Particularly when your bridge seating has no restraints.

-VR
Or worse, crew standing in combat?
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

Didn't Original Flava Gryphon also instigate a mutiny and steal a very valuable ship because he wanted a ride home? :)

-Merc
Keep Rat

What?

He did technically commit mutiny once, but that was to prevent the captain of his ship from causing a war of galactic genocide, not to get a ride home. And the board of inquiry agreed that that was probably the right call.

--G.
Split Infinitive wasn't very good, I grant you, but c'mon.
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I mean, the Invincible was slated for the breakers, so I guess I was wrong about "very valuable," but it still wasn't his property to dispose of as he saw fit, and he did convince his whole crew to violate orders, falsify a bunch of reports, desert their posts, and go haring off with him on a crazy trip back to his home universe. I believe that does in fact count as a mutiny.

That always bugged me a little bit on a lot of levels, and I was glad to see Manhunt straighten it out.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Ah. Yes, let's refer back to the early-'90s UF story that was so bad I not only took it out of the timeline, but wrote a whole different one to cover over the hole where it used to be. By all means, let's do that.

Sarcasm aside, I had actually forgotten that was even how that one went. How terrifying. You would think he'd at least have bought it in that scenario. I mean, if they were scrapping it anyway. And don't give me that nonsense about they don't buy and sell things in the Federation, it's obvious from context that when Kirk says "they're still using money" in Star Trek IV, all he means is that the 20th century still uses physical currency and not some kind of computerized banking system he can have Spock h4x0r to get them some local virtual gelt.

They weren't off by far. If they had come to 2017, presumably the first thing they would've done is score an unlocked iPhone on eBay and then jack up Apple Wallet. (I assume this is standard procedure for Starfleet undercover operations in semi-advanced uncontacted civilizations.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Intellectually, I know Secrets is really bad. But, well... I was really young when I read it and the rest of early-era (what I define as "everything before Symphony of the Sword") UF, and a lot of it really stuck with me because it blew my mind at the time.

Same reason I have a bunch of Dragonlance books still on my shelves.

>Sarcasm aside, I had actually forgotten that was even how that one
>went. How terrifying.

Huh, really? I had just assumed that changing Gryphon's return to his home timeline to another accident was to deliberately avoid some of the weird problems that Grand Theft Starship plus the very odd conceit that literally Gryphon's entire crew weren't leaving behind any family, friends, or life goals in order to accompany him caused.

>You would think he'd at least have
>bought it in that scenario. I mean, if they were scrapping it
>anyway.

I don't think Gryphon was actually rich in the other universe; he went into Starfleet basically immediately after arriving and acclimating and I'm not sure that they pay their officers well enough to afford even a decommissioned Connie no matter how frugal they are. Maybe he made some sound investments, tho. :)

>And don't give me that nonsense about they don't buy and sell
>things in the Federation, it's obvious from context that when Kirk
>says "they're still using money" in Star Trek IV, all he means
>is that the 20th century still uses physical currency and not some
>kind of computerized banking system he can have Spock h4x0r to get
>them some local virtual gelt.

That sort of thing was somewhat unclear at the time. Like, in TOS it seemed pretty clear that the Federation was still a capitalistic society, just a version that wasn't, well, vicious and evil. Then for a few years they moved to this idea that the Federation was actually this sort of quasi-hippie vaguely transhuman spiritual space utopia and the people we saw in Starfleet were actually social freaks because they retained the capacity to do things like make war on other sentient beings and use violence to defend themselves without imploding emotionally at the horror of it all.

TNG backed way, way, way off from that but Roddenberry was still wedded to the idea of a post-capitalist utopia, and really, who can blame him? But TNG is like a hundred years later, so the Federation changing makes a certain amount of sense.

DS9, in my opinion, managed to strike the best balance between "the Federation has tried to move to a post-currency post-scarcity economy" and "some things are still scarce, and the Federation is surrounded by, and does business with, polities that have NOT moved to a post-scarcity economy." So you could have things where Ben Sisko and the Federation are capable of ponying up latinum when they need to and cutting deals without seeming like total idiots who are all "what is this 'buying' and 'selling' you speak of, primitive being."

>They weren't off by far. If they had come to 2017, presumably the
>first thing they would've done is score an unlocked iPhone on eBay and
>then jack up Apple Wallet. (I assume this is standard procedure for
>Starfleet undercover operations in semi-advanced uncontacted
>civilizations.)

