Dinkledash

What, you don't hide behind 7 proxies?

I tend to agree with Dinkledash. Currency is a man-made thing. It should not be imposed by the devs. Doing so will result in a wholly artificial economy subject to all the things that destroy artificial economies in other games - imbalance, inflation, etc.
 
If you look at the history of currency on our planet - humans have used all sorts of things from shiny rocks, to rocks with holes in them, to livestock, to other humans (slaves), to bits of metal, to bits of paper and now, actual electronic bits.
 
I think that players - in their markets - should be allowed to create their own system of credits and debits - just like the moneychangers of old. Actual "currency" is, after all, just a "chit" that represents a credit somewhere, kind of like a casino chip. The actual value of these "chits" depends on the faith the community as a whole has in the organization that backs that currency. So the Republic of Zimbabwe, for example, might have trouble convincing the community as a whole to adopt its currency, while the United States of America has no trouble having others use its currency - even when both nations apply very similar monetary and fiscal policies...
 
So what I would like to see (because it is what closely models the real world) is that players/organizations should be given the TOOLS to fashion a unit of currency that fulfills the basic requirements of money: it has to be portable, it has to be difficult or impossible to forge, it has to be difficult to destroy yet fairly easy to store, etc. Then let all the different organizations try to create their own currency. Some will be more successful than others. Some will go bankrupt, leaving players with millions of units of a currency no one wants anymore. And some will become hugely successful and become the de facto currency standard throughout the game.
 
If this is NOT done, then the devs will be assigning arbitrary values to things and these values will simply be exploited. It's much easier to create the conditions for real trade and real allocation of value through market forces, and then let the thing run itself.

Do we have an org chart with department heads and such?  And while we all have jobs we want to do, I have a feeling we'll all be mostly engaged in prospecting, mining and construction in the beginning inside the safe zone.  After we get our basic facilities built and design some ships, we'll need to have security forces for when we move outside the shield to get to the good resources.  Is our intent to have organic security or will we typically engage our more militaristic affiliates' personnel in those areas?
 
And as far as the roleplaying aspect goes, since we're building our orgs up pre-alpha and all, does that mean that we already recruited and decided on our focus before we went into deep freeze?  Otherwise we're just waking up and someone says "Silverlight Industries!"  And 100 people say "Hell yeah!"

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. 

So the dynamic core unit provides power to up to 6 elements using conduits?  That could make design very interesting.  Is there a fuel tank somewhere?  Would you need multiple DCUs to provide more power for weapons and shields?  I realize that this was just a pre-alpha skeleton they were putting together but I had that thrill go own my leg.  That was beautiful.
 
So would we ever mass produce large ships with blueprints and factory units?  Or would that only be for say, sections, that would be assembled by hand?  I could see mass produced fighters, but large ships...
 
I assume that we'll have dozens of different style engines, and we'll also be able to cover them with cowlings that will armor them.
 
I'm just jazzed, keep the content coming!  Better yet let backers have the pre-alpha client and we'll make content for you!  xD

Three Guys, One Freighter. 


This should have been the name of the video

All ODY designs are purely conceptual. They are only meant to give a rough idea of the aesthetic design of Objective Driveyards. That being said, the voxel engine of DU is incredibly flexible, and educated guesses can be made about the relative sizes and functions of the different elements based on videos, screenshots, and concept art. Thanks for your input, and I wish luck to SLI on the ship market.

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 would be best if we were able to engineer components out of subcomponents each of which have particular properties, methods and interfaces. For example, a rocket engine could consist of a fuel tank, fuel pumps, high pressure piping, fuel injectors, a combustion chamber, an afterburner assembly, a nozzle and control actuators. Without each of these sub components, you can't build an engine. But if you developed a superior fuel injector, you'd have a superior rocket engine, perhaps one which is more fuel efficient, while a superior nozzle could improve manuverability, a superior combustion chamber could improve acceleration, superior tanks and pumps could increase the pressure at which you store fuel and that increases range, and superior piping could reduce weight. That way you'd have more than the Mark 1, Mark 2 and Mark 3 engines. You could have a company that makes rocket engines that are lightweight and high maneuverability for combat craft while another company makes engines that are fuel efficient and reliable for long haul cargo ships. The new Zykos-V fighter is equipped with a Motokrafwerks F-300 rocket motor with the highest vector-thrust capability of any commercially available engine! Subcomponents for major components could greatly enhance the individuality of the designs produced by players. It wouldn't be the coolest looking starship is the best, it would be deeper than that.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pixels out for Harambe

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.

I can pretty much bet you $ that CvC would be added in at some point, likely very shortly after release if not before then - based off what the developers have been saying, the vision they all seem to share, and the payment model they have chosen. It's a shame it won't likely be one of the first few things in alpha at this point in time, but I'm not overly worried about it ultimately being in the game.
 
Have faith. I know plenty of games over-promise, don't deliver, and disappoint nowadays. But likewise all reason and logic will dictate that if Novaquark can pull off what currently is promised to come out of the kickstarter campaign, they would be able to, and in all respect actually would add in CvC. 

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.

1 - CvC (yes this is a point of contention, but it feels like a high priority).
2 - Robust Contracts, scripts that can generate contracts
3 - Cosmetics shop (more income = more features)
4 - Space TU's
5 - map function that includes TU's and territory groups
6 - saddle-mount cockpits (for jet bikes)
7 - flashy doodads, decals, and other construct swag
8 - easter-egg content
9 - non-weapon combat systems (tractor beams, target scramblers, missile countermeasures, etc.)
10 - non-character items in cosmetic shop (alt skin/coloration for ship shields, thruster vapor trails, decals, etc)

Well we just reached 8k backers, congrats everyone!I agree on the fact that the stretch goal is very unlikely to be reached but we still got 550k and that's great. I'm sure we'll see some elements of CvC in alpha or beta, for test. However it'll not be the whole thing, that will be a bit after release, in some expansion. But hey the game is funded and we reached the social goals, good job everyone .

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.

I would actually hate planet destroying weapons... however.... Now that we know asteroids are colonizable and are going to be "interactive" parts of the game. what would stop somebody from say.... slinging one into a planet/city on said planet?