BACKGROUND

Trekmania is basically my dedication to the Universe of Star Trek, but this is only the latest incarnation of the site, version 4.5. 'Trekmania' wasn't even my preferred name for the site, as it started off as only the provisional working title during the early days of compilation. But I never really put great importance on the title, as long as it was adequate, and as it came to be, 'Trekmania' just stuck.

Trekmania 1.0 started off very small. I began to put plans into motion in the summer of '99 to enter the mass foray of World Wide Web Star Trek sites. This was all drawn from material and articles that I'd put together for regular magazine fandom; material which I'd created and compiled over the last ten years. The fleet listings for instance go way back to when there were only a few known classes, such as Constitution, Miranda, Oberth and Excelsior. My favourite episode reviews also go back quite a way, but with the advent of new series and shows it's been constantly refined and modified. My first crack at building a website was very basic indeed, with using MS Word, whose HTML capability is very limited, so it didn't look that good at all. In many ways it was tacky as hell when I think back on it. I used a freebie host called '50Megs.com', and although they displayed ad banners on my pages they weren't too bad -supplying me with 50 free megabytes of web space with unlimited data transfer and 24hr FTP capability. They didn't though support frames, not many free hosts do, or any active components - not that Word can do anything special. But with Trekmania 2.0 and 2.5 I started to use a trial package called 'Dreamweaver'. As 2000 rolled on through the spring, I eventually went out and got FrontPage 98, before upgrading to FrontPage 2000 for the third incarnation of the site, and on discovering how much better it was I wanted to make use of its capabilities on a host that supported FrontPage server extensions and all the active components thereof. 3.0 didn't last long, just weeks, before I began to plan and design something entirely new, and Trekmania 4.0 was born with a whole new concept - and a domain. All this was going to cost, especially when considering monthly data transfer rates. But I definitely wanted my own domain, so a total cost of several hundred dollars a year was more than likely. I was willing and prepared though to pay the necessary tariffs to support a 'decent', multifunctional ad free site; my Star Trek contribution to the web.

Version 1.0	Version 1.5	Version 2.0	Version 3.0 (Arghh!)	Version 4.0

ME AND STAR TREK

My interest and fascination aimed towards this wonderful universe we'd all like to live in is never ending. But there have been times though when I've had the odd bout of disillusionment with the franchise. My first introduction to Star Trek was in about the late 70's watching it at home (in England) on the BBC. Being still pretty young at the time I had little idea of the show's fame and success, or of its magnitude, meaning, importance, or indeed the scope and dimension of the storytelling, or what it all meant and represented in an allegorical form. My main focus of interest was this heroic, fair headed Captain Kirk, and the strange scientific one with pointy ears. They all flew around in a odd looking spaceship encountering all kinds of adventure on other planets. Yes, this was wonderful to me. The other principal sci-fi show in England at that time was Dr Who, and although very different, they were both more interesting to me at this young impressionable age than anything else on TV. A little later, I became very much into Star Wars, and shows such as Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and The 6 Million Dollar Man, -did anyone else have one of those Bionic Man dolls with a bionic eye and arm as a kid?

The point is, at any young impressionable age, outward stimuli can invariably work into your mind and subconscious, and perhaps, if it's really strong end up defining many thought processes. This is what happened to me as I continued to grow up to adulthood through the eighties. I became not a Star Trek 'fan', but a die hard Trekkie (as it was then, 'Trekker' today though ;). I followed the re-runs right through, and bought the tapes and eagerly awaited each successive cinema release. Until though, one day in 1986 when reading through the newspaper, I read an article stating that the crew of the Enterprise were to be finally 'retired', and a brand new crew and ship would take over in an ambitious new Star Trek series. I was horrified, I wanted my original heroes to last forever, although visibly aging I thought they would go on forever. If only they had picked up again in the early 70's and continued to make Star Trek series' and films then, we wouldn't have had to make do with a measly 79 episodes and four films (up to that point).

I was in America not long after Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted. It was the summer of 1988 as I recall, and I made a point of watching an episode. In a way I was excited, because this was a new episodic installment from the Star Trek universe for the first time since 'Turnabout Intruder' in 1969. To this day, even though I've seen every TNG episode many times, I cannot recall which one it was I saw on that day in '88, it obviously didn't have a absorbing effect on me. I was skeptical of if it would be as popular as the original series, ie the idea that the new captain was old, bald and French -a far cry from the Kirk persona we were used to; and the fact that there was a damn Klingon on the bridge for God's sake, a dumb face-painted android called of all things 'Data', as if he was a walking encyclopedia. What the hell was this nonsense? I wanted Kirk, Spock, McCoy and co. to come back. All in all I was truly disenchanted with all things Star Trek at this time. But of course things changed after a while....

