Star Trek Social Club

This is the full text of the email I received from The Wand Company today. Many of you may have seen the unboxing video Adam Savage uploaded. To sum it up, the only official place to purchase this is currently Amazon.uk. So far a batch of 200 sold out pretty fast (two days) with a fluctuating inventory status on the product page leading to confusion. Doesn’t appear a product page for the Tricorder is active (a search yields no results and Star Trek section of the store page displays no products for sale). Once The Wand Company get a larger inventory sent over to Amazon.uk, sales will resume. As for fans in the U.S., there is no certainty on how tariffs will affect the price.

Sales are officially being doing through Amazon.uk. The sales have been paused till inventory can be increased as a response to the confusion and sellout of 200 units within two days

EDIT: I forgot to include legible text to read.

| Dear ____,

Further to our previous email, we’re conscious that you are still waiting for your “invitation to purchase” email with a link to the Tricorder on Amazon UK.

IMPORTANT: we are making plenty of Tricorders   A very small number of Tricorders were sold on Amazon in the last two days.  This didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped, though:

The quantity (200 units) sold out very quickly, but then the Tricorder would occasionally appear to be back “in stock” for brief periods, causing confusion and frustration.

During some of these brief periods, international shipping wasn’t available. Some people had their orders automatically cancelled by Amazon for suspected fraud – we believe this is probably why one or two units would then become “available” again.  

We’re really sorry for the distress and confusion that this has caused for some of you. We want to reassure you that we are making plenty of Tricorders and we believe that you will each be able to buy one from us if you want to.  

We are pausing Tricorder sales for at least a week

We’ve shipped another batch of 952 units to Amazon this week.  We were hoping that they would already be showing up in the Amazon system by now, and that we’d be sending out a batch of “invitation to purchase” emails today, but that’s not the case.  

To avoid a continuation of the confusing situation with the Tricorder appearing to fluctuate in and out of stock, and it only becoming available one or two at a time, we are pausing the sales to allow some time for the incoming stock to build up to a sensible level so that we can create some stability in its availability.  

As I write, we are manufacturing Tricorders and airfreighting thousands of them into the UK. However, the process of loading them into stock at Amazon takes a bit of time.  

Opening Tricorder sales again

Once there is sufficient stock in the Amazon UK store to create a more stable and pleasant purchasing experience, we will set the Tricorder listing to “active” once again and start emailing people again to let them know that it is available. We will aim to do this at around 4pm UK time. We will monitor that stock carefully and pause the sale of the Tricorder again when the stock is depleted, in order to allow more stock to fill the sales channel once again and prevent the listing from going in and out of stock due to order cancellations.  

A few Tricorders are already appearing on eBay. Whilst everyone can buy their Tricorder however they wish, we strongly urge fans not to buy from third party sellers at the moment. We have plenty of stock arriving and you should wait for that to become available through our official retailers (Amazon UK, the Star Trek Shop or IGN Store).  

Shipping to a non-UK address

Our decision to sell on Amazon UK was not taken lightly and was in response to the evolving tariff situation in the US. When there is sufficient stock available, fans who do not live in the UK will be able to purchase from Amazon UK and we do not know of any restriction that will prevent this for our customers outside the UK. (In case you didn’t already know, we’re based in the UK ourselves.)  

The tariff situation

The US tariffs on bulk shipments of products from China have been changing rapidly over the last few months, starting with 10% announced in February and reaching 145% on April 10th. If those tariffs reduce to a more manageable level we will review the situation regarding importing the product in bulk to the US for sale domestically (such as via Amazon US) and take the appropriate action.  

US tariffs on small packages to individual consumers with value under $800 USD (“de minimis” shipments) have also been in flux recently.  At the moment they are scheduled to become 120% on May 2nd, or a flat fee of $100 USD, but it’s unclear which of those fees will be charged.  It’s also possible that the changes due on May 2nd will be amended or postponed.  

