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Captain's Log Supplemental: It was time to beam the Maquis on board Voyager. Two crews, once enemies, now working together in an arrangement sure to cause mildly explosive tension once or twice a season.




Tuvok got the team-building off to a great start by revealing himself as a duplicitous bitch that was working for me the whole time.









As fun as this was, it was time to get Banjo man on the line and move the plot along.





Not very helpful, but after a quick wardrobe change (was he just wearing his Starfleet uniform under the Maquis disguise), Tuvok had a lead.

Captain's Log:

Options were admittedly low at this point so the best we could do was to canary-in-a-coal-mine two expendable crew members into the ominous structure.






I'm sure our banjo-playing abductor was trying to put us at ease but missed the mark with the Deliverance vibes.






Kim and Paris attempted to make the best of it, determined to put on the greatest show ever performed in a barn.





Instead, they found themselves faced with the decision of whether they should wake up the half-Klingon woman or the guy who has the superpower of occasionally turning into a bad Native American stereotype when he gets a spotlight episode. Night of the Comet is great, but this was no hard decision.

Captain's Log:

Our tale begins with the newly launched Voyager being tasked to track down a Maquis ship in the Badlands. Who are the Maquis you may ask? You know what, it doesn't really matter. This story takes place far away from all the context that defines their group and their goals. Suffice it to say that they're outlaws and many of them are former Federation. Notable members include fan favorite-ish Ro Laren, and generic white dude Michael Eddington. The story of Voyager features 4 3 2 notable Maquis characters. Maybe the guy that played Chucky in the Child's Play movies will show up here, I don't know. Likeness rights, they are a bitch.

But getting back to the start of things, this is what we're working with:







A former current convict, and the franchise's own Charlie Brown.

We're just going to rapid-fire through this first bit of setup here because it all just happens and there's fuckall for choice involved:

Of the starship, uh... Voyager.

It's mission: To get the crew back to the Alpha Quadrant, even if the Prime Directive gets violated harder than an Orion slave girl at a pon farr orgy. To remind the Kazon that they're the most dogshit recurring villains in all of Trek. To get some measure of use out of having just rewatched seven seasons of mediocre Star Trek, which was still easier for me than getting through one season of The Expanse.




Edit: Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown (just going to toss that in for the search engine).

https://phys.org/news/2025-11-sulfur-cave-spiders-arachnid-megacity.html

Researchers may have discovered the world's biggest spider web, a massive subterranean structure spanning over 100 square meters in a sulfur cave on the Albania–Greece border. The multilayered web along a wall near the cave entrance is home to a colony of approximately 69,000 Tegenaria domestica (also known as the domestic house spider) and 42,000 Prinerigone vagans spiders. This is believed to be the first documented case of colonial web formation for both species.

Spider megacity

Researchers, including members of the Czech Speleological Society, were exploring sulfur caves in 2022 to survey underground wildlife. In one cavern, they found the huge spider megacity and reported it to other scientists, who made several site visits to learn more about the unusual colony.

The team identified the two species by running DNA tests and studying their morphology. Both are usually solitary, so finding them coexisting in a colony was a major surprise, as several researchers detail in a paper published in the journal Subterranean Biology.

To estimate the colony size, the study authors counted individual funnel webs in random sections and extrapolated the density. After measuring the length and width of the web-covered wall section, they calculated the surface area to be 106 square meters.

Currently sitting at a 64 on Metacritic.

Between that and locking two clans behind the ultimate edition or whatever I decided to wait until it's on a deep, deep sale before picking it up. I won't pay more than $15-$20 for it.

From some of the responses to hands-on time with the game, a common thread seems to be that this ended up as more of a linear action game and much less of an RPG and that it should have been called something other than Bloodlines 2.

October 21st release date. Of this year no less.

The amount of content they've added over the years is impressive; I need to give this game another whack at some point.  Reading back over the thread I think a lot of us had the same experience of bouncing off it, and it sounds like the trick is to install a whole bunch of mods before you start.