There are no "directives." These are busy Hollywood FX artists who are being very generous to devote their valuable time and effort to the calendar as a labor of love, so nobody's going to dictate to them what they're allowed to create. If the occasional individual image that comes from an artist's unfettered imagination subsequently inspires a novelist or editor to base a story point upon it, that does not reflect on any calendar art beyond that single image.
And you don't think the authors of
Kobayashi Maru might have thought "Hey, there's a calendar page where the
Columbia buys it, so let's make it happen"?
I don't have to think what might have been; I know what happens with
Columbia. I'm just not telling you, because it would be a spoiler. And it's irrelevant to the point of the quoted paragraph, which is that, even if the author or authors of some book were inspired by Pierre Drolet's wreck-of-
Columbia image (or any other calendar image) and chose to base a work of fiction on it, that wouldn't mean "the calendars" as a whole were part of the book continuity, and it certainly wouldn't mean that the editors are telling the calendar artists what to create, which is apparently a common misconception among fans.
Besides, as I said, the Kobayashi Maru event, as such, is special. It's rather "loaded" in terms of significance to the overall Trek arc. And, given that, it's extremely likely that there's gonna be some destruction going on. So why would it be that much of a stretch to remember what happens to the Columbia in the calendar, also remember that the Kobayashi Maru is coming up and so a lot of ships are probably going to be destroyed, and thus suspect that there just might be a connection?
I'm not saying I can't understand why you're jumping to that conclusion. I'm just saying, don't confuse assumption with certainty. As Sherlock Holmes said, "It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts."
If, OTOH, what happens in the calendar doesn't have to happen in "real" Trek continuity, then all bets are off. Would they do that? Meaning, would they have the Columbia do something like survive intact and be used as a museum piece in the 24th century? Or be the same Columbia as the one mentioned in "The Cage"? If so, then forget I ever started this damn thread.
Exactly. No point investing in speculation that might be scuttled by the facts. Better just to wait and see what actually happens. There's no reason to assume the authors of the novels should be constrained by what the calendar artists create, any more than there is to assume the reverse. We could borrow an idea if we wanted to, but it's not compulsory.
(Although in that case, the artist who created that calendar page might have something to say about their work being contradicted.)
They wouldn't care about that. Creative people create things based on their own imaginations, and they don't begrudge other people having different imaginations. Especially when they're working in two different media! It's bizarre to think that an artist, someone whose concern is creating pictures, would be worried about what gets done by someone telling stories in prose. You're thinking about the calendar images as though they're just a subset or adjunct of what we prose authors do, and frankly that's unfair to the calendar artists. Nothing that happens in the books can possibly diminish the visual impact or beauty of a piece of artwork. And that's what those artists care about. They create those images to have value in themselves, not merely to be illustrations of scenes from a "continuity."
I mean, some of the calendar images are of conjectural ships that have never been suggested to exist or are in their own alternate realities, like Gabriel Koerner's conjectural NCC-1701 redesign (which online idiots have repeatedly misinterpreted as a "leaked" design from the new movie). Some exaggerate scenes from canon, like the image showing the aftermath of "The Ultimate Computer" and portraying the other ships as far more completely devastated than is consistent with the dialogue in the episode. There's even an image showing all the various
Enterprises docked side-by-side at a space museum, which is a clear impossibility given that some of them were destroyed. So continuity is not a concern here. As I said, the artists are free to do whatever their own individual imaginations suggest.
Is the whole reason for this (destroying the Columbia) just because of the Ships Of The Line calendar? 
, then we know the Columbia must one day be destroyed. Since they're about to get into the Romulan War in a big way...then that might be it.
