The Yamato RPG campaign was started after I had been running the Excalibur campaign for a couple of years or so. I had two reasons for starting a second Star Trek RPG campaign – one, there were adventures I wanted to run that would fit better in an Original Series timeframe than in the Next Generation timeframe of the Excalibur campaign; and two, I had friends who wanted to play in my Excalibur game but there was no room for more players so I started a second Star Trek game instead.
Like the Excalibur campaign, I arranged the adventures as "episodes" of a television series "season". I kept good records for the first ten or so adventures, and those details are presented in the first half of the Season 1 Mission Logs. For the second half of that first "season" I only have plot summary information, which can be found with the Season 1 Mission Logs as well.
What amounted to the second "season" of the game entailed a major change in the roster; all but two of the original players left the game and several new players joined. To reflect this change the season started with a multi-part adventure to show how these new characters became the new command crew of the USS Yamato. Sadly any information I once had on the individual adventures are long since lost. All I can offer for the Season 2 Mission Logs is a synopsis of that initial introductory story arc.
I had plans for the Yamato campaign to last longer than it did. The game was set near the end of the USS Enterprise's 5-year mission under James T. Kirk, with the later adventures taking place around the time of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The crew of the Yamato was to have adopted the newer-style uniforms from The Motion Picture, and the USS Yamato itself would have undergone a similar upgrade to what the USS Enterprise got in the movies. Sadly none of this came to pass. Like the TV show that inspired it, my Original Series era campaign also found itself canceled due to lack of interest. Some day I may revisit the USS Yamato with another new crew, or maybe "reboot" the campaign entirely to give it another go. Only time will tell what the future holds for the USS Yamato.
The stardates in the original Star Trek did not have much rhyme or reason to them, unlike the stardate methodology adopted on Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the end, for the Yamato campaign, I reasoned that the stardates were specific to each vessel, with the first digit representing the year of the ship's mission. So the stardates for the Mission Logs of the USS Yamato range from 1xxx.x to 3xxx.x and represent the first three years of the vessel's Five Year Mission.
In May of 2265 the following directive was issued by Starfleet Command:
Starfleet Directive 10247:
In order to meet the expanding need for multi-mission capable vessels, construction will begin immediately on 12 new Constitution Class Heavy Cruisers at the following facilities: Sol III (San Francisco Orbital Shipyards), Sol III-A (Copernicus Shipyards), Sol IV (Utopia Planetia Shipyards), Sol VI-A (Titan Shipyards)
Proposed vessel names and hull registries:
USS Ark Royal NCC-1723 USS Forrestal NCC-1718 USS Birmark NCC-1725 USS Hornet NCC-1714 USS Challenger NCC-1719 USS Invincible NCC-1732 USS Discovery NCC-1722 USS LaFayette NCC-1720 USS Endeavor NCC-1716 USS Victory NCC-1726 USS Essex NCC-1727 USS Yamato NCC-1715
The first of these new Consitution Class cruisers, USS Yamato (hull registry NCC-1715) was commissioned July 16, 2267 at the Copernicus Shipyards on Luna.