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Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Differences in Empires Strikes Again

This is Steven Petrick posting.

Formatting, formatting, formatting.

You would think the formats would make doing the Master Starship Books easier to do.

The problem is that each empire (at least so far) has something different, which requires modifying the format to include that difference.

But at least the "General Units" will all follow a standard unchanging format, right?

Well . . . no.

The Klingons differ from the Federation because the security stations needed to be accounted for. Standard freighters and skiffs for example, do not have security stations, and not all large merchant vessels do either. And of course the Hydrans needed to account for the fighters, which means keeping track of the progression of fighters [unlike just nothing that "Weapon #3 is phaser-3s," you have to note that it was Stinger-1s (or Stinger-1Fs) from Y# to Y#, then Stinger-2s (or Stinger-2Fs from Y# and so on]. And the Romulans require separate listings for Early Years bases used only by themselves.

So the Lyrans are not going to be that hard, when the Lyrans are done it will be easy to do the Lyran Democratic Republic, right?

Well . . . no. The Lyran Democratic Republic has a pretty tightly defined history, and whereas you can pretty vaguely say that some particular unit in Lyran service started getting refits in Y#, and all units of that type had the refit by Y#, in the Lyran Democratic Republic's case you often have specific numbers of ships. There were two (2) Large Q-Ships, so the term "the refit was general in Y# does not apply. It is (in this case) one ship got the refit in Y#, the second got the refit in Y#, or both ships got the refit in Y#.

The upshot is that unlike the General Units section in the previous books, the Lyran Democratic Republic General Units require short expositions in many cases.

Format?

Sigh.