1. Medical Services Organization, MSO. Don't need the blue the quarantine planet crap but I like the idea of the MSO. And if the interstellar Plague that was the catalyst for organizing the MSO only killed 10% Frontier wise that would still produce horrifying numbers of dead that would spark the colonies into action. 

2. First & Second Common Musters: story of adirmal Morgain is a good one. By extension that would mean saving Hatzk Naar. I think the First Common Muster serves an important role in that it gets the various colonies thinking in terms of military defense BEFORE the sathar show up. On top of that Hatzk Naar has featured nicely in the Love & Atomic Rockets shirt stories that went into the magazine. 

3. Mechanon elements in Zebs time line: Mechanon Revolt, Mechanon Migration, etc. All good plot hook fodder. 

4. Tetrarch Pyramids: who doesn't like exploring ancient ruins. 

1 compiles earlier references

2 adds something like a century of events

3 works in the Rim

But I have read that there are a number of apparent retcons, and probable errors as well.

That's right, the only Star Frontiers material Cook really wrote after TSR gave the rules to others to rewrite. 

Eastman was using Zebs Guide to take SF in a Gsma World direction to suit his own vision. In fact the Osakar were a plant mutant PC from his personal home game. 

I borrow from everywhere, just going through the D&D 4.0 monster Manuel and looking at all the full color pretty pictures I noted many creatures that looked like they could have come from a sathar home ecosystem or out of a sathar bio-tech lab. 

As to changing a system. Eastman didn't just change the fast play system of SF but attempted to change the genre, add to that the rush to print nature of Zebs and it was just a quagmire. 

A bunch of D&D critters are Sci-fi inspired creatures so they totally could work as Sathar bioforms or native alien fauna. Anytime you read "magically created by a mad wizard" or similar line that is really saying bioengineer or genetically modified organism by a scientist. But I do want the D&D import to feel SF, that's why I am working on a re-imagining of the Raith (I suspect it is the same creature as the Scorpionfolk in D&D) so they are not so much fantasy creature like. In the case of GW critters many can be explained in SF terms easy enough but a few are darn hard.

I personally think if SF had continued at some point TSR or WoTC would have done terrible things to it... all I have to do is look at GW & D&D and groan over some of the things they did to those two games and then imagine the same idiots fooling around with SF. 

I suspect at this point MA1 & GW grew out of the SE/D&D games in which aliens went adventuring in the proto-test generic fantasy world that would become 2 different world settings in D&D, the aliens got killed, or never escaped the D&D setting. In fact in poking around in SE there are devices that literally nullify high tech and can plunge a planet into the sort of world you get in D&D, in addition some D&D setting worlds clearly are the dying world: A once advanced culture now on it's last legs, reduced to waring city states of primitives as it's planet was turned into a waste-land. So the "fantasy" setting is sometimes relative or a matter of perspective... if you are a primitive and find a tube that shoots fireballs well that's a wand and magic, but if you are Captain Rogers of the Space Fleet and you have a tube that shoots fireballs more than likely it's a grenade launcher or blaster or something like that. 

Just some thoughts from my research into my favorite games.

Maybe, I do remember looking at Zebs in utter frustration when I got it back in the day, but I thought Buck Rogers had something to do with the demise as well. Now I can look at Zebs a bit different, but the no follow through with the other guides is what really killed it I think. The reason I did not invest in Buck Rogers btw was because TSR killed SF and I had no faith in their ability to support Sci-Fi games at that point, only D&D. 

I think I ended up picking up my first GURPS book because of TSRs marketing decisions now that I think about it. Basically TSR chased me off as a customer for any game except D&D for a very long time.

That being the case, without Zeb's SF would still be around. Well, perhaps without Zeb's and the manatee SF would still be around. But you get my drift... ;)

Getting into much more expensive hobbies like firearms and motorcycles probably has a lot to do with that. ;)

We moved on to Twilight 2000, Swordbearer, James Bond, etc.  Come 1990, it all came to an end.  Friends finished college and moved off.  One other and I went into military, and moved off.  Plus, single player RPGs on the PC and consoles were beginning to become much higher quality.

 

I include Zeb stuff in my setting but I also get why others do not... thus the no Zebs Timeline project, besides we need those sort of references for folks so they can choose and build a setting as they please.