Link Thread

[Nate the Great]

An attempt to explain how the Federation can operate without money.


A valiant attempt, but I fail to see how such a thing would work without the government keeping track of umpteen other factors in your life that would be even more invasive and potentially destructive than just using money.



And that's just treating the Federation as an isolated ecosystem. But it's not, it deals with other races that do use money all the time. Converting all currency amounts into equivalent labor contracts would get overly invasive really quickly, and prolong the process even more.

[Nate the Great]

Death Battle features Sailor Mercury vs. Blue Ranger (Billy).


This is one of the more interesting matchups because the implied maximum power level of both combatants is far beyond anything shown on screen. I could write whole screeds on the potential abilities of both, but it would get too fanwanky.

[Nate the Great]

Fantasy casting a DS9 reboot


Interesting ideas, but I don't agree with some of these. Fantasy casting is outside my wheelhouse, so I'm not going to bore you with my choices.

[Nate the Great]

Irish People Try Freeze-Dried Fruit


Freeze-dried strawberries are a favorite of mine and I buy Honey Bunches of Oats that includes it from time to time, but the problem is that they're too expensive for everyday use.



Have any of you ever had freeze-dried ice cream? Great stuff, too bad it's also too expensive...

[DrWho42]

I got my artist friend Jacob Paik to do a doodle of the gorn captain:

twitter

[Nate the Great]

Epic Rap Battles of History: Ghostbusters vs Mythbusters


Well, that's something that happened...


And the depressing thing that I learned today was that not only is Grant Imahara dead, but so is Jessie Combs. I didn't know that she was a race driver on the side.

[Nate the Great]

10 Secrets of Deep Space 9


I knew about a few of these.


One question that forms in my mind is whether or not all of the Nor-class stations were designed to be ore processing stations.



It's also interesting to me that the only other Nor-class station we ever see, even in the expanded universe, is Empok Nor.



Okay, fine, Trexels features a third station, but I hardly think of mobile games as remotely canon.



As for the Frontier-class DS9-II in the novels, what's the point? By connecting the pylons into a gyroscope shape, you can't dock ships at them.

[Nate the Great]

TrekCulture presents the 10 best episodes to introduce Trek to newbies


City on the Edge of Forever

Amok Time

Q Who
Yesterday's Enterprise

Duet
Our Man Bashir
Scorpion
Year of Hell
Brother-I can't comment on Discovery
Second Contact-Seriously, what's a Lower Decks episode doing here?


Here's the thing: the "best" episodes aren't necessarily the ones you use to introduce someone to Trek, they usually have too much required knowledge to fully appreciate it. For example, I greatly enjoy "The Way of the Warrior", but you can't just show it to someone and have them understand everything.



Alternate universes and holodeck counterparts exist to subvert expectations of the characters, but if you don't know about how the characters work when they're normal, where's the impact?


I'd put episodes like "Conscience of the King" and "Who Watches the Watchers" above some of the ones on this list.

[Nate the Great]

A discussion of the visual effects in Flight of the Navigator


I haven't watched FOTN since I was a kid, it falls into the categories of "for a big chunk of the running time people think that a character is crazy" AND "the creators spend too much screentime showing off the effects to the detriment of the plot".

[Nate the Great]

So awhile back CGP Grey suggested that the solution to traffic is to make all cars self-driving so you don't need traffic signals.


If you don't want to watch his solution is basically making all cars self-driving and let their onboard computers talk to each other so all of them know where all the cars are.


You know, decades ago a magazine posited that we could build cars that had their engines in removable modules. Take out the module and now we have a car that can travel on a monorail track. Reach the end of the line and put a module back in for local driving. That makes more sense to me than what CGP Grey is suggesting.


Adam Something posted a rebuttal to CGP Grey's thinking. He brings up the valid points that CGP Grey ignored pedestrians and what he was actually proposing is more trains. Plus, y'know, if all cars are connected to the internet a terrorist could hack in and cause a lot of death and destruction from a great distance away.

[Nate the Great]

A TV Special about unsold TV pilots


Stay tuned for "Assignment Earth" and more Scott Bakula appearances than you would expect.

[Nate the Great]

The failed US pilot of Red Dwarf.


Yeah, I can see why it failed. I admit that my only knowledge of the original show comes from SF Debris, but even then I can see the problems. This thing goes through the motions of a story without real engagement and relies on one-liners to keep the audience awake.

[Nate the Great]

Certifiably Ingame explains spore drive


Wait a second...the idea is that there's a layer of subspace that's filled with magic fungus? And if a ship injects spores into the engines it can travel along said magic fungus? What have the Discovery writers been smoking?


