Semi-OT: The Icaran Empire Preview (the book one)

[dogscoff]

I agree with all the anti-trek stuff posted. It's all just too... clean. Sanitized. Nice.

Go around any workplace, be it an office, a factory, a cleanroom, hell, I bet even a warship or a space-shuttle. You won't find everything clean and tidy and stowed. You won't find every item in perfect working order and exactly where it ought to be kept.

In a real-world Enterprise you'd find little scraps of handwritten (or better yet, typed in arial 20-point and printed out on a4) sticky-taped to walls saying "Would engineering staff PLEASE" (Please is underlined 3 times in biro) "refrain from 'borrowing' medbay scanners for their home-cyborg projects" and "Would all colleagues kindly remember to stabilise the dilithium matrix before going off shift. Thankyou."

And so on.

That said, I had to say something about Starhawk's "window" comment. Actually, i won't say anything, I'll just link to this schlock strip and let Howard say it. The point is that you might as well make the whole ship out of glass- hell, make it out of papier-mache- since the only thing that can provide meaningful protection against the kind of energies being thrown around by those ships is more energy (ie shields). Of course Trek tends not to respect simple physics like that (I'm sure someone will now some up with a dozen examples in Trek where an unshielded bulkhead has withstood direct torpedo fire or something) but that's Trek for you. Pick the science you like, ignore the rest.

Damn... i said something after all.