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Skyrim Modding Diary - 25 July 2022


gregaaz

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Well, it's Monday again. Temperatures are down a bit compared to last week, but its still unclear if we're getting rain. I certainly hope so... I'm ready for some cool breeze. Today's probably going to be a quick one. I have a bunch of low impact mods to install. I've also got a couple of JK interior mods that I want to integrate, but my it remains to be seen how much of that I'm going to actually get done. 

 

Today's Numbers

Spoiler

For our Trek ships lore, we're looking at 1754 and 1802. 

 

  • NCC-1754 is U.S.S. Kitty Hawk. This contract was originally planned as U.S.S. Jassan, and is referred to by that name in at least one licensed work. However, it appears that the ship was actually comissioned as Kitty Hawk. The FASA launch dates suggest she was one of the first Achernar class ships to enter service despite her hull number. It appears she launched in 2262 and probably commissioned some time in the following year. She received a refit in 2266 that was ostensibly for Connie mk IV specifications (which probably equate to what Guenther & Sophia would call a Tikopai class). In both cases, the dates seem to be off by a number of years. I think most likely this ship was "bumped up" to fill an urgent need and was built early as a late-model Bonhomme Richard in 2262, before refitting to Achernar specifications in '66. We don't know much about her adventures, but it appeared she conducted survey and exploration duties very much like other Class 1 starships. Kitty Hawk was reported destroyed in 2285. 
  • NCC-1754 is also U.S.S. Shangri-la. Officially, Kitty Hawk was to be replaced with an Enterprise class heavy cruiser, which as of 2286 was still under construction. The reality was somewhat more clandestine. As you may recall from our discussion of Starfleet tactical cruisers, there were plans for a 4th Kirov class ship. Like Defiant II, this would have been built by substantially refitting Kitty Hawk's engineering hull to an augmented version of the Balson configuration. When the heavy shuttlecarrier U.S.S. Ichkeul was destroyed by the Romulans in 2284, Starfleet lacked the immediate shipyard capacity to replace such a large ship. Instead, Kitty Hawk's Balson style engineering hull was converted into a tunnel deck carrier module capable of operating twelve Mk XIVB fleet defense shuttles. While Starfleet officially maintained the fiction that 1754 didn't exist, the re-christened Shangri-la conducted a number of perimeter security operations on both the Klingon and Romulan borders, leading to confusion amongst threat forces as to the ship's identity or even if she existed. We don't have any history on Shangri-la after this point, and it seems likely that she was retired from service some time in the early 2300s.
  • NCC-1802 was planned as U.S.S. K'hotan, but commissioned as U.S.S. Darwin. She was part of the Byrd/Tikopai class and entered service in the same general timeframe as Byrd (see the long-form article about Federation Survey Evolution). In 2280, she helped save a Federation starbase from attack by the Klingons; during this incident, she had been equipped with a pair of Mk XVIII combat shuttles, which assisted in the defense. Three years later, she successfully penetrated into Klingon territory to conduct charting and reconnaissance of the strategically situated region known as the Blackfoot Pass. We don't know more about her adventures or her eventual fate unfortunately.

 

Astute readers might note a slight difference in the dates for some of Kitty Hawk's milestones. This is because of a revision to the Spaceflight Chronology calculation formula. The core formula is still:

 

  • CE date = [(SFC Date-143)*1.09756] +/- [year adjustment]

 

However, fine tuning to fix the movie era time hole resulted in a revision of the adjustment curve to maintain symmetry. 

 

image.png.fe642a647d97d91855e08c5cc1aefddc.png

 

This should result in more accurate placement of SFC and FASA dates compared to newer sources. This still won't be perfect, in part because both of those sources contain certain intrinsic discontinuities that are the result of later retcons or clarifications. Not much to do about those other than manually compensate for them.

 

 

Housekeeping

Spoiler

First things first, we have some relatively easy mods to install - specifically, I'm talking about:

 

 

So most of these are pretty straightforward. The two that might be sticking points are the Shrubs mod and the Pregnancy Mod - for very different reasons.

 

The Shrubs mod depends on Happy Little Trees, which in turn might not play nice with some of my other mods like Aspens Ablaze. We need to carefully place both of these mods to preserve my other content and ensure it isn't dead-ending other mods. We'll put them right here, after EVT but before Aspens.

 

image.png.ad005d7df247a6bc544f0184db8e98ce.png

 

That gives us this overwrite profile:

 

image.png.cc7c29aea52c1511a529a2d7d273e018.png

 

So the specialized mods are winning their conflicts while SSE itself and "foundational" mods like EVT are getting overwritten. Now let's see how this all looks in xEdit.

 

image.png.56fbceff5f4e9f01513478d537a5f3fc.png

 

Oh, that's nice :/ However these are actually vanilla Skyrim errors getting forwarded as ITMs and my conflict resolution patches have already fixed this junk. The Shrubs mod also had over 5000 ITMs, which I had to remove, but otherwise these plugins were clean and all of them were already compacted and ESL flagged. Let's now look at them from the perspective of conflict resolution.

 

image.png.c5da0668bea28500f9a947e7ae190bcf.png

 

oh FFS. This is going to take a while to go through. And on further look at this, there are some potential structural issues that - while they aren't the kiss of death - will require a lot of careful analysis. We'll put the Happy Little Mods on the shelf for now. 

 

The other mod we need to look at is the DAR mod. It has support for Fertility Mod and for the tweaks patch, but it doesn't have native support for Fill Her Up. Fortunately, there's a DIY solution posted on the website. We need to go into the conditions file and replace the vanilla settings (top) with the revised settings below.

 

image.png.c9c4b06381d9c03368fd8dfb5003ed38.png

 

Fortunately, the conditions file is just a text file, so its easy enough to edit and save.

 

OK, that wasn't too bad. However, I'm running out of time today and as a result I'll have to defer the JK mods until next time. See you then!

 

 

 

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