Starship Asterisk*

Thinking about it anew, I recall that about 10 years ago, I was surfing the web and lucked onto the web site of a person who claimed to be some officer position on some Star Trek universe virtual starship. Soon thereafter I mentally shrugged and surfed onto somewhere else. Perhaps I misunderstood. Still, perhaps the Starship Asterisk idea was influenced by this unconscience memory (that has now come to conscience).

Still, this brings up some new thoughts: Are there any other virtual spaceships currently operating out there in cyberspace? Perhaps a whole bunch of them still persist as part of the Star Trek franchise. A brief search turned up what seemed to be a web-based "first person shooter / captain" version of Star Trek, but nothing where a whole group of people were part of a single virtual starship. Does anyone know of any?

The Star Trek MMO just came out but I know everyone gets his or her own ship which I think is what you are talking about. I don't think the dynamics of a whole group of people on a single ship work out too well because most people don't make the time to play all at once, some play more than others, some get tired of it rather quickly and drop out completely, etc. And also everyone just wants to have his own ship. Just part of human nature? So you can see why it would be unlikely a game would be built around that idea, since the gameplay has to work and be fun in order to make money. I suppose there's always a way to make things like that work, though. Maybe it just hasn't been figured out. Actually if you could figure out a way to get that to work it could be some kind of holy grail of MMOs since no one's quite managed it yet as far as I know.

A quick google of "star trek RP forum" turns up a metric buttload of Star Trek-themed roleplaying forums, which are kind-of, sort-of the same idea.

Thanks. Very interesting.

Something could be done along these lines though. There is a RP site called Outspark??? that has meny RP games like Fiesta. In this game you take on a persona that travels around an environment batteling foes to gain experience points and talking to other players. Just transform the "World environment" into a "Star Ship environment" and have the RP carachters correlate to Ship Crew carachters. Different "Towns" in the Fiesta RPG area would correlate to different decks and rooms on the ship.

A hard-sf-themed RP forum could be rather interesting, I'd think.

I remember reading about a shuttle simulator that required a small lan; several different computers controlled various parts of a shuttle mission. You'd have some folks operating machines to represent Mission Control and others to actually fly the thing. A quick Google search hasn't found it.

But there's always Orbiter, which is a free space simulator. It reminds me a bit of Microsoft's Space Simulator from way back in the day, but a bit more updated. You can also expand it with the many user-mods that have been created.

Hahaha, Space Simulator. I loved that game. I also learned it's really boring if you set it to real time and wait to dock with a space station. I think they had some conceptual space stations along with maybe Mir? Yeah, I ran into them no matter how careful I was. But I was also 11 at the time so you gotta give me a little credit for trying.

geckzilla wrote:Hahaha, Space Simulator. I loved that game. I also learned it's really boring if you set it to real time and wait to dock with a space station. I think they had some conceptual space stations along with maybe Mir? Yeah, I ran into them no matter how careful I was. But I was also 11 at the time so you gotta give me a little credit for trying.

Yeah I remember the same thing, trying to synchronize my rotation just right, ala 2001 A Space Odyssey. Strauss in MIDI format didn't help the immersion very much.

Well I always hoped they'd keep working on the series, as they did with Flight Simulator. I imagine someone with the skills and drive (and time, and patience, ect) could use the engine from FS X to make a fantastic space simulator.