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This is starting to sound like a subject for the proposals board.

By Chuck Strong (Raider) on Friday, April 03, 2026 - 05:25 pm: Edit

Ref: Aux Escorts (F&E: SAE, LAE, JAE, HAE)

In F&E, may I suggest that if these escorts are assigned to higher speed units, that the the higher speed, escorted GROUP be treated as slow speed units. I'd further suggest that these escorts must forego their (+1) escort bonus when escorting a higher speed unit.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, April 04, 2026 - 02:32 am: Edit

I think you need more of a penalty than that for having an SAE escort an NCV.

By Mike Erickson (Mike_Erickson) on Saturday, April 04, 2026 - 12:22 pm: Edit

How about if an aux escort is in the group then -1 total escort group size?

--Mike

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Saturday, April 04, 2026 - 01:22 pm: Edit

"the Harbor Tug and Salvage Tug are both hard welded units" Makes sense. If they're built to push/pull things around, they need to be hard welded and not just bolted together.


Garth L. Getgen

By Simon Duggan (Gamegater) on Sunday, August 16, 2026 - 07:40 pm: Edit

What's the status of CL55? CL54 was published in 2020, its now 2026.. The highest issue I see on the starfleetstore and drivethrurpg is CL54. CL Use to be Semi-Annual, so we are behind a few issues if that is still the case. Or Has CL died?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, August 16, 2026 - 10:22 pm: Edit

We have just been busy with Covid, health issues, and increasing physical age. I'm still working on it but not actively. It will happen, just not this year.

By Simon Duggan (Gamegater) on Sunday, August 16, 2026 - 11:03 pm: Edit

That sucks. The more I ask questions the more disappointed with the answers I become. I understand Covid, Health Issues and age, but it’s been 6 years since the last CL. I know you’re a small team, but surely someone could have worked on the next CL by now. I also know you are spread thing with all your projects, maybe it’s time to start thinking of delegating?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 02:47 am: Edit

There is no one to delegate such a project to. We have already delegated pieces of it. Delegation in the past has had mixed results with too many of the delegatees abusing the privilege and more simply never doing the work. F&E has been delegated to the staff for a decade but they cannot produce what I used to produce by myself. Feel free to point to someone qualified to do the job and willing to work 40 hours a week for 1/3 what they could make in any other job. (I have been working for 1/3 of what I could make as an engineer for 40 years, and for the last five years I have been paid literally 1/7th of what I could make as a retired engineer doing occasional consulting. I get paid $12 an hour and could make more as a cashier at a local quickie mart. Just to be clear, I have never been paid any dividend for owning the corporation. I could make twice as much as a junior assistant manager at Burger King. I could make more as an overage reserve sergeant answering the phone at the local Army Reserve center and get VA benefits which I do not get now. You're welcome.)

At the time of CL50 I was working 80 hours a week and so was Petrick. Now, we both get about 20 and even that is a struggle. I can barely walk and Petrick is stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Our doctors and my wife beg us to just lock the door and walk away, which would be the best thing for our own health. I have gone to the hospital twice in the last decade with an insignificant chance of survival but I stayed alive. Petrick's doctors have told us to get to the hospital fast and bring a catholic priest with us three times but he survived (with damage).

I have been negotiating to sell the company for more than a decade but have never found anyone who could handle the job. Lots of companies will take it for $1 and trash the entire product line and do something entirely different, but I haven't kept this thing alive 40 years for $1 and I am not selling to a new owner who will trash the product line and start over. The last guy who offered to buy the company had a business plan that involved Petrick and I each working 60 hours a week as employees (who would be paid for only 40 hours) while he did nothing but take any surplus cash. I didn't care for his plan. Another group of bidders never displayed any ability to actually run the company and the only "new product" they showed me was a rehash of existing SSDs in a sneaky plan to get the customers to pay again for things they already had with zero improvements. A major game company offered me $80,000 for ADB but only if I left $50,000 in the bank account on my way out the door AND I would be expected to pay the existing employees out of my pocket, meaning I would actually pay someone to take the company, trash the product line, and produce a new "woke game system for the modern audience." Yeah, no.

