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No problem. It probably needs a little tidy up - it’s been a number of years since I touched much in that chapter.

Start with the quality: the quality is determined by either the Mission Control or the interception. however if the space politics is Anti-nuke that overrides the spacecraft quality until enough off-world factories are built. Once you get one factory you get an ET produced spacecraft instead; 2 gives you an advanced spacecraft.

Medium quality spacecraft will either be generated the same as high quality spacecraft with some specific components down-graded, or as specific medium quality types — inner or outer system. Low quality spacecraft are even worse. Because of this, a step by step guide would end up having as many different paths as each possible combination of spacecraft qualities effectively doubling the length of the rules.

I’ve held off providing examples until I’ve got all the rules locked down. As the game is still in development that means there may not be examples for some time.

These certificates are free to download and print for use with the Sixty Years in Space game. Slightly more compressed versions will be available in a couple of days.

A big thinks to everyone who has created and updated the RPG geek entry for 60 Years in Space at https://rpggeek.com/rpg/79011/60-years-in-space

A Facility with Words has also been updated with some formatting issues. It also has some changes to alert levels, civil functions and opportunities which were work in progress for the next release.

This Space Intentionally has been updated to address some table formatting issues. Thanks to Pen Zhaoqi for reporting the first of these.

For a full description of what has changed, please see the devlog post.

Quick addendum: After reading through your write up, I'm going to amend the contact generation process so that contact names should be determined through the Nominative Determinism rule and not require rolling a call sign for to be rolled for each contact. I've incorporated your edits into the rules for the next release.

Firstly, thanks for the great feedback. This is a game I've written for people to obsess over, and it's always wonderful to hear when people do.

I'd generally recommend emailing me edits rather than posting them here, simply because they are "time sensitive" and I'll usually incorporate them in a future minor or major update.

As for your suggestion to move the Mission and Launch Pad chapters to the core rules -- if I did I'd need to add roughly half of all This Space Intentionally to the core rules (Spacecraft designer, operations, infrastructure etc).

Instead I'm already planning on adding an equivalent "Landing" chapter, for travelling around sites; with more game play examples. I've shied away from providing too many examples to date, simply because the rules have been (somewhat) in flux -- specifically, I'm still not happy with the damage over time rules and I've only just solved load to my satisfaction (which will be included in the next update -- the rules change is relatively minor).

Finally, I'm planning a lot more support for solitaire for major update 2. I've not a fan of playing this game solitaire, but since the majority of players play that way, it makes sense to steer into what people are doing. A lot of solitaire will be rules for "just-in-time" creation. Instead of creating crew ahead of time you'll start the game and eg create crew capable of achieving FINAO when you need to perform an operation.

I've put up a quick survey on Twitter for the next 7 days, which I hope you'll be able to fill in in 2 minutes or less, to help me figure out the direction for update 2.

Feel free to reply either there or here with further comments:

https://twitter.com/andrewdoull/status/1766638559275168025?s=20

The Half-A Press catalogue is now up on DriveThru RPG as well at https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/24358/HalfA-Press-Pty-Ltd

I'm exploring the option of print on demand once the game leaves "early access".

Thanks! Really appreciate the feedback.

I've updated the freely downloadable files to the latest versions of the rules. As a bonus, the Sixty Years In free excerpt now includes the first 120 pages, instead of the first 100.

As mentioned in a previous update, the Infrastructure chapter which was previously included in the core rules and has been moved to the This Space Intentionally supplement, is also now freely downloadable.

This is mostly to fix an issue with a table header being duplicated in the Demographics chapter but includes a number of other small updates.

Simplified and expanded the rules for disabled crew by removing incorporated penalties and replacing them with safe penalties.

Added commentary on time keeping for actions, and the various turn lengths in the Skill chapter.

Fixed some references not working in the text.

Renamed skins as armour, cleaned up text and abilities and added fashionable PANFs.

Removed the spacecraft section from the assets chapter as it didn’t add anything useful.

Reorganised the Demographics and Assets chapter to improve legibility and keep related topics together.

Simplified the ship's locker so that only fabric items are limited.

Added descriptions for missile and raygun platforms to the Mission Control chapter.

Known issues: 

It looks like index page numbers are affected by the issue described at https://latex.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33078 where indexed entries can be 4 or 5 pages before the page number listed in the index, mostly towards the back of the book.

I’m on Twitter mostly. The community isn’t large so feel free to start building it here.

I've made minor updates to all the rule books. Fixes include spell checking, adding Afghanistan to the demographics chapter in the core rules, adding missing hull capabilities to the gas giant atmospheric depths table and extending the flight altitudes table for depths below gas giant aerostats in A Facility with Words, and adding O & B stars to the system map designer appendix in A Lot of Zeroes.

I've also moved the infrastructure chapter from the core rules to the This Space Intentionally supplement. I will be including this chapter as an excerpt from this supplement at a later date.

I've pushed this up now because of the inclusion of the game in an upcoming bundle and some marketing initiatives that should be happening in early February.

