What is Star Fleet Universe?
- Thread starter Danlav05
- Start date
I don't understand all the ins and outs myself, and I know that someone will be along who can explain it better.
The Star Fleet Universe is licensed from Franz Joseph, who created the Star Fleet Technical Manual. He ended up with the rights to what was in that, and he was able to license them out separately of Paramount.
So, the Star Fleet Universe is sort of an alternate Star Trek universe that exists independently of it. Though it has occasionally been used in official Star Trek products, like Interplay's first two Starfleet Command games, which necessitated a license from both the owners of Star Fleet and Star Trek.
The Star Fleet Universe is licensed from Franz Joseph, who created the Star Fleet Technical Manual. He ended up with the rights to what was in that, and he was able to license them out separately of Paramount.
So, the Star Fleet Universe is sort of an alternate Star Trek universe that exists independently of it. Though it has occasionally been used in official Star Trek products, like Interplay's first two Starfleet Command games, which necessitated a license from both the owners of Star Fleet and Star Trek.
I am not a super expert, but I can provide more information. Everything Allyn said is true.
It started out as a starship miniatures war game called Stars Fleet Battles. The setting itself is called Stars Fleet Universe. There is an RPG called Prime Directive. They have other games, including one called Federation and Empire, that are about fleets or ground combat.
The story is different in that they are limited to TOS, TAS and the technical manual. It features some college ships and some truly butt-ugly ships.
The Feds are constantly at war/allied with various factions, including canon ones like the Klingons, Romulans, Gorn, Tholians, Kzinti and more. New factions include Lyrans, Hydrans, Interstellar concordance of worlds, Andromedans and a whole bunch currently in playtesting.
It strikes me as weird but not bad. It's this static thing that visually hasn't changed much in forty years. Having grown up with real Stars Trek I have trouble wrapping my head around its canon. Lots of people love it, I personally prefer their Klingons to Paramount 's Klingons.
It started out as a starship miniatures war game called Stars Fleet Battles. The setting itself is called Stars Fleet Universe. There is an RPG called Prime Directive. They have other games, including one called Federation and Empire, that are about fleets or ground combat.
The story is different in that they are limited to TOS, TAS and the technical manual. It features some college ships and some truly butt-ugly ships.
The Feds are constantly at war/allied with various factions, including canon ones like the Klingons, Romulans, Gorn, Tholians, Kzinti and more. New factions include Lyrans, Hydrans, Interstellar concordance of worlds, Andromedans and a whole bunch currently in playtesting.
It strikes me as weird but not bad. It's this static thing that visually hasn't changed much in forty years. Having grown up with real Stars Trek I have trouble wrapping my head around its canon. Lots of people love it, I personally prefer their Klingons to Paramount 's Klingons.
I prefer the depiction of the Klingons from the SFU to their later depictions in TNG and later. They aren't Ford Klingons, but they're similar. It's not canon, but lots of people love it.
If you want to know more about it, try and track down Jean Sexton. She has lots of information. Maybe on Amarillo Design Bureau's Facebook page.
If you want to know more about it, try and track down Jean Sexton. She has lots of information. Maybe on Amarillo Design Bureau's Facebook page.
The company in question is Amarillo Design Bureau (ADB), owned and operated by Stephen V. Cole (SVC). The flagship game is Star Fleet Battles (SFB), and do note that Star & Fleet are two words whereas Paramount uses the one-word Starfleet. SFB is a ship-to-ship tactical combat simulation board game. It's possible to do combat with fleets of up to about a dozen ship on each side, but with more than three to five ships the game tends to bog down.
To offset this, ADB created another game called Federation Commander, which some players view as "SFB-Lite". While at first glance it looks a lot like SFB, it is truly a separate game system. If you try SFB tactics in FedCmdr, or vice versa, you'll get you *bleep* handed to you. This game allows players to field larger squadrons of ten ships or more with relative ease.
A couple years back, ADB did a joint-venture with Mongoose Publishing to port the Star Fleet Universe (a term coined by SVC to describe his vision of Trek) into the A Call To Arms game engine. I played it a couple of times. Great game system, but some items did not port well and thus game-balance suffered. ADB and Mongoose couldn't come to terms on how to patch it, so they both agreed to have a third-party re-write the game from the ground up. The person they asked is a well-respected beta-tester that did work for both companies in the past and was a primary tester for ACTA:SF version one-point-oh, so the end result feels very much like the original ACTA engine while staying true to the SFU background.
