UPF Minelayer Model and Miniature

This is not the post I had planned for this week, but since I’ve been up to my ears getting the next issue of the Frontier Explorer ready to go, I didn’t have time to do the post I had planned. You’ll probably get that one next week.

With the Assault Carriers (UPF & Sathar) completed, it was time to tackle the last of the UPF ships needed for the Second Sathar War game: the UPF Minelayer.

Now, this is a bit of an interesting ship to do the mini for. If we look at the counter from the game (shown at right), those familiar with the miniatures produced by TSR will realize that a miniature already exists with that silhouette.

This is the miniature labeled on the blister pack as the Sathar Cutter. This particular one is missing one of it’s cannons but it’s a really close match for the shape on the counter.

This isn’t the first time that TSR messed up the labeling of ship images as the counters and the “Ship Identification Guide” in the Tactical Operations Manual don’t match up. We can probably assume that they had this miniatures and its silhouette and since the cutter doesn’t have game stats (until fans created them – see Frontier Explorer issue 2 – Friend or Foe), they used the image for the UPF Minelayer but didn’t change the name on the blister pack. In the blister pack, it is sold with the Sathar Frigate so my guess is that it was supposed to be a sathar ship but the silhouette was used for the UPF Minelayer by accident.

In any case, it poses a bit of dilemma. We need to make a ship that at least sort of looks like the counter to continue with the theme of the miniatures I’ve been creating but it also can’t look exactly like the sathar ship. This is also why I saved this miniature for last as you could always use the Sathar Cutter mini as the UPF minelayer in your game as it matches the game counter. So with that background out of the way, let’s look at the ship.

UPF Minelayer Miniature

Since I’m not planning on matching the shape of the silhouette on the counter exactly, I want to look at the broad features of the silhouette for inspiration. In my mind there are four main features to be considered:

  1. The body should be somewhat roundish and elongated
  2. There should be two side lobes off the main body
  3. There should be two guns mounted forward on the main body
  4. The engines should be long and skinny.

Now that last one doesn’t match with any of the engines on any of the other UPF ships. However, I’ve always felt that the minelayer, unlike the mainline ships, used ion engines instead of atomic engines. It’s really more of a system ship that does its work before the battle starts so it doesn’t need the performance of the main warships.

And the game stats bear this idea out. Ion engines are limited to an ADF of 1 and that is what the minelayer has, unlike all the other ships which have an ADF of at least 2. So these long skinny engines can be the UPF ion engines instead of atomic ones.

The two guns really aren’t an issue either as the minelayer sports a pair of laser batteries in addition to the mine and seeker missile dispensers. And the other features are just things to keep in mind while designing the ship. The minelayer is listed as hull size 7, so in the end, the ship should be a bit bigger than the UPF Destroyer when it is all done. With those design constraints, let’s get to work.

The image to the right shows the finished model. Instead of the smooth rounded body of the Sathar Cutter, I chose to go with a more angular squashed cylinder and then add cylindrical lobes to the side somewhat like the UPF Assault Carrier.

The two laser batteries are mounted on the front of the ship and the engines are long, tapered to the back, and, although you can’t easily see it in this image, angled slightly inward at the back as are the engines on the silhouette.

Beyond that I added some surface features reminiscent of the other UPF vessels and then a bunch of small cylindrical indentations on the back of the fuselage to represent the mine dispersal system. In the model, they are all at different angles so that mines are spread out as they are ejected.

Printing the Miniature

With the model made, it was time to print. Since this is a relatively small miniature, the print only took about 5 hours. Here is the UPF Minelayer next to the sathar cutter and UPF frigate, as well as a ruler for scale.

The engines didn’t come out as straight as I’d like. I’ll need to add some more supports to them on future prints to get them to hold the right positions.

As you can see, the ship is a bit bigger than the cutter and the body is bigger than the main part of the frigate as well. It’s also bigger than the destroyer although I don’t have a picture of that one. While it’s not as long, it is about as thick and much wider so I feel that it came in at right about the correct size to be just a bit bigger than the frigate and the destroyer.

This model just about used up all of my grey resin so I’ll probably be printing in the black or white resins until I get some more grey ordered. The grey (and white) take longer to print as they are opaque resins and need more curing time but I definitely like the look of the grey miniatures. At least they photograph better than any of the others.

Up Next

I finished this model a couple of weeks ago so my Patreon supporters already have the model file. I’ll be posting it on DriveThruRPG shortly with all the other models on my 3D Models page. I’ve also added it to the Miniatures Price List here on the site.

That completes all the UPF and Sathar ships. I’m probably going to revisit the fighters soon as I need to make those models more friendly to FDM printers. The models I created work on an SLA printer but the wings are too thin (by about a factor of 5-10) to print on a regular FDM printer. I want to make the models easier to print on FDM printers (or at least versions that are) before I post those models on DriveThruRPG.

But before I do that, I’m going to tackle the last military vessel that I haven’t reproduced from the original miniature sets, the pirate frigate. That’s a ship that came in the Sathar ships box of miniatures along with the pirate assault scout which I have already reproduced. I’ve already started on the model, so once I get issue 27 of the Frontier Explorer out the door, I’ll get back to it.

Once the pirate frigate model is complete, I’ll be in a position to start offering “module packs” of printed miniatures that contain all the ships needed for the Knight Hawks scenarios from the various modules as well as the UPF Task Forces. I may need to make a few more models for some of those (the Gullwind and Elanor Moraes come immediately to mind) but that will give me some direction for future builds.

After the pirate frigate, there are just 7 ships from the original sets left to recreate: the freighter from the Federation Ships box and the six ships from the Privateers box. Those will be my next projects, interspersed with the models needed for the module packs, after reworking the fighters.

What are your thoughts on the minelayer model? Let me know in the comment section below.

Sathar Assault Carrier Model and Miniature

With the UPF Assault Carrier completed, it was time to tackle the Sathar Assault Carrier. This would complete all of the capital ships for both sides.

Now, way back when I started this blog, I posted the outline for a sathar assault carrier project. This is not the model that project was intended to create. When I made that project outline, I never imagined I’d be this heavy into creating miniatures. Although if I ever get around to actually doing that project, the end result might be fairly similar. One major difference, however, would be that all the surface features would be actual scale rather than selected for aesthetics as they are on this model. But that’s for some undetermined future date. Let’s look at the model I have created.

Building the Model

Like the others, for this model I’m working off the silhouette from the game counter, pictured to the right. As you can see, this ship is a bit more bulky and angular than the other sathar vessels which tend to be more bulbous and curvy.

That said, there are definitely some features that fit the typical sathar ship style. We have the long skinny engines with the spherical tip, long, extended nacelles for the engines struts, and a round head separated from the body by a skinny neck. The other features that stand out are the guns on the head of the ship and the rectangular shape of the lobes on the side of the ship. I’m going to assume that the latter are the location of the bays for the fighters.

image showing a small assault carrier being approached by an assault scout and exploration vessel

Now, there is another reference for the sathar assault carrier in the rules. The image to the left comes from the module SFKH3: Face of the Enemy. This ship (bottom) is described as an older, obsolete, and smaller assault carrier no longer in main-line service by the sathar fleet. In the module, it has been converted by the sathar to serve as a mobile base for larger scout craft instead of fighter craft. So while I will probably model this ship at some time in the future, I won’t be using this image as a reference for the assault carrier model.

