Star Trek

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Star Trek is one of the classic nerd interests, with over 40 years of Geek history that span several generations, and is one of the longest running Sci-fi franchises. If you are a nerd (and you are, otherwise why the fuck would you be on this site?) you are at least somewhat familiar with Star Trek.

Star Trek is to gwai-lo barbarians what Gundam is to weeaboo faggots. The polar opposite Noblebright to Warhammer 40,000's Grimdark. Probably someone at Games Workshop when cooking up 40k decided to work from the point of doing the opposite of trek.

So why should I care?

Because between them, these 5 TV series and their assorted spinoff movies, books, etc. can provide inspiration for any sci-fi game you could care to run. If you want light-hearted action, look at the sort of things that happened in TOS or DS9 to get the crew into some dangerous situation. If you want a charismatic villain, look at Gul Dukat or the Borg Queen. If you want moral issues and debates, look at the shit that happened to Voyager and remove all the transparent deck-stacking and cheesy moralising (or you could read any decent SF book/watch a Twighlight Zone episode written in the previous 50 years, if you don't need your source material to be served at a 2nd grade level).

Not to mention in any sci-fi RP with remotely freeform rules you're likely to encounter Star Trek fanboys, so you might as well know what they're talking about. The unholy spawn of a Trekkie and a Furry is known as a Chakat, and you should fear it.

Setting

Here's the Cliff's Notes on Star Trek.

The Original Series

"Wagon Train to the stars". Created in 1966 (yea, wow) by legendary sci-fi god Gene Roddenberry, it's a Pulpy adventure sci-fi, with fist-fights and gunfights and occasionally sword-fights. The Original Series isn't deep, folks. It's good, hammy fun, monster-of-the-week type stuff. The USS Enterprise is tasked by the Federation to seek out new worlds and boldly go where no man has gone before, though due to budget constraints often find that man has in fact gone there before. James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy have sex, are cold and logical, and rash and emotional, respectively, and Scotty gets shit done.

The Original Series frequently ran out of budget and entire episodes were filmed using spare costumes belonging to the production company, resulting in a series of extremely goofy excuses to go to planets full of gangsters or Nazis. This is often copied by shows who don't realise it was never a good idea to begin with and done out of pure expediency. This lack of budget also resulted in one of the more memorable inventions; unable to budget for a sequence showing the Enterprise landing on a new planet every week, the writers instead decided the ship would have a "Transporter" to special effect people to where they were going.

Fun fact The Enterprise and its sister ship have enough firepower to Exterminatus a planet by itself.

The Animated Series

The often forgotten middle child. More or less "seasons 4-5" of TOS with the same writing staff and actors, sans poor Walter Koening. At least he got replaced by a badass birdman. Being animated allowed the staff to get a lot more creative with the alien designs and plots, and the writing and acting remain... well, top notch is a stretch, but certainly at the same levels as the original series. Not nearly as bad as you're probably picturing from the name, although still limited by the low budget and primitive animation techniques of the television era it was aired in.

The Next Generation

Here's where it starts getting a little deeper, and a little darker. The USS Enterprise-D (usually just called Enterprise) is once again tasked with going where no-one has gone before, but this time around the problems are less likely to be solved in a single episode. Jean-Luc Picard is the captain, and he plots and negotiates his way to victory. Mr. Data is cold and unemotional (but he'd like to learn emotions), Riker and Worf have sex and get punched by things respectively, Wesley Crusher is an abominable little shit (even the guy who played Wesley hated him), and Geordi LaForge gets shit done.

Although the first few seasons were laughably bad, the quality improved dramatically after Gene Roddenberry conveniently died and stopped filling it with enough lazy stereotypes and tired cliches to make even George Lucas jealous. The later seasons are almost universally agreed to represent the apex of the franchise on the small screen (although DS9 also had its moments), sadly however the movies all seemed incapable of emulating this success on the big screen.

Deep Space Nine

Unlike all the other series so far, Deep Space Nine primarily takes place on a space station - the titular Deep Space Nine, out near the borders of Federation Space. Said space station is near a recently-freed world and a wormhole, so all sorts of crazy shit goes down. It's a lot more political than other series (Though TNG and Voyager have their moments) and the last series to have Gene Roddenberry's involvement.

Its the closest the franchise ever gets to GrimDark. Hasn't aged well what with one of the main cast being a terrorist, and her people coming off as right-wing bible tumblers and/or Muslim extremists now a days.

