Captain Kirk's dress uniform from the original series was certainly more modest than the brilliant burgundy uniform he wore in the second Star Trek movie "The Wrath of Khan". The detail on Dr. McCoy's suede suit from the fourth Star Trek movie, "The Voyage Home", also belied the differences in costume budget between a weekly television series and a feature motion picture although Sarek and Amanda's attire from "Journey to Babel" was certainly detailed.(I would love to have a dress made out of the beautiful smokey lavendar crepe fashioned into Amanda's gown. Worf and Jadzia's wedding attire from Deep Space Nine was also stunning.

Star Trek: The Next Generration brought us the most fearsome race, the Borg. I think the Borg are more terrifying because what shred of humanity remains in their cybernetic bodies is subjugated by a sterile unfeeling intelligence that combines the insensitivity of a machine with the unstoppable purpose of an insect.

Klingons, although radically altered from their original appearance in Classic Trek, emerged as allies in The Next Generation although several renegade groups still posed occasional problems for the crew of the Enterprise even though one of their number, Worf, served aboard her. On the promenade you could purchase your very own Klingon uniform for "only" $15,000!

Star Trek: The Next Generation also introduced us to the Nausicans, an aggressive culture that you definitely don't want to encounter in a bar (they stabbed young Ensign Picard right through the heart!). A Tosc and a Krellian were also interesting-looking aliens.

Odo, the changeling security officer of Deep Space Nine, made morphing, first introduced in Terminator 2, Judgment Day, seem commonplace.

Be sure to check your hotel room's magazines for coupons. I found a $3 off coupon in one of the entertainment guides and was still able to get an additional 10% off the price of admission because I used my Star Trek Mastercard. If you have a Star Trek Mastercard, the 10% discount also applies to any merchandise purchased from the shops on the Promenade or meals in Quark's Bar and Restaurant.

Photography is allowed in the museum (obviously) but the museum is rather dark and all exhibits are behind glass. I was able to get the above photos with a Sony FD-81 digital camera but turned the flash off to avoid glare. Fortunately, it takes very respectable pictures in low light conditions. If you have only a conventional 35mm camera, you will need to use very fast film (ASA 1600 or higher) to avoid using a flash. Also, you will need to be careful of reflection. Exhibits line both sides of the hallway and exhibit lighting on one side frequently reflects on the glass shielding exhibits on the other side.

Graphic Design Notes: To create the effect of the images blending into this page's space background, I used the free online PhotoFrame software available at http://www.creativepro.com to frame each image with a Mondrian border then selected black as my frame color blended at a setting of 10 and saved at a JPEG compression setting of 56%. To use the free image processing tools at CreativePro, you simply need to set up a free account. Another neat tool is the online version of CoolText, a 3D text generation tool with a nice selection of textures. The Star Trek: The Experience title at the top of this page was created using the CoolText Embossed text style with Clear Glass texture. I used the Next Generation font I downloaded from an outstanding fan site at http://hem.passagen.se/zpock/fonts2.htm. The Enterprise animated gif is courtesy of Auer Alexander at Axl's Black Hole. This page was designed with Adobe GoLive 4.0 for Windows. The slide show effects were created using Set Image URL actions spaced approximately 30 seconds apart on the document timeline using images of identical size (The GoLive manual says using images of identical size is important). Because of problems with older Netscape 4.x browsers rendering Cascading Style Sheets, I used a placement grid to position the images and text blocks. The title image block contains two floating boxes. The floating box containing the animated gif is layered beneath the floating box containing the title text. This effect is created by specifying a larger number as the z-index of the top layer.