Bravo Fleet
Happy New Years, Bravo Fleet! As in years past (2022 and 2020), I wanted to be transparent about what we have planned for the coming year. But first, I want to look at the goals we set out and accomplished in 2022!
What We’ve Accomplished
- Starbase Bravo RPG – this launched at the beginning of last year and has been a massive success. We’re also looking to build on what we’ve started here as a “pick-up” RPG.
- Two Campaigns – Stormbreaker and Blood Dilithium were both massively successful, and Campaigns continue to be a staple of Bravo Fleet writing. With each Campaign, we do more and more writing and more and more people get involved.
- Fleet Action – Sundered Wings took place over the early summer of 2022 and was, to date, our most active and successful Fleet Action. We continue to polish how we deliver those to members, and the things offered during them have increased in diversity. Feedback for Sundered Wings was excellent and will help us plan going forward.
- Bravo Fleet Map – the map was completely overhauled into the new format, which we think is much easier to navigate, and the interaction increases.
- A New Task Force – Task Force 47 was opened for business in April!
- Academy Updates – The BFC voted to update the Bravo Fleet Charter, which included splitting the Academy Commandant out into a separate Department Head role. David is currently holding this position, which he had already done de facto while in Operations and for the first part of his tenure as BFXO. The Character Creation Program was revised significantly, and a third program is now available, the Fiction Writing Program, which four members have now earned since it launched in the Fall!
- BFCO Term Renewal – I sought to and successfully renewed myself for another term as BFCO. Pain and suffering shall continue. Whose pain and suffering is still up for debate. 😛 (it is definitely my pain and suffering…)
These were all the goals laid out in the 2023 Roadmap, and I’m so excited to say that we met every single one of them! You may also recognize that we did a lot of other things throughout the year. All in all, I’d say 2022 was one of our most productive years to date. I think I speak for myself and the entire staff when I say that we love providing you all with a Star Trek club and playground where you can relax, enjoy yourselves, do a little writing, do a little gaming, and keep coming back to us! You guys rock, and you make it all worth it for us.
What We Expect for 2023
For 2023, I expect another year of refinement in many ways. We want to keep writing, we want to keep doing competitions, we want to keep gaming, and we want to keep building our community. A lot of our plans are based on Star Trek: Picard Season 3:
- The 2023 Fleet Action will not take place until S3 ends, and we’ve had time to digest and dissect, so at least a month. Therefore, we expect the Fleet Action to begin around the end of May or the beginning of June.
- This year we’re also only currently planning one Campaign, which is expected to take place in the Fall of 2023.
- The tech team continues to make improvements to our available starship articles (which are our most popular pages, based on analytics) and will generally not be adding anything new until S3 has ended so that we don’t have to then revise something that becomes contradicted. This includes content from Prodigy S1, which we will need time to reconcile with Picard.
Other goals relate to specific projects:
- The Academy’s fourth program on setting up and maintaining a command (the BFMS page, the wiki page, creating a plot arc, and things like that) is scheduled for launch in Q1 of 2023. The fifth and sixth programs will release later in the year, which will bring our fully-realized Academy core course online. We’d always planned on six, and as our systems matured we’ve now been able to make that happen.
- Starbase Bravo’s systems will be refined and revamped as the year unfolds as well.
Finally, the big one:
The only other main real goal for 2023, which almost certainly will spill into 2024, is BFMS related. The BFMS, this website that Emily has created, is nothing short of a modern miracle. In many ways, it does a lot of the things we need it to. In other ways, it is built on WordPress and has the functionality to do things WordPress wasn’t really designed to do in the least bit. There are also quite a few things we need BFMS to do that it can’t do on the current platform, which we need in order to expand into other offerings we have visions for on the horizon. In truth, BFMS was built the way it was built because that is essentially what we inherited, and that was what Emily built on top of. If we were doing it from scratch, it would not have been our first choice. We’ve already begun looking into new options for BFMS with a ground-up build in mind. It may be some time before there are any updates on this front, but I wanted to be fully transparent that this is one of, if not the, major goals for 2023.