Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

[Mr. Racewar1488]

Time to post the only time Star Trek got patriotic.

1:07

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Time to post the only time Star Trek got patriotic.

Isn't Shatner Canadian?

 

[Captain Syrup]

Time to post the only time Star Trek got patriotic.

sssx.io_1783197982717.mp4

Anyone ever play "A Final Unity", a '90s CD-ROM point-and-click ST:TNG DOS vidya?

Couldn't figure it out and only did the beginning, although there is a lot of solar systems to visit that have no bearing on gameplay.

It's been decades since I played any of these games, so I'm not an authority on it, but I remember one of the 25th Anniversary titles had a lot of in-depth features (ex: emergency warp core ejections). And the TNG games were pretty similar.



The game discourages you from flying around with your thumb up your ass: random Romulan ships will attack, and the transporter room won't beam you anywhere besides M-class planets.



I wonder if they borrowed notes from that old floppy game Starflight? Starflight is interesting because although you can travel to many planets, some of them are so hostile that the lava or whatever will burn up your ship if you try.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

Time to post the only time Star Trek got patriotic.

sssx.io_1783197982717.mp4

These cavemen have fantastic hair for cavemen BTW.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Isn't Shatner Canadian?

Yes, but Kirk is from Iowa.

 

[Whiskey]

I don't know why but it makes me kinda sad that the closest thing we are likely to get to a classic star trek or even deep space nine is going to be a warhammer 40k series.

I guess roboute guilliman and that eldar leader are kinda like Kirk and Spock if you squint hard enough... maybe set a bolter to stun for an episode to work with the necron or something...

 

[Phillip Green]

Anyone ever play "A Final Unity", a '90s CD-ROM point-and-click ST:TNG DOS vidya?

Couldn't figure it out and only did the beginning, although there is a lot of solar systems to visit that have no bearing on gameplay.

Unlike the 25th Anniversary and Judgement Rites point-and-click games (which are better, despite being a little older and graphically less sophisticated), I don't think I've replayed A Final Unity since the mid-90's. I recall it was cool at the time because of the pseudo-3d ship combat system, but was otherwise clunky. I'm not sure if I ever finished it.

At the time we had instruction booklets that came with it to help get us started. Given you're probably working with an abandonware digital copy without all that useful accoutrements, you might want to refer to the strategy guide, at least through the first mission to get the plot moving.

 

[AmpleApricots]

In a Final Unity, you could also pick the crew members you wanted to take on away missions and it'd affect the story and outcome (and of course the spoken dialog), that was pretty neat for the time too. The goal of these games is not only to "solve" the mission, but also to act as starfleet as possible about it and you get an evaluation at the end of the mission, that was pretty cool.

I might be misremembering this but it's possible that there was a copy protection in form of a star map you needed to have in order to know where to go (?) at least in the TOS ones, not sure about Unity.

 

[Captain Syrup]

In a Final Unity, you could also pick the crew members you wanted to take on away missions and it'd affect the story and outcome (and of course the spoken dialog), that was pretty neat for the time too. The goal of these games is not only to "solve" the mission, but also to act as starfleet as possible about it and you get an evaluation at the end of the mission, that was pretty cool.

I might be misremembering this but it's possible that there was a copy protection in form of a star map you needed to have in order to know where to go (?) at least in the TOS ones, not sure about Unity.

So it's like a proto-paragon/renegade system. Hold doors open for people, don't call bug people slurs...



The other thing I sorta remember from the 25th Anniversary is there’s always this redshirt tagging along, and keeping Ensign Cumrag alive is its own puzzle.

 

[Flexo]

The other thing I sorta remember from the 25th Anniversary is there’s always this redshirt tagging along, and keeping Ensign Cumrag alive is its own puzzle.

NGL, a trek game where every mission is an escort mission and the real challenge is how many redshirts you can keep alive (like trek: Lemmings) sounds like it would be so many horrible factors it would loop back around to being rad.

