What's new - Jun 1999

Many more details have been added to the 2300's page - notably the episodes "Best of Both Worlds 1 & 2",  "Unification", "Time's Arrow", "The Emissary", "Descent 1 & 2" and "All Good Things". In addition, the movies "Generations" and "First Contact" have been included. This section continues to contains almost exclusively canon information, and no speculation at all.

The Type 11 shuttle from "Insurrection" goes up today. Pretty standard stuff for the most part, but as with many recent shuttles I have had to do masses of speculation since there is little in the way of canon about this craft.

Two new awards also go up today. Many thanks to those who chose to bestow these on the site.

A new ship class has been added - the Swarm ships from the third season Voyager episode of the same name. I'm probably going to add a couple of Voyager ships over the next few weeks, since the ships from the other series currently predominate.

A page has been added detailing many of the particles mentioned in various Trek episodes and films. Many of these are perfectly real, and in those cases I have included some real life details not mentioned in any episode - such details are coloured as canon, in the assumption that real world physics applies to Treknology unless otherwise stated. Some are entirely fictitious, of course, and the description of these is pretty solidly based in the episodes. Then there are the more awkward ones, which are real technical words but used in ways that don't make sense - notably Magnetons, which are not particles at all but units of measurement. In such cases I have written it as if either more was discovered about the particle, or the use of the name simply changed over the centuries.

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me... yup, I have now reached the grand old age of thirty. And here I am, spending my birthday doing Trek stuff - sad or what? Not to worry, I'm off down the pub as soon as this one goes up. Bye now...

Well, we've finally managed to bludgeon Internet Explorer into working correctly. The site should now be back to it old self, with a better interface to boot. We've now solved all the problems that we're aware off, so if you have a remaining issue please let us know.

Well, we've just found out that the new site design is causing problems for IE users. The JavaScript errors should now be gone but IE4's insistance on caching pages is still causing a few problems. If you find you click a link you've been to recently and all you get is the title strip, please try refreshing that title page. It will cause the main page to be displayed. I'm still working on forcing IE to do this for you, just like Comunicator does. Appologies all round. That'll teach me to be away from my main machine, which currently has nine different browsers installed to help us in compatibility testing.

"Hey," I said, "wouldn't it be good if all the titles and link buttons for each page stayed at the top of the screen no matter how you scrolled the text?" Well, it ended up taking a good fifty man-hours worth of work to accomplish that but now it's done. You can now go to any given page on the site, and the main title and link buttons will float serenely at the top of the screen while you scroll away madly below. Now this looks pretty, and it means that you don't have to scroll back to the top of the screen to pick another subpage.

Much more importantly, however, it means that I don't have to have the relevant graphics on every page - and that means that the overall size of the site has been significantly reduced, which will also cut your download times and speed things up a little.

Note that this feature is Javascript dependant. If your browser does not support script, then selecting a page will bring up the title page which will contain a button that will bring up the rest of the page. This adds another button-push to get to any given page, but less than 5% of people visiting this site have non-script browsers. If you are one of these, then you should go to the relevant website and download a new browser - it's free of charge, so there's no excuse! If you would rather not download such large files then you can still get these browsers of most magazine cover disks.

There is now a feature for comparing the size of various space stations, plus the usual references page describing how they were scaled. One other thing to note, once you have made your selections on the size comparison section, you can go to any number of other pages on the site and your choices will still be there when you return.

We've added the next four DS9 and Voyager episodes to the list, bringing us up to episode ten of DS9 series 7 and Voyager series 5. Also, as part of our interface re-alignment we've removed the ratings information from each page and placed them on their own page. This is found at the bottom of the episode guides menu and is labelled 'Ratings'.

The Akira specs and comments pages have been re-written to reflect the recent magazine article about that ship, which finally sent my initial opinions of this class straight to hell. The new strength numbers have spilled over onto the Federation fleets page also.