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My computer is still the shits 😀 . I visited briefly in game to take some pics of the Columbia class refit. If you are wondering what it’s for I started playing around with that RPG campaign I was working on last year. After my hard drive died (shit computer 😛 ) I lost most of my finished material. Luckily I’m a pen and paper type so I had a lot of notes remaining. It still pissed me off but I had another look and started back into it. I started a new blog as a repository for Trek RPG material as I make it so when the HD dies again I won’t lose so much. If you are interested in the pitch for Star Trek: Mariner check it out 😀 .
Great to hear from you Horrid !
Sorry to hear your pc is still in zombie-mode. I liked what I saw from Mariner 🙂
"Boldly bashing Borg to bits since 2012..."It’s not dead, just old 🙁 . It functions much better in the cold. hot summer mean hot running AMD so it’s especially bad.
EDIT: Excellent! The file actually posted up. About a year ago I was able to post images pretty easily but those ones shut down and ones of comparable scale won’t load up. Happy to be able to share this little patch with you though. 5 stars on the crest for the five signing states of Federation charter. The fifth star also represents a north star to sail by. Take care!
This is the final image textured with an embroidered effect to make it look like a patch rather than a graphic along with my most recet attempt at producing a commissioning plate. I think my gradient work is getting better and this actually looks something like a metal effect 😀 !
Sweet. I like the embroided effect.
This is my commissioning plaque, as you can see I’ve been working hard on it 😛
"Boldly bashing Borg to bits since 2012..."That looks great Marcase. Did you make it yourself or is it from a template? I found the greatest difficulty I experienced was incorporating text in the “finished” metal effect of the rest of the plate. When I first had a go at it I was adding the text after the fact and it didn’t look right because it didn’t gel with the metal patterning. I ended up building the thing in a series of layers, then flattening, and converting it all into gray scale. Once it was there I recoloured the gradient to finish it off. I am jealous yours has bolts on the face and a wooden back as well but I think I could add in this details if I revisited the template. Saving work is important because once I leave a modified file going back isn’t easy. I think I figured out what I will be using a s a basis for a first adventure. It’s pretty close to Earth so I probably shouldn’t introduce a hostile species into the mix. When I get the next blog entry up it should be an introduction to the ship’s captain or an adventure outline.
The template came from the interwebz, it was the nicest one I could find at the time – my own attempts were (and still are) dreadful. Still unsure if I’ll be going for brass or black lettering. When it (finally) gets done, you’ll be on it as well. Just need to find the time and patience to do it right.
I probably know the answer already, but with the whole Discovery reboot, will any of that have any influence on your story ?
"Boldly bashing Borg to bits since 2012..."Discovery whether a divergent timeline or canon has no effect on my story unless there is a temporal event; And I don’t have any planned. I have mixed feelings about Discovery. I like the development of individual characters. I think they made for an interesting cast. I hated the big picture. It seems to over the top. Mirror U in a Klingon War won by a single ship then straight to Section 31 plots in Season 2? I don’t know if I wrote it here or somewhere on the Cryptic forums but I posted about the best future for Trek being in the past because you can only make starships go so fast before it becomes silly magic. They set a show back in the continuity yet they still gave it a magic space engine. Christ! No foreplay and they already blew their wad. It’s like they found the writer on 4Chan. Too over the top. I stopped watching about 4 episodes in and didn’t actually finish the run until April. I feel like they poached my idea for my campaign and put it on steroids. Independent invention is well and good but I’m a little pissed that if I do my arc as I outlined it the players might think I drew inspiration from elements of Discovery. I had this planned in the summer last year before they went to air. I think I did it much better. When I do the reveal you be the judge 😀 .
I meant to ask; What is your takeaway from Discovery? Mine wasn’t entirely positive but, it’s only one persons opinion.
I really liked the first 2 episodes, after that my feelings were… mixed. The CGI and overal look I liked, but I couldn’t “connect” with the crew as I had with all the other series.
Also we’ve already travelled this reboot road with Enterprise, and they did a better job with pre-TOS than Disco imho.
I’ve said it before, if only Disco was set in the future and the new Klingons were some ancient off-shoot coming back home (and wiping out their TOS/TNG cousins in a civil war) it would have worked so much better. I still use that in my ‘head canon’ to make it fit in the timeline.
