FuglyDuck

I’m a big fan of all the weird little ships the federation scrambled to produce because of the borg.

You got the defiant, sure. but you also have the Akira and the Nova and their who-knows-how-many variations. it was like morons woke up and realized maybe they really do need warships and started throwing pasta at the wall to see what stuck.

I see the last panel as Blazing Bev rectifiying the problem. hotboxing on the Magellan.

the thing about Jellico, that I don’t like is that he came into an established organizational structure and started changing it.

Was he right? maybe. Sure. A lot of the changes he made, though weren’t necessarily right or wrong… they were different ways of being a leader. Should the senior officers adapted to Jellico? absolutely. But Jellico should have also adapted to the organizational structure he found himself in.

Troi’s uniform, for example… he was right she should have been in a standard uniform… but his manner about expressing that was off. Partiularly as a temporary CO coming in as a substitute for Picard, because starfleet- probably at his recommendation- determined Ryker was unqualified. (and yes. Ryker was being a salty jackass.)

His command of the D was on the order of days; and the changes he would make would take weeks to adjust to- and probably didn’t even get figured out before Jellico left.

Even if it wasn’t because he wanted to flex on the command staff, it’s still stupid and indicative that he had no understanding of the existing organizational structure on the D. And any leader who comes into an established structure and starts demanding changes without understanding that structure is a bad leader. ESPECIALLY when their leadership is at best temporary.

As far as the mission goes, yes. 100% he was right. but his leadership skills were still on the level of “Terrible retail manager”

this is awesome work.

outta curosity, how do you feel about the Nova and Sydney classes?

They may be my favorites, lol. Nova because it’s sleak and actually makes sense as a science platform. (unlike the galaxy class. too big, too resource intensive, too many crew. and what the hell is with all the families on board getting shot at?)

I like the Sydney because it’s form follows function. it’s boxy, ugly, utilitarian. but it acutally makes sense. (Seriously… what the hell’s with the d’s compound curves? tons of wasted internal volume… exessive structural elements. Tons of vulnerabilities.)

bev is clearly not blazed enough for those puns.

Jellico still sucks, though.

all I’m going to say on this one is that there’s a ton of metal-heads that love them some baby shark.

(or maybe they just love their kids…)

don’t hate.

you should got to sleep sooner!

is anyone actually awake at 7?

It’s not until nine or even ten, and several pots of coffee that my mind is ready to absorb training information. Anything before 9, and I’m not awake enough to filter the rank sarcasm concerning the terrible AI training slides.

Except, not. Thomas Ryker was a copy, for example.

They only became different people as their experiences changed. (Which started pretty much as they came through the transport.)

I wonder what percentage of the books have absolutely bonkers advice. I know Dobson contributed a few.

Here’s what I don’t get.

Okay. All that is true. Yet they clearly still retain a certain sense of self. The same memories, experiences, personalities and such.

Remember reading about a guy who cloned several generations of cats, all the same stock. Each cat was clearly unique.

Maybe the distinction is that the experiences are basically the same going though it.

In any case. Why can’t they keep generic information on hand and and clone up a fresh body and plant the bits relevant to memory and experience and stuff?

Call sisko.

Worst case scenario he drinks a drone under the table and then loots all the shiny tech to make something clever.

While Kirk “distracts” the queen by sleeping with her. She probably thinks it was the easiest implantation ever, but whatever.

I mean. yeah. That’s “just” a very technobabbly way of saying they’re taking matter and turning it into energy and back into a different sort of matter.

Basically, mc² --> e --> = mc².

For consideration, a 6 oz steak would have something like 15.3 million gigajoules of energy getting spat out inside of a few seconds. I’m not sure how that stacks up to the ridiculous numbers of the warp core, but in more realistic numbers, it’s probably the single largest source of power on the ship.

Now, it would seem you’re correct that they’re not using some sort of procedural generation and using analog voxel maps. It is important to recognize that the TMs are secondary sources that may or may not even be canon. I’m willing to just say that ST’s engineers are amazingly, brilliantly stupid, though. (See: seatbelts. See: surge protection.)

There is no technical reason they couldn’t procedural generate their materials using some sort of materials libraries describing the materials and how they’re to be generated. LAAMPS and GROMACS were out in '95 and '91 and do exactly that. LAAMPS is a more general system for modeling atoms (and sub-atomic stuffs,) and GROMACS is specifically about protein modeling.

You could even, presumably, generate new and interesting molecules just by coding to generate new and interesting atomic properties. (like maybe Neutronium? that’d be exciting.)

For comparison, think of a Sierpiński triangle. you can generate the fractal pattern using c with just a few lines of code. The jpeg image of that would be a much, much larger file. Especially, for example, if you went down to atomic scales across say, a 18"x12"x12" build volume. There’s a reason modern gaming is now using procedural generation for all of their worlds now. Especially in games where every new map is different. (mine craft, for example.)

and then remember that every variation you could think of would suddenly get prohibitive. each one of those 37 varieties of tomato soup would have such a size. imagine the ice cream library. imagine literally everything. And then imagine every time they have to figure something. Like. Uhm. Worf’s second spine. (it’s all just chemistry.) or like in DS9’s Tosk episode when O’Brien had to replicate the Arva Node (?) for Tosk’s ship. That’s not something you can just scan down and spit out a new functional thing- it’s broken afterall. And if Tosk had a spare, he’d not need the station’s services.

