The Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual 2.0
In 1975, Franz Joseph’s Technical Manual was the perfect companion to his Enterprise blueprints. While there are more accurate sources now, these were two of the best items to have during the time after The Original Series went off the air and before the movies began.
I’ve been working on an updated edition, and I wanted to share the work in progress as a way to get the word out there about it. It’d be nice to see this as an official licenced product in ebook or printed form, or both.
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Beautiful, clean work. Did you redraw everything, or was there autotracing of scans in this workflow? I’d also like to hear about your decision to replace the small-text face with more Eurostile.
Hi Moeskido –
Yes, it’s all redraw. Autotrace is great for hand-drawn stuff, but for technical drawing like this you get cleaner and smaller files by drawing manually (as I’m sure you know). And you can blow up the images for other purposes without producing glitchy artefacts.
As to the small text font: It appears to be hand-drawn Leroy drafting lettering which was common in 1975. From a design point of view it made sense to unite the type treatment into one family and thankfully Eurostile has a large number of styles and weights to make that work.
Thanks for your comments.
Very well done. Love what you’re doing. Very interested. Would love a copy when it’s made available.
The proper colour for Command is not old gold but pale ivy. If you look at the uniforms on a properly colour-balanced TV or a digitised still, the greenish hue is clearly visible.
Very nice work there.
Would love to get a copy of the finished product.
It would be really wonderful if you could have the book bound in the original style, with the black-vinyl-covered cardboard cover with the gold typeface and insert. It had such an authentic appearance.
This is a fantastic version.
Kudos
Very nice job. I like the additional pages you created for the uniform insignia. I also like that you did not created pages for other insignia, such as Captain Tracey’s insignia from The Omega Glory. We all now know that this was a production error by William Theiss and that all Star Fleet personnel wear the same arrow head style insignia. Keep up the great work. I look forward to seeing the remaining pages.
Ha. Well, I’m not perfect. It wasn’t until the last round of updates to this post that I became aware of Justman’s memo regarding the ship insignia. I have them all from a previous layout.
Ah. Well, those were very nicely done! I’m going to miss them! Ha ha. I used to love it when these emblems were “correctly” used, such as the episode “In a Mirror, Darkly” or the graphic novel “Debt of Honor.” It would bother me when they weren’t used, such as the opening scene of Star Trek (2009). Now, since the discovery of the memo, I feel the opposite, hoping they won’t be used. I must say, the finding of the Justman memo has brought me a great sense of relief. Are you going to add the Cage-era uniforms to your manual? I look forward to seeing the completion of this project. Thank you!
Yes, I plan to include all screen-shown uniforms in the updated book. Of course, the old uniforms, phasers, communicators, etc. will be indicated as having been superseded by the regular show items.
In a previous version of this post, I spoke of the challenges of this project ever being completed and published:
So I work on it here and there, but things look faint for this ever being completed right now. But you never know. Maybe someone in the Star Trek organisation will champion it and I can put it on the schedule. I have reams of reference to fill out the missing pieces from the original book, and I’m able to make things more screen accurate. Plus full colour throughout.
Sounds good. I have been trying to do the same (but I’m more of a photoshop cut and paste guy). I don’t have any art skills or knowledge of art software programs. I have dozens of tech manuals that I want to standardize into the original manual (I know – there are a lot of us with that idea!). My idea started with incorporating the Medical Manual and the six volume Federation Reference Series into the original manual. I have no skill in making things more screen accurate. But I would make minor corrections where possible. For example, I will never call the Cage era hand weapon a Laser. To me that was a one-off production “mistake” using science fiction jargon of the time. A laser couldn’t operate like that. It is clearly a phaser, and that is what I will call it. I even jokingly wrote a scene in my mind where a young cadet asks an officer why he overheard someone refer to a phaser as a laser and the officer replies that some of the crew call them lasers or ray-guns in reference to them looking like something out of an ancient TV show. Anyway, thanks for the update!
This is an amazing project! I bought a copy of the original Technical Manual when it first came out and it is still my go-to for design references. Thanks for taking this on. So glad I stumbled over this today.
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Spectacular work! Thank you!
Thanks, Mr. Sawyer. Appreciate you stopping by.
This is simply amazing! The Starfleet Technical Manual was one of the first Star Trek books I ever bought with my saved allowance when I was young, newly-minted Trekkie — thanks, mum, for introducing me to this wonderful universe — and it has been a go-to ever since I would very much love to purchase your revision once it’s available. I’ll definitely follow your progress in the meantime.
Keep up the amazing work!
Very nice job!
I bought my copy of the original when it was first published, and still have it. This is an excellent update.
Scott, I hardly need to add my compliments, and look forward to the SFTM 2.0‘s completion.
