Tag Archives: Planets

NASCAR-Inspired Solaris Campaign

I have a serious love/hate relationship with Wikipedia!  When I read an article that intrigues me, and it links to something else I want to check out, I will start reading and I don’t realize that an hour and a half has just passed until I come up for air.  I can start on something innocent, like reading about reviews of a recent movie that’s released, and wind up finishing in an article about the Treaty of Versailles or String Theory.

Having grown up in West Virginia, everyone around me loved NASCAR.   I never got it.  You are

Not Solaris VII, But Similar Enough to Inspire Me

driving around in a circle for a few hours.  That’s not really something that appeals to me.  Why would I want to watch that?  Who cares?  Even with NASCAR being the second most watched sport in America right now, it’s still not my thing, and I doubt it ever will be.  I’m not a NASCAR guy.

So I’ve never really understood the world behind NASCAR.  But then I read that wikipedia article, and 77 minutes later, a lot of things changed.  I saw just how closely a lot of the NASCAR teams and companies really dovetail with a lot of the fluff on Solaris VII.  I grew inspired by it, and now I’m looking to try out a new S7 campaign with some ideas from NASCAR to flesh out the stable system a little more.

What do I like about it?  Let’s take a look!

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New Interactive BattleTech Star Chart

In September, MechFactory released a new and improved iteration of their ISCP, or Inner Sphere Cartography Project. This was announced on their main page which includes an overview of its changes.

For more we asked MechFactory’s owner, Pheonix Wolf about the changes:

BobTheZombie: How and when did this project get started?

Phoenix Wolf: An early idea to create an interactive stellar map of all known BattleTech worlds appeared around 2001. That time we had only a deprecated 16 bit program and a text file with coordinates for 3025-era planets. I thought that a better, usable internet-based map would be a great tool for BattleTech players – especially for those people, who –like my team- are playing BattleTech RPG (MechWarrior was the name at that time). I took the data and began building the first mapping system on php/javascript basis.

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Interactive BattleTech Star Chart

Once again Reddit has provided a source of fan-based ingenuity and useful content. Cryp71c is in production on a fully interactive Inner Sphere through deep periphery star chart that, among many other things will show political affiliation of each known planet in the BattleTech universe across THIRTY separate time periods.

As mind-bogglingly vast as the BattleTech universe is, let’s just say I’m highly impressed by this undertaking. Already, the site uses mouse and certain keyboard inputs to pan and zoom, and cursor rollovers reveal the system’s name. Future updates will include canon planetary descriptions, gravity, moons, atmospheric data, USIIR ratings, known jump points, system history; even available terrain features with a single click.

The Inner Sphere: The Not-So Final Frontier...

The Inner Sphere: The Not-So Final Frontier…

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