Making Sense of Star Trek 3: the Classes of Axanar

In my previous post on this subject I defined the various ship classes of Star Trek and their roles within the fleet. Now I'm going to return to where I began this series by explaining how the ship designs of Prelude to Axanar just make sense to me (unlike those of later Treks).

We're going to ignore the Klingon ships, because let's be honest, most fans care more about the Federation ships anyway.

One of the things which I noticed is that the saucers on the first four ship classes, i.e. the ones which existed prior to the Four Years' War (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, go watch Prelude again) have the same radius. Look at the measurements under the names: the first is length, the second is width, and the third is depth. Notice that the second measurement of all four ships is the same: 122 meters. Notice that the nacelles don't extend out further than the saucer, either.

Why is this important? Because it means Starfleet was using standardized saucer sections across ship classes. I don't know about you, but I think that's brilliant, because it suggests to me that Starfleet had standardized specifications for hulls, nacelles, etc and instead of designing a ship wholecloth they just plugged parts into a design to get what they wanted.

Yes, they got the name wrong. I'm guessing there was a last-minute naming convention swap between the Hermes and the Geronimo (see below). 

The USS Hermes, on the far left, is a frigate. (See this post for an explanation of what that means.) It has one engine, meaning it's not very powerful (see my explanation of nacelles = boilers here.) It's obviously a scout which has been retrofitted for war by attaching a weapons "roll bar" to the top of the saucer in order to give it the ability to fire photon torpedoes.

The joy of this is that classes are now configurable for their missions. Do you need a Fast Frigate? Add a second nacelle to the top (this would obviously not be compatible with the rollbar). Need an Endurance Frigate? Add a secondary hull instead... you know, like the USS Kelvin.

Image found on Pinterest. 

Want a ship with the power of two engines that can also shoot photon torpedoes? No problem, that's the destroyer USS Magellan, just move the mounting points over to accommodate two nacelles on the ventral side and integrate the photorp launcher into the saucer, right above the impulse engines and ready to absorb energy straight from engineering. You can easily see how this design became the USS Reliant.

Want a destroyer with more endurance? Just put a secondary hull onto it and call it the USS Korolev, a light cruiser. Now it has more flexibility, more sensor power, more small craft.

I'm sure some of you are wondering why it has a notch cut out of the saucer. I contend that it's there to add visual distinction to the design, because otherwise it would be confused with the Magellan class. It already looks like a Magellan with a secondary hull, so adding a cutout increases its visual distinctiveness. It's bad reasoning for a navy, but it makes perfect sense for a movie.

Talking about saucer cutouts brings us to the USS Geronimo (erroneously labeled the Hermes in this picture. I don't know why they decided to halve its primary hull, as its double secondary hulls and dorsal nacelles (a design not seen again until the Constitution) looks plenty distinctive already. I truly can't explain why they gave up so much valuable real estate. But if you look at the top-down picture where the photorp launcher is, you can see that the dome on top of it is in almost exactly the same place as the one on the photorp launcher of the Magellan.

See, I told you they switched the names. 

That one very odd quirk notwithstanding, I really like this ship. It's clearly a medium cruiser and it seems optimized for two things:

1. Science operations, with its double forward sensor arrays in the navigational deflector dishes of the secondary hulls;
2. Small craft operations, with a plenty of room for shuttles (and Fast Attack Craft in wartime) in its deep double shuttlebays. 

In other words, it's a carrier that also doubles as a sensor platform -- all the better to coordinate small craft attacks and carry out electronic warfare during battles. 

All of this uniformity of design changed during the war, because as per Prelude to Axanar, the Klingons were handily defeating Federation ships in all battles which necessitated a bespoke design. Still, you can see how the design of the USS Ares is an example of "Like the Korolev, only moreso" with its longer secondary hull and more widely-placed nacelles.

Of course, everyone knows this lady. The Constitution class is certainly dramatic looking, with her long goose neck and swept back nacelles.

