Star Trek

Gary Graham, 'Alien Nation' and 'Star Trek' Actor, Dead at 73

Good night, good sir.

https://parade.com/news/gary-graham-star-trek-actor-dead

#StarTrek #StarTrekEnterprise @startrek

From StarTrek.com, an excerpt from an interview she gave to Star Trek magazine:

"By the end of the series, Kasidy marries Sisko and is pregnant with their child. Jerald called their relationship 'powerful.'"

'Sometimes too powerful,' she says, laughing. 'The chemistry between Avery and I was uncanny… It was magnetic, because you had two seasoned actors who were both aware of that and who were both happily married.' (Jerald has been married to Gralin Jerald since 1982. Brooks has been married to Vicki Bowen since 1976). 'We wanted to make sure none of that was residual outside of that stage. We didn’t do dressing room visits or anything. We were smart enough to know the chemistry was so strong not to go there and tease ourselves in that department. A lot of the strength you saw translated on screen was the fact we resisted one another, and I think that was a great dynamic of the characters.'"

Personally I have always felt like their relationship was so believable to the point where I would forget that the actors weren't romantically involved themselves. Sounds like it wasn't so far off!

I can't figure it out. It isn't huge, but it's heavy. Specs are 9 x 2 x 12 inches - ‎1.52 pounds. And it's totally smooth on the back. Nowhere to put a hook. Has anyone figured out a way to do it?

The picture is where I have it now. On the mantle, next to Robbie. But I have a giant Spock on my wall and I want it next to him.

The site is a subsidiary of Paramount Global, so I would hope that means their info is good.

Thank you Vinny

Just to be clear, this isn’t my creation, just something I found and wanted to share.

Summaries of the various panels from Trek Talks 3 are circulating, so it might be easiest to compile them all in one thread. I'll get it started, but feel free to drop any that I missed in the comments.

‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’/’Lower Decks’ Crossover Cast And Crew Talk Cut Scenes And Hope For Follow-up

Brannon Braga And ‘Star Trek: Prodigy’ Producers Talk Janeway And “Complicated” Chakotay Relationship

Doug Jones Talks Saru Romance And “Gorgeous” Epilogue Added To ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 5 Finale

‘Star Trek: Picard’ Spin-Off Still Not In Development, But Terry Matalas Has Thoughts On “What If We Did More?”

Yesterday a friend and I got together to play board games, including and we both got our first opportunity to play the Star Trek: Away Missions tactical miniatures board game published by Gale Force 9.

So, let's talk about it!

Concept:

Away Missions is a tactical miniatures game, themed around dustbuster clubs being sent into the wreckage in the aftermath of the Battle of Wolf 359, to recover intel. The base game comes with a Starfleet away team made up of Riker, Shelby, Data, and Worf, and Locutus' Borg Unimatrix featuring Locutus himself and five drones.

There are also four expansions currently:
    • Gowon and three other Klingon warriors
    • Sela and four person Romulan infiltration team
    • The Duras sisters with three other Klingons
    • Picard, Doctor Crusher, Troi, Geordi, and Wesley

Each dustbuster club has it's own unique set of core missions to choose from, and then each faction has additional missions that can be performed during the game as well.
 

Components:

• The assimilated elephant in the room for a lot of people is probably going to be the miniatures. The design of them is very stylized and cartoonish; large heads and chucky bodies. Personally I like them the design, but I've seen plenty of people talking about the game saying that the miniatures are too great a stumbling block for them. To each their own.

I do think the miniature design makes the characters fairly distinctive. They come unpainted, but for the Starfleet characters at least, it would have been very difficult to confuse which one was which. Despite each sculpt having a unique pose and details, the Borg drones are a bit more difficult to tell apart. Each miniature has the character's name in raised letters on the back, but it isn't the easiest thing to read.

• In addition to miniatures, each character had a cardboard sheet representing their abilities, including little holes to accommodate the health pegs. These seem pretty good, if perhaps a bit larger than necessary. The modular board for the game already takes up quite a bit of table real estate, so it would be nice if if these character sheets were a bit smaller.

• The plastic health pegs I mentioned are fine, and kind of a neat weigh to implement health tracking in the game. The only complaint would be that while the rules do talk about playing up to four players, there's not enough pegs to accommodate that many characters. The expansion boxes don't come with extra pegs for the new characters, either.

• The various cardboard tokens are...fine. I like that they're not inexplicably in the shape of Starfleet deltas or what have you like some other Trek board games, but most of them are just a bit of cardboard with a word on it. Purely functional, and it would nice to have it spiced up a little bit.

• Each faction has two decks of cards: missions and support. The card backs for the decks feature of their faction's emblem, so you can place them beside one another to make the whole. That's neat. The cards are readable and the language on all the ones I looked at was fairly clear. I've never been a fan of using stills from movie or television show as art in a game, but I understand why game publishers do it with licenced products.

