I always thought the multiple designs of starships was more about selling model kits to people like Forbin, anyway. I get that there may be different designs required for different types of missions or specialized functions, but having several dozen designs in the long run makes no sense. And, as technology progresses, a single design that can perform multiple functions is more likely, not to mention more effective. So, an entire fleet of Inquiry-class starships isn't lazy, it's smart.
This page (and the next) have his posts in regards to Axanar and rights issues. He makes a few comments elsewhere in the thread, but I'm sure that he would agree that you wouldn't gain anything significant if you read his other posts in that thread. In short, he believes that owners of IP have the right to control their property in the manner that they see fit, but that if they allow for things like fan films they increase the market for their own products. Which is not an unreasonable argument to make. The problem is, however, the suits don't see it that way. They see it as people profiting off of the work that the suits have done to create the thing in the first place. However, in many cases, the fans are creating things that the suits aren't doing. There were years, after all, where the only Star Trek TV-type stuff being produced was done by fans, not the suits. So, how were the fans stealing from the suits? It's not like they were pirating stuff produced by CBS/Paramount. And fans can do things that studios can't. Let's take an ideal scenario here. The suits say that they want to turn out as much high-quality Trek content that they can, provided they can still turn a profit on it. That still leaves gaps in what people might want to see. Suppose that's there's a character who has a brief appearance on a few shows, like Ensign Ro. The suits do a market survey and discover that if she were given her own spin-off series, a number of people would watch, but not enough for them to recoup their investment in the series. An Ensign Ro-centric series done by the fans doesn't have to worry about turning a profit. The folks doing it are making the stuff because it's fun for them to do, and helps them scratch a particular itch that they might have. It also provides free advertising for Trek as a whole, since someone who's never really watched Trek might see Star Trek: Ensign Ro, fall in love, and decide to watch all the Trek stuff, buy officially licensed Trek merch, and go to cons. That's a win for everybody. If only the suits saw it that way. They don't. They argue that it's theft and that the fans are pulling customers away from official Trek. What the suits won't admit is that they're afraid the fans will come up with something better than the suits could ever hope to come up with, and then people will suddenly shift to the fan-produced stuff, rather than watch the official stuff. The suits don't dare hire the folks making the fan stuff, because if they do, it won't be long before the suits are out of a job. (Since the new guys clearly understand the target market better than the suits do, why keep the suits?) So the suits try and quash everything they can, only pulling back when they get too much blowback from the fans. (The same is true of every other series that has an enthusiastic fan base, this isn't something that's just limited to Trek.)
It really depends upon how difficult it is to build something like a starship. If it's a complicated and expensive process, then it makes sense to limit the number of possible designs out there as that makes it easier. Taking the in-universe conceit that the hulls are made from materials replicators can't process, then you'd expect there to only be a handful of designs, even though the interiors of the ships might be quite different. If, OTOH, replicators can mass-produce the materials used in starship hulls, then it makes more sense to have a lot of specialized designs, as it effectively costs you nothing to custom-design a ship for a specific task. Not merely having something like one design for a heavy-crusier and another design for a ship that's primary mission is simply exploration, but mission specific designs as well. You're going to Fucknuckle V to study the marine biology? Whip up a ship that can double as a starship and a submarine, instead of stuffing a sub into an already existing ship and having to rotate the scientists who can be down on the planet working at any one time. I think the problem is that films like Star Wars, where the fleets are made up of whatever ship the Rebellion can find have made people think that this is how all fleets should look. It makes perfect sense in the Star Wars universe, less so in the Trekverse (if they continue to hold to the idea that ship's are things that are difficult to construct, etc.).
but if you go to Fucknuckle V for the marine biology, you may as well check out the lava baths of Fucknuckle III... just be ready for a fight in case you meet up with the Butt pirates of Orion. A fleet really should look more like a bunch of Imperial Star Destroyers than a mishmash. Maybe throw in a super heavy... but it's either merely scaled up like the Executor SSD or completely a class of it's own-like a mobile station/tender.
That was my point. Even with warp drive, space is so vast that it would be quite inefficient if a starship designed primarily for marine exploration went to Fucknuckle V, only to find that there were other biological or ecological formations that they weren't equipped to study. Captain Cockblow would be pretty pissed off if he traveled over a month (132 light years), only to find out his ship didn't have all the right equipment. "Goddammit! I guess we're heading back to Deep Space 69!"
Why? Give the volcanologists their own ship and let them explore that world while you do your thing. If ships are cheap and easy to produce.
A big budget is not an unlimited budget. How many episodes in Star Trek (or even other series/genres) are bottle episodes? They do it because they are saving money for other things. So they of course are going to use stock footage where they can to save money. This is a strange hill you've picked to die on.
I will guarantee you 99% of viewers either didn't notice that the 1-second screen clip of the robot was stock footage, or they wouldn't care. It's only because the internet told him that FF does.