That job must be so immensely fraught. I remember that TNG episode where some of their dudes get busted on a world that is right on the cusp of warp. Great episode.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Oh, I probably knew it when I wrote Manhunt. Hell, I probably re-read Secrets preparatory to writing Manhunt (I know I excerpted some of HN1's dialogue straight out of it). I mean I'd forgotten it since then. That was, after all, nine years ago.

>>You would think he'd at least have
>>bought it in that scenario. I mean, if they were scrapping it
>>anyway.
>
>I don't think Gryphon was actually rich in the other universe; he went
>into Starfleet basically immediately after arriving and acclimating
>and I'm not sure that they pay their officers well enough to afford
>even a decommissioned Connie no matter how frugal they are. Maybe he
>made some sound investments, tho. :)

He wasn't, but for something like that, he'd have found the money someplace. There are a lot of couch cushions in the Beta Quadrant.

>Then for
>a few years they moved to this idea that the Federation was actually
>this sort of quasi-hippie vaguely transhuman spiritual space utopia
>and the people we saw in Starfleet were actually social freaks because
>they retained the capacity to do things like make war on other
>sentient beings and use violence to defend themselves without
>imploding emotionally at the horror of it all.

Oh man, I remember that now that you've said it. That was in the Motion Picture novelization, wasn't it? I remember thinking, the first time I read that, that it was the weirdest damn book when it got to talking about that stuff. Like the part where Kirk notes that a lot of people think he and his colleagues are weirdbeard retros for still having surnames.

>DS9, in my opinion, managed to strike the best balance between "the
>Federation has tried to move to a post-currency post-scarcity economy"
>and "some things are still scarce, and the Federation is surrounded
>by, and does business with, polities that have NOT moved to a
>post-scarcity economy."

They kind of flirt with that the way they handle the in-game currency in STO. I mean, there's latinum and all the rest, but most of the low-level transactions are handled in either dilithium (unit unspecified, probably a standardized exchange mass?) or "energy credits", which I guess represents how much you're authorized to use the replicators. Which makes sense, since if you think about it, even the stuff that comes out of replicators isn't "free" in the utopian postmodernism sense. The energy that got converted into that matter had to come from somewhere, and there has to have been infrastructure and work invested in harnessing it. Thermodynamics doesn't care about people's ideals. :)

(And then there's the whole question of how the IP for the stuff that's being replicated is handled, which never comes up in any Star Trek property I can think of offhand. I suppose if you were a sufficiently idealized future engineer you'd work for free.)

>That job must be so immensely fraught. I remember that TNG episode
>where some of their dudes get busted on a world that is right on the
>cusp of warp. Great episode.

I don't remember that one, but there was an episode of Enterprise with a roughly similar premise. It... well, it didn't suck, which is more than you can say for a lot of the first season, really. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

It surely cannot have been that long holy hell it's been exactly that long. I think of Manhunt as being a recent thing. I suppose that's only true in comparison to its predecessor.

Time is weird, man. In my head Diqiu is still the newest hottest newest thing... and that was introduced four years ago.

>Oh man, I remember that now that you've said it. That was in the
>Motion Picture novelization, wasn't it?

Indeed, which is the only reason anyone remembers that novelization. It was very high-concept at the time, right up to and including the in-character introduction from Jim Kirk.

>I remember thinking,
>the first time I read that, that it was the weirdest damn book
>when it got to talking about that stuff. Like the part where Kirk
>notes that a lot of people think he and his colleagues are weirdbeard
>retros for still having surnames.

Right?

Star Trek isn't what I'd consider the best venue for the "future societies will be very, very different in fundamental ways from our own, let's explore what that could possibly mean" sub-genre of science fiction, but you have to give them some points for trying.

>(And then there's the whole question of how the IP for the stuff
>that's being replicated is handled, which never comes up in any
>Star Trek property I can think of offhand. I suppose if you
>were a sufficiently idealized future engineer you'd work for free.)

Well, I mean... I've said this before, I think, but it bears repeating: Star Trek is primarily an aspirational series when it comes to the United Federation of Planets. It's purpose when it comes to the utopian aspects it presents isn't so much to say "here is a twenty-point blueprint for how we can make a post-scarcity society work" but rather to say "if we all pull together, and be our best selves, and inspire others to be our best selves, maybe one day we can build a world where people are all about science, and exploration, and art, and culture, rather than a world where we are all constantly knifing each other for a few more dollars."