Like the UPF assault carrier, the sathar assault carrier should be significantly larger than the light cruiser but not quite as big as the heavy cruiser. That gave me a bit of a scale to shoot for when building the model. Once that scale was decided on, I used the counter to get the rough shape of the head and body of the ship.

Here’s the final model (pictured to the right). The size of the body, neck, and head are taken directly from the dimensions on the counter.

Given the positioning of the guns on the counter, I assumed there were three evenly spaced around the head. Since the stats for the Assault Carrier include a laser battery, a rocket battery, and a proton battery, I figured that wasn’t too much of a stretch.

The size and shape of the rectangular lobes around the center of the ship are based on the counter as well. The height of the lobes from the center of the ship match the profile height from the counter and the size of the rectangle that forms the outer face, along with the width where it intersects the hull match as well. What is different is the detail on the face. The counter shows one large rectangular shaped detail that I decided to break into three smaller ones on each lobe. each of these represent a fighter bay giving the assault carrier the capacity (per the rules) to hold up to a dozen fighters.

The other major difference is the engines. Instead of the single, long engine depicted on the counter, I went with pairs of smaller engines, similar to the ones used on the heavy cruiser. Unlike the heavy cruiser, which mounted the two engines in each cluster in-line with the engine strut, for the assault carrier, I chose to mount them perpendicular to the engine strut. Additionally, these engines are slightly shorter, a bit thicker, and have a bit more spacing between them than the ones on the heavy cruiser. Otherwise, they are similar to the heavy cruiser engines and modeled on those engines.

It’s not obvious from the image of the model, which is the intention, but I started using a slightly different technique when modeling this ship. For all the ships in the past, I’ve set a global level of detail for round objects that was fine enough for the larger bits of the ships to look smooth. This resulted in way more detail on small objects (like the spheres around the upper body) than was needed and caused the rendering time of the model to be really long. Starting with this model, I’ve been specifying the detail at the individual part level, allowing me finer control and reducing the rendering time significantly since I don’t have to put as much detail into the smaller pieces.

Printing

With the model done, it was time to print the miniature. As it turns out, this model is fairly massive. In fact, physically, it has more volume than any of the models I’ve created to date, even the UPF assault carrier. Here’s a picture of the sathar assault carrier along with the sathar heavy cruiser and light cruiser (and a quarter for scale).

The light cruiser looks kind of glowy because it was printed in a translucent resin and this particular print was hollow so the translucency really shows.

It sits right in there between the light and heavy cruiser but it is much fatter. It ended up weighing a couple of ounces, compared the ~1 ounce for the heavy cruiser and ~1/2 ounce for the light cruiser. It actually has some heft to it. I may consider printing these slightly hollow to save weight and bring the cost down. Here’s another picture with it next to the UPF assault carrier.

The two assault carriers side by side. One of the features chipped off of the aft fuselage of the sathar ship when I was trimming off the printing supports attached to it. I don’t think those supports are actually necessary and will remove them next time I print one.

As you can see, it ended up being a bit bigger even though they are supposed to be roughly the same sized ships. I probably made the sathar one a bit too big, but I like the way it turned out so I’m going to leave it be. It’s not too out of proportion to the other sathar vessels. Any downsizing I need to do will come with the next round of ships, which I’ll be designing to all be to scale with one another. However, with it being this massive, it makes sense that one of the sathar conditions for retreat in the Second Sathar War game is the loss of too many of these ships.

Up Next

That’s it for the Sathar Assault Carrier. I’ll be adding it and the UPF Assault Carrier to the Miniatures Price Table here on the site as well as uploading the model files to my 3D models page on DriveThruRPG. My Patreon supporters received the model files for both of these ships a while ago.

The next ship I’ll be tackling will be a new model for the UPF Minelayer. That may be ready by the end of the month.

Let me know what you think about the Sathar Assault Carrier in the comments below.

Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY60.329 to FY60.359

A new month and new set of events in the Frontier. This month’s timeline includes events from the Warriors of White Light module (SFKH0), the beginnings of events from the Bugs in the System module (SFAD5), and more exploration beyond the edges of the known Frontier Sector.

Date (FY)Events
60.329 Patrol Group Flint arrives make the jump to the Kazak system and begin decelerating toward Stenmar station
60.330 The TransTravel corvette is completed at the Terldrom (Fromeltar) starship construction center.
60.331 – The TSS Dark Shadow is detected smuggling weapons provided by Streel to the Liberation Party on Clarion (White Light).  A firefight breaks out between the new boarding party of the CMS Osprey and the Dark Shadow’s crew. The smugglers are taken into custody and the ship impounded. (SFKH0)

– Deceleration complete, Discovery Squadron, realizing they are no match for the numerous sathar and other unknown vessels in the system begin accelerating for a jump out of the system back to OFS031 system. Luckily, they seem to not have been detected.
60.332 The HSS History’s Hope successfully makes the jump to OFS222, a bright blue main sequence star, even more massive than Belnafaer.  They begin decelerating to prepare for the return jump to OFS221.
60.333 Patrol Group Flint arrives at Stenmar station (Kazak) they spend two days refueling and preparing for the jump to OFS019.
60.334 – Strike Force Nova departs Laco (Dixon’s Star) for the Truane’s Star system.

– The TSSS Searcher departs Pale station with a shipment of titanium to attempt charting the return jump from the Truane’s Star system to the Cassidine system.
60.335 – Patrol Group Flint departs Stenmar station (Kazak) for their jump to OFS019.

– Discovery squadron successfully jumps back to the OFS031 system completely charted the route between OFS031 and OFS070.  They begin plotting a return jump to the OFS030 system
60.336 – Sathar SCC#4 completes a frigate

– Shakedown cruise complete, the fourth Saurian Ark Ship begins loading supplies and passengers
60.337 Having killed their velocity, the HSSS History’s Hope begins acceleration for the return jump to OFS221.
60.338 The TSSS Searcher successfully jumps into the Cassidine system completing the jump route between the Cassidine and Truane’s Star systems.  They decided to not report the jump to the UPF immediately and exploit the shorter jump times to move cargo between the two systems for higher profits.
60.339 – During a magnetic storm, the Matrix infection on Jetsom mutates and takes over the ship’s computer system, killing or incapacitating all members of the Alpha team on the ship (Belnafaer) (SFAD5)

– Patrol Group Flint arrives in OFS019 on high alert.  They immediately detect sathar radio signals and begin cataloging the sources.  Deceleration starts along a vector away from the inner system.  They begin the calculations for the return jump.
60.340 Four crew members from the Moneyspider are killed in an attempt to reach the crew on the stricken Jetsom when their shuttle is damaged in the descent and destroyed.  Only six crew remain on the Moneyspider. (SFAD5)
60.341 – After two days of data collection, Patrol Group Flint has identified nearly 20 different ships in the OFS019 system including two each of frigates, destroyers, light and heavy cruisers, and assault carriers.  There are numerous fighters and two of an unidentified new class of ship.

– The HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps back to the OFS221 system completely charting the jump between OFS221 and OFS222.  Details are relayed back to the UPF to collect the bounty.  They begin decelerating in preparation for returning to the OFS222 system and continuing their exploration.
60.342 – Sathar SCC#5 (OFS019) completes a cutter

– The 4 sathar destroyers from Liberty system arrive in OFS019.
60.343 – Deceleration complete, Patrol Group Flint begin accelerating back toward jump speed to return to Kazak as the jump calculations are finalized.

