Sollertia Station to Continue Development of the SGCSim

On May 20, 2014, we contacted Jason Cox, the lead developer of the SGCSim software that simulates the fictitious Dialing Computer at Stargate Command, in the TV series Stargate: SG-1 (and its spin-offs). 

We (Sollertia Station, the group behind LCARS 47) expressed an interest in continuing the development of the SGCSim, as we believe we have the dedication to enable us to do so. Jason has given us a green light to continue development of the SGCSim under the conditions that it remains freeware and that it does not include annoying applications or code designed to interrupt the operation of the users' computers. As this is already inline with our production ethos, all further iterations of the new SGCSim will continue to be freeware and without any form of in-application advertising, or 3rd party downloads (toolbars, browsers, antivirus trials, et cetera).

We will also, for archival purposes, keep online the SGCSim you've all used (version 5.2) over the years, in its original legacy form, except for a new installer. This is to ensure that this version remains online indefinitely.

Moreover, since the SGCSim is responsible for the inspiration behind the LCARS 47 Development Project, we are all overjoyed that we are now able to ensure the longevity of the SGCSim. We look forward to what the future holds for the SGCSim, and developing relations with the Stargate community and fanbase. We can't wait to work with you all.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be opening "SollertiaStation.org" as a portal website for both the projects. We will also be releasing new content and artwork from Monday the 14th July.

Sollertia Station is a trademark of Sollertia Station Ltd, a non-profit fan organization dedicated to delivering high quality freeware science fiction software. Stargate, Stargate: SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, and Stargate: Universe are trademarks of  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved. Sollertia Station claims no affiliation with  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. No infringement is intended.

LCARS 47 End User License

This license applies to the entire LCARS 47 suite and subsequent releases, versions, updates, service packs, additional material, supporting files and production material. This license may be updated at anytime.

AS IS STATEMENT

This package and all related materials are distributed as is. We make no warranty for the functionality and suitability thereto nor can we be held responsible for any damage and/or loss of data, and business resulting from the use of any part of the LCARS 47 suite.

FREEWARE

LCARS 47 is and always will be freeware. We will never charge a fee for downloading LCARS 47, any subsequent updates, modules, add-ons, and additional material. This means you do not have to pay to download and use this software.

UNLIMITED USAGE

You may download and use as many copies on as many machines as you like, so long as you have relevant permissions to install software, or you own the computer(s) of which you install the LCARS 47 suite, updates, modules, add-ons, and additional material.

REDISTRIBUTION

No part of the LCARS suite or related materials may be distributed for monetary gain. This includes hosting “pay-to-download” sites, using ad focused URL redirects, sites that target the user with popups or popunders, or any other download site whereby the person who uploaded the file receives any kind of financial gain for doing so. LCARS 47 may only be redistributed in the form of its unaltered installer. This is to ensure files aren’t altered to contain malicious code or exploited for commercial gain (referral links, and spamvertising). Moreover, if you downloaded the package outside LCARS47.com, LCARS47.net, or theBluPrint.org you use it at your own risk and at no warranty. We will not offer support for installations using files obtained from any other source.

DISPLAY AND PUBLIC PERFORMANCE

You may use the LCARS 47 Suite in any fan film/series that is published non commercially. You may also use LCARS 47  at any convention, gathering, and public or private event either on standalone monitors or as part of a constructed set piece, so long as the resulting set piece is not intended for sale with LCARS 47 as part of the package. You may not charge an admission fee to the public for viewing the displays or anything they are connected to. You may do this without permission from us or giving us notice. However, in all instances where LCARS 47 is used in motion pictures or live action videography, credit must be given as follows (in the end credits):

LCARS Monitor Animation by the LCARS 47 Development Project

www.LCARS47.com

Project Lead: Eleanor C. Davenport

Assistant Manager: Shaun Overton

Quality Control Lead: Lee Byrne

Program Coordinator: Stefan Blakemore

Historian/Exolinguist: Greig Isles

MODIFICATION

No part of the suite may be reverse engineered, decompiled, or modified in any way. This includes the installer, the program executables and any non-user-customizable files. Furthermore, the software must not be ported to any other platform. The project is under active development and as such, the source code is not publicly available and should not be made so.

MISCELLANEOUS

All the people that have worked on this project have done so voluntarily and without financial compensation. However, the financial overhead of this project have been funded by ourselves. Although some users may wish to donate to this project in support of its continued development, we would ask that you donate to charity instead since there are so many worthwhile causes out there. The LCARS 47 suite contains code from LCARSDeveloper.com and used in conjunction with the license found there.

LEGAL

Published by Sollertia Station. Star Trek and related marks are registered trademarks of CBS® / PARAMOUNT® PLC. The LCARS 47 applications are made in good faith that they do not infringe on the intellectual property of CBS® / PARAMOUNT® PLC. This work is solely intended to promote the Star Trek franchise and for the enjoyment of fans. This package is freeware. Adobe, Macromedia, Flash and Photoshop are registered trademarks of Adobe® Systems Incorporated. Microsoft®, Windows®, .NET™ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp. TheBluPrint, the Repository, theVault, and related marks are trademarks of theBluPrint™. All other marks are property of their respective owners. Original LCARS design credit: Mike Okuda.

LAST UPDATED

May 20, 2014

LCARS 47 Canon Policy

A guide for Users as to what is and what is not Canon

Foreword

The use of canon material within LCARS 47 is strictly monitored. There are times when we use non-canon sources to fill in gaps, such as missing dates, names, functions, terms, and so on.

