#technical manual

It used to be my grandpas!

I scanned my old copy of the GW technical manual and put it on ye olde Archive dot org. This is an interesting time capsule! It came out a year before Endless Waltz and Episode Zero, so some of the information doesn't match up with those later installations. Some of the English spellings hadn't been standardized yet (see: "Cinq" sometimes being used instead of "Sanc"), and the character descriptions are all over the map. This manual also features some world building details about After Colony that I have never seen anywhere else-- either because we simply didn't get that many English translations of GW ancillary material to compare them to, or because they were made up specifically for this manual and aren't corroborated in later publications (...and sometimes because they're just straight up translation errors or typos). I love this, because it was branded as the ultimate fan guide to Gundam Wing canon (we didn't have fan wikis back then), and a bunch of the facts listed are strictly [Source Needed]. Also, the splash artwork by Hideo Okamoto is incredible and it's a crying shame they were printed so poorly.

(Scans from: @CharaSoon_ken )

Janky translation and dubious canon compliance aside, I find the history of events and nerd lore here to be really intriguing, even when it sometimes clashes with other sources; like the idea that Gundanium takes so long to refine and produce that the Gundams were in development before any of the pilots were born-- a very cool and grounding concept that would make a lot of sense! If only they'd used it in the series! Under the cut: the timeline cutout from pg 60-61 so you don't have to tilt your head 90º to read it:

Coming soon, Jett Reno's Guide to the U.S.S. Athena.

Looks amazing, and amazed we finally have a spiritual successor to Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise!

Concept designs for the Nova-class starship. Note bottom left design features a “variable-geometry warp nacelle pylon”, something that would be incorporate in Star Trek: Voyager. Design talk for each ship below the cut:

Once Star Trek: The Next Generation became a hit, it was interesting to note how the material available to the fandom changed.  For the period between the end of The Original Series and TNG, most of what was available was fan-produced.  

Then Paramount and the staff from the show started producing “official” works like the technical manual above.  These were considered canon, and they were very welcome because a lot of the fan-produced stuff, while extremely fun, was contradictory.  But these “official” releases seemed to lack the earnestness and enthusiasm of the fan-produced works.

This is the Death Star Technical Companion, a meticulous examination of the Death Star in RPG terms, published in 1991. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: books like this are almost entirely useless in any practical sense for someone running a roleplaying game, but damn, I love them.

The DSTC is useless for one major reason: the Death Star is operational for a tiny amount of time covered in the original Star Wars movie and explodes at the end of it. There is not a lot of time to get your characters in and out of it, especially without the gigantic problem of encountering or otherwise messing up the events of the movie. Further: most West End Star Wars material takes place after A New Hope, so the designers likely never seriously intended this to be a much-used book.

Still, for you continuity brains out there, this is probably a dream come true. Whatever questions you might have about the logistics and operation of a planet-sized laser cannon, they are likely answered within, in pretty tedious detail.

Let’s be honest: this was likely designed as a moneymaker with the RPG elements really an afterthought required by the licensing agreement. This sort of book, in the form of Technical Manuals filled with plausible blueprints, had been feeding the appetites of Star Trek fans since 1975. Following suit for Star Wars was a no-brainer. In fact, Starlog would publish several volumes of technical journals dedicated to both Star Wars and Star Trek, starting in 1995. I have the collected Star Wars one – if you’d like to see it, let me know in the comments and I’ll dig it out.