What's new - Mar 2003

A new article goes up today, concerning the history of the Borg.

I know we've been a little light on updates lately. We're getting ready tocreate a database for all the ships on the site, which will help us to spotproblems much more easily and will mean that when a ship entry is added orupdated, every single affected page will be updated simultaneously. This shouldhopefully mean that the site will become a lot more interally consistent andwill make updates more frequent and comprehensive. In the meantime, we'redoing what we can to keep at least a trickle of new stuff coming out.

Also, thanks for those who wrote in with suggestions for ways to modify thestrength system to fix the glitches I mentioned on the 9th of this month.There have been some interesting ideas there, at least one of which may wellbe workable...

On what I described as "a sad day" a couple of couple of yearsago, I forecast that Britain would stand beside America in its hour of need.Now these two allies are engaged in a long overdue battle to liberate thepeople of Iraq from the dictator who has slaughtered them so callously forso long, and in the process to make the world a safer place for us all.

To the brave troops waging that war we at the DITL sends its best wishesand support. Here's hoping that the fighting is short, the casualties areminimal and the victory complete.

 

The Suliban Cell ship has been added. for the moment this is on the shuttles section because of its small size. I may reconsider this when I do a full entry on the ship, because although it is indeed shuttle sized it is seems capable of operating as a proper independant ship.

Thanks to Commodore Rappaport a couple of typos in the series guide are fixed.

Cador Davis pointed out another addition to the "Little Bangs"dead shuttles list, from TNG "Timescape". I have also brought thecast list up to date through to "Canamar".

I've added "Canamar" to the Enterprise episode guide.

Kari points out that a date was wrong on the Endgame images page, so this is fixed. Adam Broughton has prompted me to slightly re-word the episode guide nit for "Elaan of Troyius".

It's been pointed out be a few people - most recently John Healy - that the strengths index numbering system doesn't work too well in some respects. Long time visitors will know that I re-wrote the system a while back to try and make it work better. At the time I knew that the new system was less than perfect, but the flaws were pretty minor. Recent developments in Trek are making them more obvious.

The problem is agility. Shuttles and other small craft have agilities in the high tens of thousands or more. Unfortunately, this usually gives them an overall strength of at least 20 to 40 or so. My personal preference is for shuttle strengths more like 2 - 4. I could do this by simply weighting the agility factor so low that it let shuttle strengths be in that region, but unfortunately if you do this then the agility numbers of the bigger ships have absolutely no effect on their strength. Even the system currently in place makes agility a very poor factor - you have to increase the agility of a Galaxy class more than sevenfold to bump its overall strength by a mere 10 points. Weighting agility significantly less than this would imply that agility is an irrelevance to Starship designers.

It used to be no big deal, because mostly it was just shuttles had such low strengths. But with the advent of Enterprise we are getting a whole raft of ship types which need to be vastly weaker than the TOS ships - right about the strength of a shuttle. So we are left with the NX class rated at 40, while its own shuttle is rated at 30 despite the fact that the shuttle has zero or close to it in every factor but agility.

I'm thinking about possible solutions to this, and have one or two ideas in mind. But it may be a while before anything gets done, because it may mean tweaking the strength numbers to some or all of the ships and that's a big job.

Janeway's shuttle from endgame has been added, picture courtesy of ColleenJean.

A bug in the Sh'Ran page has been fixed, thanks to Kyle aka CommodoreToroca.

I've added "Future Tense" to the Enterprise episode guide. Quitea good episode by Enterprise standards...

Thanks to "Some body" - yes, that's actually what he called himself- I've added a quote to the DS9 episode "Defiant".

Chris points out a small typo on the Foods list - the word "for"was mis-spelled.