We’re launching a ship: USS Apollo-A returns

StarBase 118 Staff · September 24, 2018

Exciting news: We’re launching a ship this week to make room for an influx of new members!

In addition to two returning members, we had 13 applications from a viral post on Reddit about our community. These folks had, as a group, some of the best written applications I’ve ever seen so I hope that you’ll find their writing just as enjoyable as I did!

Huge props to our Academy Training officers who all showed up on deck when we put out an urgent call to help train all the new applicants. With 15 people in training we had three classes running at once – the most we’ve ever done.

We expect about 10 people to enter the fleet this week as a result. (Some of the new applicants dropped out, others are retraining this coming week to get a little more practice.) We hope that you’ll welcome all these new players with open arms, especially since many of them have never before played with a Star Trek PBEM and will need to meet new friends who can help them get comfortable with our grame.

Because of all these awesome new recruits, we’re launching a new ship under the command of Rear Admiral Renos, the USS Apollo-A. The Apollo is accepting 10 current members as transfers from across the fleet to make room on our established ships for new members.

But there’s a little something special about the Apollo: We’re experimenting with this ship’s sim pacing, to see if it helps us retain more members. The Executive and Captains Councils have been discussing for a long time now how we can help maintain our fleet size, and even expand, in this environment where it’s getting harder and harder to grab the attention of Star Trek fans for a text-based sim. One of the things we’ve discussed at length is the fact that some of our best simmers have to take leaves of absence because they’re overwhelmed by the number of sims they need to read each week. And so the Apollo will be trying out a plan to keep the number of sims on the list as manageable as possible for everyone.

Everyone will still be expected to sim the average of 12 times a month, or three times a week, just like on every other ship. But this ship’s staff is going to work on using smaller away teams, pushing crew members to post smaller (but well written!) sims, and use fewer tags on a daily basis to facilitate a plot progression that keeps the ship at a lower sim rate.

We’ll be working with RAdml. Renos closely to see how this ship operates over the next six months and determine if it’s a format we want to push to more ships. And we’ll report back to the fleet in Spring of 2019 with more information about how the experiment is going.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about what’s happening, please don’t hesitate to talk to your ship’s Commanding Officer, who has been deeply involved in helping us launch this new ship and is fully briefed on all the new players we have coming in.

Click here to join me in sending the Apollo crew into the unknown with some funny gifs in their ship forum!

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