USS Highlander History (Out of Character)

Created by Captain Tim Williams on Wed Oct 9th, 2013 @ 7:32pm

The USS Highlander as a sim was created in December 2007 by Matt Williams, the writer behind the character of Captain Tim Williams. Originally created as part of a simming group called Sigma Division which based itself in the Gamma Quadrant, the Tim Williams character was given the initial rank of Commander, but due to organisational changes at the time, it was decided by the Sigma Division staff not to announce the sim's creation until the start of the following year.

During this time period, Sigma Division was restructured and essentially restarted from scratch, with the Highlander being one of the initial sims in the new-look group. It was at this point that the Tim Williams character was elevated to Captain, as were all commanding officers in the group at that time. As a result of ideas and out of character help given in the management of the group, Matt was shortly named the new commanding officer of the group's only organisational unit at the time; Task Group Alpha, which was a position also assumed in character by the sim's CO.

Towards the end of 2008, a split emerged within Sigma Division, and a number of sims - including the Highlander - split away after disputes over the group's management style and formed a new group, known as Epsilon Force, which had put into its original constitution measures to prevent any abuse of power or extreme unilateral use of power by the fleet's senior management. As one of the founding members of the fleet, Matt took on the role of webmaster and that of the initial Task Force Commanding Officer post, overseeing the only task force at that time, numbered Task Force 84. It was during the formation of Epsilon Force that the founding members decided to base the fleet in the Delta Quadrant in order to distance themselves from Sigma, and the concept behind the joint mission that would see all of the original ships to the quadrant started to come together.

By the end of 2009, Matt had resigned from his positions as webmaster and as task force commander over disagreements of the fleet's managerial style and the way it went about its daily business, and had formed Pegasus Fleet as his way of creating an environment where these issues were no longer present. The Highlander remained as a sim in Epsilon Force, but had started to see declining activity as a result of the playerbase it was able to bring in and keep active under the Epsilon Force umbrella. Shortly after the start of 2010, Matt abandoned the episode that was being written at the time - with only two posts completed - and started the finale mission which would see Tim Williams demoted from Commodore, and the destruction of the Highlander. All inactive crew were removed, and those remaining saw out the mission, which took over a year to complete due to struggling activity levels. Finally, in June 2011, the Highlander was shut down, and a new sim opened in its place; the Galaxy-class Eisenhower.

The Eisenhower was meant to be a new start for Matt and his sim in Epsilon Force, on which he retained his command character of Tim Williams, but it was shut down after a disappointing start of its first mission, which failed to get past the first plot point. The character and the sim remained dormant for some time afterwards.

The first revival of the Highlander began in late 2011, when Matt tried to bring the original ship back with a new crew and renewed vigour. The destruction of the ship on Talos IV was altered to have the ship severely damaged, and requiring two years to repair, and any mention of the transfer to the Eisenhower was removed. The sim gathered members quickly and progressed through its inaugural return two missions at a strong pace, but after the start of the third, the sim failed to return to form after a three-month server outage for the Epsilon Force servers, and Matt decided to once again close the ship down.

The final resurrection of the Highlander once again doctored history slightly; and replaced the return to the Delta Quadrant with a low-visibility tour along the Romulan Neutral Zone, and the ship then being reassigned to Pegasus Fleet In-Character in the year 2390 (RL year; 2013). The ship was to take the place of the sim which Matt founded Pegasus Fleet with; the USS Endeavour, in order to help renew that sim and inject fresh life into it, as he was having difficulty writing for his existing character at the time.