Greetings,

RL has not been very kind with me these last weeks, but hey I am still alive ;-) ... my CD-Rom drive is working again at last, which will allow me to do the final playtesting of some new battles and missions.

1/ First of all, I would like to thank Grand Admiral Ronin for my promotion and High Admiral Astatine for the recommendation. I guess I will have to work even harder to fully deserve it :-)

2/ A mission design contest has been released; the goal is to get some demonstration missions for the Jedi Convention 2001. It concerns all gameplatforms, TIE, XvT and XWA. The deadline is January 10th, 2001, all details are available at http://www.tiecorps.org/tac/contest.html

3/ Rear Admiral Shadd, recently awarded the GoE, will be leaving soon his position of Tactical Head Coordinator (TCHC), position he held since the creation of the Tactical Staff. He will greatly missed and the whole Tactical Office wishes him good luck for the future. Do not send any application, my second Command Attaché Vice Admiral StarLion will replace RA Shadd and lead the Beta Team.

4/ Vice Admiral Wlodek and his Phoenix Team have begun their verification/correction work on last year battles.

5/ If the recent violations of the 407th Article of War (falsified pilot files) do not take too much of my time with investigations, you should see some new battles released this week... be sure I enjoy a lot better doing final playtesting than sending pilots to the HCI :P

6/ IW: the fifth and last part of the Rion Shadow Campaign is under construction, I have already made 2 of the 5 missions of the XWA Battle... expect it to be as good as "Ambassadors" ;-)

To end this report, the golden rule of mission designining: "Playtest, playtest and... playtest !"