– Strike Force Nova arrives at Pale (Truane’s Star).  They will have a five day layover to cross train with the Pale militia before heading out to Zebulon.
60.344 – The PGCSS Marionette, which vanished from Terledrom (Fromeltar) without its crew 28 years ago, suddenly appears in the White Light system headed directly for Clarion Station (SFKH0)

– The decelerating sathar destroyers pass very close to the accelerating Patrol Group Flint. Relative velocities are too large to allow for an engagement but there is now doubt that the sathar are now aware of the presence of the UPF ships.

– Discovery Squadron successfully jump back to the OFS030 system completely charting the route between the OFS030 and OFS031 systems.  Work begins on engine overhauls and plotting the jump to the OFS026 system.
60.345 – Attempting to approach the PGCSS Marionette, it repeatedly veers away and the the CMS Osprey is forced to disable its engines and maneuvering jets in order to board the ship.

– The crew of the CMS Osprey find that the ship is being controlled by a deranged cybot calling itself the Puppetmaster.  After a zero-g battle with robots controlled by the Puppetmaster, the cyborg is destroyed and the crew takes control of the ship. (SFKH0)
60.346 Repairs to the PGCSS Marionette’s engines allow it to be diverted from its collision course with Clarion station.  The ship is impounded for inspection.
60.347 Loading complete, the fourth Saurian Ark Ship departs the Sauria system for destinations unknown
60.348 – Training with the Pale militia complete, Strike Force Nova departs for the Zebulon system.

– Patrol Group Flint successfully jumps back to Kazak.  Flight forces in the system go on high alert.
60.349 TransTravel corvette arrives at Terldrom (Fromeltar)
60.350 After an amazingly long string of bad luck in several of its ventures, the Groth Energy Corporation, the major power supplier on Groth (Fromeltar) declares bankruptcy.  While they maintain power generation, all other corporate activities are frozen.
60.351 After nearly half a year of investigation and the death of seven more of the young eorna, the cause of the mysterious deaths is finally uncovered. One of the “Great Plan” eorna had been sabotaging the endeavor and subtly poisoning the children. He is taken into custody.
60.352 Patrol Group Flint arrives at Stemnar station where they will remain on alert with units of The Flight until Strike Force Nova arrives.
60.353 Three days after declaring bankruptcy, the Groth Energy Corporation (Groth, Fromeltar) is purchased by an undisclosed off-world organization for a fraction of its actual value. The new owners immediately begin restoring complete operations.
60.354 Discovery Squadron successfully jumps back into the OFS026 system although they end up much further out in the system than intended. The decision is made to try to get to OFS017 directly and not take the detour caused by their misjump to OFS025.
60.355 Sathar SCC#3 (OFS138) completes a frigate.
60.356 The HSS History’s Hope arrives back in the OFS222 system and begins plotting their next jump. This jump will take them beyond the Outer Frontier Sector.  Their target star is a white dwarf, 6 light years away.  They designate this region of space as the Yazira Sector and their destination as YS001.
60.357 Strike Force Nova arrives at Volturnus (Zebulon) and joins up with Patrol Group Virgo.  The crews are given three days shore leave on Volturnus before they leave the Frontier.
60.358 After several days of investigation and analysis, the eorna responsible for the poisoning of the children is diagnosed with a subtle mental illness that caused him to be unable to accept the new direction the species was going with the discovery of the egg ship.
60.359 In light of the subtle nature of the discovered mental illness, all eorna associated with the eorna egg project undergo a deep psychological analysis.

And here’s the updated full timeline file:

DetailedFrontierTimelineDownload

State of the Frontier – Dec 2019

It’s convenient that the last Tuesday of the month also happens to be the last day of the month so that this post falls on it’s usual day. I hope everyone had a happy holiday season and have fun and exciting plans for the new year.

As I did last year, I’m not going to do a big yearly retrospective and look forward. I’m going to keep this to the typical monthly perspective and save the year-long views for the anniversary post in May.

Looking Back

In November I predicted that December would be pretty hectic. It turned out to be even crazier that I expected. So much so that a few of my posts didn’t quite get up on time to be posted at their usual 8am Mountain Time schedule. I still managed to get them up on Tuesdays, but some were a little later in the day. I don’t know if anyone other than me even noticed.

The craziness also spilled over into my timeline posts on Twitter. There were a few days right around Christmas that I was just never really near a computer and I got way behind on making the posts. Next year I’ll have to remember the schedule those posts in advance instead of doing it the day of. Part of the problem there was that I had a block of days that I actually hadn’t made entries for yet and so not only did I have to post. I also had to create the entries as well. I’ve gotten a bit behind in that and need to take a day and get the next few months of the timeline sorted out. In getting caught up I found I missed a few entries for one of the threads so the summary post next week will actually contain a few entries that never went out on Twitter.

UPF assault carrier model

I finished up the UPF Assault Carrier this month although like everything else it took a bit longer than I expected. I had planned on it being the second post of the month but it ended up being the fourth.

Obar Enterprises logo - The letters O and E stretch horizontally and touching with the flags of the letter E colored to look like ship engines.

In the meantime I posted another organization, Obar Enterprises, that I use in my games. This is a follow-on post like the Streel post I did a while back.

I also tried something new in the third post of the month by recording the prologue to my novel Discovery as an audiobook to play around with that format a bit. I got a really helpful review from someone on Facebook that gave me some ideas going forward. I had fun doing this so I’ll probably record more of the book in the future, especially if people would like to hear the rest.

server with Extended Frontier map in the background

Last month I mentioned that there were be a bunch of behind the scenes technical stuff going on with the websites that I’m hosting. I started that process this month moving this site and a couple of my smaller, low-traffic sites from my web hosting provider that I’m not completely happy with to my new server. Progress on this suffered due to the holiday activities but I was able to move one of each of the different types of sites I host (WordPress, Drupal, basic HTML) over to the new server so moving the remaining sites should go fairly smoothly. One of the advantages of moving is that these new versions of the sites will have HTTPS enabled instead of just HTTP.

The other behind the scenes effort that was going on was working on the next issue of the Frontier Explorer. I started strong but then fell behind due to the holidays so I’ll have to put in a bit of effort this next week to get caught up. With any luck, we’ll have the issue out by mid January.

Looking Forward

So what’s coming up in January? We’ll start next week with the usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post. The following week will be a post on the Sathar Assault Carrier. I started and finished that model on the 26th so it’s ready to go, I just need to write it up. I don’t know what the third post will be but I’ll likely do the write-up on another corporation. And we’ll end the month with the State of the Frontier post.

RPG Blog Carnival Logo

It is also possible that the third post may also be on a completely different topic. I’ve volunteered to host a month of the RPG Blog Carnival this year and while I don’t know what month I’m hosting, I’m going to make an effort to participate more in the topics of other hosts. My main issue in the past has been that a lot of topics have been either areas I don’t usually dabble in, or they’ve been topics completely unrelated to sci-fi games. I’ll by trying harder this year to twist the topics to sci-fi so we’ll see where that goes.

Along the way, I’ll be putting out another issue of the Frontier Explorer as I had just mentioned above. We release the Winter issue each January so that will be a prime focus this month.

I also plan on moving all of the remaining sites off of my remote hosting provider. I have four left, including my personal site, the Frontier Explorer site, and my New Frontier Games site. The fourth is a personal site for one of my sons. Once those are done, I’ll just have a few sites to migrate from my old server to the new one, although some of those will take some work and that probably won’t start until February. Or at least until this month’s Frontier Explorer issue is done and out the door.

Finally I’ve also started working on a UPF Minelayer miniature. This one is going to look a lot like the official Sathar Cutter miniature since that’s the silhouette on the game counter but it will have the stylings of the other UPF ships rather than the sathar stylings. Once that is done, I’ll have miniatures for all of the standard UPF and Sathar ships. From there I have a few more of the original miniatures to reproduce and then I’ll going to start on some new ships. I’ll probably finish the minelayer model this month but it may not be written up until February.

That’s it for now. Keep gaming and have a happy new year!

UPF Assault Carrier Model and Miniature

Unsurprisingly, December has been kind of hectic and I didn’t get as much time to work on this miniature as I had hoped earlier in the month but I managed to finish it in time for Christmas.

This is a model for which there is no original miniature so this one comes completely out of my imagination. Well, almost completely. Like the others I’ve created from scratch, we at least had the silhouette from the counter. Now this shop deviates significantly from the cylindrical shape of the the other capital ships in the UPF roster and actually looks a bit more like the UPF assault scout. It’s also radically different from the silhouette given in the UPF Campaign book that I’ll use for a different version. In any case, this was the basis I used for the model.

Building the Model

The first thing I needed to do was figure out a scale. According to the rules, the Assault Carrier is supposed to be hull size 16-18. This makes it a bit bigger than the light cruiser but smaller than or on par with the heavy cruiser. We’ll see how well I did with that later but based on the size of those models, I picked a scale and got started.

The first order of business was to get the basic body shape down. I knew that I didn’t what to make it as thick as it was wide since that would make it very, very massive. So while I matched the silhouette, I made the fuselage flattened rather than as thick as it was wide. I didn’t have any good idea what that circle on the silhouette was supposed to be so I just left it off. I suppose it could be a really big dome but it was right where I wanted to put the fighter hangars so I ignored it.

I again reused the standard UPF class C engine that I’ve used on all the other capital ships That makes it differ somewhat what from the silhouette as they are longer than depicted but that’s not really a big deal. The gun batteries at the nose are also a bit bigger than depicted on the counter.

With the basic shape done, it was time to add surface detail. The first thing I did was add in hangar bays for the fighters. Since an assault carrier can hold 8-12 fighters, I decided that this one would have 12 bays. There are three on each “face” of the fuselage. They are the three rectangular structures sticking out toward the back (thicker) part of the ship. Each one represents a bay for a single fighter.

After that it was just a matter of adding details to give it some character like the other ships. I turned out that there was a lot of surface to cover on this model, more than on the others. I reused some of the surface detail structures from the other models and created a few new ones for this model. I’m starting to build up quite a collection of objects.

The angled surfaces of this model provided some interesting opportunities to play with the relative rotation of the details having some parallel to the surface and other (like the hangars) not rotated to be at the same angle. For each face of the model, I composed all the surface features on a flat, vertical plane an then rotated it to be flush with the surface of the ship. This make positioning everything much easier.

When adding in all the detail, I struggled between how much regularity to include (e.g. identical, regularly spaced features) versus applying a bit of randomness. You can be the judge of whether I hit a good balance or not.

All told this model took about 8 hours of works spread out over a month of time, often in 15-20 minute increments here and there when I could find the time.

Printing

This post would have been up a bit sooner but there were some issues in getting the model printed. Well, printing was straightforward, but getting the final model rendered ran into some problems.

There is a lot of detail on the model and in the end, my laptop that I do the modeling on was unable to do the final render to the printable file at the high detail level I wanted. It kept crashing due to running out of memory. In the end I had to render it on my big computer (which I’ll probably do as a matter of course from now on as it has more memory and a faster CPU). And even then there was a weird problem in the rendering that I had to figure out. Since it took 2.75 hours to render, even on the big computer, that was not a fast process.

From this I’ve learned that I need to start being more selective and assign rendering detail at the individual element level instead of globally. The issue is really on the round pieces as you get lots of vertices in those parts that really are needed on the small parts but if you don’t have it on the larger pieces, you notice the individual faces. I’ve been setting the detail level high so the big pieces (the lobes and weapons balls in this model) look good but that’s been serious overkill on all the small parts. In the end, the raw model file for this ship was 381 MB. The next largest ones were the space station at 239MB and the battleship at 215MB. So that’s something I’ll be looking into on future models.

I finished the model Sunday afternoon and thought I’d have a print by Monday morning but all the rendering problems resulted in me not getting the print started until late Monday afternoon. It takes twelve hours to print so it just finished this morning. But it printed and it looks great. Here’s a picture of the side not shown in the model image above. It still has the printing supports on it as it’s not done curing yet. They will all get removed once that is done.

It’s still curing so I haven’t removed the printing supports yet.

I was very happy to see out it turned out. The details in the model image looked a bit over powering, maybe because of the color scheme the software uses. But printed, they looked just right.

Earlier I mentioned that we’d check in on how I did on picking the scale. Here’s a picture comparing the assault carrier with the battleship (left) and heavy cruiser (right). I probably should have included the light cruiser as well but didn’t. This image shows the side of the assault carrier that was in the model image.

The assault carrier should have roughly the same volume as the heavy cruiser. It’s shorter but much fatter. And going by the volume of resin needed, more than double the size. So on an empirical basis, I probably made it a bit too big but I actually think it looks just about right aesthetically. So I’m happy with it as it is. However, it’s way too wide to use as a chess piece if I do make a chess set with the ships so I’ll have to think about that.

Coming Up

I’ll get the model posted up on DriveThruRPG in the coming week (and updated this post with a link) as well as getting it added to my Miniature Price List page.

This finishes all the UPF models except for a new minelayer. I’m holding off on that one as you can use the sathar cutter miniature in a pinch since that one matches the silhouette of the counter in the game. I’ll revisit that model soon but next up is the Sathar Assault Carrier.

A year and a half ago when I started this blog, the Sathar Assault Carrier was one of my original projects that I’ve managed to not spend any time on. This will not be that version of the assault carrier as I wanted to create a full set of deck plans and a model that matches them like I did for the sathar destroyer. That’s a very large project. This version of the miniature will be created just as I’ve done with the UPF Heavy Cruiser and Assault Carrier – using the counter silhouette to give its shape and adding surface details based on the existing miniatures. The sathar ships are less cluttered so this should go faster.

What do you think of the UPF Assault Carrier? Let me know in the comments below.

Discovery Audio Book – Prologue

I haven’t finished the UPF Assault Carrier yet as this week has been pretty crazy. It’s close, but not quite done. I still want you have a post this week so we’re going to try something new. This post would have gone up earlier today but I ran into some technical issues that I had to work around in getting this post up. This will be a fairly short post.

I’ve been thinking about making an audio book out of my Discovery novel. Not so much because anyone is clamoring for one but because I want to play around with the format and gain some more experience in recording and audio editing.

My microphone, noise cancelling headphones, and a copy of the book

To that end, I sat down, busted out my Blue Yeti microphone, fired up Audacity, and recorded the prologue to the book. That took about 15-20 minutes. Then I sat down and started editing. That took a bit over an hour. Maybe close to an hour and a half. I wasn’t actually paying that close attention. Partially because I needed to fix things, and partially as I had to remember how to get around in Audacity.

I learned quite a bit even from this short exercise which I’ll discuss a bit below. Some I expected and others I should have expected, but none of them were real surprises.

In any case, here’s my first cut at this, a 12 minute clip of the prologue. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Discovery-Prologue.mp3 (7.3MB)

My Takeaways

Here are some of the things I learned while working on this initial part of this project.

  1. I need to breath quieter. Most of it has been edited out and there were definitely parts where you couldn’t hear my breaths but I still needed to edit out quite a few, especially in the long pauses. And I’m sure there are a few I missed.
  2. I need to work on my tonal inflections a bit more. This wasn’t bad for a fairly cold read. I had read over the prologue once before I started reading, and I’m the one who wrote it, but I probably could have put some more time in to thinking about exactly how I wanted certain passages to sound.
  3. I should practice a few different voices. I put some variation into the voices of different characters but not a lot. That is definitely not my skill area.
  4. Don’t be afraid of retakes. There were several passages that I completely flubbed. I just paused and started over. These were super easy to remove in editing and I shouldn’t be afraid to reread anything for a second or third take. I should also be willing to go back and redo sections that I notice while editing. I didn’t do that this time so you might have caught them. There was even one section where I used the first few words from the first take and the rest from the second take since I liked the intonation better for the beginning of the sentence in the first one.
  5. This doesn’t go fast. I had originally thought it would take about half an hour to edit the clip but it ended up taking over twice as long. I’m sure it will go faster as I get more experience both in making fewer mistakes that have to be edited and in editing more efficiently. But I still need to budget a sizeable chunk of time to this.
  6. I need to learn how to use Audacity (or some other tool) more effectively. It has all kinds of bells and whistles but I only know how to do very basic stuff with it. That might be able to help speed up the editing process.

I’m definitely going to keep working on this. I don’t know how often I’ll actually do the recording or how often (if at all) I’ll post segments here, but it will be a fun project to pursue.

Your Thoughts

I’d be very interested in hearing your feedback. Did it read too slow? To fast? What audio issues did you pick up on? Do you have suggestions on improvements? How does my voice sound?

That last one is definitely one I’m not qualified to judge on. As everyone knows, your voice sounds much different to you when you hear a recording as opposed to when you’re speaking. That’s due to some of the sound you hear while speaking is from vibrations transmitted through your head and skull to the ears which isn’t present in the recording. I’ve gotten used to the sound of my recorded voice, but I’m still not a judge of whether it is pleasant to listen to. My wife likes it, but she’s biased. What do you think?

In any case, I hope you enjoyed it. If you’d like to have me post more segments regularly, let me know.

Obar Enterprises

I don’t have the UPF Assault Carrier done yet so this week you’ll be getting a new organization you can use in your game.

Obar Enterprises Logo – a stylized freighter with three engines

Those of you who follow along with the Detailed Frontier Timeline, either on the monthly posts here on the site or via the @StarFrontiers Twitter feed, may have noticed the introduction of a new organization into the timeline: Obar Enterprises.  Anyone that has played in my online games in the last few years has also probably run into, or worked for, Obar Enterprises.  And anyone that participates on any of the old online Star Frontiers forums might recognize the name since my handle on those forums is Terl Obar, the name of one of my early Star Frontiers characters and one of the founders of the company.

Obar Enterprises in My Games Today

The following description is the basis I use when players encounter Obar Enterprises in game, whether just in passing or as employees.  This is not how the characters were originally created, as that involves the module adventures and the PCs might run through those.  The section at the end of this post, entitled “The Real Story”, tells how they were created and advanced in real life. 

Background

The company is owned by two couples: Terl and Yala Obar and Leelab and Reesta Lar.  Terl and Yala are yazirians while the Lars are dralasites.  It’s an unlikely pairing given their races, but they form a tight group.

Terl and Leelab, or Lee as he typically goes by, originally met years ago when they were hired as troubleshooters for the Cassidine Development Corporation (CDC).  Terl was a medic with psycho-social skills and Lee was a weapons expert.   Lee would often joke that he “took ‘em apart and Terl put ‘em back together.”  Despite the general prejudices of their races, the two hit it off and were often assigned on the same team.  Over time, Reesta became part of their core team bringing environmental skills and Yala joined as a technician and computer expert.  Others came and went from the team to fill in needed skills but the four of them formed the core.

Over time romance blossomed and the two couples were married.  While this could have potentially been an issue, CDC was willing to bend the rules due to the effectiveness of the team.  Had their performance dropped, they might have been split up, but since their performance stayed high, and even possibly improved, they had no problem staying together as a unit.

CDC, especially after very successful missions, allows its employees to purchase stock in the company.  The four took advantage of that to greater or lesser extents over their time with the company.  CDC has done well over the years and this allowed the Obars and Lars to build up a very sizable nest egg.  After many years with CDC, the four decided that they were ready for something else.  They had made many contacts over the years and decided it was time to work for themselves. 

While at CDC they had picked up starship skills:  Yala was a capable Pilot, Lee an Energy Weapons gunner, Terl had picked up the Rocket gunnery skill, and Reesta had picked up a lot of computers over the years and had become a passable Astrogator.  They lacked an engineer but figured they could hire one. 

Cashing out a small portion of their CDC stock, combined with a sizable chunk of their savings, they were able to purchase an old, used hull size 7 tramp freighter, the TSS Searcher, and get it up and running.  Hiring a pair of engineers, they started hauling freight primarily between Dramune, Cassidine, and Prenglar with the occasional run out to Truane’s Star as well.  They organized their new endeavor under the name Obar Enterprises, Leelab and Reesta not wanting to put their name on it.

After about a year, they decided to take a gamble and chart a route through the Xagyg nebula from Cassidine to Truane’s Star cutting the travel time between those two systems down from three weeks to just one.  This would allow them to move desired commodities between those two systems quickly and turn a tidier profit.  With that in mind, they loaded up the Searcher with a cargo at Triad, made sure the main and backup life support were topped off, and picked up several extra jumps’ worth of fuel, just in case things went wrong.  Ready to go they set off on this new adventure.

Luckily, nothing went wrong and they safely arrived in the Truane’s Star system.  Similarly, the return jump to Cassidine went off without a hitch.  With the new jump fully charted, they decided to keep the route as a “company secret” figuring they could make more money having the private jump route than they could from reporting the route to the UPF.  This turned out to be the case and they made a sizable profit over the years before someone else charted the route and reported it, making it a standard route on the UPF maps.

Not long after the new route was charted, Reesta decided that the merchant life was not for her.  They had had several close calls with pirates over the years and especially since they had struck out on their own and she wanted to do something about that.  She also missed the more structured life working for CDC but, not wanting to go back there, decided to use her starship skills to secure a commission as part of Spacefleet and help fight the pirate problem directly.  She retained her partial ownership in Obar Enterprises but left the day to day operations to enroll in Gollwin Academy.  Given her existing experience, she was fast-tracked through the program graduating in only a year.

In the intervening years, Terl, Yala, and Lee have continued to grow Obar Enterprises as Reesta has begun working her way up through the ranks of Starfleet.  While still primarily a freight company, having expanded their ship roster to include several freighters and escort ships, they have also diversified some of their endeavors to include mining operations and, drawing on their experiences at CDC, some for-hire troubleshooting teams.  It’s also rumored that they have an exploration branch that is cataloging the unexplored systems in the Frontier but there is no public mention of this portion of their business.  Reesta currently commands an assault scout as part of Task Force Cassidine.

Current Activities

Cross-section of the Morning Glory

Terl, Yala, and Lee still typically make the run between Cassidine and Truane’s Star, although now in their company’s flagship, mobile headquarters, and their home, the TSSS Morning Glory, hull size 20 freighter.  In addition to their freight hauling activities, they have a couple of mining operations on Pale and New Pale in the Truane’s Star system, as well as one on Rupert’s Hole in the Cassidine system.

