(Part 2) Top products from r/DaystromInstitute

If you're looking for books that don't require a lot of prerequisite reading to understand, some of the old numbered Trek books are quite good.

One of my favorite OLD TOS books is Black Fire. This book has superb writing and Pirates!

Another of my favorites is an early DS9 book called Fallen Heroes. Brutal and sad, with a lot of Quark and Odo.

Anything by Peter David, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Diane Duane, Diane Carey (before she forced sailing references into everything), or Ann Crispin.

For the authors I listed above, here are my favorites from them:

• Peter David: Q-Squared. This is a dimensional-hopping book with fantastic twists and turns, and packed full of David's perfect dialog. Other Q books by David include: Q-in-Law and I.Q.
  
• Peter David: The New Frontier Series. Combining characters from other Trek shows and books, Peter David weaves a wonderful tale full of humor and adventure.
  
• Keith R.A. DeCandido: Articles of the Federation. basically The West Wing in Star Trek. Fantastic characters and great writing.
  
• Diane Duane: Her Rihannsu series basically defined what modern-day Romulans are like. Beautiful writing and vivid characters.
  
• Diane Carey: Captain's Table: Fire Ship. My favorite Captain's Table mini-series book. janeway is forced to join another crew as a lowly worker when Voyager is lost to her. Love this book SO much. Other good Diane Carey books include Best Destiny and her involvement in the Star Trek: New Earth mini-series.
  
• A.C. (Ann) Crispin: Some say her Yesterday Saga is her best Trek, but of all her work, I loved Sarek the most. A wonderful look into the life of Spock's father.
  
  Hope this helps!

This magazine-style book, "Starship Design," may be a fan-production so not officially canon, but it's so well done that I have always considered it to be canon. Beta-canon anyway.

Enlarge pages 11 and 13 and you will see clearly-labeled aft phaser emitters (just above the hangar bay) and an array of 5 ventral phaser emitters on the bottom of the engineering hull. The aft phaser emitters are seen used in Enterprise - "In A Mirror, Darkly," although that is a pre-refit Connie, USS Defiant. I have checked on various models, screenshots, and other schematics available and those that show a ventral view all have those bumps clearly labeled as phasers.

Even though this is, as far as I know, beta-canon at best, we have to admit that having no ventral phasers of any kind (the aft phaser emitters can at least cover part of the aft dorsal arc) would be an enormous tactical oversight with almost the entire secondary hull unprotected from a huge angle. While ships and phaser emitters of that era don't have nearly the same 360x360 degree phaser coverage of TNG-era phaser strips, even the Miranda class variants have the megaphaser units for aft weaponry, and the greater maneuverability and smaller profile to make up for its blind spots.

For Connie-variant comparison, the Decatur/Belknap class designs show that along with the lowered pylon/nacelle assemblies, the aft phaser banks are relocated at the top of the neck aft of the saucer, where they canprovide far greater coverage than the placement on the Constitution class, where peripheral firing arcs are blocked by the nacelles and pylons.

Something else I've always loved about this book is how the articles details design changes to various pylon/nacelle assemblies and the experiments with them, which suggests a far greater degree of modular design than we thought, at least in experimentation if not in large-scale production. We could reasonably expect a lot of these experimental variants in a postwar period where modernization and fleet reconstruction are both high, so they can be produced and tested quickly, and the idea scrapped and refit to a working module if it doesn't meet expectations.

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Even ignoring this book completely, a previous write-up of mine posited this: The Constitution class was meant to fill a major gap in the fleet - a true modern ship of the line, heavy cruiser classification, that could stand toe-to-toe with the Klingon D-7 and K'Tinga battlecruisers as well as the fleets of other encountered species. It was overpowered and crammed with every last bit of top-of-the-line technology it could get, with zero free space for future expansions and upgrades. By comparison, the fully-canon Rick Sternbach blueprints of the Enterprise-D --full hi-res Imgur album link-- show an enormous amount of empty space all over the ship, earmarked for "future expansion," or "mission-specific space," to say nothing of the absurd number of small crew lounges and recreation spaces on every deck, easily removed to cram in new stuff.

