GDW Virus Vultures

Pardon me, folx, I'm about to exhale plasma.
Send the kiddies from the room.

AAAAAAARRGGGGGGGGGH!!!!!!!

Ok, that's better.

Now about this virus...

Does anybody here remember one of my designs last year?  The Vulture
Class orbital repair bot?  I had designed a robot which would move
around a planets orbit, deorbiting junk and generally cleaning up the
place to keep things from smashing up expensive spacecraft.

Well, I wrote a little story about it to go along with the design.
It seems that a pack of these little bots were being used to clean
up The Battle of Two Suns.  They came across the wreck of a Kinunir
class cruiser and reactivated it's computer.  The (slightly paranoid)
Artificial Intelligence program took control of the robots.  The ship
then used the robots to repair itself to a jumpable condition.

The ship then began spreading virus programs that went out taking
control of other Vulture repair bots.  These bots began cacheing
spares and equipment for the continuing repair of the cruiser.  They
also began building up a small fleet of ships which had been damaged
and had been convertied over to control by the AI software.

Contrast this with the 'Vampire' ships GDW suddenly 'came up with'.
*MY* fleet had a source of repair parts and the Muscles to repair
themselves!  Theirs will malfunction when they miss their annual
maintainance!

Now, I'm *REAL* *SURE* GDW came up with this one on their own.
Yeah!  Right!  And Nobody ever saw George's stuff on watercraft
design either!  And Everybody at GDW just *FORGOT* that Rob Dean
did virtually *ALL* the ship designs for *TWO* recent releases.

You know an interesting thing about that Vulture Bot...  I wrote it
up at a time when Rob Dean was communicating with Chuck Gannon.  Rob
was telling me that he wanted to send Chuck copies of the designs he
and I have done.  So, since he sounded interested, and Rob had sent
me his address, I sent Chuck a copy of the Vulture bot and the story.

I never got so much as a reply.

So I figgered he wasn't interested.  |-P

*AHEM!*
Now, I'm not accuseing anybody of anything *YET*.
But Fukkit!  Something is *GODDAM* *FUCKING* *SUSPICIOUS* around here!

What is GDW gonna do *NEXT?*  Write up an adventure about some Zhodani
before the Fifth Frontier WAR?

A *VERY* angry,

Scott 2G Kellogg
Oh great!  They're gonna redo the vehicle design system
******************A G A I N??**************************

Disclaimer: I'm *CERTAIN* Rob Dean had nothing to do with any of this,
he got screwed by GDW at about the same time.  I *KNOW* Rob wouldn't
be a party to any wrongdoing here.  And if he had *any* involvement in
it, it was purely accidental.  So, Rob, please forgive my putting your
name in here.