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Sunday, October 31, 2010

Name Tracking

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

Star Fleet Battles has a long past, and sometimes people submitting things forget that they are not the only ones doing so. It is easy to look at the name of an existing ship and decide to build a scenario, or even a fiction story, around the name. An example of a scenario is "The Dictator's Diplomat", Dictator being the name of a Klingon D7N.

The problem is that you may not be the only person who has decided to use a particular named ship for a particular thing. This does not mean that you should not continue working on the idea, but it does mean that it is a good idea to ask if you can use a particular ship if it is necessary for what you want to do. Asking lets us check our records and make a note that someone asked at a particular point in time if they could do something with that name. If someone else subsequently asks, we have a record of the previous person's request and can say "no", or give a provisional "yes". For example, the IKV Vandal appears in the fiction story "Escape from the Holdfast", and history says it was converted into an FX (advanced technology frigate) at a later date. Does that mean some cannot do a scenario or piece of fiction perhaps titled "Vandalizing"? No, the ship is still available as long as the story (or the historical outcome) does not require the ship to be destroyed, and does not interfere with any of its previous mentions (like having the scenario set in Y206, the year after the ship was apparently destroyed by being caught in a Nova blast).

And even if someone asked to use a ship, if the record says they asked six months ago, and nothing has been heard from them since, we would probably release the ship to a new request.

So if you plan to write an article and use a named ship, even if the only existing record you can find of it is in a list of ship names in the R section of the empire as the only previous place the name has ever been used, ask. There could be someone else working on an entirely different item that needs that particular name to make it work.