I've taken on the responsibility of managing director, so to speak. I'm coordinating all the projects we've now started to make sure they integrate effectively with one another and to keep each developer on task. This is the kind of stuff I really enjoy, so I'm having a blast setting it all up and pointing each guy in the right direction.
As you can expect, initially the group was all over the place with wild ideas of what they would do and what they wanted to do. In the end, I've focused everyone's work onto a handful of things which we've desperately needed for a while but have been able to make due without. It would have eventually caught up with us, so it's good that we're finally working on these things. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, we're getting a modern authorization service set up to manage all our tools. We're creating a contract payment calculator that will ensure as fair a payout method as possible. We're also working on a new killboard that will work with our payment calculator as well as adding the ability to add a pilot to a kill as a scout or logistics. I'm also trying to get a website made still, but we really just don't seem to have any experienced web developers, so it's a struggle. I hope to be able to write more about this website soon, but I don't want to reveal my hand too early. It's a big project and I can't rush it. It has to be just right!
We've still got a long way to go, I'm sure, and I don't know if we're going to be able to use the current auth services that are out there or not, but it's really nice to see us beginning to move into this type of coordinated era.
More importantly, the alliance is deploying for the first of a series of upcoming contracts. This one is going to be a pretty standard event, but it's always nice to get out there and do some work. Obviously I'll write more about this once it's over.
The second one is going to be a lot more fun. Clearly I can't say anything now, but this is going to be an awesome contract. It's an amazing contract type, one of my favorites in fact, and it's in a really promising area. I can't wait for this one to start, and I'm sure I'm going to have a lot of really great stories to tell from it.
Of course, the moving part of deployment is annoying these days. It takes a long time to get everything done, and we can't carry nearly as much as we used to. But as I've said before, it's a price I'll happily pay for living in a post-Phoebe universe. Having a carrier of my own makes this much easier. Our deployment loadout for a single pilot almost fills up a single carrier, so it's quite a task to get ships out there for the guys who don't have carriers yet. I've been trying to brainstorm interesting ideas for moving ships that isn't overpowered, but there's really no easy solution to that problem, and I honestly don't believe there is a solution. Moving a lot of ships rapidly is overpowered, and despite how much I may complain, I'm really happy to struggle through our deployments.
