Spoilers galore await the careless reader.

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A couple of major issues in the first six books first.

1) Colonization.

So this is how it could look like in the Trek universe. 60,000 people in 70+ ships, with livestock barges, industrial drones, huge dormitory ships, even a morgue ship and an organ bank. The end result is something different from the two-penny colonies we usually see, with a bunch of farmers in a single village. Pros and cons of this approach?

2) Olivium.

The mcguffin behind the books is an exotic "transperiodic", "transuniversal" element that, if handled right/wrong, releases more power than antimatter. Can the regular Trek universe survive the introduction of this stuff in the 2270s, or does Carey eventually have to write it out of the picture?

3) Gamma Night.

McGuffin #2, the radiation surges from a ballet of a neutron star around a black hole obscure all sensors for ten hours out of thirty. The physics seem sound, especially in book #4, written by the Oltions who earlier gave us warp-speed space whales and spinning-up of a tidally locked planet. Can we invent any other natural phenomena that would present similar plot possibilities? Trek meets hard scifi, and the two actually like each other.

4) Challenger.

The gadawful ship from the cover of book #6 might not be that gadawful after all. The cover doesn't do her justice - she's far uglier, and apparently has no Constitution parts at all. She began her life as the light cruiser Peleliu, with 80 crew - a ship unlikely to bear much resemblance to Constitutions. Incidentally, Carey also gives us Starfleet "cutters", also with 80 crew, and calls the Challenger a "composite frigate". Book #6 almost makes me buy the concept of building a starship (well, not really a starship in Carey terminology) in two weeks.

Then there are a billion small technical details that might be of interest. Book #6 is a surprise - Carey abandons her FASA roots and goes straight to the Sternbach-Okudaic faith, with technobabble 101% compatible with the TNG TM.

The various disasters, natural and other, that befall the colony also deserve some scrutiny. Are they plausible? Do they have implications?

Unlike some earlier Carey books, these feature likeable and complex aliens whose cultures also enrich the Trek universe. Any speculation on how they could be used in future "Challenger" books? These books certainly have potential of an useen kind. The Challenger is tied to a single location and a single mission pretty much like DS9 was, and the books probably will stay true to this initial premise more than DS9 did.

Timo Saloniemi

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Proxima Centauri or Bust
[email protected]

Anyway I just bought the entire Frontier series and now there is another one? I hate it when that happens...

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Predict the unpredictable, but how do you unpredict the unpredictable?

The Challenger schematic will be difficult to make, because none of the component ships used is a canonical or previously established design. Here are the specifics, anyway:

-Primary hull out of a Chesapeake class cruiser that only had a crew of eighty (and remember that Carey uses "cruiser" in the sense of "smaller than starship") - so it can't be anywhere as big as a Constitution saucer. It seems to be a saucer nevertheless, apparently with at least five decks. On the cruiser, access from bridge to sickbay was cut when decks 4-5 were compromised.
-Nacelles out of a Starfleet tender ship - not necessarily the usual LN-64 type.
-Warp engines inside the nacelles out of a Conestoga class dormitory ship - each huge Conestoga was equipped with two modular "mule" impulse/warp engines (capable of only warp 2, if we believe the first book), and apparently these could be taken off their housings and packed into the tender nacelles (where they can do at least warp 6).
-"Fanlike" pylons from a non-Starfleet ship, mounting the nacelles to the sides of the secondary hull
-Secondary hull probably from the cruiser, too, but both hulls feature added armor and plating from other vessels, in asymmetric patterns. Main powerplant or "dynadrive" from an alien ship, a Blood Plume.
-Some sort of very short neck between the hulls.
-An odd "top hat" of sensors atop the saucer.

The thing is capable of planetary landing (or at least takeoff), has decks 1-11 but no deck 7, and features in the secondary hull a shuttle hangar and a sickbay (whose location is in a bit of flux, though). And in the best of Starfleet traditions, there are no heads in the entire secondary hull. Crew requirements are estimated at 50-60.

The thing was dubbed a "composite frigate" (Scotty says a frigate is a compact multipurpose combatant, as opposed to bigger cruisers and specialized ships like destroyers, and I'm cool with that), isn't officially Starfleet yet (the crew is a conglomerate of mutineers and aliens), and is named "Challenger", no USS. The registry was something like NOV-91951-L, which is supposed to honor the shuttle Challenger - 51-L was the mission she was lost in, and 919 is how the characters (and possibly Carey) misremember the "registry" of OV-099.

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"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
- George Bernard Shaw

As for book prices... I think over here it's �5.99 a book, which works out at, uh... about US$9.50 a book. Jeez... bring on the e-book revolution!

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"Replicate some marmalade, Commander - helm control is toast!"