Apparently at a quantum level there's no difference between biology and physics. This is ludicrous because at the quantum level there is no biology at all, all biological functions operate at scales far larger than quanta.


Also it seems that Discovery can activate spore drive while at warp. Also ludicrous. Say that this stupid fungus dimension is F, subspace is S, and normal space is N. Warp drive is designed to go N->S and S->N and spore drive is designed to go N->F and F->N. To go S->F or F->S requires a third kind of drive.



I could go on and on, but I'm not in the mood. Sufficed to say, I have another reason to never watch Discovery.

[Nate the Great]

I never watched Digimon Xros Wars but there's a scene where the previous main characters appear and their Digimon go to their most powerful forms. Is there some dimension-hopping going on here? Who knows.



I fell away from Digimon after Frontier. Data Squad never really hooked me, except to remind me that the theme song sounds more like Pokemon music than Digimon music.

[Nate the Great]

(Aside before the main link, Joanne Linville AKA the female Romulan Commander AKA Liviana Charvanek died June 20th at age 93.)


Discussing the issue of female captains in TOS.



Of course the simplest answer is just that Lester is insane (which she was) and Kirk wasn't in the mood to argue the point.

[Nate the Great]

I return to the "Voyager contacts home" clip from "Pathfinder" every now and then, but a comment really got to me. "Reg Barclay is like the Neville Longbottom of the Star Trek universe. He starts out extremely awkward and clumsy, but in the end proves to be a hero."


I only read the first four Harry Potter books and I think I only watched the first five movies, but even so, I can see where that came from. It also got me wondering how the Harry Potter characters would do as Starfleet officers (sans magic, of course).

[Nate the Great]

Compilation of times Weird Al voiced cartoon versions of himself.


I'm kinda surprised that the Weasel Stomping Day music video from Robot Chicken isn't included.

[Nate the Great]

Courtesy of Facebook: A photo of Sean Astin with a stack of movies that he's starred in.


I get that most people these days know him from Goonies or Lord of the Rings or Stranger Things, but I remember him best from the Disney made-for-TV movie The BRAT Patrol. You can watch it on YouTube. I have fond memories of the Wonderful World of Disney, my parents taped most of the '80s entries.



And if you're wondering, it was released on VHS, so it could be in the stack. I can only find UK copies online, but I have seen rental store copies of the other Disney TV movies of the era, so I'm sure there's a US version also. I still have my VCR copy.



I do recommend The BRAT Patrol. It's a typical gang of misfits vs the smug organized club movie. Sean Astin plays your typical Zach Morris/Ferris Bueller type who can talk his way out of trouble, but he does it well. Stay tuned for the Brian Keith cameo.

[Nate the Great]

A comparison of the sizes of fictional starships


Some of the ships shown are absolutely ridiculous in size. If the E-D needs a thousand people on it, how could you have some of these ships without millions of people on board? How could you possibly coordinate all of the tasks that would have to be done? Furthermore, some of these ships are large enough to have their own ecosystems that you'd have to tie into the ship's functions.


EDIT: In the comments the question arose whether a Star Destroyer could destroy a Dyson Sphere. I think no, it would just punch a hole in the Sphere. You'd have to build the Sphere to be able to handle anything inside AND outside it, including comet impacts. The thing generates its own gravitational pull, after all. You'd have to have a million Star Destroyers firing inward from all directions to destroy a Dyson Sphere.

[Nate the Great]

MetalBallStudios does videos on many categories of fictional things, so here are some more that involve Star Trek things:


Fictional Buildings (Millennium Gate)
I'm surprised that this guy remembered the Millennium Gate.



Fictional Planets (Romulus, Vulcan, Qo'noS)
FYI: We have no other name for Romulus for some reason. At least its sister planet could be Remus or Romii. Vulcan of course is also known as 40 Eridani A (you see that name a lot in the pre-TNG novels). I will never call the planet Ni'Var. Qo'nos has the alternate spelling of Q'onos, and some weirdos call the place Kling.



Star Trek Starships
I don't like the mixing up of starship classes and names in this one. We don't even have proof that there was a USS Miranda or USS Soyuz. Furthermore, while the TOS Romulan Bird of Prey never had it's class named on screen, the expanded universe called it Vas Hatham class or T'liss class. Plus there is no "Constitution II" class, only Constitution class refit or Enterprise class. And what is the Andromeda Ascendent doing in a Star Trek video? At least they had the V'ger cloud at correct scale for being 82 AU, even if that was ridiculously big compared to the Enterprise (or the solar system itself).