Database Modules

Although nearly half a century of Star Trek is filled with interesting things to include in the Federation Database, there is also a vast number of things that we think deserve recognition, and simply put, compliment canon. The "Point Defense Phaser" from Star Trek: Armada is a perfect example. The reference to the Point Defense Phaser inside LCARS 47 has been edited to avoid conflicts with canon. In the Federation Database, this specific example was named "Point Defense Targeting" and is written in a way which would seem plausible. 

"Point defense targeting is a defensive form of phaser fire whereby incoming hostile projectiles are eliminated by outbound phaser fire. Unlike point offense targeting (targeting the hostile ship/station directly), point defense targeting requires far less power as most explosive projectiles will detonate as soon as the point defensive fire reaches its target. Point defense targeting is also utilized as a means of destroying rogue asteroids, space debris, and other planetary, station, or ship-bound threats..."

Artistic License

There are times when original canon source material is not available. For example, alien languages like Romulan and Cardassian. In this case, our project linguist will draft up an entirely new language based entirely on canon material such as using only using glyphs that have appeared on screen. With regards to Drydock, and the cutaway MSDs, some classes do not have a canon MSD shown on screen (like the Akira and Steamrunner). We therefore have to do the whole design from scratch. In other instances, we may have to edit existing canon MSDs to make certain features physically possible (the Intrepid class shuttlebay).

Controversy of Non-Canon

Many fans have differing opinions of what canon is and what it is not. We understand that we cannot satisfy everyone.

Canon

Our current reflection of what is canon is as follows:

• Star Trek: The Original Series 
• Star Trek: The Next Generation 
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 
• Star Trek: Voyager 
• Star Trek: Enterprise 
• The Prime movies

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture 
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan 
• Star Trek III: The Search for Spock 
• Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country 
• Star Trek V: The Voyage Home 
• Star Trek VI: The Final Frontier 
• Star Trek: Generations 
• Star Trek: First Contact 
• Star Trek: Insurrection 
• Star Trek: Nemesis 

Our current stance on what is not canon is as follows:

• Star Trek: The Animated Series 
• All Star Trek novels 
• All Star Trek games including Star Trek: Online 
• All Star Trek comics and animated shorts 
• Any official board games, trading cards or other miscellaneous paraphernalia ^{See note 1} 
• Any fan made material ^{See note 2} 
• Any of the 'JJ-verse' movies 
• Star Trek (2009) ^{See note 3} 
• Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) ^{See note 3} 

Further Non-Canon

As a blanket statement, the following examples are established as non-canon and will therefore not qualify for inclusion:

• Starfleet “Marines” or 24th century “MACOs” ^{See note 4} 
• Rihannsu as a native term for Romulans and the Romulan language ^{See note 5} 
• V’Ger and the Borg 
• Starship classification (Dreadnaughts, Destroyers, et cetera) 
• The USS Titan being a Lunar class starship 

Appendix and Notes

1. Exceptions include using the SkyBox pIqaD (the Klingon Language) as it's the most canon-abiding usable language. We will not however use the Klingon Language Institute's pIqaD as this is fan made and neither it’s formatting or its glyphs are used in any of the canon series.
2. Fan made material may not please everyone, and therefore we will not add any fan made material. There's also an issue with obtaining permissions from each author.
3. The reboot will not be considered for inclusion for three reasons:
1. The reboot movies take place in an alternate universe and therefore do not affect the Prime universe. 
2. There's also a major debate regarding the reboot movies' canonicity as much of their story lines directly contradicts established canon, the apparent explosion of Romulus, for example. 
3. Moreover, the reboot movies fall under new financial interests with CBS and may represent legal problems regarding intellectual property licensing. However this is more of a legal issue rather than a canon issue. 
4. Starfleet “Marines” are a direct conflict of canon in that they represent a militaristic arc of Starfleet that does not exist in the series and movies. We know from canon that Starfleet is not a military, it is merely an agency of the United Federation of Planets tasked with peacful exploration, first contact, and in some cases escort duties. There have been instances however that have required Starfleet to act in a more defensive manner but all of these events are handled entirely by Starfleet themselves. Many people cite the strange uniforms in the Deep Space Nine episode titled "The Siege of AR-558" as evidence to support the existance of Starfleet Marines, but these are meerly special purpose combat uniforms just like the desert uniforms seen in Deep Space Nine: "Shadows and Symbols"
5. This is completely refuted in Romulan text appearing on screen. Further reading

LCARS 47 Decision to Cut Support for Microsoft® Windows® 98™, ME™, 2000™, NT®, and XP™

Foreword

With the ever advancing technological market, opening up new possibilities enabled by cutting edge technology innovations, we have therefore decided to take advantage of such technologies. To this end, backward compatibility with Windows 98, ME, 2000, NT, and XP will come to an end with the release of LCARS 47 version 6.2.1.

Microsoft® .NET Framework™ 3.0/4.0

Most new applications in LCARS 47 require Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 which is currently not supported by Microsoft Windows 98, ME, and 2000. It is also not natively supported by Microsoft Windows XP, however it is available to XP users as an optional update through Windows Update. Due to the requirement of Microsoft .NET 4.0 and the added barriers for Windows XP users obtaining it, we feel that, at this time, we do not have the resources to provide support on this front as the overhead would be prohibitively costly to the project both financially, and with regards to time management.

Microsoft® Speech Recognition API

VoiceCommand uses the Microsoft Speech Recognition API which was first released with Microsoft Windows Vista, and no available compatible alternative exist for previous Windows operating systems.

Summary

With all this, LCARS 47 may still work, in places, with previous versions of Microsoft Windows. We will not however, have an official end user support line for LCARS 47 running on the titular operating systems of this document.