Little minor thought occurred to me after watching Three Days of the Condor again.  I've heard since my time in the First Gulf War the liberal/progressive chant of "No Blood For Oil" and simply put it down to their usual brainless silliness.  However, here we have a post-Watergate movie that specifically portrays a "rogue" operation inside the government that is all about destabilizing parts of the Middle East so the USA can invade to secure the oil fields.  The guy who discovers the plot gives it all to the NY Times to keep himself safe from retaliation, hopefully. BTW it is a GREAT spy flick.

Reading multiple comments from various movie sites, a common thread comes through about "how believable this was, especially after Watergate.", and I simply started to wonder, since along with the No Blood for Oil comes the idea that the wars in the Middle East are caused by some kind of conspiracy of insiders who are beyond the government.  Just a thought.

This has been building up for a while now.  It isn't sure what the actual issue Palladium Books is having, but they obviously aren't making the marks.  The nickname coined for what is currently going on: Gencon Suicide Pact.  Which means: Kevin Siembieda of Palladium decreed that RTT starter kits will be available by Gencon 2014.  Which was really no big deal with a December 2013 Kickstarter fulfilment date, even with a bit of slippage.  After all, this is what Palladium said during the Kickstarter: "  Risks and challenges
A project of this scope requires the successful collaboration of artists, sculptors, writers, game designers, and manufacturers. Managing this complex process and minimizing delays are the largest challenges we face in bringing Robotech® RPG Tactics™ to market. We have learned from past experience that success requires careful planning and a full understanding of the scope of the project. In order to facilitate the timely delivery of Robotech® RPG Tactics™, Palladium Books and Ninja Division have brought in a host of new talent to work on the project.

To help ensure realistic deadlines, we have completed the vast majority of our development before launching the Kickstarter. Sculpts for the game pieces are almost entirely complete. The rulebook and game components are deep in development and will be ready for layout soon. Our manufacturers are also ready and have reserved factory time for the project. This means that as soon as the project is funded, we can lock down a timeline with our manufacturers to get the game produced.

It is our commitment to you, the Kickstarter backers, that we will maintain consistent communication throughout the process. This means regular updates, product photos, and plenty of behind the scenes insight as we complete the creation of Robotech® RPG Tactics™." (Emphasis added)

They are still doing sculpts of pieces, getting approval and finalizing sprues.  Not "almost entirely complete".  Not "vast majority of development". 

I've been holding out for the sight of the Valkyries, since they are what will make or break the game.  Palladium cannot manage to assemble (or even get) the models and the heat got hot enough that they started throwing Ninja Division under the bus.  Ninja Division has retaliated by putting the models together competently....but they still partially assembled the models to make it seem there were now less parts than previously shown.  Add into this, each sculpt evidently has its own little connection to a flight stand, so each sculpt needs its own flight stand instead of generic ones for all sculpts....which means opaque flight stands instead of clear.....so flying Zentraedi Battlepods look like they either are losing something out their...or have something shoved up their....  Bad design choice. 

Enough, I've seen the Valks, they are crap, I'm getting out.

Battlefront (Flames of War) have taken over Dust Tactics, yes, I know, old news, but the trivia I've heard is that part of the divorce with FFG limits Battlefront from "reducing the value" of the Dust Warfare product they still have on hand....which means Battlefront with their Flames of War mentality cannot touch the actual game they'd love to fiddle with.  Instead, Tactics is getting "warfarized" a bit.  BF has been doing a lot of good, they now have multiple specific battle boxes for each faction, consisting (so far at least) of a hero, vehicle(s) and a squad or three.  They have also rationalized and consolidated the various rules (which were spread over a half dozen books) in a new rulebook...but then the meddling comes in.  First they got rid of the simple & clear LOS rules for ones that are a bit muddier and arguable; as in over the table top arguable.... 

Next, and most stupid, they started introducing firing arcs for vehicles, which I consider a good idea in a number of cases, but then they make the exception for turreted vehicles.  Well, okay, that works too.  Then they decided that the Axis walkers that turn at the waist (making the entire upper torso a turret) are "fixed gun" vehicles too.  Hello <knock, knock> anyone home?  The justification for walkers was their extreme (compared to tracked AFVs) agility in urban and close environments, but now Battlefront decides not only to kill that but make them fixed forward tank destroyers that are easier to see & easier to kill than a real tank destroyer...dumbasses.

However, I did pick up Osprey's little skirmish game, Ronin.  It looks like a lot of fun and thanks to some stuff I snagged for free at NOVA and a couple of other places, I can build up a Buntai or two for some quick and easy fun.

