CONCEPT: This was one of my very earliest concepts - I wanted a unique way to include the weapons in the manual, which is something other booklets haven't done. What I was picturing was those cheap newsprint advertisements for car dealerships or grocery stores -- just badly put together and BUSY as all hell. I think it ended up being slightly too slick to get that across... but it's close! So many fonts, colors, text directions all at once...
REFERENCES-
- "Gar's Emporium" - The smugglers den from Action Stations - apparently it escaped the event horizon!
- The image in the corner is Bhurak Starkiller, taken from the original Claw Marks.
- The images are all from Origin's Privateer source models, rendered out anew. Note the cheapo rainbow effect to cover their jaggy edges.
- Gun specifications come from the original Privateer.
- Credit pricing is my own; although there were plans for an economy in Arena early on, this was created well after that was dropped.
- The "Mark" numbers on the guns tribute/add to the Wing Commander I blueprints, which gave these designations for the holy trinity of Wing Commander guns (laser, mass driver, neutron).
- "most efficient" - A nod to Wing Commander fans like Mark Minasi who calculated that the Tachyon was by far the most cost effective gun in the original Privateer.
- "Hades class ships" - There's a retcon! The massive awkward plasma weapons in Privateer are the same type found years later in Secret Ops. Go figure!
- The font along the side is the Kilrathi font from the Wing Commander movie, as published in the Confederation Handbook. I used a downloaded version someone made and tried not to use any of the 'non canon' letters... but that may have been abandoned in order to spell something in the background.
- In general, the gun descriptions are all designed not to hurt any of the 'how-it-works' descriptions from past titles.