Or like, to accommodate “Steak with extra asparagus” or “double butter on the mashed potatoes”. all of that could just be a variable in the program script producing the pattern.

I mean, you go in and ask for coffee, the barista is going to assume you mean drip. They might ask if you want a light or dark roast. They’re not going to ask you to pick from 37 different beans, then ask whether you want it a light roast, dark roast or decaff, then ask how you want it brewed (steam pressed, drip, pour over. cold brewed. french. perc. cowboy. Turkish. Greek.) then ask how hot you want it (warm. hot, HOT HOT, cold. Frozen.); how strong do you want it, do you want cream (Soy, oat, half/half, full cream, milk. Goat milk. Almond. butter.) how much cream. Sweetener (Sugar, honey, raw sugar. corn syrup… i think you see my point?)

A good barista knows when not to ask, as much as when and what to ask.

though it’s almost blasphemous they didn’t conjure up a grilled cheese to go with it.

I mean, Like I said. in-universe, I just assume it was named by politicians (or bad admirals, if you prefer.)

And yeah. Another one that bugs me? Neutronium.

Outside of a neutron star’s gravity, it becomes, uhm. How shall we put this? One of the most explosive things we can conceive of IRL.

Probably a good thing Wesley didn’t try to play with a block.

Transporters and replicators might be the same kind of hardware, but they’re vastly different forms of implementation.

I’d like you to walk thorugh a couple scenarios in terms of work/design flow.

lets start with “they start with scans of materials”

lets say, the materials are all scanned down, and they just tile them to fill in what ever part you’re trying to fabricate. lets say they’re 1 cm³ cubes of materials. sure, the computer could tile those cubes digitally, and then cut them back into the shape you needed. But, how do you handle the gaps between the blocks? you could fill them with procedurally generated molecules/atoms, right?

Now lets go to what an engineer would really do.

You’d start with computer models of the materials in question. Probably, a single atoms. You’d design the shape and size of your part. Lets say a tube composed of A36 stainless steel with a 10cm inner diameter and a wall thickness of 2 cm.

You’d model it (or the computer would. Vibe modeling. yayy for AI that actually does what you tell it.)

You’d then define the material as a36 stainless, which, in the modern world has a certain definition. but you don’t need to be so fuzzy on it. You can specific exact percentages or parts per-whatevers or however you want to. The computer would know it’s mostly iron with .26% carbon and some other stuff.

The computer would then call up the models for iron, carbon, and the other stuff, and then generate a diffused alloy structure of all that together, using an optimized distribution for whatever application you tell it you need it for.

you wouldn’t need to scan materials. You can just model the atoms and procedurally generate the bonds, and then tell the replicator how to print the damn thing. You wouldn’t even need massive amounts of data storage to print something, because you could procedurally generate small portions at a time and feed it directly to the replicator as it goes.

There would be no need to scan anything, because we know what an iron atom is and can model it.

You might want to scan that super duper 5-michelin star chef’s food, but that defeats the point of that. And frankly, you don’t want to eat a steak that’s always the exact same. you’d want to procedurally generate the steaks, too. and everything else. because humans don’t like to eat the same shit all the time, we like variation.

Tom was annoyed because he didn’t want to sort through 37 varieties of tomato soup. He didn’t care- he just wanted food.

Everything they can produce stems from an original object that was molecularly scanned and programmed into the replicator. They cant just make whatever out of nowhere, and they introduce miniscule errors and imperfections each time. Like making a photocopy.

At the risk of being long winded, there’s absolutely no reason that, given a technology which literally spins most forms of matter into existence from pure energy, that you would need, or even want, to start with a scan of some physical object. If you wanted to replicate some sort of piece of artwork, sure. but even then, you’re not just “making a copy” of something. Consdier the martini. if you didn’t add to that, then there’s a solid chance that the martini is going everywhere because you’re replicating the liquids at the same time as the glass.

you would either have to add some kind of containment field to keep the liquid in place while the glass is also built up, or more simply, just replicate the glassware first (or at least the surface holding the booze).

Even then, chances are, the martini is set up to be parametric. what if they only wanted one olive? or three? what if they wanted a different kind of gin? or shaken, not stirred. Maybe they didn’t want mixed over ice at all, but chilled to a very cold temperature? what if they wanted it room temperature? or slightly warmed? (okay, that’s gross.)

but getting back to the ‘no need to scan anything’. if you know what’s in the materials making it- lets say you want a steel i-beam, of a certain size- then you could simply define the material, procedural generate an iron alloy with x% carbon and whatever other materials to produce the perfect steel.

And here’s the neat thing: that steel i-beam would have fewer flaws any “traditionally” made i-beam ever would, because it’s synthetic. any of the flaws would be on the molecular or probably atomic level, with a perfect diffusion of the alloyed materials, and crystal structure and everything else. You could, presumably, even, use impurities intentionally so as to create weak points so that the I-beam fails in a known and predictable manner.

You can see the design flow for creating stuff using a replicator in Voyager, that episode with Naomi and Flotter, where harry is designing a stuffie at neelix’s behest. That’s how it’s done. Harry didn’t start with a stuffy he scanned in. It was literally like vibe coding, but with design files. (this is probably why he never got promoted. he was a Vibe, uh, engineer.)