So, you have a little trouble with your internet connection, then you get a new laptop with a new OS, continuing to have a little trouble with your internet connection.  So, you get the new laptop mostly setup, but have to stop because your internet connection is going to crap every few minutes.  Not only that, but instead of just hitting your laptop, it is hammering your entire network.  So, you call the cable company and they ping your modem and see everything is fine.  Next, you replace your router and all the cables, but the problem still persists.  Back to the cable company, who sends out a real nice cable guy, who goes over your troubleshooting with you, agrees that the problem must be with the cable....but all testing shows that the cable modem and cable are 100%.   Now two of you are scratching your heads and you think...what if I shut down the new laptop?  TADA!  The problem is the brand new laptop has a wireless on the fritz, that when it "fritzes" decides to actively jam your wifi signals.  Back to the drawing board...

Anyway, if nobody is keeping up, Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter is delayed and now being split into two waves.  So, it will be a while before I see those minis.  Hopefully, Palladium Books and Ninja Division have gotten a clue about how to deal with the Chinese for minis.  Their screwups are fairly obvious to me, they tried to do all the preproduction work for the entire line before talking to the Chinese, when they actually could have been tooling, scheduling and running blocks of minis off if they had started talking to the factory as soon as the Kickstarter too off like a rocket. 

Why Robotech?  Well, it was fairly easy to see that if the FLGS doesn't stock a game, drumming up interest in it is an uphill battle, especially in the current economy.  Which kills Dust Tactics and Dropzone Commander, but makes it interesting because the FLGS owner is planning on stocking and supporting Robotech.  Now all that is needed is a good enough game to keep some interest up. 

But, now that I have some time to kill, I think I might have a bit of fun and perform the silly time waster of writing a real Codex:Black Templar for my own amusement.  I've already roughed it out, it took a couple of days, I just need to check some details, get it formatted like I like it and polish some of my notes about why I chose certain things.  I'll get to that if I get bored with everything else and feel the urge to type.  The saddest thing...this was seriously so easy to do, including looking and considering choices between "mainstream" and "fluffy" rules choices, that there is really no other reason for GW to have not produced an actual codex except for a desire to streamline their product and do away with the Black Templars as an independent group of loyalist Space Marines.

Was missing for a bit, my little laptop was dying and after messing with it for a bit, then dealing with a weekend visit by my sister that turned into one a bit longer, instead of disassembling and reassembling it again I decided to go ahead and buy a new one.  I'd long ago decided that I was going to get out of Microsoft's hair when they canned XP while it was still the best selling (and best written and best performing, etc.) OS they had.  After all Vista was a bomb, the only thing you can say about Win7 is that is better than Vista, ditto Win8 vs Win7 and all three will light up honest spybot/virus software as obvious malware from all the scanning and reporting they do.

So, I've made the jump over to Linux, specifically Ubuntu.  Lots of fun, easy to transition and although there is some learning curve, it isn't very steep

It still proceeds apace.  Almost all of the Dust  stuff is off the shelf, replaced by 40k boxes.  The 40k stacks are taller...

Now I'm pretty much down to one box a day sorting as I go to put it on the shelf.  I've split some time off to start converting foam blanks I had already cut for my Plano gun case mini boxes to Dust ready ones.  I had to get the next size up copper coupler (30mm bases, heroes and maybe IA3 needing 40mm), then sharpen one end, and I had forgotten what a pain that was.  Now they are glued and drying, but after fixing the technical issues from my first attempt, I've ran into another, my homemade foam trays have gone from perfect fit for 3 per case to probably just a bit too tight for 3.  I should be ready to take DT to the FLGS on Saturday.  Especially since I'm not planning on anything more ambitious than the original core set units for playing, although I'm going to take some of the newer models along for display.

Heh, the reason for all this goes to the wife.  I was looking at my NOVA buy one-get one free coupon for KR Multicase and noticing that Dust foam is rather cheap, so she pointed out that I could put the extra stuff in the gun cases rather than just stacking gun cases full of 40k up on a shelf. 

Having looked over the physical aspects of the changes to the Black Templars, I'd have to say that the units came out about like I expected, which was a bit short of what should have happened.  Mainly, ignoring the fluff aspects, it was to the good as far as cost of units, wargear options, etc. 