It's actually easier for me to update the live release, as I found some terminology that hadn't been updated to the latest version while adding it back in. Crew Replacement rules are in the events section of the Missions chapter and described in the Politics chapter. You should be able to download the updated rules as of now. I've also done some minor formatting updates on the main rules which is why they've been updated.

To answer your first question as I said in the announcement post at  https://itch.io/blog/661872/update-1-is-out, I'll be providing a complete list of changes in a development blog post later. To answer your implied question, I've still not decided what to do with the crew replacement rules. They're relatively easy to add back in, should I decide to do so. I can easily give you a modified copy of This Space Intentionally if you want to try them out.

Update 1 is now out.

Email andrewdoull@gmail.com if you’re able and willing to do a read through and comment on the rule revisions, with the subject line “Update 1 feedback”

Firstly, apologies for this and the delay in my response. Here's a link to a Dropbox containing the full component list including those components: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/kcfufqs4znsel8r90ly5v/high_frontier_3rd_edition_c.... I'll rectify in the next update to the rules which isn't too far away.

Other changes such as proofing edits, player aids, and the starting scenario I’m working on at the moment will be free to download once the game goes from Early access to full release for people who have already purchased this. The way I have sold the game may involve me having to issue out discount coupons in order to achieve this, as there will be a price increase.

My thinking at this stage is that the HF4All versions will be a separate edition because of the volume of terminology changes needed; and I might have to do a kickstarter in order to fund making these changes. So at this stage I can’t promise that the documents you purchase will include this.

However, I am thinking of releasing a (slightly more expensive) Infinite edition which will effectively buy electronic copies of both editions in advance - if and when they are produced. Would that work for you?

These are colonist abilities in the board game, so you might get them from there if you want to use colonist cards. I believe there may be an aero brake capability in the capabilities chapter as well (Edit: it’s right next to the Laser broom capability so I’m assuming you just neglected to mention it - however the capabilities in the core rules are supposed to mostly  match the capabilities from that chapter, so I’ll need to add laser broom as an option in the core rules as well).

And the refinery/mobile factory modifier applies for both rolls.

There's an excellent teaching game of the board game that will give you a feel for the complexity level that I've tried to adhere to. There's also the first 100 pages of the rules available in the Download demo section called "60 Years in Exerpt.pdf"

Let me know if the permissions I've set allow you to make an editable copy.

Link is https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/116Xa63J97IKRKjsSbN1D_EQ9w9qzNh7RmXpC3O8J...

It is entirely standalone. You don’t even need the High Frontier map.

But if you haven’t played the High Frontier board game, you may want to invest in the equivalent of the Dungeon Masters Guide.

The core rules assumes you have bought and played the board game so doesn’t spend a huge amount of detail on this - something I’ll have to rectify as this is more of a break out hit than I expected.

This Space Intentionally spends a lot more time on this. The launch pads chapter is designed to give you a feel for running some space missions as if you were playing the board game. The Missions chapter then outlines the process you’ll follow travelling from site to site.

Because I am an excellent graphic designer, the crew sheets are just Google sheets. Would sharing read only copies of that work?

There’s a number of ways you can get the High Frontier map of the solar system if you don’t own the board game.

You can get a poster map from Zazzle - just make sure you order a big enough a copy and not a postcard. https://www.zazzle.com.au/new_postermap_3rd_edition_high_frontier_nov_2015_poster-228522866334726293

You can download the Vassal module at https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:High_Frontier_(3rd_edition)

There’s a good getting started guide for Vassal at https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Getting_Started

If you haven’t seen the map before, it’s really an incredible thing to look at 

And fixed.

It would be me misspelling it :/ I’ll fix

I've now released all the supplements as separate game purchases. You can see them all at https://itch.io/profile/half-apress.

This also allows you to buy a particular supplement out of the recommended order of acquiring them. Do so at your own discretion -- however if you're just looking for a source book for a specific purpose, such as generating new star systems, you can get the supplement that does that (A Lot of Zeroes) without having to buy everything else.

You can use them as references but they’re not required. There’s a Spacecraft designer in This Space Intentionally that builds spacecraft using random tables instead.

Thanks! Have a great day.

Given that it’s explained in so many topics, would it be possible to get this added to the FAQ or any other relevant documentation?

I absolutely want people to be able to upgrade their purchases later - I’m just not sure of the best mechanism for doing so. If required I will publish separate games for the supplements but I am hoping to avoid having to do that so that people don’t accidentally purchase the same thing twice.

Hi,

Jus wondering when I can reasonably be expected to get my game indexed? I’ve read the documentation and believe I’ve met all the requirements.

It’d be great if we could specify the page count for book downloads — or better yet have it automatically detected for common book formats.

That's a downside of using a now unsupported LaTeX module (tabu) - I'm not aware of a ready fix for this. Migrating to the new shiny table module is on the todo list but there's downsides other than the amount of labour required.

It only affects a couple of tables badly and whether it is visible at all depends on the PDF reader implementation you use. For instance, I can't see it in browser-based PDF readers.