Federation Commander

[BrentO]

Are the SSD books for the Omega sector available in PDF? And possibly color, too? I can't seem to find them on W23, DriveThru RPG or Wargame Vault. Thanks for the help.

[Valander]

Bump. I've gotten a couple buddies into SFB recently (finally, another group to play with), and we were talking about looking into Omega stuff "soon." Since we're minis junkies, I'm not as concerned about the counters and have a fondness for digital products, but only the Omega Master Rulebook is currently available. I'd love the SSD books to be available, too.
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[Steve Cole]

We are working on these. They have to be updated before they can be uploaded or certain picky reviewers trash the entire company's ratings for uploading the non-updated books.

We have a lot of books to update and haven't done them all yet, but we will.

The omega books are hard to update because they were done by Bruce Graw in a software package we don't use (and cannot get because it's out of support and doesn't run on our machines). Translating them into a format we can use is tricky and very very time consuming. It literally takes five or six times as much work per SSD to update Omega. It's actually easier to start over from blank paper but we don't have time to do that. So a given number of "Steve Petrick Days" will either update five alpha books or one omega book, so alpha (which sells much better anyway) gets done first.

And it gets worse. We never had the files for Omega One and they were destroyed when Bruce had a hard disk crash, so those would have to be done over from blank paper.

As a point of business philosophy, we could in theory take an hour each day to do one lost omega SSD and in three months they'd be done. But the problem is there are about 20 of these "take one hour a day" projects begging for that hour (wall of honor, proposals board, converting the Shapeways pics into clip art, doing FC ship card packs, and many more) and we can, at best, divert one or two hours a day from new products into such older projects. And there isn't much point in doing one page of one of the 20 per day in rotation as that would mean progress at the rate of one page a month and it would take decades to finish anything.

We're doing the best we can but the number of hours in a day isn't infinite. Right now if anything gets done on a hour-per-day project it's usually during unpaid overtime.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Valander]

Thanks for the reply. I completely understand the resource constraints on a small company. Add to that tech challenges of unknown/lost/unsupported file types, and, well, yeah.

Completely agree, also, that Alpha stuff should be priority. I buy that up as it comes.
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[Steve Cole]

We are making a lot of good progress on a lot of projects. With so many product lines to support, we cannot do every product line every day or even every week, but we will see some slow movement on getting those SSDs replaced and updated after the current round of projects is over. Of those, two are done (Gorn MSSB, Merchants), one is out of our hands (GURPS licensor review), one is over half way done (ACTASF2, I'm plowing through the Klingon roster), and the last (Star Fleet Index) has been pushed back because it needs more work than we thought.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander