Star Trek: The Next Generation Writers' Technical Manual

The Star Trek The Next Generation Writers Technical Manual is an internal document of Paramount Pictures intended to familiarize prospect writers and directors into the, in this case, technological nomenclature of the show in question.

Once it became apparent that Star Trek: The Next Generation would become a hit, it was felt by the production staff that the Star Trek: The Next Generation Writer'/Directors' Guide, otherwise known as the "Writer's Bible" (a term already used for similar documents used for the Original Series), needed an additional internal guide to help prospect writers out in keeping internal consistency where the ever growing technological aspects were concerned. Both Michael Okuda and Rick Sternbach felt obligated to compose such a document and a first edition was drafted for the third season in 1989. The second edition, the 1990 fourth season edition, became the basis for the much enlarged Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, intended for the general public.

Summary

 * From "About this document":
 * The Star Trek Writers' Technical Manual was developed to provide a handy reference for the detailed technological background that our writers sometimes need, and is offered as a supplement to the Writer'/Directors' Guide. It is NOT required reading-relatively few of our scripts use more than a tiny amount of this material. Still, some story points do hinge on this stuff, and Star Trek has always prided itself on scientific accuracy and internal consistency – hence this document.

Contents (fourth season edition)

 * About this document
 * Section I-A technical primer
 * Section II-Technical memoranda
 * Section III-Emergency procedures
 * Section IV-A celestial bestiary
 * Section V-Index