The Constitution's time was limited from the day it was built, and even the refit could only do so much. Built before the Klingon war, wartime advancements led to the refit program to bring the Connies up to par and maintain the ship-of-the-line status for as long as they could. Once the fleet was back up to full operational strength (1/3 of the fleet probably took a good 15 years or more to rebuild, putting this timeline around the end of Kirk's 5-year mission), the Excelsior program was begun, and the Excelsior class isn't just massive for the sake of being massive. Learning from the limitations of the Constitution, t's got empty space enough for over 100 years worth of upgrades and refits and internal redesigns to keep up with technology in the same basic spaceframe.

The Miranda-class, meanwhile, had 2 major benefits that kept it in service and allowed it to be upgraded and refit many times. The first is its size; it's a heck of a lot faster and cheaper to build/refit these frigates than heavy cruisers with their enormous secondary hulls. And second, without the neck and secondary hull limiting what can be done to the existing hull without compromising structural integrity or inertial damping systems, you could slap additions or modules into, onto, basically anywhere on the ship you wanted to. You start out with a basic Knox-class frigate. The rollbar/pod and extended aft engineering section makes it a Miranda-class heavy frigate and solves a lot of those mission-specific alteration problems. The whole Miranda concept is just a modernized redesign of the decades-old Soyuz-class that was being retired from service right after the war.

As a bonus, when the Constitutions were eventually retired, the saucers could be easily refit into Knox- and Miranda-class frigates, and the warp nacelles switched over as well. So you might downgrade a ship in classification, but also extend its serviceable lifespan significantly for a bare minimum of manpower and materials cost. As the Excelsior replaced and eventually far exceeded the number of Constitutions, there was just no reason to keep the old beasts around.

I have a copy of "Strange New Worlds, Volume II" that I read quite often. It was a fanfic contest that produced some surprisingly good work. I recommend you check it out.

One of the stories contained in Vol. II is called "I Am Become Death". It's a tragedy told from Data's point of view that deals greatly with the emotions surrounding the loss of Lal, Tasha Yar, and eventually the rest of the Enterprise crew, while he endured. The plot centers around the "Children of Soong", androids Data created. I encourage you to read it if you get the chance.

Granted, it's only one fan's idea of what might happen had Data's attempt at creating life had been successful, but it ends well and raises some interesting questions along the way. It was also written in 1999, which explains why Data is still alive, but then again, the last page or two also offer another explanation, but I won't spoil that for you.

In case you want to read it (and I strongly encourage you to, because it's really cool), I won't give you any plot details. Basically, [](#s "Data's race of androids have resulted in the death of all humanity in the universe, because what need has an immortal being with human life? Think Revulsion, that episode from Voyager with the hologram who hated biological life.") (PS I suck at formatting)

Personally, I think that the death of Data and the existence of B4 will change that idea substantially. More importantly, I don't think B4 will ever create any more androids, or at least, not for a very long time. I'd be more interested in seeing a pre-existing race of androids coming into contact with the Federation. The interaction between biological and technological, with B4 as the meeting of the two, would make for some great television (or a movie, perhaps?).

Side note: I can't find the text of the story online (but then, I didn't really look very hard), and I'm a little hesitant about transcribing it here without the author's permission. I did find Strange New Worlds, Vol. II on Amazon, if you're interested. It's dirt cheap, and it's available on Kindle. At the very least, the stories it contains would make for some interesting discussion here.

Quotable Star Trek. Basically every relevant, significant, funny, profound statement ever uttered in Star Trek (excepting Enterprise) condensed into a single volume, helpfully organized into Chapters by subject-matter.

I've flipped through this book a number of times for inspiration and reminiscence.

Of the novels, I sadly haven't read many, so my choices are far and few between, but I like "Q Squared." I'm always a sucker for "What Ifs" and parallel universes and this feeds that sweet tooth nicely. (Though I'd have switch the personalities of the Romulan and Cardassian officers).

