Engineering Department History

Welcome to the STF Engineering Department, or ED. The ED is the second oldest Department in STF, after the Personnel Department. Started in 1994, the ED was run under the administration of Mike Ballway for the first 2years of it's life. Since then, a large number of EDirs have come and gone, including STF notables such as Mike Cathcart, Randy McCullick, Owen Townes, and Colin Wyers. However, the purpose of the ED has been a constant in that time: to ensure all ships in STF have decent, usable specs. In it's time, the ED has taken over other small divisions and sections. One of which is the Dockmaster (originally a Proto-ED in 1992), and the Department of Registry. These departments were originally in charge of keeping a list of which ships had which design, and making sure that registries (NCC numbers) weren't redundantly (or inappropriately) used. As these are really technical issues, both duties have been "assimilated" into the ED. The Dockmasters office still exists, but is really only used as the webmaster for the ED. A relatively new issue the ED handles is that of new technologies. Originally, designers could put what they wanted into specs and the technology became official if passed. However, more and more we saw that on occasion such technologies spawned redundancies, or that a ship spec would be held up because of a piece of bad tech. Thus, the ED also approves new tech independantly of ship specs now.