Backgrounds

This is Steven Petrick Posting:

Star Fleet Battles has been in publication for a very long time. The result is that is that it has a very large and complex background. Adding to it is not simply a matter of writing something new, but having to go back and find out if something written before affects what you may want to write today.

An example is creating penal ships for the Klingons in the Early Years Period.

Seems simple, just take a D4 and do a D6J conversion to it.

Of course, you get into problems: When do warp packs show up? The D6J boom has a warp pack, was the technology in the Early years able to provide such a thing, or should that be a later technological development?

Then there is the background. Obviously you can write whatever you want since this all happens before D6Js show up, so it does not matter, right?

Well, not really.

In SFB we have Module R8 which introduced National Guards and provided the Klingons with LD4s, basically a D4 upgraded to General War level technology and used by the National Guard (so to speak) for local defense of important planets. That does not affect the D4J design directly, but there was obvious opening for an LD4J, and one was published in Module R9. THAT affects the D4J massively.

It does not answer the question of whether or not D4Js could have warp packs (the LD4J does, but all that sets up is that perhaps the technology shows up in Y120), but it DOES provide background and history on the D4Js such that, when the background for the D4J was written, it has to take account of the background of the LD4J that would actually enter service decades after the first D4J.