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The Romulans say: Hold my Ale.
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Just going to put this here because ST makes the list not once, not twice, but thrice!
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The bridge on Star Trek TOS doesn’t face forward?
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Nope. The TL;DR is that originally the turbo lift was supposed to be directly aft, so the ship model was built to reflect that. After initial shooting they moved it clockwise for camera shot reasons (Shatner comes out of the lift, goes to his chair).
The producers went with it, and even in the earliest answers to fan letters they declared that it wasn’t necessary for a star ship’s bridge to actually be oriented forward since they wouldn’t feel inertia.
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One little bit of early Trek lore that was lost was the idea of star dates being unique to each ship, due to time dilation and other factors each ship had a “starship own date” much like the Unix Epoch, each ship’s star date based upon when the ship entered service. So by this measure, the star date of the Enterprise is the number of dates* since the ship was officially activated for duty.
Now that would mean different ships would have different star dates. and also that all time measurement is local. Which honestly is too confusing for us even in the early 21st century, so since it was never canon it was simply forgotten.
But it’s still a cool idea I wish they had kept.
*date not having to mean a terrestrial date. If we want to be really, really nerdy, we could say a star date is a million seconds, or ~27.7 hours
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Time dilation doesn’t occur under warp drive in the Trek universe and the effect is negligible under impulse as full impulse is actually only a quarter light speed. From the tech manual:
The problem of different local times in travel is a long considered and resolved issue.
Edit:
Time dilation calculator says that a 4 hour in star system full impulse trip would yield a time difference of 7 minutes. Obviously that would be inconsequential under the usual quarter impulse.
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This was in 1966, remember, before there was any canon. The makers were still surprised that Star Trek was so popular and how fans could ask such questions.
Part of the attraction of Trek is for me all the Making Of stories, how Roddenberry, Jefferies and all the others got so much done to give us such a rich world.
One of the good things about the Okudas is how they took all the fan works, the work done by FASA for their role playing game, and finally made a canon. But I do like the contradictory works of early fandom.
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So it was an idea that was spitballed by someone that was never actually part of the show?
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Never said it was.
The only places where I read about it was in The Making of Star Trek and in fanzines. It was never canon, and fans knew it. It occupies the same space in Trek lore as Franz Joseph’s additions he made when he wrote The Star Fleet Technical Manual with its dreadnoughts, tugs, and stuff like that. I think some of the early novels might have had something like it, but they wildly contradicted one another.
One other idea that was tossed in the dustheap that I found interesting was from the author John M. Ford, who in The Final Reflection had the TOS Klingons be genetic hybrids, created by Klingons to think like humans. They were also part of the FASA supplements, as I think the writers were heavily influenced by him. The writers of Enterprise took a different tack, so it remains non-canon. Discovery seems to have introduced another possible reason why Klingons looked more human as well with VoQ/Ash, but that is again fan speculation.
I repeat: I thought (and still think) it was a neat idea, and would have fit in television’s desire not to be too precise with dates.
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Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, call it what you like as long as, occasionally, I get stuff like this:
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I really enjoyed Picard series 3, episode 1. It feels a lot more like an adventure than the portentous drama of series 1 and 2 (and don’t get me wrong, I mostly enjoyed the portentous drama), and the first half of the episode really reminded me of the TOS movies with the familiar groove between the TNG cast members who show up. I spent a lot of the episode smiling because it’s good fun even as there seems to be a major threat coming for the Federation. I was worried that it was just going to be the TNG cast going back out for one last adventure but the returning cast all have decent scenes here and most of them look to be sticking around for much or all of the story.
The pacing of plot setups feels more like this is being written as a really long movie as opposed to the “novel for TV”. It’s hard to explain but this doesn’t feel like a roughly standalone episode of TV that has ongoing plot points, like Discovery usually does, and it doesn’t feel as much like a “chapter” in the same way that Picard series 1 and 2 did (and I just rewatched all of Picard so it’s fresh in my mind), it’s an hour of a longer story, but it’s structured to feel satisfying as opposed to just stopping, and it works really well.
I’ll be interested to see what people think of the music, a lot of it is reusing prior pieces from TNG and the TOS and TNG movies. I really liked the score in the prior two series and they dipped into the older stuff from time to time - like the piece of the TNG theme played on a flute in the opening credits, or the Voyager theme playing in some of Seven’s scenes, or the First Contact theme in the Ten Forward sequence in the series 2 finale. But there’s a lot more of it here. I’ve seen it hailed in early reviews and I don’t know if I’m as positive personally but it’s also not horribly incongruous or anything.
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Yes. It Felt like another TNG movie. But hey, I liked It.
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ETA a minor Picard spoiler…
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It does remind me of other stories that employ the same structure, but you are right: it’s more like what used to be called a miniseries feel than an episodic feel. Finally watched it tonight, as they drop on Fridays here in Europe.
It was a nice, solid episode, I feel. Just my usual grumbles I have, which I will keep to myself because I am in a solid minority where these grumbles are concerned. 
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ETA a minor Picard spoiler…
I liked the tone of disdain that the captain of the Titan ship uses when referring to Admiral Picard and Captain Ryker. OK, that’s part of the character’s composition, so that we can create instant dislike. But it was still fun to see that not everyone in the 25th century is a big fan of the Enterprise crew. Some just want to do their job well, keep the Federation in order, and are horrified by the often reckless behavior of our beloved characters.
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Are these Picard spoilers, just so I know and don’t click on them?
And just a general note, if people can spoiler blur for new series, at least until the DVDs are released, it would be much appreciated! I’m sure I’m not the only one without Paramount+!
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I assumed they were Picard spoilers and also haven’t clicked. I pushed the button on Paramount Plus, but I’m doing a TNG refresher before starting Picard. I also appreciate the blurred spoilers, but, yeah. Knowing what the spoiler is for is super helpful.
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Good point! So, if folks wouldn’t mind indicating what show they’re spoilering, so we know and can jump in whenever we catch up, that would be awesome!
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