Joint Fleet Command Monthly Report – October 2017 (and it’s a big one!)

Written Bydulac
Published On
13 November 2017

Welcome to October’s (nearly Novembers!) Joint Fleet Command Monthly Report! It’s a big one too!

In this issue:

  • Normandy Outrage
  • IFS2 News
  • Projects Updates
  • Fleet News
  • JFC Update

Onwards!

Episode 1: Where du Lac accidentally retires a ship class by the power of Discord

Strangely enough, this started out as me (du Lac), having a bit of fun IC and recalling all the Normandy Class carriers to Earth for a refit while I flew over on the Ascension. The resulting news article and Discordbot pushed resulted in me spending two days saying “No, I’m not retiring the Normandy”.

But then I got thinking and decided that I’m going to retire the Normandy as is. We’ll be replacing the carriers with the Ascension class, which funnily enough look like the Normandy but are a bit (lot) bigger. It’s being worked on by du Lac, Mox and Bish so hopefully it won’t look completely nuts (*cough* Immense Class Starbase *cough*) and we’ll be dropping it on a Fleet Council near you soon!

This also gave inspiration for the Fleet Monthly Song!

IFS2 News

Not a lot happened on the front of IFS2 this month. Lots of behind the scenes stuff, mostly du Lac and Joon prototyping stuff for the next phase of IFS. It looks terrible, like someone’s basically had an attack of munchies at a Krispy Kreme drive-thru and left the evidence all over the place so it can’t be revealed just yet. Though we did get email notifications working properly so now if you set your notifications to “All email” or “Digest” it’ll actually send the emails! Huzzah! We’ve also had some quality news submissions coming through from CO’s, so thanks guys for the IC content and keep it coming!

Projects Updates

M’aat – Fleet Rules

It’s been slow but steady this month on revising the rules. As you can imagine it’s quite a complex beast. Admiral Sharr’s happy with it so far, which is good.

Ptah – Fleet Technology

We’ve sent the Fleet Council a list of 14 ships we’re retiring from the Prime Universe timeline. We’ve also identified a whole bunch of shuttles, runabouts and fighters which need merging or rewriting and which is heading to the Fleet Council for approval. Then we’ve got to go through the ships and redo the aux craft loadouts. Strangely this one started as du Lac asking “Where did the Raptor come from and why doesn’t it make sense?” and has now resulted in a good few weeks of work for Bish. Everyone feel sorry for Bish.

We also had a new member join us, Sadler – XO of Falkirk – will be sharing his groundpounder perspective. Marines all over will be happy to know you’re not getting new spec boots.

Seshat – Fleet Lore

This one’s starting up, once me and Joon get our heads out of IFS2 and the work we’ve done this weekend (coming in Novembers report). We’ve got two or three interested people so it should be enough to make a start on.

Thoth – Fleet Academy

Yeah … see Fleet News for this one.

Fleet News

Well, the big news we need to share is around the Academy. Admiral Sharr will take the role as acting-Director of the Fleet Academy under his duties as a member of the Joint Fleet Command. This next bits from him:

“To ensure a speedy recovery of the Academy, only mandatory courses (COAL and COR) will be accepted. Any requests for non-mandatory courses will be rejected and the student will not receive the course materials.

So that I can perform a full assessment of the Academy and make the required changes to allow it and its staff to best serve the Fleet, I will be relieving instructors of their positions. I thank each instructor that has remained with the Academy, your hard work and dedication is appreciated. If you are currently active with a student please email the Academy with the current progress. Together we will ensure every student is completed as quickly as their schedule allows.

I will be opening the Instructor position in the near future once the role has been defined to best fit the new structure of the Academy. Should you wish to return to the Academy then please email me at [email protected] once those roles open.

Thank you, everyone, for your patience and we hope to have the Academy back and ready for the new year.”

So yeah, that happened. We’ve also started looking at CO Academy and developed a new structure for it which should be fit for a modern fleet.

We’ve also voted to remove Cloaking Devices from the majority of Fleet Sims. There’s an announcement about that here if you missed it

Joint Fleet Command Update

Last but not least. When we brought du Lac (me!) on board back in July, the JFC announced it was going to take some time to review how JFC should work in the future. We think we’ve finally got a model we’re happy with. Each member of the JFC’s going to have a specific focal area, whilst retaining shared responsibility for the overall operation of the Fleet. This works out to look something like:

  • Admiral Sharr: Academy, OMA and Webmastery things like the domain names and stuff
  • Admiral du Lac: Fleet Services & I&D
  • Admiral Sepandiyar: Fleet Operations

Wait. Admiral Sepandiyar?

Yup. New JFC Member Announcement!

We’ve had a long think about who could fill the 3rd Triad spot. We’re happy to announce that Mac, currently of Task Force 72, will be shedding the Green of the Marine and donning his Admiral Sepandiyar character. Now, this one’s not going to be a straightforward transition where we’d just take him now, slap him in a red suit and make him dance like the drunken dad at a family party. Given the upheaval we’ve had in the Task Forces recently, Mac’s going to transition over the next few months into a JFC role. This gives him time to leave 72 in a stable position, write a concluding storyline for Falkirk and means we can introduce his new Admiral IC through the current Obsidian Command storyline which is removing cloaks from the majority of the Fleet. He’s already claimed the USS Alexander, one of the new Ascension Class Deep Space Carriers as his flagship so it’ll be interesting to see how this one goes. Make him feel welcome and things!

So in closing!

Appropriate tune considering the amount of time du Lac put his foot in it this month.

or it could also be – depending on your preference