Trekkie Mail Templates

Before composing your mail, please check to make sure it does not resemble one of these. If it does, simply use the template, insert your name, and save us both a lot of time.

Style over substance template

Hello, my name is {insert name here}. I just discovered your website, and while I can see that you've put a lot of work into it, I believe your conclusions are biased and wrong. You're completely one-sided on every issue, and your whole site drips of sarcasm and contempt for Star Trek and its fans. You should rewrite the site to be more fair to Star Trek.

Of course, I have no specific examples of where you've applied a different standard of evidence or method of analysis to Star Trek as opposed to Star Wars, and I have no technical input to offer, but that's irrelevant. I believe that style is more important than substance, and since your style is sarcastic and dismissive, your conclusions must therefore be wrong.

Golden mean template

Hello, my name is {insert name here}. Why do you hate Star Trek so much? At every turn, you make the Federation appear weak and feeble compared to the Empire. According to you, Imperial ships have superior speed, firepower, armour, and every other damned thing. Can't you see how extreme and one-sided that is?

If you could put aside your Star Wars fanaticism for a minute, you would see that the two sides are roughly equal, despite the Empire's thousand to one numerical and speed advantage (this would mean that one Federation starship should be able to effortlessly destroy thousands of Imperial ships). You would also agree with me that even after tens of thousands of years of space travel, the Empire wouldn't have learned a single thing that the Federation doesn't already know, because again, both sides should be assumed to be equal no matter how much larger and more experienced one of them may be. Do you see how much more reasonable that is, when compared to your extreme position?

Ad hominem template

Hello, my name is {insert name here}. Where do you get off acting like some kind of science expert, when all you've got is a Bachelor's degree in applied science and a P. Eng? If you had a PhD that might mean something, but you don't. Therefore, all of your scientific and technical comments should be considered null and void. After all, even though I'm just a high school kid, I know all about higher education and the difference between a Bachelor's degree and a doctorate (you university graduates like to say that post-grad degrees merely give you research experience and further specialization, but we high school kids know better; we know that PhD students are the only ones who learn anything, and that everyone else just sits around on their asses for years so they should be assumed equal to high school kids).

Remember: the validity of every idea is determined not by its logical consistency or its conformance with observations, but by the authority of its source. And since you're not a PhD, I can dismiss all of your arguments out of hand, since that's a hell of a lot easier than coming up with logical reasons to dismiss them. By the way, did I mention that I'm a creationist?

Blithering idiot template

Hello, my name is {insert name here}. Where do you get these ridiculous numbers about Imperial ships travelling at millions of times the speed of light? You obviously didn't watch the films. In ANH, Han Solo says that the Millenium Falcon's top speed is "point five past lightspeed", or 1.5c. So it will take years for Imperial ships to get anywhere in Federation space, and they'll be slaughtered by ships with warp drive, which will run rings around them.

Of course, I have no explanation for how Darth Maul could travel from the galactic core to its outer rim in a few hours at 1.5c, but since I don't do math, I will never figure out why that doesn't work (it's a sure bet that I don't realize that at 1.5c, it would take more than 7 hours just to travel the width of our solar system). But hey, I'm a blithering idiot Trekkie fanboy, and I don't do math or science. So I'm right, and you're wrong. In your face, Warsie!

{now, pick any two of the following}

1. If the Empire is so powerful, why was it defeated by the tiny Rebellion? If the Rebels could do it, the Federation should walk all over them (of course, I'm assuming that the entire Empire was actually defeated by the Rebels instead of self-destructing after the death of the Emperor, but since that outlandish assumption makes the Empire look weak, I'll ignore the logic and the official literature and run with it. I'm also quietly ignoring the fact that Rebel warships use Imperial technology, and most of them dwarf the largest Federation warships, particularly Home One which was somewhere between 4 and 5 km long).

2. If the Death Star is so tough, why was it destroyed by a single nuclear weapon? (of course, I've just developed amnesia about how a Galaxy class starship and the entire Borg unicomplex were destroyed by computer viruses, and how the Enterprise would have been destroyed by a terrorist bomb the size of a cell-phone if they hadn't been stopped. I've also ignored the fact that the Death Star survived its close proximity to the Alderaan explosion).

