standardizing hanzi when he unified China, or that Korean king inventing hangul. Except that at this point in Cardassian history, all official records were digital and typing was a lot more common than handwriting, so the new script was designed to be typed and not written. Of course, this reform would be slower to reach the more rural parts of Cardassia, and even in a technologically advanced society, there are people who don't have access to that technology. But I imagine the government would be big on infrastructure and education, and would make sure all good Cardassian citizens become literate. And old regional scripts would stop being taught in schools and be phased out of digital use and all the kids would grow up learning the digital script.

Which is good for the totalitarian government! Imagine you can only write digitally. On computers. That the government can monitor. If you, like, write a physical letter and send it to someone, then it's possible for the contents to stay totally private. But if you send an email, it can be very easily intercepted. Especially if the government is controlling which computers can be manufactured and sold, and what software is in widespread use, etc. 

AND. Historical documents are now only readable for scholars. Remember that Korean king that invented hangul? Before him, Korea used to use Chinese characters too. And don't get me wrong, hangul is a genius writing system! It fits the Korean language so much better than Chinese characters did! It increased literacy at incredible rates! But by switching writing systems, they broke that historical link. The average literate Chinese person can read texts that are thousands of years old. The average literate Korean person can't. They'd have to specifically study that field, learn a whole new writing system. So with the new generation of Cardassian youths unable to read historical texts, it's much easier for the government to revise history. The primary source documents are in a script that most people can't read. You just trust the translation they teach you in school. In ASIT it's literally a crucial plot point that the Cardassian government revised history! Wouldn't it make it soooo much easier for them if only very few people can actually read the historical accounts of what happened.

I guess I am thinking of this like Chinese characters. Like, all the different Chinese "dialects" being written with hanzi, even though otherwise they could barely be considered the same language. And even non-Sinitic languages that historically adopted hanzi, like Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese. Which worked because hanzi is a logography—it encodes meaning, not sound, so the same word in different languages can be written the same. It didn’t work well! Nowadays, Japanese has made significant modifications and Korean has invented a new writing system entirely and Vietnamese has adapted a different foreign writing system, because while hanzi could write their languages, it didn’t do a very good job at it. But the Cardassian government probably cares more about assimilation and national unity than making things easier for speakers of minority languages. So, Cardassia used to have different cultures with different languages, like the Hebitians, and maybe instead of the Union forcing everyone to start speaking the same language, they just made everyone use the same writing system. Though that does seem less likely than them enforcing a standard language like the Federation does. Maybe they enforce a standard language, and invent the new writing system to increase literacy for people who are newly learning it.

And I can imagine it being a kind of purely digital language for some people? Like if you’re living on a colonized planet lightyears away from Cardassia Prime and you never have to speak Cardassian, but your computer’s interface is in Cardassian and if you go online then everyone there uses Cardassian. Like people irl who participate in the anglophone internet but don’t really use English in person because they don’t live in an anglophone country. Except if English were a logographic writing system that you could use to write your own language. And you can’t handwrite it, if for whatever reason you wanted to. Almost a similar idea to a liturgical language? Like, it’s only used in specific contexts and not really in daily life. In daily life you’d still speak your own language, and maybe even handwrite it when needed. I think old writing systems would survive even closer to the imperial core (does it make sense to call it that?), though the government would discourage it. I imagine there’d be a revival movement after the Fire, not only because of the cultural shift away from the old totalitarian Cardassia, but because people realize the importance of having a written communication system that doesn’t rely on everyone having a padd and electricity and wifi.

[jaegermonstrous]

HC: Cardassians don't dance in the same way as Humans. They definitely dance, but dance is always a communal activity carried out by - at the smallest - a familial group. Large state and social functions have specific dances, like crowd dances in our world. There are sets of steps which are part of a larger dance, and which would be nonsensical done by a single person. Everyone has a role in these dances, correspondent to their social status. Orphans and other people with no social status? Well, they don't get to dance. It's one of the ways in which they're marked as apart from the great body of the Cardassian state. They might know the steps, but they wouldn't be allowed to participate. This isn't to say orphans and other no-status people in Cardassia don't dance, but they certainly don't do it publicly. Underground dance clubs are for sure a thing.

It's one of the things many Cardassians find utterly perplexing, even threatening, about Humans and other cultures. A singular person can dance! All by themselves! Not only that, but some of them make a career out of it. Dancing entirely alone, demonstrating their singularity, their disconnection from their people and their state! Can you imagine?

