What's new - Sep 2002

After re-reading my recent phaser article I have fixed a few nits. Most are typos or slight changes in emphasis - for instance in talking about phaser type numbers the article at one point suggested that phaser types are not related to type numbers, when it meant to say that phaser types are not related to power output.

Two more substantive changes, though - first, a gentleman with the tag Randers2 points out that "Best of Both Worlds" mentions EM frequencies in connection with phasers, so this has been included.

Secondly, in my discussion of "The Corbomite Maneuver", I wondered why Kirk used phasers at warp when photons would be more effective. In fact on re-reading, it's clear that the alien object was far too close to the Enterprise for Kirk to use a photon. So this is now fixed.

Another typo fix has been done to the Romulan Warp Drive article - at once point I calculate a ratio of Enterprise speed to Romulan speed of 1 : 17.59. The keen of eye will spot that this makes the Enterprise the slower of the two - the ratio should read 17.59 : 1, not vice versa.

A little bad maths has also been fixed in the Size of Starfleet article. I had mentioned that the seventy one numbered starbases plus the six non-numbered ones made seventy six bases in total. Gee, great going Graham, That's what we in my family call "having a brain-fart."

Two new images go up, one of the Constitution refit and one of the Excelsior refit. They are much superior to the old versions, though both still need a little touching up.

Doing the new size comparison image for the Constitution involved a fair bit of vidcapping from TMP, and in the process I noticed that I only had two images on the ship's entry. This seemed far too few for such an important ship, so I added three new images and a larger scan of one of the original two. I rescanned one of the Excelsior images and added a new image of the Enterprise-B leaving Spacedock.

Another two articles this week, one focusing on the Trill species and the life of the Dax symbiont in particular, and one discussing the issue of technology levels in Star Trek and why the species we see are so similar to one another on this front.

A while ago I modified the Klingon D7 to make it more of a match for the Constitution class. After a bit of prompting by Adam Broughton I've taken another look and changed the strengths of the D7s and Constitutions again. Adam points out that the Constitution was more than a match for any of the D7s it met, and the specs of both ships now reflect this. The early D7 seen in 2151 is now somewhat better than the NX class and the late one seen in TOS is not quite as good as the TOS Constitution; the K'T'Inga also compares slightly less favourably to the refitted Constitution. I've also changed the Romulan D7 to match. The strength calculator has been brought up to date with the new numbers, but as yet the fleets pages have not been fixed to represent any of the recent strength changes.

A viewer who included no name points out that the Prometheus entry omitted to mention that the ship had holoemitters throughout all decks, so I have included this.

The Valakians and the Menk from Enterprise : "Dear Doctor" have gone up on the alpha quadrant other species pages.

Thanks to a kind viewer I now have decent sizecomp pics of the Borg cube and sphere. I have no idea who it was that sent the image, because I lost all my email in the Win 2000 debacle. If you read this, mail me so that I can give you credit please.

We've added Noonien Soong to the people list. He gets the usual bio but no picture just yet. ArticlesA new article all about phasers has gone up.

A new article all about phasers has gone up.