Day 7: Engage
Oh come on. With how big of a Star Trek fan I am you’d think I’d pass up on “Engage”? Captain Picard’s catch-phrase when sending the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) into warp. It even got to the point where other commanding officers attempted to try to find a good catch-phrase to jump into warp.
Starships from Star Trek have always been one of my passions. Collecting technical manuals, blueprints, and posters detailing the vast number of starships seen on the show. I’ve even earned the mantel of “Treknologist” when a co-worker brought me a name plate with that title for my office. Years later it now hangs on the wall in my Geek Den.
Back in the early 1990’s when I was collecting all of the FASA Star Trek role playing books, I loved how the Starship Tactical Combat Simulator worked. I was able to compare how different starships stacked up against each other. I gathered photo copies of all the starships I could find from the official guides, the rulebooks, the modules, magazine articles and fanzines into one big three-ringed binder. Even after findings all of these ships and their stats, I wanted more. Luckily FASA created the Starship Construction Manual. With this book I was able to create homebrewed stats for some of the starships that I had in my book and blueprint collection. I recently found this three-ringed binder and I started to scan my original documents into PDF format. You can see the previous scans Here, Here, Here, Here and Here.
There was one starship in my three-ringed binder that I created from scratch. One of the minor governments in the FASA lore was the Affiliation of Outer Free Worlds. Basically it was a mini-Federation found within the Triangle region. A lot of ex-Starfleet officers found employment in the AOFW Space Navy. The only vessel I found for my book came from a Stardate Magazine and it displayed that they used Federation based equipment. So I created the Emerald Class VII Scout. For the image, I quite literally cut-and-paste the top off of a Federation (Upgraded) Class Dreadnought for the images and used the assembly rules from the Starship Construction Manual. Here is the PDF for download.
Final Thoughts:
“Small” as a primary suggestion for a topic made me raise an eyebrow. Yes, Haflings are small. But I wasn’t moved to use small as a subject. I could see some options for “Inspiration” but it had the bad luck of being on the same day as Engage. “Better”? Again not very inspiring. There were a few days like this that the bulk of suggestions were lacking.
