Ep 1 - The Preview of Things to Come!

Welcome to Relay Station Bravo! We're previewing what's to come with the relaunching of Relay Station Bravo. Aaron shares his story of joining Bravo Fleet and his love for Star Trek.  We aim to reach out to the Star Trek community and engage with Bravo Fleet members. Aaron discusses the history of Star Trek and its impact on him. He highlights the role of Bravo Fleet in providing a platform for writing, competitions, and gaming. 

Aaron also talks about the excitement around the upcoming asset system in Bravo Fleet, which will revolutionize ship assignments. Listeners are encouraged to visit bravofleet.com, join the Discord server, and be part of the growing community. Future episodes will feature senior staff members and members sharing their stories and creations.

Creators & Guests

Host

Aaron DeLay

I've been producing, hosting, and making podcast media for a long time. I love Star Trek, Doctor Who, writing, and talking about people's passions and loves when it comes to the world around us.

Producer

Bravo Fleet

Offering a friendly & welcoming place to share your passion for Star Trek, whether through writing stories, video games, or talking about your favorite episode!

What is Relay Station Bravo?

Founded in 1997, Bravo Fleet is one of the world’s largest and oldest Star Trek online fan communities. Our podcast is all about our members, their written stories, the activities we participate in, and our shared passion for Star Trek, Science Fiction and more!

The following is a production of the Bravo Fleet Communications office.

Welcome to Relay station Bravo, the Bravo Fleet podcast. My name is Aaron, also known as Captain Geronimo Fontana, a member of the Bravo Fleet communications office. I am the staff officer for podcasts. And welcome back to a reimagined, born, remodeled, and revolutionized relay station Bravo, the Bravo Fleet podcast. It's been on our minds for a couple of, couple of weeks, a couple of months, and we've been thinking about bringing it back, and we've managed to brainstorm some ideas for some content and some structure and some pieces and parcels of this thing.

And so today's episode is a preview of what's to come, as well as me sharing my story and letting you know why I'm here to talk to you about Bravo Fleet and its members, its members'stories and its members'history with Bravo fleet and all of that and more. So much to talk about, so much to discuss, and so much coming soon to this podcast space. And we're so excited to be back here and with you listening, be you member of Bravo Fleet or someone who has just stumbled upon this podcast via the many, many platforms that are out there. We're excited to have your ears, and we're excited to see if you want to check us out. Our website is bravofleet.com.

Type it in anywhere you have access to the Internet, bravofleet.com. There are faqs, there's all kinds of information, and I myself will be telling you all about it here in just a moment. So if you're a Captain Janeway, grab your coffee. If you're a captain Jean Luc Picard, grab your Earl Grey tea, hot. And if you're any captain in between, grab your preferred chilled or hot beverage and get ready, because here we are with relay station Bravo.

The Bravo Fleet podcast starts now.

Welcome back to Relay station Bravo. My name is Aaron, and this is the Bravo Fleet podcast. With this episode. The goal here is to preview for you kind of with a teaser, but also with some substance. So we don't just want to be like, coming soon from bravofleet.com, this is the podcast, and then just blitz.

I'd like to give you some content and some context because that, I think, will give you an idea of what's coming and what we're doing and how this came to be. Back in the day, there was a relay station Bravo podcast, and the idea now has been to reignite it, to remodel it, to reimagine it, and to use it as not just a way to outreach into the greater Star Trek community, but also to reach out to our membership, which is one of our greatest assets and our greatest pieces of us is our membership. We have an incredible group of people who continue to show up on discord and compete and engage and be a part of this growing community here in this little corner of the interwebs or the webs, whatever you want to call it. It's your varying terms for the Internet, and it's just been a lot of fun to kind of rebuild this and to kind of dream big with what the possibilities for this podcast are. My story is kind of how we're going to start this introductory piece, and I want you to hear this story because I'm not a longtime member.

I've been a part of it since April of 2022. So there are many members who have been a part of this community for the better part of 510, 1520 plus years. That also speaks to why people have stuck around and remained in Bravo Fleet and participated and engaged and continued to grow this thing because they care about Star Trek. They care about the community. They care about having a place where people can gather and exchange the ideas and the conversations that Gene Roddenberry started all those years ago with the original series and Captain Kirk and all of that.

There's a certain kind of power in Star Trek, and I can't quantify it or even qualify it, really. I'm sure I can do a little of both, but there's just something about it that pulls me in. And my Star Trek story began around 97 98. I was in middle school, and I was a big old nerd. I looked it, too.

