Dinkledash

Thing is, one of the main functions of a government is minting and printing currency. I can see that in the beginning of the game we're going to need currency issued by the defacto government, the Arkship AI godmind. However, as planets become independent, have their own military and economies, write and enforce their own laws, they're going to want to manage their own monetary systems as well. Well managed economies will have stable currencies and exchange rates, while poorly managed economies will experience inflation, attempt to enforce price controls, etc. I think it depends on how many players we ultimately have. If we top off around 20-30,000, we probably won't have enough players to have independent planetary economies, and all banking and currency will have to be managed by game mechanics. If we have 100,000 players, we'll probably have two or three large political units with enough interested players to manage a government bureaucracy, arrange for deficit spending to build large battlefleets, have elections (or not) and manage customs and immigration issues. In that case, there may be enough critical mass for money to be minted by these organizations and the arkship currency can be retired.

It looks like CvC is out of scope for general release and will be in the first update, but they'll be doing the character customization instead, which will certainly enhance roleplaying in the beginning.

Is it worth playing around with Space Engineers waiting for DU alpha to start up?

Form follows function. Unless I'm selling a ship I don't see the point of sexing it up. If wings don't matter, I'm not going to use them. If they improve performance in atmosphere, I will use them.

Thank you, you're a gentleman Aetherios.

What's happening?

Yeah, he's a pretty congenial asshat.

Maybe we can strap four of them together with voxels to make a cargo carrier.

I spent some time in Afghanistan and the Russians weren't fighting terrorists, they were exterminating villages. There are ruins and graveyards everywhere, people using parts of rockets and shell casings as grave markers. The mujahadeen were mainly northern Turkmen and Uzbeks we were supplying with weapons, including Stinger missiles which we smuggled in. The Taliban are mainly southern Pashtuns supplied by Pakistan.

Does it come with scanners? Can you do prospecting from inside your ship or do you have to get out and hump? How much material can I store in my nanopack? Does the hovercraft have a cargo capacity (or need it if we can store tons of material in the nanopack?) Will we get it in alpha and beta as well as general release?

There's also evading customs duties. It could be that trade is only allowed through approved ports on certain planets, and that duties are charged when offworld goods are brought in. And it could be that certain items, powerful weapons for example, aren't allowed in the borders of a particular planetary or interstellar government, and smugglers would sneak or bribe their way past customs officials. Of course, who would really want to be a customs inspector? I bet there are going to be some jobs that people get rotated through and paid well for simply because they aren't a lot of fun. Piracy is probably pretty fun on its own, however.

I'd like this if I had any likes left today.

Duplicate post oops.

It's always "because science" or "because magic," isn't it?

Dude, I'm not saying that we need WMD and CD in the game, I'm saying let's come up with a rational explanation as to why it doesn't exist. How about this: everything we create will be coming from matter compressed into a K3 manifold. When it is projected into spacetime, it is assembled along a kyrium scaffold, which remains behind after the object is instantiated. This properties of the scaffold include remarkable inertial dampening, to the point where two ships built on kyrium scaffolds could be rammed into one another at near relativistic speeds and they'd simply bounce off one another. Nuclear weapons won't work because kyrium also serves as a damper to runaway fission reactions. An implosion chamber created using kyrium scaffolds would absorb rather than reflect neutrons. And dropping rocks from space won't work because the AI is actually aware of what we do with the objects we create. The AI is programmed to prevent the use of WMDs, but it does allow other forms of violence, as humans are by nature an aggressive species. And it is entirely possible we could run into another aggressive species out here in the unknown, one who can build and use weapons of mass destruction, a species we will need to be able to counter through violence. Therefore, it is necessary that humans retain the capacity for violence, even though the worst sorts of violence are forbidden by physics and the programming of the arkship godmind.

Player graphic elements could get rather graphic indeed. I'm sure we want there to be freedom of expression but not to the point of creating a hostile game environment. There should probably be a process by which you submit graphics for approval (perhaps requiring the approval of community mods.) We can't stop people from building flying penises, I suppose, but letting them plaster the sides of those penises with hardcore gifs might be a bit much.

How would the game engine know if someone has a reason to attack someone else or whether that reason is a good reason? Maybe the reason is he doesn't like the color of his helmet, or maybe it's because they're both running to stick a claim beacon in the same resources-rich hex. Or maybe they had a nasty argument in a bar. What reason is good enough for wanting to kill someone if not self-defense and how could a game engine determine criminal intent? If someone is aiming a weapon at me but hasn't fired yet, am I allowed to shoot first? If he wants emergent politics, I think he has to allow emergent law and order as well. He'll do what he wants of course, but I think safe zones and arkship AI-enforced property rights are a sufficient foundation for civilization. Beyond that, if the AI is setting and paying bounties for the bad guys, then the AI effectively is the government, and I don't think he wants that. By definition, a government is the only entity allowed to legally employ violence for any purpose other than self-defense. Any organization that can only do so under conditions determined by the AI godmind won't be a government.

