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Thursday, October 16, 2014

Yet Another Hydran Master Star Ship Book Update

This is Steven Petrick posting.

Jean Sexton has completed her read through of book's draft, and I have done the "designer's notes" page (which she has not read yet, but that is more or less a formality as she does not  have to go and look anything up).

At this juncture, I have some graphics SVC has not transferred to me as of yet (would be embarrassing to publish the book with "Federation PFs" on some of the "placeholder" graphics used to get page count), and four graphics that need to be corrected.

Other than that, I am just waiting on any final reports from the field. Then I will run off a final "check copy" which Jean will compare to her annotated corrections copy to make sure all of her marked corrections were done properly.

We will then do a final look at the layout.

That may require re-PDFing the book several times (the program has a tendency for stuff on pages to "jump" due to accumulated fractional errors in the layout, so the only way to be sure the layout works is to do a PDF, look for places where a jump has occurred, go back into the file and insert a blank line, sometimes take a blank line out, and then re-PDF the book and do it all again). That, fortunately can all be done on the computer screen.

So far, all of this has caused the book to grow from 106 to 110 pages.

There are always little niggling issues that turn up.

The original "R1.0" section file is modified for each new empire, and that always requires looking for things that get carried over from an earlier empire, and sometimes forgetting to add things for the new empire. An example of the latter is the FRX. The advanced technology fleet repair dock is an "X unit," so it should have access to Stinger-X fighters, but this was overlooked until just earlier this week (its fighter data has been adjusted to allow it to use Stinger-Xs). This is an issue that does not come up with any other empire (no one else has X-fighters), which is why it got overlooked, as the unit is not in any normal "X-technology" product, but was published in Module R11. Hydran X-ships that appeared in Modules X1 and X1R, and even in Captain's Log (the D7HX) allow for Stinger-X fighters, but previously not the FRX, but if a Hydran SBX or BATSX can have Stinger-X fighters, then surely the FRX should be able to operate them, so this has been (as noted) corrected.