Greetings everyone! Once more I’m Robert Archer, also known by many as RAdmCockRoach (or any variants thereof!) in Discord. Today I want to go into some details regarding how as Sarah mentioned in her earlier intro post, we plan to bring the unique back to STF! My role in this is highlighting one of the unique areas of STF which occasionally gets some love but other times is often overlooked by many.

That area of STF is of course the club’s Engineering Department. To directly quote from the department’s charter, ‘This Department is tasked with creating, maintaining and codifying STF-specific ship specifications and technology for use by STF, and acting as an Engineering-related resource and knowledge base for STF members.’ So what this means is all those nice pretty ship specs you roleplay on! They were made by much time, effort, blood and sweat of members past and present. While participation activity is hit or miss, depending on interest in making a ship specification or technology I have found in my many times as the club’s Engineering Director generating interest is sometimes hard. But, by observing member discussions and talking to people directly you can often guide people to take that plunge.

This brings me to an example of how such an approach and guidance can generate an unique event and history, with permission from Kirt Gartner. Kirt Gartner at the time of this example was the chief engineer on my ship the USS Ark Angel. During a main sim we had going on the ship the ship was invited to participate in a ship to ship race. Long story short I, as the GM, originally intended them to mod a shuttle or something. Instead Kirt and the rest of the crew jumped in with both feet to build their own ‘racing runabout’ ala similar to the Delta Flyer but with less frills. With basic guidance from me on how to build a design this resulted in his Flying Angel Racing Yacht/Runabout which, after a period of reviews and tweaks, became a fully approved spec in the club’s Tech Manual! https://www.star-fleet.com/core/command/edept/notes/667/ Later his interest grew and he is currently working on another design for submission called the Hero class Explorer which once it too goes through our review process and gets approved will then be open for future or current CO’s to use it for their areas to roleplay on. We were able to have a newer member find a part of the “unique” in STF, where he could find new, creative - and unique! - outlets for his interests, and become a more experienced member in STF in that area.

The point I’m getting too here though, is that STF’s engineering department has the ability to create exciting new toys (technology), and ship designs to roleplay on. While the current system is by no means perfect it is sound enough to currently get the job done for what we need and there are currently efforts slowly in the works to revise this system to something newer and more versatile for our needs. In the coming term we would work with the person working on these ideas to support them in seeing this revision put through as much as possible. Such a revision process is lengthy and may take more than our term so we would want to see it foster to the point where its momentum is carried through to the next term.

To this end one avenue of approach to bring the unique back to STF is encouraging members to look at these lesser seen areas of the club. In the case of the Engineering Department, we will do this by working with the chosen engineering director for our term with front page news ads of submissions, giving overviews of current EDept events and happenings in Discord, and encouraging Q/A sessions on the boards and in a Discord room which we will have setup for people to join to ask community questions for feedback This is just one example of showing how we can focus on the “unique” in STF.

I hope this wets everyone’s appetite for our further plans coming soon!

Sarah Hemenway / Robert Archer