News

Zentrix
I may have got my hands on volume 3 of the Japanese Zentrix DVDs. 
These were always difficult to get a hold of. The only way was to get them second-hand or as ex-rentals.
When I decided to try and round them up in 2019, you could get the whole set of 6 ex-rentals for about £200-300, which seemed expensive.

I haven't seen an offer similar to that for about a year now and they only show up individually and rarely at that. You often see used volumes running for well over £200 *each*.
However, a while ago, I managed to get volume 2 for a much more reasonable figure (in fact there were two and I ordered both), and volume 1 a while before that.

Just now, I saw volume 3 pop up for a fairly reasonable amount on FROM JAPAN and I've ordered it, although there's no actual photo on the listing; just the description and product code.

In the fullness of time, I may be able to get the other three.

TV-Kun
In addition, it was very slow going trying to find any further instalments of TV-Kun that have the X Bomber manga in them.
March 1981 popped up and I've grabbed that as well. I already have the first two instalments; November and December 1980, but I have yet to scan them.

Wow, I really hit the motherlode here!
Lots of copies of all 8 volumes of the US VHS tapes of Star Fleet.

I think I'm right in saying that, these are the source material for the original SFXB website, and are where all the still images and videos on the site came from, before the DVDs were released in 2009.

I did give everyone else in the group first refusal, but Andy seemed to be running short of space, so I will look after them.

I'm running a Star Fleet museum now; every DVD release, laserdiscs, endless publications from all over the world; and now VHS. 😉
I guess the site is the same in a way.
I remember years ago, that a friend of mine passed on the laserdiscs and 2004 Japanese DVDs when he went travelling.
I don't know how he got them in the days before Rinkya and FromJapan.

I will get these scanned in because the covers are a really interesting impression of the show; a bit like the French comic books.
At the moment, I have absolutely masses of material from Japan and elsewhere to scan and add to the site.

Thanks very much Andy!

You might've noticed that Star Fleet Saturday hasn't been so regular, lately.
This is not an indication of a lack of interest in the site on my part; more that things've been a little difficult of late.

What I might move towards is either just releasing updates when they're ready, or an alternating thing, where I do an update on the game one week and something about Star Fleet the week after and so-on.

In any case, I have a small mountain of scanning material to work through for Star Fleet, so I made a start on the 2005 Special Effects Hero BEST Magazine VOL.5, which you can find here:
	BEST Magazine

With things dragging on, we've got to keep ourselves entertained somehow.
I wanted to do an old Galaxy class ship that'd been refitted and pressed back into service after a good number of years.
It has practically no windows; only armour ... and more phasers.

I did not have to look far for this week's Star Fleet Saturday.
Brad has been very busy reworking his X-Bomber 3D model and started work on the Dai-X as well.

Take a closer look on the SFXB Forum

Migration Away from Facebook
I've been busy migrating all the content that I put on facebook onto the website.
This has taken me about a fortnight but the process is now finished.

The website's hosting has also just been renewed for another 3 years (and 6 months for free).

Doctoku's AI Upscaling Project
On the SFXB Forum, user Doctoku has created a 720p AI-upscaled version of the first episode of the original X Bomber Japanese version of Star Fleet:
	SFXB Forum thread
	Google Drive direct link

SFXB Forum Issues
At the same time, I learned that newly-registered users on the SFXB Forum were having problems accessing the forum.
This problem in the forum's database has been fixed with a bit of SQL trickery, but it means that we had trouble with spam users who registered over the past months who were then able to disrupt the forum with spam messages as well.

I've pruned all spam users from the forum, along with any of their messages.
I've also tightened up the registration requirements and added a number of spam mail domains to the blocklist.

Lastly, after a recent upgrade, there were problems with the 'breadcrumb' navigation. That's now been fixed.

Fan Artwork
I added a much cleaner and better version of Japanese artist Shiina's Star Fleet illustration to the Fan Artworks section of the site.

The other week, I found this nicely-styled illustration by Ryuhi Misaki on twitter.

I found this yesterday.  It's an article scanned by twitter user; bomberxf01, which the person claimed was part of an initiative to make a movie of the show, after the series ended.
The write-up didn't mention a date when the article was published, but I don't see how they could have produced a movie, with all the props, sets and puppets having been destroyed by fire ... unless they planned on re-creating them.

The situation with the unknown enemy is growing serious and the NX-191052 has arrived to reinforce NX-140646 at Starbase 17.

The Lin Wood is essentially four engineering-style hulls, containing a total of four conventional warp cores and four 'Best of Both Worlds'-style deflector cannons.
These four main weapons are capable of simultaneous fire, or a continuous, sequential rapid-fire cycle, where at least one cannon is firing at any given time, which can be sustained for at least several hours of continuous output.

The 8 phaser strips are intended for point defence and the 18 photon torpedo launchers are there for no real reason, just in case; the intention being that the vessel would normally be escorted by an entire battle group.

Since the ship contains no holodecks, large cargo bays, cetacean ops or petting zoos, the ship can maintain a surprising maximum warp for extended periods, the exact value of which is highly classified.

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.

Profiles: SFXB Forum