Star Trek - The Final Frontier (Beta 1.0)

[rjord2021]

With the new Star Trek show arriving in 7 months, if the time era is what I think it is then races and planets introduced in that period will also be added to the mod as they would have existed in the Kirk era. These would be added to parts 1, 2 and 3 of the mod.

[rjord2021]

A lot of research is required to make sure I have every planet ever listed, mentioned or hinted at in Star Trek.

For example, I needed to add planets such as Gravesworld and Buckleys Planet into my map but where exactly were they?

Gravesworld was mentioned in the TNG episodes and Buckleys Planet was not mentioned at all but both planets were listed on a chart seen in the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

That chart is shown below with the only view of it from the movie seen in the top part of the picture and a subsequent picture I found shown in the lower part of the picture. The location of these planets in Klingon space near the prison planet Rura Penthe is highlighted on the right.

I have the hi definition chart stored on my computer and these worlds will be added to the map with others I have found on the chart.

[rjord2021]

A lot of progress has been made on the mod in the last 2 weeks.

Portraits of alien races are being created from scratch with images being designed for their appearance in both Distant Worlds Universe as well as with the various event cards.

Some imagining and research needs to go into some of these images.

For example the Tholians will be encountered on the planet Tholia which is a Y-class planet.

Y-Class planets are characterized by a toxic atmosphere, surface temperatures exceeding five hundred Kelvin and thermionic radiation discharges. They were sometimes nicknamed demon class planets due to their extremely inhospitable nature to most humanoid life. Tholian biology requires high temperatures around 480 Kelvin (207 °C, 404 °F). They can tolerate lower temperatures for a brief period of time; if they were exposed to temperatures around 380 Kelvin or less, their carapace would crack. In other words at lower temperatures they would freeze solid and shatter.

With the temperatures being over 500 Kelvin my thoughts are that Tholia is an extremely volcanic planet emitting a tonne of radiation.

Keeping this in mind I have the events of my mod considering this when your ship reaches Tholia. If you have the Tholians as one of the Empire races in the mod you will meet them at Tholia. Otherwise the Tholians will be encountered as inhabitants on their world and a storyline will be played out using the event cards.

Considering the inhospitable nature of Tholia if you take a landing party down to Tholia you will need to wear special suits which puts your landing party in increased danger if the suits should fail.

Below is an example of an image I created showing a Tholain ambassador on Tholia.

[rjord2021]

200,000 years ago, the Iconian Civilization was annihilated by an unknown race. The Iconians were thought to be extinct however this was not the case and a number of Iconians had escaped through their Iconian Gateway to the Gamma Quadrant.

200,000 years after fleeing to the Gamma Quadrant, it is the year 2263 and the first of millions of Iconians steps through the Vandros IV Gateway from the Gamma Quadrant.

The Iconians have returned to the Beta Quadrant to return home to Iconia.

The planet Iconia is in the Romulan Neutral Zone and soon the Iconians plan to destroy Romulus while causing the Tholians and some other races to become aggressive towards the Klingons and the Federation.

Below is an early image of what one of the Iconains look like on the planet Iconia..... some more photoshopping is required.

[rjord2021]

I have set myself a target of adding all 524 Star Trek races into the mod within the next 14 days.

For the next step of the mod I need Base pictures for each race to be added to the mod... at a later date the pictures will be modified as required.

The way this mod is planned any of these 524 races could form an Empire that you will have to deal with....on top of the races you selected at the beginning of the game.

524 possible Empires would mean you would have an almost infinite number of games played before you repeat the same game twice.

[Retreat1970]

If you didn't know, you can only have 50 ship sets. If you did know, nvm.

[rjord2021]

ORIGINAL: Retreat1970

If you didn't know, you can only have 50 ship sets. If you did know, nvm.

Thanks..... I have heard about it and will look more into it and work the mod around it.

As far as I know at the moment this is to do with the file fighters.txt

With all the races being added they are being added as independent alien life forms already on the planets.I have to do some testing on this but if these lesser known life forms need ships such as when they form an Empire then I am hoping they will use generic ships I will be building.

[rjord2021]

Today the first 27 independant alien life forms are being added to their respective planets in my Star Trek map and these will be used for testing before I add more in.

For example on Andoria I would have 2 different alien life forms.... the Andorians and the Aenar.

In tested the mod to make sure I was able to add two life forms on the one planet.
In my test shown below I added a Romulan and a Klingon colony on the planet Gamma Hyromi III

[rjord2021]

One change I am making to the mod is calling the systems by their proper names.

For example the Andorian system will be renamed to the Kay'va system which consists of the following planets

Kuy'va (Primary)
Kastra (Andoria I)
Kuy'Thela (Andoria II)
Andron (Andoria III)
Brok'va (Andoria IV)
Andoria (Andoria V)
Onlith (Andoria Va)
Kul'va (Andoria VI)
Kazaan (Andoria VII)

This means that when your map shows a system called Kay'va you are not going to immediately recognise it as being the Andorian Home System as you would if it was called the Andorian System.


Following that example, the Klingons will have their home system called K'thar.
The Romulans however will still keep their system known by the correct name as the Romulan system

[rjord2021]

Somewhere between the Mutara Nebula (as seen in the Wrath of Khan Movie) and Rigel is a system called Alpha Orionis.