Another ADB game that has a loyal following is Federation and Empire (F&E), which is a grand-strategic simulation of the General War that started as a small boarder skirmish and swept across the known galaxy for eighteen or so years. With starting fleets measuring well over a hundred ships per empire and the requirement to track economic income/spending, this game is not for the faint of heart. It's not a hard game, just big. Very very big.
ADB recently added another combat game to their inventory, that being Star Fleet Marines. As the name implies, this is a ground-combat simulator. I have a copy but have yet to play it. After a quick read through the rules, I felt it to be pretty standard for this type of board game. It's not Squad Leader, but it's more than G.E.V. / OGRE.
Some years back, ADB dabbled in the Role-Play-Game arena with their Prime Directive game system. To be honest, their game-engine left a lot to be desired. ADB has since correct that mistake by licensing and porting the Prime Directive background into the GURPS system, and then into D20 & D20-Modern. I have been told they plan to port it into the Mongoose version of Traveller game engine. In the first edition of PD, the characters were assumed to be members of the elite Prime Teams, who are a blend of first-contact specialists and special mission operatives (aka commandos). The revised versions allow players to assume the role of pretty much anyone on the ship, including the captain and bridge crew, no matter how little sense it makes to these people to lead away missions.
As someone already pointed out, everything ADB does is under a license agreement with Franz Joseph Design, which appears to have no expiration date (unheard of these days), with additional agreements with CBS/Paramount. These agreements allow ADB to use almost anything from ST:TOS / ST:TAS and the Franz Joseph Tech Manual, but pretty much NOTHING from ST:TMP / ST:TNG / etc.
Someone mentioned the Star Fleet Command computer games. These were not ADB products, but were based heavily on the SFB board game. They were done legally with proper license agreements with ADB and other parties.
One of the cool things about the Star Fleet Universe is that it's very consistent. Much like how Downton Abby is written with one voice by one author, SFU was/is edited by a single man, Steve Cole. That's not saying he comes up with all the ideas all by himself. He freely accepts ideas submitted, and will give name-credit to authors where credit is earned (something I can't say all other game companies do, sadly).
For the record, I do not work nor speak for ADB. I can say that I do know Steve Cole and the entire ADB crew personally, and have the pleasure of considering them all friends.
To offset this, ADB created another game called Federation Commander, which some players view as "SFB-Lite". While at first glance it looks a lot like SFB, it is truly a separate game system. If you try SFB tactics in FedCmdr, or vice versa, you'll get you *bleep* handed to you. This game allows players to field larger squadrons of ten ships or more with relative ease.
A couple years back, ADB did a joint-venture with Mongoose Publishing to port the Star Fleet Universe (a term coined by SVC to describe his vision of Trek) into the A Call To Arms game engine. I played it a couple of times. Great game system, but some items did not port well and thus game-balance suffered. ADB and Mongoose couldn't come to terms on how to patch it, so they both agreed to have a third-party re-write the game from the ground up. The person they asked is a well-respected beta-tester that did work for both companies in the past and was a primary tester for ACTA:SF version one-point-oh, so the end result feels very much like the original ACTA engine while staying true to the SFU background.
Another ADB game that has a loyal following is Federation and Empire (F&E), which is a grand-strategic simulation of the General War that started as a small boarder skirmish and swept across the known galaxy for eighteen or so years. With starting fleets measuring well over a hundred ships per empire and the requirement to track economic income/spending, this game is not for the faint of heart. It's not a hard game, just big. Very very big.
ADB recently added another combat game to their inventory, that being Star Fleet Marines. As the name implies, this is a ground-combat simulator. I have a copy but have yet to play it. After a quick read through the rules, I felt it to be pretty standard for this type of board game. It's not Squad Leader, but it's more than G.E.V. / OGRE.
Some years back, ADB dabbled in the Role-Play-Game arena with their Prime Directive game system. To be honest, their game-engine left a lot to be desired. ADB has since correct that mistake by licensing and porting the Prime Directive background into the GURPS system, and then into D20 & D20-Modern. I have been told they plan to port it into the Mongoose version of Traveller game engine. In the first edition of PD, the characters were assumed to be members of the elite Prime Teams, who are a blend of first-contact specialists and special mission operatives (aka commandos). The revised versions allow players to assume the role of pretty much anyone on the ship, including the captain and bridge crew, no matter how little sense it makes to these people to lead away missions.
As someone already pointed out, everything ADB does is under a license agreement with Franz Joseph Design, which appears to have no expiration date (unheard of these days), with additional agreements with CBS/Paramount. These agreements allow ADB to use almost anything from ST:TOS / ST:TAS and the Franz Joseph Tech Manual, but pretty much NOTHING from ST:TMP / ST:TNG / etc.
