Pilot's Log

An update to This Post, I found one of the vending machines in question. The toys are called Robotakons and they're under the "Amusement Factory" brand, which is one of the many holdings of CoinStar. There are eight pieces in the set, in assorted colors. I got myself one...a pod type walker with no weapons and a pair of jump jets on the backside. One of the legs is warped, so I'll have to glue it to a terrain base if I want to use it as a game piece. I think it would scale pretty well with Mechwarrior Dark Age, CAV, or Heavy Gear.

Hey.

One of the things I'd been trying to follow--without success--has been the Russian tabletop game Astroid, which I thought was going to be imported by this year but hasn't to my knowledge. I lost what computer files I had from the game with the crash and so I went back to the host site (www.tehnolog.ru) for what files I could find.

Good news...they had all the official "data cards" for download. Bad news...they're all in Russian. And so I had to use AltaVista's unwieldy virtual keyboard to type Cyrillic into Babel Fish and get translations.

I'm lucky we have these systems. But I also think a lot of how they're supposed to work is counter-intuitive.

In the meantime, I have to translate and type up the stats for the 16 robots in the series. Here's what a couple of the pieces look like (they come unpainted):



FP