[marzipanandminutiae]

how does antiquing work in Star Trek?

like, okay, there's no scarcity Because Replicators. great! except you can't replicate an antique, not the real thing. probably some AMAZING reproductions- 24th-century historical costumers must be having the time of their lives, because as great as modern synthetic baleen is, imagine what you could do with a machine that literally replicates the exact molecular structure of the same! or that extinct flax that made medieval linen so great! -but I know antique collectors. there's nothing like the feeling of something you know so many other people have loved for centuries

is it like a barter system? do you go to the antique "shop" with things passed down in your family or found in the equivalent of a Facebook buy-nothing group, and trade what you have for what the history nerd running the place has based on your respective interests?

is Brimfield like a giant swap meet? could I go with, say...a big bag full of my grandmother's chunky 1950s costume jewelry and trade it for 1880s blouse waists because the stall owner wants the former and I want the latter? equivalent value wouldn't matter- what's value, beyond how much you treasure something? nobody's got rent to make or bills to pay, after all

do people become antiques "dealers" just for the thrill of the hunt and the pleasure of matching an object to someone who will love it? you don't have to work, after all; you can spend your whole life searching the world for rare treasures if that brings you joy

this is a nice thought

[whirligig-girl]

Eaurp Guz's roughly 1:30 scale live-steam model of Slaibsgloth Coal Railroad No.32, a ~1.6 meter gauge 2-8-8-2 garratt steam locomotive built on planet Mellanus in (earth-)year 2346 and retired in 2379 (two years ago) for service bringing coal carriages from the coal pits up to the interchange at the Glooiw & North Eastern. It is unusual for a coal burning steam engine to remain in revenue service--the majority that remained in use after the development of Diesel-Hydraulics were decommissioned with nuclear-powered railway electrification in the 2360s, and the ones that remained were mostly converted to oil burning. The Slaibsgloth steam engines meanwhile persisted right up until the closure of the coal mine. Glooiw & North Eastern has acquired the 40 locomotives. Their fates are uncertain but railway preservation groups remain optimistic.

When Guz first came aboard the Cerritos she was overworking herself constantly, which lead to her being so tired that she was leaving residues on the consoles and generally doing sloppier work. It turned out that Guz had been working double shifts, and when Billups found out he put a stop to that. That's when Guz turned to a hobby she'd done a lot of before joining starfleet--model rocketry. Armed with far more advanced tools than she'd had on Mellanus, she made accurate working model replicas of real historical prewarp spacecraft from a variety of planets and would fly them in real space whenever possible.

Eventually, she also found a new appreciation for her childhood love of trains, and her model-making skills and tools translated well to model railroading as well. She has a little shelf layout in storage that she occasionally tinkers with, and she runs large scale model trains on the holodeck. She could run full-scale holographic trains on the holodeck too of course, but it wouldn't be nearly as satisfying. And then there's the 1:5600 scale BM-gauge railroad she's building on a microscope slide! (Bµ gauge is "Byte micrometer" gauge or a track spacing of 256 µm)

Guz eventually wants to build a roughly 1:80 scale modular layout of the Slaibsgloth Coal Mine, with smaller scale electric-powered models of the Slaibsgloth coal-burning steam engines and enough track to wrap around a room and give them a good run, but unless she can rally support for a Cerritos chapter of the Starfleet Rail Transport Modelling Club or she can get her own crew quarters, it's a pipe dream--or maybe something for her retirement.

Replicators and advanced computer aided design tools reduce the amount of time it takes to get modelling projects done by whatever factor is desired. Technically Guz could probably replicate fully assembled working models as long as they fit in the replicator bed, but where's the fun in that? But she's still only got so much time in an off-shift, and doing it 'properly,' scratch-built using machine tools like 'real' modellers on Mellanus, or manually defining all of the geometry in a CAD program like modellers on Earth, would take too much time.

see also: alt versions of the locomotive.

[procrastinatorproject]

A couple people have pointed out the TNG ep "The Chase" in the comments which might give a hint to what's happening with Trek species-hybrids.

But I have this vague memory that Spock being conceived required some kind of medical intervention? I might be completely misremembering everything, but isn't there a mention somewhere in Trek about how inter-species procreation wasn't possible for a long while until doctors figured out how to facilitate it?

Or am I hallucinating this/mixing my sci-fi franchises somehow?

HELLO IM HERE TO TALK ABOUT MY ISSUE WITH BIOLOGY AND STAR TREK AND ITS ISSUE WITH THE LAWS OF SPECIATION CUZ I HAVE A BONE TO PICK WITH BIOLOGISTS (I disagree with many of the laws and theories put in place specifically in biology)

The law of speciation in biology is that the way to classify different species is that they are not able to procreate, and if they are, that the offspring is infertile. They are plenty of examples of hybrids in Star Trek. One of the most famous being of course, Spock, a human Vulcan hybrid. Spock never had any children, so it’s very possible that Vulcans and humans are able to make offspring, but they are still considered different species because their offspring is not able to procreate itself. But then how are Deanna Troi and B’Elanna Torres able to have children?? Deanna Troi is a human Betazoid hybrid, by the law of specification that should mean that humans and Betazoid are able to procreate, but their offspring is infertile right? WRONG! Deanna Troi is somehow able to have children with Commander Riker!! The same goes for Torres, Torres is a human Klingon hybrid, so specification law should mean that Torres is infertile, because human’s and Klingons are not classified as the species and therefore are not able to make fertile offspring. But then HOW is B’Elanna Torres able to have a child with Lieutenant Tom Paris? If Tori and Torres and both the offspring of supposedly different species, then how are they able to have children of their own?? Wouldn’t that mean that Humans, Betazoids, and Klingons are members of the same species? Is the law of speciation different in the future? If I’m being honest, I don’t think this is an issue with Star Trek. I think it’s an issue with our rules of biology. I think so many things in our current biology whatever are flawed and very close minded, but that’s just me.

