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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • “Is Discovery canon?” is an interesting question because the only real purpose canon serves is to give us boundaries for where it’s reasonable to stop expecting (searching for?) a degree of consistency throughout all of Star Trek

    When someone says “that’s not canon” what they’re usually telling you is that they don’t care to reconcile it with other Trek

    Given that Discovery is two seasons of “top secret classified never happened” and three seasons of “800 years later than any other series,” even if we decided it was canon in some technical or legal sense, it gives us basically nothing that could potentially influence other Star Trek, before or since. In other words, it’s not canon in any practical or meaningful sense.

    tl;dr yeah I guess you’re right


























  • It depends on whether you are approaching the question from a narrative perspective or an empirical perspective.

    Narrative: The Federation wins because the Federation are The Good Guys™ and the Empire are The Bad Guys™. The Federation starts out on the back foot and it looks pretty grim in the middle, but ultimately they eke out a win. If this is a TNG two-parter it plays out the way “The Best of Both Worlds” did: engineering prowess combined with timely application of the human factor wins the day. If this is a DS9 arc or Discovery season, then Section 31 does what needs to be done.

    Empirical: The Empire crushes the Federation like a bug. The Imperial industrial base is enormous and their power generation capabilities vastly surpass anything the 24th century Federation can muster:

    • The Death Star could violently destroy an entire planet, reducing it to asteroids. In “The Die Is Cast,” a combined Romulan-Cardassian fleet requires multiple volleys to simply glass the surface of a planet.
    • The Millennium Falcon—a ship a little larger than a runabout—could cross the known galaxy (Tatooine on the rim, Alderaan in the core) in a day. Voyager estimated a similar journey would take 70 years at maximum cruising speed.
    • In the 2360’s the Federation built six Galaxy-class ships and maybe a few dozen more throughout the course of the Dominion war. These are among the largest, most powerful, most advanced ships the Federation can build, yet they are dwarfed by an Imperial II-class Star Destroyer and the Empire built hundreds of these in the mere two decades it existed.

     

    It you could somehow snap these two spacefaring nations into existence and pit them against each other, it would be like late-WWII United States facing off against Napoleonic France. It’s a blowout.










  • Creator or Daystrom here: the conditions that created Daystrom eleven years ago don’t exist on Lemmy. More simply, Lemmy isn’t big enough to host a new Daystrom.

    I made Daystrom because /r/startrek was so full of memes and jokes that it was increasingly difficult to have an actual discussion about Trek. Discussion posts were drowned out between low-effort posts like memes and jokes and even if you did get a discussion prompt to garner some votes, the thread itself would have a bunch of jokes at the top, because jokes are easy to upvote. If you wanted actual discussion, you had to go hunt for it.

    On Lemmy, the meme subreddits have already taken off and so it’s unlikely that StarTrek@lemmy.world is going to be flooded with memes. StarTrek@lemmy.world is so small that if you posted a discussion prompt right now, it would very likely be the top post in the community for the next 24 hours.

    Now of course, there’s no guarantee that if you posted a discussion prompt in StarTrek@lemmy.world, the answers won’t be jokes and dismissive replies. For whatever reason, Trekkies love to respond with comments like “the real answer is ‘don’t think about it!’” which is mildly rude, honestly: if someone makes a thread about it, obviously they would like to think about it. But, outside of the very largest communities on Lemmy, there is so little comment activity that it’s easy enough to sift through the replies and discuss with people who would like to discuss.

    One could make a community that enforces Daystrom’s two key rules: only discussion prompts allowed, and no memes/jokes/dismissive comments. But daystrominstitute@startrek.website exists… and it’s pretty much dead. Enforcing these rules in a place as small as Lemmy comes across as heavy-handed.

    So, tl;dr if you want “Daystrom on Lemmy,” I invite you to post discussion prompts to StarTrek@lemmy.world.



  • I’m glad you liked it! From here on out I would just say watch The Next Generation. If you find that you’re struggling in seasons one and two, I recommend you skip around using the IMDB ratings. The good episodes in these seasons are few and far between, but are easy to spot by their score.

    Once you get to season 3 the show has found it’s voice: the the average episode is pretty good and the terrible episodes are mostly behind you. Mostly.