I mean, don't get me wrong. I've had many long and fun hours trying to game out and argue about exactly how the UFP really would work if one took it seriously. I would love to watch a two-part episode whose plot synopsis was "The crew of the Enterprise attend an economic symposium. Data presents a paper on the sociological consequences of matter replication in the late 2200s. Picard gives a talk on artisanal crafts in a post-scarcity economy and hosts a wine tasting with the products of his family vineyard. Riker has a three-way with a statistician and a mathematician."

But I'm what you'd call a niche audience.

>>That job must be so immensely fraught. I remember that TNG episode
>>where some of their dudes get busted on a world that is right on the
>>cusp of warp. Great episode.
>
>I don't remember that one, but there was an episode of
>Enterprise with a roughly similar premise. It... well, it
>didn't suck, which is more than you can say for a lot of the first
>season, really. :)

I recall that one as well! Not a bad yarn.

Really, I've been going through Enterprise again lately, because Netflix has almost all the Star Treks and with Discovery coming up I was like "I should look at the other prequel series again."

And you know what? My opinion of it has improved. It is still the weakest of the Treks, and that's something considering some of the shit Voyager pulled, but there's some really good concepts in there and they're occasionally executed very well. And Jolene Blalock acts the hell out of T'Pol, which, again, is saying something considering some of the scripts they handed her.

I remember the b-plot in an otherwise very shitty episode where Archer is being implored by a less technologically advanced race to share all his cool toys with them. And he's thinking to himself "I would love to help these guys, these are good people and they deserve it, but they have zero experience with this kind of stuff; we'd have to stick around for years and make sure they don't blow themselves up because they're not used to working with antimatter, and... oh. Oh NO. This must be what the Vulcans feel like ALL THE TIME when we ask them for shit. Goddammit! Those pointy-eared motherfuckers are right." And T'Pol is standing there not-smirking at him in that way Vulcans have of not-smirking.

And I just thought "huh! Genuine growth. Archer's knee-jerk 'man, FUCK the Vulcans' attitude has actually had a narrative payoff. Good job show. I would watch a show that continually delivered at this level."

-Merc
Keep Rat

Indeed.

>Time is weird, man. In my head Diqiu is still the newest hottest
>newest thing... and that was introduced four years ago.

Well, to be fair, it is still that, though that has more to do with the pace of progress recently than anything else.

>>I remember thinking,
>>the first time I read that, that it was the weirdest damn book
>>when it got to talking about that stuff. Like the part where Kirk
>>notes that a lot of people think he and his colleagues are weirdbeard
>>retros for still having surnames.
>
>Right?
>
>Star Trek isn't what I'd consider the best venue for the
>"future societies will be very, very different in fundamental ways
>from our own, let's explore what that could possibly mean" sub-genre
>of science fiction, but you have to give them some points for trying.

Roddenberry wrote the TMP novelization himself, IIRC, so I think it's probably the most direct conduit to the frustration he must have felt pretty much daily at the fact that literally no one else involved in the development and production of Star Trek shared the full extent of his idealized vision. He had to sell it to the network as Wagon Train to the Stars and Wagon Train to the Stars it has remained forevermore, in spite of his most strident efforts to steer it back onto what he considered its proper course, most notably in the early going of Next Generation.

I can relate. It can be really, really annoying when a thing takes on its own ethos without consulting its nominal creator first.

>I mean, don't get me wrong. I've had many long and fun hours trying to
>game out and argue about exactly how the UFP really would work if one
>took it seriously.

In that case, you may enjoy this book, which came up in a list of recommendations on Amazon the other day and in which I, personally, have no interest at all. :)

>I would love to watch a two-part episode whose plot
>synopsis was "The crew of the Enterprise attend an economic
>symposium. Data presents a paper on the sociological consequences of
>matter replication in the late 2200s. Picard gives a talk on artisanal
>crafts in a post-scarcity economy and hosts a wine tasting with the
>products of his family vineyard. Riker has a three-way with a
>statistician and a mathematician."
>
>But I'm what you'd call a niche audience.

I approve of the idea of presenting Riker more like the cop with the mustache from Super Troopers. "OK, who wants a mustache ride!"

>And you know what? My opinion of it has improved. It is still the
>weakest of the Treks, and that's something considering some of the
>shit Voyager pulled, but there's some really good concepts in
>there and they're occasionally executed very well.

Yeah, I wanted to like Enterprise more than I did, but I still enjoyed it for the most part. I think we had a thread about it in General or private-mail or someplace, some years back, when I finally had an opportunity to watch seasons other than the first.

>And Jolene Blalock
>acts the hell out of T'Pol, which, again, is saying something
>considering some of the scripts they handed her.

