Forget the characters – Star Trek thrives on cool spaceships. TrekLit’s given us a bunch of new ships over the years, most notably the USS Titan. Recently the USS Aventine was revealed, prior to being plastered on the cover of the Aventine chapter of the Typhon Pact next year.
Sometimes we get neat little fold-out diagrams, and pretty CGI cover art. Some ships we never ever see.
I was wondering what everyone’s favourite TrekLit ships were – here are mine:
Dreadnought!
Dreadnought! starred the badass USS Star League, a take on the old Tech Manual dreadnought with TMP/Excelsior styling and a hexagonal saucer. The cover pic was brilliant.
Dreadnought! also features the USS Pompeii, a Saladin-class destroyer. Again this is from the Tech Manual (where it’s the ship the USS Kelvin from STXI was based on), but it’s described as ‘boxy’ and nothing like the saucer and single nacelle configuration. The slim corridors described kinda reminded me of DS9 Defiant. The ship also has a shuttlebay, which the Tech Manual ship doesn’t have (but the Kelvin added on top)
There were also 2 types of fighter shuttles on the Enterprise and the Pompeii that had diagrams at the back of the book.
Diane Carey did a fantastic job of bringing the ships to life.
My Enemy, My Ally
Bloodwing was a standard Romulan Bird of Prey, but the ship I loved was the USS Inaieu. A miles-long Federation ship with four warp nacelles, powered by four warp-cores, and a crew of elephant-sized nonhumanoids. They just don’t allow ships this cool in TrekLit anymore.
(And some people insist the new Enterprise can’t be 700+ meters long and powered by six warp cores. But then those people ignore “non-canon” novels anyway…)
The Final Reflection
There are pics of the Federation ships from The Final Reflection floating about the web (I believe they’re from the Spaceflight Chronology). The Federation flagship USS Mann is an ugly blob with nacelles awkwardly sticking out the rear. The other ships look nicer.
Using later Treks we can reverse-engineer what Krenn’s D-5 cruiser looks like (they were in Enterprise), as well as what the Federation ships looked like inside (they’re from the same era as the USS Kelvin from STXI). That said, John M. Ford probably saw things quite differently.
The Entropy Effect
Captain Hunter’s Aerfen (Entropy Effect and The First Adventure) is a border-patrol fighter, described as “much smaller than the Enterprise”, a sleek “avian predator” painted in scarlet, silver and black. A crew of around 12. Sounds very un-Starfleet, and thus I'd love to see what it looks like.
The Return
An awesome concept, and one that could never ever work on film: A Borg Hypercube. A hypercube is a (theoretical) 4-dimensional shape. You can find fairly nonsensical videos of 3D representations of them rotating on YouTube.
4D Shapes can’t exist is 3D space, but the Borg Hypercube is a station floating in transwarp space, which the authors say is 4-dimensional. Picard’s crew feel nauseous looking at its “impossible” innards (which sound like a Borgified M.C. Escher)
Anyone else got any favourite TrekLit ships? Or ideas of what the 'unseen' ones might look like?
Sometimes we get neat little fold-out diagrams, and pretty CGI cover art. Some ships we never ever see.
I was wondering what everyone’s favourite TrekLit ships were – here are mine:
Dreadnought!
Dreadnought! starred the badass USS Star League, a take on the old Tech Manual dreadnought with TMP/Excelsior styling and a hexagonal saucer. The cover pic was brilliant.
Dreadnought! also features the USS Pompeii, a Saladin-class destroyer. Again this is from the Tech Manual (where it’s the ship the USS Kelvin from STXI was based on), but it’s described as ‘boxy’ and nothing like the saucer and single nacelle configuration. The slim corridors described kinda reminded me of DS9 Defiant. The ship also has a shuttlebay, which the Tech Manual ship doesn’t have (but the Kelvin added on top)
There were also 2 types of fighter shuttles on the Enterprise and the Pompeii that had diagrams at the back of the book.
Diane Carey did a fantastic job of bringing the ships to life.
My Enemy, My Ally
Bloodwing was a standard Romulan Bird of Prey, but the ship I loved was the USS Inaieu. A miles-long Federation ship with four warp nacelles, powered by four warp-cores, and a crew of elephant-sized nonhumanoids. They just don’t allow ships this cool in TrekLit anymore.
(And some people insist the new Enterprise can’t be 700+ meters long and powered by six warp cores. But then those people ignore “non-canon” novels anyway…)
The Final Reflection
There are pics of the Federation ships from The Final Reflection floating about the web (I believe they’re from the Spaceflight Chronology). The Federation flagship USS Mann is an ugly blob with nacelles awkwardly sticking out the rear. The other ships look nicer.
Using later Treks we can reverse-engineer what Krenn’s D-5 cruiser looks like (they were in Enterprise), as well as what the Federation ships looked like inside (they’re from the same era as the USS Kelvin from STXI). That said, John M. Ford probably saw things quite differently.
The Entropy Effect
Captain Hunter’s Aerfen (Entropy Effect and The First Adventure) is a border-patrol fighter, described as “much smaller than the Enterprise”, a sleek “avian predator” painted in scarlet, silver and black. A crew of around 12. Sounds very un-Starfleet, and thus I'd love to see what it looks like.
The Return
An awesome concept, and one that could never ever work on film: A Borg Hypercube. A hypercube is a (theoretical) 4-dimensional shape. You can find fairly nonsensical videos of 3D representations of them rotating on YouTube.
4D Shapes can’t exist is 3D space, but the Borg Hypercube is a station floating in transwarp space, which the authors say is 4-dimensional. Picard’s crew feel nauseous looking at its “impossible” innards (which sound like a Borgified M.C. Escher)
Anyone else got any favourite TrekLit ships? Or ideas of what the 'unseen' ones might look like?
