Good Monday, Wingnuts! I bring greetings from the land of the generally sleep-deprived...
Work this week continued in Chapter 6.3 (the vehicle catalog), with pretty much no work done in 7.3 (capital ships) this entire week. Monday saw the corrective work I indicated in the last update, mainly re-figuring costs, correcting typos and swapping out Mass Drivers on the craft that had been finished to that point. I also got initial work done on Chapters 6.4 and 7.4 (the non-canon catalogs) on Monday, adding in the preambles for those two chapters and creating the list of initial craft I intend to seed into both. I still haven't received any submissions from the community aside from starfox1701's Vanguard-class, but I'm still hopeful things will pick up soon. I also updated the cost of the Wake-class example in Chapter 7.2 to reflect the re-calculated cost of her onboard fighter compliment. Tuesday saw more corrective work, this time to deal with the effects of ECM on hit difficulties; stats for the Rapier-II/A, Crossbow, Epee, Morningstar and prototype Wraith were completed by the end of the day. On Wednesday my attention turned to Kilrathi craft, with stats completed on the Salthi, Dralthi-I, Dralthi-II, Krant, Jalthi, Gratha, Hhriss, Sartha, Drakhri and Jalkehi. I also decided to explictly list out the Tachyon Radar and Ion Engine accessories for all craft (as they are always part of the general Fightercraft chassis). I also took the time to extract information from the WC3 macro stat spreadsheet; I don't remember who initially posted that sheet to CIC, but thank you. Finally, on Thursday, I completed stats for the Grikath, WC2 Strakha, WC2 Gothri, Privateer Gothri, and the prototype Jrathek from Academy, wrapping up all small craft up to the end of the WC2 era.
That put me towards the end of the craft I had sized up to that point, so I began in with the Armada craft and hit a snag in regards to the size of several craft. Ultimately, I decided that the length stat there represented a "long dimension" rather than a proper length, and treated it as such; for many of those craft, that meant treating the listed length statistic as wingspan. Not a great solution and I'm not happy having done it, but it did get me back on track with sizing quickly. The last craft I was able to size on Thursday was the Darket; I had to request 3D views from the community on the Ekapshi, which was the next craft on my list (this in turn has lead to a on-going discussion of ship sizes in Privateer, which was not my intent and which caused me some further headaches, though the issues raised have been resolved to my satisfaction at this point) . Thursday also saw the removal of redundant craft entries from the WC4 and Prophecy craft lists.
After inputting the calculated data early in the day on Friday and making a slight change to the remaining empty tables, I worked up a list of remaining fightercraft to be sized, and began sizing them. I was able to complete sizing all small craft through WC4 on Friday. I also was able to add information to my notes on the lengths of Nephilim ships, thanks to the efforts of the WCPedia project (I owe a tremendous word of thanks to whoever added the shipsalien.doc information to the Nephilim entries in particular). The weekend was spent inputting sizing information into the tables as it became available, shooting side-shot screenshots of the craft from Arena and Prophecy (had the top downs of these already from the work I was doing with silhouettes late last year), and pixel hunting. As of this morning, I have measurements for all small craft that will be in the game except for the Privateer 2 craft; no size data is available for those craft, so I may ultimately get stuck there. If that happens, that happens; I can always move on to capships and come back to the P2 craft if I need to. I have reason to be hopeful that some size info on the P2 craft will become available soon.
Plan for this week is to continue in 6.3, of course. With most of my pixel hunting done at this point, determining size classes for the remaining craft will be simple enough (again, excepting the aforementioned P2 craft). I intend to get that information put into the tables and to continue to build craft statistics in sequence. I'm hopeful that I'll make substantial progress again this week, and perhaps be able to move on to capital ships soon.
I'm still accepting submissions for the game's non-canonical sections; just post your ideas to this thread.
WCRPG remains at 79.28% complete as of this morning.