Kuritho

For feedback and/or community/NQ endorsement.
 
Proposed terms:
 
BCE - Before (the) Collision Era
CE - (Post) Collision Era
AE - Alioth Era
 
 
Key Dates:
 
0 CE |  (-9854 AE ) -  August 8th, 2538 - The Final Collision - Earth is destroyed
 
(0 CE - 9,854 CE) - "The Long Second" - The Arkship is in transit for 9,854 years (310,968,590,400 seconds) before it enters the system containing Alioth.
 
9854 CE | 0 AE - "Year 0" - Landing on Alioth - Game "Launch" (could be Beta if that's when "Alpha Teams" enter play.) In real life terms, the year 12,392 A.D. Dates after this point will progress as a measure of seconds (Unix style) since the server goes "live".
 
Why?
The Gregorian calendar is based on the Earth's rotation around the sun - .
The sun no longer exists, making the Gregorian calendar essentially irrelevant at best, and stupidly complicated to implement on a new world at worst.
Astronomy (and logically by extension, the astronautical industry) uses the Julian calendar.

In astronomy, the Julian year is a unit of time; it is defined as 365.25 days of exactly 86400 seconds (SI base unit), totaling exactly 31557600 seconds in the Julian astronomical year.


As a game mechanic - using a static Julian system is a nice way to deal with the idea that Alioth may or may not rotate at game launch. It then becomes a universal reference standard, with any given planet's rotation (if rotation is implemented) being able to, depending on how the game implements objects in space, be measured in seconds and turned into a local Julian (i.e. fixed length) calendar.

Feedback welcome.
 

This is how I think the first PvP battles will go..

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.

How to break solar farms in safezones:
Place blocks to block sunlight and let them slowly drain then attack

just assign one guy with a rusty spoon to dig for weeks to allow the whole org to attack!
 
mwahahaha, its full proof!

I'm going to use my keyboard and mouse

YAY. Now let's get 200K more in the next 2 days and get our stretch goals

The Kickstarter is looking like it's in the bag.
 
Yay
 
KICKSTARTER SUCEEDS. HELL YEAH.
 
CONGRATS NQ!

So The color of the laser could effect the way it works in certain mediums. For example, a red laser has less powerful photons, but there are more of them per watt of power. It may be easier to stop these with a sandcaster, for example, while blue lasers may not work well in atmosphere. A green laser may split the difference. Specific coatings would work better against different color lasers: blue photons would be reflected more efficiently by blue paint, so matching your lasers to your paint jobs would reduce damage by friendly fire. Mirror surfaces would work well against all colors, but maintenance would be a pain, it would be expensive, and would be quickly degraded in battle due to carbon scoring, or if hit by a missile or projectile.
 
Deflector shields would be electromagnetic fields that repel projectiles and missiles. Armor would be heavy plating that could absorb all kinds of damage.

SPACE WHALES CONFIRMED?
IF NOT IM GONNA "WAIL".

yeah it's why i don't go to walmart anymore 

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.

So modular weapons shaped with voxels? Where do I sign up?

Ooooo pretty.
 

First ingame screenshot of Alioth.
Enjoy.
 

That was goddamn legendary!
 
But we are getting off track.
Long story short: Subscription based payment is a win-win for everyone. They get a constant flow of money, they make a better game, we play that game.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I don't know how old kid means (I'm going to guess around 14) but this is not a game for kids. I started playing EVE (whose community is very similar to DU) at 18 and people made fun of me for being a kid, and with good reason. Kids are immature. Games like this are not for kids. Period. I wish parents would realize that and not just expect the gaming community to be a bunch of babysitters. Had a 14 year old in an EVE corp once. He broke the rules and was a dick normal 14 year old, so we kicked him. The kid gets his Mom on mumble .... she starts lecturing about how she paid for the game so we had to be nice or she'd call our moms or whatever. Who cares. Long story short, our CEO ripped her a new poop shoot and we all died laughing and did age checks from then on.
 
Sorry, back to the topic.
 
Like people have said, f2p makes for terrible games. The problem is that 99% of the people who say "Let's make it free but have micro transactions to pay for it" don't actually want to pay the micro transactions themselves, just like the OP here. So either the developers get no money and the game crashes and burns or they make the micro transaction relevant to gameplay and the game becomes horrible. Like Twerk said, games are a privilege not a right, and if you can't afford them you can't play them.  The monthly sub is the best/only way this game is going to work.
 
EDIT 1: The DAC system does allow for people to play free, so if you are willing to put in the work, there is that for you.
 
EDIT 2: I know the topic has been beaten to death ... I just wanted to share my kid story ><

just block twerk and this community turns into a nice place to be.

Seriously? It's your tact that is lacking, Twerk. And your grammar/ability to form sentences & paragraphs, but that's another problem.
 
The first thing you say is: "Welcome to the forums. You are a freeloader." That's a real great way to welcome someone to the community...

You can try having a mass to mass comparison between two ships to determine a "core overload" explosion happen.

E.G. if a starfighter crashes on a battleship, the starfighter explodes.

This mechanism can be used to "overload" the enemy ship.

If two same sized ships collide, both get obliterated. That's physics and it's realistic. 

The problem with that? No wreck is left behind, nothing can be salvaged.

If suicide attackers were to do so, they would have no ship to salvage. So, it's not a viable tactic.


But for war tactics, there need to be a skill points penalty when you die, so people will not abuse the mechanism without repercussions.