From a tactical standpoint, these design choices don't make sense, but it's worth repeating that the Enterprise was designed, first and foremost, to have a striking and unique design for a visual medium. In that sense the designer Matt Jeffries succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, as the Enterprise is still iconic 50 years later. This is, unfortunately, also where Starfleet designs stop making sense to me, with far more exposed parts and each class a custom design with a unique hull configuration.

Thank you for riding with me on this in-depth geek-out regarding the ship classes of Starfleet. I hope you had fun! Leave your comments below. 

Making Sense of Star Trek 2: Classes Defined

See part 1 here.

What's a destroyer? Is it larger than a frigate or smaller? What purpose does it serve within a fleet? These are the kinds of questions that this article will attempt to answer. But first, a few caveats:

1. I am not an expert on naval terminology. However, this isn't that big a deal, because...
2. ... a lot of naval terms aren't consistent even within the same country's navy, let alone across the fleets of different nations. 
3. There's a difference between surface ships and space ships, obviously, including their roles. 
4. Therefore, this article's purpose is make sense of Starfleet and to be internally consistent throughout, not to be consistent with other navies. 
5. I'm going to be using military terminology (because navies are military) which may be a little jarring to some people who believe the fiction that Starfleet isn't a military. 

Classes, Listed

Starting with the smallest actual warp-capable vessel and going to largest:

• Fast Attack Craft
• Corvettes
• Frigates
• Destroyers
• Cruisers
• Capital Ships

DISCLAIMER: In no way is this chart canonical.
It is, however, the best reference I've found so far. 

Classes, Defined

Fast Attack Craft

On Earth we know these as Gunboats, Patrol Boats, Torpedo Boats, etc. In Star Trek, they are shuttle-sized ships that have warp capability, phasers and/or torpedoes, and a crew of 1-2. FACs have a high impulse speed due to their small mass, but their warp speed is based upon their mission. For example, a FAC designed for patrol will have a lower-rated warp rating, trading maximum speed for endurance, whereas a FAC meant for high-speed attack will be capable of much faster bursts of speed but for a much smaller amount of time, greatly reducing its range. 

Examples of this are the Federation attack fighter and Maquis fighters, as well as the Danube-class Runabout when equipped with a weapons pod. 

Corvettes

Corvettes are the first of what you would consider actual ships instead of "boats" or "craft". They have a bridge instead of a cockpit, a captain* instead of a pilot, and an actual crew complement, but they are still quite small in comparison to typical Starfleet ships. Compared to other ships, corvettes are lightly armed and armored (this includes shield strength) and are suited only for specialized roles. Within those roles, they do an exemplary job, but outside of them they are completely inadequate.

Examples are the Maquis Raider and the Oberth-class science vessel. A Klingon Bird of Prey might be a corvette, depending on which size it is; see Bird of Prey Size Paradox. 

* By which I mean "holding the position of ship's captain" rather than "holding the rank of Captain". An actual Captain would not be in command of such a small ship; it's far more likely that this would be the first command of a Commander. See Starfleet Commissioned Officer ranks for more information. 

Frigates

While the corvette is the smallest class of ship, the frigate is the smallest ship you'd want to take into battle. In fact, it's the smallest of the Ships of the Line, "the Line" referencing a wet-navy tactic of the 17th to 19th century in which ships would form in columns (aka The Line) and sail past each other while delivering volley fire from their broadside cannons.

Being warships, frigates effectively outgun anything that doesn't belong to another military; however, being lightly armed, they don't do well against heavier military ships unless there are a lot more frigates than enemy ships. Fortunately, frigates are rather easy to build, which means that wolfpack or swarm tactics are an effective option. In a defensive role, they make great escort ships, either protecting merchant convoys or screening, which is preventing other ships (FACs, corvettes, and possibly larger ships if there are enough frigates) from overwhelming the larger, slower ships in the fleet. In peacetime, frigates make excellent anti-piracy patrollers and long-distance scouts.

