Rebel Squadrons

News from the Logistics Office, 20070106

By COM David Vaughan
Unit: The Rebel Squadrons
General Announcement, Jan 06, 2007
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Greetings. ":)

In my time as Logistics Officer of the RS this past year, I have had the honour of working with a team of talented and dedicated individuals which have helped me overhaul the fictional context of the club and re-create or adapt it into something much more consistent and realistic.

At first I attempted to document all of the work that we were doing, who worked on what, etc. However I soon abandoned the idea, as it was quickly taking more time to document our activities than it was to actually work on those activities.

That said, while 'documenting the documenting' was abandoned for practical reasons, there are members of my office who have been performing admirably that I feel are lacking in recognition, which I am here to address.

Specifically, the two officers under my command in the Logistics Office in question are Generals Rekio Corsair and Michael Raven.

Both officers are Fleet Generals who have led their respective divisions while also spending time on projects with me to help revitalise (or in some cases, create from scratch) the RS fictional context. Both officers have worked in tandem with myself as well as by themselves on various projects, and have greatly contributed to the successes and achievements of the office, in service of the RS.

I would like to take the time to honour them for their contributions to the Logistics Office of the RS.

Major General Rekio Corsair

General Corsair was the only other officer with an avidly expressed interest in working on the fictional state of the club back when Vice Admiral Borran approved our appointments to the Logistics Office in March, 2006. And while Rekio has gradually moved on to concentrate more on his new fleet, having finished the logistics projects he began, it is long overdue that his efforts are recognised publicly.

Specifically, the following are the achievements that I wish to highlight.

* The main force in determining the RS to be a task force in the New Republic Military. Now while that might sound obvious now, with hindsight, before the Logistics Office firmly established just what exactly the RS was (technically), there did not seem to by any agreeable consensus on what we technically were. General Corsair, after many discussions with myself and others on the issue, finally settled on the fact that the best established canon model that the RS fit into easiest was a task force not assigned to a battle group. (For more explanation of what specifically a New Republic task force is, as it is much more precise and determined than the otherwise-nebulous term would imply, please read on)

* Reorganised the Order of Battle to better suit attempts at realism. Before this project was embarked upon, every division had their own massive military force which would best be described as overkill. This is mostly due to the scaling-down of capital ships in the flight simulators, in order to make it possible to go up against them with starfighters and not be instantly-killed. Prior to the reorganisation, the RS fielded a starfleet roughly one-quarter the size of the New Republic's galactic defence force. That should give you an idea of what magnitude of adjustments were required. And while people might not necessarily be happy that their favourite ships are no longer with us (either wiped out in the Battle of Blerthmore, or transferred, destroyed or decommissioned years ago, having not appeared in ITOD campaigns for many years), for the sake of realism Rekio embarked upon this task to make the size of our starfleet fall within the parameters of a New Republic task force. (For information pertaining to the task force's current Order of Battle, please read on)

* Assisted General Raven in the creation of missing information for the Binaural Sector. While the Binaural Sector data creation project was led by General Raven, Rekio contributed greatly to the creation of original data of worlds and locations which Raven later drew upon to form the overall representation of the Binaural Sector. (For more information, please refer to the Binaural Sector Project under 'General Michael Raven', below)

* Inputted most of the harvested locations data to the wiki. Rekio spent countless hours uploading locations data to the wiki gleaned from the harvesting project of mine (all attested locations mentioned or featured in all fleet ITODs of the RS), in addition to information from the online Planets Database. (For examples of Rekio's work, please read on)

* Updated the Logistics Office website and prepared to maintain it. One of the first acts Rekio did in the Logistics Office was the update the website, which was merely a series of redirects to other departments. However, despite his efforts, the website has once again reverted to a series of redirects, as we decided to move most of our work over to the more flexible wiki structure.

Those are all of the major contributions to the Logistics Office that I can recall off the top of my head that General Corsair has provided. However, my memory is not the best, and I may have left items off the list.

However, there are two more things that I would like to thank Rekio for, even though they were not extensive projects worked on by himself, but without his prompting might not have happened.

Item 1: Asking me to be the 'lead, central designer' for the then-upcoming VSG campaign. Since that time it has expanded out into the first real attempt at a unified ITOD for the RS, and would not have happened as quickly if he had not put me onto the project in the first place.

Item 2: Very similar to Item 1; suggesting the revival of the Tactical Operations Division. The new version of TacOps is a centralised system to take care of ITOD, so that the various Fleet COs can concentrate on managing their divisions and members rather than trying to tackle stories, also. The model suggested and now employed is the lead designer co-ordinating and designing campaigns and outlines for missions, with the mission builders for the platforms being directed by the lead designer. This system seems to be a much more ordered system than previous times, as there is a dedicated person for each position. Instead of Fleet COs trying to manage their members as well as making missions, coming up with ship names and details, as well as trying to produce an engaging storyline with varied and interesting missions, each of the various roles are broken up into more specified positions, for ease of specialities. i.e. mission builders can concentrate on doing what they do best: making missions, instead of trying to juggle a year's worth of story content and development at the same time.

