The run of the reborn Star Trek TV series and movies would continue until 2005. Then the franchise ended for a time, heavily weathered and no longer well thought of in most circles.
During that period, Star Fleet Battles continued to be published, becoming a better model of ship combat in that revised setting than it ever was on its original release.
On the role-playing side, there was Prime Directive (193), Star Trek RPG (1998), and the Star Trek Roleplaying Game (2002). Given the Next Gen focus for these games, I didn't pay them much mind and can't really review them. I assume that they would at least attempt to mirror the changes found in TNG and later and thus would fail completely to model original Star Trek. If anyone wants to leave their insights in the comments below- please feel free.
2009 saw the release of a new big screen Star Trek under different hands. It was to include the original characters, and offered the hope of regaining the original ship (and adventure) style.
As I noted at the time, I rather liked the movie. However my hopes for a return to the Enterprise of old in all its glory were dashed.
This version was much larger (over twice the length, and thus 8x the size). It came with enough shuttles to service its entire crew in a single flight. That's fine, but other changes weren't so innocent.
The DVD notes that phasers are sublight weapons, carrying over TNG techology limits back to the original era. Sigh.
Worse, the Enterprise's Warp Drive was nerfed even more than it ever has been. Now it was completely a Star Wars style light speed drive. The ship becomes blind to the real world under warp- not seeing the wreckage of the fleet it nearly crashes into upon reaching Vulcan (in fact the scene is almost a direct copy from Star Wars and the arrival of the Falcon at Alderaan- complete with the fact that the rubble was in both caused by a planet killing weapon). This from a ship that used to be able to scan objects light years away.
At this point, very little of the original is left from a technology or usage PoV. Nor do I ever expect it to return in either game, TV, or movies.
Next, the conculsion where I ponder how this could happened.
Part: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, Conclusion
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2 comments:
Is Federation Commander (the new sexed up version of SFB) close enough to SFB that you put both in the same rating? I haven't looked at FC to know if there are any differences, but it's garnered some attention lately.
Looking forward to your conclusions - this has been an interesting series.
Federation Commander looks like it shares all the core design ideas of the original, so I don't expect it to be much different in character.
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