30 March 2009

A Captain of His Times

My character in the campaign was Michael T Drake III, captain of the wartime USS Vanguard (NCC-72317), a modified variant of the Saber-class starship (known in our campaign as the Ranger-subclass). This vessel saw two years of the toughest combat as part of Saber Wing 77, commanded by Commodore Erika Benteen and Captain Drake was very much a product of his times. Having suffered nearly crippling losses in the time before and the earliest phases of the war, Starfleet found it necessary to rapidly promote younger officers to more responsible positions and Drake was one of them. Given his acting captaincy while in his late twenties, by the end of the war in 2375, Drake was a seasoned veteran. Shortly after the war, with the decommissioning of his wartime command, Drake received a permanent promotion to captain and command of a new Vanguard (NCC-91000), a much larger ship. Our campaign dealt with the events of 2376 and well over half the episodes were based on the older ship. As Frank would describe it to me, serving on that small, overgunned and frightfully overworked vessel was something akin to the feeling one gets when watching Das Boot, a movie which depicts the harrowing life aboard a German submarine during the Second World War. Having watched the miniseries Band of Brothers, I felt that the actor Damian Lewis was best suited to my concept of Captain Drake, were he to be cast in flesh and blood. I won't go into a detailed biography of the character, but suffice it to say that this young man had been through two years of hell and had seen three quarters of his graduating class from Starfleet Academy killed in action. The officer that emerged from the war and how he dealt with the postwar situation was my focus as a player. As a final note, I would like to credit and thank Ambessalion at the Star Trek Photomanipulation Archive (http://stpma.net/index.php) for his fine rendering of Damian Lewis as my character.

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