In early 1989, I was re-introduced to Star Trek: The Next Generation through a friend, who had a pal send him tapes from the States (for this was about a year before TNG hit terrestrial UK screens). At first I wasn't sure, but said I'd take a of couple tapes home to check them out. I remember neither had 'Encounter At Farpoint' on them, the pilot he didn't have, so I'd have to wait a while before seeing it, but most of what I saw were second season episodes, with a couple of first season ones as well. One of the first episodes I saw was 'Skin Of Evil', I thought 'great', this supposed major character (Yar) has been killed off in one of the first shows I've seen! And with that dumb talking oil slick and plastic rocks I didn't think production values had increased much since TOS some 20 years previously. I remembered amongst the others on the tapes was an episode called 'Time Squared' that had been mislabelled 'Time's Square', -from reading the label I didn't know what I was in store for! But I think it was that episode which made me sit up and say, "hey, this is good." And then, I was hooked. Within a year I had 'The Best Of Both Worlds' in my VCR, and the BBC had only recently bought the show and were screening the first season. This convenient arrangement of getting tapes from the States soon after US transmission went on right up to 'All Good Things'. As for more recently, I was happy watching Voyager as it came on our Cable network. And now Enterprise is here, and I have mixed feeling about it so far...

PROJECT: TREKMANIA

I would have called myself a Trek fan for more than twenty years, and a stalwart TOS fan as well, but I have to say the last ten years have been the most enthralling and exciting. And I still think back to reading that newspaper article in late '86, and being in a state of recoiling horror on realising my crew of the Enterprise were being 'replaced', and then I laugh to myself at how limited my vision had been.

For years now I've been an active member of fandom, subscribing to magazines, and small fan-made presses. I've written articles, attended meetings, cons and so forth, So, as I got heavily into computers over the years, and with the advent of the Internet, I thought the logical step was to build my own website. At that time I'd had no training or tuition, I just muddled through and built it up bit by bit, and in a way it created itself. Of course lots of blood, sweat and tears went into the core construction, but it was a labour of love, so the work factor wasn't really 'work' per se. But I still look at what's here and still think it's hopelessly inadequate, which is why I pledge to keep improving and modifying it. One aim I have in particular is to provide a more complete multimedia archive of Trek episodes, from 'The Cage' right through to today. As far as present downloadable items go, I already supply wavs of key dialogue, ship and episode picture archives and even MPEGs representing notable, exciting Trek moments. Further additions to these sections will be forthcoming with time. I've also implemented a CGI Artwork section dealing with my own starship design developments utilizing Lightwave 3D modelling software. These starship meshes are still in an early stage, but again with time they will improve, and the section will grow. A big increase in data for the site will require extended web space as the overall size of the site may well swell into the hundreds of MBs range, I'm sure. Luckily, for Mpegs I can use Yahoo as a kind of subweb for storage, so they won't compromise my agreement with my current host. With my webhosting package I'm limited to 1.5 MBs per file, so that rules out keeping any of my video capture clips on their servers. As far as the long term projections go for Trekmania we'll just see how things go...... Now that the fifth Star Trek incarnation 'Enterprise' has come into being, I'll be opening up new, relevant sections to deal with it. Like pretty much every other Trek site I suppose!

I think all of us have an individual vision of what Trek is, and what it means to us. This site is my vision, and yes there's some multimedia stuff here, such as icons and wavs etc, that just goes with the territory for this kind of site, but with Trek I've always been into ships, and my first love in Trek was the original Enterprise, so the main gist of this site is geared toward ships, and the fleet in general. But there are thoughtful and philosophical issues explored as well, such as the previously mentioned 'Best of Trek' where I disclose what is so great about what I believe to be the top 50 Trek episodes of all time. This goes a long way to describing why this television show is so special, and where in my opinion the highest apexes have been over the years. I've also worked on a 'Diplomatic Relations' section where all known canon material regarding the prominent alien races and powers are detailed -which includes some of my speculative suggestions to fill in gaps and certain grey areas. On top of that there's the 'Science Lab', with originally created pictures, and speculative writings, as there are significant informational blind spots and canon ambiguities in various areas of the Trek Universe. Where such blind spots exist, I've extrapolated, expanded and embellished, presenting my own opinions and visions.

I hope you enjoy surfing Trekmania, but if you have any comments, suggestions or even criticisms, mail me at my domain....

- Revised/amended 11th Sep 2002

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COPYRIGHT, SOURCES AND GENERAL INFORMATION

My site is a fan site, it is unofficial and is non-profit making. I have no sponsor, NOTHING in this site is geared to making me any kind of money whatsoever. Some of the pictures, icons, fonts, Gifs, and midi files have been downloaded from the internet. Other images, conceptual designs, Mpegs and audio (wav) files have been created by me. Various information, fleet data, and other existing canonized material has been taken from references found in: