This post is only a few days late. But there is a good reason. I’ve spent the last three weeks packing, moving, and settling in in Tucson, AZ. I’m down here for the rest of the year as my wife is on sabbatical at the University of Arizona as I mentioned in my previous State of the Frontier post. With that out of the way, on to the regular content.

Looking Back

July went basically as planned. It started with the Second Battle of Theseus post followed by the monthly Detailed Frontier Timeline post. My last post was the remaining deck plans for the HSS History’s Hope. That post, combined with the previous posts about the ship (HSS History’s Hope posts – first five posts at the link), provide everything you would need to use the ship in your game. At some point I’ll do a full technical manual for the ship.

That was it for posts on the site. After finishing the deck plans, my daughter came to visit from grad school and we shifted in the packing and moving mode. That said, there was some work that went on behind the scenes.

First, I continued to work and get ahead of the Detailed Frontier Timeline. I’m about two weeks ahead at this point and trying to keep posts scheduled so they come out on time. I’ll talk more about that in the Looking Forward section below.

Next, I started looking into a revamp of the Frontier Explorer website to make it more mobile friendly and simpler not that we are not actively publishing any more.

Finally, I started assembling the resources for a new project that I hope people will like that I’ll talk more about in the Looking Forward section as the first post in that project should be coming out in August. So let’s move on.

Looking Forward

First up as always will be the Detailed Frontier Timeline post. It should have been up yesterday but I wasn’t quite settled and able to work on it. Related to the timeline, I have events figured out through August 14th but there is going to be a major battle on the 15th that I need to play out before I can move beyond that. This will represent a change in tactics on the part of the sathar and it will be interesting to see how things play out. If you look closely at the timeline published so far (or are following on Twitter), you might be able guess where the battle will be.

I mentioned before that I have a new project I’m starting up. In comments about the Extended Frontier Map, people have commented that they’d like to see astrographic data about the star systems. So I’ve been assembling a suite of software tools to generate star systems and world maps. I’m going to start generating star system data for each of the star systems on that map and generating a catalog. I haven’t decided on the format or where it will be housed (here or the Star Frontiers Network wiki) so there might be some fits and starts as I get it going and work out the details but a first trial system should be posted this month. If I can streamline the production process, you might start seeing a new system every week but that will probably take some months.

Another thing that happened last month is that my old Arcane Game Lore blog went off-line. The blog has been fairly dead for a while and apparently my co-blogger, who was hosting the site, allowed the domain name to expire and it is now owned by someone else and seem to be some advertising site. Unluckily, I never did a backup of the posts and I can’t get a hold of the site owner to see if he has them or access to the data still. Luckily, they are preserved on the Internet Archive so I’m going to start rebuilding the posts here. There are posts from 2013-2018 from me there to pull over and at one point I was posting weekly. I basically stopped posting there when I started this blog. The posts will be back-dated to their original post date so they may not show up in the RSS feed for this site, but as I get them posted I’ll make a summary post for those interested in going back to read what I wrote back then.

That’s probably enough to keep me busy, but if I find some more time, I might start working on 3D modeling again and finish up the Privateer miniatures. I’ll also be working on website updates.

Final Thoughts

I don’t really have anything else to add. Other than to thank my Patreon supporters and encourage anyone that likes what they find here to support me on Patreon as well.