What will happen next

We will write to everyone in waves in order of their first registration with an invitation to purchase as the stock becomes available. As mentioned above, we will aim to send those emails out at around 4pm UK time.  

LLAP  

To be fair, we don’t _actually _ know if this is teasing a crossover with the Nickelodeon property… but the expenses used to give us a new Captains Chair and the Patrick Starship give me pause.

My money is that if this appears in an episode, it would be in a limited fashion. Think the Moriarty teaser in Picard S3, or perhaps the Quin vs Q shenanigans might be more apt in that episode of Voyager. (It happens, but is largely restricted to a brief segment of the episode)

Mine is that Picard talks in his sleep.

Picard dreaming. I now sorta feel like he talks in his sleep.

• Janeway records the stardate 61898.2 in her vice admiral’s log.

• Janeway recounts the events of “The Devourer of All Things, Part II”

• It’s Doctor Crusher! From Star Trek! Doctor Crusher is voiced by Gates McFadden, who played the character on TNG.

    • ”She’s surprisingly hard to track down these days.” It was revealed in “Seventeen Seconds”, Doctor Crusher left Starfleet after learning she was pregnant with Jack.

• ”Been a while since the Shinzon incident.” Admiral Janeway did order the USS Enterprise E to Romulus in “Star Trek Nemesis”, but she didn’t have any interaction with Doctor Crusher in the film.

• ”Last I heard, he was busy with the Romulan evacuation.” We learned in “Remembrance” that Picard left the Enterprise E to to command Starfleet’s rescue armada ahead of the Romulan sun going supernova.

• There have been two Starfleet ships named for Archimedes, one mentioned in the Short Treks episode, “The Brightest Star”, and the Obena-class vessel seen in LDS’ “First First Contact”.

• ”I saw a glimpse of my future.” Dal looked at the timestream, despite being told not to, in “The Devourer of All Things, Part II”.

• “When I was your age, I was lost too. Lost my father, my heritage, my purpose.” As per “Tattoo”, Chakotay’s father died defending their colony. Chakotay would have been 40 or 41 at the time.

• ”I never truly belonged until I became Janeway’s Number One.” Janeway declared Chakotay first officer of the USS Voyager in “Caretaker”.

• We learned that the the USS Protostar’s proto-drive is powered by a literal protostar in “Terror Firma”.

my friend asked and I really don’t know because he likes to make fun of snoring

A warning upfront. They rank every single uniform, even clothing you didn’t realize was a uniform. The video is 1 hour 14 minutes long.

• The episode picks up where the pervious episode, “The Devourer of All Things, Part II” left off, with the Protogies having located an older, grizzled, bearded Chakotay on a remote world. Chakoldtay immetately throws the CHAH-mooz-ee stone Dal was holding out to him at the end of the previous episode over his shoulder and goes back about the business of living off the land.

    • We see Chakotay whittling a chess set. Though as alternate dimension Kirk puts it in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”, the old fashioned, two-dimensional version, ”Basically idiot’s chess.”

• It’s the Emergency Janeway Hologram! From Star Trek! The EJH…died for lack of a better term when she sacrificed herself in “Supernova, Part 2”, but thanks to time travel, she’s back.

• We learn that from Chakotay’s perspective, it’s been ten years since he was rescued from Solumn by the Protogies in “Who Saves the Saviors”.

• Chakotay explains that he and Adreek stranded the USS Protostar to prevent the Vau N’Akat weapon learned about in “A Moral Star, Part 2” from reaching the Federation, and Dal recounts how the Protogies set off the weapon in “Supernova, Part 1” and then destroyed the Protostar in “Supernova, Part 2”.

• The first instance of an ion storm in Trek was in the season one TOS episode, ‘The Galileo Seven”.

• Zero finds the Protostar’s dedication plaque, and we learn that the ship was launched on stardate 59749.1. Assuming stardates happen sequetionally, that would put the launch of the Protostar after the events of all or most of season 5 of LDS, the latest stardate for which we have is 59499.6, “Fully Dialated”.

