X-Bomber the Game

Introduction »

Welcome to the home of X-Bomber the Game: a vertical-scrolling spaceshooter for Windows, based on the Japanese sci-fi TV series: Star Fleet

It features lots of arcade action, weapons and explosions.

News »

Star Fleet is Quiet

All my usual sources of Star Fleet news have been very quiet over the past few weeks.
I've had to put the game on a back-burner for various reasons over the past month, but I will be getting back to it.

In the meantime, one thing that we have in Northumberland is a very large second-hand bookstore: Barter Books, in the old train station in Alnwick.

It has a lot of old children's annual books, like TV21.
We've picked up a lot of Stingray and TV21 comics there, but since our daughter was quite small, I've picked up quite a big collection of Rupert annuals.

There's something about how charming and imaginative the stories and adventures are and we read them a lot.

I saw on Saturday that Barter Books had somewhat replenished their supply, so I hoovered up these four: 1971, 1982, 1993 and 1998.

2025.05.13

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Site Perf Issue ~7pm Yesterday

Sorry if you had problems accessing the site around 7pm last night and ran into a 508 error,
The site was running very slowly or not loading at-all, and in cPanel, you could see that 99% of the CPU time for the account was being used up.
I found a whole load of IPs in two different network ranges that were running constant bogus queries against the forum and other things.
It was also being run from quite a range of device types, judging from the user agent strings.

So I blocked both IP ranges from cPanel and everything was back to normal right away.

At one point, there were 80 'guest users' on the forum spamming the server with constant queries.

The traffic was coming from a VPN company in Singapore.  So the origin of the disruption could have been anywhere.

It makes me wonder why anyone would set up the resources and direct them to stun a PR3 website about an old TV show.
I don't think it's been a bot net because of the different types of devices involved.
We had this same sort of thing about a year ago from an AWS farm near Langley.

2025.05.09

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Bye (Star Fleet) Skype

I think I mentioned it a while back, but I saw that Skype has now been shut off by Microsoft.
I feel that they should go back to MSN Messenger because at least it was fun.
Another thing that I remember fondly was Odigo, which plugged into AOL and ICQ services, among others.

It had a radar where you could talk to people near you, or that had similar interests, and it had a very particular graphical style to its avatars and UI.
It played the sound of an arrow hitting a target every time a message came in.

The UI had little panels that slid in-and-out and the client had that skeuomorphic quality where it looked like a communicator device: like Trillian.
That was when graphical user interfaces were actually graphical, unlike Teams, which is all grey backgrounds and featureless buttons.

2025.05.07

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Star Fleet Legacy

I have a new Star Fleet story by Suzy to share with you.
You can find the two parts to download on the Fan Stories page, or just click below:
	Part One	Part Two

For the title image, I used The Angels' Dance by Tyler Young.

2025.05.04

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Asleep in the Ice Prison

We have another update from Ben over at X Blogger!
I like this episode because we get to see quite a lot of the colourful ice planet as well as some unique Alliance vehicles and installations.

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱▱▱

2025.04.28

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Star Fleet Skype Teams

Thanks to all who joined for a very pleasant Star Fleet Teams, last week!
We will be doing another in October, for anyone who would like to join us.

I will have a bit of a look into doing it over Discord, since Teams Personal doesn't feel all that personal, at least to me.

I see that Gary's hard work on the battlecruiser has been spotted by Star Fleet fans in Japan, so there's some positive recognition. 😀

2025.04.28

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Yu Hagitsuki - Dai-X

I got this image from pixiv. 
This artist's profile is well-worth a browse.

Check out his page on the site as well.

I wish we could see an image from this artist, showing some Alliance ships or machines fighting with Dai-X, but that seems not to be the artist's style.

2025.04.15

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BMT 3D - Termoid Soldier

This is good. Check this out:
	Star Fleet Termoid Soldier - X-Bomber T pose test render STL - YouTube

2025.04.14

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The Great Easter Slug Hunt - Week 3

When the youngest family member has a cow protein allergy, chocolate Easter egg hunts become a bit difficult.
This year, we are having a series of Easter slug hunts...

Leelu really liked the little figure of Burpy that came with the megamorph blaster, so I'm tracking down the slug figures that were made in 2012-2015 which are much more accurate than the new ones.

I try to assemble them from all over the place and, in the weeks leading up to Easter, I hide them in and around the house.

2025.04.13

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David Chamberlain - Dai-X Build

Thanks very much to Dan at SFFB for sending me these images of a great build of the Moderoid Dai-X kit by David ...

I think that this is a brilliant shade of red that's been chosen and the paint has a really nice metallic effect.
For me, the amount of weathering and panel-lining is just the right amount too, which, I always find to be a very difficult balance to strike.

It would be really good to see more projects from this fleeter!

2025.04.13

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