[Psionics] [Space] Psi Trek - Worldbuilding

[Flyndaran]

Trelane was overtly a confused child. Why must his words on Earth history that we know is askew be taken at face value?
He could easily have mixed up all sorts of periods making any single statement about his aesthetic incomplete at best.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Trelane was overtly a confused child. Why must his words on Earth history that we know is askew be taken at face value?
He could easily have mixed up all sorts of periods making any single statement about his aesthetic incomplete at best.

Trelane's confusion is beside the issue. It is Kirk and Spock's confusion that contradicts the typical dating of Star Trek.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Trelane was overtly a confused child. Why must his words on Earth history that we know is askew be taken at face value?
He could easily have mixed up all sorts of periods making any single statement about his aesthetic incomplete at best.

Jaeger pointed out that Gothos was 900 light years from Earth, and that Trelane was essentially looking through a powerful telescope. Kirk says that Trelane was looking at events 900 years past. They're the ones who establish the date, not Trelane.

The issue is simply that the producers hadn't established exactly when Star Trek took place, so various writers sometimes slipped in their own ideas. Consistent world-building was not a point of the original Star Trek series; the Federation, Starfleet, and Earth of the future were just a scaffolding on which to hang various plots and ideas.

[Flyndaran]

Okay, it has been a while since I saw that episode. But still, Kirk's knowledge of history shouldn't be taken for expert, right?
I certainly agree that Star Trek often tossed out science well known in the 60s for story or writers' ignorance and misunderstanding of scale.

[Stormcrow]

JAEGER: Notice the period, Captain. Nine hundred light years from Earth. It's what might be seen through a viewing scope if it were powerful enough.

TRELANE: Ah, yes. I've been looking in on the doings on your lively little Earth.

KIRK: Then you've been looking in on the doings nine hundred years past.

Whether their knowledge of history was exact, I'm sure their knowledge of astronomy is excellent. It's hard to run a starship without it.

I don't see how this can be interpreted any other way. "The period," the decor of Trelane's house, is what might be seen by a powerful "viewing scope" nine hundred light years away, because it took the light nine hundred years to get there.

We've taken this topic off track, though. Suffice it to say that later Star Trek fixes the timeline rather firmly, and any aberrations in the original and animated Star Trek series must simply be considered apocryphal.

According to the philosophy of this topic, I wouldn't worry about it. Don't copy the Star Trek timeline, just create your own. Or don't! To really recreate the original Star Trek feel, maybe just create the vaguest of outlines for your history that you can hang adventure seeds off of.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

My point is not that you can't find a way to include psionic technology in Star Trek; it's that there's no sign that such technology exists. I think most people would find such technology to be too jarring to exist in a setting that is supposed to emulate Star Trek. "But I don't need a psychic connection to my phaser!"

OK, just checking, but have you read GURPS Psi-Tech? Your words give me the impression that either you haven't, or this is another area where you're interpreting things rather differently than I am.

In the Psi Trek setting, I'm thinking that in most cases, the psychic connection is below the level where it's noticeable in-game most of the time, unless you're doing something specific that requires it.

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Trelane makes a point of admiring Napoleon, and Napoleon did most of his thing in the 19th century. Trelane thinks that Napoleon is relatively contemporary.

OK, the very early nineteen century, then. The point, which I think we both agree on, is that the writers really didn't care about what dates other writers had used. I'm not happy that we've spent this many posts discussing this tangent, but I don't blame you for it.



Do we have any consensus on whether we want to just create a new timeline for the 'Genetics Wars' (or whatever we end up calling them), or use something based on TOS , or TNG? Do we want to further discuss that?

EDIT: I don't really expect us to have a consensus on this yet, but I'd really rather we were discussing that, instead of going in circles around the unfortunate fact that most American TV writers have historically not cared about continuity anywhere near as much as fans do.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

Do we have any consensus on whether we want to just create a new timeline for the 'Genetics Wars' (or whatever we end up calling them), or use something based on TOS , or TNG? Do we want to further discuss that?

I would suggest to leave that for the time being and circle back to it later. It seems to be something in the distant past, and going by its relevance in Star Trek movies, was the set-up for a couple of movie plots but not significant to how the setting looked.

Instead, focus on what you want to see in the current day of the setting first, then you can think about what things in the timeline might be necessary to get there. (That is, if you end up *needing* a detailed timeline.)

[PTTG]

Let's consider the purpose of the genetics wars in the first place -- I believe they mainly serve to explain why no modern states are dominant parts of Earth politics, and to establish the end of modern economic systems.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Let's consider the purpose of the genetics wars in the first place -- I believe they mainly serve to explain why no modern states are dominant parts of Earth politics, and to establish the end of modern economic systems.

Um, that wasn't my reasoning (as noted, I wanted to include a justification for a Safe-Tech future), but if they're devastating enough (the Post-Atomic Horror, with the possible addition of engineered diseases), that is certainly a plausible effect. Star Trek is a post-After The End setting (that is, one where an ATE scenario happened, and then humanity recovered), and I intend that Psi Trek is, as well. Depending on how the wars go, and when they take place, Earth may have off-world colonies that can help them recover, or the off-world colonies may be dying out as a result of being cut off from supplies they need to get from Earth.

The degree of devastation probably varies widely, but as I don't have ATE right now (and am short on funds), I don't intend to go into a lot of detail about that. The basic idea is that there are a few places where things are actually going fairly well at the local level, people are able to feed themselves and even have some luxuries, they have some regular trade between settlements, and they can almost pretend that The End of the World never happened. There are places that are like Bozeman in the ST: First Contact movie, which is not as good but still not horrible, and then there are places that look like Mad Max or the trial scene from Encounter at Farpoint, and so on, all the way down to places where basically everything is dead, and travelers go around them.

Whether humanity drags ourselves out of the hole on our own, or get aliens helping, is another matter that should probably be considered.

A thought on the 'young supermen' that the show didn't go into: The physical traits that they have in Space Seed don't do a good job of explaining how they seized power in a modern society. Strength and durability are really not enough. My current thinking is that the geneticists stumbled onto a combination of genes that gave the young supermen high levels of the Smooth Operator talent, and possibly a few others, at the cost of lots of nasty mental disadvantages. They might or might not be much smarter on average than normal humans, but the most effective of them are individually very smart - so, IQ 12 or higher for those individuals, with Smooth Operator 3 or 4. Probably a few other mental advantages, like Eidetic Memory and Lightning Calculator. Might post a suggested template later on.


Thoughts?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Let's consider the purpose of the genetics wars in the first place -- I believe they mainly serve to explain why no modern states are dominant parts of Earth politics, and to establish the end of modern economic systems.

Any World War III would accomplish that purpose. If you had to put a purpose to the Eugenics Wars in particular, is that they establish why the future has minimal genetic engineering. In fact originally the Eugenics Wars and World War III seem to have been different events.