Examples are the USS Kelvin and the Hermes and Saladin classes. Based on its size and crew complement, the Saber-class is probably also a frigate.

Destroyers
A destroyer can be summed up as "an average warship". It has good speed, endurance, weapons and defenses, but it is slower than a frigate (which it outguns) and faster than a cruiser (which outguns it). As the name says, the purpose of destroyers is to destroy things, and usually those things are specified within the ship's mission. For example, some destroyers might be optimized to battle swarms of smaller craft like FACs but be unable to hold their own against frigates; others might be glass cannons, designed to destroy larger vessels but unable to defend themselves effectively. Pairing a destroyer with several frigates makes a useful fighting element where the strengths of one class compensate for the weaknesses of the other.

The USS Defiant is both an excellent and terrible example of the class. On the one hand, it is specifically designed to destroy ships larger than itself; on the other hand, it is both smaller than expected (sized more like a frigate) and punches well above its weight (it fights more like a cruiser). The USS Prometheus is also likely a destroyer, although its size in comparison to other Starfleet vessels, as well as its crew complement, is unknown; this assumption is based on the ship being designed for "deep space tactical missions", i.e. battle, and its ability to split into three elements for said battle.

Other examples are hard to come by, as the writers of Star Trek like to think that Starfleet isn't a military and therefore don't have dedicated warships, the Defiant and Prometheus notwithstanding. However, hazarding a guess based on ship size, crew complement, and armament that even the Enterprise lacks -- dual aft torpedoes and fore/aft "mega phasers" affixed to the weapons "rollbar" -- the Miranda-class USS Reliant could be a large destroyer. Ships of similar volume and known to be used in wartime are the USS Centaur and the Constellation-class.

The Pasteur is another good atypical example; even though its size makes it more like a light cruiser, its highly specialized mission as a hospital ship (i.e. a destroyer that doesn't destroy anything) means it relies on support ships for protection in fleet operations.

Cruisers
Interestingly enough, cruisers are hard to define in terms of size because in both real life and in Star Trek there are several types of cruiser: light, medium, and heavy (sometimes known as battlecruisers or "pocket battleships"). In light of this I have chosen to define a Starfleet cruiser as "any starship larger than a destroyer which is capable of operating independently of a fleet or other support vessels for a sustained period of time." Cruisers have a good mix of offensive and defensive capabilities (see "operate independently") and can be good "jack-of-all-trades" ships.

The ur-example of a Starfleet cruiser is the Constitution-class USS Enterprise, and the Excelsior might have been a heavy cruiser of its time (if so, it's a perfect representation of the pocket battleship); in the TNG era, the increased size of ships would result in it being downgraded to a medium cruiser at best. Intrepid-class explorers are an excellent example of a TNG-era light cruiser, with both the Ambassador and Akira classes filling the role of medium cruiser and Nebula-classes as heavy cruisers.

Capital Ships
This is another name which is sure to cause dissension within the ranks of hard-core Star Trek aficionados, but what else would you call the Enterprise-E, a ship bristling with planet-busting weapons and by itself able to turn the tide of battle against a Borg cube, or its even larger predecessor the Enterprise-D? These ships are unquestionably the flagship of any fleet action and often have battle groups built around them.

"These characteristics define a capital ship: if the capital ships are beaten, the navy is beaten. But if the rest of the navy is beaten, the capital ships can still operate. Another characteristic that defines capital ships is that their main opponent is each other." - William S. Lind, America Can Win, p. 90

The capabilities of capital ships are well-known thanks to seven seasons of The Next Generation and subsequent movies. Their main drawbacks are being slower than smaller ships (the Enterprise-E has a maximum speed of Warp 8) and a vulnerability to being swarmed by smaller vessels. Even with their ability to engage multiple opponents at once, too many ships can overwhelm their defense grid if they are attacked on multiple vectors simultaneously. Eventually a capital ship becomes a large, slow-moving target, and while some of the swarming ships will undoubtedly be destroyed, enough will get through and do damage. After all, that's how the Federation defeated the Borg cube in First Contact.

