I have enjoyed the lore regarding the war with the Vanduul. Some dates are now set in lore, I guess to support the upcoming Squadron 42. This being a development project where roadmaps are constantly changing, do you constantly adjust the dates in the lore, or do you manage them by other means?
TL;DRLore dates have rarely needed retconning because the long history leaves gaps and latitude, though expanding the number of star systems forced some dates to be repositioned.
I mean, we've been pretty good about them so far. I think with a lot of this stuff, at least with the current developments of Vega II and Bishop's campaign, these things don't happen on a dime. So we have a little bit of latitude. We try to build that in, I guess, to make it a bit easier, but at least particularly with the Vanduul war, I think we have some latitude as to when events happen around the ones that we've established. So we have room to play, and we don't paint ourselves too badly into a corner.
Yeah, 900 years of history is a lot of time. So Dave did a really good job at the start laying these foundations through This Day in History and a really broad timeline. And so there's these big gaps, though. And with that much time, it's pretty easy just to toss something in between two different dates and have it work out for the most part. Dates, I think, have so far been one of the things we've had to retcon least. They've been pretty sticky.
There's a lot of wrestling.
Yeah, because it was the systems, actually. Once we started building the system maps, because originally, at the initial phase, the PU was only, I think, supposed to be 20 or 30 star systems, and then it expanded. So the ones that we had already created expanded out, and suddenly there were now 100 or 110 or whatever the number is. So the Time Capsule had established dates that now had to be transposed to this new arrangement of systems. So some of them got a little funky. Specifically, the system where first contact with the Banu happened was much closer to Earth, but when the map expanded, suddenly it was far away from the Banu. So it didn't really make sense. So we had to figure out how to place it so it made sense in the narrative, again, without retconning too badly.
Yeah, I forgot about that, all the hard work you did on that discovery timeline, making sure when the Star Map was final that we were discovering things in the right order, because I think there were a couple of instances where a system that was really far away had originally been discovered much sooner than was humanly possible.