From their time at CDC, they still have many contacts in that corporation as well as contacts in Spacefleet (through Reesta) and in the Pale government on Truane’s Star.  They will often contract with those organizations to do specific jobs that those organizations don’t want to be associated with directly or don’t have the manpower to pursue.  As part of this portion of their business, Obar Enterprises maintains a small band of troubleshooters that they can assign out to various missions and assignments much like a small mercenary company.

The rumored exploration activity is also a reality although it is not something they talk about.  OE has purchased a Moraes class exploration vessel and have a crew exploring all the systems between Truane’s Star and Scree Fron.  As part of this they have discovered a habitable, although uninhabited world, that they are working on a plan to develop and colonize.  The TSS Searcher often disappears from the Frontier for weeks at a time to deliver supplies to this system.  All of this is a secret company project.

Current Resources

Ships

Obar Enterprises has a number of ships operating around the Frontier.  In addition to the Morning Glory, they still have the TSS Searcher in operation, along with a hull size 6 Pacific class freighter, the TSSS Dark Rose.  They operate two Stiletto-class assault scouts, the OESS Courage and OESS Excalibur, that typically serve as escorts for the Morning Glory.

For their troubleshooting teams, they developed a small, hull sized 2 spacecraft.  The prototype, the TSSS Dart (StarFrontiersman issue 11) has now been in operation for about 3 years.  They currently have three of these ships commissioned, the Dart, Bolt, and Quarrel, with a fourth, the Flechette, scheduled to be built in the future.

Their exploration ship is registered as a yacht, the OESS Enterprise.

In addition to the ships above, they have another hull size 20 freighter currently under construction in the Triad starship construction center.  The OESS Dusk’s Radiance will be Lee’s primary ship when it is completed in the next year.

Installations

To support their shipping operations, Obar Enterprises maintains offices on the major stations in Truane’s Star, Dixon’s Star, Cassidine, Prenglar, Dramune, and Fromeltar.  Being a registered corporation on Pale, they also have an office in Point True but it is minimally staffed as their true headquarters is onboard the Morning Glory.

As mentioned above, they have mining operations on Pale, New Pale, and Rupert’s hole.  Additionally, they have a mine on an asteroid somewhere in the Truane’s Star system and it’s rumored they have a compound on Laco in the Dixon’s Star system.  There are also rumors of another complex built into an asteroid in the Cassidine system but nothing is know about that complex if it exists (GM Note: it does, but it’s in the Truane’s Star System, not Cassidine, and it’s different than the mine).

Finally, they have a small science installation on the surface of a planet in the FS42 system and are in the process of constructing a small station in orbit around that planet.

Responses

Obar Enterprises is a fairly typical small business but has very deep pockets when it comes to resource acquisition.  The nest egg from their time at CDC is very large although they don’t really need to tap into it for regular operations due to successful business over the years and careful resource management.

The Obars and Lars don’t need to work.  They have so much money that they could retire and live extravagantly at any time.  They work because they want to and endeavor to make sure that their employees are well taken care off.  Because of this, their employees are quite loyal.

Individually and as a company they are much more willing than would be expected to take on risky or adventurous endeavors just for the excitement of it.  Since money isn’t an issue, a material loss is not a major setback.  On the flip side, they don’t hold back when defending their own and will bring all available resources to bear on any threat to their assets and especially to their people. 

Overall, Obar Enterprises is a friendly, upright organization but are willing to take on risk and expend resources to achieve their goals.  They will not start a fight but if one breaks out, they will end it as quickly and overwhelmingly in their favor as possible.  I’ll probably go into more detail about Terl, Yala, Lee, and Reesta themselves in a future post.

Plot Hooks

PCs might interact with Obar Enterprises in a number of ways if you include the company in your game.  These include, but are definitely not limited to:

  • Employment – As former adventurer’s themselves, they look for those type of beings to fill the ranks of their workforce, especially their troubleshooter/mercenary division.  The PCs could be hired as a troubleshooter team for the company and assigned missions for the company or contracted out to other organizations.  Or they could be recruited in the exploration division.  They will have fairly wide latitude in how they proceed.  They will be given objectives, not processes.
  • Competition – Maybe the PCs will be going after the same cargo, target, or other objective as a team from OE.  They’ll have to use ingenuity and resourcefulness to win out as the OE team will be well funded and equipped.
  • Collaboration – Maybe the PCs work for an organization that has contracted OE for help and some number of NPCs from OE will be working with them.

These interactions could occur in any of the areas where Obar Enterprises have interests or activities.

The Real Story

So that’s Obar Enterprises as I currently use them in my games.  If we were playing D&D, the company would probably be considered Neutral Good.  They want the Frontier to be a better place and follow the rules when possible but are not afraid to color outside the lines when that gets better results.

While the history given works in a generic campaign, that isn’t how the characters got to where they are.  Terl, Yala, Lee, and Reesta were some of my earliest characters when I first started running and playing Star Frontiers, along with four others, a human couple and a vrusk couple, that I used sort of as test cases for all the modules.  As a group of eight, I ran them through all the published modules, very much in the order that I talked about in my Module-based Campaign posts.  They left CDC sooner than described (and joined it later), joined the Clarion Royal Marines, and participated in the Beyond the Frontier series.  I’ve removed those references from their current form so that those adventures can be used for PCs in the game.  If you don’t plan on using those adventures for the PCs, feel free to add those details back into the background of the OE crew and give them contacts and connections in those systems.  They might even be local celebrities in certain parts of the Frontier.

The CDC investment came from the Mission to Alcazzar module.  That module has a table you can roll on to see how their investment does.  It’s way too generous with only a 20% chance that something bad will happen (90% loss or 50% loss – 10% chance each), a 20% chance there will be no change, and the other 60% of the time the investments will multiply by 2 (20% chance), 5 (20% chance), 10 (10% chance), or even 50 (10% chance).  So if you invest the 5,000 Cr. the module allows and let it ride for a few years, you’re probably going to have a lot of money.  I’m sure I fudged some rolls in my early teens toward positive results.  The listed value of that “nest egg” on their character sheets is in the hundreds of billions of credits. Each.  But given the generosity of the table, that can be achieved in just 10-15 years of random rolling which is why I spread it out over more time in the write up.  They really can buy anything that they want if it is for sale.

In the character and ship sheets, the TSSS Dark Rose is really the Gullwind, acquired as part of the Dramune Run module.  That was the ship they started with and used to plot the jump from Truane’s Star to Cassidine.  The Searcher came later as their second ship.  Also, they have never cashed out their CDC stock.  Acquiring the Gullwind for free, plus the money saved from the other KH adventures where they were well paid, provided enough capital to get started and they’ve done well and grown their resources.  I used to play out running cargos around the Frontier.  Each ship sheet has a strip of cellophane tape across to top with its operating budget written in wet erase marker (dry erase wasn’t a thing).  I’d worn out the paper writing and erasing all the time that I hit on that as a solution.

I have a folder full of papers detailing the characters, their ships, and their installations.  A lot of those probably need revising from the wild imaginations of my teenage self and updated with a dose of realism.  There’s also a notebook containing the full plan for the FS42 system.  I had originally placed their system where Belnaefar is located on the Zeb’s Guide map but that was before I owned a copy of Zeb’s guide.  I had placed Benaefar in the system down to the left (FS22) originally.  With the move of Belnaefar, I’ve simply moved the location of the OE system (named Sadar in my notes).