We're all nerds at some point in our life, but I was what you call the stereotypical, kind of like nerd hung out with his nerd herd and all of that. And it was an awkward time to be alive. And it was really weird, and we didn't understand ourselves and nobody really understood us. This was pre Internet, this was pre Google, this was pre everything. This was maybe the days of Myspace.

If you're familiar with that, if you don't know what that is, you should probably Google Myspace, what is that? And then you'll know what the age, the time, the era that we're speaking of regarding when this was going on. But I became interested in Star Trek because I started watching it on my television down in the basement where my room was. And it began with yesterday's Enterprise and relics, and I began to really connect with Star Trek and its vision for a future of space travel. And this was at a time when we were still doing space shuttles and things into space.

And I was never really a science nerd. Like, I'm not a science geek. It's not my jam. Science fiction, however, that's where I really, really find my joy and my creativity is able to just explode and go crazy. And so I began to really dig into Star Trek, started to watch original series.

I watched generations. I think I went to the movie theater for generations, and the ups on that one and the mids and the downs in that movie, kind of. But I kept coming back to Star Trek. I had gone to one Star Trek convention as a young adult at that point, and I was loving it. And I discovered play by email online Star Trek stories.

And this is where, if you're a member of Bravo Fleet or if you're a longtime RPGR with Star Trek, you know what PBEm was? The play by email role playing. For those of you who are unfamiliar, my goal here is to make a very brief introduction. Play by email is what it sounds like. You had an email list server, and you would create stories based on a character that you had built a profile for.

A lot like role playing with dungeons and dragons and other kind of role playing operations where you create a character, you come up with the characteristics, you come up with their strengths, you come up with their weaknesses, things of that sort. You then put that character out, and you start to write from that character's perspective. And everything about that character's history and story begin to influence their interactions and their engagements with character, plot, setting, and all those things. So that was a majority of my life, probably 23, 24 years of my life, was solely centered around Star Trek, play by email, on various fleets, some that are still around and some that aren't. And so in April of 2022, I was looking for something different.

I was looking to kind of try something else. And I had heard about Bravo Fleet, and I was like, well, I've never really gone there. Let's give it a try. And so I signed up, I got on Discord, and the rest is history, for that matter. Star Trek has always been my center, has always been the thing that I've come back to.

And I think it's because of the vision of Gene Roddenberry and the vision of the future. The vision of the future is we've solved a lot of problems. We've eliminated things. We've managed to become the better angels of our. Whatever you want to call it.

But we still struggle. There's still bad things that are happening that the Federation and Starfleet has to deal with, has to address, and has to try and negotiate and try diplomacy, and if diplomacy fails, then you have to try and figure that out. And that has always been very fascinating to me, because it's echoes of our current world, but it's also in an entirely different universe, and an entirely different. There are very different values that are given in the Star Trek universe to things, and there's different beliefs about things, and that always fascinated me because it was so different and so unique. And you had good actors, like the original series and Next Generation, Voyager, DS nine.

There were classically trained and excellent actors and actresses on those shows, and it was just incredible. So for me, it was watching well written stories being portrayed by incredible actors and actresses who were there to put together an incredible story about the future of human, of the human race, and of aliens and of galaxies and of quadrants that we've never even thought of. But here we are imagining what that future can look like. And I always come back to Star Trek. It's always my first science fiction love.

I don't think I've ever walked away from it, because it's the first one that I ever really found and loved and enjoyed, and it has retained. I'm 41 years old now. It has been with me for the better part of 31 years, and I have never wanted to like, oh, I'll explore something else. I've always come back to Star Trek, so my Star Trek and Bravo Fleet story are intertwined, because I found a place where I can write, and there are varying ways that you can kind of climb. We call it the Bravo fleet management system, ladder of promotions and of ranks that opens up your opportunity to write on ships and different larger classes as you go.

And that's all contained on Bravo Fleet website. You can look at that, we'll talk about that more in detail. But for me, that was as a writer, I've actually recently published a book, which was amazing, and I've always been a writer since middle school, since high school, I've always wrote something. I've always been writing something, and if you look at my high school stuff, your mileage may vary on the quality of that writing, to be very clear. And even my first year or six months in Bravo Fleet, when I was writing my stories, there was sometimes a simplicity to it, and I was learning.