This has already become far more wordy than I was intending, so I'll try and cut straight to the point.

For his service to the Logistics Office, I am hereby awarding (with the assistance of FC Trebonious-Astoris) General Rekio Corsair the Kessel Cup.

Thank-you Rekio for your hard work on logistics projects. ":)

I hope this small token of gratitude will be sufficient in symbolising recognition of your work in the office. :)


General Michael Raven

As commanding officer of the ABG, General Raven was probably not the most immediately obvious person I would have expected to join the Logistics Office, as the ABG is kind of a divergent continuity from the main RS continuity (although we have been working to address that), and I'm not sure if his initial request to join the office was a joke or not . . . That said, appointing Raven Tactical Logistics Officer would probably have to be the smartest decision in my entire RS career. Screw all my other achievements. This one was the smartest! :P

Seriously. Raven has been a godsend. A walking (accurate!) Wookieepedia that also solves problems. What I lack in tactical savvy, Raven more than compensates for. Which is exactly why he was unofficially working for the Logistics Office as tactical and technical advisor long before his name was on the office door.

Honestly, I cannot praise his efforts and work ethics enough. In fact, I believe that he has probably put in more work to the Logistics Office (through sheer sweat-work) than I have. However, it's difficult to quantify accurately, so that is probably a highly subjective statement.

But onward to the details! Some major achievements that Raven has contributed to the Logistics Office here follow.

* Helping me develop and establish the RS timeline. As I have described to someone the other day, if you have any praise for the timeline restructuring, Raven's your man; if you have any problems with it, then come see me. This was a joint project of Raven and mine which I could have done solo, but the quality level (and quickness of completion) would have been much, much lower. While I had goals in mind and the overall outline in my head, Raven did most of the hands-on work crunching numbers and working out solutions that inexplicably almost always lined up perfectly. Just ask him about it for clarification, if you thought that was merely a spurious comment. (For more information about the Timeline Project, simply refer to . . . well, any new campaigns and narratives, and the in-universe dates you will see bandied around the website nowadays)

* Tactical advisor. For advising me on tactics, both real world and in universe. He has been doing this since before he was assigned to the office, however he has done so much, much more since the planning and execution of the VSG/RID Tour 1. Anything to do with tactics I run by Raven first, or perhaps flat-out ask for input in the first place, partly to make sure we don't have unrealistic missions where four unshielded TIEs take down squadrons of Star Destroyers, but mostly because Raven is the authority on tactics and a proponent of realism in campaigns. (For more information on this, refer to any new campaign and mission material — yeah, the mission was hard? That's because war is hell, and we're not pussyfooting around the issue)

* Developing Orders of Battle. In addition to helping dictate what type and number of craft should be present in each battle depending on the parameters I outline, Raven has also had a strong hand in the development of the Orders of Battle employed in the current campaigns. Specifically the Subterrel strike force, which has yet to be unveiled story-wise (with the optimal balance of craft types based on what ships we could use most effectively cross-platform), and the enemy formations, which are heavily detailed; most of which will be uncovered as the campaigns progress, if not obvious at the present time. (For more information on the Subterrel strike force, please read on)

* Technical advisor. This is kind of a bleed-over from the previous few points, but Raven has been the chief advisor for technical information, such as what ships are capable of, what ship would be the best choice for this type of operation, and so forth. It is this sort of advice that prevents me from including stupid technical blunders, such as presenting Victory Star Destroyers that swoop about too fast to hit with lasers (yes, that is a Kevin J. Anderson reference; you may kill me now). (For more information on . . . this is a bit repetitive? Just check out the damned missions and narratives. :))

* Narrative writer for the Unified ITOD. Now, this here is an achievement that would ordinarily deserve a medal for by itself. Raven is the author of the excellent narratives of the VSG/RID Tour that is currently operational. Put simply, he kicks the ass off any narrative-writing efforts that I could even attempt. And I am grateful for that — before he offered to take up the project, I was going to have to write the narratives myself . . . quite a daunting prospect, and one that I would not have been able to live up to and realise as well as our roleplaying master here. I cannot stress enough how impressed I am with his efforts in this domain. So instead I'm going to give him a medal. :P (For an example of General Raven's excellent narratives, please read on)

