What's new - Jul 1998

A whole new section goes up today, detailing some of the major characters of the various Trek series. Each gets a chronology of the major events in their life and a few paragraphs talking about them, plus some images to go with it. It's accessed via the "personnel" button above. Hope you like it.

A new award for the site, the W.S. site of the week award. And don't forget to vote for me in the warp core awards - just click this link and it takes less than thirty seconds to vote. You can vote every day, and I would really appreciate it if you did.

After seeing "Message in a Bottle", I finally caved in and re-sized the Akira to be a lot bigger than I previously had it. This might throw some parts of the site out of whack a bit - I haven't adjusted the strength indicies yet for example, because I'm in the early stages of doing a total re-write of that part of the site. Look out for more changes in the future...

A new modification to the direct comparison feature - you can now select any number of ships for comparison, instead of just being limited to two. I've also added a 'clear' button to reset the list.

Also, I've added various types of Starfleet shuttlecraft to the size comparison list - thirteen new types in all. If you try to compare a shuttle like the Type 15 to the Predator class, don't worry - it's not broken, the shuttle is just less than a pixel in length! Also, I've added the Olympic class medical ship from "All Good Things".

Some new images have gone up today - two new pictures on the Akira page, one on the Prometheus page, and one on the Disruptor images page.

A new addition to this page - the Centaur class seen attacking Sisko's Jem'Hadar Attack ship in "A Time to Stand".

The direct comarison feature has been upgraded to give clearer pictures, especially on smaller ships. This has allowed larger scaling factors to be used - instead of a times two maximum, it will now enlarge up to fifty times.

New classes for the site - the Romulan Scoutship and the Vulcan Warp Sled.

You may already have noticed that we have a whole new section going up today - the technology page. It describes the basic operation of Star Trek technology, generally with an image or two attached. For now there are only three entries, but more should be going up as I get around to them.

Next up, we have a new feature on the size comparison page. Previously, it was pretty hard to directly compare two classes if they where of radically different sizes, because they would be several pagedowns apart. Accessed via the 'direct comparison' button on the size comparison menu, the new feature allows you to select any two ships and have them displayed right next to each other, along with a percentage comparison of the lengths. There's a checkbox that lets you either show the ships as they are in the normal size comparison page, or zoom them up in size for a clearer comparison of some of the smaller ones. Note that this uses scripting, so turn it on now if you have it - remember, we have no adverts here so you won't get any of those annoying pop-up boxes all the time.

The power pages have also been revamped a little. I've added some figures for the Genesis Device, a rather speculative calculation for the Husnock ship seen in "Survivors", some estimates for the Romulan D'Deridex class Warbird, and a look at the properties of tritanium - many thanks to Sean Robertson for doing the calculations based on "Unification" and for getting me thinking about tritanium. The latter has also led to a reworking of the E-D's phaser attack on the Borg in "Q Who?". Sean also sent me a bunch of other power stuff which will be going up sometime soon - I think he's trying to launch a takeover by sending me so many good ideas the entire site ends up being based on his work! :-)

In addition to the new calculations, several of the power pages now have attached images, including some nice pictures of the Genesis explosion.

There are various new images around also, but I haven't really been keeping track of how many or which ones. Voyager has some new and much better pics, as do one or two other classes. Putting the images on separate pages has emphasised just how awful some of them are - but fear not, reinforcements are on the way! I've located a couple of really nice, close-up views of the Saber, Steamrunner and Norway classes and hope to have these up in a few weeks.

Those pesky Binars have been back, and they've now made the site even better!

Okay, as of now the site is split into text pages and image pages. So if you click on the starships button above and pick a ship, you see all the usual specs and notes on one page. But at the top is a set of buttons; one of these takes you to the images associated with that class, another will take you direct to the size comparison page, another to bring you back to the specifications, and then there is a fourth to take you to a 'comments' page (see next paragraph for more on those). The same system has been applied to all pages which have images in them. By doing this, I hope to let you come onto the site for a quick check of some factual detail or other without having to download all those big binary files if you don't want to. This will save you time waiting, not to mention keeping my ISP off my back about the bandwidth I use up. I think it also enhances the LCARS styling of the site.

As mentioned, all Starships now have a 'comments' page attached. These are new to the site, and stem from the questions you've had for me about some of my assumptions. Basically, the comments page for a ship explains why I've speculated the way I have, occasionally gives sources for the canon info and other 'real-world' background stuff, and just lets me say what I think about the ship. Note that the comments link button is blue, which means that the pages are set in our time and not the 24th century. As of now about half the notes pages don't have anything on them - I'll be adding stuff as people raise questions about the entries, or as time allows.

Finally, we have had some new awards lately. Many thanks to all those who where kind enough to grade my site, and special thanks to Quadrant-B for their glowing review. It's nice to know that people appreciate all the hours I put in!

Well, that's it for this time. I'm off to visit some family for a while, so I may not be able to respond to queries quite as fast as normal for the next couple of weeks. After that we should see updates going up on a pretty frequent basis for a while, as I am now on my summer break from school. Hope you enjoy the changes, and keep on Trekkin!

Yes, it's a new dawn for the Daystrom Institute Technical Library - the Binars have recently visited to tweak my interface! So as of today, the site has gone fully graphical. All titles, menus and lists are now '3-D' look LCARS buttons instead of the old text ones. As well as looking a lot prettier, the re-designed look has several advantages.

First, the main menu options are now permanently on-screen no matter what you do - this will make the site lot easier to navigate as you can choose any option, any time.

Second, the buttons are now separated according to their timeframe. All the orange buttons at the top relate to the '24th Century' portion of the site - these items are written as if by a person within the Star Trek universe. The row of blue buttons at the bottom contains all the things that don't fit this scheme - including my fan fiction, links, site guide and (of course!) this page.

Thirdly, the redesign increases the size of the main area of the site by some 10% (at 800x600), giving more area to view images and text.

While revamping my site I took the oppurtunity to tweak a couple of errors that I haven't had time to do before. The 'Hedeki class' entry is now spelt properly as 'Hideki class' and the 'Dominion Fighter' is now more properly labelled as the 'Attack Ship'. I also took a moment to enlarge the entry on the Type 12 phasers a little to give a bit more history on this weapon.

In addition to the new look, I've put up a couple of new classes. The Pehonix from First Contact is up there, along with the good old Constitutions. Enjoy.

Whew! This has been quite a weekend, I can tell you! Look out for more in the future from the Daystrom Institute Technical Library, the fastest moving site on the Web!

A brand new entry on the site, this page gives a brief description of some of the major battles the Federation have been involved in over the last few years. Alongside this is a link to a 'picture storyboard' - anything up to ten or so images chosen because I felt they conveyed the flow of the events. I hope you like this page, and if you have a nomination to be included please e-mail me, via the orange 'comm' button, and let me know.