Anonymous

With reference to Rules 3 through 9, plus of course 12 - the Silent Legion exists for purposes such as this. Make whatever you like to tag people - we already know who they are. And they can try and hide - it won't matter. We'll still show up regardless. We don't want your bounties. Or your praise. If asshattery is afoot it will be found. So Asshats of the future DU reading this with your grubby scammer eyes. Hate us. And let the hate fire sustain you till we arrive. Because Rule 19. Anonymous loves you.

I vote yes, not for G-force effects, but rather - Gravity in general. (In that sense the G-force vs tech debate is moot - if there is real gravity in play, we as players need to design means around that.) So G-forces - for craft in atmosphere - yep. For land and water vehicles, yep. For launching to space - yep. And so on. And gravity = some cool sci-fi stuff like sling shots using planetary gravity wells. 2 cents. Anon.

@N Actually, you're just thinking about this using a traditional, (quite old now) MMO lens. DU's content is player-made. But not entirely as far as we know - that could happen. But, more's the point - Alioth, the system, the Universe - as we discover these things (and given procedural generation) - this is new content. Persistent new content. And really - that's what the REAL value proposition of a P2P system over DU is - it never gets turned off. That's the beauty of all this. They are starting their development journey now, with a drop date of Dec. 18. One only has to consider the ubiquitous techs which will be in play at that point that WoW and EvE can't match. For instance - today, No Man's Sky, despite criticism, shows the power of procedural generation at scale - DU will take that further. And with the advent of blockchain tech - DU could leverage Distributed Application technologies - (bet they are already looking at it) - the beauty of which is that you can make an MMO as awesome as DU, with massively reduced server costs, as the more people play, the more compute power you effectively get. (Check out Zeronet website's for instance). And literally, the "servers" in models like that can't crash as the data comprising the universe becomes peer to peer and consensus based - essentially any modern online game, on steroids, with a single source of uncorruptible truth at it's core. That both we and NQ made. THAT's why I'll pay a sub happily - because I'm paying for persistence. And a sub means that if I want to take a 2 month break or even a one year break - say I go on an overseas holiday or if I was a soldier, get deployed - I can. I reactivate my account and EVERYTHING is as it was, but changed in a way that has provenance - a real change history just like the real world. No resets, no take backs. The closest thing to a real (in a persistent tangible, non-transient or ethereal sense) alternate reality you will ever likely see. Don't get me wrong - all good things come to an end, I know - but while DU is alive, it will be a single game continuum - you will really make history - and that's worth it.

(Oops, double post from mobile)

However, serious note. And I will start a new thread later on this - for a DU GIS as well as time/date/calendar to work (IF player/community input matters with core stuff like this) we need to know key background info as space and time must be dealt with together. RL Work hat off - as you were.

As a geogeek - I endorse this idea. Because maps.

Things. They know things. They went on strike briefly in 1974, unfortunately during the critical filming stages of Zardoz. As a result... this.

I weirdly enough made a post under my org about this very thinking - my conclusions were a little different in that Alioth must be but one of many worlds as well as virtually one of the last Arks built. (I agree with the rest pretty much maths wise ) So if we assumed say, starting from a medium projection baseline of a world population of 10.9 billion in 2100 (but notably and consistent with today, around 1.2 billion in the developed world with most growth happening in Africa, and assuming no breakthrough longevity tech causing trending to 0% mortality with no change to fertility/birth rates) that a staggered approach to building and launching say just 1 million people per Ark (as you don't want too many eggs in one basket since the plan is basically firing Arkship buckshot at the galaxy and hoping we hit something), at a rate of 10 per year (over 400 years), the UN conceivably saves 4 billion people, including importantly (to the ones saved) most of the population of the developed rich countries. So lets further assume only a VERY generous 10% make planet fall, that's 400 seed worlds - all potentially trading with each other, with different rotation and orbital speeds. So I'd suggest that DU needs local times and calendars as a game function, thus allowing emergent game play to happen if needed - one polity exerting a calendar standard on others, (Roman style!). That said - a sane start for any world is Year 0/0/0 (assuming all worlds will use a "day" rotation cycle / lunar cycle / solar cycle model). The colonists can assume no one else made it, so why tie to a meaningless reference from a now long dead world. The second generation of colonists won't even have a concept of Earth, A.D or C.E, the solar/lunar/Gregorian calendar. "GMT" can be easily fixed to the Ark geo-location on any world. However it raises the interesting point that any time keeping device colonists begin with (especially ship based AI's and computers) are using software written on Earth using Earth times and date systems - that could be an interesting RP hook for people - using Earth time/calendars gives you away as a space-faring ship based type or space-station dweller? Additionally, what happens to human body clocks when its not a "24 hour" world (or rather, 86,400 second world)? Are we indeed stuck with "Earth time" almost physically?

