ASDB HISTORY

The mandate of Star Trek: A Call to Duty's Advanced Starship Design Bureau is to create the most accurate and comprehensive technical specifications for starships currently used in the online Star Trek RPG, A Call to Duty. Originally christened the "Technical Specifications Team" by Steve Mallory, the team decided to adopt an organization whose roots exist in the realm of Star Trek history. Thus, the ASDB was born and is continuing its work to this date, ever-growing because its members are unwilling to put a limit on the information that can be squeezed into their creations.

The project first started on October 26, 2001 when Project Leader Steve Mallory emailed his newly-selected team to inform them of the direction that he wanted to take with the specs. Kurt Goring, Robert Pate, Jason Sharp, Robert Siwiak and Mike Stannard, all veteran players of ACTD, quickly began work on their first starships, basing the layout on Steve's existing Akira-class. Remarkably, even when it was considered to be complete back in November, the Akira-class went through almost four complete revisions before reaching its accepted completion at the end of January. In that time, a complete overhaul of the technical specifications format took place and ended in what now looks like a mini-technical manual based upon the Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manuals.

In an effort to remain as close to the Trek Universe as possible, the majority of these specifications are based upon canon information from the shows and movies. The term canon refers to any information revealed on screen in some way, with secondary sources such as official publications and interviews with staff members providing additional information. Even though the Galaxy, Defiant and Intrepid classes have all been extensively covered on and off screen, there is still a great deal of information about them that remains a mystery. To that end, many of the various classes in ACTD have little or no information given about them. The Norway-class's canon knowledge bank consists of a few fly-bys of the ship in Star Trek: First Contact and a few lines of text in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual. The New Orleans-class was only briefly seen on screen as a partially destroyed hulk in TNG's "The Best of Both Worlds" and two ships of this class were mentioned in another episode and termed "frigates." How then do we manage to create 30 pages of information on these ships and know that it's correct? Well, we try to make logical conjectures about the ship's role and hardware by comparing it to other ships of similar design and size, but we can't say for sure that it is exactly like the creators thought it would be.

Our job here is essentially to provide the canon for the ACTD realm, by creating the final word on what a starship is designed to do. Actually, that above sentence is worded a bit incorrectly. The Ship or Station Manager of our fine vessels has the final word, much like the writers on Star Trek. These specs are meant to provide a guide for their jobs, as well as to inform players with background information about their ships. Does that mean that your SM can suddenly add one deck on a mission, or hook on a third nacelle? No, not really... unless some twisted plot involved the warping of hull plating to the extent that another deck were to suddenly emerge. These specs are not meant to totally bind and constrict the SM, but rather to act as the lines in a coloring book. Much like these lines, our SMs may chose to run their crayon right over that line from time to time, but not often.

As stated before, these are the official specifications for use in ACTD. Granted, we are unable to write about every minute function and location aboard a starship, but our goal is to become that bottom line and final word for the game. Characters can still make reference to other locations not mentioned in these specs, but they are not free to mention that a holodeck conveniently exists right next to their room unless they happen to have their quarters on that same deck. Where possible, we have tried to attach numbers to certain figures as to allow the crew to get a greater feeling of actually knowing how many crew are working below decks, how many shuttles are sitting in the bay and how fast their ship can go. Overall, we think you'll be impressed...

Robert Siwiak
Chief Content Editor, Webmaster