Inventory

I went through all my BT miniatures today, and came to the conclusion I have far too many.  In fact, since its been >10 years since I really enjoyed a game, I would consider any serious offer to take the ENTIRE LOT off my hands, not in pieces, but the WHOLE thing.  Oh, and I still want to inventory my B5 GROPOS/Ships, a bunch of 40K Epic stuff, most of my Tyranids, my Heavy Gear miniatures, and lots more.  I'll try to get the rest inventoried soon.

Here is what I got:

351 Possible Fake Mechs (all but about 20 look *very* good if they are fake).  I say possibly as I bought them online, and can't be 100% sure of their legality.
544 Real Metal Mechs (MANY unseen)
286 Real Plastic Mechs
96 Turrets from various vehicles for defenses
525 Vehicles (20 Wet Navy, 6 VTOL)

43 ProtoMechs
833 Battle Armor
275 Infantry
64 Warships
101 Various Dropships
25 Small Scale Aerospace Fighters (Clan)
3 Full Sized Aerospace Fighters

That is a grand total of  10 Regiments of mechs (almost 1 of LAMs), over 4 regiments of armor, over 9 regiments of Battle Armor, 3 regiments of infantry, and enough of a Navy to land them anywhere.  About 150 mechs are *really* well painted, all the rest are stripped, primed, or never painted and many are still not assembled.

Not sure what I would want yet, but it'd be in the high thousands, and would most likely require a pickup, as mailing it would be annoying.

As for other stuff, I've wrote about 80% of a program to randomly generate an entire star system, with full details for every planet/moon.  I still have a bit to do when it comes to orbit periods for moons and quite a few planet based algorithms, but its coming along VERY nicely, and I'll port it to a webpage when I'm done which would take all of a few minutes (thank you MSFT and .NET!)

I'm also trying to finish up a list of every planet on any BT map ever printed, and allowing you to pick any month and render a map instantly of who owns what that month.  I had to enter over 40K names in excel, and now have to go through the 500 or so systems that aren't on the 3075 map to get their coordinates (I did the 3075 map a while back for my Cartographer app).

Monthly Update

Well since apparently I can't update weekly, I think primarily because I am not a big fan on on the blogspot interface thing, I'll try to get something out every month.

Here is what I've done over the last few weeks:

- Bought Spelljammer on ebay, and really like it.  Its an old D&D game with ships in semi-outer space.  Its got great history, well over 100 ship types, and plays like a wargame with RPG aspects thrown in.  

- Bought ISC War for Federation and Empire.  If you love counters, like I do, Federation and Empire is *the* game to own.  I can only hope that CBT takes some lessons from it with the eventual release of Interstellar Operations.

- Dealt with vendor after vendor for our new (though old) house.  The latest is Time Warner, as they are telling me that their cable cards won't work with windows media center.  I just bought 2 X-Box 360's as media center extenders to get rid of the crappy cable boxes.  Got another tech comming today, hopefully he is a bit smarter than the previous one.  NOTE:  If you ever have time warner folks comming out, ask for their IN HOUSE employees, not their contractors which always suck.

- Finally got the MW Technology of Destruction book on ebay.  Not sure what is in it.

- I have 6 things on order from BattleCorps, I'm starting to wonder why I pre-order stuff when it takes months or even YEARS to get shipped :(

And BT stuff.  Basically the last month any free time for BT I've had has been devoted to typing in roughly 40,000 names of systems.  I went through every map, in every book, and typed in the systems and who owned them during that year.  Something like New Avalon,3025=FS.  This way I can not only create a map in any timeframe, I can also create invasion waves by month or even day if necessary.  I've had somebody correcting my dozens of typos and helping clear up when systems were discovered/abandoned.  At this point the list is pretty complete, but waiting on the Kurita handbook so we can get those maps inputted.  At that point I'll have to create a single map, with all systems from all time periods, to get their new interstellar coordinates.  This is a huge pain, as TPTB have gone the way of detail and automation and create the maps in Adobe Illustrator, ugh.

Now I'm still dealing with some vendors, and working on some algorithms to programatically generate systems (including stars, all planets, all moons, etc, etc).  I hope to be done in a day or two, at which point I can randomly generate statistics of all types for all the systems.  Then I'm hoping to start working on formulas to procedurally create planet terrain, which has been a long term project of mine.  I actually have a "bid" sorta thing for $1000 to help get it wrote on freelancer.com, but I am starting to doubt the success of the winning bidder.

I'm trying to get a few things knocked out before the end of the year, as I'm running for US Congress next year and have to devote all my time to trying to win the primary for the Texas 32nd Congressional District.  I am going to run on the Republican ticket, but my "American" party takes precedence.  I refuse to take even $1 from anybody (you can offer your time, but not your money) and am running against a millionaire, so the likelihood of me seeing anywhere near the votes I need are, well, slightly above zero.  However, I feel it is my duty to try to do the right thing, and if Americans are truly educate themselves about the candidates I feel I can't loose against my opposition.  However, if they don't, and just vote for the "old guy", they really deserve what they have coming to them :(