Guess I slipped a little bit this month. I’ve been meaning to get this written up for a week so far, but it took a little bit before I made some time for it. But here we are, finally.
The month since the last Sitrep has been a bit slow, I guess. Been tidying up some things, cleaning up the fallout after my operational audit, mostly getting everything back on track after it was sidelined in order to get everything tuned up for the audit. One of those things was, surprisingly, scheduling my vacation. Now I can take some time off knowing that I’m not leaving my colleagues holding the bag. They’ve got a lot on their plate and they don’t deserve to get that as a “reward”, after all. Which means more Starfire. Win-win, as they say!
What’s happened so far
So, a few things that were intended to happen last month didn’t, and a some that weren’t, did. The good news is, I’ve got almost a week of vacation time booked up to happen right now, so I have plenty of time to actually get things back on the rails and moving properly. It’s my goal to spend most of this week actually hammering through a LOT of the below, so when November comes around, I’ll have more than a little to report for the October sitrep.
The bad news is, firstly I had a bunch of art that I was meaning to post, but I just completely forgot. It’s all done and completed, but I just didn’t get around to it. I’ve got a fresh sticky note set up to do a story post on it, and then update the website page where it matters. I’m hoping that I can get one more art piece set up and done this year, but that’s not a guarantee. I’ve got a good artist and I don’t want to put undue pressure. I’ve still got two more concept art sections that need to get done. On the flip side however, I ended up tripping across a fairly good artist that was interested in doing some other setting work, so I’m hoping that I can engage them with some other artwork.
The art that I mentioned last month is now done: that will be going up on the website with its own post next week. I imagine it should be of some interest to someone. It was to me! I’m also sending out another contract for some more art. Two more after that and I’ll have basic concept work done for all the major races in my universe. Which is actually a pretty nice milestone, all things considered.
What’s happening next?
I have most of this week off, so my goal is to latch onto everything below, and just power through as much of the below as hard and as fast as I can. There’s a lot down there that needs doing, and I’m planning on making several sprints over the next few days to really make a dent in things. I’ve been working on the lead-up to this week to get things prepped and lined up so that I can just dive in and get the main tasks accomplished instead of having to do more prep work. I can’t anticipate everything that will need to get done, but if I can think about it, then I’ve tried to mitigate or get things lined up.
I’m hoping to get tasks 1, 2, and 4 at the least done. Ideally with some additional progress done on 3 and 5.
1) Push the turn processing up to get everyone lined up and done 140
As mentioned previously, everyone’s caught up to 140, but the next press would be to get everyone rolled up to 142 to get everything lined up.
2) Set up and run the 3rd Battle of Elysium to a conclusion
I’m still using Tabletop Simulator, though instead of managing the run in, I’m now looking at managing the actual battle in Elysium orbit. Let’s take a look at that numbered list and see where we are…
- Initial run in-system, including flank reconnaissance to see if the strike force gets within launch range of Elysium
- Drone staging at the launch point. This will take approximately 20 hours, so I expect it to involve multiple gunboat strikes, and a rather spirited defense.
- The actual drone wave impact
- Follow-up operations. This may involve pulling back to rearm for a second drone strike (surprise! bet you didn’t see that coming…)
#1 has already been done, with the story written. I’ve been chatting with the person who previously ran the Elysians, using them as the kind of “strategic-tactical” brain making the overall decisions, with me implementing them. Which meant that #2 was rather anticlimactic. Given the force disparity, I think the Elysians did the right thing to hold their forces in reserve.
Last night I finished rolling the last die rolls for the drone bombardment and it’s actual results. I commented on the Starfire discord that I knew I set up a pretty intensive overkill factor, but I didn’t quite realize it until I started chunking through the dice. It was about 4000 die rolls! 2000 torpedo to-hits, then another 2000 PD interception shots to see what the defenders shot down. Under most circumstances they wouldn’t care about misses, but given that a “miss” in this case meant that a probably-megaton grade warhead was impacting someplace on planet I would imagine every effort would have been made to intercept them as well. Luckily for the Elysians, the nature of drone bombardments means that they can engage every inbound with the best odds they can achieve.
I’ll let you guess how well that worked out for them.
3) Do a full overhaul and update of my map (as seen on Fleet Management Mk2) so it’s all on one well-organized map WITH space to expand
All of the mapping software has been installed and updated. So next steps is to start cracking open the software and getting to work.
4) Finish the writing work for Scenario Book 1 – The First Contact War
No new progress to report on this.
5) Go do a second pass on the artwork for Scenario Book 1, incorporating new details and design concepts over the past year
No additional work here has been done, but I’ve run across someone who might be able to do some more art for the internals on the book. No idea if it will actually work out, but it would be nice to have some art beyond just the 3d work that I’ve done.
6) Start fishing in my contacts to find someone who can do proofreading for Scenario Book
No new progress to report on this. Again, this is something that needs #4 to be done first before this can be seriously examined.
Dollarton Proxima Shipyards 