The Full Thrust Image Archive - A Proposal (longish)

Introduction
============
Having started the ball rolling, I feel I should close the loop on the
discussion. To summarise quite a few people felt that it would be
very nice to have WWW page devoted to FT ships contruction and
painting as proposed by Mike Miserendino <phddms1@cris.com>.

Primarily the contents would be how to build various ship models and
color photographs of finished ships that their makers have sent in.

Several people stepped up to providing the scanning resource and web
site:-

/***  
Mathias Double <beowulf1@bu.edu> volunteered access to scanners but
has no web space. He also said he would scan any pictures sent and
forward them to the WWW site.

Jerry Han <jerry@uunet.ca> said he had virtually unlimited  WWW space.

Michael Carter Llaneza <maserati@hypnotic.com> said he had a WWW site
<http://www.hypnotic.com/ImperialDispatches/id.html> nearly up and
could post pre-scanned & rectified & compressed images.
***/

Taking Ship Photographs
========================
I propose that those people interested take good color photographs of
their ships. I think the photographs need to be clear and with the
ship filling the majority of the background. Not little dots in a
corner & fleets shots will probably not work.  

A well lit ship against a black background would probably be best. The
photographs should be normal snap shot size. I'd use 35mm film as
anything smaller is likely to be too grainy. Enclose a caption with
each photograph, written on the back of it, this is to appear with
each image.

See the Imperial, Eldar & Tyranid ship lists at
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/at2u/sfleet.html 
for the sort of quality we should be aiming for

NOTE I think that you can't expect to see the photo's again unless you
enclose a Stamed Adressed Envelope.

The photographs then need to be mailed to Mathias Double who
volunteered to scan them in. NOTE Mathias needs to give us his postal
address.

Scanning Ship Images
====================
He will scan them in at a sensible resolution (150 dpi) for final
display size and then format them to standard size (about 300x150
pixels) and color maps range  (256 color ) GIF format 
and perform any image manipulation required - cropping, gamma
correction  etc. He will also produce a thumbnail of each image
(100x75). 

He will enter the caption against each GIF in a file named after the
image file (I hope all this is OK Mathias).  
These will be compressed (zip) and sent to the target WWW site by MIME
encoded  email (unless the site has ftp access).

Construction instructions can be submitted in ASCII text to the site
or sent in GIF format. Its up to you to produce them in a form the
site can accept.

The WWW Site
============
The BIG question is where do we put them, I don't think I can  make the
decision
but consider:-

o It would be nice to keep all the FT stuff in one place, Mark's
Unofficail FT
page is nice but does he have the space for megabytes of GIF's on his
account?

o Jerry & Michael have both offered space. 

	Jerry has a FT page with all the mailing list digests already 
	   http://www.uunet.ca/~jerry/ft/full-thrust.html

	Michaels site is a WWW SF magazine 'Imperial Dispatches' which
	will have an FT page 
	   http://www.hypnotic.com/ImperialDispatches/id.html

o We need to choose a site that has a fast enough server for image
rich pages.

o a site with ftp access might be better for image uploading.

Once the site is chosen then the scanned images will be displayed
along with any caption supplied. It would be good webiquette to put
thumbnails up with links to the full size image from the thumbnail.

We can then let other SF net resouces know the URL - Hooray

Action Items
============
We need to decide on a site and if this proposal is OK with all those
involved respond please to the list or my email I will summarize, later.

Thanks for the response so far...

Tim Jones
timj@uk.gdscorp.com