Links (hosted)

Here is a list of sites hosted under the Tempest.online roof, mostly old stuff I keep online for nostalgic reasons.

Star Wars Modeling Alliance (SWMA Mirror, 2002) The Star Wars Modeling Alliance, in short SWMA, was a platform for sharing Star Wars related 3D models. It had a quite large community and a huge collection of models, reference material and tutorials. It was established in 1995 and went offline in 2001. The reason never became entirely clear to the public. The site said "due to serious hardware damage", later "due to substantial problems". There were still some mirrors around then, but they died quite quickly, too, so all the excellent content the SWMA had offered was gone. I made up my own mirror in late 2002, using the material I had on my own hard disk and what some of my friends had saved. For reconstructing the site design, the Wayback Machine helped quite a lot, although I ended up writing all the HTML code new from scratch. This mirror is an inactive archive, it's only for keeping the old SWMA stuff online (so please don't send me new models to add them there). Today there are some really great other sites around for SW models, like Sci-Fi 3D for example. Also, models made today will usually provide higher detail than the ones back from the SWMA days. But still, if you are looking for SW-related models, the SWMA may have what you can find nowhere else.

Kappa Squadron's Flight III Homepage (2002) This page was useless even back when I made it, and I knew it. :) A Flight homepage, while people didn't even care much about Squad pages. But I wanted to try building a webpage, and this is what came out. I kept it because it's the first webpage I ever made. Considering that it isn't so bad.

AD Khaine's Operations Manual (2003) Well, the name is pretty clear, this is the Operations Manual written by former OPS, Admiral Khaine, in 2003. As you will guess from its age, this isn't official anymore, so why did I keep it? First, because I think it's well-written and well-structured and is a very good guide about how our uniform and medal system (still) work. Second, because none of the OPS Officers after him ever wrote a manual for themselves, so this is still the newest one ever made. Well, newest OPS manual, of course. Today you will find all info about medals and award regulations in the training manual - most of it still 1:1 as Khaine originally wrote it.

Kappa Squadron Homepage (around 2004) In today's TIE Corps, we don't have Squadron pages anymore. Finally everyone was reasonable enough to realize that they don't serve a real purpose. Back in the day they were mandatory. Which means you could actually get fired from your CMDR position if you didn't have one of these up and running. Given that all really relevant information about a squad was and is on the TC roster pages, this always seemed silly to me. After all, not everyone who has the skills to be a great CMDR does have the skills to also be a webmaster, or is lucky enough to find one amongst his or her subordinates. That situation somewhat improved in 2002, when the Internet Office came up with a self-made Mini-CMS, specially tailored for squadron use (hence named "SquadFirst"), plus the hosting service (named Minos) to run it. It was, however, very ugly out of the box, so I made a customized Kappa version. Still, some of the system's restrictions are annoying to this day, like the fixed width of 800 pixels. Content-wise, the most interesting feature of the site is the Kappa History, which also contains links to even older Kappa Homepages: 2003, 2002, late 1999 and early 1999 (screenshots only).

The Newcomer's Guide to the TIE Corps (2006) The "Newcomer's Guide" was made to help new recruits to "find their feet" in the TC by assembling the most important stuff about getting started in the TIE Corps on one site: Training requirements, finding and joining a squadron, communication via IRC, how to get the first promotion, how to get a uniform, some flying tips, and a list of widely used acronyms. Most of the stuff that you could find on this page wasn't new, it could be found on the official EH and TC pages as well - just with the major drawback that it was scattered all over the place, which I found quite confusing when I started in the TC. As that situation hasn't improved significantly since back then, maybe there should be an updated "Newcomer's Guide to the TIE Corps" - this one cannot really be used anymore as a lot of the info is very outdated.