In my bid to try and finish at least one book a month this year, I've finished Matter by Iain M Banks. It was harder going that his other books that I've read recently (e.g., Surface Detail, which I thought was excellent) but it did give me some ideas to feed into a potential Traveller campaign - notably the interaction between the different societies of wildly varying technological advancement. The ending was… different, but not something that he hasn't done before.

Next up is The Prefect by Alistair Reynolds.

Ideally, I'd like to get back into the habit of reading at least a book a week, but I have too many other things on for this to be likely any time soon.

I have finally managed to clear my worktop of my 25mm Stargrunt colonial militia figures, which have been sitting there half painted for well over a year. I now have three oversized squads (10 men each, since they are meant to be low quality troops) of them, but have decided I may want one or two more squads.

However, I'm going to wait until I've cleared my NSL Jaeger troops and finished my 6mm Dirtside armies before buying any more. Honest.

The colonial militia are mostly green troops, but do tend to have highly trained snipers. Out of all my Stargrunt armies, the militia probably make the most effective use of snipers. However, they are often lacking in heavy artillery and mechanised support. They are shown here with a medium GEV tank.

It's time to change the website again. In an attempt to streamline and simplify, I've switched from using Alfresco to DokuWiki. This does mean that some things which were relatively easy to do are now much harder to do (for example, I lose the use of webscripts), but the other 90% of things (just display basic content) is now a lot easier.

I'm going to push the new site live before the end of 2012, which means that some content will become temporarily unavailable. Hopefully it won't be too long before I can add in support again for these missing features.

Back in the days before I had a means to serve dynamic web pages to an unsuspecting world, I had a complex set of scripts which built a static web site from source files. One of the features of these scripts was that they could generate maps for some of my fantasy campaign encyclopedias.

When the site was moved to Alfresco, this ability was lost. The process consisted of various XSLT plugins that generated a graphical map from XML files, cropping and scaling as required and producing both thumbnails and full sized maps. Rather than attempting a quick and dirty fix to replicate the old static maps, I decided to drop support for now and wait until I'd re-written the mapping software to produce fully dynamic maps in the style of Google Maps.

That was six months ago, and the number of lines of code written for the new mapping software has been exactly zero.

Which means that my fantasy encyclopaedia has been without any maps for too long. Rather than start a flurry of activity to finish the software (I was surprised to see that it's further along than I'd remembered), I've pulled some of the old static maps out of retirement and added them to the encyclopedia. They're not complete, but it's a start, and helps to show a bit about what the world looks like.

The image of a globe above was actually generated by the original version of the software and exported to Celestia. It was what gave me the original idea for my Traveller mapping project, which is another thing that is taking too long to complete.

Finally, after many years of procrastination, I have finished painting my NSL fleet for Full Thrust. I still need to purchase some extra fighters to keep the carriers fully stocked, and the ship designs need to be validated, but it's pretty much done.

The major delay was deciding how to base everything. I had decided on using the short plastic flight bases from the B5 Fleet Action miniatures, but when I ran out of my spare ones, I discovered that getting hold of anything similar proved impossible. Then Jon Tuffley mentioned the possibility of casting short flight stands, so I delayed things for these to become available, but he was too busy to actually make them.

So, after years of waiting, I finally made my own. I'm using MDF bases from Products For Wargamers, who do a large line of 2mm thick bases in many shapes and sizes (from 10mm to 60mm diameter). This allows me to have bases comparable to the size of the model.

For the poles, I'm using clear perspex for 'escort' vessels, and copper rods for anything larger. They are relatively short, providing a low centre of gravity (less likely to be knocked over) and reducing storage space. For the big capital ships, I'm using GZGs big metal stands. A simple label identifies the ship class and number.

So, I now have two NSL fleets - my original fleet, plus this New Construction fleet that uses the newer models (which are much improved over the originals). One day, I might get a chance to play again. Until then, I'll just tweak the ship designs until I'm happy with them.

Next up, I just have the new FSE, NAC, IJN, IF and Scandinavian fleets to paint. Still not entirely sure why I've bought this many fleets.