Agreed; she made T'Pol more likeable than she really has any right to be.

("Wait, are we talking about T'Pol? Zoner, she had a psychotic episode.")

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I have to wonder what he would have made of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels, which take his ideals to their logical extreme. The Federation sometimes seems like a precursor phase of a Culture-like civilization.

Other things, like Special Circumstances, not so much.

Roddenberry almost certainly would have really loved them. Well, maybe not the part where in order for the Culture to work it absolutely requires AI gods that are beyond human intellect or corruption to make all the important decisions that we can't be trusted with in order to work. But literally everything else. He'd probably go "I love this, but lose the robot overlords, there's no reason the people can't run everything themselves."

Quibble tho: the actually-existing Federation in the media as it evolved away from Roddenberry is actually rather politically retrograde. It practices an immensely strong form of federalism that does very little to protect the rights and dignity of its citizens as regards to the local politics of their specific species or homeworlds. Member worlds are permitted to do things like exile people forever because they disapprove of their private consensual romantic choices or to forcibly remove children from their parents in order to raise them in single-gender enclaves, and Federation law supports that and will even in some cases enforce it on their behalf.

-Merc
Keep Rat

This was in part due to the corruption of the Prime Directive from its TOS days as a simple policy of not giving the mundanes any hint that there was intelligent life beyond their planet and became an effective ban on the Federation and Starfleet "interfering" in the affairs of any member planet. But not only was this a bad policy, it was also one that was inconsistently enforced. At least two worlds the Federation had dealings with allowed the repression of an entire gender, but when Bajor temporarily reinstated a caste system, the Federation rejected its application for membership.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

As CdrMike noted, in the Star Trek canon that seems like it's mostly based in writers' misreadings of the Prime Directive. In UF (since this is after all the UF board :), it was a deliberate reaction by the Federation Charter's framers to the United Galactica, which the Federation replaced and which had a strong "get with our values or GTFO" policy stance. This was very popular with persons who would've been savagely repressed by their local leaders without it, but on the other hand, it caused sufficient resentment among the sorts of local leaders who wanted to get some savage repression going that it ultimately led to a galactic civil war.

On the flip side, the Federation's policy of declining to hold its members accountable for savage internal repressions eventually caused such friction between savage-repression-oriented and non-savage-repression-oriented members that it ultimately led to a galactic civil war. So, you know. Maybe you can't win.

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

To be fair, the United Galactica didn't have the literal embodiment of entropy and evil within the cosmos taking a personal interest in making its corner of the universe as fucked up as it possible could. The Federation had that millstone around its neck.

Maybe things would've gone wrong anyway; not everything is Surtur's fault and galactic civilization has demonstrated that it is more than capable of immolating itself on its own. But he certainly couldn't be helping things, and the United Federation of Planets passing into history was such a near-run thing. Being maybe two days faster off the mark than Bill Clark or Admiral Cartwright being just a little bit better of a person than he otherwise was might have changed a lot of things.

-Merc
Keep Rat

He probably would have pulled the standard dimension/time traveller bit of "as far as they know, I invented this."

Simply happening to know the solution to a problem can be worth a lot. e.g. If you land in a world where they still use serpentine gunpowder, you can make a big impression with the four words "try mixing it wet."

During a time travel adventure in season 3 of Enterprise, Archer and T'Pol convinced an ATM that it needed to hand over a lot of notes. And I'm pretty sure the time Voyager ended up in the 90s, they just told the Replicator to magic them up some money, because of course they happened to have that on file.

This leads to the mental image of them all having the same serial number, and Janeway getting busted for counterfeiting.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barratry_(admiralty_law)

The things you learn reading KanColle fics...

more like a single throwaway line that Clancy uses to prove Ryan has some chops as far as knowing whats what. After that it never comes up again.

‘Is there any crime you haven’t committed, Master Platime?’ she asked sternly.

‘Barratry, I think, Your Majesty. Of course I’m not sure what it means, so I can’t be entirely positive.’

‘It’s when a ship captain wrecks his ship in order to steal the cargo,’ Stragen supplied.

‘No, I’ve never done that. Also, I’ve never had carnal knowledge of an animal, I’ve never practised witchcraft, and I’ve never committed treason.’

‘Those are the more really serious ones, I suppose,’ Ehlana said with a perfectly straight face. ‘I do so worry about the morals of foolish young sheep.’

Platime roared with sudden laughter. ‘I do myself, Your Majesty. I’ve spent whole nights tossing and turning about it.’

(Eddings had his flaws, but I always loved his dialogue.)