"Well, if they're going to call me a villain, I'll be the most terrifying villain ever!!" is the sign of the kind of mind that was going to be a villain no matter the excuse. But you're hardly hitting the top 1000, even just by WF's villains. There's at least 947 imaginary cunts between you and Castle.
What’s Twilight’s rating? Or any of a number movies and TV shows that should be considered dreck yet are strangely popular. It made enough money for CBS to continue to green light more Trek and that’s all that counts as far as they’re concerned. And speaking of milking a dead horse, we’re getting a Twilight prequel and another Tiger King series because that’s how Follywood works.
They green lit a second season of Picard before the first season aired. I doubt CBS executives were expecting such low ratings.
Low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes don't mean shit to the suits. It's the ratings on AllAccess they care about, and those are far more accurate and detailed than the ones they've been getting from Neilson over the years. If the AllAccess ratings were truly horrible, they'd not be rolling out all the new Trek like they're doing.
All Access is like Netflix, they don't really release their numbers. They're releasing new Star Trek because they pissed off enough fans and are milking the IP before they lose the right and they're making a desperate cash grab. CBS Viacom is losing money. Their stock is way down and they're desperate. Besides, it could be another year or two before this new series sees the light of day and who knows what happens with Hollywood by then.
And? I wasn't asking for the numbers. I know that they're not going to be public with them, because people would shit a brick if they knew how much data CBS was getting. You know, things like time of day, what kind of device the person watched it on, when they paused, when they rewound, when they fast-forwarded, and when they stopped watching. All they ever got from Neilson was a brief bit of info about the demographics of the audience (age, gender, net worth) and if the person watched the show. Evidence, please. I don't mean postings on social media, or ratings given by the general public on some place like Rotten Tomatoes, I mean something like a trade publication (The Hollywood Reporter or Variety) that discusses this. Because that's what the suits really pay attention to. Who are they going to lose the rights to? Roddenberry? He gave up an awful lot of the rights when they did the original series. I've not heard anything about the possibility of them ever losing the rights to the IP. Par for the course in Follywood. That's why you'll have a bunch of movies with similar themes coming out at about the same time, or in rapid succession. They had a $1 billion dollar drop in earnings due to lower ad revenues. They have an annual income of around $7 billion and they're a division of megacorp. They're unlikely to go under any time soon. Also, as has been well-established, accounting and Follywood have only a passing acquaintance. If you go by the official numbers, Return of the Jedi didn't make a profit, yet somehow, they've kept making Star Wars movies. As of yesterday, it was up. Short-term trends in stocks are generally meaningless. Theranos was a hot stock for a long time, until it came out that the company wa a fraud. Uber's stock is usually going up, even though the company doesn't turn a profit. That's the nature of Follywood. Studios are used to working with long lead times. That's one of the reasons why you'll hear about so many projects being picked up and then not seeing the light of day for years, or if ever. They try and snap up as much as they can so that if a concept becomes really hot, they have something in the pipeline almost ready to go. That's also why they're all-in on things like "reality TV." They're cheap to produce, they can go from concept to finished product in a short period of time, and if it flops, they're not out a shitload of money (the concepts are also quickly forgotten, so the people involved in them don't have the kind of stigma attached to them they get if it bombs, unlike what happens when a movie or scripted series bombs).
I got about halfway through and, while some good points were raised, too much of it descended into so much inconsequential nitpickiness that I gave up on it. Was it really necessary to spend 3 minutes harping on Agnes referring to something as a galactic treaty? [satire]"Well, not everyone would've signed on to that treaty, so how is it a galactic treaty...?[/satire] Jesus, that was tedious. Perhaps galactic means "all of the important powers in areas known to the Federation." Good points aside, I stand by my take on Picard: not the greatest Trek, but it will certainly do. Edit: I may watch the rest of the Red Letter Media video later. I just reached my fill.
I watched the whole thing. The nitpick you refer to is meant to be funny. Another couple of things he pointed out were things I nitpicked as well, the copy and paste fleet, synths being easily killed or taken down by people with inferior strength and the stock footage they used. He also complained about the lack of optimism of past Star Trek and Patrick Stewart being a part of the writing process. These are common complaints I see for both Discovery as well. Many people that the writers have abandoned the overall theme of Star Trek. Now we’re supposed to be getting this return to classic Trek with SNW and I hope this is true, we’ll see. I don’t hate either show, but I can see a lot of flaws in both that I don’t see in TNG or DS9 and I don’t understand why they can’t give us something similar. Almost every other science fiction show is a dystopia. In times like these, a Star Trek show that shows an optimistic future would be a welcomed alternative, IMO. The plot lines of DSC and Picard seem to be a jumbled, convoluted mess in the vein of The Rise of Skywalker. If this new show turns out to be what they promise it will be, I’ll be pleasantly surprised and I’ll happily praise Kurtzman for it. Maybe season three of Discovery will be good. I hope so, but I’m not going to just blindly praise the show just because it’s Star Trek.
Yeah, they've jumped the shark for me. Must be nice to get those sweet Patreon dollars no matter how much you slack off and phone it in.