Otherwise, the outline provided is pretty true to how I originally envisioned and ran the characters.  The only other major difference is that Reesta never really participated in the OE endeavor other than to be a part owner, she, plus the other four from the group, went right from the Beyond the Frontier series of adventures into Spacefleet.  They get together as often as they can when the Morning Glory is in Cassidine and she’s not on patrol.

That’s Obar Enterprises as it currently exists in my game and how it came to be.  I’m sure there are details or other information that I left out.  Let me know what you like about the write-up and where it could be improved in the comments below.

Small Website Update

Just a quick note to mention a few updated I’ve made to the website. They are relatively small but important.

server with Extended Frontier map in the background
Here’s the new server computer. My work and personal laptops are there on the right and the Extended Frontier Map is hanging on the wall behind it.

First, as I mentioned in my last State of the Frontier post, I have a new server. As of this post, I’ve migrated the site from the old server to the new one. This required reworking a little bit of the back-end infrastructure to get everything working. Not so much to get the site up, but rather to make it so it will be easier to add in all the other sites I want to bring to the server. Since the new server is a much faster machine, you might notice some performance improvements although this site has been fairly performant already.

The other change, and arguably the more important one, is that as part of those back-end changes, I’ve added an SSL certificate to the site and it is now accessible via HTTPS instead of HTTP. You may or may not have noticed when you accessed the site to read this post. As I bring other sites over to this new server they will be HTTPS enabled as well. This should hopefully help with the various search engines (which down rank non-HTTPS sites) and with browsers that give warnings or even block sites that are HTTP only.

That’s it for now. Now that I know the server and infrastructure are working, I’ll be moving the other websites over the course of the next few weeks. If you run into any problems or issues, be sure to let me know.

Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY60.299 to FY60.328

Here’s the next installment of the timeline. As always, you can get these daily as I post them on the Star Frontiers Twitter feed. This month sees the Discovery Squadron arriving at their destination, Strike Force Nova setting out to deal with the sathar presence in OFS019, and the HSS History’s Hope continuing its journey well beyond the Frontier. We also see the beginning events of one of the modules and the emergence of a new small corporation that will play a role later on.

Date (FY)Event
60.299 Star Law agents at foil an attempt to explode a bomb at the Council of Worlds headquarters on Gran Quivera (Prenglar).  The suspects claim to me members of the Anti-Satharian League but the League leaders deny their involvement.
60.300 Further investigation and interrogation of suspects captured at the Council of Worlds bombing reveal that they are actually members of the Free Frontiersman Foundation, a radicalized political faction bent on overthrowing the UPF.
60.301 Sathar SCC#2 (Liberty) completes an assault carrier
60.302 Strike Force Nova arrives back at Morgaine’s World (Prenglar). Crews are given a week of shore leave while Spacefleet decided how to best utilize the Strike Force given the recent discoveries.
60.303 Discovery Squadron successfully jumps into the OFS030 system but arrive much further out than anticipated.  However, the jump is considered a success.  They begin immediately monitoring for sathar signals and plotting a jump to the OFS031 system, just five light years away.
60.304 HSS History’s Hope arrives in OFS221.  Calculations begin for jump back to OFS224.  The crew hopes that the second attempt will be more successful than the last.
60.305 After a long investigation, the security leak at Nesmith Enterprises of Triad is attributed to a shadowy faction know as the Investors.  Little is known about this organization beyond that it appears to be supported by very rich financial backers.
60.306 Calculations complete, the Discovery Squadron begins accelerating toward their jump to the OFS031 system.
60.307 Calculations complete, the HSS History’s hope begins accelerating for the jump back to OFS224.
60.308 The two destroyers from Patrol Group Virgo, still stationed in the Zebulon system, are tasked by Spacefleet with a reconnaissance mission to OFS019 and charting the return jump from OFS019 to Kazak. The two ships depart immediately for Capella.
60.309 Crew of the Jetsom start experiencing minor issues with the ship’s electronics (Belnafaer) (SFAD5)
60.310 – Repairs of the Streel starship construction center (Pale, Truane’s Star) completed restoring the SCC to full capacity.

– An assault scout for the TransTravel corporation is completed at the Minotaur (Theseus) starship construction center.  It begins its maiden voyage headed to Terldrom (Fromeltar).

– Successfully arriving in the OFS031 system, the Discovery Squadron begins decelerating toward the inner system searching for sathar signals.
60.311 – Construction of CDC mining base on Alcazzar (Rhianna) complete, full scale operations begin. (SF4)

– The two TransTravel assault scouts arrive at Terldrom (Fromeltar).
60.312 The HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps back to OFS224 and begins decelerating in preparation for a jump back to OFS221.  Details of the full jump route are transmitted to Spacefleet.
60.313 Strike Force Nova is ordered to the Zebulon system while the UPF negotiates with the Rim Coalition to allow the large fleet to traverse Rim space. The Strike Force leaves orbit around Morgaine’s World and begins accelerating toward a jump to Dixon’s Star.
60.314 After four days in system with no detection of sathar presence, the Discovery Squadron decides to spend an extra week in the system before making their final jump to the OFS070 system.  This will allow them to catch up on repairs and maintenance for their ships before the final push and allow the astrogators extra time to work on their calculations.
60.315 Having fully recovered from their trek, the Spire Dragons team holds a final press conference on Gran Quivera to recount and discuss the expedition and answers questions about the trip.  Thousands attend to hear the details.
60.316 Sathar SCC#2 completes a destroyer
60.317 Deceleration complete and engine overhauls finished, the HSS History’s Hope begins accelerating for jump back to OFS221 to start the next leg of their journey.
60.318 The two UPF destroyers tasked with charting the route from OFS019 to Kazak, now dubbed Patrol Group Flint, arrive in Capella.  The crew takes two days of shore leave on Faire before continuing onward.
60.319 Construction of TransTravel corvette complete at Prenglar and the new vessel begins its maiden voyage to Fromeltar.
60.320 Obar Enterprises, a small independent freight company successfully charts the first half of a new jump route from Cassidine to Truane’s Star with their small tramp freighter, the TSSS Searcher.
60.321 After only a week of deliberations, the Rim Coalition authorizes the entry of Strike Force Nova into Rim space.  This will be the largest Spacefleet presence to ever enter a Rim system.
60.322 – Repairs, maintenance, and calculations complete, the Discovery Squadron begins their final jump to the OFS070 system which was the destination of the transmission from the Glass Pyramid on Laco (Dixon’s Star) nearly a year earlier.

– Strike Force Nova arrives at Laco (Dixon’s Star).  They will have a twelve-day layover before continuing on.  There is some concern in the Council of Worlds about sending such a sizable portion of Spacefleet out of the Frontier.
60.323 Fourth Saurian Ark Ship is completed and begins its shakedown cruise.
60.324 Patrol Group Flint jumps into the Osak system, they remain near jump speed while traversing the system and plotting the jump to Kazak.
60.325 The TSSS Searcher arrives at Pale station over two weeks ahead of the time it would typically take to make a run from Cassidine to Truane’s Star and begin unloading their cargo.  They immediately begin looking for a cargo and working on calculations for the direct return jump.
60.326 – Discovery Squadron successfully jumps in to the OFS070 system.  Signals from sathar vessels are immediately detected upon arrival.  A deceleration vector is chosen to attempt to minimize the signal reaching the inner system and work begins immediately to calculate a jump out of the system. 

