Just thinking out loud. If I recall correctly in the military you buy your own pins, rank and ribbons that you have earned. If it was possible to have custom ribbons and medals made to mirror the SFU medals and ribbons would someone buy the ribbons and medals they have earned form ADB? Then maybe go to conventions wearing said ribbons as part of a SFU uniform to demo SFU games?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, October 18, 2014 - 04:34 pm: Edit

We looked into this once and the minimum production runs and set up fees were not workable.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Saturday, October 18, 2014 - 05:07 pm: Edit

Bummer, I wonder how the Honor Harrington fans are pulling it off. They must be bigger than I think- http://store.trmn.org/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1_7

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, October 18, 2014 - 05:50 pm: Edit

Dunno, but I may know who to ask.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, October 23, 2014 - 03:47 pm: Edit

Several people have asked (a couple of them on our page on Facebook) about awards from long long ago.

Medals and other awards really did not start until Doomsday (the earliest ones recorded are 1992). Anything done pre-doomsday has yet to have an award issued for it. We want to eventually go back and do those, but there are problems.

One is that it was a long time ago, records were not kept because nobody even thought of giving out awards, and it's literally a matter of taking any given product, looking at the staff list, then turning through it page by page looking for any names. That's a ton of work in itself (just to get the campaign ribbons for the products), and it's not that simple.

As noted, no records were kept, so other than the vague notion that Felix Hack did more than anybody, we litterally have no way to know if a staffer in 1982 got a bronze star or a silver star or a gold star or a commendation. (At some point the Medals Board is going to just give everyone the same medal. We might even invent a new one, and Old Warrior Star or something.) Worse, there really is no such thing as a staff list for 1979-1992. We would have to reverse engineer a staff list based on what products came out that year. That means going through about 50 books as above and trying to compile the data.

And it gets worse, two ways. First, lots of staffers did work not on specific products, and there is no record of (or way to reward) that work. Second, if a scenario printed in some product was reprinted in some other, we need to track that specific scenario (or ship, or story, or whatever) because you only get the device-ribbon for the first publication; you get a blank ribbon (for some things) if it's reprinted later with no further work on your part. Then again, some people did a whole scenario while others just suggested the title. Since 1992 we kept records and make sure that those who did more work got a nicer ribbon, but there is literally no way to figure that out for the pre-doomday era.

Which means it's not just make a list of all of the pre-doomsday products and randomly go thorugh them looking for names and giving everyone a diamond-ribbon (since we can't tell who earned a star or cross) and maybe three or five random books get done every captain's log and sooner or later we have done them all. We actually need to do the books in order, and just figuring out what order that was is literally a matter of looking at the copyright dates. Assuming we can find a copy of every product and put them on the table in order.

Things like research bars there is no way to reconstruct. Term papers are actually included in the current counts. Origins judges ... there just isn't any solid record of every year and who was there and what they did.

Now, I have been contacted by (or seen posts by) a dozen people. Here are three random examples.

One staffer wants his medals for 1982-92 (and he deserves them). But as above we have no idea what years he served or how much he did. In theory if I had all 50 (or however many) products I might reconstruct a staff list and give him half a dozen Old Warrior Stars but I dont have that stack of products.

One guy says he designed some of the Hydran ships (and I don't doubt he did). But those were pre-doomsday. In theory I could figure out just that one guy in four or five hours, but what about everyone else from back then? Do I do the ribbons (not medals in this case) for people in the order they complain? I guess maybe. or not.

A third guy wanted to know how he rated. Well, there are no awards for him on file so he must have done stuff prior to doomsday. He wasn't on staff so he won't have medals, but he might have campaign ribbons. But as above, there are two choices (both of which assume we can actually assemble a complete archive of pre-doomsday products and find 4-44 hours to go through them). One is to go through everything compiling everybody, the other is go go through everything looking for his name.

Somewhere, somebody is about to offer to help do this. Well, before you do, let me get back from my trip and figure out how that input could be compiled, and what format it needs to be in. As always, it can easily as long to check something as to just do it, so for any volunteer award compilers to be effective, you need to send in the data in a way we can check it most easily. Before everybody invents his own way of doing what he thinks will work, let me find time to establish a system.

I have always wanted to issue awards (of some kind) for pre-doomsday but as you can see it is much harder (and may produce less rewarding results) than doing each product as we move along.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, May 16, 2015 - 04:05 pm: Edit

All CL50 awards are now on the Wall of Honor, unless we missed somebody.

Check your page. You are the only one responsible for the accuracy of your records.