Timo's Hobbyist's Guide to the UFP Starfleet

Discussion in 'Trek Tech' started by thesonofodin, Oct 31, 2012.

  1. publiusr

    publiusr Admiral Admiral

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    I remember a Canopus from Sternbach's Chronology.
    I still would love to see more of his superwarp ship drawings, if any.
     
  2. thesonofodin

    thesonofodin Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Timo, have you done any updates to the guide?
     
  3. Revanche

    Revanche Ensign Red Shirt

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    I keep a link to his Google drive and check every few weeks. His last posted update was last August. Here's hoping your question will lead to an update.
     
  4. thesonofodin

    thesonofodin Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Revanche, could you post a link?
     
  5. Revanche

    Revanche Ensign Red Shirt

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  6. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Whoops! I have been meaning to respond to this, but I simply forgot when summer happened. :o

    There are updates behind the link now. I think I have now covered all the FASA official designs (from their manuals and Jaynz), as listed at the wonderful http://www.ststcsolda.space/ . And by "covered", I mean not just entries but excuses and innuendo as well (see e.g. Liberty ships).

    I'm waiting for all of ST:Axanar to finally happen so that I can sort out Ares and perhaps Marklin. So far, their take on the Abrams ships has allowed me to integrate the non-alternate elements of those alternate adventures into the Guide, in accordance with my usual perverted standards.

    There's also an ongoing crusade to take into account the new theoretically canonical registries for certain TNG ships, gleaned from HD background graphics. For example, it now appears that there is no proper support for USS Trieste being of the Hokule'a class, so there's some swapping of the stories for the pre-TNG ships there.

    Apart from that, I doubt there's much point in checking every few weeks. ;) Sorry about that!

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  7. Revanche

    Revanche Ensign Red Shirt

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    Thanks, Timo. I'll be enjoying your efforts (and will check back next year). :)
     
  8. aridas sofia

    aridas sofia Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    The Knox-class, for example, isn't even named for the US Navy ship or for the same namesake, but rather for a governor of the Martian Colonies IIRC. OTOH some of those ships are definitely inferred to be drawn from Earth naval experience. The unstated notion being that there was some link between the Earth's navies and whatever organization from which Starfleet evolved.
     
  9. Brainsucker

    Brainsucker Captain Captain

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    Timo, your link is no longer work.
     
  10. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Brainsucker likes this.
  11. Steve Willis

    Steve Willis Ensign Newbie

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    Admiral Timo,
    I am most impressed with how you have managed to interweave all of the early aspects of space flight from several conflicting sources without diminishing any of it. I have racked my brain, after First Contact, and especially after Enterprise started. I had no idea how to connect it all together. I almost threw my 1980 Spaceflight Chronology in the apocryphal pile.
     
  12. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Thank you! SFC was just about the most difficult thing to integrate, but IMHO well worth the effort. I did brutalize the timeline, sometimes taking the dates at face value, sometimes applying the 52-years-out-of-whack correction factor even to things preceding the great divide of the Romulan War.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  13. Steve Willis

    Steve Willis Ensign Newbie

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    You are very welcome. I even try to reconcile temporal displacement, recursive causality loops, reasons of how colonies are established before they are supposed to, etc. Temporal theory and time travel give me a headache.
     
  14. Unicron

    Unicron Boss Monster Mod Moderator

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    Some aspects of canon and fanon usually do. ;) For my part, I've always enjoyed having a "big" Starfleet and including ships from a variety of offscreen manuals, even though it's very difficult sometimes to make different ideas mesh together (but not entirely impossible, IMO). FASA's RPG suggested that the Reliant/Miranda type cruiser evolved from the older Anton class, with the Reliants being given a new registry system for their class (the 1800 registries being refitted Antons in this case). Ships of the Starfleet instead has two TOS frigates, the Surya and Conventry classes, which were then refitted into the movie era frigates. Since the Avenger class name for the Reliant existed in older sources and the Miranda name wasn't canonically used until TNG, I personally like to assume that perhaps the Miranda designation refers to a modernized or refit version from that era. Thus I can include both sources as a logical progression without necessarily having them at odds with each other.

    As for trying to combine the cruiser and frigate origins, it's a bit convoluted but still workable in my system. I tend to think that the basic Reliant spaceframe is pretty reliable and modular, and would stay in service for a long time. Perhaps after Starfleet developed the Avenger refit for the frigates and realized the Antons were similar, they decided to explore both possibilities. This would make several classes that shared the same parts and resources, making future upgrades and experiments more viable, and would also have the benefit of producing ships that looked similar outwardly but had different roles and capabilities, and the Klingons or Romulans might have difficulty knowing which they were facing. The frigate models are more heavily armed and less geared for exploration than the cruiser models.
     
  15. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Yeah, I could well see Starfleet going for massive standardization, both in terms of designs and in terms of designations - perhaps at those junctures where the Klingon conflict is defused by Organia/Khitomer and resources are freed for such things. Or perhaps just before Organia/Khitomer, as Starfleet struggles to get more mileage out of its warfleet.

    Nevertheless, turning an Anton or a Surya into a Miranda/Avenger, or a Constitution from the TOS to the TMP version, is a massive undertaking, probably unparalleled in the real world - building all-new ships should have been simpler and cheaper! Which is why I rather like to postulate that something further was involved - a situation akin to the London and Washington Treaties where the signatories would scale their ships up and down to match tonnage limitations, deliberately misdesignate ships, strike recently built vessels from active strength and retain relics, in hopes of coming up ahead in the game when (not if) the war began.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  16. thesonofodin

    thesonofodin Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Timo, do you have any updates? That once a year question I have to ask.
     
  17. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Was gonna add Axanar stuff. Not going to happen, it seems. So the only real updating so far has been some minor reshuffling to make names and registries from recently revealed TNG-R Okudagrams mesh better, adding a few pics, and wondering where the heck the Thufir FASA destroyer article went or whether I just dreamed of having written it...

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  18. thesonofodin

    thesonofodin Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Timo, I have a few old guides I can look through and check on the Thufir.
     
  19. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Thanks! I have kept a couple of older versions, too, but no trace of that ship other than a comparison picture in the Lenthal entry.

    ...Plus registries for the supposed Starfleet-owned Mk III Thufirs in my registry chart, marked "cruiser" apparently for the sheer size of the design compared with the likes of Andor. (I always try to insist that every ship included in the Guide past the 2161 mark has actually served in the UFP Starfleet in some capacity, even if that wasn't FASA's idea with those Andorian designs.)

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  20. Longinus

    Longinus Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    @Timo. I notice that you have included Abramsverse ships but in greatly reduced size. Could you elaborate on your thinking on that?