Next
In my next post I'll show my work and explain how all of this ties in to Prelude to Axanar. 

Making Sense of Star Trek

So I've been thinking about Star Trek recently. It's actually something I do a lot, despite the fact I don't talk about it much, and the reason I don't talk about it a lot is because while I can enjoy the series for what it is, there's still a part of my brain that wants to make it into a role-playing game.

And I'm sure some of you are wondering Well, what's the problem with that, Erin? There have been many role-playing games set in the Star Trek universe. Just use one of those. Except the problem with that suggestion is that when you start digging into it -- as a GM must do in order to make a setting into a role-playing game -- there are things about it which make no sense whatsoever.

No, I don't mean the things you're expecting, like all the anachronisms or the technology that's basically miraculous. I'm not even talking about the numerous discontinuities within the setting (although that's something else I'd have to eventually deal with).

No, in this case I'm talking about starship design. Look at the various Federation designs since Next Generation came out. Why are some sleek and some squat? Why do some ships have warp nacelles that rise up from the engineering hull, and why do some have nacelles that curve down?

Why even build the Galaxy class when the Nebula class has 90% of its capability plus a configurable mission pod plus a much smaller cross-section (a definite advantage in combat)?

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/nebula.htm

And don't even get me started on Trek's ship classification system wherein they apparently think that a frigate (traditionally smaller than a destroyer) is second in size only to a cruiser.

This is the kind of thing which bothers me when I'm trying to sleep.

And then, I re-discovered Prelude to Axanar. I'd seen it before, of course, and was awed at how amazing it was in terms of writing and special effects. But when I saw it again, I noticed something else which floored me: the ships made sense. 

If you haven't seen it yet, you must. Clear 21 minutes from your calendar and watch this masterpiece fictional documentary.

If you don't have the time or desire, then just watch this clip of absolutely gorgeous ships fighting each other.

I have a bunch of thoughts trying to get out all at once, and I'll try to make sense of them for you.

First, you need to understand that Gene Roddenberry is a World War 2 veteran. He flew in the Air Force (the Army Air Corps at the time), which partly explains why there are so many officers onboard Federation ships and not many enlisted. His understanding of the Navy also seems rooted in that area, and it carried over into Star Trek.

For example, the warp nacelles. They are ostensibly mounted on struts because they are dangerously radioactive and they might need to be ejected. However, this makes no sense to anyone who knows that there's an antimatter reactor at the heart of all Starfleet ships and no one seems to give two flips about how dangerous, explosive, and radioactive that obviously is...

... except hold up one minute. The whole antimatter core is fully a product of the motion picture series and later TV shows. In the original 1966-1969 series there was no reference to any reactor at all! Dilithium crystals, yes, and they were somehow necessary for powering the ship, but it wasn't explained. It was all very vague. In fact, if you look at the engineering room in TOS it almost looks like that nacelles are the reactors, feeding down to engineering to distribute power across the rest of the ship.

http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=142

Once you realize that Roddenberry has simply extrapolated 1940s and 1950s technology into space, suddenly things make more sense. For example, the nacelles are quite obviously boilers, machines which power the ship and everything else on board. Without it, a ship cannot move, fire, or do anything else.

Boilers are also hot and dangerous, which explains why Roddenberry would want them kept away from the crew. And of course, the more boilers you have, the faster and more powerful the ship is, which means that more nacelles mean a beefier ship and therefore fewer nacelles mean a weaker one. Some of you no doubt recall the old one-nacelle Saladin class ship from Franz Joseph's Star Fleet Technical Manual and others the Larson class from the old FASA Star Trek RPG as examples of ships both smaller and weaker than the Enterprise, but if you want something more canonical, how about the TNG-era Freedom class or the alternate timeline USS Kelvin? And in the opposite direction, we have the four-nacelled Cheyanne, Constellation and Prometheus ships.

How does this all tie in with Prelude to Axanar? This article is already getting long, so I'll save that explanation for next time, but here's a teaser:

Brain Squirrels

Let me tell you about brain squirrels.