– Messages are dispatched via subspace radio to both the UPF and Rim Coalitions with all the jump data and news of the sathar presence.
60.327 HSS History’s Hope arrives in OFS221 without incident.  Work begins on plotting the next leg of their jump to OFS222, only 4 lightyears away.  They decide to make small jumps to improve their chances of a successful jump.
60.328 Alpha team descends to Jetsom while Beta team returns to the Moneyspider.  Their shuttle brings the Matrix to the ship infecting the systems in the Moneyspider and Snobol (Belnafaer) (SFAD5)

Here’s the full Timeline document:

DetailedFrontierTimelineDownload

The full timeline document is starting to get pretty big. It’s up to 27 pages at the moment. We’re approaching the end of Frontier Year (FY) 60 in the timeline. Would you like to see a new document for the new year or should I just keep growing this one? Let me know in the comments.

State of the Frontier – Nov 2019

This post should have gone up a couple of days ago but I was completely swamped over the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s a pretty busy weekend at our house with my wife running a half marathon, Thanksgiving dinner, Black Friday Christmas shopping, and buying and decorating our Christmas tree. Along with all the regular weekend stuff like grocery shopping and laundry that had to be done. There wasn’t much free time to get the blog post up. But the craziness is behind us so let’s get to it.

Looking Back

The month started with the regular Detailed Frontier Timeline post, the next of which will come tomorrow. After that I finished up the Module Based Campaign thread and wrapped up that series covering all the Knight Hawks modules. I have to admit, it feels good to wrap up a series like that.

The last two posts of the month were the UPF Battleship and Heavy Cruiser models. I’ll admit I didn’t expect to get the Heavy Cruiser done last month but it took considerably less time than I expected to create the model and so the post was ready before the end of the month.

There were some other things going on behind the scenes last month as well. First, I’ve been having some issues with my web hosting provider and made the decision to bring all my web hosting back to my home server for the time being. That said, the computer I’m using as my home server is an old laptop that is about six years old and showing its age. To that end, I used some of the Patreon money from both my Expanding Frontier Patreon and the Frontier Explorer Patreon and purchased a new computer system to serve as a new server for my websites. That computer arrived this month and I’ve been getting it configured and set up. A big Thank You to all the Patreon supporters that made this possible.

The second thing that happened was that, given November is National Novel Writing Month, I decided to participate in a reduced #NaNoWriMo challenge. The normal event is to write 50,000 words on a new project. I knew that I didn’t have time for that, so rather than do the full challenge, I set myself a goal of writing for at least 15 minutes each day working on my Star Frontiers novel. The other part of my goal was to complete at least 10,000 words by the end of the month. And also posting my daily progress on Twitter.

I ended up not writing anything the last three days of the month (see the intro paragraph about how crazy those days were). Despite that, I more than met my word count goal with a total of 12,751 words written this month bringing the total word count of the novel up to 70,243 words. I figure the story is a little more than a quarter of the way finished so expect somewhere between 200k to 250k words when the rough draft is finished. If I had been able to write those last three days, I would have most likely had just over 14,000 words based on my writing rate through the month. Despite not getting to write the last three days, I think this was a success.

Finally, I started putting my miniature model files on-line on DriveThruRPG where people can download them if they want copies. I created a 3D Models product page in my New Frontier Games account where they are being made available. I haven’t quite gotten all the models I’ve created up yet but most of them are there. All future models will appear there as well. The model files that are recreations of the old TSR miniatures are listed as free, pay-what-you-want products while the new models that I’ve created myself will typically have a price of $0.99 or $1.99.

Looking Forward

Going forward, at least for the next few months, there are going to be some changes to my postings here on the blog. I’m going to try to get a post up every week but that may not happen. I’ve been going strong for a year and a half and I don’t want to break the streak, but if I do, you’ll know why.

The main change in posting is going to occur because I’m going to be spending a lot of time working on the websites that I maintain. And there are quite a number of them. Besides this site, I also maintain the Frontier Explorer website, starfrontiers.info, starfrontiers.us, and the Star Frontiersman website. Plus a website for New Frontier Games, an old blog (Programming Space), a website for a OSR gaming magazine that hasn’t launched yet, and personal websites for myself (I’d link to that one but see below) and two of my kids.

Initially all of these sites will just be moved over to my new server. With more memory, (much) faster disks, and a (much) faster CPU, you might even see a performance improvement. For the most part, those migrations should be seamless. There will be a bit of downtime but it should be small. Once I have them all up and running as is, I intend to start making some much needed updates and improvements to many of the sites.

You shouldn’t see any major changes to this site. I’m happy with its current design and so don’t have any major plans for it. The one thing I will be doing is enabling HTTPS and installing SSL certificates on the site to allow that. That’s one of the things I’ll be learning how to set up in the next month or so. That will be happening across all my sites.

The starfrontiers.us site is going to get a major overhaul. It is still the same site written by Bill Logan back in 2006/2007 and needs some major updating. That is going to consume the majority of my spare time over the next few months as I work on it. There will also be some updates to the Frontier Explorer site to make it more mobile-friendly. I’m also going to overhaul my personal site. It’s currently configured as a blog but since I have this one, I want to make it more of a profile site that links to all the various projects I have going instead. The other sites will be much lower priority.

In addition to the website work, I also have an editing job coming down the pipe for a FrontierSpace adventure, and a job doing the index for a new RPG coming from DWD Studios. Plus I’m hoping to continue my novel writing. And it’s time to start working on the next issue of the Frontier Explorer. As you can see, I’ve got a lot going on.

What this means is that I may not have as much time for specific blog posts. Here’s what I see happening for the next few months.

The Detailed Frontier Timeline posts will continue, both here at the first of the month, and daily on the Star Frontiers Twitter feed. I’m continuing to work on that project and intend to keep it going for a long time to come.

I’m really enjoying the modeling and miniature creation. (I think I’ve mentioned that in the past). As such, that is going to be a major part of this blog going forward, at least for the foreseeable future. I’m currently working on the UPF Assault Carrier and that will get posted in December. After that, you can expect to see the sathar assault carrier, a new UPF minelayer, and then recreations of the pirate assault scout, the freighter from the Federations Ships box, and finally recreations of the six ships from the Privateers box. That should keep me busy for a while and those will probably be released one a month for a while. I don’t think I’ll get to them any faster than that. And after that, I have ideas for a whole bunch of more ships.

This State of the Frontier post will probably become the regular last Tuesday post of the month for a while instead of just being an extra post the last day of the month. In it, I’ll update you on progress on the website updates, Frontier Explorer status, and any other projects that haven’t reached completion but which I’ve been working on. It really won’t change much, just go from an extra post to a regular one. Although if I do still have a lot to write about, I’ll bump it back to its extra post status to give you more content.

That leaves me with one or two other posts each month to keep the one-a-week schedule, depending on the way the days fall in the months to come (Dec and Mar have 5 Tuesdays, Jan and Feb have 4). I don’t know what I’m going to fill those with, although I’m leaning toward fleshing out more corporations like I did with Streel a while back. If people are interested, I could also post excerpts from the novel, although most of that is really rough and subject to great change when I get to editing in the future. The other thing that might end up here is bits of a new adventure I’m planning on starting (I know I need to finish the ones I’ve already started so they may show up as well). I hope to go to a con next year and run some Star Frontiers games and need to develop the adventures for those. I’m open to suggestions here for content. If there is something you’d like to see more of, please let me know.

That’s it for now. There is a lot coming up in the next few months so I’d better get to work. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions in the space below.