This is the Federation Ship Recognition Manual (1985) for FASA’s Star Trek RPG. This series of books (there are two more, you’ll see them the rest of the week) is another example of how the FASA RPG leans into a militarism that isn’t really present in the TV series, but still makes a kind of sense. Star Fleet is a navy, a thing that is intrinsically militaristic. It makes sense in terms of verisimilitude that they would have military stuff like officers manuals and ship recognition guides. But the pulpy utopianism of the original series naturally downplays both verisimilitude and military tropes (and the latter becomes even more emphasized as the franchise expands) to the point that I find these books slightly jarring.

They’re super cool, though! I am a sucker for ship schematics. It is wild to me to see this number of Federation ship variants, though. 42 in all, with nearly all of them riffing in some way on the saucer-centric design of the Enterprise. I find most of them plausible (and there is some evidence that at least one went on to inform future film or TV ships – the Loknar class frigate clearly anticipates the flipped Enterprise NX-01 from the 2001 TV series).

Which brings me to one of the wildest things about this game and Star Trek in general, at least from this moment in history that is full of lore wikis and interconnected cinematic universes: in 1985, there was zero interest on Paramount’s part in maintaining any kind of consistent canon. This is partly because, despite the ongoing film series, appetite for more Trek content was strong. Strong enough that Paramount was content feed it with just about anything, so long as they got paid. As with West End’s Star Wars RPG, this put FASA in the position of both creating and compiling what amounted to the central collection of Star Trek lore at the time (it should be noted that a key difference was that Paramount didn’t care at all, while Lucasfilm actively encouraged and embraced the developing RPG canon).