Have you ever been just doing your thing, minding your own business, when out of nowhere you get a crazy idea or mad urge to do something and your brain just seizes upon it like a drowning man grabbing hold of a rescue line and refuses to let go? And for the rest of the day (or longer) your brain is obsessed with it, working out the how without even bothering to wonder about the why?

That's a brain squirrel. Although mine often turn into brain hamsters because they just love to run on that squeaky wheel inside my brain, which is how I envision my mind trying to turn a weird idea into something actionable.

Why do I bring this up? I'm glad you asked.

You see, for several months now I've been having this nagging desire to run a Star Trek role-playing game. Now normally this would not be a problem, however:

1. I already have a perfectly good science fiction RPG (Traveller) on the back burner. I really do want to finish that campaign before I start another one similar to it. 
2. I haven't seen every episode of every series out there. This is a problem because, as we all know, Trekkies are HUGE canon mavens and someone will inevitably reference something I haven't seen. 
• Best case scenario: I have to pause the game to look things up. 
• Worst case scenario: canon conflicts with my adventure and I have to change things. 
3. Speaking of which, the canon is inconsistent, sometimes even within the same series, and is often contradictory or flat-out nonsensical. 
• For a perfect example of this: How many decks does the Enterprise-E have?
4. I'd go mad trying to reconcile it all, and if I force things to make sense I'll end up re-writing the universe so drastically that it will look like a cross between The Orville and Battlestar Galactica.
• How drastically? If I go down that road, I end up with an alternate universe where the Klingons don't use Cloaking Devices, Starfleet divisions have a fourth color, transporters use quantum tunneling to briefly co-locate people rather than turn them into energy, replicators can't create anything more complex than macromolecules, and it's impossible to have battles at warp speed unless your warp fields touch.
• Then I start adding things like "Every Starfleet vessel aboard a certain class needs a dedicated Diplomatic Officer" because being a good captain != being a good diplomat. This Diplomatic Officer might, or might not, also work for Starfleet Intelligence...
• At which point it isn't Star Trek. It's at best a Trek-flavored knock-off.

And yet, despite these very good reasons why I shouldn't do it, my brain squirrel-hamsters have decreed that I must as the very least figure out how to run a Star Trek RPG. That shouldn't be so hard, right? There have been no fewer than four licensed and therefore official RPG adaptions (by FASA, Last Unicorn Games, Decipher, and Modiphius) and approximately umpty-bajillion unofficial ones, so I clearly have an embarrassment of riches from which I can select a game engine, right?

Right?

Hahahahah. I scoff at your logic. My brain squirrels have declared that none of the existing Star Trek RPGs are suitable for how I'd want to run things, which means that to make the squeaking wheel in my head stop I'll have to design my own. 

Gentlefolk, this is how Game Masters go mad.

Catching an ST:D

I'm not letting that joke go. You can pry it from my cold, dead hands. 

Over the last week, I've watched 5 entire seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and just today I watched all three JJ Abrams movies. This helped me get a perspective on where Trek has been, and where it's going.

On the night of its release, I watched the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery and and the third episode of The Orville. Suffice it to say, I had a much better time on one of those three episodes.

I feel that it's necessary, before I begin properly, to point out that there's a strawman argument going on right now amongst critics of critics of ST:D's marketing. The story goes that people are objecting to the diversity of ST:D's cast, and that it would be a real (irony here) shame if Trek were to have a cast that included a black woman, a Russian, a Japanese man, a Scotsman, and a half-human, or if it were to have a blind man and a formerly hostile alien race on the bridge. That's an excellent point, but it's countering an argument that no significant number of people actually have. No one is objecting to a diverse cast in Star Trek. Trek has always had a diverse cast, even when it wasn't 'safe' to do so. Rather, people are objecting to the show being marketed as "good because it's diverse" when Trek has always simply been diverse without having a brass band trumpeting it from the heavens of Hollywood's finest spin rags.