What bothers me the most is that Disco threw out established Trek lore and had to reboot everything because of legal reasons, and thereby throwing the Golden Goose into a burning warp core. I found out (much earlier) about the whole Tardigrade game/plagiarism issue, and that really p*ssed me off because this will be the one issue that will kill Discovery – We’ll have a (shortened ?) Season Two and that’s it.
I’m not sure if a Picard mini-series will be able to save Star Trek on tv, which feels like a CBS panic move in any case.
I’ve rewatched all of Disco S1 a few times now, and maybe I’m too rooted in ‘old Trek’ (or just plain old) but I’m not as invested in it as the originals.
Then again, TOS got its revival after it disappeared from the small screen, so perhaps Disco will improve with age.
"Boldly bashing Borg to bits since 2012..."Wow. I never knew about the tardigrade story. My story build just kind of happened but, that guy has been on it for 4 years. That’s just too similar. If they were grabbing ideas from other sources it’s no surprise the story feels like such a convoluted mash up. So much depends on what they do with Picard. Stewart is a great actor who can prop up a mediocre cast. If they put the time into it and build a strong drama around him I think it could be killer. If they throw out like a bit of jackoff with his name on it TNG fanboys will still slurp it up even if it sucks and won’t believe anyone who tells them it is so even if it is true.
When I first saw the new Klingons I felt the same about them. Rather than reimagined cosmetics I thought there might have been some Hurq DNA in their physiology and the peculiar tomb ship.
As I said the visuals were neat and the characters were interesting apart from the lead. Burnham has to be the flattest most unremarkable Trek character I can remember; I forget shitty ones quickly. They padded the a Mary Sue with “cool stuff” because at some level they must have been aware there was nothing there. Unfortunately the I don’t think the story will age well. I just don’t feel there is some greater meaning we are missing. It’s just a rats nest of disparate ideas that aren’t tied together terribly well.
Did CBS have to do that? The Star Trek movies were the licensee who had no choice but to reimagine the franchise. CBS agreed to stand down for 10 years while Paramount (or the owner of Paramount) made their movie and established their brand. After ten years or more of sitting on their asses and collecting royalties it seems the best they could do was produce derivative work of Trek projects that emerged while they counted their money. The look was Paramount Star Trek, The period and Klingon War was Axanar, Maybe the Tartigrades did come from the developer. Hell, they even rehashed the Discovery from old McQuarrie designs for Star Trek: Phase 2. It’s a shameful train wreck. Fuck! I even have favorite episodes of Voyager 😀 . I do like Saru and Stamets though.
Same, I even like Tilly/”captain Killy”. Lorca was just ‘too dark’: he certainly was no Picard or Kirk or even Sisko.
I’m looking fwd to Season 2.
In other news, I’m currently enjoying a revival of Stargate Atlantis (to my wife’s ‘rolls eyes’ annoyance) – I forgot how much I enjoyed that one. You could very easily replace the stargate universe with the Trek universe in that series: if only the Discovery producers/writers took lessons from SGA.
"Boldly bashing Borg to bits since 2012..."Hurray! I just had a major breakthrough regarding my plot for the whole season! Big ideas are fine but collecting the little ones that seem like nothing more than “colour” that advance the plot as whole are milestones. I’m super excited by this. On the “Oh, he actually did something I can look at front” I have a couple items I designed in the style of Enterprise as play aids. I’ve included the crew patch for USS Hunter; An Intrepid class platform launched shortly before Mariner, A character sheet for the senior flight controller, and a test for a space battle map presentation. I tried to present the information in the map and character reference in the style of ENT graphics. The patch is just for flavor and doesn’t really do anything in game other than dress things up a bit.
Uh oh. I hate typing. Looks like Chief escaped my attention when my fingers got away from me. Good thing I plan to revise the NPC data to keep it simpler. All of those motivations (values) make it a little to complex when switching from character to character. I used a character generation app intended for PCs rather than a simpler NPC model. I’m not a fan of mechanics so a program that did the work for me was useful. Unfortunately it made the character a bit to good at everything and narrowed the latitude I had with assigning abilities. Inputting the data by way of a graphics program is a bit of a pain in the ass too. Once you type something in it’s like a brushstoke rather than a word document and I have to “erase” by “painting” over.
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