Does it meander? Yes. Does it embrace a few predictable patterns and twists? Yes. But it also depicts not only a lushly imaginative SF setting but a set of characters convincingly wrought by that world.

It is beautiful and horrifying and tragic. And if nothing else, you will remember the Lazy Gun.

(My favorite Locomalito project is--and may always be--Hydorah, but I sank plenty of hours into l'Abbaye des Morts, Curse of Issyos, and Toxic Tomb as well!)

...but I'd been envisioning small and cramped (probably ruling out the CR-20), maybe modified from a shuttle of some sort.

Thanks so much! It's a fair question but I'm afraid I don't have a good answer... I don't like to speak to what's not in the text (and I don't remember the specifics).

I certainly wasn't thinking about U-Wings at the time, as the book was written a while before those first appeared...

So lovely to hear! Thank you for reading.

If memory serves, I named the orobird way, way back in the day! What's not to love about them?

I spent way too much time trying to smudge the text!

I'm sure some clever enough person could make an algorithm to reconstruct it based on likely word lengths, but that seems like a lot of work for what I suspect would be a disappointing result.

But also because every writer works differently. My guess is that you could run draft comparisons for a dozen different authors and see different patterns in the redlining, revealing a bit of their style.

Everyone finds a process that works for them. Very often ONLY for them.

I do most structural work early, in my outlines, and largely stick to that plan. There are always exceptions, but you won't see whole scenes added / cut every chapter. Or many whole chapters added or cut. Usually, anyway.

Why am I sharing all this? Mostly because I think it's neat.

...but it's not unrepresentative of my process, either.

There are pages lightly touched. There are pages with multiple paragraphs torn out and new ones inserted. No whole scenes added or cut in this section, though--those are rare for me.

But all of that is speculation on my part, and I don't normally keep notes on minor points like that, so I can't confirm or deny anything.

Wish I had a good answer for you but it's been a very long time since I wrote those lines. Your assumptions about Umbara and Salient seem reasonable, and my guess is that the Corporate Sector campaign wasn't referencing any specific continuity (other than the existence of the Corporate Sector!)

So glad it worked for you, and thanks so much for the kind words!

(Seriously, I do not want to overstate my contributions in any way. But it's a neat project and I love a good turn-based tactics game--and they've got a top-tier team of designers, writers, artists, cinematics folk, and so forth. I'm looking forward to playing it.)

Wrong time period!

Thank you so much for reading!