The final art rolls in...

Hello there!

Thank you for your patience.

The final two pieces of vehicle art came in this week from Lee Madison, who did a very good job with both. I discovered while over at ClassicBattleTech.com that I could not equip the Striker II with a single Artemis-enhanced LRM-10 and keep the three SRM-4 launchers standard – it would seem that if you install Artemis on one missile rack, the others on the vehicle, regardless of type, must also be equipped.

This made the Striker II overweight, so I just removed Artemis and added an additional ton of ammunition. Naturally, I had to change the writeup to reflect this. The Velite is good as it stands, so no changes were necessary.

Also, Geoff and I hammered out the Jenner writeup and Eric Ou came through with the wonderful illustration at the top of this blog entry.

All that remains of art is the possible addition of those vignettes I mentioned earlier by David Dryburgh, and to be honest, I would rather pay him up to date before asking again. I have no doubt he can do them, but I owe him about $100 and need to finish paying him and several others before moving on to actual production of the PDF.

The PDF itself – layout issues still need to be resolved, and I have not had the best of luck staying in contact with Jim Devlin. I am going to go over the existing layouts and mark the changes that must be made prior to actually sending the information Jim needs to get started.

As for that information, I’ve made significant inroads into packaging the material, but still have not gotten a mailing address from Jim for mailing the info on a CD or jump drive. I will shoot an email to him after posting this blog entry to see what can be done. Otherwise I will have to ship it to him in 25 meg snippets, and that won’t be good for him when it comes to downloading.

I am also going to take a step in the next few days towards a more thorough vetting of the existing writeups. Part of the problem is that I am correcting on the fly as I read the text on a monitor. Well and good, as far as that goes, but I have found that I actually do better work if I am reading it from a printout. Call it a hangover from the days when I would proofread my work on hobby electronics using fanfold printouts from my Commodore C-128.

Whatever the reason, I have found many styling errors, repeated phrases and words as well as other troublesome flaws when reading a printout of a single entry. So this is how it will go: I will step out and purchase a new ink cartridge for my printer, along with a ream of paper. Then I will go through and print out every single entry, including art. Punch holes in all of them, then put them in a binder. Then take the binder with me wherever I go and make the changes with pen and ink. Finally, I will enter the changes electronically and that should do it.

The art is essentially done. The edited writing is nearly so. I have to finish making payments and we can get on with the production. As you can see from the previous paragraphs, there will be plenty to do while waiting for the money to arrive, so it’s not like I will be idle. Just a few bases to touch and when the last payment goes through, we should have everything lined up.

Then it will be up to our layout man to get things together and a collaborative effort to ensure they are done right. I will keep you posted.

Taken directly from my TRO tracking sheet, I owe the following:

JP Sphagnum - $25
Lee Madison – at least $60, give or take depending on how many models he wants, if any.
David Dryburgh - $105
Jeremy Pea - $50
Ian Stead - $15

That all, so far as I know. If anyone reading this knows of an amount I owe them still, please drop me a line and tell me how much.

Thanks for stopping in.

Steve