FASA Starfleet Intelligence Command Manual

Noteworthy for a couple of reasons:

1. My dual-view of Pavel Chekov, first as a line officer and then as an undercover agent.

2. The featured starship is a bladeship – my personal design.

3. I wrote a fair amount of written material that was incorporated into this book.

For most of the time I worked on the TREK series my “second life” was as the battalion S-2 (intelligence officer) for 1st Battalion, 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne) UTARNG. I was doing so much in the way of technical writing for that job that I kind of eased into writing a special operations command supplement for Starfleet. Known as ‘SPOOX” they were an SAS/SF/GS7 amalgam with their own dedicated ship designs…like the bladeship.

Bladeships were packed full of sensors and receivers for use in reconnaissance and surveillance. It had some weaponry, but it was meant to fight running away (it had two torpedo tubes firing aft but only one firing forward). It was the fastest ship in the ST:RPG universe but couldn’t take a whole lot of damage and had sleath-shields that were the closest thing Starfleet had to a cloaking device…in other words a combined AC-130, submarine and “black helicopter”.

“SPOOX” was another casualty of the demilitarization that The Great Bird was stressing in the late 1980s – but it was just as well because I ended up butting heads with editors over what they wanted (Rambo) vs. what I wanted ( Tom Clancy). The bladeship and a lot of the equipment were folded into the rest of the Intelligence manual material.