OK, so the tech and crafting skills and availability of necessary resources will be our contribution to crafting, and perhaps there will be some basic customization of the standard designs such as colors and maybe faceplate opacity, but for vanity gear you pay real world money. That's fine by me. Now that you mention it, letting the Harambe Corporation design their own custom codpieces may not be such a great idea.

Since this game will be player content driven, a cosmetics shop would, I assume, mean that players won't be able to come up with their own cosmetic gear? I mean, will we be able to make our own gear at all? We should be able to make weapons and armor and such out of voxels and elements. Or is character appearance going to be a customization reserved for the professionals? Space TUs could be enforced by shielded beacons. I assumed that there was a way to claim an asteroid or make sure people can't build tits on your space station without your authorization but if there isn't that's a high priority.

Yes and size of the target will be a factor, so shooting a spinal mounted wave motion gun that fires once every 60 seconds at a fighter would be silly. And I'm sure that even though you're locked, if the target gets out of range or arc, you lose your lock on. You can lock on with a big cannon, and if you have max skill and max tech and your opponent is driving a dumb steel slab like the captain of a garbage scow, there's no reason not to blast him out of space with it.

Given that philosophy, why allow combat at all? I understand that given the lack of moral hazard, the impossibility that you could actually die, there are lots of people who indulge in gratuitous violence in games. I also understand that we don't want folks destroying someone's exquisite voxel palace with a suicide brick. But what's the mechanism that will prevent that from happening? It has to be explained somehow, not just say "it's a game" and break immersion without an attempt at worldbuilding and roleplaying. Perhaps you can have nukes, but they don't work on planetary surfaces because making nuclear dampers is cheap and easy but requires access to geothermal power. So they can work in space and can be used to wreck space stations and asteroid bases but not planetside cities.

It's not just the design, it's the QA testing in pre-alpha. Alpha testing is generally for things like playability and balance, but the internal QA is going to have to go through any combat system they design with a fine toothed comb. And we're not just talking about fighter vs fighter here, we're taking about multiplayer ships shooting at each other with specific elements and doing damage, presumably, to those elements as well as the hull. And the players would have to be able to repair them, develop skills for using them, create a lot of combat-related graphics (and doing good explosions is a pain in the ass.) So yeah, I thought that a 100K stretch was pretty modest, representing at most two more underpaid FTEs (Full Time Employees.) When you look at the size of the team as it is, 500k euros for 2 years of work is a pittance. These guys are going to be working 70 hour weeks for survival wages and if they can't deliver on stuff they didn't promise based on their funding, you won't hear me complaining. I'd rather see CvC go through a full alpha cycle too and I hope they can manage it, and I'm going to do everything I can to help them get the best possible game out there at general release.

