I think it would be nice and should make a decent project to create an SSD and R section rulebook that brings together all the ships, rules and SSD's for captains log 1-55. Would be nice to have them all in one place by race. Just a thought.

By Nick Samaras (Koogie) on Thursday, November 02, 2023 - 03:49 pm: Edit

At least half of the SSDs have been published in formal products. The master starship books include the Captain's Log ships not formally published.

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Thursday, November 02, 2023 - 07:38 pm: Edit

Also, the various MSSBs include a few pages of ships from the various Captain's Logs, including what number to find them in.

(HOWEVER, I do agree that a single product with all of them would be something I'd buy in a heartbeat. )

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, November 02, 2023 - 10:27 pm: Edit

I suspect it would have to be a series of products. It would get too big very fast. If you guess there are four new ships per issue that's 220 ships and I think there were a lot more than four.

By Dal Downing (Rambler) on Thursday, November 02, 2023 - 11:19 pm: Edit

I like the ideal of a Captains Log SSD Compilation. However I would only want the ships that have not been published previously or will be published shortly. Why buy these ships a third time?

Also I am assuming some of the Early Logs ship would need to be eliminated, The Photon Doomslayer an Hammerfield from CL#3 come to mind to mine.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, November 02, 2023 - 11:42 pm: Edit

My concern would be that some reviewer would complain that they were not updated with Crawford Boxes, advanced shuttles, and other things added over the years. That means doing work for what might not be serious sales. There is also the issue that the earliest SSDs were done by the "knife and tape" method and would have to be done over from scratch.

In any case SPP would probably be the one to do it and he'd have to finish Orion MSSB first. I'm not sure he wouldn't have to finish all of the MSSBs first. Now, if it just happened that Mike West and SPP used the same software (they don't) we could farm out the updates to Mike W, who is quite good. If I won the lottery I'd give ADB a million to expand with and that would include hiring Mike.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Friday, November 03, 2023 - 10:34 am: Edit

A further complication is that many of the Omega SSDs in Captain's Log are in Bruce Graw's distinct SSD format. Although some of the more recent playtest SSDs for that setting, such as for the Omega-Paravians in Captain's Log #54, are in the "standard" SFB format.

But even if one were to set all of the yet-to-be-formally-published Omega SSDs to one side, they might be better served being further sub-divided and channeled into different future products, depending on what type of unit (and for which Omega empire) they happen to be.

Speaking of which, I hope that the playtest Zosman Marauder material from Captain's Log #50, the CL50 Supplemental File, and Captain's Log #52 can be collected and expanded upon someday, in order to create a playtest Zosman e-product...

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, November 03, 2023 - 03:30 pm: Edit

You also have to understand that updates (such as Crawford boxes) would mean doing the Bruce-format SSDs over from scratch.

I do seriously appreciate that you guys are always trying to find products that ADB can do for zero/low work in quick time and that would be legitimate sales items. Such things have happened in the past and the extra sales are most welcome. Sadly, this isn't one of them (because some jerk on the PDF stores trashes us if we do a non-updated product).

You are the best-educated game players in history. Because I went to the effort to explain things, you guys LEARNED and now know more about how games are created and published than any other customer base in the history of the game industry. I salute you!

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, November 03, 2023 - 03:40 pm: Edit

That said, the answer here is "not right away" instead of "not ever". It's not a "zero work, good sales" product, so it goes into the list of "things we can pick from the next time we need a project".

If you want to increase the odds of this getting picked just post "I will buy it" and we'll count how many said that. Lots of interest in buying it means it gets done.

Or rather, they get done, as it would be in batches, maybe 50 or 100 SSDs, maybe 10 caplogs, maybe some other number, or something else entirely. It probably would not be done in a way that every caplog adds to previously-released products, so if we did it in 10CL batches we could do 41-50 but doing 51-60 would (Jean says) wait until we did CL#60.

By Jeff Guthridge (Jeff_Guthridge) on Friday, November 03, 2023 - 10:21 pm: Edit

I would like to have the opportunity to buy collected CLs actually. If you need to edit the text, even better, as this would allow you to trim out the irrelevant and overruled items such as they are. While the history in the pages of CL are a part of things, they do tend to increase the chaff-to-seed ratio when looking through things looking for that needle-in-the-haystack, especially for items that are not in the omnibus rule book or other rapid-access-respositories.

I appreciate that the system is a living thing and I’m wanting to condense thirty years (1992 to present) into as tight a package as can be done… That said, I know its no small task.

FWIW, please include me in the tally of those willing to buy collected CLs.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, November 04, 2023 - 12:24 am: Edit

I don't see collected captain's logs happening. We could not give you any cheaper price than buying all of the books separately. Since you can already buy all of the books separately, you can assemble the collection yourself.