By Simon Duggan (Gamegater) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 09:03 am: Edit

@Steve, thank you for the response. As a business owner I see a number of things that make me go HU? But I will not pick the response apart. I guess ADB is going to do what ADB does.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 09:04 am: Edit

I'm genuinely curious how one would write a "woke" game system for a space combat game. Kinder, gentler disruptors and hellbores?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 11:45 am: Edit

Simon: feel free to email me ideas, but I doubt you can think of anything we haven’t. We don’t do what we do, we do what we have to do. For myself and my family the best thing I could have ever done would have been to stay out of the game business. I sacrificed a lot to keep ADB going. Engineers get a lot of opportunities that I had to pass up. The answer to every suggestion we’re ever got was “we tried that already.”

Jessica: Their plans shocked me. Quotas for characters of this or that category were just the first step. Promotion of certain modern political views woven into all backgrounds. Ship names picked based on a certain modern ideology. Lots more. Every scenario background and ship class history would be required to include political statements.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 11:54 am: Edit

The UFP Star Fleet is the ultimate meritocracy. With vanishingly few exceptions, you don't get promoted - heck, you don't make it through the academy - without being excellent. (Particularly the case in a post-scarcity future, where the only reason to join Star Fleet is because you really want to be part of Star Fleet.) Quota systems make no sense in such an environment.

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 11:55 am: Edit

ADB has that amazing Paramount license. That alone has considerable value.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 02:50 pm: Edit

Anyone willing to pay me considerable value for the amazing license should call the office and ask for me. If I were 50 instead of 75 I could think of four ways (at least) to make a $1 million profit, starting with RPGs, novels, and comic books.

By Eddie E Crutchfield (Librarian101) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 02:59 pm: Edit

I really wonder about the license, it gives you some abilities, but what does it block out. How much more could you do if you could tie the game to the movies and their advertising.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 03:11 pm: Edit

I would hope that, beyond taking care to review the "real-world" array of licences and agreements which permit ADB to operate as it does (and obliges them to follow the rules and guidelines they must in order to do so), a potential future investor in ADB would be mindful to review the "in-universe" material in products like Prime Directive Federation to get a good sense of how things can, or perhaps cannot, operate in the SFU.

Or, to put it another way: questions about such things as how Star Fleet selects its Academy cadets (major planets each have a number of "slots" they can advance nominees for); how its existence is itself a political compromise (said major planets took a lot of convincing to give up their separate fleets - and even longer for the concept of the National Guards to be formalized); how much of an operating budget Star Fleet has to manage (a perennial "peacetime" debate in the halls of the Federation Council and Assembly); and whose taxes are being spent in the first place (with different tiers of membership, "full" members have a higher tax rate than associate member planets): these, and many more besides, are covered in a book I'd consider to be John Sickels' greatest contribution to the Star Fleet Universe to date.

Which is not to say that everyone reading PD: Feds would agree with every aspect of the Federation as presented within. But, perhaps that itself is part of the goal: to walk a careful "editorial" line that does not lean too heavily towards one side over the other, but rather aims to provide readers on different sides of the political spectrum to find enough common ground to share this IP together.

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By contrast, I find it instructive to consider how BattleTech has evolved over time from a "real-world" perspective.

IP issues with the "Unseen" aside, BT was part and parcel of FASA 1.0 until that company closed its doors. Alas, various sub-components of BT found themselves with different IP holders thereafter. For example: the video game side of BT is under a different holder than the tabletop game side.

Despite these challenges, "classic" BT persisted through the efforts of various licence holders: starting with FanPro, and then to Catalyst Game Labs.

Although they were at a remove from those working on the Clix-based MechWarrior: Dark Age/Age of Destruction. During the time MW:DA/AoD was a thing, there were limits in how far forward in the timeline "classic" BT was permitted to go.

Also, there were issues for a time surrounding who had the right to re-publish either the "classic" or "Dark Age" novels.

And the problems surrounding the "Unseen" took their own time to resolve.

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Despite this, things have been on the up in recent years.

Tabletop BT - to include both the "classic' scale and its faster-playing counterpart Alpha Strike - have been going through something of a renaissance, not least with the help of two successful Kickstarter campaigns.

Many of the issues from past years have since been resolved. CGL has been able to move into, and then past, the time period covered by the Clix game: the Dark Age has given way to the new IlClan Era.

Although, just as the SFU provides support for different time periods (such as the Early Years) here, there is ongoing support for different BT eras: to include going "back" to the rise and fall of the first Star League.

