Bravo Fleet & Star Trek: Picard

To all the members of Bravo Fleet, past and present:

In early 2020, we will be receiving the first new official canon in the late twenty-fourth century of the Prime universe in nearly twenty years with the debut of Star Trek: Picard. This is an exciting time for Bravo Fleet, and we intend to take full advantage of it. This is something that Bravo Fleet, and in fact the simming community at large, desperately needs. Bravo Fleet will be going in both feet first! We want to make this announcement now so that everyone can get ahead of the game and be properly and fully prepared!

Within a month of the end of the first season of Picard, we will be changing the default setting of Bravo Fleet’s fiction to 2399 to line up with Picard. Through the run of the series we will be proceeding at a 1:1 time scale, with one year passing in-universe for each that passes outside. This will allow us to keep pace with Picard in time.

This is a necessary step in the long-term security and survival of Bravo Fleet. With the exception of the Hobus storyline, Bravo Fleet has largely languished in its own fanon (“fan canon”), far removed from any source material, since Nemesis premiered in 2002. And while we are all some of the most creative people on the planet, we can only do so much with so little over almost two decades without feeling stale. Another large reason for this change is because we don’t want to have to continually and constantly have to retcon our own ongoing writing as Picard is airing. It’s much more conducive for us to move to 2399 and adjust our “history” according to Picard. Rather than Picard outright changing what we’re doing in its history.

What does this mean for you? It means that our primary canon support will be focused on the new 2399 setting. Most current fleet stories will be wrapped up or see major changes as we prepare for the time skip, and new stories to tell in the new setting will be discussed. Some stories will endure a decade into our timeline’s future. In the end, the specific year doesn’t affect most individual sims, but it does affect fleet storylines which, in turn, trickles down to the sim level. For your sims, we will offer as much time as you need to tie off your current storylines and make ready for the time skip. For those who do not want to move to the 2399 setting, there will be options as well. If the number of sims staying in the 2389 setting is small, they will be moved to a new Task Group in Task Force 99; if it is large, we will open a new Task Force for the “classic” Bravo Fleet setting. Fictions outside Task Forces 99 and 64 will need to advance to the new setting – a part of the point of fictions is to help tell the fleet’s stories, and that means they need to run inside the main setting of the fleet. All non-alternate (TF99) or historical (TF64) sims opened once the time jump is made will be 2399.

This will also serve as a soft reboot of sorts for Bravo Fleet. We have two decades of our own canon, and we do not know how much of that will be contradicted by what happens in the new show. We will, as always, be following screen canon first, so this will be an opportunity to bring our stories and those being told by the creators of Star Trek more closely into line. But it will serve as a fresh start for many people and will allow us to tie nice ribbons on other storylines.

At the same time as the time skip, we will be restructuring our Task Forces! The current structure, while straightforward, has led to situations where areas of operations and breadth of storytelling, especially in 72 and 93, are overwhelming. While each task force is simply divided into the four quadrants, 38 and 9 don’t encompass the entire quadrants they represent. Asking the staff of 72 and 93 to manage the canon and sheer potential number of sims in those task forces is not fair. Additionally, we’re looking for stability in our task forces, and burnout is not the way there. We will be adding multiple Task Forces to Bravo Fleet between now and around the time skip, each with a smaller, more focused area of operations. We’re hoping this will help sims focus on the stories they want to tell a lot better, allow task force staff to have more individualized attention on specific stories and areas of operations, and help build a more cohesive story overall between the sims in a task force.

COs – look for surveys to be hitting your inboxes in the next few days so that we can get a tally count for those wanting to stay in the 2389 era and those going with Bravo Fleet to 2399. We will also be releasing more information on future task forces as we finalize what that will look like.