X-Bomber the Game

Sorry for the lack of a Star Fleet Saturday, last week ...

Brad Smith Dai-X
As you can see, Brad is doing fantastic work on 3D-modelling LegTrax.
You can find more images and give him encouragement on the forum.

TV-Kun Manga
I'm currently scanning the March 1981 issue of TV-Kun, which contains an interesting instalment of the X-Bomber manga.

The February issue is sitting in a warehouse in Japan, waiting to be shipped.
The January and April ones; the two that I'm missing, aren't showing up anywhere currently but they should show up eventually.

Other Stuff
I did have good luck with my Zentrix project...
A few weeks ago, I wrote that I wasn't sure that I'd ever find the last 3 volumes of the Japanese Zentrix DVDs.
Then, a set of ex-rental copies; volumes 3-6 appeared, where the price was exorbitant but was steadily coming down.
I checked on FROM JAPAN one day and a full set of 6 retail copies appeared; in great-looking condition for very substantially less.
Since I didn't expect to see nearly as good an offer in the future, I bagged it and, hopefully, we should be getting that part of the site completed before too long.

Star Fleet Saturday didn't take much time to prepare this week, since the scanning of the second instalment of Televi-Kun had already been done last weekend.
So, enjoy what's turning out to be quite an interesting project.

In the last few weeks, the site has had a few other improvements.
The media system will use the new HTML5 video and audio tags to play mp4 videos as well as audio files without people leaving the page or opening a new tab. That seems to work pretty well.

The website can also handle webp images, although it doesn't perform any server-side resizing, since this new Google format is pointless, and hopefully, it won't catch on.

There are quite a few additions to the Star Fleet area of the site:
	Publications - X-Bomber Super Manual
	Toys and Merchandise
	VHS Tapes

Star Fleet Saturday was a bit delayed this week...
I finished scanning the first instalment of the Televi-Kun X Bomber manga and full-colour feature, that were published in November 1980.

It's been a bit of a tricky process getting to this point, since the books themselves are not that easy to obtain, and not that easy to scan, as it turns out, either.

Anyway, out of the six instalments, I've managed to track down four in total and I'm working on the other two.

I may not manage it, but I will try to scan the second; December, instalment next week.

At the same time, the site has undergone quite a few other updates and additions.  I'll write a little update, summarising those at some point.

It took me a long time to find it, but here's the third out of the six volumes of Zentrix DVDs released in Japan.
This one was in a red box, which I seem to remember, indicates that it was a retail copy, rather than a rental one.

It's taken me about 2 years to get this far but, hopefully, I'll eventually manage to get the rest.
I saw volumes 3-6 as a set on Mercari but I can't justify the £400+ cost for the three that I still need.

	Screenshots
	Menu screenshots and cover scan

I contacted my friend; Maria, whom I met over Facebook, (before we both ditched it), to see if I could complete the fan artwork section a bit with some of Maria's illustrations.

They really capture the nature of characters from the show well.

Anyway, I received some great scans; far better than what I'd found before.
Go and check them out because they're great.  I've asked whether there's even any more where those came from.

	Maria Ramirez

Also, I have received my latest care package from Japan with another instalment of the TV Kun X Bomber manga.

I will have to get busy scanning those so I have something to show you next week.

The Star Fleet fan work area has undergone some remodeling.
I wanted to get rid of the separation between models and artwork for artists that needed their own folder. Sometimes, artists would have done illustrations and models or sculptures and it made no sense to split those into two separate folders.
Artists with their own folder are now all grouped together therefore:
	Fan Artworks - Contributors A-Z

At the same time, the fan stories page was a useful guide to which contributors had written stories; better than sifting through individual folders.

So, the fan stories page is unchanged, and the fan artwork and fan models pages are still there to display content that's not organised into folders by artist.

There are also three new additions to the artwork folder:
 - Lee, Shiro and Hercules by _108
 - Makara by akunotsubo
 - Orion and Makara by womanimel (shown above)

I designed this as a really vicious, mid-sized attack ship.
The 'saucer section' is effectively two structures that channel and attenuate the beam from the polaron cannon emitter in the centre.
The saucer also mounts two dorsal phasers on each side.

The ship has two forward and aft torpedo launchers, but beam firepower makes up the majority of its arsenal, to avoid the need for resupply in the field.

The ship is about the same length as a Prometheus or Excelsior class and is fast and highly manoeuvrable, and protected with a rapidly-regenerating shield system.

Uploaded a number of new items into the Fan Artwork folder:
 - Dai-X and others by bludgeon3
 - Dai-X and Shiro by nakaR6 (shown above)
 - Dai-X by yakitetuiro
 - Lamia by watari_saburo
 - Makara by jamescorcoran78
 - Princess Keeli and Dai-X by 3D12aRfHh5pUTZV

Edit   [ 2021.04.10 ]
I found the Feb 1981 edition of TV-Kun, so we should now have 2/3rds of the TV-Kun X-Bomber manga.
I've just got to see whether it makes its way to the warehouse before my other items run out of their 45 days of storage.

Search
Over the weekend, I brought a few search tools, that I'd been working on for a while, to the point where people can get some use out of them ...
The "contact" link on the menu bar has been replaced with a "search" button.
The site-wide search uses DuckDuckGo, which is a very privacy-oriented search engine.
The accuracy of the search results seem to be getting better-and-better, the more it gets used.

The two search boxes below, search within the titles and contents, respectively, of the site's database.  Currently, it returns news and version history results, but this will be subject to change as part of a larger overhaul of the news subsystem.

There is also a link to the SFXB Forum's advanced search page.

Initially, I planned to build the search features more specifically into the news module, but it works better to have the search functionality together and accessible on the main menu.


Navigation   [ 2021.03.12 | 18:31 ]
I improved the navigation for the News/CMS subsystem and added a way for people to 'like' anything that they come across.

At one time, the system did originally have a commenting system, which worked quite well but it was disabled because moderating the comments created quite a bit of overhead.


Image Upload   [ 2021.03.09 | 16:46 ]
Behind the scenes, I added an image uploader and resizer, to make adding site updates quicker and easier and to get away from the problem of linking to content in the site's main content directories, where the file and directory paths can sometimes be subject to change.


Next Episode ...
Lastly, I finally binned my facebook account. If you'd like to contact me to make any suggestions about the site, don't hesitate. Use the link over on the right.
Alternatively, drop us a line on the SFXB Forum.

I have a mountain of new stuff to share on the site.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be tidying a few things up and trying to get those added.
Then I'll be going back to the game itself to see if we can finally get that finished.

I tidied my Star Fleet Saturday folder out a bit and made a few additions to the site...
I found some additional images of Matsukami's X-Bomber model from prinzemathieu on deviantArt:
	Matsu Kami - X-Bomber

I added two images of some nice 3D-printed models of PPA and Qonto (from Sankukai) by twitter user; gooo_yaaar:
	Fan Work - Models

I made a correction in regard to the 1993 poster that, on closer inspection, was for the Japanese laserdisc release rather than the soundtrack LP.
	Laser Disc and DVD Sets
I added the seller photos, for completeness, for that, plus the B-club magazine, that arrived a while back.
	B-Club

Please don't hesitate to get in touch. I'll be glad to hear from you and I'll reply as quickly as I can.

Email me at:
... or contact me via the SFXB Forum contact page.

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