Steve,
I just skimmed the spacedock document... It looks really good. I was just wondering, since it did not go through the "normal" publishing channels, if this "book" is closer to your vision than any of the other books that have seen print.
At 189 pages with no spaceship pics, I can imagine if you did include any it would have been a massive book.
It's definitely closer to my vision than it would have been if published, at least in terms of textual integrity. It's 132,000 words, whereas the normal LUG supplement is 67,000. SD was originally word-budgeted at 88,000. Even if we'd been able to bump that up a bit, it still would have meant cutting a lot of material.
Just for fun, at one point I went through the manuscript to see just how small I could make it. By trimming everything not directly related to some rule, or an explanation of a system, I got it down to about 52,000 words. But at that size it's a colorless, drab sort of manuscript -- usable, but not nearly as much fun.
Since SD is an entirely rules-oriented book, the loss of illustrations doesn't bother me, really. It's of more concern to me for the SRM, but even there I can live without it for the present.
The SRM will also differ from at least some of the potential ways LUG might have published it. We'd discussed the possibility of putting out a series of books, each with, oh, 6-10 ships I suppose, but each ship given a much more detailed treatment. This treatment would have included lots of little mini-maps of bridges, sickbays, and other important places, and illos and such -- George and I had some good talks about it, and even laid out a starship just to see what it would look like in the format we had in mind.
But when it comes down to it, my only concern is that the information gets out to you guys. I'd be perfectly content to just slap it into plain text boxes and upload it if I had to. Fortunately for me, I have Don to make my words look spiffy.
Registered User
How Close to Your Vision Mr. Long?
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