So, to make up for it, Paul offered to put in a good word for me at West End and make sure my portfolio got in front of WEG's art director.
I had finally gotten to contribute something to (what was then) official Star Wars canon, and couldn't get credit for it. Although I didn't blame my friend, I was justifiably annoyed. When I called Paul about it, he told me that his editor had refused to allow him to add a "special thanks" credit, and due to contractural reasons, he wasn't able to admit that he had solicited outside help for the book. Unfortunately, I had received no credit whatsoever. Even the cover art featured one of my characters, a twi'lek mechanic named Sil Vatura, illustrated very similarly to the portrait I'd drawn on her character sheet. They had been rendered digitally and cleaned up, and the Tequila Sunrise had been renamed Chaser (there's no tequila in Star Wars), but both interior and exterior designs matched my drawings almost perfectly. When the book was released in early 1997, I was both excited and dismayed to find my starship designs, in their entirety, laid out on removable pages in the back of the book. I agreed on the condition that I get a "special thanks" credit in the book and then I sent him my entire collection of characters (more than a dozen, at least), including copies of hand-drawn deck plans for two YT-class freighters, the Starboard Misfit, and a modified YT-1300 called Tequila Sunrise (after the Eagles song of the same name -I have a habit of naming ships after song titles and lyrics). As one of my former Star Wars RPG players, Paul was aware of my predilection for creating random NPCs for my games, so when his editor asked him to fill the book with additional characters, Paul called me and asked if I would be willing to share my creations with him. Not long after that, Paul Danner, a friend of mine from high-school, was hired by West End Games to write, Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy, a Star Wars RPG book detailing bars, clubs, and cantinas from around the galaxy. Later, I created an NPC named Lynnori who would captain a YT-1930 called the Starbound Misfit a name inspired by a lyric from the Pink Floyd song, "Learning to Fly" ("Tongue-tied and twisted/Just an earth-bound misfit, I"). While she never played a large role in any of my games, it was still a starship design that I was always quite proud of and felt had a lot of potential. I initially created a small design drawing of the ship, including a basic interior, called it (pretty much at random) the YT-1930, and made up its RPG stats in the D6 system, the only official Star Wars RPG at the time.
So, 'round about 1994, I was inspired by a police traffic barricade (no, really) to create a design for a Corellian YT-series transport (from Star Wars, obviously) that was triangular in design instead of round. A long time ago, on a college campus not really all that far away.
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