• The board is modular and double sided, so you can get different configurations of either a Starfleet ship or a Borg cube to run around on. Everything looks good, though by its nature, the details on the cube do seem to blend together.
 

Rules:

So, full disclosure, I forgot to put the rulebook back in the box after scanning through them, and thus when we got to play, we were using the quickstart document, and an online pdf on my phone. That meant a lot of encountering a situation and trying to look it up on a tiny screen, so I know we made mistakes while playing. Probably more than usual for a first time game.

The quickstart document is not, in my opinion, sufficient for learning the game. There is important information left out, and I think that a condensed version of the rules should at least have the basics of play.

The full rulebook wastes a bunch of space with three pages of fiction setting up the backstory of how an engineer on the USS Ahwahnee developed some weapons modifications to fight the Borg at Wolf 359, but she was killed by a hull breach before she was able to implement them. I suppose it's nice to get a bit of a backstory, but for this sort of game, it really doesn't seem necessary.

Anyways, the full rules seem pretty well laid out. There was never a moment where I had a question that I couldn't find the answer to.
 

Gameplay:

• It's a tactical miniatures game, so that means moving figures around the board and getting into fights. Though something I liked about this game is that combat was not the primary driver, at least not for the core missions we choose. I, as the Starfleet player, was trying to repair the ship, and my Borg opponent was attempting to assimilate it, and we got points for actions that furthered those goals.

• The line of sight rules for the game are somewhat simplified compared to other tactical miniatures games I've played, in that if a character can see into a room where an opponent character is, they can see the opponent character. You can't get cover from being positioned behind a corner or anything like that.

• There is a "take cover" action though, so it's not as though characters need to be standing in the clear for anyone to assault them (though we never actually used the action); it's just not a function of the miniature positioning.

• We played with the pre-built starter decks, but both the decks you have for your away team are customizable. I didn't cycle cards a lot even though you can always discard unwanted cars a the start of a round.

• Attacks and skill tests to complete objectives are done with dice pools of d6s. For attacks and opposed skill tests, both players involved roll dice and compare values in descending order. If one player is rolling more dice than the other, all dice that don't have something to compare against don't count, and that's disappointing.

• The game comes with a cardboard tacker to arrange the dice for comparison, and it seems somewhat extraneous. We stopped using it because we're adults who can compare results on a die without needing to line them up in a bit of cardboard.

• The game lasts for three rounds, and then it's done. Which is not particularly climatic if I'm being honest. Both players compare the number points they've scored between mission cards and their core mission, and who ever has the most points wins, even if all their characters have been incapacitated.
 

Conclusion:

I enjoyed the game quite a lot once we started to find a rhythm to the gameplay. I'm very curious to get the other away teams on the board, especially the Duras Sisters.

I also might attempt my first foray into mini-painting with these figures. Probably gonna start with the Borgs.

Components: 9/10
Rules: 7/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Overall: 8/10

Tracy Tormé Dead: ‘Sliders,’ ‘Star Trek: Next Generation’ Writer Was 64

"The Big Goodbye" was an early TNG classic. RIP.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tracy-torme-dead-sliders-star-trek-next-generation-1235783832/

@startrek #StarTrek #StarTrekTNG

Captain Burnham and the U.S.S. Discovery are sent to retrieve a mysterious 800-year-old Romulan vessel; until the artifact hidden inside is stolen, leading to an epic chase. Meanwhile, Saru is offered the position of a lifetime, and Tilly’s efforts to help pull her into a tangled web of secrecy.

New ‘Star Trek’ In The Works With ‘Andor’ Director Toby Haynes On Board

https://deadline.com/2024/01/andor-toby-haynes-star-trek-movie-seth-grahame-smith-writing-1235712646/

@startrek #StarTrek

They have quite a few guests lined up this year - the full list can be found here.

My wife recently started to show an interest in watching Star Trek. Previously she had seen The Wrath of Khan when she was single digits in age and not much else.

So far we have watched some of the first season of TOS and some other key episodes (still need to show her Mirror Mirror and The Trouble with Tribbles for sure, and probably episodes with Pike, which I think is starting to come up for us soon).

We watched a few episodes of TNG, for some reason Paramount through Amazon started us in the middle of season 3 instead of the season 1. She did not like how Wesley is treated on the show (she is a huge fan of Wil).

From there we moved to Voyager and are about half way through the second season. She is liking it, but not a fan of Neelix (I cannot wait to tell her he improves after Kes is gone) because of his jealousy towards anything that interacts with Kes. I have never finished watching all of Voyager myself, I think I am in season 6 or 7.

I watched all of Discovery (I think I finished anyway), the first Season of Picard, most of Strange New Worlds, and some of Lower Decks. Since she has said she wants to watch the new stuff with me I am doing my best to not watch it all so I have some new episodes with her.

At what point would you move from the old stuff to the new stuff to keep someone from being too confused? Or if confusion arises would you go back and watch the old stuff to answer questions? I know we will not watch Picard until we have gotten well into the Borg stuff in Voyager and some episodes of TNG dealing with it.