USS Cheyenne Operations Manual & YouTube Video Discovery

Since I published my book about the fictional starship U.S.S. Cheyenne back in 1995, I've always tried to keep a eye out for anything relating to that ship. I'm still trying to figure out what happened to all those 16 years in between!

Over those years, someone will usually seek me out requesting if they can purchase a copy of my book from my reserve stock. Well, first off - I don't have a reserve stock to sell. I just have my own personal copy that's been marked up with needed corrections and one unmarked copy if I ever do manage to come up with the money to do another print run.

But with Print on Demand publishing now available for the past several years, I am getting the itch to get my book back into publication again. Question now becomes if I should just print off an exact copy or add to it.

Add to that, when I originally did that book, not a lot was known about the special effects model that was built for the Wolf 359 battle scene with the Borg. After the book came out, there were major differences between it and what I interpret from viewing the video tape of the show I made - over and over again. Gawd - remember video tape! Now we have screen capture and can burn to DVD disc whatever we want! The major differences from my drawing and what really was built was the pylons off the much shorter dorsal/ventral necks were straighter. No graceful curves.

The book was done with my Apple LCIII computer using Canvas 3.5 drawing software and the book layout was Adobe PageMaker version 5 or 6 if I remember correctly. Over the years, I was more or less able to keep pace and upgrade my systems until Apple switched over to the Intel chip. Now I work off of a laptop using Windows Vista-and I am not able to recover the majority of my artwork off my floppy discs and transfer them over to a CD for archive storage.

Now we have 3d cgi software programs that people are making their own fan base movies (re: Star Trek: Phase II anybody?). Anyway, its Sunday morning and I did a Google search for USS Cheyenne and discovered this YouTube video someone created. It is of the saucer separation maneuver for this class of vessel.

And for those of you who looked me up over the years asking about getting your own copy of the USS Cheyenne Operations Manual. First off, a big THANK YOU! Second, I hope with Print on Demand technology, a new, revised Manual can be produced. No promises for this year. But hopefully before the 20th Anniversary of its original printing a way can be found to put it back into print again.