Regarding Justman’s memo, however…
Being likewise the proud owner of a dog-eared first edition SFTM (and several mint copies, one of which bears, mysteriously, a $7.95 cover price, though having identical publication info inside!), and having endured the “Roddenberry retcons” of the SFTM and animation (among other indignities – remember when fannish conventional wisdom was that Class F shuttlecraft were sublight?)…
…I put no stock in the Justman memo (is this cited in Inside ST? been a while since I’ve re-read that). In my view, logic dictates that the “highest” canon is what appears on screen. Mind you, I’m not a Thermian-level absolutist; such obvious (and understandable) errors as the planet killer’s swallowing a shuttlecraft whose apparent size rivals the Constellation are to be taken with a teaspoon of salt. BUT. Given that Decker as well as Tracy (and some guest cast in “Courtmartial,” IIRC) bore non-arrowhead ID – well, “I refute it thus.”
Suggestion: end your SFTM 2.0 with an appendix, introduced by “official documentation” regarding a portion of the 23rd c. download whose content was to some degree garbled, and cannot therefore be taken as 100% accurate. Thus, the 2.0 becomes “completist,” while allowing Justman-memo acolytes to dismiss the appendix as apocryphal.
Again, frakkin’ great work.
“In my view, logic dictates that the “highest” canon is what appears on screen.”
Then you should watch TOS carefully again, as the only time a crew from another Federation starship bore an insignia other than the delta was the three officers we saw in The Omega Glory. The memo is about this production error. There were no other errors prior to this episode, or after.
“BUT. Given that Decker as well as Tracy (and some guest cast in “Courtmartial,” IIRC) bore non-arrowhead ID – well, “I refute it thus.””
Decker’s insignia was not the insignia particular to the USS Constellation. Decker was a commodore and his insignia was to signify that he was a flag officer with a field command. Also, his insignia doesn’t have the department emblem command star that should be present if this was in fact the specific insignia for the Constellation. Fans have added the command star after the fact, but it was never there because it wasn’t supposed to be there. If we would have seen the rest of the Constellation’s crew they would have been wearing the Delta.
Commodore Wesley, in The Ultimate Computer wore the starbase duty insignia, like other commodores serving on starbases. He didn’t have Decker’s insignia because he only took temporary command of the Lexington for the purposes of the war games. We don’t get to see the other officers on the bridge, but they would be wearing the starship duty insignia (i.e. Delta). In fact, anyone serving on a starbase wore the flower emblem (Court Martial, The Ultimate Computer, The Menagerie, etc).
As for Court Martial, when Kirk enters the lounge with McCoy there are officers lined up at the bar giving Kirk grief. These are clearly not crew from the Enterprise, as no one under Kirk’s command would talk to Kirk in that manner. Furthermore, when Kirk walks in the lounge he says “Looks like my class is well represented here.” indicating that he hasn’t seen these men in a while. These officers are from another starship and they are wearing the Delta. On the other hand, Kirk’s ex and jag officer is wearing the same flower that Tracey and other commodore’s wore because she’s serving on a starbase.
There was the outpost duty insignia that we see in Arena and Balance of Terror. We also get to see this insignia in the Strange New Worlds season 1 finale, “A Quality of Mercy”.
In Charlie X, those men who dropped Charlie off on the Enterprise were merchant marines. Again, they didn’t have department emblems on their insignia. Because they didn’t graduate the academy they don’t have the honour of wearing the Delta.
If you watch TOS carefully it’s all very consistent, aside from the one production error with Tracey and his crew in The Omega Glory, which was addressed by the memo. The various insignias we see throughout the series are all based on the duty postings, not ships. So, if you really stand by your “the ‘highest canon’ is what we see on screen” statement then you should just accept the memo and toss out the fan theory that all ships had different insignias.
And to be honest, the fan story that Starfleet adopted the Delta as the universal insignia for Starfleet was pretty cheesy and made the Star Trek universe smaller and the characters far too much of god figures. Besides, in TMP we see the crew of Epsilon 9 sporting unique insignia for their posting, so it’s clear that Starfleet didn’t adopt the Delta universally at that point. The theory is kind of a mandela effect.
* slow clap *
Great work.
Are you still updating this? Would a crowdfund be something to help? I’m sure some of us would even be willing to buy the PDF version as a separate transaction after crowdfunding, we know this is a lot of work. Add me to your email list for updates on the progress.
Hi Mike –
As I said further up this thread, I’d need a licence from Paramount to legally distribute the book as a product, plus permissions/agreement from Karen Schnaubelt as her father’s heir.
I’m not holding my breath for either.
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– Scott
This is awesome work! Thank you for this! 🙂