Lastly, any of the reference materials which I fall back on from time to time. This being the Encyclopedia, Chronology, Episode Guides, and Klingon Dictionary.

The only Tech Manual I have is the old TOS one from the 70's, which is an interesting anachronism (it has SF headquarters being a space station in space.)

I actually disagree completely with your central objection here. You object that OP conflates emotions and morals, and state that you don't need one to have the other. I think that you absolutely do need emotions to have morals, and Vulcan's as a hypothetical aren't even a good imaginary test case for an example of people who have no emotions who do have morals for exactly the reason that they DO have emotions. Very strong emotions, in fact so strong that their entire planet turned to suppressing their emotions in a last ditch effort to achieve any kind of lasting culture.

I don't see how you're drawing a line between desire and emotion. What is desire if not an emotion? What is it to say you desire something if there is no emotion driving it? In my view, the nature of desire/emotion/value judgement is not nearly so clear cut.

You're right that Data has desires, and he also clearly has things he values. In my view, these behaviors constitute emotional states, although his outward expression of these emotions and his subjective experience of them are clearly very different from a human beings. That isn't to say he is flawed or broken, only that he is different. He is mistaken when he says he has no emotions, when what he really means is that he doesn't have the subjective experience of emotions that humans have. The emotion chip provides him with that subjective experience, but this is a change in how he experiences emotions, not the create of emotion ex nihilo.

For more about emotions and morals, I would refer you to The Emotional Construction of Morals by Jesse Prinz. No need to read it if you have no interest in the subject, but if it sparks your interest I found it to be a really great read on moral sentimentalism/emotionism.

If you liked that episode, check out the book Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Foreward. It's a great read, with a similar concept underneath it.

> Heard there is a novelization of the episode (and maybe a sequel novel?)

Novelization, "Relics" (Amazon Link)

Sequel Novel, "Dyson Sphere" (Amazon Link)

The novelization goes into more detail, and there's a nice extended version of the holodeck sequence, including interaction between Picard and the TOS crew.

The follow-up was a fun read, IMO. Goes into a lot more detail about the Dyson Sphere, its builders, the space around it, the life in it (the Enterprise was wrong in the episode; there's life there). It's been years and years since I've read it, so I can't go into more detail.

An aside: the novel Engines of Destiny (Amazon Link) goes into some more detail about Scotty's trip on the Jenolen (sp?) and a certain TNG character who helped him decide on that journey.

Read this:

Star Trek (2011-2016) Vol. 9: The Q Gambit https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VGOH4J4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_rAnRCb0Q938A4

Is not cannon, but it will answer your question partially and it’s a great comic!

Are you completely sure about that? But let's put that aside for a moment. I said we should use a different term.
Feudalism.

This is what employment on Ferenginar is most possibly like. Rom is our only true example, so there's really no help there.

But that kind of unbridled capitalism can only lead to something like feudalism.

Now, to go back to your point about not being able to unionize being hardly slavery. Look at it this way, there has never been unionization on Ferenginar. There have never been worker's rights. This means things like worker safety is not a concern over profits. Neither is child labor. I won't even get into gender issues.

Workers without rights are almost slaves.

Well, that was super-confusing for a second. I'm reading Castles of Steel, which is a history of the British Navy in WWI, in which Admiral Jellico; Commander of the Grand Fleet, is prominently featured.



Highly recommend it to any naval history buffs, or just anyone who wants to better understand how badly the fog of war can screw over well-laid plans.

I'm going to add to the chorus of voices here saying that Star Trek has always been a character-based show, and that it would be a mistake to depart from that.

If you wanted to widen the scope of a series, you could do that while still remaining character-based. Game of Thrones is an example of a character based show where there are multiple storylines all going on at once with their own characters, for instance. But it's not just a disconnected series of stories all taking place in the same universe.

Interestingly, Stephen Whitfield's The Making of Star Trek, which seems to copy liberally from Roddenberry's show bible and extensively quotes his pitch letters, makes it clear that one of the defining characteristics of Star Trek that it isn't an anthology series.

