Clone Wars Sourcebook - Space Transports

[Anstrona]

Well it's taken quite a long time to complete, but I finally managed to punch out the space transports subchapter for our Clone Wars Saga Edition Fan Sourcebook. This subchapter contains original artwork by Eric Allen and myself. Comments or suggestions about this chapter, as well as others, would be greatly appreciated in our forum. Enjoy!

[Lord_Lemartes]

Hi, uumm! What the smeg happened with this chapter?. Who put it together in that awful way. I loved both the fighters and capital ships chapters, but this one is absolutely awful. As a fan of your material, to my mind this is not up to your own usual high standard.
In the other two chapters there have been only ONE SHIP PER PAGE, which is great and leaves room for pencilled in notes in the bottom right corner. This chapter is an awful hodge podge with ships overlapping each other on the same page, which to many is very difficult to follow and gets rid of our note bit in the bottom right corner. The ONLY exceptions to this should be when statting more than one version of the same ship type, such as The Consular class cruiser variants in the Capital ships chapter. Is there any chance that you can go back to the ONE SHIP PER PAGE FORMAT Please guys.
My second question is about the naboo ships, you have them titled H-types, but in the Incredible cross sections books and The New essential guide to vehicles and vessels, they are titled differently.
As follows: SWEP1: Modified J-Type 327 Nubian (I presume there are civilian versions of this vessel by its name).
SWEP2 (Beginning): Custom Built J-Type Diplomatic Barge. SWEP2 (Ending): Custom H-Type Nubian Yacht.
SWEP3: J-Type Star Skiff (As statted in Saga SOTG).

My last bit is a pet hate of mine.
I hate it when there are unessecary uses of colour and/or black ink in documents. You guys and your over-use of The Vomit coloured background, and the unnessesary use of black bits around the edge of the RCR version of the cwsb. Could you please stop using the entirely unnecessary full TWO PAGES of black on pages 3 and 4, i don;t mind the pics in the middle but the full page coloured black, ....come on guys is that really necessary.

Thanks for the good work, keep it up, and i can't want for the monsterously large vehicles chapter.

[Anstrona]

Well, I compile all of our material. The previous layout with one ship per page was an absolute editing and design nightmare. That, mixed with the fact that the two newest official books (Knights of the Old Republic Campaign Guide and The Force Unleashed Campaign Guide) didn't follow the one ship per page layout from (which only appeared in Starships of the Galaxy), we decided to follow the era books' layout rather than SotG's. I agree it doesn't look as nice but it turned the compile of this particular chapter into a 3 hour job as opposed to a 12 hour or more job. With the old method we had to start the compile, and if a particular entry spilled over into a second page we had to make emergency/last minute edits to shorten it, or in the case of the shorter entries... we'd have pages that were barely a quarter filled with pretty much nothing left to put on the page which made it look very odd. Maybe I'll toss some captions above or below the pictures to make it a little less confusing when I do the final vehicles recompile.

The Naboo ships you're referring to from the other books are custom versions designed specifically for Padme and the Queen of Naboo. The ones I have statted (H-type, J-type) are "typical builds" since Nubia Star Drive builds all of their ships to order. The reason the other books call them "modified" is because the Theed Royal Corps of Engineers modified them after purchase.

As far as the colors are concerned - the designs we used are fashioned to look like the official books, first and foremost. The tan backgrounds in our RCR books, and the black chapter splash pages are the way they are presented in the official books. So we felt it was necessary, yes. However, I'll talk with Keith and see what he thinks about me changing the background of the splash pages to white to make it a little more printer-friendly. The RCR chapters I wouldn't hold your breathe, though. We're discontinuing them and we'll be converting them to Saga Edition, in fact now that I've finished the transports chapter I'm going to start focusing on updating and converting the Jedi Council entries this month.

[Lord_Lemartes]

Thank you very much for allieviating my concerns, i just thought it needed tidying a little thats all.
As i said before keep up the great work. If you need any help at all i am unemployed and have a lot of time on my hands, so you can call on my services if you need help, i'm always finding little errors in things that other people miss, and not just your stuff by the way.

[Anstrona]

Do you think that adding captions to the pictures, and possibly placing them a little more strategically would put your mind at ease? Keith and I discussed the black background thing and we're probably going to change it to white for all our future updates.

[Lord_Lemartes]

Yes, but please don't get me wrong i know what ship is what, it's just that some are in the wrong places and to newbies it would be cofusing. And it's great to hear that the black background will be removed, i allready did it to the capital ships and fighters chapters as i have my own copy of Adobe acrobat professional edition version 6.0. Not that i know how to use the bloomin thing though, all i know how to do with it is convert a document to pdf, extract images and text and remove annoying backgrounds HA!. On the subject of the splash pages, can't you put an image there that reflects the contents of the chapter, The fighters chapter has the ETA's, but so does the other two chapters.
Anyway thanks for considering my concerns, keep me informed of anything you need will ya!. Cheers... andy.

[NarCranor]

In terms of designing new chapter splash pages, I believe tron did not spend time on that because he knew we would be compiling all 3 of these space vehicle chapters together, negating a need for him to create more.

Hope that answers your question there. We really do appreciate the feedback, anything to help make the docs stronger!