    • The Protostar’s dedication plague has the quote, “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves,” which seems to paraphrase a line of William Shakespeare’s “Julius Ceaser” and is attributed to him on many internet quote sites, but is not actually from the Bard’s works.

• Jankom sets about repairing the broken down runaway ground vehicle, which was introduced in “Dream Catcher”.

    • In this episode we learn the runaway has a hover function.

• ”Out of all the planets to maroon yourself on, you pick this P class nightmare?” Class P planets have not been previously mentioned on screen, but were introduced in the “Star Trek Maps” reference book, published in 1980. According to the “Star Trek Star Charts” reference book, Class P worlds are over 80% glaciated. Assuming Jankom is right, Chakotay apparently marooned the Protostar in a warm spot.

• Dal discovered Adreek’s skeleton, and we learn that Aurelian skulls have spurs of bone projecting from them, presumably covered by the feathers.

[O]ne thing defines [Seska] in contrast to the Cardassians we’d been regularly seeing on Star Trek at that moment in time: she’s just kind of an absolute hot mess.

...

But it’s kind of what makes Seska work as a character: despite all this, villainy or otherwise, nothing ever quite clicks for her. It’s a great mirror to uphold against Janeway’s decision to have the crew take the long way home in the first place, the idea that, if they did ultimately just go Seska’s route and exploit their advantageous power in an unknown quadrant, it would doom them.

I would like to see Vulcan fail.

Anyways it has been destroyed in DIS

but I haven't seen a kind of evolution with, maybe starting with Spock and Burnham, that they learned to appreciate emotion and affection again.

• The episode opens in the office where Wesley took the Protogies at the end of “The Devourer of All Things, Part I”, which appears to be based on Gary Seven’s office from “Assignment: Earth”.

    • Wesley confirms that it is not the actual office from “Assignment: Earth”, but a replica mimicking that office to train the Travellers’ field agents.

    • The newspaper in the office has a headline reading “Apollo VII Launches.” There was an Apollo VII mission patch displayed behind the bar of the 602 Club in “First Flight”.

      • The story of “Assignment: Earth” did feature a rocket launch, but that was for an orbital nuclear weapon platform, which Gary Seven was able to sabotage and detonate.

    • When Wesley turns around the bookcase revealing a hidden computer identical to the Beta 5 computer as seen in “Assignment: Earth”

• Commander Tysess swears on the Wall of Heroes to protect Maj’el with his life. The Wall of Heroes was first mentioned in “United” when Shran said he would take Archer’s blood there after killing him in an honour duel.

• ”Fall back to the battle bridge!” The USS Voyager A is the only ship other than the USS Enterprise D to have a battle bridge mentioned in dialogue.

• Admiral Janeway shows up wearing a tank top, a look she first sported in “Macrocosam”.

• ”Tom Paris taught me that one.” Janeway and Paris spent a lot of time together during their time in the Delta Quadrant, particularly in the episodes “Time and Again”, and “Threshold”.

• The Voyager A’s shuttles are armed with quantum torpedoes. We’ve previously seen runabouts armed with micro-torpedoes, but this is the first shuttlecraft that has been explicitly said to be equipped with torpedoes of any sort.

    • The shuttle is also able to survive the detonation of a full spread of quantum torpedoes at close range.

• ”Now, if you six would step under the modified Boreth crystals near the Orb of Time, I can get the quantum signature readings I need.” We learned in “Through the Valley of Shadows” that time crystals are a naturally occurring mineral on the Klingon monastery world of Boreth. The Cardassians returned Orb of Time to the Bajorans in the episode “Trials and Tribble-ations”.

• ”Fine, but Jankom’s still not sure this won’t scramble his genes like a Jiballian omelette.” Neelix claimed his seven-spice Jiballian omelette was famous in “Prototype”.

• Janeway recognizes Wesley despite the two never having met previously. This is because there’s only ever about seven people on any given Starfleet ship that do anything, so everyone in starfleet knows who they are. See: all of Star Trek.