We knew that the end was coming for centuries, and we realized at some point that we would never be able to finish enough arkships for all the Earth's populatoin. The wealthy sought to purchase legacy berths for their great grandchildren, the politicians fought to place their power structures into the design of the post-Earth societies, and corporations developed breeding programs for their employees, paying bonuses to people who married based on recommendations from their predictive genetics algorithms. And the poor despaired. The teeming billions of crowded Earth, suddenly forgotten as the rich world tore resources from the ground and pumped poisons into the air, heedless of damage done to a doomed biosphere. War was inevitable as poor nations without the technical capabilities to build their own ships insisted that their resources would only be used for arkships built for their own populations. The rich world shrugged and looked upward, tearing up space resources treaties as they tore the moon and asteroids asunder, plunging the third world into chaos as the markets for lithium, cobolt, platinum and gold went into freefall after a massive metallic asteroid inclusion was discovered a few hundred meters under the Sea of Tranquility. Faced with the near total loss of their populations in a hundred years, nations in Africa, South America and the subcontinent formed an alliance and demanded that space-based mineral extraction be shared equally by all nations based on population. Chinasia, however, with a near monopoly on rare earth elements needed for superconductor manufacturing and their own technical capabilities, sided with Normerica, Europa and Russia, calculating that they'd get more arkships that way. Desperation knows no morality. When the arkships under construction at Chonquing and Hangzhou vanished in blinding flashes of nuclear fire, Indians and Pakistanis danced together in the streets, while their governments disavowed all knowledge of the actions of the Humanity Front, a terrorist organization that demanded global distribution of arkship construction. Nobody knows if the nations of the subcontinent were behind the attack, and nobody ever will know, as the resulting regional nuclear exchange reduced the populations of India and Pakistan by 80% and of China by 50%. The waves of desperate refugees quickly overwhelmed hastily assembled UN facilities, and millions died of starvation and from disease. When the brain plague struck, it was truly a shock to a reeling world. A novel virus, not recognized by the nanomeds that swam in every human's bloodstream, that did irreparable damage to the brain within days. It started in the refugee camps, where millions huddled in misery. The first symptoms were lassitude and depression, so it was hardly recognizable as a disease, until the sufferers slipped into catatonia, stopped eating and drinking, then died. In the Mashhad camp, 70% of the refugees perished within a week. Aid workers returning to their homes carried the disease back with them to their crowded megacities. Before the WHO was able to identify the virus and publish an update to the global nanomed network, seven billion people, more than half the Earth's remaining population, succumbed to the illness. Arkship construction halted as corporations desperately sought out people with the skills necessary to continue the projects, making promises of dozens, even hundreds of berths to the descendants of surviving engineers and project managers. One of those engineers was my grandmother, Ethel Dinkman, to whom I am forever personally indebted. Most berths were assigned by lottery among those who's test scores and skillsets met the requirements defined by the UN's Colonization Commission algorithms, but I was raised inside the forbidding plascrete walls of the Nueva York shipyard, one of the several million legacies of that desperate time when men and women were able to make the corporations bend to their will. If the AI driving the mighty arkship feels that the legacies have been betrayed by the board, when the time comes for the launch, the ship will just sit there. So here I am, raised and trained to be a survivor, a legacy stockholder in SilverLight Industries, a berth guaranteed to me and several cousins, no doubt to the consternation of management, who see us as nothing but bodies taking up space that could be used to save better trained, more intelligent, and no doubt more closely related men, women and children. Well, neener-neener. The ship AI, using my grandmother's voice, will do more than scold them if I'm not here when it's showtime, so the company takes good care of me indeed. Frighteningly good. I feel like I'm kept safe in a cocoon of resentful passive-aggression. I wonder what will happen when we get to our destination. I'm a legacy stockholder, after all. I have a considerable energy share for my resurrection node, the wealth of any twenty random colonists. And anyway, no matter how resentful they may be, the AI won't let them touch me inside the ship shields. And they'll need me. I'm a good coder, a good shot, a well adjusted sociopath with a stifling upbringing, perfect for a weapons designer. I'll keep my eye on the bottom line and show the company I'm value-added. I better, or I'll wind up cleaning other's spaghetti code in a cubicle at the bottom of the arkcity pile. How can I let that happen, when there's a whole universe out there, one without plascrete walls and guardian drones? I'll get the company rolling, and then I'll take my odd habits, my verbal tics and my curious obsession with early 21st century Normerican cartoons and see what's out there.

Harsh. But true. I think we need to stick with the story right now. We're humans from Earth who got stuffed into an arkship, freezedried and shot into a planet. That does give me an idea though.

The most important ships to build in the beginning will be prospectors designed for the home planet. I don't know if we'll be able to mount scanners directly on ships or if we'll have to get out of the ships in order to scan. The design of the ship will depend on the range of the scanners if they are ship mounted. We may also be able to build drone-mounted scanners so you get to a location then you deploy your drones and they run a pattern around your ship and draw a map for you... a lot will come down to the instrumentation we can build, the capabilities of the elements and so forth. I know that mining itself is going to be a human-only activity as they don't want to allow ships or drones do it since that would result in planet-wide devestation. If we have the option of refining ore using a ship-borne refinery, we may have a prospector-refinery design so we don't want to fill our inventory with unrefined resources. I know that we store resources in our nanopacks but I don't know what the inventory capacity will be. Maybe we'll have room for a whole day's mining on our back. Maybe your inventory fills up after half an hour and you need to head back, in which case having cargo capacity on your prospector ship will be very valuable. I've read that there will be different scanners for different materials. If these can be mounted shipboard, it may be convenient to have the full array of scanners available in the ship. It may be that a crew of prospectors need to work together, one on each type of scanner, which would result in a much larger ship. Or maybe we'll be able to script the scanners together so they fire in sequence and we can build a scanner map showing different kinds of resources. We may want a ship to run the scans then land and send out vehicles with their own cargo capacities that the miners drive to their targets while the ship moves to scan the next hex. It all comes down to the business rules are for scanning for, mining, refining (if needed) and storing resources, and what elements are available. Will we know the depth of the resources when we detect them? Will there be deep resources that we have to dig down to even be able to scan for? Will we have to have ships that can drop off a mining camp with basic defensive systems, then run back to base to fill up with security forces, then return with a load of ore... so the ship may not be specialized at all. Basically I'm saying what's important in my philosophy as a designer and scripter will be building vehicles that respond to rules, conditions, economic realities and the military situation. I think it's important to consider what will be possible and come up with some basic ideas for a variety of conditions so that as we discover the rules, capabilities and conditions, we'll be in a position to come up with efficient and cost-effective designs. I'm going to want to be able to quote a Return on Investment for the equipment I design, for example, so that people will know what they're buying.