* Ship name fountain. I myself lack creativity when coming up with names for ships, so Raven's skills at naming have been invaluable in both retconning terrible historic names (The Imperial corvette Ugly Face, anyone? I have a whole damned list of terrible names that have been replaced if anyone is interested in seeing them), but also creating new, dignified names for newly introduced craft, especially Imperial craft, which have a tendency to often be the most poorly named by Imperial detractors (and being in a New Republic-aligned club, that is to be expected, I guess). I personally find Raven's name Exterminatus to be a more dignified name for an Imperial warship than, say, Ugly Face. :)

* Developing sector data for the Binaural Sector. For some reason any detailed information that existed about the Binaural Sector has been lost over time. What information that did exist was mostly requested changed by FC Fox, as the system names were rip-offs from some rock band. So General Raven embarked upon a project to extrapolate on what information was known about the locations involved in the Binaural Conflict (read: not much), and produce a comprehensive and coherent detailing of the most notable locations within the region. As noted above, General Corsair assisted the process by creating individual worlds and locations, especially names, which Raven used to construct the re-realised view of the Binaural Sector. (For anyone who wishes to see this data, please read on)

In addition to those notable efforts, General Raven has also worked on a number of other projects that, while fully completed, have not yet seen the light of day. The work is done and finalised, but there have not been suitable opportunities to present the data to the club. Here is a short listing of some of these various projects.

* Ground forces of the Star Destroyer Redemption. As a courtesy to Admiral Falcion, whom I believe requested this done, Raven developed a highly detailed and sensible load-out of the Star Destroyer Redemption's ground forces. I have a feeling that these details are sure to be utilised at some point soon in campaign narratives, but they have not been publicly released as yet.

* RS Income and Expenditure Budget. Raven also worked out the in and out flow of credits that the task force has each year, based on the tax-paying populations of the various worlds in RS territory, plus New Republic funding, military and research grants, expenses for maintenance of ships and supplies, and donations from grateful civilian populations for the liberations of their worlds from the oppressive grip of the Empire. This behemoth amount of work might not have obvious applications to everyone, but will allow us to treat the in-universe RS organisation as much more of a living, breathing unit, rather than an arbitrary sequence of plot decisions. For example, if the task force is running low on credits, we're hardly going to be able to afford to keep all of our fighters stocked with expensive torpedoes for combat operations, will we? Once again, a project that has not been publicly released yet, but which will be affecting ITOD campaigns.

* RS Salaries. As an off-shoot of the previous project, Raven has also detailed yearly earnings for officers of the RS, based on their rank within the organisation, as well as their highest position held. This does not necessarily have any real applications, other than helping immerse members in the fictional context by helping add realism to roleplaying. Again, another finished project not released yet. Anyone who enjoys writing narratives and roleplaying their characters are sure to appreciate this data.

* Ship damage data. And finally, a project that will be used primarily behind-the-scenes . . . General Raven has worked out guidelines for the statuses of ships under various circumstances, and the number of casualties / survivors of the damage and destruction of vessels in combat. This probably won't interest the average member, however will be of great assistance when plotting out narratives and determining what ships would be available or unavailable depending on the damage incurred in missions.

I could go on (but I doubt anyone would keep reading my droning words :P), but to sum up: Raven is an excellent and highly-valued member of the Logistics Office, who has worked excessively hard since joining, and continues to power full steam ahead, despite working for his other major commitments, such as RSXO and CO of the ABG.

It is with great honour that I award General Raven (with assistance from FC Trebonious-Astoris) the Tatooine Suns.

May this medal hopefully go some of the way to communicating how appreciative we are for your continued service in the Logistics Office. ":)


And here is where I should probably wind this up. However I would also like to briefly (yes, briefly, I won't bore you for much longer!) acknowledge several members who are essentially Honourary members of the Logistics Office due to their work assisting us:

* General Joshua Hawkins, for all of his assistance with coding (an example which can be found on the main RS site — he set up the Mediator News Service system which will enable the Logistics Office to publish in-universe news articles) as well as other advice.

* Commodore Himm El-Syna for his work in TacOps as XWA mission builder, specifically making VSG101A and for his willingness to mentor budding mission builders.

* General David Pasiechnyk, better known as 'Heavy', for his work in TacOps as BoP mission builder, specifically making VSG101B.

* And Commander Luren Ketan, better known as 'DaLe', for his work in TacOps as the sole mission builder for the EaW platform, specifically making RID101.

As these fine officers are not officially part of the Logistics Office, I am unable to reward them with anything other than recognition for their attested service. However hopefully higher-ups in their chains of command will recognise their service and award them appropriately. ;)

And there are officers currently working for the office, if via round-a-bout ways, however they will be acknowledged after their work is done.

Apologies for the extremely long post — I felt these fine officers who have contributed to the Logistics Office and the RS as a whole deserved to be acknowledged and recognised for their efforts.


":)

Brig. David Vaughan
Logistics Officer

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