In "editorial" terms, not everyone has been fully on-board with some of the decisions made along the way. But then, even back in the days of FASA 1.0, there were already portions of the fanbase who had very different views on things from the Clan Invasion era onwards - so a little Venn diagram-ing is part and parcel of things.

Still, through all of this, the core mechanics of "classic" BT remain, though the degree of iterative adjustments and errata notes it has digested is perhaps comparable to that seen in Captain's Edition SFB.

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What might the BT example mean for ADB and the SFU?

It's difficult to say for certain.

Still, much as I'm glad to see that long-running gaming IP persist through its own times of trouble into the present day, I hope that the universe this BBS is dedicated to can find a viable way to chart its own path going forward.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 05:15 pm: Edit

We can do more of what we have done.

A license that mentions the TV shows or Movies or characters would pay seven times the royalties, last two years and then be cancelled with our creation licensed to other companies (for two years), and an approval process that would make us lucky to do one product a year.

By Simon Duggan (Gamegater) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 05:26 pm: Edit

Nothing wrong with TOS. But I wonder if it would help us understand if we knew what the license was, just a general idea not specifics. That way we know what we can suggest or cover without getting ADB into trouble. I want to say the license is for what is in the Original Technical Manual only, but that maybe wishful thinking.

Also what is the separation between the license and ADB created stuff? Its obvious you can create cardstock games, and miniatures that are outside of Paramount Star Trek Universe.

Another thought, is ADB open to licenses as well?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 09:32 pm: Edit

I've posted this many times, it's no secret. The license was issued before there was anything beyond TOS/TAS so none of that is covered. It covers "what we had used before it was issued" so it's not all of of TOS/TAS. We can create new empires, planets, starships, species, weapons, and fiction. We cannot use the characters from the show. We cannot use the Enterprise but we can mention it only in cases where it would look stupid not to mention it, like a ship list or that story we did about ENEMY BELOW. We have a separate license for the tech manual.

I am not sure what "open to licenses" means. We cannot issue licenses to anyone else, but we can do "joint ventures" with other companies. We can put stuff we create on stores like Shapeways and DriveThru and Kindle. We have talked with Paramount about getting another license but their terms are unworkable; we'd have to give up the non-expiring license we have with no guarantee that a new license could be renewed. We don't have the manpower to get a Star Wars license, for example.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 09:34 pm: Edit

Before it was issued, we used a license from Franz Joseph Designs which Paramount accepted as legit, so we were never unlicensed or illegal. We still have the FJ license.

By Simon Duggan (Gamegater) on Monday, August 17, 2026 - 10:18 pm: Edit

@Steve Thank you, I had not seen the license info before, I still have a whole load of archived posts to go though so maybe in there someplace.

So basically as long as the TOS TV show content is not touched, your license is broad. Just one word for that..... NICE...

AS for the 'Open to licenses', you own the work you have created for SFB, FC, etc... Can't you issue licensees as long as its within your framework? Now maybe I am thinking of Joint Ventures as you put it. Do you have a restriction on what joint ventures can be? I know in the past you have stopped Fan Created empires and associated SSDs, so stuff like that is still a no go?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 - 12:10 am: Edit

We cannot license someone to use, for example, the Lyrans because the Lyrans are linked to the licensed material.

We could, and have, issued licenses for non-SFU games such as SIEGE OF LENINGRAD.

Joint ventures would be things like CALL TO ARMS STAR FLEET. Both companies spend money and both companies get money. We have a veto over anything said or printed or otherwise done.

We have a policy that allows thousands of third party SSDs and dozens of empires on a no money fan distribution thing. We have stopped people trying to make money using our property or Paramount property without permission.

We have deleted about 90% of things posted over the last thirty years just on a lack of space. Good luck finding everything.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 - 10:22 am: Edit

There is now a permanent topic for this. I'm not sure what happened to the old topic we had for that; maybe it's still here. But we can chat about this in that topic.

By Simon Duggan (Gamegater) on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 - 10:44 am: Edit

Good idea, felt like we were sidelining Captains Log. What is the topic called and where did you create it?

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 - 11:17 am: Edit

Simon, you'll find it under:

Company-Conventions-Stores-Ideas
About the Company
The Paramount License

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 - 04:27 pm: Edit

http://www.starfleetgames.com/discus/messages/12032/44079.html?1787083416

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 - 04:35 pm: Edit

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Quote:

Good idea, felt like we were sidelining Captains Log.

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