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This page last updated on: 04/26/2004 14:21
Background:
The Star Trek (tm) Ship Construction Manual was an add-on module for the Star Trek (tm) Starship Combat Simulator Game which was produced by the FASA Corporation under license from Paramount. In the early 1990's FASA lost the contract for the Star Trek Role Playing Game and stopped producing additional modules for the game.
The Ship Construction Manual (SCM) allowed players to develop their own unique types of ships by going through a construction process where the size of ship, computer, engines, shields, and weapons are all chosen and subjected to several rules and restrictions. The SCM came with a paper worksheet that players built their ship on and covered all calculations which needed to be performed. You could develop, and then fight, ships from the United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, the Orion Colonies, and the Gorn Alliance.
History:
As I became more familiar with the SCM, I quickly grew tired of having to punch in numbers into the calculator in order to perform all the necessary computations. I had had a bit of BASIC programming in High School, so I developed an Apple IIe BASIC version where the user needed to type in all the required information and the computer would perform the required computations. A few years later, I adapted the coding for IBM compats. And there the project languished for several years until I became more familiar with Microsoft Excel. I used Excel to produce a spreadsheet which the user would simply enter the required information into the identified cells and Excel would crank through the calculations. In my searchings on-line, this is the maximum extent that I have seen the SCM taken...until now.
All the above programs suffered from one fatal flaw...if you didn't have the SCM, you wouldn't know what to put where.
I had thought that the next logical step in the process would need to have a good amount of Visual Basic knowledge and/or Microsoft Access knowledge, and I tried to teach myself several times how to use each program and began a few attempts at creating a program/database which would include the tables contained within the SCM such that it was as "point and click" as possible. These programs didn't make it far before I found myself bogged down in coding and intricacies of VB and Access. I had thought that someone else with more knowledge and experience would have to develop a truely computerized SCM in some distant future.
I returned to Excel and started playing around with the program and found that I COULD do some of the things that I wanted and needed the program to do. After about 3 months of tinkering, I have a finished product. You still need to type in some things contained in the tables, but the program automatically searches for the required data in the table and displays the information where it needs to go.
Left Click on the symbol below to open the SCM for that Star Trek (tm) Government or Right Click on the symbol and "Save Target As" if you do not wish to run this through the browser.
System requirements: the Excel Spreadsheets are written in Excel 2000.
You must enable the Macros when you open the spreadsheet in order for the "Reset All" function to work.
For whatever reason, the pictures and the hyperlinks to the excel files aren't functioning...I'll work on it.
United Federation of Planets
Klingon
Empire (coming soon)
Romulan Star
Empire (coming soon)
Orion Colonies
Gorn Alliance
Future:
Future iterations of this program may include the ability to "mix and match" across government lines, adding in cost and availability factors, and including additional information gleaned and reverse engineered from other FASA resources on ST:TNG equipment and statistics.
If you have any ideas for enhancement or improvement or find this useful, please send me an e-mail at pedersonm@aol.com.
Matt Pederson