The Betelgeusians are found on Betelgeuse II in this system and were referred to in the Original Motion Picture.

Details of this race were hard to find and while the Betelgeusians are on Betelgeuse II there is a major Orion population center on Betelgeuse XIII......assuming now that the Alpha Orionis system has at least 13 planets.

Below is the best image I can find of the Betelgeusians prior to my changing the TNG era uniform to one more suitable to the Kirk era.

[rjord2021]

When researching the races that will appear in this mod sometimes there is very little to work with. For example, the picture below shows the 3 Betelgeusian Ambassadors seen in the Motion Picture movie and not much to go on here. But it gives me an idea of the clothing to photoshop onto the image in the prior post.

Nornmally I would not spend too much time on little-known races however the Betelgeusians are an interesting race and I have put together a story with them and the Orions on Betelgeuse XIII .

[Twigster]

Holding out hope this is still coming along OK. [8D]

[Lecivius]

Me too. I come in here looking for news a few times a week [;)]

[rjord2021]

Sorry for lack of updates in the last 2 weeks.

A fair bit of work has been done on the mod in the last 2 weeks and am still concentrating on 3 areas of the mod:

1... Building character profiles and pictures of every race encountered in every episode of Star Trek except Voyager which was in the Delta Quadrant.

2. Refining the Galaxy Map with the correct number of planets , names and locations in the Alpha or Beta Quadrants

3... Creating story cards and events for the mod starting with every planet and system encountered by James Kirk in the TOS series upto and including all movies up to and including Movie VI.


Characters in the Animated Star Trek are also recreated in the mod however not in their animated form.

For example below is Lieutenant Shiboline M'Ress from the animated series.

Lieutenant Shiboline M'Ress was an interesting character as she was the Communications officer on the enterprise when Uhura was absent for 6 episodes of the animated series.

M'Ress is from the Caitian species and below is a picture I found of the Caitian species w3hich I have photoshopped further to add to the mod.

[rjord2021]

There is a lot of work going into this early stage of the mod.....

This work is vital for setting the building blocks for parts 1, 2 and 3 of this mod and is something which is tedious and require a lot of research and photoshopping.

The aim is to have an alpha version of part 1 out as soon as possible ....followed by the release version.

Soon after that part 2 will be out followed by part 3.


Then when Distant Worlds 2 is released all 3 parts will be upgraded to DW2.

[rjord2021]

With the mod I am looking at the whole Alternate timeline thing as every time you play distant worlds you are in fact creating an alternate timeline from the original series of Star Trek.

For example the character of Spock is known to be serving on the Federation ship Enterprise which assumes that Earth and Vulcan are allies.

I need to look at a situation where Earth and Vulcan may not be allies and where this places Spock.Should he still be a Federation character or a Vulcan one.

This is handled by the event cards and you get instructions on how to deal with Spock...but there are many other characters like this that I need to deal with in the same way as they should not be on Federation planets or ships if their species are at war with the Federation.

[rjord2021]

There were slight differences in how the Cardassians appeared in TNg and those seen in DS9 and I have photoshopped how they would likely appear in the TOS era.

The Cardassian system now has the following in the system

Cardassia I - class B
Cardassia II - class B
asteroid belt
Cardassia III - class M
Cardassia IV - class M - (Hutet)
Cardassia V - class M - (Cardassia Minor)
Cardassia VI - class M - (Cardassia Prime)
asteroid belt
Cardassia VII - class Q
Cardassia VIII - class I

[rjord2021]

Just a quick update on the project.....

I have gone through 123 species from A to E found in Star Trek and selected 74 of them...roughly discarding about 40% of them as not having enough information or any pictures about that specific race.

The next step is to add alien species from F through to Z ....there are roughly 264 species in this F to Z group.

Assuming the same 40% percent may be discarded I am looking at discarding 106 races and adding a further 158 species to the mod.

This would give a total of 232 species found on planets in my mod and any one of them can form an Empire if you have that option enabled.


These figures suggest that I am roughly 32% of the way through research, photoshopping and testing of the alien species you will 3encounter in the mod.

There will be more species added as I need to add in the species from the movies since 2009 and Star Trek Beyond coming out this month has 50 new species which may be eligible for this mod.

[rjord2021]

Some species did not make it into round one of selection for the mod.....however they could be added in a second round.

For example the species Bzzit Khaht is found on the planet Althos IV and was not added to the mod initially as their total screen time in any Star Trek episode or movie is roughly 1 second and only seen in the distance with very little detail.

However they are Federation members and should be seen in the mod some way and will more than likely be one of the many species encountered in the event RPG cards and not as a species in Distant Worlds that could form an Empire and be seen in ships etc.

Information has been extracted from them for the Galactic map recording that they are from Althos Iv in a system Nakagima 62B which I will need to find on the map and update accordingly.

[rjord2021]

Have completed alien species group with names F to H. Of this group 11 made it into my mod and 10 were discarded due to insufficient data.

I discarded 47% of the species due to no pictures of that race or no information on their home world.... so this means of the remaining 253 species I am looking at possibly as few as 119 more species will be added this round.

Added in the Horta from Janus VI and the Hupyrian race from Tau Coronae to finish off this group.