With the launch of the STARFLEET International chapter version of Starship KAGA a mere few days away, we have some editorial decisions that make changes to the series after the pilot.
First off: the class has changed. SFI’s Advanced Starship Design Bureau has yet to certify the Parliament-class for service. I don’t quite understand why a ship that has been established for over two years isn’t kosher yet, but whatever. In order to get the chapter launched we’ve selected the Nova-class. This is something of a reversion to an earlier draft for us, as before the TNG+ era KAGA was a Parliament, she was briefly a Nova, although with a different registry. We are keeping the NCC-78120 registry, despite the class change, because it’s already on all our t-shirts.
As someone coming from a tabletop RPG background, with years of STAR TREK gaming experience, the Nova-class is a much better PC ship class. Larger ships provide too much of a resource to clever players (dozens of security officers, shuttles and multiple transporter rooms); a smaller ship tends to reign in munchkinism to a level more like what we see characters on the show do.
The Nova-class is cute, and very popular with the group. A Rocketpunk SPACE PATROL poll conducted in 2021 resulted in the class getting 71% of the vote. Also there are a plethora of resources available from a detailed technical readout on the class from ACTD, to at least two sets of deck by deck plans, and 3D renders of key locations from Falke2009.
While the original portrayal of the class indicated a science vessel of rather limited warp capability, later variants were portrayed as small capital ships functioning as light explorers. To reflect this KAGA will be a standard Nova-class hull (saucer and secondary hull), featuring the notched front end, and the larger impulse deck, combined with the warp nacelles and pylons from the uprated Rhode Island. This suggests a faster vessel that still maintains significant survey and research capabilities for long-range exploratory missions. In terms of the Star Trek Adventures RPG, she is a Nova-class spaceframe outfitted for pathfinder and reconnaissance operations and officially termed a “Light Explorer.”
With the details of the ship fleshed out we have one more bit of fun to talk about – the series theme. Luckily there are talented people making copyright-free music available on YouTube including this piece by Jeremusic70:
I especially like the implied warp jump in the music at about 0:40, 0:54 and 1:30.
Anyway, that’s where we are with world-building so far.