As stated in a prior post, I have been wargaming since around age 11. By 12 (13?) I had fallen in love with Starship Battles and Starfire, designed by Steve Cole and published by Task Force Games. How I loved those! I taught several friends and numerous battles ensued.
As I matured, so did the games.
In my early twenties, I wrote a program for the Macintosh to check the validity of Starfire ships designs that would also calculate cost and other such things. This brought me to the attention of Tim Olsen, big shot at Task Force Games, and at his request, did playtesting and development for him.
For a brief while, I joined my comrades-in-arms as the Starfire design board, and it seemed for some time that our primary purpose was to try to bring sanity, proofreading, and playtesting to the insane stuff that David Weber (yes, the famous author) was doing for Starfire. I helped the Crusade project be published, and my name is in the credits. I also worked on the aborted and bloated super space epic ISW-4, Interstellar War 4, about Bugs vs. everyone else. The source material was eventually published as On Death Ground, and The Shiva Option.
I wrote a draft of a Starfire project for Insurrection, but around that time interpersonal conflict drove me away from the Starfire design board, and one of the death-rattles of TFG was to sell the Starfire game rights to my opposite number, Marvin Lamb.
One of the products NOT spawned by Weber?s writings was the Vestrii / Alkelda plotline, which was sparsely illustrated by a great artist, Jackie Southerland. Note the attachments below, which are a sampling of his (her?) renderings of Kess battle riders. I vow that I will bring those ships to life. It may not be this year, but it will happen, just like when I vowed to resurrect the Imperator Titan.
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