Help:Designing Ships for your Background

From Star Trek: Gamma One

General Information

All characters on the game have been posted to a ship or station at some point. For some this is just during the cadet cruise, and for others it is during the cadet cruise and postings after the cruise. Selecting your posting gives you an opportunity to develop some flavour for your character.

If you look at Federation Starships you will find a list of ships which appeared in character or NPC backgrounds. Federation Installations contains the same information for bases and other installations. You can locate ships or bases with interesting roles, or locate other players and possibly work an IC connection into your background. If nothing interests you on those pages, you can can also look at Memory Alpha for ships and stations which appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

You can and, in some cases, should create your own vessel. When creating your own vessel please search our website and Memory Alpha to make sure that the name hasn't been used before. Also please see Federation Starship Classes and Memory Alpha's Federation starship classes for a list of classes. Select an appropriate class for your ship.

Whether you pick an existing ship or create a new ship and select a class, this can be used to help create your background. If the ship is a science vessel, then it will be exploring nebula or planets or other related missions. If it's an escort, then it will be protecting others ships or stations.

Selecting and Designing Ships for Your Background

1. Determine how many ships or stations your PC served on. If, for example, your PC is a Lieutenant JG then he would have served on three or four vessels. You decide that he served on one vessel for his cadet cruise, then served on a station while he was an Ensign. Just before the end of the Dominion War he is transfered to a ship, which is damaged heavily during the final battle and decommissioned as a result. He is assigned to a new posting and is there for the 2-3 years before being assigned to the USS Vanguard or USS Marathon. Now you know you have three ships and one station required for his BG.
2. You can use one ship or station which already exists from the wiki (or two if you have four or more postings in your background). So you look over the existing Federation Starships and Federation Installations and decide one on ship for your post-war posting.
3. At this point you will need to create the ship you served on for your cadet cruise, the station and the ship which was destroyed. Stations can either be selected from the Memory Alpha list or you can create something like Station ### or Starbase ### or so on. For the ship creation you will first want to select an appropriate class (for example, one which is either still being made, or isn't newer than the posting you're selecting it for -- IE, if the posting occurred in 2365 you can't select an Akira-class as it did not yet exist) and then select a name for the ship. Use the search feature on our website and on Memory Alpha to make sure that the name (and if you want to create it, the registry) do not already exist. If the search comes up blank, then you have located a valid name for your ship. Include both the ship name and class in your service record when mentioning your posting to that ship.