The starting mod counts for Skyrim are 1766 and 1715. So we don't forget, let's do our customary lore dive on those.

• NCC-1766 was authorized as U.S.S. Kestrel. It's unclear if this ship was ever actually built, since many planned Achernar class ships were either cancelled or re-programmed to other classes. The Klingon Command Academy depicted Kestrel in a simulation, but that doesn't provide any real confirmation she was ever built. 
• NCC-1715 was U.S.S. Merrimac. FASA describes this ship as U.S.S. Challenger, and in a reversal of the normal pattern (since Merrimac is named in canon), I'm assuming that Challenger was the original planned name and Merrimac was her as-commissioned name. Ships of the Star Fleet indicates she commissioned in 2250, whereas FASA indicates about 2253. '53 would put the launch date at the very end of the Bon Homme Richard commissioning schedule, which might indicate that Merrimac ran into some kind of issue just after commissioning that sent her back to the yards. In any event, she launched as a BHR (roughly equivalent to a GCA). FASA indicates she refitted to Achernar class in about 2258, which is a bit early, so this probably means she got the phaser refit and maybe Achernar type engines at that time; there's some evidence she also received the rear phaser modification at this time. Refit to Enterprise in 2271, CX in 2292, scrapped in 2300. Beyond a brief mention in Star Trek II, we don't have any details about Merrimac's adventures, sadly.

We've got a few mods to look at today for Skyrim. Let's start by reviewing the simple ones, specifically:

• High Poly Dragonborn Ingredients
• Optimized Meshes for ENB Lights Rustic Rudy Silverware
• Legacy of the Dragonborn Skyrimified Enemies
• The Soul Cairn Parallax
• Snazzy Porn

Most of these mods are simple replacers, so we're going to mainly be worried about asset conflicts. Soul Cairn was no problem, only replacing its parent mod and a couple vanilla assets. The lighting mashup mod was a bit tricky for me, but only because I had to update a bunch of underlying mods to ensure compatibility. We've got three plugins we need to look at, also - the LOTD patch, the Optimized ENB Lighting mod that underlies the Rustic Rudy patch, and the latest version of Snazzy.

All three plugins were clean except for a couple of orphaned ITM records in Snazzy that I removed.

Snazzy did reveal a bunch of conflicts which I had to patch, but that's no big surprise - it just underscores the fact that this update added a bunch of new content.

With all these loaded up, let's take a quick tour to see them in the world.

Looks good!

Next up we've got JK's Sinderion's Field Laboratory. This one has been sitting in my "to be installed" pile for a while, so let's check it out today and see if its a good fix for us. The mod does have patches for Bury Sinderion and The Blackest Reach, both of which we'll install. The Blackest Reach, in turn, has a patch for Blackreach Railroad, which is also on my list of mods to install, so we'll give that one at least a cursory examination.

The JK mod doesn't have any asset conflicts, so let's take a look at it in xEdit. It's already compacted and ESL flagged, and its mostly clean - the only issue was corrupted navmesh edge links, which I had to repair using the xEdit script. 

Before we mess around with the railroad mod, let's confirm that Sinderion's lab isn't screwed up at all. Conflict resolution went pretty smoothly, with mostly just Lux and CACO conflicts to sort out, but no reason not to do our due diligence.

Very nice. I have been seeing a bit more light fighting than I'm pleased with, so its going to be time to run the Synthesis patcher again soon. However, first let's check out the quest mod.

Blackreach Railroad is an older quest mod that, as the name suggests, adds an abandoned Dwemer railroad to Blackreach and ultimately allows the player to use it as a travel method. The mod also has an unofficial Legacy of the Dragonborn patch as well as add-ons to connect  to several other mods. Today we're going to look at the main mod as well as its LOTD patch to see if they're suitable additions to my game world.

There was only a single asset conflict, which appeared to be benign, and only the main quest plugin is uncompacted (chances are, its too big to compact). 

As suspected, the main mod is indeed too large to compact. No big deal there. The entire mod stack was clean, and conflicts were limited to top-level cell data. That was actually very clean and free from annoyances. If I remember correctly, this mod - like a number of others I have - will need attention later to clean up its starting process (my end goal is to have no quests starting when I launch the game and to have no map markers prepopulating. I have a Synthesis patcher for the latter, but the former will need some work on my part).