In the last couple diaries, we've talked about the place certain numbers have in the Star Trek expanded universe. Today our mod counts line up with...

• NCC-1711 -- Originally authorized for U.S.S. Potemkin, a Constitution class first class heavy cruiser. As touched on in a previous entry, 1711 Potemkin was initially renamed Excalibur and later canceled entirely. 1711 is a rare Class 1 NCC that wasn't ultimately used, even during the NCC reassignment spree that happened around the time of the Enterprise refit and Constitution upgrade programs. Potemkin and Excalibur were ultimately both completed as ECPs on earlier authorizations - NCC-1657 and NCC-1664, respectively.
• NCC-1660 -- The original U.S.S. Buenos Aires was a Miranda type cruiser that had a number of adventures in the mid to late 2260s before finally being lost in 2268. She was an older design, possibly belonging to the Anton class or (assuming the 'cruiser' designation is literary license) its Class 1 cousin, the Surya class. We know this from her use of circumferential warp nacelles rather than the newer movie-style linear nacelles. However, both Surya and Anton class ships were authorized under contracts in the 1800-1900 series, so this is something of an anomaly. Some time later, Buenos Aires was rebuilt under the same NCC as a Chicago class "heavy" cruiser, which were actually uprated Kearsarge class light cruisers. Like Berlin, the SFB Ship Registry has no service details for Buenos Aires, so we don't know that incarnation's fate.
• NCC-491 -- Without drilling down into really deep non-canon sources, there's no information about this contract number. It may have never been used.
• NCC-551 -- This contract was authorized for construction of a Class 1 destroyer of the Saladin class (specifically, belonging to the Cochise subclass). The Saladin class was plagued with power system issues relating to its weapons systems, and many of its ships were either completed as or refitted into different configurations. 551 was initially authorized as U.S.S. Achilles, but underwent substantially redesigns prior to commissioning. By the time it launched, it had almost completely changed in design, Ship of Theseus style, with a completely redesigned saucer and an enlarged propulsion system sharing common parts with U.S.S. Wolverine and her two sister ships. How her name changed is unclear, but there are fragmentary records of an Enterprise class U.S.S. Achilles (unknown NCC) operating in the 2280s. It's likely that during her long development cycle, the name was reclaimed for this ship or a forebearer. NCC-551 launched as U.S.S. Two Moons. She was subsequently lost during an encounter with a cosmozoan. Four more Fast Destroyer conversions were planned, but all of them were cancelled because of recurring availability problems relating to the special propulsion components.

Before Sidequests of Skyrim, there two mods that provided sidequests outside of the framework of a new or existing faction. The Notice Board was the earlier of the two, and while it was a little rough around the edges it added some genuinely valuable functionality. Today we're going to install this mod and its successor/companion mod, Missives. 

For TNB we are going to grab four mods:

• TNB itself
• 4K Notice Board - though I installed the 2K version
• Notice Me, Sempai!
• TNB SMIM 3D Ropes Fix
• TNB Better Solstheim Quests (the author removed their mods from the Nexus but you can find this on AFKMods)

The first thing we want to look at are asset conflicts, and we can see that all the issues are internal. It's just the improved textures overwriting the ones that ship with the basic mod. As long as we keep the mods in this order on the left side, we don't need to do anything special with the assets. 

As far as the plugins go, we can see that two of them are uncompacted. We'll need to look at these in xEdit to find out if they really need to consume a full sized plugin slot. TNB is about 800 records and NMS is about 1200, so neither of them need to be full-sized. Both mods have SEQ files that we'll need to regenerate but otherwise they appear to be clear to compact. We'll start out by doing that.

Compacting for ESL with Novel Cells

Conflict Resolution

Visiting the Boards

Now that the Notice Board is installed, let's grab Missives. Specifically, we're going to grab the following files:

• Missives
• Missives CFTO Patch
• Replacer Boards for Missives

Like TNB, the only asset conflicts were internal asset replacements. However, Missives' main plugin is over 2048 records and so can't just be compressed willy-nilly. What we'll want to do long term, I suspect, is to split off some or all of the object references, but that can wait - especially since we'll probably want more OEM patches for this mod in the future. The good news is that I didn't find any problems during cleaning. As far as conflicts, we had a few worldspace edits in Raven Rock that I need to verify in-game. 

We also need to take another tour to look at the different boards to see what they look like and whether or not anything is intruding into their positions. 

We'll be visiting...

• Karthwasten
• Winterhold
• Dawnstar
• Dragon Bridge
• Morthal
• Riverwood
• Ivarstead
• Falkreath
• Kynesgrove
• Windhelm
• Riften
• Markarth
• Whiterun
• Solitude
• Raven Rock

I like how the list of areas isn't exactly the same as TNB. That's a nice touch that will add some diversity. Now let's see how everything looks in game.

In general everything is looking pretty good. Falkreath had a minor conflict with Prison Overhaul, which I'll fix in the CK. XPO is also the source of a conflict with Windhelm, that'll similarly need CK attention to fix.