The Seekers novels are coming out soon, and I haven't heard much about it yet. I wondered if we could get some teasers about the books, especially about the characters.
The series features the Sagittarius and the Endeavour from Star Trek: Vanguard. Clark Terrell, Atish Khatami and their crews will be the main cast. PS: Sorry if your response is "well, yes, I know that"; I don't think there's much else revealed. Although David Mack did mention that an Orion crewman will feature - she's apparently going to be more important in book three than in the opening two-parter, I think?
I'm getting more interested in the Seekers as well, if only for the pretty covers! Tempting me with paper books again...darn pocketbooks!!!
Thanks. Ever little teaser is appreciated, and the Orion woman sounds interesting. I'd imagine a lot could be done with that character given the sexist stereotypes of Orion women in that era and how they've been developed since.
One of the reasons I'm so stoked for Seekers is that it will be following in the "TOS:Vanguard" vein that was establised as "What-If HBO did The Original Series" I was always a fan of the TOS era Films, but TOS as a TV series never really appealed to me and I only really came around to enjoying stories from that era after Vanguard gave me a new way of looking at the same material... "With Fresh Eyes" so to speak. Hopefully that made sense.
Well, actually, although it uses characters from VNG, I gather it's more in the vein of TOS, telling episodic adventure tales.
^ Pretty much. We're picking up ships and characters from Vanguard, but we're not looking to replicate the tone or structure of Vanguard. Whereas the saga was close-ended, and was rather dark and gritty, Seekers is meant to be open-ended, and to return to the sense of finding adventure in the final frontier, and trying to leave people and places better than we found them.
Sorry, I guess I didn't explain it well. Before I'd read Vanguard, TOS wasn't "real" to me. It was hokey and strange and something that never really clicked for a child of the 80's who grew up watching TNG (Which has it's own ironies I'm sure, but still). After having read Vanguard, my perception of the larger TOS era shifted. It gave me the ability to see past the limitations of 60's design, special effects, and aesthetic to see a world that was 'believable' as the 22nd century. Many of Greg Cox' novels are TOS adventure tales, and I've found myself enjoying them quite a bit, but I never would have really given them a fair shake if not for the perspective that I got through reading Vanguard. Tonally, I'm not expecting Death and Destruction on a Cosmic Scale or dark and gritty what-have-you, etc. What I am expecting though is the TOS Era I've come to appreciate combined with the excellent writing we've all come to enjoy throughout Trek Lit over the past Decade or more telling new stories with new characters in an Era I'd basically written off due to my own past presumption.
Given the nature of some of those special effects, it's no surprise that faith in a loving god was abandoned.
I was wondering if there were any good descriptions of the Sagtarrius' bridge? It would be nice to have some deckplans perhaps - it seem to be where the new ships fal down, we know what the ships look like, but rarely the interiors. I think the only original interior we saw on a book cover was the Excalibur's bridge in New Frontier.
I've described the bridge of the Sagittarius several times in the Vanguard novels. It's a single compartment on a level deck. The entrance is a sliding door on the aft bulkhead. Captain's chair in the center, combination helm/operations console forward. Wraparound main viewscreen on the curved forward bulkhead. Duty consoles line the bulkheads; the tactical station is aft, near the door. Communications is on the port side, sensors are to starboard. The compartment has a low overhead. It is Compartment Number 01, located at the front of the saucer and is flanked by the captain's quarters to starboard and the XO's cabin to port.
What are the cruising/top Warp Speeds and the main weapons load-out of the Sagittarius? Trying to get a sense of how it stacks up against a Constitution-Class. (which I'm assuming is Top-of-the-Line Federation Tech for the era?) And thank you.
The Sagittarius has a top cruising speed of roughly Warp 9.4 (TNG scale). She has a single, multipurpose probe/torpedo tube, but she usually carries only about four photon torpedoes at any given time. She has twin phaser nodes, both mounted on the dorsal side of her saucer (which makes the ship a bit more vulnerable on its ventral side). If she ever goes in for a TMP-era refit, this is one thing I would definitely want to fix. The ship is equipped with a single lifeboat, on the starboard side of the main deck. In the cargo hold, the Sagittarius carries two amphibious rover vehicles, which are stored disassembled between deployments, to save space. (Its original rovers, Roxy and Ziggy, were lost in action in Storming Heaven; the new rovers are Vixen and Blitzen.) The Archer-class ships are actually newer than the Constitution-class ships, and they carry Starfleet's state-of-the-art sensors and comms. They are made to go very far, very fast, and peek behind the curtains without anyone else ever knowing they had been there. More details about the ship can be found in this Vanguard Series Bible Addendum. Note that this document is a bit out of date, especially with regard to the current crew, and it contains SPOILERS for Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind. Archer-class ships can also outrun and outmaneuver Constitution-class ships (in part because of their superior power-to-mass ratio), but the Archer-class ships are not made to last long in firefights. They are designed as high-speed outriders, and their loadouts are specialized for scouting operations and long-range reconnaissance.
Really??? That doesn't seem possible. That would be something like warp 12 on the TOS scale, and Kirk's Enterprise had a sustainable maximum of warp 8, only managing to survive faster speeds with alien intervention. And its cruising speed -- i.e. non-emergency speed, the equivalent of a car traveling at highway speeds -- was only warp 6. Heck, even Voyager in the 24th century had a cruising speed of warp 6 on the new scale (about 7.3 on the old scale) and a maximum rated safe speed of warp 9.2. So a cruising speed for a 23rd-century vessel that's faster than the top sustainable emergency speed for a vessel a century later? I'm sorry, I don't see how that can be.