1) It surprised me how many people on the Internet, even non-Black Templar players, agreed that rerolls to hit in CC should have been have been standard for all Black Templar models.
2) Expected fail on GW's part to correct the cost of the plasma pistol.  Seriously, it was pegged at 15 points back when you could use it in CC (and it would be darn well worth it) for its S/AP.  For the last two editions, it should have been dropped down to a more reasonable 10 points at the very least.
3) Keeping the ability to have a special & heavy weapon in a 5-man squad was a little surprise, the plasmagun going up to 15 points was not.  The increase in PW/PF costs was also expected. 
4)  I think Marshal Laeroth is correct.  By RAW, if you upgrade one Initiate to Sword Brother, then you can only have 9 Neophytes from the phrasing.  I don't think that is the intention, but there it is.
5)  As expected, no price break on the LRC, but the LRR does get a little break.  The LRC should have shared that break, and I would have called it down to 225 each for base costs.  GW missed the boat on not giving Black Templars a benefit to being the discoverers/inventors of the LRC by giving Crusader squads (+ICs) that total 16 models a serious price break on the LRC, say down to 175.  "Oh you can take LRCs in your troop choices, that rocks soooo hard.", just doesn't cut it when it is still the same price as anyone else pays.  Pretty much any Marine group can take some LRCs and shove troops into them by giving up HS choices.  Sure, they lose HS slots, but at those prices who can afford much other HS for those slots or need more than 2-3 anyway?
6) Sword Brethren units becoming equivalent to Sternguard/Vanguard was expected and not a bad thing if GW had intended to be honest about upgrading the Templars while saving some effort by placing them in the same book.
7)  The EC pretty much...stinks.  Not bad, but overpriced.

Given the changes to fluff, the spurious "chapter tactics" and the fact that the above, where it is good, is all the good there is...GW drives yet another person away.  I was chatting with my FLGS manager yesterday and after he thought about it, the few "serious" players they have left drop about $500 with each codex release, plus a bit from others who have that army.  The owner (manager of the second store) is already discussing what to replace their GW product wall with because of declining sales overall.  So the manager was happy to talk about me filling an empty game table on 40k game days with something else that others might want to start buying.

Nothing much, more opening of boxes, sorting out the empty and populated sprue, clipping off parts of sprue that still have a couple of bits on them for the "unclipped bits" boxes, etc.  I've gone through almost all the big boxes and got them stacked (big as in length & width, don't care about height) on the shelf.  I've got a couple more that are just vehicles or WIP that I'm going to box and pad a bit with stray foam to put on top of the rest.

Found a DZC blog off the Hawk Wargames forums that has some nice posts with the nickel version of the differences between the four factions. 

In minor sad news, it seems my FLGS has been seduced by the TwitMyFace cult and is shutting down its forums in favor of TwitMyFace operations.  Gee, look Mom, it's quicker and easier and nicer and funner and loads up your computer with spyware and brings offensive items from foafs onto your computer and all automatically unless you fight like heck to deny access.  Yes, I just had to spend time cleaning some computer hard drive space, not mine, but...

Okay, all of the DT stuff is off the shelf, my two black Army Transport bags are packed to the gills, the shrink wrapped GW boxes are up on the shelf and I've run down some of the stray DT items that weren't where they were supposed to be.  The gun case idea kinda works, the bases for DT are a bit bigger (30mm) so I cannot use the egg crate foam for now.  I'll have to find my other foam I used to cut spots for 40mm bases and get something closer to 30mm to use as a cutter.  Considering I don't need all of the units at first, I can probably just use the cases where I have the original foam and just lay the guys into the egg crate for now.  Or just take the big Dust box with all the minis in it. 

Now it is just sorting through and condensing all the boxes.  I'm beginning to choke at all the minis I'm finding stashed in boxes.  Except for Neophytes, I think I could field six full Crusader squads (weapon options might be limited), plus some Sword Brethren and probably a squad of Assault Marines , maybe two.  And the sprue, the massive amounts of sprue.  Actually, this is good, I've test build one small piece and it works fairly quickly once you get past the boring bits of cutting it up.  You make "bricks" out of the sprue, then just plastic glue them together into a wall.  Easy building build.

BTW, what's up with you guys.  Dead, dead, dead on traffic for a while, now

I hate life blogging, but I understand it.  Not going to fill the page with prose, but sorting through my table, trays, containers and such, finding bags of  bits, stray minis that were set aside for later work, partly finished projects, most amusingly my poor partial squad of Sisters conversions, I do okay, mainly because the small size doesn't make it obvious, but I'm not really a titty sculptor.  My wife made a couple of comments about "lopsided" and when I pointed out that all women are "lopsided", she riposted with "not that much they aren't".  Heh.

Getting near the end now after a couple of hours.  Going to take a couple more, but that is finishing the storage solution transition between DT & 40k as I swap minis in and out.  Amazing how much of what used to be fun packs away, nice and neat in their own little bags.  The best part about little toy soldiers, like Pooh, they will wait patiently on your shelf for the next time you need them and be just as happy to see you then as they were when you played with them everyday.

Oh GAD!  Do I have enough boxes for all these vehicles....

Do not tap at a post like this while still working on the subject.  I forgot about these, where did I get them....Ebay.  Lowballing.  Imperial Fists Rhino/Razorbacks and another pair of Immolators.  Ack, I think there is an Exorcist floating around loose in these boxes....I think I have everything I need for that mech list I never fielded.  Or a couple ofLater.