keep on trekkin

wandered around looking at christmas lights tonight. headed up onto the ridgeline that runs from like 50th down past my place, in a rough diagonal from just past the hollywood district to down fremont past alameda. good god i want to live on that ridge. the view of downtown from up there is AMAZING.

i wish my camera worked. i could prove it was amazing.

more trek ideas today. some good, some bad, i’m sure. no idea which is which at this point. i think i’m going to definately end up with two major trek ideas bouncing around; post-movie/pre-next-gen Star Trek 2 and post-voyager Odyssey.

trek 2 is about a non-enterprise ship, a prototype ship crewed mostly by the starfleet corps of engineers, used to test out new and bizarre technology. essentially a hybrid of ideas from the movie enterprise and the enterprise D. but it’s not the flagship. it’s just another ship running around on various missions, largely within federation territory. i’m not entirely sure how that would hold people’s interest, as i have no idea what kind of large storyline i can tell within that timeline. there are seeds of ideas though. the early klingon/federation alliance, the disappearance of the romulans, the aftermath of the big and wierd alien threats like v’ger and the probe, the orion syndicate, the cardassians occupying bajor, and etc.

but the character set that’s most appealing to me doesn’t quite fit into that timeline. so it’ll be hard to write a crew that doesn’t consist of something like a younger picard, jack crusher, beverly pre-crusher, kerzon dax, and tom paris’s father.

the crew i like is the younger one from my starfleet/star trek academy ideas, which fits more solidly into the post-voyager trek universe, with more advanced technology and all the things that all the other star trek shows have brought to the table, most notably a.i. characters and all the wierd technology voyager brought back, and the political state ds9 and the next gen movies have failed to adequately resolve.

so they could be the crew for odyssey, which is set 50-100 years after voyager returns.

but i really like the feel of the trek universe in the movies, when the galaxy was still this wild and untamed place full of wonders unknown, and most importantly, aliens that were more alien than wrinkly noses. by the time next gen happened, the galaxy was fairly well explored and understood. all the cultures picard ran into were just aspects of our own culture, with prosthetic bits to make them look funny. the entire galaxy was just a bunch of white people.

setting a show during the movies lets me do real exploring and real alien stuff. but so does setting odyssey in another galaxy.

there’s always the temptation to start at the movies and disregard next gen and onward, or do an alternate version of events where things play out differently. but at that point, i might as well do an original universe like babylon 5 or andromeda.

still.