And so we have a cool academy where you can take classes that have been designed by volunteers, but volunteers who are, that's part of their job in life or part of their part time or full time hobby is writing and engaging with the writer and how to write strong stories, both in science fiction, but also in the larger fictional world of writing that we do as humans. And it's really cool that they do help you become a better writer. And so I've taken some of the courses I'm working through the writing. One, it's been a slow process, but I'm getting there. But there's opportunities to improve.

And so what I've done is I've taken advice. I'm able to post my stories in the Discord channel about stories and get helpful feedback on like, hey, this structure works. I think this is good, but hey, maybe tweak this or hey, shift this around and that, stuff like that. And it's always been very helpful to get that feedback. And so it's made me a better writer.

And you look at my writing today and I think it's a lot better than it was. But that's the beauty of it, is that I'm still learning, I'm still learning how to write compelling characters in an interesting setting and fantastical plots that are echoes of what a Star Trek story should be or sometimes push the needle on what a Star Trek story should be. So it's been a really all around experience of I've learned how to be a better writer, I've learned how to write well, and I've learned that I need to get better and continually improve with each story that I write and each mission that I complete as a writing volume. So that's a lot of what I have done in Bravo Fleet as kind of my main what I enjoy doing is my writing, but I've also done competitions. There are flash games that I really enjoy trying to be the best, although many times I fall short because there are a lot better flash game players in our membership base who do amazing things there.

And I've also done puzzles, I've done trivia. Trivia is fun because sometimes I'm really good at it and other times I'm just like stumped and I still try and I might get like one or two right and I'm still like, all right, I'm going to turn in the competition because I'm at least going to have tried, done my best to do something there because I'm trying to be the best I can and I'm okay with not being the best trivia person.

I'm trying to get better at it. And so we've done that. There's a lot of cool competitions, the gaming World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft. Nope.

World of warships is the correct way to say that. And then Star Trek online is also something we do, and they're starting to do Star Trek gaming nights. Star Trek online. Gaming nights among us has been a featured game that we've done gaming nights with. And with that, you can actually earn ribbons which help you be promoted to earn higher ranks and all those kinds of things.

There is a new system coming. It's called the asset system. And what that will be is it'll be kind of a revolutionizing of how ships are assigned and things like that happen within our structure. So I say these promotion pieces, but they're still what we're working with. But very soon, we will be hearing more about this new asset system and how that will be impacting our fleet and our members and the future and what is ahead.

So hopefully something here has struck your fancy. If you have questions, if you're interested in going, I want to know more about Bravo Fleet. Well, I have the website for you. Bravofleet.com is where you can go. There's frequently asked questions that you can click on and explore.

You can become a member and join us on the Discord server and have a chat with us and be a part of a community that continues to grow around the ideas and the ideals of Star Trek. But even beyond that, with all kinds of conversations about movies and games and plants and everything else, anything and everything else is up for discussion on bravofleet.com. We do enjoy being in community and being able to hang out together. So thank you for listening to our first kind of preview episode. We'd love to hear from you.

Please come find us on discord to let us know that you listened to the episode and that you're looking to be a part of Bravo Fleet. And we would love to see you there and chat with you and encourage you and cheerlead you as you continue in your journey or begin your journey with Bravo Fleet on bravofleet.com. My name is Aaron, and it has been a pleasure sitting here with you. Hopefully you've enjoyed your tea, your coffee or other beverage. I have been sipping at a steaming cup of Earl Grey, and it fuels and fills my soul.

I'm a captain Picard fan of the Earl Grey. Hot. On the weekends, I tend to shift into Janeway and coffee because getting up on a Saturday morning requires extra motivation and liquid courage. And that is my coffee. Coffee block.

Nothing fruffy. Just give it to me straight. So there you go. We will look forward to the next episode, where we will have a Bravo Fleet senior staff member to chat with and to talk about. And we will hopefully also have members to share their stories and also possibly sharing dramatic readings of their fictions that they've created currently or in the past, or even talking about future stories, future fleet actions, future priority missions.

The future is here on bravofleet.com, and we're so excited to continue to share the evolution and the creation that goes on in Bravo fleet. Until next time, thanks for listening to relay station Bravo, the Bravo Fleet podcast. As you go out there into the final frontier, boldly go and live long and prosper.

The songs access, climb on top and battle night by relax Zine are licensed under an attribution, noncommercial, share Alike 4.0 International License. You can find their music on their free music archive [e-mail]. Music R-E-L-A-X-S-Z-E-N-E.