The Nerfing of the Starship Enterprise: Part I

I downloaded and tried out the Star Trek Online MMORPG yesterday. This despite my hate for all things Next-Gen or later (it's set 30 years ahead of the last Next-Gen movie).

As I was playing it, I couldn't help but do some reverse-engineering on their Starship Combat system (which to my mind isn't very star trek like except for sights and sounds- but seems fun so far). And that started me thinking about the whole subject of what such combat in Star Trek was and has become. A subject that touches TV, Movies, computer games, war games and table-top rpgs.

Star Trek got around you see. It was in fact the first game design that I ever did, a ship to ship simulation that was used for a rpg campaign.

And it seems to me this may be an interesting subject for the blog. I'm not really sure what one can learn from it, but there might be something. So here we go, the start of a rambling series of posts that will cover far more on the subject than anyone would want.

When I design a game, I pick what I consider the core mechanic section and those parts of the source material that cover it. The idea is to make them match, i.e. simulation at its purest.

For a Star Trek style game, ship combat and modeling would be a major subsystem. So I began there.

The original show Enterprise was a marked departure from sci-fi ships before and after it. It was also interesting in its influences. Unlike most sc-fi (the Honor Harrington series is a good example) it didn't use just one historical influence, but a number of them.

It's length was picked to be about that of the supercarrier USS Enterprise. The number of the ships built of it's class was 13, and that's close to the number of carriers the US maintains in operation (I think it's currently 11, but it was 12 and even 13 some time back as I recall). I doubt those numbers were picked at random. The ship was to invoke the power and prestige of the modern supercarrier set in the 23rd century.

It wasn't a carrier however. Strategically and operationally it was more like an Age of Sail Frigate, say the USS Consitution. It's crew of 430 nearly matches that ship's crew of 450. Like those ships, it would 'sail' beyond an effective chain of command and due to the limits of subspace radio- could be weeks away from direct communication. Indeed, in some cases it could out-run long range subspace radio for that matter and arrive before the signal.

Thus its Captain was given vast decision making powers- including the decision to go to war.

Along that same line of thought, the ship itself was the power projection, not it's shuttles. Perhaps this was due to budget, or perhaps it was due to keeping the focus on the bridge crew. Whatever the reason the Enterprise herself projected the Federation's power- not a fleet of starfighters she carried.


That sets the background. As to details, in pure sc-fi terms the Enterprise had other marked differences from ships before and after that would need to be mechanically reflected. Let's define those in the following bullet points:

• She was a warp speed warship. That is the original Enterprise fought at faster than light speeds. Indeed, engagement at sublight was said by her engineer to be akin to "wallowing like a garbage scow against a warp-driven starship."

In contrast almost all other sci-fi ships used jump drives, i.e. you 'leaped' from point A to B without really crossing the space inbetween. Combat was restricted to only subspace speeds. This is true of Traveller ships, The Mote in God's Eye, Star Wars, etc. The list is nearly endless.

The Enterprise on the other hand actually crossed that space at a faster than light speed. She could scan things in it, attack in it and defend in it. And she was almost alone in the sci-fi world in this ability.

Recently a new series of books provide another ship capable of this although the A.S.S. (yes tht's correct, and the humans are less than amused at that but it wasn't their choice) Vorpal Blade can't run it's sensors or fire weapons at such speeds. Even so, it gains vast advantage against foes who only have jump drives in its battles.

• The Enterprise Deflector shields were impressive. In some ways they were the classic force field. They were however quite powerful, able to protect the ship (at least for a time) against weapons that carved up planets into bite sized bits.

One important point about them, is that they all but ignored incoming fire below a certain power level. In other words, just any hit didn't reduce them ("shields holding firm Captain"). Rather it required either an attack of enough power or of a special nature to reduce them. In this they worked much as WWII battleship belt armor did. It could ignore 5" shells forever, and only had to worry about much larger weapons.

• The Enterprise had two weapons systems- phasers and photon torpedos in a number of mounts. What's interesting however is that even when one 'diverted all power to the weapons'- only one of these mounts fired at a time. Further its weapons (both the phasers and the torpedos) worked at faster than light speeds.

In power levels they granted the ship the ability to destroy planets although to what degree was never stated. Perhaps it was just boiling off the surface instead of reducing it to rubble, but whatever the case they weren't cap guns.

Normally sc-fi ships are like WWII battleships, dozens of guns going off. The Enterprise was quite the contrast to this- able to put much of the ships power into a single weapons bank for a single vastly powerful attack.

• This last feature meant that the Enterprise fought off it's power plant ("Scotty, I need more power!"). Thus power allocation would seem key to any simulation. It would have to pick between max effort for shields, drive, or weapons- it couldn't do them all but could do a solid mix and divert that to individual subsystems.

• Warp Factors were a cubic times the speed of light (likely multipled by a constant afterwards). Thus Warp 1 was the speed of light, and Warp 8 was 512 times the speed of light. The ship had engagements at both sublight and hyperlight speeds. This would require an interesting approach in game mechanics to represent.

• Given that the Enterprise wanted to fight at Warp Speed (and considered it a serious disadvantage not to), it is clear that the system should reflect this.

• Warp Drive was a function of the drive and the power plant behind it. The Enterprise was the larget Starfleet ship, and it was the fastest. No smaller ships had the power needed to outrun it, and shuttle sized ships were sublight.

• The Shields covered at least 4 arcs, each were independent both in damage and in how they could be reinforced with more power.
  

All in all, it was very impressive even in Sc-Fi terms. Converting it to a gaming system would a challenge. Note that I can provide excellent support for all the above claims (but haven't to save room), although I must admit that consistency failed sometimes on the original show. The first time phasers fired on screen for example they used the special effects of the photon torpedos...

As this blog series continues we will look at early attempts to design Star Trek space combat systems, and how they ended up nerfing the ship along the way both in games and in the following TV/movies.

Part: II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, Conclusion