ACTD - Advanced Starship Design Bureau


	FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
General Questions Technical Questions Using Our Specs Website Questions General Questions: Q. Can I join the ASDB Team and help you guys out? A. Sorry, but we've already closed the application process long ago. While it may seem like an extra hand would help in taking on some of the burden, it would create a few headaches in redistributing the workload and bring about various other concerns. The people onboard are permanent members, so we don't have to worry about somebody bailing out or coming in to replace them. It has taken some time to hammer out and finalize what we have all decided to be our final direction, and that cannot exactly be described in a few words. Perhaps in the future, should our directives change, we'll open up the application process for a new task. In the meantime, the best way to give us a hand is to look over our stuff, and see if you can spot any errors, whether they're simple grammatical errors or us managing to forget about a certain Star Trek fact. Some of you hold real-world jobs as engineers, logisticians, and hold various other positions, and can offer a degree of that experience to help make our specs more realistic. Email us with suggestions, comments, corrections or visit our newsgroup at news.acalltoduty.com. We're always looking for high-quality canon images to put into our Images section, as well. *Q. Are these the* official specs for ACTD?** A. All the specs on this site are indeed the official ones used by ACTD. As far as matters within the game go, the ASDB starship specifications are the definitive source for information on a particular ship class... so no photonic cannons, transphasic torpedoes or batmobile-like ablative armor generators. This is the only official source for up-to-date specs, so secondary sites created by ACTD players or their official starship sites may not have the most recent versions. Q. Who are you guys and why are you doing this? A. To some extent, we're probably a lot like you... a group of guys who love Star Trek and spend a chunk of their day wanting to be in that 24th Century universe of faster-then-light starships several football fields in length. We have episodes and movies on tape and DVD, as well as a wealth of official publications in the form of technical manuals, encyclopedias, and magazines. Q. I'm in need of contacting your team for some reason. Where can I find you? A. Steve Mallory, as our Team Leader, is probably the most qualified to answer any of your inquires. You can find his address on our Contact page, and if he can't personally answer it, he'll know who on the team to pass your message onto. Technical Questions: Q. How do you "make up" the date when a ship is launched? A. We don't really make it up, but rather produce a date that seems consistent with known information. On the various series and the slew of technical manuals and magazines they've spawned, we've already been told the launch dates for a handful of the classes seen on screen. One of our accepted beliefs is that the NCC number of a starship follows a rough chronological order, and this is the basis for determining what ship class came before another. Q. Where do you guys get your information from? A. Our Sources section lists the majority of the sources that we used in creating these specs, aside from one very important one... our heads. In reality, these specs are just great fiction, and are original works created by the members of our team. Not all of our team has a library of Star Trek books sitting in their room, but even then, only a relatively small amount of information can be squeezed even from the volumes of books and magazines termed "official" by Paramount. Granted, those with these sources on hand are often the ones who bring forth canon examples of particular ships, technologies, and history to the team's attention, it is everyone's artistic writing talent that is the main source that creates our specs. Essentially, we have various sources classified into certain levels of "canon," which is basically how official information is. The five Star Trek TV series and the 10 movies constitute the highest level of canon, while official publications such as the technical manuals and Encyclopedias, as well as information from staff members come into play on the second level. Novels and unofficial magazines, such as the Communicator are not considered to be canon. On occasion, information within the series contradicts another source, and this is dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Q. Am I expected to memorize these specs by heart when I play on my ship? Nope, but just remember that this resource is available to you. We've collectively watched every episode of every Star Trek series, read every official publication, magazine or book, and scoured the web for interviews with those who were a part of creating Star Trek so that you didn't have to. We don't want you to be a nerd like us... just have fun in the game! Q. I'm a smart cookie, and I know for a fact that some canon often contradicts other canon... what are ya gonna do then, huh? Chose the canon that's "more right," so to speak. The Defiant is the best example of this, and I suggest you read the Author's Notes section for that class's specs. This has come up more times than not, and we do have to make logical guesses - its not pretty, since real hard and concrete knowledge on a great many ships we use in ACTD is practically nonexistent. What we do have, we infer in conjunction with the canon available for that class. Q. Hah! I mock your specs and laugh at their conjectures! I'm so sorry to hear that! If you have a problem with something you see here, I suggest you try contacting Steve Mallory, Project Director at at the email address provided on our Contact Info page. If you can give him a reliable canon source or at least a good argument as to why we should change something, we'd be more then happy to look into matter and consider a revision. Using Our Specs: Q. Can I use these specs on my own site? A. Yes, but only if you cite the ASDB as the source you copied them from. Nothing is worse then copying another person's work and not giving them credit for what they've done, or worse yet, claim it as your own. Some have actually done this with our specs, and it goes to show that some don't have the maturity yet to be amongst the online community of Trekkers and Trekkies. If you decide to copy an entire page of specs, please leave the copyright information at the bottom intact. If you chose to take parts or modify some of our work, at least place a statement at the bottom of the page or in an appropriate location on your site that acknowledges copyrighted work like: "The starship specifications present on this website were originally created for the online RPG Star Trek: A Call to Duty by the Advanced Starship Design Bureau. To see the original version, as well as specifications for other starships, please visit thier website at http://techspecs.acalltoduty.com." Those who chose to steal our specs will ensure that we will close our doors and never make any public releases again. Because they are original works, international copyrights do apply. Q. Can I copy your specs and modify them for my own uses? A. Yes, though we ask that you modify the copyright information to reflect that you've changed our work. For ACTD Starships, we recommend you only copy deck layouts and basic information from our site, rather then the entirety of a particular starship because over time we will be making revisions. Simply place a link somewhere on your starship's specs to the particular class specs in the ASDB (please don't direct link to the printable specs). Website Questions: Q. Why is the site design so boring and simplistic? A. Yes, yes... the LCARS look is considered to be outdated simply because so many people use it on Star Trek-related sites. But, we're not trying to design a revolutionary site with nice, pretty graphics and so forth. Our important feature is our content, more specifically, our written content in the form of our technical specs. The site is designed to work on all monitor resolutions, allowing all of our players to be able to access it. Yes Virginia, even at 800 x 600. Our players using 56k and slower modems will appreciate the relatively quick download time for each page, hence our very simplistic layout. Q. I use a Mac and your site doesn't seem to be working right... namely with some spacing. A. Even using the most recent version of Internet Explorer, some of the spacing seems to be off when viewed on an Apple... most likely due to my lack of robust HTML skills. That said, this site is best-viewed on a Windows-based PC using Internet Explorer. Q. I use Opera or a non-standard browser, and the site looks... funny. A. This site is designed to work in Internet Explorer 5.0 and above, and appears to work fine using equivalent versions of Netscape. Browsers such as Opera or Mozilla are not supported, so if you have any complaints, view the site in an appropriate browser first. Q. Who is that guy whose always talking in the first person on every news update? A. That'd happen to be me, Robert Siwiak, the guy who is in charge of making everything look spiffy before it gets put on the site... err, I mean, webmaster. Q. Can I use the images from the ASDB site on my own webpage? A. In short, no. Aside from what you'll find sitting in our Images section, the other pictures you see on the site are original creations either by myself, or in the case of Class Development Patches, by other members of the team. The aforementioned Images section contains a collection of various screen captures from the public domain, and you're free to make use of them. Please note that I've listed where these images came from, and as a courtesy, it'd be nice if you did the same. Last edited on 01/04/2004 by Robert Siwiak FAQs compiled by Steve Mallory and Robert Siwiak