Someone mentioned the Star Fleet Command computer games. These were not ADB products, but were based heavily on the SFB board game. They were done legally with proper license agreements with ADB and other parties.
One of the cool things about the Star Fleet Universe is that it's very consistent. Much like how Downton Abby is written with one voice by one author, SFU was/is edited by a single man, Steve Cole. That's not saying he comes up with all the ideas all by himself. He freely accepts ideas submitted, and will give name-credit to authors where credit is earned (something I can't say all other game companies do, sadly).
For the record, I do not work nor speak for ADB. I can say that I do know Steve Cole and the entire ADB crew personally, and have the pleasure of considering them all friends.
A bit more information about the PRIME DIRECTIVE role-play-game series. But first, allow me to once again point out that I do NOT work for nor speak for ADB or Steve Cole. If any of the below interests you, please contact them directly. Thanks.
As mentioned above, PRIME DIRECTIVE has been ported in the GURPS, D20, and D20-Modern game engines. ADB plans to port it into the Mongoose version of Traveller. Steve Cole posted this message on the starfleetgames.com/discuss forum:
Somebody sent me an email about some RPG system he likes. It's fairly new and I had never heard of it, which isn't at all a bad thing. I explained to him these key points:
1. We do want to do new systems.
2. ADB is not going to do the conversion in-house. We will need a reliable outside designer who can provide the replacement text (see #3). We do not have the years it would take for in-house people to learn a new system to expert level.
3. The way to do them is to take our existing books and replace the game system stuff while leaving the history, background, art, technology, and so forth intact. We are not interested in an outside author rewriting or changing history. If an author wants to create some new stuff it will have to be handled separately as a general submission and used in some other product. For example, the fiction in the Klingon book will be the same in the Klingon book of every game system. If somebody want to write a new Klingon fiction story, we will review it as any other fiction story and if it gets publish it will be in some other product.
4. The way the above gets done is we do the page layout in-house using text files and instructions sent by the outside designer. This might be "replace everything on page 38 with this file" or "on page 42 halfway down the left column it says "TL6" and that needs to be changed to "HL4".
As I said, I don't work for ADB, so don't ask me what they'd pay or what sort of deadlines they'd impose. Please contact Steve Cole directly.
This should really be posted in the Fan-Fic topic, but I'll include it here. ADB publishes a twice-per-year magazine called CAPTAIN'S LOG that includes a bit of new stuff for all their games (SFB, F&E, FedCmdr, PD, etc.) One of the larger items in every edition is a fiction story. For as long as I can remember, Steve has said that this is usually the last thing they receive to insert into the layout, and often he ends up writing said fiction himself because the scheduled author misses the deadline (or simply goes AWOL). He is always on the lookout for good authors who can write good STAR FLEET BATTLES fiction. I asked about posting here on Trek-BBS, and this was what he said:
That said, he did go on to say that he is willing and eager to work with any author who can stay within the guidelines that ADB must abide by. He plans to create / post a "SFB fiction writer's guide", and there are a ton of "input guides" posted here: http://www.starfleetgames.com/input-guide/index.shtml. One of the first documents any prospective SFB writer should read is this one-page PDF: http://www.starfleetgames.com/documents/Trek_Vs_Star_Fleet_Universe.pdf.
Obviously, given that said fiction would be about Star Fleet BATTLES, it should be based heavily around a combat scenario. That doesn't mean you have zero character development. But the combat scene must make sense, both within the game's rules (e.g., phasers and disruptors rearm/fire twice as fast as photon torpedoes, so a story having the Federation ship get six shots off before the Klingon can reload won't fly), and make sense in real-world logic (i.e., "Hey, let's ignore our orders and take a long detour right thru the heart of a nebula where we know our sensors won't work!."). Steve Cole and Steve Petrick are both ex-military and won't print a story that fails basic military logic. Mistakes happen in the fog of war, but stupid people don't run starships.
Also, ADB is always on the look-out for people who can do good art work. Cover art is of course in full color, but interior clip-art is black-&-white / shades of grey. And it's got to be better than my stick-man figures. I can't draw to save my life.
However, one "art" project I did (not yet published) that I am very proud of is a set of plans mapping out every deck and every room of a Federation Police Cutter. There is hope that it will someday be included in a PRIME DIRECTIVE publication. ADB has published several sets of deck plans (see here: http://www.starfleetgames.com/deckplanresources.shtml) but they are in need of more. I started working on plans for the Armed Priority Transport, but I seriously do not want to take on a larger project. I would love to see someone else do up deck plans for Gorn or Kzinti ships.
