Still no ideas for How-To articles for this month, but I think an FnF will work instead. It helps that I’m nearly finished with the first one. My FnF articles are basically just ‘wiki style’ pages for fictional things I really like with my personal input thrown in somewhere. Also pictures. They’re not typical blog articles but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The other article is definitely going to be a Code Fairy follow up, I just need a good day to sit down and go through the game a couple of times. Today I was busy cleaning up, catching up on world events, and organizing plugins.
Fleeing Victory
I’ll try to have one or both of those done by this weekend, but there’s a very good story in the Zion setting that’s vying for my attention all day everyday right now. It’s making it really hard to focus on FV and LGT.
It’s actually pretty funny. For a while the well was extremely dry on the Zion side of things. Aeon has a couple of things that are ready and waiting for me to finish my economic research, and Praedia content just spawns out of the aether as a whole. It’s Zion where ideas struggle to coalesce into something coherent.
Until now, that is.
Now a whole (local) setting has erupted into existence out of thin air and I can’t help but fill in little details and timelines to make it as real as possible. I really need to start writing soon.
Things are starting to get back to normal, so it’s time to catch up on things (and shoot some things).
Clan Battles
8 Wins and 4 Losses. It looked something like this: 2 Wins, 1 Loss, 6 Wins, 3 Losses.
2:1 ratio? I’ll take it.
Overall a very good night, and this is Storm League, too. It’s safe to say we’re competing at that level now. We’re not just hanging on like the previous Tier 10 season.
That said, there aren’t any duplicate ships or aircraft carriers allowed this season. I’m sure that would throw a whole squadron of wrenches at any strategy we use.
Next Week
I want to knock out at least a couple of my January goals this week. I’m looking at doing both Fleeing Victory chapters as well as that first article. Remote play works but I need to play directly from my PS4 first to get familiar with the content, and then go through and get the screenshots I need through remote play, so that will probably take a couple of days.
I should also be able to finish The Long Moonlight by this weekend.
Site Work
I’m still poking around the site in the background, ditching old or less helpful plugins, finding decent or flat-out better alternatives, and so on. When I have the time I’m going to add a few more things to the front end to help with navigation and making the Praedian Records more appealing.
Speaking of which, fiddling with that picture of the Bourgogne reminded of my Favorites in Fiction pages. I need to get back to making those, too. I’m not sure if FnFs should count toward my ‘2 articles’ monthly goal, but it’s tempting. It’s not significantly less work than something like a review or a How-To article.
It would have been so nice if there was a smaller cockpit I could have used. I’m even considering making a small block cockpit on future designs so the scale of the plane doesn’t have to be quite so big.
Anyway, things are a bit tough right now so I’m focusing on what comes naturally and trying to put the finishing touches on the Cosmo Messer.
The changes I’ve made so far are listed below:
Added 3 additional hydrogen thrusters (Messer can now pretend to be a VTOL in 1.2g gravity)
Increased hydrogen tanks from 6 to 12 (to compensate for the additional thrusters and increase the range)
Added a magnetic plate on a hinge near the cockpit (in case a connector isn’t available or compatible)
Trimmed back and smoothed out the sloped areas around the engines
Finished adding navigation and strobe lights to the ship
The current unmodded build
A lot of other considerations have gotten sidelined for aesthetics, so the Cosmo Messer is heavier than it looks; extra plating to pretty up the default paint scheme and so on. There are some areas inside I left completely empty to try to balance this out, but in order to hover on Pertam I needed nine hydrogen thrusters. That’s not a huge number, but I feel like any less than that and the ship would be dangerously sluggish at low altitudes. Either way she flies. The range still isn’t great, but there are a couple of free programmable blocks left that might be able to hold a ‘fuel management’ script or something.
All bottom thrusters are externally mounted
Originally the Cosmo Messer only had six thrusters in pairs of two. This wasn’t enough. I tried landing on Pertam and wound up crashing. The engine shrouds took the brunt of it, and only because I was trying to point the tail downward to enlist the main thrusters for help. twelve thrusters trumps six. Anyway, the Messer has some strategically placed heavy armor in the form of its nose and winglets, so even after smashing up the tip of the tail and the engine shrouds and falling onto its stomach, there wasn’t much damage.
I couldn’t take off again though, so in a way the ship was completely totaled.
After laughing at myself, I upgrading one of the copies I left up in orbit and tried again.
Success.
I love those engine shrouds~
The Cosmo Messer is based on the Cosmo Falcon, but it was never intended to be a Space Reich copy of the thing. There were going to be some major differences from the get go since the Falcons have actual landing gears and a lot of pointy bits. Without the Plane Parts mod, there was no way to come up with anything decent for a vehicle this small, which is weird because the ship is too big in every other regard. I tried a lot of things and broke a few copies, but in the end, only the modded versions are ever going to have proper landing gears. The base model will just have to make due with that connector and the magnetic plate.
If the cockpit were just a little bit smaller, I’d be a little bit happier
If I can finish this thing up soon I’m planning to upload it to the Steam Workshop. Whether or not that happens, I’ll be writing on PR about it the hour it’s finished.
I shouldn’t get into the details, but suffice to say 2022’s off to a rough start for the family. I’ve also been distracted trying to figure out exactly what moves I need to make over the next few months and what order they need to be made in. It’s not going to be as cut and dry as I thought; there’s a lot I need to do and I’ve got to do it all myself for now.
Anyway, I had to mention something today so it might as well be that. Hopefully better news tomorrow.
I was hesitant to try such a round about way of juking the scene blocker on my PS4, but after testing it a little, remoteplay is good enough for my purposes. I don’t need it for streaming or showcasing videos. It’s mainly for screenshots, so as long as the frame rate stays around 30fps, I can get everything I need for my Code Fairy follow up article.
The resolution is … good enough
Since that’s a go, my Code Fairy follow up will be the first of my articles for this month. I’ll try to get that done over the weekend or early next week. Fleeing Victory should probably take priority, though.
