What sort of station?

[Dan Stack]

There was an interesting thread I started here about what sort of ship people chose for their groups and why. I'm curious if any people here are running station-based games - I know I've seen AslanC and Styrofoam Man describe their stations. Anyone else?

If you are, where is the station located, what sort of station, etc.? Why'd you choose that?

[Dan Stack]

This time I'll start out by answering my own question. I've had a game on Bridgetown, set on the borders of the Kellinan Reach. (From the LUG DS9 Game)

For my own purposes, I made this roughly close to Bajoran and Cardassian Space. It was on the frontiers of the vast Kellinan Reach, an unexplored region of space.

The station was actually an ancient asteroid, settled and resettled, with thousands of architectures. It was a refuge for pirates and all sorts of other rough lifeforms. I was inspired by Frederick Pohl's Gateway novel for Bridgetown.

As a hook, I also had a primitve Iconian Gateway on Bridgetown, discovered in one of the first adventures. I may actually return to Bridgetown at some point - I rather enjoyed it, but I ran into the problem that I was injecting a little too much continuity from the Dominion War with not everyone intimately familiar with that.

[Owen E Oulton]

In many ways, my Star Trek: Relic game can be considered a station-based game. Although the PCs are the crew of a Danube class runabout (making it a ship-based campaign as well), the characters are members of the crew complement of Dyson Base - the runabouts are mobile adjuncts to the base. Of course, being inside the Dyson Sphere, it could also be considered a planet-based campaign, the Sphere having more in common with a planet (or rather, a whole bunch of planets) than a station...

Dyson Base (which got thoroughly trashed last session and will be rebuilt and expanded) is a small ground station, serving as the coordination and analysis centre for the exploration of the Dyson Sphere. It has a relatively small crew and is heavy on lab spaces. It has little in the way of recreational facilities- officially, anyway. In fact it is located on an island with a semitropical climate, several excellent beaches and kilometres of wooded areas. It is lightly armed, a decision Starfleet is now regreting after the loss of two runabouts and several crew members during an attack by forces unknown. Up until last session, it was also completely isolated aside from the monthly ship visit - now they can open the portals from the interior, which should dramatically change the dynamics of the game.

[Lt Cmdr Matt]

Starbase 001 was to be a base that my PC crew from the Eclipse. They were to find it abandoned and when their only way home disappears settle in for a few months until the wormhole reopened.


The actual station did not have a name and the crew nicknamed it Starbase 001 after Sector 001. They had a friendly race that hated the Romulans and were prepared to go to war with them. A few religious extremists closed the wormhole and destroyed the wormhole generator.

The series fizzled out for lack of players.

[Dan Gurden]

Deep Space 10.

Was initially the former Empok Nor, and was set in an alternate universe where elements of the Cardassian military were against the Dominion from the get go. Leading to Stafleet and Cardassian forces running the station as Deep Space 10 as the location of the Cardassian Government in Exile.

For a short while it was quite fun, but collapsed as it got too big and complicated too fast.

There was also 'Eden Project' a planetary colony under Starfleet Colonial Command, a game that never actually occured in the end... But was looking fine, from the Starfleet Security Precinct in the old town, to the archeological station on the mountains, the Starfleet Traffic Control orbiting satellite and the Starfleet landing zones at their planetary colony.

It was looking fun and a lot of thought went into it, but it was one of those concept games that never acually followed through.

[JALU3]

Oulton that sounds like a great idea. Lots of exploring, inclosed space environment . . . but what of challanges? I'd like to hear more.

Don . . . DS10. That sounded fun as well, but I can see how you said that it was getting big fast.

OK, what had my players do, way back when, was have them fly to the far end of CU and take possession of a outpost on a far flung Agricultural world after the DW, to help the new Democratic government mantain stability there. However, the School year was winding down, and I had to end it. So I sent them to a neighbooring Romulan Protectorate after they recieved some strangle communicas from that systems Cardassian government.

Well they ended up finding a Romulan plot that lead to the end of the series, and the loss of their XO. When they got back from that, the science team figured if they can slingshot back in time using their systems sun, they can go back and save their XO. Well . . . it backfired, and I ended it with them going 25 years into the future.

[Publius]

Anyone interested in the deckplans for a Regula style station?

I would not have mentioned it at this early stage, but this thread makes it apparent that many people might like to see some Stations. Three things: (1) the plans are not altogether done or anything and I'm having a problem finding the time to finish them. Anything I put out now will not have that finished polish I'd prefer myself. (2) The outside is canon, the inside is not. I have not hamonized these plans with the set-pieces of TWoK or anything. If you like, it is a later version (approximate TNG) of the station or something. (3) It is intended to be modular, so there are relatively large areas left blank in the present plans. Given time, I might be able to come up with some sort of "common" variant.