With that out of the way, what did I think?

I'm torn. Had you removed the Starfleet livery, called the "Klingons" something else, and just called it Discovery, I might have felt very differently. Much like The Orville, this could have worked as a tribute to Trek while making an entirely new IP. But being in Trek's playground, this just doesn't work, for a number of reasons.

While there may be inconsistencies between the Kelvin Timeline (of the Abrams movies) and vintage Trek's Prime Timelikne, there is a very good reason for that. The Narada Incident irreparably changed the timeline, with highly advanced and experimental technology being introduced in a very public and very messy way hundreds of years before it should have been developed. This accelerated both the technological level of advancement (which is why the Kelvin Enterprise is larger than Picard's Sovereign class Enterprise) and historical events (Kirk taking command, the Khan incident). However, Discovery takes place mere years after Star Trek: Enterprise -- long before the timeline was disrupted -- so there's no explanation for certain things that don't fit, including:

• The robot (?) woman on the bridge of the Shenzhou when Lt. Commander Data was the first AI in Starfleet. 
• The use of holographic communicators, when they were at an experimental phase in the later years of Deep Space 9. 
• The design of Burnham's space suit being lighter and thinner than suits shown in series that take place over a hundred years later. 
• The Klingons possessing a cloaking device when those were obtained from the Romulans during Kirk's service.

Another common complaint that I see is that Trek shouldn't focus on war and that Discovery is dropping us into a war in the first episode. I'd be a hypocrite myself if I said Trek shouldn't handle war, as DS9 is my favourite series, but it needs to be handled properly. DS9 spent years setting up the characters and the setting, letting us get to know the crew, before they raised the stakes and had us invested in their experiences. DS9, in short, earned their war.

Then there's the things that are just inconsistent in and of themselves. For example, the Klingons:

• Their language seems to have changed fundamentally. Despite there already being an entire existing language for the Klingons, they're speaking something that doesn't sound at all like the Klingon language, with such a stilted cadence to their speech that it makes them difficult to listen to.
• Visually, they've changed again. They don't look anything like the Prime timeline (which the show claims to be part of) or the Kelvin timeline Klingons (which expanded the bone ridges across the head, but retained the iconic visuals). They look like they're wearing misshapen cockroaches on their heads. 
• The Captain and First Officer speaking loudly to each other about not violating General Order One (aka the Prime Directive - do not interfere in the natural development of a pre-warp species) while in the hatchery of a pre-warp species on their way to interfere with the natural development of that species? 
• And how is a mind meld from years ago allowing a Vulcan to communicate telepathically across light-years?

There were a few things I liked, although most of them were undercut by the end of the second episode. I adored Captain Philippa Georgiou and the Shenzhou. The ship was quite well-designed, and Michelle Yeoh's performance was top-notch. She had the perfect blend of mature serenity and well-earned smugness, with a French name and a decidedly not-French origin that reminded me quite a bit of Captain Picard. Had the show followed her, I felt she could have become a fine proto-Picard figure, and seeing her use a phase rifle as a tool early in the episode, even if it was in violation of the Prime Directive, was pleasing as well. I was also fond of Doug Jones's alien Lt. Saru, the highly intelligent and highly bent on self-preservation attitude providing a smile.

The show is inconsistent with its pre-release messaging as well, considering that the Klingons were billed as a very clear analogue for Trump voters and the emphasis on diversity. The main character, Burnham - a black woman with a male first name raised by Vulcans - gets chewed out by a white male Admiral for judging by race, by which she responds to 'not confuse race with culture' - something that critics of Islam frequently have to say to progressive accusations of Islamophobia. In short, ST:D is so woke it comes back out the other side, as the episode climax is brown-skinned religious zealots destroying a ship called Europa headed by a white man by driving a vehicle into it. In trying to build the perfect analogue of Trump voters, it crashed headlong into every ugly stereotype of people from the Middle East.

