Star Trek: Star Fleet Technical Manual

by Franz Joseph

Book Overview

This is the one, the only, the complete Star Fleet Technical Manual with everything you'll ever want to know about day-to-day life on the Enterprise. With architectural designs of the Enterprise,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345340744
• ISBN13: 9780345340740
• Release Date: July 1986
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.4" x 10.8"

Customer Reviews

Fun book but Roddenberry didn't think so

I have the original hardcover of this book and loved it when I got it. However, Roddenberry had a fit when he saw the single and triple warp nacelle starships in it. He said there would never be a starship with 3 nacelles. He intended there to be an even number of engines. That is why when he was still alive you never saw odd numbered engined starships in Star Trek. You saw the regular 2 engine ships and Picards 4 engine Stargazer.

The beginnings of another Star Fleet Universe...

This book, one I remember from my younger days, when TNG was in its prime and TOS was considered rather dated (well, at least in the small part of Ireland I was in) is a very important one, not just for the effect it had on Trek fans when it was first published, or for the differences between it and the post-movie era Paramount Trek universe, but also for the universe of game systems it helped inspire and (for the Federation) provide a reference point: the Star Fleet Universe series of games from Amarillo Design Bureau. Ships such as the Saladin or Federation class ships, which never saw the light of day on a movie or TV screen, were brought to life on tabletops in Europe and North America, where they found entire fleets of alien races to match up against. The map of the Trusteeship territories and the borders of the Romulan and Klingon empires evolved into the strategic map in Federation and Empire, where one can control an entire star empire or even alliance of empires through peace and war. And over twenty years after the publishing of the Manual, elements from the games it helped produce found their way into the Starfleet Command series of PC games, bringing a whole new generation of gamers into the alternate - but equally legitimate - universe of Star Trek which may not have happened, or would at least have looked rather different, had the Manual not been published (though the SFC designs were from the movie era, the ship designs and campaigns owe far more to the SFU than the Paramount one). This Manual helped open the door to the Star Fleet Universe, and for this at least should be remembered. Gary

The stuff that dreams are made of....

I still remember the thrill I felt when I found this book while browsing in the college bookstore back in the 70's. It was just so darned cool! Prior to this there was little or nothing available on the open market from the series. That's why the fans created this book- it went from nothing to EVERYTHING. You started out with the actual Articles of Confederation, to organizational charts, to lists of vessels by class, to star charts, to technical drawings (lots and lots of technical drawings!) And it all looked so professional in it's black plastic simulated leather cover. It was a dream come true. You could browse through it for hours making up your own adventures in your head. Sure, the franchise didn't use the starship designs shown, but they could have- they were good. There were also some notable omissions (why no identification silhouettes for alien vessels.) Also why include that goofy little "ray gun" and omit the phaser rifle? But then they did include those extra pages in the back where you could sketch and write your own contributions. Overall, though, this manual was the stuff that dreams were made of. I still remember setting aside the physics or math home work to flip through this manual- only to hit the books again refreshed with a little more of a sense of mission and purpose. I still have mine, and I still pull it down off the shelf occasionally when I feel the need to dream a little....

The Stuff Dreams Were Made Of

I can just barely remember watching The Doomsday Machine on the television with my father in the late 1960s. When I became older, visions of Captain Kirk and the proud USS Enterprise filled my mind with adventure and derring-do. I wanted to know every detail about the program, and for a time, we had nothing but a few grainy photographs in books like The Making of Star Trek, The Trouble With Tribbles and The World of Star Trek. Of course, you could do as I did, buy TOS filmclips from Lincoln Enterprises and examine them under your junior high school science class microscopes!, but mostly there was precious little available to us.Then came The Star Fleet Technical Manual and all that changed instantly. Around the same time, Franz Josef designs mass-marketed their Enterprise Blueprints, causing Lincoln (now Star Trek) Enterprises to begin selling spirit-duplicated versions of the original Paramount set blueprints, too!What heady days! Back then, there were very few geeks as we know them today, and it was OK that every little detail did not match between the TV and the books. Hell, without video tape, let alone DVDs, who knew? Who cared?! Fans and their love of Star Trek were all that mattered and this book was the ne plus ultra, the Mother Lode of Trekker Trivia.I am proud to say my original, first edition print, with plastic slip cover, is beat to the bones with dog ears, spilled turpentine, saw-dust and pencil notes from all the hours spent in the garage making phasers, communicators and more from plywood, elbow grease and imagination.What glorious days! O to live them again!

A must-read for every Star Trek fan

Franz Joseph's STAR FLEET TECHNICAL MANUAL includes many design elements that might raise questions in fans' minds. Is the Enterprise's bridge really rotated 36 degrees off the ship's centerline? Does the Federation really have a starship with three warp nacelles? Is the Starfleet shuttlecraft really too small to allow its occupants to stand up and walk around?If you watch the original Star Trek series and take its sets, props, and miniatures literally, then the answer to all the above questions is no. On the other hand, if you take Star Trek's sets, props, and miniatures literally, then the Enterprise has no bathrooms, Sulu and Chekov gain tactical information about enemy ships based entirely on flashing console buttons, and the Enterprise's warp nacelles spontaneously feature either large, colorful, flickering forward domes, or small, unlit, red spiked forward domes.If you want a technical manual that is 100% faithful to the sets, props, and miniatures as seen in the original Star Trek television series, then the STAR FLEET TECHNICAL MANUAL is not for you. If, however, you want a book that takes the sets, props, and miniatures and extrapolates cohesive, realistic, and exciting technologies that enhance the believability of the Star Trek universe, then this is the book for you.The STAR FLEET TECHNICAL MANUAL did far more than fuel the imaginations of countless fans. It also served as the model from which all subsequent Star Trek technical material is based. Gene Roddenberry himself was very impressed with the book and its counterpart, a set of hand-drawn, deck-by-deck plans to the original starship Enterprise. Although Roddenberry would later denounce the canonical status of the STAR FLEET TECHNICAL MANUAL, the book's influence on the Star Trek universe is widespread.The very identity of the first two starships Enterprise is due in part to Franz Joseph's contributions. To my knowledge, it was Franz Joseph who first dubbed the Enterprise a Constitution-class starship, and that name made its way into indisputable Star Trek canon: witness Picard and Scotty's holodeck conversation in Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Relics."The "real" Star Trek universe does not exist on the television or movie screens, in novels, official magazines, technical manuals, comic books, T-shirts, posters, porcelain plates, or fuzzy toy Tribbles. The "real" Star Trek universe exists in the mind of each of its fans. The STAR FLEET TECHNICAL MANUAL helps bring that universe to a tangible and fascinating life.