Since there is so much variation in the Regula sizes, with the last (Starbase 375 I think) being like something 70 times the size of its original use as the 'office complex', I opted for a 'do-able' scale and made it approximately the same size as it was seen in TWoK: Main section (mushroom dome down to the tanks, not counting antenna) ~82m height and 100m in width (the modules would make this about 200m in width), 123m height tanks underneath and a top antenna of something like 60m tall. It has about 184 beds/berths, some of which can accomodate more than one person (married housing or whatever) for a total possible 'crew' of 239. The decks are 4.5m tall, which make them plenty big to handle both generous ceiling heights and/or decent jefferies tubes. The Shuttle bay holds 20 size worth of shuttles on one side and it can take on larger craft on the other (about three danubes would be pushing it on the inside, but 2 with plenty of room).

If there is any interest I should be able to get a link up here in about a week.

[Lt Cmdr Matt]

I definitely am interested in the Regula deckplans!

[AslanC]

I too would be interested in seeing those

Are they based on the FASA ones?

[Publius]

Originally posted by AslanC
I too would be interested in seeing those

Are they based on the FASA ones?

Nope, like the Nova-class and the Java-class Cargo hauler these plans (but not the exteriors obviously) are all mine. I actually posted onto a separate thread to see if anyone who had a copy of those FASA plans might like to shed some light on the details (like the little spheres on top of the mushroom and that sort of thing), but I got no nibbles there so I did it all myself. From what I heard the FASA plans weren't all that great, but never having seen them, I don't know personally.

[Owen E Oulton]

I have the FASA plans. Quite simply, they suck. If you've been foloowing my comments on what makes for bad gaming deckplans over the past couple of years, these qualify in almost every category. They are poorly drawn, badly scaled and abysmally planned. They also claim that the actual profile we've seen as the Orbital Office Complex and Regula One are a defense outpost, and that the administrative and research stations look entirely different. Utter trash.

[Dan Gurden]

Originally posted by Owen E Oulton
They also claim that the actual profile we've seen as the Orbital Office Complex and Regula One are a defense outpost, and that the administrative and research stations look entirely different. Utter trash.

But Owen they are nothing alike. Anyone can see that the design is flipped by 180 degrees. I am sure in space it doesn't really matter, artificial gravity and all, but Kirk and Scotty were definatly not walking on the ceiling to get into the observation pod...

Up is down and Down is Up... I get confused at times...

[el queso]

My campaign - Star Trek Haven has had the cast described a couple of times by me, but I don't think I've covered the station itself. It's a bit of a stretch but...

Set during the Dominion War with the Federation/Klingon/Romulan alliance a Ktarian base has been 'purchased' by the Romulans and the Feds in the middle of their neutral zone. They co-own the station as a supply and repair base for their ships and as a sign of trust (even if they don't trust each other at all).
The base itself was originally owned by another race, it is made up of about seven five hundred metre high cubic platforms with incan designs covering them. Then there are false walls built on top of them and turbolifts connecting them. There is a landing pad a couple of miles away with tubes soon to be filled with lifts to connect it to the station. An atmospheric dome covers the station and keeps the rainforest on the bottom regulated. The rest of the planet is a desert with a few mines run by people on the station.
At the moment (episode 1.3) the station is a wreck. The Maquis used it at one point and trashed the place. The chief engineer has not stopped working for a month as the life support works and the lift from the temple district to operations, the rest works from time to time but too many parts are falling off.
All in all, a good laugh. The group have really gotten into it and the engineer's player who is a total trekkie loves rushing around with the LUG technobabble table and fixing things. At some point I might stat it up but there are a lot of strange elements to it.

Enjoy!
Charlie E/N

[toadkiller]

We're starting a side-game (PBEM) where a small fleet is taking a station "kit" out to a interesting cluster of stars. They'll begin building the station which will eventually become their base of operations.

[Ineti]

My group once tried a station-based TNG/DS9 era game. We called it "Outpost Euridia." The station was on a planet near the Romulan NZ and was in a little-explored sector of space. The station had three runabouts assigned to it, much like DS9. We created a lot of plot hooks in the planet itself--specific weather patterns, interesting indigenous species, and the like. The big hook of the series would be that there was a major Iconian artifact on the planet (that the Rommies would have been very interested in). My character was a xeno-archaeologist, so that would have worked nicely.

It lasted three episodes before we got tired of Trek and did something else. (We had just finished a three-year run doing a ship-based Trek game --we were burned out.)

I'd love to revisit the idea someday. We had a lot of cool stuff planned out.