The Klingons as seen in The Final Reflection can also be seen in the FASA Star Trek RPG from the same time period. I believe Mr. Ford wrote quite a bit of FASA's Klingon supplement for the game, IIRC. At the moment, I do not recall if the game material saw print before the novel, or the other way around, though.
Guy McLimore (then head of FASA's
Trek line) had actually been roommates with Mike Ford in grad school, and Ford was the one who'd introduced him to gaming. Ford was also a big contributor to the RPG
Traveller, and FASA got its start as a
Traveller licensee, so there was already a lot of familiarity there.
According to the editor's note in the first edition of the Klingon supplement (written by McLimore), Ford's novel and the game supplement had originated independently, but very early on they realized they were working on parallel projects, and got permission from Pocket and FASA to work a little more closely. The game used the Klingon cultural concepts that Ford created and fleshed out, and in turn Ford used some things from the game in the novel. (He never says what that was, but my guess would be it involved the ship combat sequences.) If there are any parts of the supplement that Ford actually wrote directly, it's probably the parts styled as excerpts from "
An Informal Guide to the Klingon Empire, by E. Tagore and J. M. Ford".
It's a shame they abandoned that Spaceflight Chronology. I kind of liked it.
Well, the picures were pretty.
Maybe with a bit of work, some of it could still be wedged into the gaps in the Okudachron.
As it happens, on the SFC's Memory Beta page I've been working on a section comparing the two timelines and noting which parts are more (and less) adaptable to the standard timeline.
http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/S...nology#Differences_from_the_Standard_Timeline
The part I'm currently working on (and so is not up there yet), the timeframe in which
TFR takes place -- the period between the end of the Romulan War and the commissioning of the Constitution class -- is actually probably the most readily adaptable, except for some of the obvious technical issues that were superceded by
ST:Enterprise.
It was 79 years in the SFC (2109 to 2188) vs. 84 years by the Okudachron (2161 to 2245). Canon references to that period are minimal (mostly of the 'this or that ship disappearing' variety), and not much Treklit goes there either (and most of it right at the end). Since that period is mostly a
tabula rasa, a lot of political events could be "ported over" pretty easily (the Phi Puma supernova and related evacuations, the
Tritium fiasco, the Back-to-Earth Movement and "Dissolution Babel", etc.). With a bit of reinterpretation, even some of the technical issues could be used. (In ENT ships had a "dilithium matrix". Is that the same thing as the dilithium crystal chamber used in TOS? Reinterpreting the SFC's "discovery of dilithium's properties" might provide an answer.)
(or read, whatever.)
