USS Endeavour

Long before superterran.com — before the Tripod Windows XP site, before the first line of Visual Basic — there was a Star Trek sim I crewed: the USS Endeavour, at geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bay/1698.

A note on what this is not. My actual first website was a GeoCities page I built by hand in Netscape Communicator called "Doug’s LCARS Webpage" — and that one is still lost; the hunt for it is its own waypoint. The Endeavour is a different site: not my build, but the LCARS Star Trek fan-web my own first page grew out of, and the best thing the archaeology has actually recovered from that world. Worth its own exhibit on those terms.

The Endeavour was an Akira-class starship (NCC-31743) in a play-by-email Star Trek RPG — part of Bravo Fleet, Task Force 21. You didn’t read a sim like this so much as crew one: you filled out a character application, got assigned a post and a rank, and the story advanced by email between missions. I was one of the crew. This exhibit is what the Wayback Machine still holds of it.

The ship

The general-info page is exactly the kind of lovingly over-specified document a teenage Trekkie writes when nobody is stopping him:

NAME: USS ENDEAVOUR · REGISTRY: NCC-31743 · CLASS: AKIRA · TYPE: LIGHT BATTLE CRUISER · PURPOSE: EXPLORATION AND DEFENSE · DATE OF COMPLETION: STARDATE 9711.06 · CREW: 450 · COMPUTER: XJ75 BIONEURAL TETRALINEAR CIRCUITRY · MAXIMUM CRUISE VELOCITY: WARP 9.50

…right down to the shuttle inventory (“10 MARK IX SHUTTLEPODS, 4 WORKBEES… 1 STOAT VEHICLE {CLASSIFIED}”).

The crew

The pages render the roster in glorious black-on-blue, the way GeoCities Trek sites always did. Senior staff were marked with a little pulsing dot:

• Commanding Officer — Captain Timothy Scott Abrams
• Executive Officer — Commander Elaina Troyer
• Conn / Helmsman — Cadet Braxton Mariah
• Operations — Karn
• Chief Science Officer — Lt. James Kirk (yes, that name)
• Chief Security / Tactical & S.T.O.A.T. Officer — Lt. Kaldor, Son of Carath
• Chief Engineer — Lt. Cmdr. Miranda Sunstar
• Chief Medical Officer — Commander James Morely
• Counselor — Lt. Becca Careen
• Chief Shuttle / Runabout Pilot — Carl Lankerford

Every other post — Assistant Chief Engineer, Head Nurse, Emergency Medical Hologram, Bartender — was listed as “Available,” which is what a sim looks like when it’s recruiting harder than it’s flying.

The captain’s bio sets the tone. Abrams was written as half-Klingon, with the kind of backstory a fourteen-year-old thinks is deadly serious:

Born and raised on Earth, New Jersey, USA… In the last year or so, I have decided to learn more about my Klingon Heritage… The USS Endeavour is my first command.

The mission

The very first mission dates the whole thing. Bravo Fleet ran on Star Trek stardates, and the Endeavour’s shakedown cruise is logged at Stardate 9806 — June 1998:

Mission 1 — Shakedown. The USS Endeavour, with her new crew, heads off for a shakedown run and to patrol near the Krazzel Space border… Cpt Abrams has asked Lt Kaldor to try and acquire a Klingon Cloaking Device for the ship, since Bravofleet is out of them.

The LCARS part

By 2001 the same site had been recommissioned as the USS Wildcat and dressed in a proper LCARS frameset — the left-rail of glowing buttons (MAIN, BRIDGE, ENGINEERING, PERSONNEL, LIBRARY, JOIN) that is the thing I remembered building. The library page even spells the acronym out in full:

USS Wildcat Library Computer and Retrieval System. You have accessed the LCARS system.

Most of that 2001 chrome — the button graphics, the top bar, the main frame — didn’t survive the Wayback crawls; what endures is the older Endeavour layer underneath. The buttons are gone, but the Library Computer Access and Retrieval System lives up to its name: the record is still retrievable.

The Trekkie grew up

The sim wound down and the AOL address died, but the Trekkie didn’t. In August 2008 — about nine months before J.J. Abrams rebooted the franchise — a user called ".ST" turned up on The Official Star Trek Movie Forum and posted a small manifesto on how to save Star Trek. That was me, a decade past the Endeavour, making more or less the argument I’d have made from the helm:

You know, I would consider myself a Trekkie. I’ve seen every episode in the franchise several times… The Original Series is greatness incarnate.

If you want to Save Star Trek, Paramount needs to get their head around the fact that people don’t want to watch the same old characters on the same ol' crew, doing the same ol’ thing over and over again. It’s the flippin’ Star Trek Universe!

Screw Star Fleet… Surely there’s a detective on earth who solves crimes without the resources of a Star Ship. Somebody who hates Star Fleet for some reason or another, and drinks too much.

Deep Space Nine is the peak; leave Starfleet behind and go find the stranger stories — a take I aired years before Lower Decks and Picard went looking for exactly those. Recovered from a forum-notification email in the Gmail archive; the posts themselves are long gone.

Provenance

Recovered from web.archive.org and preserved in the museum archive. The server was run by someone else; the play-by-email format means real members posted under character names, so which of these officers was me isn’t written down anywhere on the surviving pages — but the crew was unmistakable the moment I saw it. So this one’s an honorable mention, not a portfolio piece — not a site I built, but the LCARS Star Trek fan-web that my own first websites grew out of.