Star fleet technical manual

[Wingsley]

Memory Alpha article on Susan Sackett.

 

[PCz911]

First: thank you all for the great links and the insight into this provided to this newbie
Second: I think I believe like avro arrow that, in my mind at least, Fj s work should be 'canon'. (avro arrow... Isn't that a plane from wwi?)
Third: wow, it was shown in the movies. How cool. I spent hours staring at this stuff as a kid
Fourth: I've been lucky enough to know Richard Arnold. But I never did ask this question. Never thought about it.

 

[scotpens]

(avro arrow... Isn't that a plane from wwi?)

The Avro Arrow was a Canadian supersonic jet interceptor of the 1950s. The project was abandoned due to political controversy.

 

[Irishman]

Arnold was the one who claimed GR said TAS wasn't canon and there's no evidence GR made any such claim.

GR signed off on FJ's blueprints and so in extent (as far as I'm concerned) the tech manual. And elements of the tech manual and blueprints made it into the films.

That said, to me, that only says those things referenced onscreen could be considered canon while not necessarily the rest of the work. This would happen again later in the spin-off series making references to TAS.

It really doesn't matter, guys. It's entertainment. It's fun. As soon as we take the fun out of it, we've taken out what we love about Star Trek, leaving just a dead husk.

Can I get an "amen"? ;-)

 

[F. King Daniel]

Amen! I love the FJ manual and blueprints, and all the fan-made expansions (Federation Reference Series, expanding the TM into the TMP era, and the FJ-style blueprints for the Klingon Battle Cruiser and Federation Dreadnought, among others) are a testament to it's awesomeness and influence.

 

[Unicron]

If you compare a lot of FJ's work, as nicely, done as it is, it doesn't match up with what we saw onscreen. He also speculated on a lot of things that were never seen onscreen and were subsequently ignored by later films and series.

For me the testament of FJ's work isn't so much what he did but how he did it and the scope of what he did.

Yep. Some of his changes make sense in light of his profession as a technical artist, and in having to choose whether to depict some elements 100% as they appeared onscreen or in a way that was relatively accurate but made engineering sense, he tended to go with the latter. FJ said in an interview that he didn't recall specific objections from Gene Roddenberry over things he created for the Technical Manual at the time, and that he would have willingly changed or dropped such elements (vessels with odd numbers of nacelles for example ) had such a complaint come from Gene. He was invited to serve as an artistic/technical designer for TMP, but he declined on the grounds that he felt it wasn't his place to decide how Star Trek should look. That was Roddenberry's place.