[allgremlinart]

almost started writing out a bunch of worldbuilding theories before I remembered that Gene Roddenberry is laughing at me from hell watching me do this and I got so mad I deleted it all

[lichqueenlibrarian]

LOVE that the Romulan Commander is realizing that they didn’t stop to consider the everyday practicalities of James living as a Romulan.

Can he use the shower without scalding himself or the flasher (zaps a layer of skin off) without damage? Will he be able to do something as basic as open a vehicle door? How can he survive in a world geared to a strength that is beyond him?

[reijnders]

long awaited but you also have to wait some more

been too busy with work + school prep + Other Bullshit to write/draw out the biology stuff for operation trillspec so all u get rn is the pretty outsides

TRILL. along with a size comparison for my version of Bajorans and also Humans. and a tentative foray into some language stuff, but i am making Many languages for trill so watch out

ALSO ALSO ALSO a first pass map of my version of the Trill homeworld, which i am currently filling with cultures and languages

[isagrimorie]

i forgot that tilly was asked to be the first officer of discovery in the third season. and, I think how mind-blowing that is. i like discovery a lot but sometimes the writers make truly mind-boggling choices.

i forgot that tilly was just a cadet in s1 and then an ensign.

making her an (acting) first officer, while still an ensign, was a bizarre choice. (harry kim is crying somewhere)

especially since nilsson and rhys take control of the bridge when the command team is out.

unfortunately, the way discovery is configured we don't really know most of the bridge crew.

or, maybe it would have been better if a new character was introduced as their 32nd-century guide and as a temporary XO.

but also, who is the senior staff of discovery? do we know?

i assumed that culber was CMO all this time only to find out from interviews he wasn't the CMO.

stamets can't be the chief engineer since he's science division and he mans the spore drive function and not the whole ship. i assume its jett reno.

who was the head of security when nhan left? is it rhys??? why is booker (who I really like) memory alpha listed the head of security of discovery (season 4)??? he's not starfleet.

i just realized the whole problem why they got tilly as acting first officer is because I don't think any of the writers in seasons 2 to 3 of discovery sat down and solidified the hierarchy on the ship other than captain.

it's so nebulous and it doesn't need to be nebulous.

it's like how inconsistent the ranks are on SNW uniforms.

i know these are nitpicks but these are details that help build out the world. and it's such an easy thing to address too, it's frustrating they don't.

and this is on the discovery writers for not taking the time to iron it out. i understand they want to focus on different people and keep the heroics away from the bridge, other than saru and michael. but that doesn't excuse how lazily they went about it.

anyway this is just a bug bear that I stumbled on when I remembered how tilly was made into acting first officer of discovery. it didn't niggle at me back then but somehow rewatching voyager and a lot of other trek made me realize, I can actually pinpoint the line of command on each show but stumble on it when it comes to discovery seasons 3 and 4.

again, i think this is why season 5 is doing a great job. wilson cruz said that by season 5 he might as well be the CMO, so I'm taking that as canon.

this is what happens when every season and episode is just one story of crisis situations without any standalone downtime episodes.

(this is also a problem for picard s3. it's the single story and 10 episode thing. it ties the hands of writers.)

what i wouldn't give for a discovery episode where the ship is just doing routine maintenance. follow an engineering team down a jeffries tube, watch them have a boring senior staff meeting where all department heads report to michael.

(wait, have we seen discovery do a senior staff meeting scene?)

have rayner sit down and manage personnel.

honestly, i think the trek that does the best in doing personnel, handling extras, and making a realized world is still ds9.

[grayrazor]

My headcanon for the Klingons is that, just like with the vikings and samurai that they're based on, the honor-obsessed warrior elite are maybe 10% of the population at most. If you visit a Klingon planet and go anywhere other than the castles of the great houses you see farmers, industrial workers, scientists, engineers, etc.

Maybe in times of relative peace they start giving the more prestigious bureaucratic and clerical jobs to the warrior class, like Edo-era Japan did, to give them something to do so they don't make mischief, that's why you see "warrior-lawyers" like Colonel Worf, Ch’Pok, and Kolos.

Another data point is Martok, who was a commoner--relegated to being cleaning staff on a starship because of Kor's prejudice--but became a warrior after proving himself in combat.