I think someone really needs to read the latest BattleBlog to learn about the scope of this initial release and future plans.
Well I didn't know about it, so I read it, and it didn't say anything about actual years. It does say it may respark the Objective Raids, which sounds awesome, and perhaps it appears TPTB will be going towards a more hard dataset instead of an intentially vague one.
The vague data we have now, has been completely responsible for the following applications not being created:
#1. Vehicle Designer
#2. Mobile Structure designer
#3. Building designer
#4. Base designer (collections of buildings on a map)
#5. Support Vehicle designer of all types
#6. Warship/Dropship/Jumpship/Space Station Designer
#7. Aerospace/Fighter Designers
#8. A strategic game that allows one to be a faction, and fight for control of the inner sphere
#9. Dynamic and animated maps of invasions, battles, civil wars, exodus exploration, etc
#10. A dynamic, navigatable, jump route plottable, map of the inner sphere (and clan homeworlds)
#11. Dynamic production maps of units, showing where all parts are made and the unit assembled
#12. Dynamic random unit tables, creating historical percentage of units for any year, from 2500 to 3100
#13. A dynamic TOE for units, showing the little boxes and chain of command lines for units
and others...
I know this, as each one of those projects I have tried very hard to do, but my inability to "fill in the blanks", as well as people who refuse to accept non-canon, have kept me from finishing any one of those, yet much of the design work has been done and I've spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours working on all of them together.
In fact, I'm even blowing thousands out of my own pocket (
http://www.freelancer.com/projects/Visual-Basic-NET/Planetary-Mapping-System.html) to get the algorythms coded to randomly generate worlds with maps accurate to 10m (I won't go into details on how I keep the data managable). This would allow me to map every single system in the inner sphere, and fit on a blu-ray, with far more data on each planet than explorer corps gives. I'm thinking of just trying to create my own somewhat parallel universe as there is just so much missing from BT in regards to details that are *absolutely* required for any computer adaptation.