Hello and welcome to another episode of Truth OR Myth Beta Canon, a Star Trek web series that dives into the history of any given topic using Beta Canon sources and my imagination to fill in the gaps. In today’s episode, we’re looking at Mr Scott’s Guide to The Enterprise, one of my favourite Beta Canon reference sources, to better understand its place in Star Trek History.
As always, because Mr Scott’s Guide is Beta Canon only, all information re-laid should pretty much be taken with a grain of stardust, and only considered a little bit of Star Trek Fun! And so, with all that out of the way, let’s begin.
The Constitution Class Refit, a beauty to behold. A lovingly updated design for the big screen, fandom would yearn to know more about this amazing class of starship, and Mr Scott’s Guide to the Enterprise would satisfy that craving and more…
A while back, I made a video on the Franz Joseph Starfleet Technical Manual, and you good “Tri-Naries” really seemed to enjoy that video, so I thought I’d branch out a little, and give you a taste of another one of my favourite manuals, Mr Scott’s Guide to The Enterprise, which in my younger days, I pre-ordered and eagerly awaited its release.
Published July 1, 1987, sitting at 128 pages in length and created by Shane Johnson, this in-depth guide to the starship occupied most of my imagination for a very long time.
Shane Johnson would eventually become Lora Johnson after undergoing a gender transition.
A “Trekkie” from the moment Star Trek: The Original Series made its resurgence in syndication; Johnson got her start in the Star Trek universe by creating fan fiction blueprints and schematics before she was hired on by Pocket Books.
In 2008, after being diagnosed with several life-threatening health issues, Johnson dropped out of the public eye, and very little has been heard from her since. But she would leave 4 Star Trek specific, works of brilliant art for fandom to drool over, the Starfleet Uniform Recognition Manual, The Worlds of the Federation, another favourite of mine, the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Journal and of course Mr Scott’s Guide To The Enterprise.
This guide had everything any fan could want. It was a deck by deck, thorough examination of the Enterprise which included everything from Room Blueprints to uniform diagrams, truly a marvel of fascinating details.
Though primarily published in English, released in the US, Canada and UK, there was one other international release, translated to Portuguese and released in Brazil. Though this Brazilian edition would radically change the cover of the manual and list it as an aid for Star Trek themed RPG games.
Johnson, like so many Trek lovers of the time, was a huge fan of Franz Joseph’s Star Trek Blueprints, the basis for the Star Fleet Technical Manual, whose contents Joseph had also drawn, and so Johnson approached Pocket Books in 1985 with a proposal to draft a similar set of blueprints based on the USS Enterprise as seen in the first 3 Star Trek movies.
Pocket Books declined her offer, but due to the success of the Joseph Starfleet Technical Manual, countered with an offer that she writes a similar manual instead and eventually, Mr Scott’s Guide to the Enterprise would be born.
Mr Scott’s Guide was published shortly after the release of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. And as a result, this manual would include a section on the newly commissioned Enterprise-A, receiving input from long-time Star Trek production staffers Andrew Probert (co-designer of the refit-Enterprise) and Michael Okuda, who served as a technical consultant on the book.
As I said, Fans were hungry for Star Trek Reference Materials, and as a result, we were all eagerly awaiting this manual release. So anticipated was this manual, that Pocket Books had to increase its initial run of the guide from 30,000 to 60,00 copies, just to cover all the advanced sales.
Of course, Mr Scott’s Guide To The Enterprise is Far from perfect. There is a lot of little details that have long since been proven incorrect or contradictory by Alpha Canon itself.
Take for example the Classes Name. In Canon, we know it to be the Constitution Class Refit, but in this guide, it’s referred to as the Enterprise Class, and being young at the time of the guide’s release, I was more than willing to accept that as fact.
Of course, decades later I now know better, but there are still those fans out there, that will fight to the death over the Classes name, not willing to accept the truth of the matter, for what it is.
Also, this manual refers to the origins of the Enterprise-A, declaring the USS Ti-Ho, Not The USS Tahoe, like some of my American channel fans thought the ships name was in one of my previous videos. The USS Ti-Ho was built from the ground up to evaluate another version of the trans-warp drive supposedly successful in the Excelsior Class.
Well, canon has proven that particular experiment in Transwarp by the Excelsior, to be a failure. As in TNG times, starships are still travelling around at Warp Speed, and ships like Voyager are still trying to create a Transwarp drive… And before anyone starts furiously typing in the comments section, that the reason the Transwarp experiment failed was because of Scotty’s sabotage of the Excelsior, I must inform you that you are incorrect.
In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, during the court-martial scene, The crew are charged with the sabotage of the USS Excelsior, which means Starfleet knew Scotty had sabotaged the ship. After all, they couldn’t charge our intrepid crew with the crime, if they didn’t know about it.
Besides if they knew about it, then they would have simply repaired the damage done by Mr Scott, and trial runs would continue.
But as if this discrepancy in Transwarp for the Enterprise-A wasn’t enough, Gene Roddenberry himself would throw a huge wrinkle into the Beta Canon Spacetime, causing an anomaly still felt today, as he would declare that it was the USS Yorktown that became the Enterprise-A, and not the Ti-Ho, and some fans will still argue that point to the death.
Even Transwarp itself would receive an incorrect description of how it worked. Using the TOS Episode “The Tholian Web” as its inspiration, functioning by shifting a vessel with Transwarp through spatial interphase into a parallel continuum in which the USS Defiant (NCC-1764) was lost.
The book even makes use of the FASA naming and dating scheme, placing the vessel’s refit in the early 23rd century, something we now know to be far from canon.
But even with all its discrepancies, it’s still a valuable guide on so many levels… With accurate layouts of virtually every set shown in the first 3 movies, Mr Scott’s Guide to the Enterprise is a treasure to behold.
As a teenager, id often get lost in those schematics, closing my eyes and able to picture where everything in every room was. I mean what Star Trek fan, doesn’t love those kinds of little details, and although my copy of the manual has certainly seen better days, it’s still actually holding up quite well, probably better than I am.
I’d just like to take a moment here to extend a huge thank you to Lora Johnson for her amazing work. And if by chance Lora, you ever come across this video, I want you to know how much you influenced me throughout my younger days, and how important your work truly was to me, thank you so much, and I wish you peace and long life…
So, if you ever have the chance to pick this little gem up, perhaps from a local used bookstore at a bargain-basement price, I highly recommend that you do so! It’s well worth its inclusion in any Star Trek Fan’s library, even if it’s just to browse through on occasion, and dream of the Final frontier onboard the Enterprise, Boldly going, where no imagination has gone before…
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Thanks again for watching, Live long and prosper…