Voyager

Voyager is...well, it's controversial shit. Many people say it's the worst series, but those people obviously haven't yet seen how pants-shittingly awful Enterprise is. The USS Voyager gets teleported over to the other side of the galaxy, and the plot of the series as a whole centres on its efforts to get back home with the primary obstacle being the consistently terrible decisions of its own captain.

Like TNG and DS9 it's a character-driven drama just as often as it is a sci-fi adventure romp, although from the fourth season onwards the only character the writers seem to care about is Mary Sue of Nine (but she's hot, so that's a good thing). Fans who stuck with the show despite its glaring failings were given one final slap in the face with the controversial shit final season, in which the producers decided "screw steadily crafting a satisfying conclusion to a story which we have wasted for most of the last seven years anyway; lets just ignore it until the final episode and then throw in some shit about trans-warp conduits and time travel, bitches love time travel".

Hopes that the franchise had sunk to a new low from which it could surely only get better were about to be proved wrong in spectacular fashion...

Enterprise

A bold and according to some successful attempt to create a series even worse than Voyager was, from the minute the fantastically awful theme tune started the fans knew in their hearts it was fucking doomed. So bad that even the most devoted Trekkies gave up on it, in just four seasons this series almost single-handedly killed off the Trek franchise (which is actually quite impressive, in a perverse sort of way).

It's a prequel to the rest, taking place on the first Enterprise, before the Federation got a lot of shit figured out - so there's a lot of primitive versions of things from other series. At least the uniforms were pretty cool in an air force sort of way, although when that's the best thing you can say about a series that tells you all you need to know about its quality (or lack thereof).

Was retool twice, the third season tries to be 24 in space while the 4th is a massive apology about the last thee season that tries and fixes all the problems they made, and the only season that's close to being good.

Amusingly the final episode is set on the holodeck of the Enterprise-D and leaves us with the firm impression that the producers would have much rather just continued making The Next Generation; considering the mediocre quality of the Next Gen movies this probably would have worked out better for all involved.

Films

As a general rule the odd numbered ones are shit.

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture (AKA the Slow Motion Picture)
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (KKKHHHAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!!!! Widely considered the best of all the films, and the only one considered a straight up great film, no qualifiers.)
• Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Where is Spock? He's on Genesis. ALL AHEAD FULL!)
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (The crew of the Enterpise travel back in time to save whales. No, really. Zany comedy romp beloved by the general public.)
• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (Mysteriously the movies just jumped from 4 to 6)
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (The Space Cold War ends amidst Tom Clancy-esque drama. The sendoff for the original cast.)
• Star Trek Generations (Malcolm McDowell blows up planets to get into a magic space ribbon to live forever, no it does not make sense in context. Also, Kirk dies on the the bridge in the sense that the bridge kills him.)
• Star Trek First Contact (TNG crew face off with the Borg to ensure the future happens. Lots of action, good performances, best of the movies with the TNG cast.)
• Star Trek Insurrection (If you thought the Na'vi were a bunch of Mary Sues, you ain't seen nothing yet! B-b-b-baby you ain't seen n-n-n-nothing yet!)
• Star Trek Nemesis (The last stand of the TNG cast, ending not with a bang but a whimper. It also broke the even-good-odd-bad rule by sucking.)
• Star Trek (2009 Alternate timeline "reboot" with the original crew. Skubtastic.)

Relaunch

Like most long time franchises Star Trek has a massive line of books. Unlike most they're basically just fanfics as nothing but the show or movies is canon so the writer can do whatever they want. This changed after Nemesis since they might never have another show or movie in the "Prime" universe the writers got there shit together and wrote a group of books with tight community very close to the shows. The relaunch novels are a continuation of the show they're about. Also they're the Titan books which is about Riker and Troi getting their own ship, which happens to be staff by every race in the Federation including living rocks and a space cyborg ostrich.

Also the Borg go nuts and eat Pluto... yeah...

Star Trek Online is also part of this (its written by the same writers), although it ignores the Borg part never happen.

Games

There's been plenty of vidya gaems featuring Star Trek, including one of the earliest action multiplayer wargame: Netrek. There's also been plenty of tabletop gaming that was inspired by Star Trek without being merchandising bullshit.