Again, I don't work for ADB. Please contact them directly from this page: http://www.starfleetgames.com/contact.shtml.
Thanks for reading.
As mentioned above, PRIME DIRECTIVE has been ported in the GURPS, D20, and D20-Modern game engines. ADB plans to port it into the Mongoose version of Traveller. Steve Cole posted this message on the starfleetgames.com/discuss forum:
Somebody sent me an email about some RPG system he likes. It's fairly new and I had never heard of it, which isn't at all a bad thing. I explained to him these key points:
1. We do want to do new systems.
2. ADB is not going to do the conversion in-house. We will need a reliable outside designer who can provide the replacement text (see #3). We do not have the years it would take for in-house people to learn a new system to expert level.
3. The way to do them is to take our existing books and replace the game system stuff while leaving the history, background, art, technology, and so forth intact. We are not interested in an outside author rewriting or changing history. If an author wants to create some new stuff it will have to be handled separately as a general submission and used in some other product. For example, the fiction in the Klingon book will be the same in the Klingon book of every game system. If somebody want to write a new Klingon fiction story, we will review it as any other fiction story and if it gets publish it will be in some other product.
4. The way the above gets done is we do the page layout in-house using text files and instructions sent by the outside designer. This might be "replace everything on page 38 with this file" or "on page 42 halfway down the left column it says "TL6" and that needs to be changed to "HL4".
As I said, I don't work for ADB, so don't ask me what they'd pay or what sort of deadlines they'd impose. Please contact Steve Cole directly.
This should really be posted in the Fan-Fic topic, but I'll include it here. ADB publishes a twice-per-year magazine called CAPTAIN'S LOG that includes a bit of new stuff for all their games (SFB, F&E, FedCmdr, PD, etc.) One of the larger items in every edition is a fiction story. For as long as I can remember, Steve has said that this is usually the last thing they receive to insert into the layout, and often he ends up writing said fiction himself because the scheduled author misses the deadline (or simply goes AWOL). He is always on the lookout for good authors who can write good STAR FLEET BATTLES fiction. I asked about posting here on Trek-BBS, and this was what he said:
We tried that a few years ago and got a bunch of fiction that violated our license and a bunch of arguments from writers. Remember that SFU fiction has to be SFU fiction and the Trek BBS guys really aren't familiar with the differences and keep using non-licensed trek elements that would get us in deep trouble.
That said, he did go on to say that he is willing and eager to work with any author who can stay within the guidelines that ADB must abide by. He plans to create / post a "SFB fiction writer's guide", and there are a ton of "input guides" posted here: http://www.starfleetgames.com/input-guide/index.shtml. One of the first documents any prospective SFB writer should read is this one-page PDF: http://www.starfleetgames.com/documents/Trek_Vs_Star_Fleet_Universe.pdf.
Obviously, given that said fiction would be about Star Fleet BATTLES, it should be based heavily around a combat scenario. That doesn't mean you have zero character development. But the combat scene must make sense, both within the game's rules (e.g., phasers and disruptors rearm/fire twice as fast as photon torpedoes, so a story having the Federation ship get six shots off before the Klingon can reload won't fly), and make sense in real-world logic (i.e., "Hey, let's ignore our orders and take a long detour right thru the heart of a nebula where we know our sensors won't work!."). Steve Cole and Steve Petrick are both ex-military and won't print a story that fails basic military logic. Mistakes happen in the fog of war, but stupid people don't run starships.
Also, ADB is always on the look-out for people who can do good art work. Cover art is of course in full color, but interior clip-art is black-&-white / shades of grey. And it's got to be better than my stick-man figures. I can't draw to save my life.
However, one "art" project I did (not yet published) that I am very proud of is a set of plans mapping out every deck and every room of a Federation Police Cutter. There is hope that it will someday be included in a PRIME DIRECTIVE publication. ADB has published several sets of deck plans (see here: http://www.starfleetgames.com/deckplanresources.shtml) but they are in need of more. I started working on plans for the Armed Priority Transport, but I seriously do not want to take on a larger project. I would love to see someone else do up deck plans for Gorn or Kzinti ships.
Again, I don't work for ADB. Please contact them directly from this page: http://www.starfleetgames.com/contact.shtml.
Thanks for reading.
Yes, I have heard that said many many times over the years. Be that as it may, the game is still in publication and still being played quite a bit. If you're looking for opponents, you may want to try the Star Fleet Battle On-Line site. Or perhaps try the Federation Commander game if you find SFB to be too complex. Another option is the "A Call To Arms" miniatures game, which is far simpler than the other two.
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