The most frustrating part, though, is I have no idea if these criticisms will stand. Burnham -- whom I dislike as she's written basically like Sheldon from Big Bang Theory -- is seemingly the only returning cast member come episode 3, when she joins the crew of an entirely new ship with a new captain. The show might take a completely new direction, or it may hang on tightly to all of the complaints I have with it.

It's almost a shame I won't know, as I have no intentions of paying CBS $7 a month to watch one show that I don't know if I'll be invested in and still have to watch commercials on CBS All Access, and I can't help but feel that's not a coincidence. Internally, ST:D will be judged by how many account sign-ups it garners for CBS, but that's not data we'll ever see. Instead, we'll see that The Orville, which airs on the same night that ST:D premiered, got significantly higher ratings. And maybe that was the plan all along.

I'm going back to re-watching DS9. I still have a season and a half to get through before I start a new job.

Salem Watches Television: An Unexpected Discovery

Wooo that was a misleading title, wasn't it?

I love Star Trek. Not to the extent of my big three, which are Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, and Mystery Science Theater 3000, but in the eternal debate of Star Wars vs Star Trek, I'll always pick Trek. I remember seeing some of the movies when I was visiting my dad's family in Boston as a wee one, catching reruns in the afternoon, and staying up late to watch The Next Generation and Deep Space 9.

I still haven't (and most likely never will) finish watching Voyager. I keep meaning to watch the last two seasons of Enterprise, but can never find the time for it. I suppose this is for the best; those series will never reach the brilliance of story-telling that DS9 did, so I'll let them go.

I even enjoy the relaunch movies to an extent. Into Darkness was still visually pleasing despite being inferior to its inspiration, and it's a shame that nobody saw Beyond, because it was a lot of fun

What am I getting at with this nostalgic reminiscence? Well, Star Trek: Discovery will be coming out soon... I think. I say "I think" because I actually have no intention of watching it -  not from some misguided boycott or sense of betrayal or anything like that, but just out of a lack of interest. I've kept up with behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt on the series, and given the re-writing, re-casting, and overall mess that's been going on around it, I just don't see a reason to get invested.

I've seen public statements that have been comparing the Klingons in ST:D (and who thought that abbreviation was a good idea?) to both Muslims and "Trump's America", and which celebrated the gender and racial diversity of the main cast, but there has been absolutely no confidence shown whatsoever in the actual writing of the show.



ST:D (I'm not going to stop calling it that) just does not look interesting at all. Something which has caught my eye - though in a very surprising way - is The Orville.

That's... a nice ride.

I hate Family Guy. I viscerally hate it. I don't think I've ever enjoyed something that's had the creative hand of Seth MacFarlane on it; there's just something about his humour that doesn't click with me. So when I heard he was making something of a comedic tribute to Star Trek, I decided I was going to just stick to ST:D and be done with it.

Except for two things:

1. ST:D is going to be on CBS All-Access, and I can't really think of anything else on CBS I want to watch, so I don't really want to pay for a subscription service for one show. I have a feeling this is going to be a fairly common sentiment as well, so a large portion of ST:D's audience is going to be torrenters, downloaders, and pirates. 
2. The Orville is... actually pretty good. 

That last one was a shocker to me. I wasn't going to watch The Orville, but given how many people on my timeline were singing its praises, I gave it a shot. The effects aren't bad (a plus, given how it will save on budget with its minimalist style and slightly cheap CGI); the writing isn't over-the-top inexplicable Family Guy humour; the acting is serviceable; and most importantly, it's got heart.

While I feel that ST:D is going to be a lot of super-serious people pulling super-serious faces while bashing us over the head with a Trump-hammer painted in a vaguely Klingon-esque manner, The Orville promises a light-hearted space adventure somewhere between TNG and Galaxy Quest. And really, I think that's what I want right now. I think that's what a lot of people want right now, if the ratings are any indication. 

"Are they right? Am I out of touch? No... it's the viewers."

Here's to you, Seth. While Trek may be lost to heavy-handed message fiction, you've earned a chance. Don't waste it.