 

[Hey Johnny Bravo]

NGL, a trek game where every mission is an escort mission and the real challenge is how many redshirts you can keep alive (like trek: Lemmings) sounds like it would be so many horrible factors it would loop back around to being rad.

There was a Trek/social media parody game that came out a few years ago called Redshirts which was more about your character surviving ridiculous circumstances.

 

[Midwit]

I vaguely recall there being some subspace fuckery involved in impulse drives.

I've seen reference to shuttles having "750 millicochrane impulse drivers", which would imply that the propulsion is provided by subspace fuckery rather than straight thrust.

 

[Sayer of the N-Word]

I can't imagine that impulse/"thrust" isn't some weird scifi process, ships like the Enterprise are the size of a small city, but they're zipping around star systems in a few hours and doing donuts in the parking lot after school's over.

 

[Gimmick Account]

I think they just work on the principle of whatever the episode needs and don't think about it.
With enough thrust you can get around the solar system in a matter of days. It's just usually more like years because you're trying to get bang for your buck with orbital mechanics. But with big fusion rockets you just point at a planet and press go. The mass of the ship doesn't really matter (it's just a term in the equation that means your ship mass is probably 99% fuel either way, as long as you have enough overall oomph to go quickly parabolic. The TWR of the engines themselves is almost always a negligible factor, to go back to something mentioned earlier).
Add to that inertial dampers so you don't pancake your crew accelerating and I suppose a few hours is feasible too. Not from like one side of pluto's orbit to the other but for a regular commute, why not.

But oh yeah, I remember the millicochrane shuttle thing and being annoyed by it.

My I rationalisation I guess would be that in-universe, they don't care, just like we don't when we recycle names for a lot of hardware. A tachyon arousal inversion cannon isn't a 17th century bronze cast tube artillery piece but we still call it a cannon because it's concise and the name is free real estate when black powder is obsolete. So the Enterprise A and shit might have had actual fusion rocket impulse drives, but 60 years later when even your toilet seat uses warp coils you just call anything meant for sublight that and make it glow red because it looks cool,
That makes even more sense when you consider how convenient it'd be when talking about any miscellaneous alien race you encounter each week with whatever various interchangeable technology their "impulse" engines might happen to be based on.

 

[Clown College 2nd Year]

I've seen reference to shuttles having "750 millicochrane impulse drivers", which would imply that the propulsion is provided by subspace fuckery rather than straight thrust.

It seems like I read some place that at higher impulse speeds a ship will generate a weak warp bubble to overcome the effects of relativity at speeds very close to the speed of light. So, ya there's some manipulation of subspace in some way. Also aren't millicochranes a measure of how much space/time is contracted to create a warp bubble?

 

[Phillip Green]

I can't imagine that impulse/"thrust" isn't some weird scifi process, ships like the Enterprise are the size of a small city, but they're zipping around star systems in a few hours and doing donuts in the parking lot after school's over.

The only quasi-canonical explanation (at least that I'm aware of) for how the impulse drive works comes from 1991's TNG Technical Manual, where it does mention warp fuckery as part of the design, at least for the Galaxy class:

During the early definition phase of the Ambassador class, it was determined that the combined vehicle mass of
the prototype NX-10521 could reach at least 3.71 million metric tons. The propulsive force available from the highest specific-impulse (/sneed) fusion engines available or projected fell far short of being able to achieve the 10 km/sec2 acceleration required. This necessitated the inclusion of a compact spacetime driver coil, similar to those standard in warp engine nacelles, that would perform a low-level continuum distortion without driving the vehicle across the warp threshold. The driver coil was already into computer simulation trials during the Ambassador class engineering phase and it was determined that a fusion-driven engine could move a larger mass than would normally be possible by reaction thrust alone, even with exhaust products accelerated to near lightspeed.

There's also fan theories that have the ship's inertial dampeners playing a role. The idea is they don't just prevent the crew from getting turned into red paste during 100g maneuvers, but also reduce the ship's effective "mass" and allow these relatively small fusion rockets to accelerate giant ships.