So, are these things you've dredged up from some archive of yours, or did you whip that ship up in a day.
The short answer is both, kind of. The ship was done in one day.
The long answer... well, you're forgiven if you don't want to read it.
I have an intermittant 30 years of Traveller stuff I've come up with, but the majority of it is unrefined and not worth sharing. The whole idea behind me starting my blog was that I could take some of that work, clean it up, and then get it out to people who might get some use out of it, rather than having it sit in an old binder.
I've always loved drawing starship deck plans and cartography. I started drawing "starship geomorphs" in a sketchbook a couple of years ago after seeing
Dyson's Dodecadedron site. After I'd filled an entire sketchbook I figured it would be easy enough to clean them up and draw them in AutoCAD. I started looking at ways I could format them for printing and eventually decided I would try to make it something of quality and share it with the Traveller community. So the geomorphs you see posted as part of my challenge were done about a year ago.
Other things are seeds of ideas I have all over the place. My intent with the A-Z challenge was to kick myself in the butt and get more stuff cleaned up, maybe spending 1-3 hours a day putting some shine on something to make it worthwhile. For example, I thought the dropship would an easy one, because I already had a dropship and different modules drawn in one of my geomorphs. I thought I'd just take that, put some spit shine on it and give it to the world. The problem was I took the base drawing from a model of the Halo dropship. I don't mind borrowing stuff from more skilled people for my own gaming enjoyment, but I wouldn't feel right passing someone else's work off as my own. So I decided to design the dropship from scratch, but that meant redrawing all the payload modules to fit the new design. I really like the satisfaction of having a completely realized project - both the 2D deck plans AND a corresponding 3D model. But that takes time - especially when you are trying to meet some third criterion of complying to something like Traveller's starship construction rules. It's an additional challenge to get all that information together in a clean format that is easy to read and that people will enjoy looking at.
Now add to all those challenges the "constraint" of doing this kind of work alphabetically. One of the things I like about the A-Z challenge is that it is forcing me to think about things I might not have thought about otherwise. The downside occurs when you run into something like the letter K, which I had
nothing on. I had actually spent a couple of hours trying to write a review of the Kingdom RPG and how it can be used to benefit Traveller players, but I'm a notoriously slow writer and my heart just wasn't in it. My fall back position for this challenge is to go with something I've got partially worked up, but if not then I can always bang out a model and deck plan pretty quickly. So late yesterday I started going through my Traveller books to see what I could find out about K'kree ships. I'd seen them before but never designed one.
I've got about fifteen ideas for what to do with the letter S, so that should be easy. The good thing is that when this challenge is done, I'll have ideas for things to post for the next couple of years. Looking at random posts in this forum is also amazingly helpful. There's a ton of good information here.
