My wife and I were at the Motorhome show at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham today (UK, not Alabama ) and we've ordered our first Motorhome (RV). It will arrive at the end of March 2020. Given my free time is likely to be severely curtailed at that point (weather permitting), that gives me something of a hard deadline for the initial C# release.

So while I don't normally commit to release dates, one way or another I will have something released before the end of March 2020. With any luck it will be a little sooner than that, assuming nothing major comes along to interfere, but that is now my target date.

This doesn't mean that C# Aurora development will cease at that point, but it is likely to be even slower than normal in the summer months.

After starting to dig into plausible technologies for the next century (the current pet project of mine) I feel that somehow the tech tree of Aurora C# could use a some refreshing. For example Nuclear Pulse propulsion, I now realize that is based on the Orion project and the torchships sci-fi trope. Perhaps there is room for improvements or at least alternatives, like adding solid core nuclear thermal propulsion?

That's just an example, but there are others. What about the various FTL means of travel? Will we always be restricted to use wormholes, or a FTL propulsion, Alcubierre-style can also be added to the game?
I see you coming ... "the game is defined by nodes, which are wormholes, no way Steve can add another mode". Can he? Yes I believe that's easy to do. Just have the FTL ship disappear from the game during the time he travels to another system. Factor its speed, check the distance in light years between the 2 system (a distance already in the game, right), and then once the time is elapsed, makes it "pop" into the new system, in some plausible spots. No need for a new "map" or much new coding ...

But that's just two examples. My main point is that perhaps Aurora C# can benefit from a kind of face lift on the tech tree ...

For the FTL thing ? No. I don't think so. Aurora is heavily inspired by Starfire, at least it's early editions, and one of the key features of jump points is that they have few, if any, relation to realspace distance. A jump point in sol could take you to Alpha Centauri, Barnard's star, the center of the galaxy or even in one of the outer clouds. And so far from what I've seen Aurora ascribe by that philosophy. Not only that but having to actually make a realspace map of the galaxy around sol would be an absolute pain in the ass, and basically the other FTL would create another new game, where defending jump nodes or point is utterly meaningless and jump shock means nothing. So no, I don't think so.

He does a good job in this series of balancing threats and protagonist power.  While Damien continues to grow in power, he is balanced by quantity / quality of opposition as well as the political constraints of the background.

What is this Roguetech? Are you talking about the mod for Battletech? If so, is it really THAT good?

RogueTech takes the BattleTech core game and pretty much turns it into BattleTech.

Much of the games core rules are either replaced entirely with ones more appropriate for BattleTech or tuned to remove 'gamey' open to abuse tactics all too common in the vanilla game.

A lot of the existing weapons along with newly introduced ones are redesigned to fill particular niche roles, so there is actually a strong drive to design your lances to work as a unit against the enemy, where as in the vanilla game you could very much just pure blind firepower all your mechs and stomp your way through anything.

The MechLab scope is expanded massively to the point where all the various sub-components of each mech are now exposed and open to customisation.

The galaxy map is opened up entirely to give you the full scope, with a online persistent system ownership state that the mod keeps updated as you play along with everyone else playing RogueTech (Plus a pretty cool live control map you can find here)

Enemy and friendly unit AI are quite improved... still not great, but improved enough so that alongside the increase in typical enemy strength that actually pulling a victory in anything above 1.5 skulls without some casualties with a non-advanced tech lance actually feels like an accomplishment. (Just for the love of Bob, disable nukes when installing RogueTech. They're stupidly unbalanced and broken at the moment and will constantly throw unmanageable same spawn turn suicide mission losses that you couldn't possibly counter).

MechWarrior traits have been significantly tweaked so your pilots background actually now matters, and finding the right pilot for the right mech can make all the difference in a battle. It's not just about how you spend XP on their skill tree anymore. Traits do matter.

i have read a number of Glynn Stewart's series and liked them all so I decided to give this one a try too.

It is a very well done merging of sorcery with science fiction which I initially thought I would dislike, but I ended up devouring the first book and immediately buying the second.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074CJKXXY?ref_=series_rw_dp_labf