Persei-Aries War Resumes
Star Trek has been ported into Darkstar
Over the last three days I’ve been working to pull the universe of Star Trek into the Darkstar tactical starship combat system.
The “data basis” for this effort was the FASA Star Trek Starship Tactical Simulator game of the 1980s. Although not officially “canon,” the writing, warships, and history presented in under this FASA license is still kept alive on many fan websites and has clearly influenced Star Trek development through the Enterprise series, Prelude to Axanar film, countless novels, the Star Trek Online game, Discovery series, and other parts of the Star Trek verse.
As a FASA game (the same company that developed classics like Battletech, Renegade Legions, Shadowrun, etc), STSTCS was beautiful, detailed, balanced, customizable, and encouraged players to design and modify their own starships. Through a meticulously-calculated, cross-referenced, and balanced point system, anything players would design in this system would automatically be “tournament legal” and playable in any STSTCS game.
This old game was also one of many inspirations for Darkstar back in 2012. So converting starships from STSTCS into Darkstar so warships from these two universes could interact in a formal Darkstar wargame has naturally been a long-time item on the Oriskany wish list.
Finally, it’s been done. Finding huge spreadsheets on these FASA fan sites, and applying some hard “Darkstar design-style” crunching, I’ve created a conversion system that will support a wide range of Star Trek factions, eras, and designs into Darkstar.
So far I have weapons and systems tables for Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian, and Gorn. Future expansions might include the Dominion and Orion pirates.
The tables will cover anything from the TOS era through the Dominion War. So from the Four Years War before the original series through the end of DS9 / Voyager will be able to be constructed and “reliably” portrayed in Darkstar.
A few things will be left “off the table” for the moment. At present I cannot recreate Romulan War / Archer era warships (22nd Century), nor many things from Star Trek Online (2409 – 25th Century).
I will not be handling transporters. They are a “broken” plot device, and would rarely be able to be used on a Darkstar table anyway when warships have shields up.
I will not be handling Saucer Separation capabilities. The vast majority of ships in the Star Trek universe cannot do this anyway.
I will not be handling uber-races like the Borg or Udeen (Species 8742).
Things I will be bringing in will be Romulan cloaking devices, DS-9/VOY-era quantum torpedoes, etc (yes, they’ll be very expensive). There will also be a rudimentary power allocation system that will allow players to prioritize propulsion, weapons, and shields during a battle (a ubiquitous staple of Star Trek stories and combat).
So far I have about 10 warships designed in the new system, from the Class II Pulsar class warp shuttles to the Marklin class destroyers made famous by Garth or Izar during the Four Years War, the classic Enterprise 1701 and Enterprise 1701-A refit, the Excelsior class “battlecruiser”, and the Galaxy-class flagships of the 24th Century Federation.
I have also prepared D-7 battlecruisers (M-class “K’tinga” variant – “Bringer of Destruction”) of the Klingon Empire.
The images below show a small sample of what is prepared so far.
Warship Record Sheet for the USS Essex (NCC-1719). This is sistership of the USS Enterprise after her refit we see in Star Trek the Motion Picture - Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (also, NCC-1701A from Star Trek IV-VI). It is one of the older Class XI Constitution class (Mark IV series) cruisers confirmed in FASA sources to undergo the "Enterprise Class" refit of the early 2270s. Note also the warship component layout has been redesigned to more closely resemble the layout of Star Trek ships. Again, those war nacelles make Star Trek ships far more fragile than Darkstar ships ... IF the Darkstar ship can shoot through the Star Trek ship's much better shielding).
Warship Record Sheet for a D-7 class battlecruiser, specifically the "M" series "K't'inga" (Bringer of Destruction). The captain is Kang, one of my favorite Klingon characters from "Day of the Dove" episode, Season 3 of the original series. In general, Star Trek ships are proving under-gunned and VERY thinly-armored compared to Darkstar ships (several examples from the movies and TV shows support this), but much more heavily shielded, much faster, and much more flexible in terms of their power allocation special abilities. I have added the ability to include additional armor in Star Trek ships. Note this K't'inga class carries an extra belt of armor over her engineering section and impulse engines (stern section).
The design tables for the Enterprise refit Constitution class. The base categorization structure is drawn directly from the FASA source material, the universal Class I - Class XX hierarchy. Within that structure, however, there is TREMENDOUS latitude regarding the available power. Therefore, the point value calculation system is much less bracketed for Star Trek ships than native Darkstar ships, with cost being a simple function of a base for class plus 1 point per 100 units of available power in the design process. 
The design tables for the Klingon K't'inga class. Systems like Shielding, impulse propulsion, and warp drive are far more efficient in the Star Trek 'verse (thus lower power draws reflected here). This allows a typical Star Trek ship to carry much better shielding and move much faster than a comparable-sized Darkstar analog. However, the Darkstar ship usually has much more powerful weapons, and thicker hull plating. The point of this project is to allow Star Trek ships to fight Darkstar ships ... or Star Trek ships to fight each other in the Darkstar system.
Very impressive, look forward to seeing some games played out.
Thanks very much, @gremlin. Like I was saying, I’m prepared to “support” literally hundreds of designs, perhaps over a thousand, from various FASA STSTCS fan sites, etc. At the MOMENT, however, I have Enterprise Refit and K-7M class ready to go … I may run a playtest game between these two ships as early as tonight … possibly Friday … depending on other commitments (Sitrep, etc).
Once I’m tentatively happy with how Star Trek ships behave against each other, I’ll “OPEN A WORMHOLE” between Star Trek and Darkstar and put ships from the two verses against each other.
Classic Star Trek was always a favorite of mine. How will the ships of Picard’s Era compare with Kirk’s?
Thanks, @pslemon – Some more Klingon ships are coming, as well as Romulans. I can’t wait to do the V-8 Bird of Prey … you know … the REAL one … not the “Klingon” Bird of Prey that wasn’t supposed to exist (screw up in the script re-writes of Star Trek III – but we’ve been stuck with it ever since).