FederalSpace:Main Page

Introduction

Response to my scattered, disorganized notes on RPOpen was overwhelmingly favorable, to my great and pleasant surprise, so here may I present a more organized view of Federal Space, my alternate-universe Star Trek project. This is one of those personal pet projects that's perpetually under construction, so please make free use of that "Discussion" link up at the top of the page—new ideas and spins are always welcome, and just because I don't use 'em doesn't mean someone else can't. Enjoy. — Shadowjack

Overview

Federal Space is a decidedly non-canonical spin on the familiar Star Trek universe, refracted through a lens of harder science and more consistent worldbuilding. One-liner descriptions:

• Star Trek: Stand Alone Complex.
• Star Trek run using GURPS, as a TL10 Conservative Hard SF setting, rather than a TL12 Superscience Safe-Tech setting.
• Pacifist Star Fleet Battles.
• Star Trek with hats.

Why bother? Because Trek is a wonderful set-up for sci-fi gaming, and the general setting elements are familiar to most of us, but the way the setting has evolved makes it difficult to run "straight." In a TV show, the protagonists don't abuse the technology or society because of genre convention, but if you approach things from the perspective of a gamer or an SF fan, you need more internal consistency. Essentially, this setting jettisons the old technobabble and back-history, as well as the older tropes like single-biome, single-culture planets, and then takes the old names and visual elements as inspiration for a new setting that resembles Trek strongly, but runs differently under the hood.

It also gives me a chance to jettison some of the infuriating paroquialism that has crept into Trek over the years, and re-open possibilities of social commentary that Trek-as-written had closed off. My taste in escapism is not to have a setting where social problems no longer exist, but to have a story where they do exist, but people can successfully fix them—whilst, and at the same time, playing around with spaceships that go whooosh.

While this is a more serious take on the concepts, I've been careful to avoid making this GRIMDARK TREK (like the oft-seen meme of an authoritarian, Stalinist Federation, complete with Ministry of Truth putting out propaganda shows), and also to avoid losing the sense of playfulness. Damn it, I like the red shirts, and green-skinned alien babes, and all that silliness.

Table of Contents

For ease of reading and modification, I'm splitting things up. Here's the start of a table of contents, and I'll add more depth as we move along.

1. FederalSpace:Technology — The first thing anybody ever asks about. What can we do with those marvellous toys?
2. FederalSpace:Peoples — The second question: Who are these people and what makes them tick?
3. FederalSpace:PlotFodder — Ideas for storylines, characters, side worlds, etc.
4. FederalSpace:Images — I do a lot of visual thinking for this, so here are sketchbook scans, plus a few cleaner images, or inspiration from other sources.

Inspirations

Besides the awesome thread in RPOpen, my inspiration has included:

• All six Trek series and the movies I've seen (up to VIII), though particularly aspects of TOS and TAS, bits from TNG and DS9, and a bunch of Wrath of Khan.
• Forbidden Planet, which I consider to be one of the top three Trek movies, despite being made by different people before Trek ever aired.
• A bunch of 1950s through 1970s literary SF, most notably Ursula LeGuin's social SF (Left Hand of Darkness shows how complicated just a single world can be), and Keith Laumer's hilarious Retief stories. Also, trying to add much more recent hard SF, but I'm way behind on my reading list.
• Matt Howarth's Keif Llama comics, for wonderful weird aliens and troubles with interspecies bureaucracy.
• The Traveller RPGs, the Star Fleet Universe, and GURPS Transhuman Space.
• Lots of anime space opera, for those big serious space battles and cynical space politics, and a dash of the lighter stuff (like Dirty Pair) for that sense of a future you'd enjoy visiting.
• Masamune Shirow's manga Appleseed' for its arcologies, bioroids, and musings on the human quests for utopia via technology and social engineering. (Combined with gunbattles, and that hint of inter-phenotype dalliance.)
• Dashes and bits of other sci-fi, including Aliens (baseball caps) and Cowboy Bebop (multilingual signage) and the Lensman stories (the original mad starship engineers!) and A Miracle of Science ("Mars thinks you're cute!").
• And some of my uniform designs are cheerfully ripped from Star Wars, bringing two fandoms into head-on collision. Oh, and I always liked Brian Daley's ground-level take on that universe.

My future reading list includes the Trek-related works of John Ford and Diane Duane, neither of whom I have read, but both I am told have the knack of applying consistency and good writing to the Trek universe. (I've avoided even trying to read Trek novels after bad experiences with the Star Wars Expanded Universe… hopefully this'll go better.)