Letting everyone know I'm not dead yet! A combination of things has drawn my attention away from TrekBBS, not least of which is a sudden increase in my work hours in addition to me having obtained an internet connection powerful enough to actually play Star Trek Online without an insufferable degree of lag.
But the Illustrated Guide to Starfleet lives on!
First rough draft is available and I'm going back and making some revisions to the project, which means I'm back to looking for some feedback and/or suggestions and requests.
Expect more updates coming in the next two or three weeks.
I absolutely love this manual, but are you going to get get into the USS Vengeance specs at all, or not get into it further because it was a section 31 ship which technically didn't exist as far as starfleet was concerned?
I've got some Vengeance data from what little is actually known about the ship, and I'm combing through some of the NuTrek novels for little tidbits that might be useful. I'm also working from the assumption that some of the more militaristic designs from TOS fanon (the Akyazi class perimeter action ships, for example) would have appeared in this timeline as Section 31 vessels and would be otherwise unknown to anyone outside of that organization. Whether to include them or not in the guide is a different question, though.
I like your explanation for how the flagship Enterprise is able reach the velocities it seems to make in these movies, but just to be a pain in asymmetric photons, why don't there seem to be ANY transwarp ships in the TNG era or beyond?
My opinion is and has always been that "transwarp" is a physical concept in the Trekiverse with a very
specific scientific meaning and should not be interpreted to mean "warp drive, only faster." By analogy, it is similar to the concept of "transonic airflow," which is why I expanded the definition to be shorthand to "
trans-dimensional vortex
warp drive."
By extension, the warp drives we're familiar with in the 24th century would function by generating those vortexes artificially in a very limited region around the ship; they would not rely on pre-existing vortexes (artificial or otherwise) and would be able to take advantage of trans-dimensional effects anywhere they wanted. Slipstream drive would probably work the same way, except the warp field would extend tens of lightyears ahead of the ship while in flight (and is also inherently unstable, which makes it much harder to use).
Voyager would have a much shorter series if starfleet could have just sent a transwarp flagship out to pick up the crew...
Voyager would have a much shorter series if the ship had been as fast as the Enterprise-D was in "Q Who?" in which Data calculates the ship would be able to travel over seven thousand light years in about 31 months. Or, for that matter, if Voyager was as fast as the TOS Enterprise, which managed to cover the 1000 LY sprint back to the Kalandan Outpost in under a day.
This being an alternate timeline, I see no real reason to take Voyager into account AT ALL. But if I absolutely had to (if, say, Rick Berman was holding a gun to my head or if I was trying to talk Kate Mulgrew out of jumping off a bridge) I would simply suggest that the lack of accurate navigational charts for the delta quadrant meant Voyager could not take full advantage of the natural trans-warp vortexes and was limited to more conventional FTL speeds.
Hello there!
I know this is bumping a thread, but this project is great and wanted to offer any help the author might need in continue this project.
Please keep up the good work!
Appreciated! As I said, I could use more feedback to see what does or doesn't make the most sense, just so I can see if I can make what we've seen self-consistent at least as far as the Abramsverse. I am far less interested in making the Abrams timeline consistent with the TNG spinoffs; I'm thinking in the context of TOS, ST:Enterprise and the first six movies.
And this explains the Abramsverse version of Robert April's Enterprise in the comics.
Actually, based on this "deleted"/cut scene from "Into Darkness"...April's ENterprise (at least at one time) looked VERY MUCH like Kirk's in TOS (pre-refit) in the Prime Timeline (with only a few minor changes - like 2, instead of 3 little circle windows/deflector on the front of the saucer. And the window arrangement around the saucer-edges. It my have been wee *bit* BIGGER too. Plus there is the NCC # beginning in "0"...):
^But none of the DVD releases - even the expensive boxed sets - have any deleted/cut scenes....so that they can try to make the fans double and triple-dip...
(But, after these were leaked, Paramount took them all down...of course....)
I had this cap in mind when I started writing the Bonaventure pages. I am still trying to decide which imagery to use: I thought Gabe Korner's Enterprise would fit pretty nicely into a TOS-based continuity, but I'm starting to really like Madman's "Prime Alternative."
That's sad that they didn't keep it in. I like all the little historical details of Starfleet that ended up in Marcus' office.
FWIW, the "powerwall" graphics were also present in Admiral Pike's office. To a certain extent, that makes them canon.