• Location: Raveh Sector, Orellius Sector Block
• Faction and Level: Federation, Any Level
• Foundry ID and Server: ST-HSRO4D6XK, Holodeck

Summary: One of Starfleet’s many missions is making navigational charts of explored space.  Survey duty isn’t generally the most exciting in the universe unless you find something unexpected… and this unexpected discovery becomes an unusual relief mission.  Diplomacy is the order of the day, especially considering the people you meet…

(Mild spoilers after the break) continue reading…

Greetings, this is Captain Allen of the Federation star ship Andromeda here again to continue my mission to bring technical speaking to every star ship Captain in the galaxy.  Last week we looked at some technology related technobabble that should give your science and engineering bridge officers something to talk about.  This week we’re going to get you up to speed on your Chief of Medicine’s commonly used phrases.  Medical technobabble is a very strange animal indeed and very difficult to master because you really can’t do surgery or bio scans or tricorder scans in the same way that you can shoot bad guys with a phaser. Hopefully this will give you a good starting point for a hook or complication for the player of your mission to solve.

There are a lot of things to keep in mind when writing medical hooks, complications and plot points, and I need to bring them into the spotlight before we move on to the terminology because we take a lot of these things for granted.  The first is that most alien civilizations look a lot like humans, but their insides may vary wildly.  You will want to research the Biology portal on Memory Alpha to see if the NPC’s race has any physiology that works or doesn’t work with the plot line you have in mind.  The second thing to keep in mind is that the player will often wonder “Shouldn’t I be concerned about exposing myself to unknown possibly deadly pathogens?”  The answer is somewhat complicated, but generally “no.”  While the Enterprise series required gel and a short quarantine of away team members before re-integration with the crew, in The Next Generation the transporter was regularly used as a Deus Ex Machina that would cure almost anything.  The third thing to keep in mind is that pathogens, poisons, and injuries are relatively easy to fix in most situations but surgery, diseases and healing after a lost limb is not always guaranteed. Simply getting rid of a pathogen or treating a genetic disease is only the first step, often times a patient will need a lot more help to get their body functioning normally again, and that’s where a player character Captain or a doctor or an Emergency Medical Hologram’s purpose becomes clear: to diagnose the problem, apply the treatment, and balance side effects and symptoms until the patient is healthy again.

continue reading…

Greetings, this is Captain Allen of the Federation star ship Andromeda here again to continue my mission to bring technical speaking to every star ship Captain in the galaxy. Last week we took a look at some common go-to science technobabble that will help us write a mission feature or science related story complication and its solution.  This week we’ll look at some more technology related technobabble, including the mother of all technobabble, for the same basic purpose as last week: to provide a problem the player has to solve.

One of the important things to keep in mind is to use your best resource for technobabble research, Memory Alpha’s technology portal.  I find that the Science section is more useful to start from and many of those links will lead to technology sections, but sometimes you have to take a step back and say, “Am I missing something BIG here?”  Nothing is worse then getting halfway through your mission and realizing, “oh wait, wouldn’t the blah blah blah do this blah blah trick and make my entire plot break?”  There was an episode of Deep Space 9 that did this witha new alien species whose speech patterns were ‘unable to be picked out by the computer’ and then seemingly halfway through the Universal Translator sort of ‘figured it out’ and the story progressed from there, and I doubt you’ll be surprised if I say that through the first half of that episode I was screaming at my TV and the second half I was rolling my eyes and /facepalming.
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