Someone once wrote a whole novel explaining how Bones gets his hands on a few cases of Romulan Ale now and then: http://www.amazon.com/The-Romulan-Way-Star-Trek/dp/0671634984/ref=pd_sim_b_1

I remember enjoying the book, but it's probably been 20 years since I've read it.

>To your last point, indentured servitude is not slavery. The idea is that you have a debt which you pay off through work directly for a person. Slavery is the absence of wages and freedom but being required to work. An indentured servant is paid a wage and generally has freedom outside of their job.

In real history, that distinction is not as sharp as you seem to think. "Indentured Servitude" has very often been slavery in everything but name. This has been true globally, though the book I linked focuses on the US.

Is this what you're referring to? I didn't realize this existed until this moment.

Those other people aren't the focal point of the episode. Bell is.

The comments are from 2000's Deep Space Nine Companion. They're not recent.

I'll be the first to admit that Gene was a pot smoking, abusive, adulterous jerk who stole all the credit and alienated half the writers who worked on the show. But he was no where near as bad as Columbus was.

I can understand how you can see the fanbase whitewash a lot of what Gene did over the years as an analogy to Columbus, but I still think its unfair to make that comparison to a guy who literally enslaved people.

(If anyone doesn't believe me on the stuff I said about Gene go read Herbert F. Solow & Robert H. Justman's book).

One thing I will say in Gene's defense, to paraphrase Riker: I don't think you're a saint, but you did have a vision, and now were sitting in it.

It was this: https://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Classic-Episodes-Hardcover/dp/0385365241

I don't mean to make it sound like hard scifi literature, but it was far less campy and far more serious than the series. There were also some minor but significant changes made between these scripts and the show.

You could tell that some of the episodes were slightly dumbed down for TV. In Operation: Annihilate! for example, it wasn't intense light that killed the beasties, but rather the magnetic flux of the star. They also realized that there was no way a starship had the power to overwhelm the natural magnetic field of a planet, so they found an alternative you'd never expect of the Starfleet we know. They were also on the verge of sterilizing Deneva via orbital bombardment to contain the epidemic before finding this solution.

On a semi-relevant note, does anyone else here remember the Khan that the world did suffer in the end of the 20th century? One who has been implicated in contributing to the instability of current world affairs? And is still on the world stage in Pakistani politics?

Abdul Qadeer Khan, also respectfully known by some in Pakistan as Mohsin-e-Pakistan (Urdu: محسن پاکِستان‎, lit. "Benefactor of Pakistan"

• AQ Khan: Father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb who after "house arrest" has recently jumped into politics
  
• AQ Khan, the godfather of North Korea's bomb
  
• Initiated the illicit sale to and development of Pakistani nuclear technology for Iran and Libya, and possibly creating a black market available to various non-state entities.
  
• "The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets...And How We Could Have Stopped Him"
  

Yes because it indexed insanity. I took a class with a Orthodox Jewish law professor who also happened to be a lawyer. There’s also a good discussion of it in this book:

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo3627888.html

Edit:

Also this book contains a discussion of the discourses and evolution of Jewish law on the death penalty which changed from Biblical to classical to Medieval Times.

https://www.amazon.com/Execution-Invention-Discourse-Rabbinic-Christian/dp/0195179196/ref=nodl_

Israel’s de facto ignoring of the law in practice aside, de jure the death penalty is supposed to be all but forbidden in Israel due to the Rabbinical law on it. Eichmann is an obvious exception (and there’s a few justifications for why that was allowed), as is, yknow, their policy of assassination and carpet bombing, but there are, in fact, sub segments of Orthodox Jews who won’t serve in the IDF, ON TOP of the other normal reasons, bc they view it as in violation of the laws.

Also David Daube has a good analysis of the Talmudic law on executions, etc. so, for example, if an oppressive power demand you turn over a specific person for execution one is allowed to do so for the sake of self preservation, but one is not allowed to do so for “any odd person” (Hayes, p 189, 2017). The two things of note are that people are enjoined to self preservation in light of oppression & a murderous state, and one can’t be complicit in the murder of another or oneself.