I know a lot of you have been reading the new member orientation discussion in the Main ComNet, and probably recall Raz's request for people to work on histories/timelines/missions logs for the Army & Navy. I volunteered to work on our side but, in order to have time to write while working on this, I'm going to ask all of you to help me out when you've got spare time.

There'll be an IC reward for each mission you chronicle for me here- amount yet to be determined, but it'll likely be a few thousand ICs per mission. Anyone who goes above and beyond in helping me might just win a medal to go along with those ICs- just don't neglect your writing either. That'll defeat the purpose.

For reference, here's the wiki page all this will be displayed on: Naval Timeline

For each mission you look over, fill out the following form:

Mission Name:
Mission Type:
Mission Unit:
Mission Commander:
Mission Start Date:
Mission Link:


Form Instructions:
Mission Name: Just type in the name of the mission.
Mission Type: What type of unit performed the mission? Could be a Flight, Squadron, Wing, Small-unit, Taskforce, Fleet, Navywide, Chapter, or special CD (see the Note below).
Mission Unit: The name of the specific unit (or units) that took part.
Mission Commander: Who was in charge of the mission?
Mission Start Date: What day was the original post starting the mission made?
Mission Link: Add a link to the mission topic, so I can easily check and retrace your steps.

Note: The only CD missions included in this are those that had an official part of the VEN storyline- things like Nazgul: Mea Culpa, in which an official execution happened. Interim stories and training count as well. Personal stories do not.

You can start at any point in the history of the VE, but I heavily recommend that you use this topic to communicate with each other both so that everything gets covered and so that no one accidentaly copies a story that's already been done.

Please keep editing on the wiki page to a minimum- the first section, the narrative history, should be edited only by myself, Tryk, or a member of the NHC. The timeline is open to anyone once I've got it formatted, but I'd still prefer to keep most of that in a relatively small group so errors will be minimized.

This is a huge undertaking, documenting over ten years of stories...but we're well up to the task. I have every confidence that we can knock this out in weeks, if even that long. Remember: The only way to eat a 72oz steak is one bite at a time, so break out the bibs and barbeque sauce and prepare to gorge.

Thank you in advance.

-Drac

Each thread is a single entry on the timeline. If a thread contained multiple engagements, mention them. But only one entry will be made for that thread. If a battle is covered by three separate threads, three entries will be made for it. The narrative, naturally, will blend everything that's happening at once.

-Drac

Good work, Tryk. Keep it up.

As an added incentive for people to pitch in, and because this really is a huge project that will be very valuable for the Navy, here's what I'm going to do: When we're done a section will be added to the page recognizing all of those who contributed, in order by the magnitude of the contribution. In short, if you want your name to go down in Naval history (pretty much literally), here's your shot.

-Drac

Looking great, Tryk.

I did the first ten stories of 2011 today, so anyone who's interested in what the timeline will look like can feel free to check that out. Suggestions are welcome, but remember: the timeline itself will not hold details about what happened in a given story. That's why the title's a link to the story and why there's a narrative section.

-Drac

Haven't gotten to A Page yet- I'm going straight up from the bottom, choosing the stories that will count as I go. When I run into something that isn't newer than the ones before, I just insert it where it belongs. Less skipping around this way.

If someone's scanning the timeline they're probably looking for a certain commander, unit, or mission title and will likely have a decent (aka, within a year) idea of when the story began. What's there ought to be enough, especially when they can just click the link of any likely looking story and see if it's the one they want. If we added, on average, one more line to each entry for a short description, we'd end up with hundreds more lines added to the overall length of the page, which'll already be one of the longest on the wiki.

-Drac

If it gets so big that we do have to split the years off into separate pages, we likely will add a short description since we'll be able to afford the room. I'd rather not go that route, though, since splitting pages could make it more difficult to find missions that started in one year and, for the most part, took place in the next. I'd also like to keep the impressive scroll we'll have to have in order to get all the way down the list of stories we've done.

-Drac

Unfortunately, I can't. I don't have access to IRC unless I'm on my laptop at a wifi hotspot, since the other two computers I have access to are public ones. Those're the ones I'm almost always on right now.

I've thought about using tables, and we can certainly go that direction if everyone thinks that's better, but my feeling is that they'll make the page too busy, especially considering the length it'll be.

-Drac

Very cool... May I go at 2010, boss; you can handle 2009?

EDIT: Also, I was thinking more along the lines of the "Story Participation" template, with a couple more columns, rather than a standard table... so it would keep track of total numbers, either of posts of stories, and have space for various info on each entry.  Sadly, such a thing is beyond my meager wiki skills...

I guess I just like the clean lines, lol.  We can certainly focus on getting the information up, rather than worrying about the logistics of tables.  And, I'm handling the 2010 stories, if that's cool with you, Drac. 

fyi: Driver's adventures on Ator and the Expansion Wars are considered canon. the Navy picked up most of the currently used fleet from Ator.

http://comnet.imperialnetwork.com/topic/13767/<---An Opaque Mirror

http://comnet.imperialnetwork.com/topic/13990/ <--Gone for Soldiers

those are all of the stories of 'The Expansion Wars"...as of now

What do we do about stories that just sort of trail off, without a real ending?  Things like: http://comnet.imperialnetwork.com/topic/14327/, are what I'm thinking about...  It seems like an "official" training op for the Intelligence service, but it doesn't really progress very far.  Do we include it?

I'm cool with that, but in this particular case I'm not sure there's anything TO know... It's basically just a mission briefing.  Just wanted someone else to give it a quick read; if that's still your decision, cool, it goes on the list.

Hmm...well, is it a completely OOC document, or perhaps not? I'd envisioned the possibility of formatting the narrative as an in-universe document. We could have it be a report from the NCC, with the NCC's name mentioned in only one or two places so it'd be easy to replace when a new NCC comes in, and thus keep the source accurate as the document continues to be updated. It wouldn't be too hard to do the same to the timeline- the addition of beginning and ending tag sections would do it pretty effectively.

I think it'd make it more of a fun read to do it that way, personally. Thoughts?

But yeah, as G said, anything initiated with the intent of being official will remain so. Many missions weren't finished for one reason or another, so we have to assume they did finish in Naval canon.

-Drac

You're a beast, and, thanks for the clarifications.

I love the idea for an IC document for the narrative section (my own wiki page plays with that construction in places), but the actual entries I maintain should be stories, not missions, since there ARE all stories but they aren't ALL missions, and since we're dating them OOC, not IC (at least for now).