Big update at Forgotten Trek: after using Wordpress for 10 years, I've converted the whole site back to HTML. Wordpress has become too clunky, especially for a website that doesn’t require frequent updates. I never got used to the “Gutenberg” bloc editor and it inserts a lot of superfluous code, which slows the website down. Clean and simple HTML gets rid of everything I don’t need and should load much faster even on slow connections. Writing about lost and forgotten Star Trek fansites also made think about the survivability of my own. HTML is easier to capture for the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It doesn’t require regular software updates. A Worpress blog could become dangerously outdated if its owner ever disappeared. (No worries - I'm not planning to. But you never know.) Speaking of lost and forgotten fansites, I added entries on several in the last month: Computer Core Dump, Copernicus Ship Yards, Spike’s Star Trek Site, Star Trek Nexus, Strange Fascination, Izan Home Page, LCARS Computer Network and Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'm hoping to be able to publish several new stories in the coming months, including about the creation of Data, the Klingons, the Romulans and Starfleet, as well an essay about the Federation. If you spot any errors, typos, or find links that don't work, please let me know!
New: Creating the Klingons. How they evolved from unscrupulous villains into honorable allies of the Federation.
Awesome! I didn't realise the Klingons and Romulans existed in the TOS show bible. I thought they were only made up for "Errand of Mercy" or "Balance of Terror".
The bible was revised over time so they may have been added after their episodes. This is a great site by the way. I've come across it a few times while doing research and it's been really helpful.
I just looked through the first- and second-season editions of the series bible, and neither one mentions the Klingons or Romulans. The quotes that the Forgotten Trek site attributes to the bible are verbatim from The Making of Star Trek, p. 257. Now, TMoST does have a fair amount of content quoted or paraphrased from the series bibles, but I've never seen a third-season edition of the bible.
Good choice: I moved many of my sites back to html or custom-made PHP exactly for the same reasons. Lately I found I spent more time updating the CMSs and fixing things the updates broke than adding content.
Yeah, that's where I got the quote from, and The Making of Star Trek claims it's from the writers' bible, so it must be from Season 3's?
I just reviewed that chapter twice, and at no point does it claim to be quoting from the series bible. Even if it did, if TMoST was your source, you should've cited it as your source rather than falsely claiming you consulted a text you actually didn't. The portions that do quote from the bible don't differentiate the quoted parts from the new or paraphrased parts, so you can't assume that something in TMoST was from the bible unless you can verify it directly from the bible.
@Christopher, I know you're trying to help, but please give me your feedback without telling me what I "should" or "shouldn't" do. Maybe I'm overly sensitive to this, but I don't like being told what to do. :-) You are correct, though! I just double-checked The Making of Star Trek too, and it doesn't attribute the text to the writers' bible. I'm not sure what happened. This particular article started out more than two years ago with a collection of quotes from books and interviews and I added bits and pieces to it over the years. Maybe I messed up the attribution in the process of editing and rewriting? Or I had a reason to attribute it to the writers' bible in the first place - but I can't remember if I did... Sorry! I have changed the article to be on the safe side, attributing the quote to The Making of Star Trek, which is what I can verify right now. If anyone knows if there was a separate Season 3 bible, and Whitfield copied the description from there, please let me know.
New story: Writing The Next Generation. From the chaos of Season 1 to the writers running out of ideas in Season 7.
It's an interesting article, though I would point out that some of your examples could use better context. You mention that Jameson was promoted to admiral some years after his PD violation that left Mordan in brutal wars for almost half a century, but Starfleet didn't know about that. Jameson admitted that he falsified his report and that he grossly misjudged his attempt to "balance" the delivery of weapons to both sides. Pressman's original mission on the Pegasus is what I would call a potentially gray area. It's possible that the test was illegal under treaty terms, but that wasn't going to stop Starfleet Intelligence from exploring possibilities and that Pressman did what he was ordered to do. The mutiny likely occurred because something in the prototype got screwed up, moreso than the possibility of the cloak research being illegal. And considering the plot silliness of the Feds apparently signing away the right to build stealth technology that's proven effective, I can't entirely disagree with Pressman's criticisms. Admiral Kennelly ("Ensign Ro") acted poorly on the basis of unreliable intelligence that the Cardassians were supplying him, in the hope that they could get Starfleet to take out Bajorans for them. I wouldn't classify him as insane or even the typical evil admiral, just dumb. Overall though, I generally agree. Starfleet is not always written as the most logical force, or some of its characters, but that's because of plot reasons. Plot is always the final determinant.
Generally, cloaking has only been shown to be effective with stripped-down, bare-bones combat vessels that minimize power usage that could leak through the cloak, like Romulan and Klingon Birds-of-Prey and the Defiant. Basically submarine-like vessels, in keeping with how their debut episode, "Balance of Terror," was a pastiche of the sub-warfare movie The Enemy Below. So I figure Starfleet agreed not to use cloaks because they just don't work well on Starfleet's usual multi-purpose vessels that are more focused on research, diplomacy, general support and law enforcement for frontier communities, and so forth, not to mention crew standard of living. They're only feasible for the kind of warship that Starfleet didn't build until the Borg threat led them to develop the Defiant. So at the time of the treaty, Starfleet simply had no use for cloaks. Although the flaw in my hypothesis is the D'Deridex class, the gigantic Romulan warbirds that are even bigger than a Galaxy-class ship but can cloak with no problem. I think the huge Klingon dreadnaughts we saw later on could cloak too.
Yeah, I'd generally agree with you given the known problems with cloaks (they're very power hungry and even the Romulan models haven't gotten around the energy drain, except the Scimitar for plot reasons ). But we've seen larger ships like the D'Deridex and the Vor'Cha use them just as stealthily, and they have more more mass to devote to systems. One could argue that if anything, a large ship could carry a better, more effective cloak than an older smaller one. Course, I'm not a believer in the idea that Starfleet never builds dedicated warships or tactical vessels, if only in limited numbers. I've always found that concept rather silly, to be honest.
@Unicron, of course you're right, every one of those examples has more context. Some "insane" admirals may be more insane than others. In most cases we're simply talking about cases of poor judgement. But there is a pattern of poor judgement, which I think calls into question the wisdom of trusting individual Starfleet captains and admirals to make decisions that should probably be left to diplomats and politicians. Or at least be group decisions.
I think the problem is that TOS was designed to be analogous to the Age of Sail when ship captains on the frontier had to make the big political and diplomatic decisions because the authorities back home were too far away; but then later Trek shows moved the focus more inward to the Federation core worlds, while still perpetuating the habit of a near-exclusive focus on Starfleet. So the Starfleet-dominated decision-making that was originally intended to be frontier-specific in the absence of other authorities ended being imposed on contexts where there should have been other authorities. For a long time, I've wished we could see a Trek show told from the perspective of the Federation's civilians. We kind of got that with Picard's first season, but season 2 is back in the Starfleet fold.
That's a good point. To be fair to TNG, at least they showed Picard regularly consulting with admirals whereas Kirk was on his own most of the time. On the other hand, I do remember we occasionally saw Federation civilian officials and ambassadors in TOS. There were a few in the first season of TNG. After that, I think the only civilian Federation officials we saw were Lwaxana and Sarek?