Star Trek Haynes Manual Discussion?

^Wha??

 

^I wasn't quite clear. That's from Of Gods and Men. In FASA, the Enterprise-B flew four 5-year missions, carried many important persons on diplomatic missions, made several first contacts and suffered the least casulties of any starship several years in a row. It was wrecked fighting IKS Klingons and Romulans in the Triangle.

 

From my perspective, I was saying, "Wrong! Wrong!" because they were using the Spaceflight Chronology timeline, which wasn't even considered accurate when it came out, never mind however many years later when "Mr. Scott's Guide" came out and it was bloody obvious that the movies weren't even close to that timeline.

Novels and comics don't count anyway, and my dream manual would be produced by folks actually working on the show, so future contradictions would, hopefully, be kept to a minimum.

 

Anyone else reminded of James Dixon's epic page-by-page destruction job on Mr. Scott's Guide? It was a text file that's probably still floating about the net somewhere. He made you almost believe it mattered that FASA and Shane Johnson's take on Trek differed slightly from Franz Joseph's and the dozens of unofficial fanzine manuals floating about back then. He did one for the TNG manual too, but I never bothered with it.

Sorry - every time I hear "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!" I think of that lunatic Trekkie.

 

So?

 

Dixon is definitely in category all his own. In fact, he's practically an adjective at this point.

 

Who's James Dixon? I've seen you guys refer to him before, but I'm still not clear on exactly who he is.

 

James Dixon is one of those individuals that gives overly-analytical fanboys a bad name. He's produced excruciatingly detailed chronologies and analyses of various projects, both official and fan produced, and seems to take it personally if folks don't hew to his particular viewpoint and/or conclusions, and can't seem to understand that those who actually produce Star Trek are under no obligation to even acknowledge his existence, never mind pay any sort of attention to his findings (he seemed particularly miffed that when I started my Enterprise deck plans, I specifically rejected the Franz Joseph plans from any sort of consideration).

In fact, he got so contentious with those who didn't agree with him that he eventually got his arrogant keister permabanned from TrekBBS, and probably a few other places as well.

He continues to serve as a cautionary tale to many of us, that there is a line you don't want to cross, lest one finds oneself in the "Get A Life!" club.

 

...and he can't be mentioned offhand without derailing a thread!

Sorry, everyone. He should have a wikipedia page that can be linked to whenever he's menioned.


I'm curious - does the Haynes manual mention whether the 1701-A was a new ship or not? The old TNG manual said it was the refitted USS Yorktown renamed, and Mr. Scott's Guide said it was a brand new (transwarp) Enterprise-class ship, the USS Ti-Ho. Also, does it have 21, 23 or () 79 decks?

 

Unfortunately, the Haynes say that Enterprise-A was the USS Yorktown.

 

"Unfortunately"?

 

Yeah, it too thought that was accepted fanon-fact.

 

Due more, I would hazard, to their being particular anemic in content in recent years (Starship Spotter, the Hayne's Guide, etc.) while increasing heavily in price over the years. The 'tie-in tech' books are more and more gloss, but less and less content.

For non-tech tie-ins, look at the abysmal quality of the last few toylines for Star Trek. If you're going to shovel a bunch of overpriced dog-feces out on the market, you shouldn't be too surprised when it doesn't sell.

 

Which is a physical impossibility since the Yorktown was explicitly one of the ships hit by the Whale Probe (TM) during the events of the movie. (She was the ship that rigged up solar sails to keep the crew alive.)

I know people won't count TFF, but that movie also explicitly states that the ship is new and in need of a proper shakedown, something that a repainted Yorktown wouldn't require.

 

That guy was on TrekBBS too?

I totally remember that name. I used to read the FidoNet echo back in the old dialup BBS days, back in the late 80s. He was on there. Got himself perma banned from the echo too.

People suspected him of showing up again under various aliases ("Chris Pike" was one, if I recall correctly) but no one ever definitively proved they were him.

That's a name I never expected to see / hear again.

 

It's never stated that it's a newly-constructed ship. It's a new ship to Scotty and the gang, and the faulty construction work it's been having could be the result of the ship's trashing by the Whale Probe.

 

So, in a period of a few days (literally), they dragged the Yorktown back, rebuilt all of her internal assemblies, put in a new engine (explicit), decommissioned or reassigned the entire crew (or cleaned up the bodies), re-allocated the ship as the Enterprise, AND were able to get Kirk on it despite not knowing if he would be exonerated at trial?

OR

Once Kirk was exonerated, they took a new ship and simply rechristened her the Enterprise rather than the Tai-Ho?

Sorry, but the Enterprise-A having been an uprated Yorktown does not make sense, and was nothing more than Roddenberry once again inserting himself into a production that he had nothing to do with otherwise. It was an 'homage' to himself and 'Star Trek Is...' and shouldn't be regarded as anything more than that.

 

Once the probe stopped doing what it was doing, plenty of power systems came back online all over the place. No reason to believe that things were any different with the Yorktown, so refurbishing was probably very straightforward.

Also, Starfleet seemed to be quite enamored with the new Excelsior class and was determined to phase out the older ships, so it's entirely possible that Yorktown was already scheduled for decommissioning in the near future, or possibly was already in the process but with the emergency, was pulled out of spacedock and sent out to meet the probe. So it's well within the realm of possibility that we're talking about a ship that was already on the decommission list and was given a few extra years of service life as the Enterprise-A.

Makes a helluva lot more sense than Starfleet deciding to decommission a relatively new ship (less than ten years old) right on the heels of Khitomer.

And remember, anything from TFF in between campfire scenes is just the product of Kirk and McCoy trying to tell Spock a ghost story, with the help of several helpings of McCoy's "secret ingredient" and therefore easily discountable.