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An official version of this ship is available in the Command Division sourcebook.
Welcome to Starship Sunday, presenting a new spaceframe for the Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game, filling in some gaps until official material can be released.
For the first month of the year we’re visiting the seven decade gap between the launching of the Enterprise-B and the the Enterprise-D occasionally known as the “Lost Era”. This week is the scientific Oberth-class.
First seen in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the Oberth was a small vessel used for scientific or scouting missions. The class was also likely the replacement for the larger Crossfield-class see in Star Trek: Discovery and serves a similar role to the modern Nova-class; Oberth ships can be used to tell similar stories in the Lost Era: investigating stellar and astronomical phenomena and delving into the mysteries of space. As a smaller ship, it serves as a more intimate setting, with fewer crew members to keep track or or rely on in place of the Player Characters, forcing the crew to reply on themselves and their own talents rather than an NPC specialist. It would also be a good ship for a first command for a game with a young, inexperienced crew that is slowly earning a larger vessel. A lesser role of the class was as a scout vessel, and an Oberth ship could be equipped for tactical missions against neighbouring powers, such as during the Federation-Cardassian War at the start of the 24th Century.
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I think you ought to give ditl.org a writing credit for these!
I don’t every recall having seen that site. But wandering over to their Oberth article, wow are there some similarities. Enough that I checked my browser history (I don’t see any sign).
I tend to limit my research to the canonical or semi-canonical sites of Memory Alpha and Memory Beta, looking at their articles and transcribing bullet points that I then mangle into sentences. (Even though I created these for personal use back in September, I don’t like copying other people’s words.) But the identical descriptions in the two articles give me pause. I imagine I googled “Oberth-class” while doing some couch research on my iPad and found their article, then tried to remember the details so I could write it down on my desktop, internalised the phrasing. I’d be impressed with my memory if not for the plagiarism. More impressively, I’ve revised each of these spaceframes a couple times since I originally made the PDFs, for publication here. And the copied text survived each edit. :/
Regardless, I don’t like copying out people’s works so I’ll have to revise again…
These things happen. I just recognised a lot of the facts as I’ve often used ditl for Starship reference/ideas myself!