Ah. Right you are and will do! I'm actually rethinking it all (the org) heavily anyway as it is proving difficult to tie in 500 years of pre-history, and now I have all that lore to catch up on! So it will get polished and rewritten - it was just a quick piece anyway Watch this space Cheers

OK. So the backstory is being moved to the right forum spot. <= (in case the first couple of comments make no sense ) So when I decided to really commit to Dual after lurking many a month (since commit = goodbye life), I got to thinking about the notion of organisations in the human context, and what that might look like in 500 years. "But the game is set in 10,000 years" you might say. And I'd respond by pointing out that the game is set after all players have slept 10,000 years. Which means the baseline social reference frame is really circa 22nd century to 26th century Earth. "Why 4 centuries. The backstory says 2537 (CE)." No - the backstory says the U.N committed to the Rebirth Program in 2027. We know the Program called for thousands of ships. And that each one holds millions of people. The sheer logistics and the 500 year lead time would almost necessitate an plan for an orderly and staggered migration plan - that is - Arks will launch as each one is built. It is unlikely they would be built all simultaneously - almost certainly they would be built in orbit due to the fuel required to escape the gravity well (we know they are massive enough to withstand a controlled collision and solid embedding into planetary crust - think about that a second...) if they were built planet side. So I assume the short story talks of Arks as smaller loading/ferry ships. Aetherios' posts make a nice plausible idea there - the Arks are made up of smaller sections which could be these ferry ships. So, beyond that - being conservative, let's assume it takes no more that 100 years to design and build and test the first ships, including the working (and tested!) technology for associated systems - namely, working cryogenics and fully realised AI - not some pre-canned chat bot - both of these very key (and currently non-existent) technologies are critical to Dual's backstory just to get us to the new worlds. Based on that, I am working from a premise that the first ships started leaving no earlier than around say 2125. "Yeah, well that's all good and all but so what?" Well, the so what is that we are already, via the backstory/game site and (canon) short story, making assumptions about the nature of human society in the 26th century. Such as assuming the idea of a corporation, or indeed, a nation state, (and by inference the U.N) still exists, although I further note that all things change in form over time. And I thought to myself, "well, if those things still exist, other social constructs born of those things would probably still exist." One such construct that really interests me is the notion of the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO). While many are familiar with the notion of a DAO through the classic Al 'Qaeda terrorist model, or more recently in the media, the D.A.O blockchain project that raised $50 million in a kickstarter - neither the pursuit of being a griefer pretending that being an asshat to people is "roleplaying a terrorist" nor pursuing an E.V.E style commercial empire is really of interest to me in Dual - not like the politics / government side of things does. So if only there was a DAO I could use as a model which had a political and/or government angle. And is interested in the common good, a key element of roleplaying online in a community. Maybe one that wanted to actively prevent a re-occurance of humanities usual ailments: "The first guerillas were born, the first battles. The first madmen greedy for power and resources established their little empires, enslaved villages, attacked isolated communities with their ships to raid them for raw materials, energy and constructs. A resistance is organized, but it is weak." Luckily I found one in Anonymous. In short - the Silent Legion is so far a thought experiment in how a group like Anonymous might evolve into a DU law enforcement / vigilante justice group. More soon!