3. If Imperial ships are so tough, why did an asteroid smash a bridge tower in TESB? (of course, I'm ignoring the certainty of prior damage from previous asteroid impacts as well as the Hoth battle, and worse yet, I'm implicitly assuming that a Federation ship would have survived that impact, despite the incident in DS9 where we saw Jem'Hadar cockroach fighters tearing Klingon heavy cruisers to pieces by ramming them with nowhere near the same amount of kinetic energy, or the incident in Voyager when a Species 8472 bioship was destroyed by a collision with a Borg cube, also with less kinetic energy).

4. Where do you get these numbers about thousands of Imperial ships? I only saw a few dozen at Endor (of course, I ignore the fact that the Imperial fleet was scattered all over the galaxy at the time, not to mention the looming question of how the Empire could control millions of star systems with a few dozen ships, particularly since the Trade Federation alone had far more than that. I also ignore the even larger question of how the Empire could build and staff the Death Star, equivalent to millions of ships on its own, without having the industrial or manpower resources to build more than a few dozen ships).

Spacebattles.com Babies template

Yeah, yeah, I know that these idiots are not representative of the entire board, but they are using your board as a base of operations, so save your flames because I don't see what other name I should give them. Do we avoid the term "Islamic terrorist" just because not all Muslims are terrorists? Anyway, onto the Spacebattles.com Babies template:

{Insert silly screen name of spacebattles.com baby here}

Wong's site is a load of crap (but if he challenges me to a debate, I will concede that his major points are all correct, deny ever having said otherwise, and then try to limit the scope of the debate to nitpicks).

Wong's methods are completely unfair. He grabs every advantage for Star Wars, and he ignores countless advantages for Star Trek. I would list examples of such unfairness, but it's much easier to generalize or nitpick (besides, if I made a nice convenient list of my criticisms of his page instead of peppering insignificant nitpicks throughout the discussion boards, it would be a nice big fat target, somebody would send it to him, and I can't risk being made into an example on his Hate Mail page, since I know that most of my criticisms are pseudoscientific bullshit).

Wong is totally unfair to his critics. He lambasts them on his Hate Mail page rather than contacting them directly, which is cowardly and dishonest. Of course, we've been criticizing him relentlessly from afar rather than contacting him directly, but that's completely different. Why? Because ... because ... because he doesn't give people the right to defend themselves ... except on every sci-fi related discussion board and public newsgroup on the entire Internet. It's as if we're muzzled!

In other words, he's not allowed to criticize anybody on his site unless he invests the time and money required to add discussion boards to it. If he wants to criticize us, he should come to spacebattles.com, sign up, and then waste just as much time here as we do (this will have the added benefit of stealing time away from his work on his own pair of websites). If he doesn't make an exception to his policy of eschewing newsgroups (including his own former stomping grounds at ASVS) and discussion boards in favour of his family, his job, and his two websites, then he must be a coward (unless he comes out and issues a challenge, in which case we will all run away and hide ... while still calling him a coward).

And last but not least, Wong is mean and rude. But we're not, even though we insult him constantly, accuse him of dishonesty in virtually every post, and some of us (such as IXJac, who makes the term "moderator" seem oxymoronic) even went so far as to defend that Laird idiot and his oh so hilarious prank of defacing Wong's family pictures by depicting monkeys urinating on his wife (we never understood what that "throwing stones from a glass house" analogy meant anyway).

Backhanded compliment template

Hello, my name is {insert name here}. I think your site is great, and you've obviously put a lot of work into it. I admire your writing abilities and your technical knowledge, and I agree with many of your points. However, you've made at least one serious factual error: {insert a minor nitpick or an alternate interpretation of facts, rather than an actual factual error}. You should try to correct this error as soon as possible before anyone else notices it, because it reflects badly on your entire site.

Of course, I realize that it's rude to state my disagreement with your site this way, because I have stated my position in such a manner as to imply that your position is so hopelessly wrong and indefensible that there is no possibility of debate. However, I have brilliantly defused any hostile reaction by starting my post with an insincere compliment (see?), so you can't get belligerent or I'll accuse you of being rude, and my next message will be the Style over Substance template. Naturally, I can't imagine that you will see through this oh so original tactic.