What's new - Oct 1998

Well, once again I'm a victim of my own success! I - or rather, you - have broken Demon's restrictions on bandwidth from my site again. This means I'm on their slower server until at least the end of the month. Sorry for any inconvenience this causes you, but with a 25 MB per day limit, and recent days totalling up to 40 MB, I've got a problem that I just can't solve by swapping menus around. I am considering setting up a mirror of my site, but this will involve paying out for another ISP account somewhere. Since I won't allow any kind of advertising or sponsorship on my site, I'm still wrestling with my wallet on this matter! If I manage to force it open, you may well see a mirror of DITL going up sometime in the next couple of weeks. Until then, I urge patience.

Please note that this site does NOT yet include info from this book, as I don't have a copy yet. While I appreciate the efforts of those who are posting or want to post me info from it, I plan to wait until I can get my own copy so as to get the full picture before including anything. That means the new info shoul hopefully start appearing sometime in the next month or so.

To try and help sort out some of the download problems I've been having (see September for details), I've made some changes to the organisation of the site. The "What's New" page has been split up into one page for each month, which should save you a bit of time looking at the most recent developments. The Starships list has now been split into three parts - one for Federation ships, one for starbases and space stations, and one for the rest. The title graphic on the front page is now LCARS style, which has cut its size somewhat.

The biggest change is to the size pages. The "Under 1,000 metres" and "Over 1,000 metres" pages were generating a lot of bandwidth, and they showed you nothing that you couldn't get via the "Direct Comparison" page anyway. So I have removed these two pages completely.

Clicking on the "Size Charts" button of any specific class will now take you to a shorter chart which shows you that ship compared to the two next smaller ships. This will cut your download time for this feature significantly, and for smaller ships gives you a much better view since they will now be scaled to fill the screen.

These features are only available to those with a JavaScript enabled browser. If you don't have one, then go to the Netscape or Microsoft website and download the latest version - these programmes are FREE, so there's no excuse to soldier on with an obsolete browser - at least for Windows and Mac users!

The power pages have undergone some minor changes to correct spelling mistakes and improve the grammer here and there. I've also changed all the carroted numbers on the exponential values to proper superscript ones.

In addition, there is now a page for the Photon Torpedo. It's mostly based on the Tech Manual, along with my usual extrapolations and wild guesses.