Sand, All up in my Junk, Part 1
 
Stier didn’t remember landing, nor did he remember walking all this way. He could see his own footprints however, and not in view of the Arkship he wasn’t quite sure how far he’d gone. His head was pounding, his legs felt like limp and sore, and the grit of the place had gotten to him.
 
He was in a desert. The sun was furiously bright but beginning to dip to the edge of the horizon threatening to begin to set. He was doubled over at the edge of a sand dune as pale as an eggshell staring back at the tracks left by his ascent. It was unclear if he had walked or crawled to his current position, but he was certain that he would be unable to summit the next mound to the west. The bottom of the valley shows cracked earth of a rainy season past. Stier had a moment of panic, but realized that his suit not only shielded him from the heat and the cold, but recycled his liquid waste with almost no loss. Water would not be a problem, nor food as his Nano-former had plenty of protein solution stored in it, and more than enough energy to disperse it. He stared down at his scratched display and despite the comforting evidence of his ensured survival, the panic did not fully subside. Instead it retreated just enough that it didn’t fill his mind just as the sun’s orange glow had begun to peel back against the night. The day subsided too quickly and his fear left far too slowly.
 
It was about time for some shelter. Stier swiped through the menu on his Nano-former again for survival polymer but was dismayed to find just the protein solution. He rolled his eyes and took a few sphere-fulls of sand from the dune. The structure of the dune shifted and gave, and he began to tumble violently head over heels down the dune until stopping at the rocky bottom of the valley followed by a sand-flow up to his shoulders. Shielding technology was advanced enough to prevent a starship from crashing full-speed into a skyscraper, but somehow he managed to bruise his rear on the rocks through his personal shields. He stood, and groaned while nursing his new lump on his backside. Stier didn’t think he had any blueprints for structures made out of sandstone, and he hadn’t had time to learn how to turn sand into glass with the Nano-former. He had just landed after all, and the simulator was pretty different from where he had managed to walk to. His lack of memory worried him as he constructed a dome with a simple entrance not unlike an igloo, but out of the sand he had collected from the dune. It was surprisingly tough for being made of sand, the grains were compressed into a solid form, but he did manage to chip the entrance a bit with his helmet when he tried to crawl in.
 
Stier tried to get comfortable in his new shelter, however his groin was badly chafed. The sand had worked its way into his suit, and based on the sting he realized that the area had become enflamed. His first thought was to go ahead and remove the sand with his Nano-former, but seeing the reduction sphere overlap with his crotch, it occurred to him that he might lose more than the sand if he went through with it. Staying put for a while seemed like the safer choice, so he took a break and went AFK (Away From Konsciousness). Day snuck up on him, and he returned to find chunks of his shelter was missing. He remembered the simulations, someone had tested out a plasma rifle on his hut! Stier crawled back out of his shelter on hands and knees and found two other spacers, each with weapons pointed right at him. He could see the combat warning blinking on his display.
Their suits were a newer model, probably Omegas that got on the ship after the initial launch. One of them had a Lv.1 PET with him, poor thing’s legs were moored in the sand. “Nice Hut” mumbled one of the Omegas practically breathing into his mic. He was sporting the basic concussive pistol, probably spent hours trying to get magnesium for bullets. “Drop your DAC’s Alpha” cracked the prepubescent voice behind a laser rifle. This one was also an omega, but might have traded his PET for a decent weapon that uses his Nano-former’s battery instead of solid rounds. “Can’t drop DAC’s noob, they are digital” replied Stier, “contract or trade transactions only, just like spacebux”. “I said drop ‘em!” cracked the child again, this time firing twice and missing. It was unsure if these were warning shots, or if his weapon skill was just that bad. “They don’t drop on death either, DNA coded like spacebux too” said Stier, “only the Nano-former discharges on death and it’s pretty lossey”. The mumbler shot this time, one bullet hit Stier’s shield membrane above the right shoulder staggering him. The second one caught him on the left side of his helmet, crushing the shield and making its way into his skull.
 
Stier came-to in the Arkship’s infirmary missing a few cubic feet of sand.

But uhh... then someone could simply search your faction name and they'll know everybody in your secret society group thingy.

Why are you a secret society if you are blasting your name in the public forums?

I have a few ideas regarding interactive maps/star maps.
 
Star Map 
Star Map is stored electronically in your Nanopack All players start will no data in their SM Data is added to the SM through scanning  Data can be selectively uploaded to a map data file These data files can be sold or shared with other players Features
Manually created POI’s can be created to mark discovered constructs, or any other location of interest POI’s include an optional description When uploading, you can select which discoveries you want to include or do a complete upload The SM will keep track of the first player known to have discovered the locations on a given players map
Discoverer can opt to have their name undisclosed
Data from multiple players can be merged onto one data chip
Data points on your map that were purchased from other players cannot be resold unless allowed through RDMS
Using the RDMS you can prohibit rival organizations from purchasing your data Automatically collects data on locations of planets, resources, and organization territories
Potential Effects
This could add gameplay for intelligence agents, who try to pinpoint the last known location of a target with the POI system Players buying a unknown map, will have to investigate POI’s at their own risk, because they could be falling into a trap Eventually most planetary data around Alioth will become common knowledge, as competing explorers are continually adding new data to the markets and the value of the older data decreases Some data files will sell better than others because of the usefulness of their POI's Some players explore unknown areas to make money on the open markets,  others will do so on contract, and some will do it just to benefit their organization.