Federation Commander

[cnuzzi]

I asked about this on the FB group, and Jean said to email SVC and ask if Steve Petrick could work on it. As I don't know SVC's email, I figured I would post it here and hopefully someone will bring it to his attention.

I recently bought a number of FC and SFB products from w23, including the SFB R Modules. One of them, R2, has the SSDs available, but not the rulebook. Can the R2 Rulebook be released on PDF?

[djdood]

If you still want to email SVC, his contact info is on the Contact page for the ADB website.

http://www.starfleetgames.com/contact.shtml
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[Steve Cole]

The problem (here we go again) is that back when we posted a few non-updated books as PDFs we got so totally trashed in reviews that it cost us thousands of dollars in sales. So, we only upload books that have been updated, and updating one book takes a couple of months. There is a list of books to update and I am sure if R2 is not on line that means it hasn't been updated. There is a staff meeting tomorrow and I'll bring up the question. (I am not the one who updates them and I really don't know where that project is.)

Okay, I just this minute sent an email across the hall to Steve Petrick (chief of SFB) telling him to bring his list of what modules have been updated & upload and which ones have not. I have instructed him to pick the easiest one and get it uploaded this month. Given the MSSBs I would think R2 would be fairly easy.

BTW, my email address is literally in every product.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[cnuzzi]

Great, thank you! I was actually wondering if it may have been an oversight, given that it was so unusual for the SSD book for a module to be out on PDF w/o the rulebook.

Stupid me, I didn't think to look in the books for your email.

[Steve Cole]

Actually, I got some people together yesterday and found out that the reason the other books haven't been updated is we still have stocks of the old printing. It was deemed to be non productive to update R2 if that mean throwing away hundreds of dollars worth of books we already paid for.

The matter is complicated and will be reviewed at a future meeting.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Steve Cole]

Okay... there is good news and not exactly good not exactly bad news.

The staff meeting today found that the stockpile (232) of R2 rulebooks is not much money (they were printed many years ago in a batch of 10,000 so they cost about a dime each). So at some near term point they will be discarded and new updated books will be done.

That said...

We have just run out of print of another book which has to be done first.

Then we will see if anything else needs to be done before we update R2.

We will be spending four weeks doing nothing but CL54 at some point that will start sometime in June. (That depends on when I recover from the 3 Jun surgery. If you don't know, I have lost 150 pounds in the last two years so there is this ugly empty circus tent wrapped around my middle and only one way for it to go away. That will involve a very long but very shallow incision and I have to be very careful until it heals or my insides will fall out.)

I should be back at my desk sometime between 10 and 30 June. Then Steve Petrick and I will do CL54. Before and after CL54, he will update whatever he can. It is at least theoretically possible that the out of stock book and R2 and something else could all get done before I get back from surgery. It is not impossible that even during recovery someone could bring me a clipboard of pages to review. It is also not impossible that he might not get R2 done before sometime in August. But at least it's moving and I thank you for inspiring me to look into the matter.

I do look forward to spending my recovery period playing PLANETBASE and CLIFF EMPIRE on Steam.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[cnuzzi]

Thank you for the update. Good luck with your operation!

[cnuzzi]

Is the Module R2 Rulebook PDF likely to be released by the end of this year?

[Steve Cole]

I doubt it; there are too many others that need updating. We cannot upload anything we do not update or we get trashed in reviews which lowers the sales of every product. We will update everything but not all on one day.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[cnuzzi]

I'm curious - why was it decided not to release the R2 Rulebook along with the SSD books, like the other R-Module books were?

[Steve Cole]

We update the books separately. When we ran out of R2 SSD books, we updated it. We had R2 rulebooks in stock (the computer, which could be wrong, says we still have 1992 printing rulebooks in the warehouse) so there was no need to switch it to POD and so it wasn't updated at that time.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Jiraiya1969]

[Steve Cole]

We have never done that before. Updated books are separate products. PDFs are separate products. Some companies price their books higher than we do in order to include PDFs; we price each product for what it's worth and let you spend your money where you want to without having to buy things you don't want to buy. Any company that gives you something free is charging more for something else.

I will note that once you buy a PDF you get the updates if/when they happen automatically and free.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Jiraiya1969]

[Steve Cole]

The MRB gets updated now and then with everything done. You'd have to ask Jean or Steve Petrick if they update it every time they update a component (they don't read this forum so Email will work). I honestly don't know. I have enough trouble figuring out which F&E Books I have updated and in what order.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander