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A Ship By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet

by Paddy Tye, 1E Creative Manager

17th January 2025

Erik Pressman Nella Daren

Changing a name isn't uncommon, even in Decipher's era. After all, 1995's Beta Edition of Premiere changed "Lwaxanna Troi" to "Lwaxana Troi", and Premiere Remastered makes many similar corrections. Clearly all the "I.K.C." Klingon ships changing to "I.K.S." has been an ongoing process over the last decade or so!

Some name changes are for general clean-up and consistency - like changing all the dashes to colons, or simplifying "Rogue Borg Mercenaries" to just "Rogue Borg" - the majority of cards already used this abbreviated name anyway! This further reduces the need for clarifying entries in the glossary!

But sometimes Decipher just got it wrong. Erik Pressman for example. They got his name (Eric not Erik) and his rank (Captain not Admiral) incorrect in Premiere. The addition of his ship, the U.S.S. Pegasus, in All Good Things did try to get his name right correct, but Premiere Remastered allows us to once and for all clean up this confusion! Credit to Decipher though for managing to include a "Lost" Easter Egg in Terry O'Quinn's lore, years before the show was even produced! Bravo!

Another character with an issue with their name was Nella Daren. According to Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Chronology and the Star Trek Encyclopedia used "Neela" but the script used "Nella Daren", which is also how it was pronounced in the show. As such, we've reverted to using the show itself as our core guide here, so she is now Nella Daren - which prevents any possibility of confusing her for a treacherous Bajoran engineer!

J'Dan U.S.S. Brattain

J'Dan was another weird one. The cast list for the script uses the name "J'Ddan", and clearly this was the source Decipher had opted to use. However, everywhere else uses "J'Dan" - even in Second Edition he's named J'Dan. As such, we've brought his name in line with 2E and Memory Alpha and dropped the extra D!

[While on the subject of extra D's in names, don't forget to read Charlie's about the U.S.S. Enterprise vs U.S.S. Enterprise-D debate here!]

Our biggest name-based obstacle though was one of the ships in the set. The U.S.S. Brattain. While pronounced Brattain in the show and named after Nobel-winning Physicist Walter Houser Brattain, there was a misprint on the ship's model used in the show, with "U.S.S. Brittain" showing on screen instead. Whoops! Understandbly, Decipher copied the name seen on the model, and even featured it front in large letters on the card image!

However, internal displays did use the correct spelling of U.S.S. Brattain. So in good George Lucas style, we didn't leave those past mistakes uncorrected! Many, many thanks to the Art team on this who managed to manipulate and edit the image to change the name seen on the model to use the correct spelling - something Paramount themselves have yet to fix!

If WB95 was the Beta Edition to fix the first round of Decipher's typos,Premiere Remastered is the Gamma Edition!


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