What's new - Apr 1999

Well, you'd think I'd have got into the habit of being more careful about spelling by now but no, still as incompetent as ever! Proper names don't get picked up by the spellchecker, you see, so at least I have an excuse. And anyway, who says spellings will be the same in the 24th century anyway? Ha, never thought of that did you! :-)

Finally got around to taking out the photon torpedo page, a whopping five months after Chris Wagner pointed out its shortcomings! Sorry it took so long Chris, but I just plain forgot about it. Mea culpa. It's possible that a modified version will go up sometime in the future which addresses the photon in a more realistic (or should that be unrealistic?) manner, but don't hold your breath for this - the power section has never been a great priority for the site, and my "To do" list is a very long one.

The numbers on the welcome page have been updated.

I've been promising for months that this was on the way - well, finally it's here. The strengths of all the different ships have been re-worked, and the system for calculating overall strength has been re-vamped. Details of the latter can be accessed via the comments button on the "Fleets" introduction page; briefly, the system now allows shuttles to have proper agility numbers well above those of the capital ships, takes account of the photon and quantum torp yields given in the DS9 TM for greater accuracy regarding those weapons and now includes factors such as hull material and thickness and SIF protection for the overall hull strength.

The Federation scoutship and Holoship from "Star Trek : Insurrection" have been added to this section.

The next two Voyager and Deep Space Nine episode reviews have been posted.

As promised, I've wrote a whole new section which goes up today. It's inspired by the Temporal Investigations team seen in "Trials and Tribbil-ations". The premise is that Temporal Investigations is able to scan all of the alternate timelines we've seen created and destroyed during Trek, so seeing all those things that never "really" happened - Voyager's Year of Hell, etc. This is basically an excuse to let me put up images of episodes which the Daystrom Institute otherwise wouldn't know about.

The fleet page has been broken up into sections for each of the major powers, and the numbers of ships in most classes have been revised considerably upwards. There is also some speculation as to losses in the war so far added to this section.

The layout of the buttons on the site has been slightly altered - first, the "Comm" button at the top of the screen has been replaced by a "mail author" button at the bottom - since blue is the colour for 20th-century related items, this is its proper place. Since I had no room on the bottom strip to put the mail button, I have relocated the link to the welcome page and you can now get to that page via the site guide list. The links and series guides buttons have also swapped places, to allow people with 640x480 monitors to access the guides.

The ships, stations, shuttles, weaponry, species, sci-tech and power menu lists have now been put into alphabetical order. The rest are in whatever order seemed most appropriate for the contents, e.g chronological for the Battles list.

Also, I have re-named the tech button to "Sci-Tech", to accomodate ramblings of a more theoretical nature, if they crop up in the future.

The loss of Deep Space Nine as seen in "Call to Arms" has now been added - the usual page or so of description along with a dozen images.

The series guides section now contains a set of "Best of Trek" and "Worst of Trek" pages, one of each for each series. There is a top five list and a detailed review and discussion of the best and worst episode. These are personal choices and reasons only, so please don't email me with "how can you say this is better than that!" type comments!

The series guides section now contains a list of cast members for each of the four series. At the moment it's far from complete - so far you see the major characters (Kirk, Picard, etc) and a few of the more important recurring characters (Q, Dukat, etc). It will be expanded over time. Those characters that have an entry in the Personnel section are linked to their respective pages.