Star Crackers returns in 2014, this time to print, and so now it's time to go through the first series and see what works, as was done on sister series Distant Destinies. The new version features a tighter timeline and more astronomically accurate stars and planets, and unlike DD it will not take as long to change them, as there are not as many convoluted details to work over.
The series stars a crew aboard a 'police cruiser ship' called the Vanguard, since we will no longer use Pine Hill names for characters or ships. The space hero commander, Colonel Clark, his oddball adopted son, Azzilott, his insane pilot girlfriend, his new shrink Kimchi and the rest will take off with new adventures based on the first 'season' of the series and beyond.
Each season typically becomes a working novel, so what's left is enough room for a novel, and since there are 3 basic seasons of the first series, there are enough for the first novel.
It will be set now much farther off in the future, 2491, and the aliens will be at or near the level of the humans, and the whole mysterious advanced alien civilization thing from the film is still there, and those ones are still dead.
Basically this is Maelstrom's (a Star Cracker spin off developed in 1994), cousin, the long in planning story Jon Yeager never got around to, and is still working on 19 years later. The story is now closer to Maelstrom without the need to really know what that was. We've learned so much more about science and astronomy, but more importantly, storytelling, that much of the other stuff has diverged considerably.
We went off in another direction with conspiracies and space battles and spoofing Star Trek which really didn't need to be done, and was distracting, so this will get back to the original premise. This is getting back to the basics of the original story, the everyman crew in space without a clue, the whole young adults in space idea it was originally.
The later series, Missions, may be retconned or not happen. We will see. Missions would still end with Raxler and Clark on the Xurie's last world they colonized, but it would not be Raxler's planet because that's silly and there would not be an epic space battle.
The even later series, Prospectors, may happen completely different if it happens at all. With Prospectors stemming from the space battle story that never quite worked, the whole premise would be radically different if the war never took place.
So unlike DD we aren't necessarily even using the later stories unless it's for a reason. It could still happen though.
Jon even said Clark should never have become a general. Maybe Schmidt could have, but not Clark.
Also now that we know of past school fellow students Libby and Chris and they still exist, we cannot use their names as characters, nor can we use Rachel or some of the others, as they're around too.
So it should be very exciting. What we're doing now is charting the stars and seeing where it is all fit together and so far it is amazing. The story will be Star Crackers the way it was intended to be, not merely a few drafts shy of a fan fiction. It's going to be awesome.
And yes, our online movie is still up and it's fun too.
And Raxler should not have his own planet. That's nuts. Nobody would ever give him a city, much less a planet. Ha.
