Relevance of the Starship

[Valdivia]

Although all Star Trek series had a group of main characters, all of them had a protagonist that was not a crewmember. I do not mean a civilian, or some officer that was not technically part of the crew. I am not even talking about a live being. It was the ship. The Enterprise (several of them), Voyager, or even Deep Space 9 (or, if you want, the Defiant) were also protagonists of their own series, they also helped shape the stories that were told in them.

A similar phenomenon happens in our simming. He write about the stories our characters live, but our starships play an important role in those stories. Our characters learn to love their ships, or their stations, and make them part of the story. 

Right now, the fleet offers a great variety of starships, all of them different. The crew of the Darwin is embarked in launching a whole Task Force, and they are launching a medical ship with it (note: you can help name it!).

So it is natural to ask, how relevant is the starship in our story? And with that I mean, how does the choice of starship affect how our simming develops, what stories we play, what we do onboard. What does our choice of starship say about our simming?

This is a new post in our category Simming Questions. Here we will be asking questions about our community, our characters and our writing, and how you interact with it all.

 

Edited November 9, 2016 by Valdivia

[+ Hutch]

An interesting question.

I feel that the choice of ship is a very important one. Although it doesn't absolutely dictate the types of missions it certainly does influence them - a deep space explorer would be more likely to encounter new species for instance, while a Defiant-class is geared more towards combat than planetary science.

[Evan Delano]

In my mind, the ship is extremely important to the overall tone of the sim, and should be treated like another character in and of itself. For the people who live and serve on that ship, it's home, work, and pretty much every other aspect of their every day lives, often for years at a time. For me, it's absolutely critical that the ship be treated as more than just a backdrop for a sim, or a vehicle to take our characters from one planet to the next. All of us spend months and even years helping to develop and shape a ship into what it becomes, and that's why it's often painful to see a ship be decommissioned or destroyed. I understand the necessities of change, but I do hope that people recognize the loss or retirement of a ship can have as big an impact on a character as the loss or retirement of a close friend or family member.