There’s a lot of fighting between DS9 and B5. The story goes that B5 series creator J. Michael Straczynski had shopped the series bible around, including to Paramount. They weren’t interested, but when they heard it got picked up by WB, they rushed their own space station based Star Trek series forward. With people coming over from TNG, they get a pilot ready faster than JMS can create a series from scratch.
Since they had the B5 series bible, there’s long been allegations that DS9 is a ripoff of B5. Indeed, there do seem to be some elements stolen out of it. For example, the pilot of B5 has a “changeling net” technology that lets people impersonate each other, which had apparently evolved out of an early draft of a changeling species, which DS9 copies outright.
What Paramount studio execs did was definitely underhanded. They were deliberately pushing out a show to make sure B5 wouldn’t get to the same level of popularity as Star Trek. They probably did steal elements from the B5 bible and pushed Berman and Piller to use them.
However, fans make more of the similarities than are really there. Berman and Piller were almost certainly unaware of why the studio was pushing certain ideas and where they got them from (and JMS said as much at the time). Most of the stolen elements are ultimately superficial. The way the central conflict unfolds is very different, the characters are very different, and the technology is all different. B5 doesn’t center around a planet coming out of a long term colonial authoritarian government, and DS9 doesn’t have humanity crawling out of a war that nearly destroyed it and which ended for mysterious reasons. B5 doesn’t have an excellent father-son relationship, and DS9 doesn’t have a wisecracking ambassador who’s very likeable despite doing some incredibly fucked up things.
They are both excellent shows, and well worth your time.
I’ll take DS9’s first two seasons over TNG’s first two any time. Yes, even Move Along Home. TNG also peaked around season 5, and was somewhat more mixed after that (but never going quite so low, either).
Big air coolers don’t fit because there isn’t enough height off the CPU inside the case. An O11 Dynamic (regular size) doesn’t fit an NH-D15, for example, but it fits water cooling with at least one regular thickness 360mm rad on top just fine. (And also one on the bottom, and a thin one on the side).
It has more points of failure, and that failure can be more catastrophic. If your air cooler falls off somehow or the fan dies, CPUs these days are pretty good about shutting themselves off before they melt. If your fittings leak, it can destroy everything.
It’s a fun thing to do. I like my setup (O11 dynamic XL, two 360mm rads, dual pumps, both CPU and GPU blocks), but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone. It’s a lot of effort and expense for a little gain. But it’s a hobby on top of a hobby, and that’s fine if you want to go for it.
I wouldn’t cite LTT for much, but IIRC, that was only true to a point. The NHD-15 is great, but a lot of cases can’t fit one. Same with many other high end air coolers. It might also cool to the same temperature, but is also running the fans harder to get there.
Yes. The advantage is that you can make the surface area of the air cooling part much, much larger. I had a water cooled system that could do web browsing and other basic tasks with zero fan speed (though it was better to leave it on very low speed to avoid hunting behavior).
Also, there’s some benefits to thermal mass. Short term spikes can be absorbed by the water without increasing fan speed.
I’ve had this theory running around in my head about followups to any series. Every person has a slightly different take on what their favorite part of the show is. For OG Star Trek, maybe you liked the banter between Spock and McCoy. Maybe you liked Kirk’s swagger. Maybe you thought Scotty was hot.
If a new production comes along years later and doesn’t reproduce the specific elements you like, then you will hate it. The producers might have been ultrafans of the original with good writing chops, a solid cast, and high production values, but if it doesn’t have those specific elements for you, then you’ll hate it.
Those elements are different for everyone, though. The list of possible elements can be very long, and no new production can possibly check off even a significant fraction of that list. Therefore, any new production is bound to have a long line of haters regardless of its quality on its own merits.
Was Star Trek supposed to be about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on a ship strutting around the galaxy? TNG changed that. Is it at least supposed to be about strutting around the galaxy? DS9 changed that. Should it at least be about interacting with the alien races we know? Voyager changed that. And so on.
JMS made a Star Trek pitch back in 2004. I like Babylon 5, but I don’t think I would have liked his version of Star Trek. The outline focused on elements I didn’t care about and just seemed meh to me in general.
This goes for any other long running series, of course.