• Star Fleet Battles (1979-2010) The crunchiest starship combat game you're ever going to find outside of a computer. Takes some liberties with the setting, which is why "Star Trek" isn't actually in the title.
• Call To Arms: Star Trek (2011) Their license for Babylon-5 expired, so they rethemed the game to Star Trek along with improving the system to make it more nifty. Less micro-management than SFB, and ships get some cinematic feats.
• Star Trek: Expeditions (2011) Ignore the tie-ins to the movie, Reiner Knizia designed this. Explore the gameboard, flip over missions, try to have the proper crew to get victory points.
• Star Trek: Fleet Captains (2011) Tile flipping, exploring, and spaceships fighting over resources
• Star Trek: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator (1983) FASA designed this, so it feels like Battletech but not as good.
• Star Trek Red Alert (2000) A Diskwars game themed to Star Trek.
• Star Trek CCG (many) There's been a few of these, but never popular enough to catch on. They also suffered from the game balance problems of fans wanting their fave character, but needed extra rules for their quirks. There's also the problem of putting numbers to character stats, such as one game that asserted that Picard had about twice the integrity of a Klingon pig. Latest versions are "deck-building" games to try to cash in on the popularity of Dominion and Thunderstone.

Star Trek (2009 movie)

Whilst Star Trek has never been known as the most awesome of settings by /tg/ save for some rare bits of win here and there, it is still point and fact an enduring sci-fi legacy of a time when ideals and a utopian dream was striven for. Star Trek 2009 proceeds to ritually defecate on all that star trek once stood for. It is to the Star Trek universe as Codex: Grey Knights is to Warhammer 40,000 - a work of such incomprehensible nonsense and utter failure that it is honestly terrifying to look upon. Monumentally idiotic to the point of being subject to nearly as much mockery as Chakats in the Star Trek universe, Star Trek 2009 is utter shit, and its creator, J.J. Abrams, is a hack of the worst order.

And the numb-skullery does not end there. Whispered amongst the void between stars and pointedly avoided as a conversation piece in social gatherings of the higher geek Echelons, it is said that Abrams, not satisfied with the pillaging and slaughter of 40 years of geek history, is once again creating a menace to sci-fi families everywhere. His Star Trek 2013. Which, when released will be photon torpedoed in earnest. It is all that can be done to body-shield the sacred tomb of Gene Roddenberry from the inevitable spit that will be coming his way thanks to the machinations of this idiocy. On a related note, Abrams is also lined up to direct the upcoming 7th Star Wars film.

At least, that's what the pissed-off fanboys will tell you. We're not here to judge, just extract lulz.

There are two sides to every story, and when you can't compromise you can see two completely different views of the same goddamn thing. What we need is compromise. What we have is well... To get things straight, people either love or hate this movie for what it is and it can be summarized in two paragraphs:

Trekkie Hipsters think: This was given to be a total revamp of the entire Star Trek universe, a modernization that would invite new generations of Trekkers to the fold. It resulted in one of the largest nerdrage controversies in the history of Sci-fi, with J.J. Abrams labeled as a total fucktard for effectively ignoring 45 years of Star Trek history. Set in what is clearly an alternate timeline version of the 'The Original Series', it adds flashy, sexy, lens-flare faggotry to the aging Star Trek universe. Featuring a newly redesigned Enterprise that looks like it was built by Apple and more action than an entire season of TOS, it did indeed win new fans over. It also, to be fair, pissed off a lot of the old fans, but let's be honest: they could have remade Wrath of Khan shot for shot and old fans would have been pissed off about something.

Trekkie Fanboys think: This was given to be a total revamp of the entire Star Trek universe, a modernization that would invite new generations of Trekkers to the fold. It resulted in one of the largest nerdrage controversies in the history of Sci-fi, with J.J. Abrams labeled as a total fucktard for effectively deleting 45 years of Star Trek history. Set in the timeline of the 'The Original Series' (where good ol' Abrams could do the most damage), it adds flashy, sexy, lens-flare faggotry to the aging Gene Roddenberry Star Trek universe. Featuring a newly redesigned so-totally-Not-phallic ship (the Enterprise), and proceeds to butcher and rape Star Trek fluff from there.

>> Trekkie debates are so much more civilized than the rest of /tg/. DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS

FYI the new Abrams movie "Into Darkness" is coming out. Form the looks of it, its basically Wrath of Khan without what made that movie work (more or less, aging crew on an out dated ship vs superhumans in the lasted, best ship and Kirk's only advanced is his years of experience) and Abrams shit replacing it.

Would you like to know more?

• http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/ Main Memory Alpha: Star Trek wiki
• http://sfdebris.com/ SF Derbis/ opinionated episode reviews, has some non trek stuff as well