The Sound of Progress...

Hi.

Some good news and some bad news.

Good news first:

- the White Knight has been redone by Jake. A little background and cleanup and it will be good to go. One man down.

- We’ve contacted other original artists and gotten them to accept commissions for rework.

- We’ve been offered a nice ‘Mech piece by Eric Ou, originally commissioned by Brian O’Connor. Rather than attempt to redo the Capellan Emperor, I have decided (based on the fact that there are a number of new Emperor designs that debut in our period) to replace the Emperor with an updated version of the Terran Hegemony’s Battleaxe. Yes, it is an upgrade to the original. Take a look at the top of this post to judge whether or not the art is fresh. The writeup is in the early stages, but I promise it will fit and it will be good. And yes, I will offer the Emperor as an online addition to anyone who wants it – the art was improved by David White and actually looks better than the original it was based on.

- We are introducing a new ‘Mech for the Lyran Alliance as mentioned before, replacing the Zeus PE. The Vagabond writeup is in the end stage and looks quite promising. It’s a pulse beast.

- Ian Stead is making solid progress on the redo of the Roland Omni Tank. He will be doing several other pieces as well.

- Eric did a preliminary sketch of the Isometrus, version 2. Unfortunately he has lost the original sketch in a move, but plans to refine it further.

And now the bad news:

- Our layout man is still down. He is in sporadic contact, but is still recovering.

- Our local man doing background art has not made any progress – he is faced with going under the knife soon for an unspecified ailment. I will be shifting to a new background artist within the next few days. Hark! It’s the curse of the TRO!

- I have ten vehicles and three ‘Mechs which need new art. Some of it is already in progress, other stuff needs to be commissioned. This is going to set me back another $300 so if anyone wants to pitch in, I would be grateful. I am still making payments on the color plates done by David Dryburgh.

I will be going through the Battleaxe writeup this week and re-doing the credits, TOC and Index sections to adjust for our new machines. Then I will put each machine (including its variants) in PDF format and install them in the Record Sheet folder.

That’s pretty much it. My son ‘graduates’ from Junior High School this week and is very happy to have the schoolwork lifted from his shoulders for a couple of months. He will be attending PE over the summer and should have a ball. Meanwhile, I have finally gotten down to attending some much-neglected yard work (the moss is taking over!) and spreading new bark on our front garden areas. It is good to get outside even though the weather in these parts still feels like spring.

Take care and thanks for stopping by.

My apologies for the musical box, but two or three songs have been acting up and despite repeated attempts to reload, they are still gunched. The site will not permit uploads at the moment, so perhaps this has something to do with the provider site itself.

Steve