THE MONTH IN BRIEF
Manufacturers were given the power to freeze their companies so they could go away without worrying about shareholders running riot. Alternatively, if things got too much to bear, they could declare bankruptcy and revert to Industrialisthood.
Those who died too frequently and racked up their insurance premiums found a way to reduce them again, by bribing one of the droids working for the insurance company. Illegal, of course, but then that's the kind of society we live in; full of corruption, greed, bribery and chicanery.
The executive washroom in the Galactic Administration HQ building became accessible to those who had purchased a keyring from Gallaghers. Amongst the facilities on offer are a shower and a hot tub - and it even has a drinks licence!
Diesel threw a huge party to celebrate those Fedders who had just graduated. Yay! There's a report in the Inside Scoop section of this yearbook.
Players started to reserve the planet and system names they would use once they were allowed to have their own worlds.
The asteroid Jade was opened for business. Meanwhile, Hazed asked for players who wanted to design other asteroids, moons and planets to be added to Sol.
FROM THE POSTBAG: ASTEROID BELT ROUTES
As new asteroids are cleared for trading opportunities, and the routes to them certified as safe and programmed into navcomps, some Fedders are starting to query the logic behind the available routes. Those who use FedTerm's auto-mapping facility, or who have drawn their own maps of the belt, are wondering why they cannot fly directly between sectors that appear to be next to each other. The Fed II Star has received several letters of complaint about this issue.
Quite why people are complaining to the Star, rather than to the Imperial Navy, whose job it is to determine safe routes for space navigation, we don't know, but we can't really argue if people consider us to be the ultimate authority on everything!
We contacted the navy on behalf of our readers, and they explained as follows:
"As you know, the asteroid belt has all kinds of debris in it, from tiny dust-motes to huge great chunks of rock. There are certain safe paths through this space junk, which we keep clear using special sweep-ships. But our resources are limited so we concentrate on clearing the paths that lead from the belt's entrance point to the individual asteroids. This means that paths linking the asteroids to each other are not considered safe. There is only so much we can do!"
The spokesthing also pointed out that a square on the map actually equates to a space sector hundreds or thousands of miles in size, so just because two squares on the map are adjacent to each other, it doesn't mean there's nothing blocking the access between them. So, for example, you can't go in a straight line from Doris to Jade because there's too many rocks in the way.
TRIGGERS IN SPACE
Not for the first time in Fed II, something that started out as an amusing joke has been taken too far and is getting irritating. I am talking about the way people are sitting in planetary orbits and using triggers to send an act command to any ship that passes by. All credit to whoever it was who came up with this idea, and it was fun for a while, but it's a joke with a short shelf-live - it has now reached it's use-by date. Enough is enough.
It has been pointed out to me that there is nothing in the rules that says players should not do this. Well, no - it doesn't say anywhere "using triggers in orbit is not allowed". However, the rules do not list all the things that you should not do - if they did, they would be 100 times as long as they are, and probably still wouldn't cover all possibilities.
Using triggers to automate sending messages to other players is something that can easily edge into disruption. We don't support the use of macros, triggers or any other automation in the game - we tolerate them, so long as they don't cause problems. So here's some guidelines about when you can or cannot use triggers to respond to other spaceships.
It's fine to have a trigger like this set up, so that as you fly around space in the course of earning your groats, your ship responds to any other ship it passes in the night. But it's not fine to hang around in orbit, or on any of the well-travelled space routes, just so you can use your triggers. And it is never, under any circumstances, ok to go AFK while leaving triggers set to send messages to people.
Sending messages to other players - whether say messages or acts, or messages on the comms - are part of the social interaction in Fed II. They are intended for people to communicate with other people, not computers to communicate with computers. Once triggers start doing it, then it's not social any more, it's mechanical, which misses the whole point.
SLARTI WHO?
If you have been to see the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, you may have noticed it contains a planet builder called Slartibartfast, and wondered if he was any relation to the planet builder called Slarti in Fed. Well yes, he is, and here's how he came to be in Fed DataSpace.
Back in the days of GEnie Fed, when the ability to modify player planets was first added to the game, access to the workbench was outside the game itself. There was a little menu that let you enter the game, read the news, or go into the workbench. But when Fed moved to AOL, the shell menu went away, so access to the workbench had to be provided some other way - it was moved into the game itself.
We needed a location to house the workbench access. An office on Mercury which had housed The Weekly Fedder (an in-joke from the Compunet days) was designated the new home for the workbench, and I was given the job of writing the description. Being a Hitchhiker's Guide fan, I decided the obvious person to be in charge of designing planets would be Slarti (I shortened the name to make it easier to type). Now, in Fed II DataSpace, Slarti has moved his operations off to the outer edges of the Solar System, where he sits in his space station workshop, staring at the award he was given for his fjords, waiting for the link to reopen.
Slarti is the only thing in Fed that we've deliberately "borrowed" from HHGTTG but there are other similarities, to do with style and tone... Fed and Hitchhiker's come from the same tradition and display a British sense of humor and outlook on life. In particular, in the film, the way the Vogon bureaucracy works is just how I imagine the Galactic Administration being run!
The film itself has had mixed reviews, and several Fed players have told me they really didn't like it. Personally, I loved it and was enthralled from the cheesy dolphin song at the beginning to the defeat of the Vogon army at the end. It was a brilliant realization of Douglas Adams' vision, and if he were still alive I am sure he would have been thrilled by it.
SUN - BAD. CUSTOMS - BAD. SUN + CUSTOMS - STRANGE!
Those boys from customs are very keen. They'll pursue suspect ships just about anywhere - including the surface of the sun, as Midrats found out when he was leaving Pearl on a hauling job recently. He took a wrong turning, as so many people seem to do, and plunged into the red hot flaming plasma. As you would expect, his ship's refrigeration equipment wasn't capable of protecting him, and he was rapidly turned into a crispy-fried commander.
At this point, who should appear on the space horizon, but the customs cutter. Not to rescue the dying Midrats, but to divert his ship to a quiet location for a search. During their inspection, they must have noticed the blackened corpse in the command center, but did they do anything about it? Oh no, they just carried out their duties without batting an eyelid (or equivalent ocular covering). It was only when they had finished that they allowed the blistered ship to transport its dead owner to Earth, where he was cloned and reanimated in hospital.
This callous treatment had earned the unfortunate Midrats a place in the Hall of Fame (and Shame). You can check out all the records here.
REAL LIFE NEWS: HIGH-TECH TEA
If you work in an office with other people you may well be aware of the problems caused by the fact that some people never take their turn making cups of tea. Regardless of whether it's all done on an informal basis, or if there's some kind of rota system, it just seems that some people always manage to wriggle out when it's their turn.
Some software developers in the UK (where tea-drinking is compulsory) got so fed up with the unfairness of it all, that they have developed a "turnkey b2b enterprise-level web-based tea management solution infrastructure" - surveillance software that monitors who has been pulling their weight when it comes to tea-making, and who has been slacking.
The Teabuddy system lets co-workers create office groups online to record rounds and requests, complete with personalization options for milk preferences and number of sugars required. Before going to brew up, tea-makers log onto Teabuddy and check a box next to the name of all those they are making a cuppa for. The software tallies the total cups made and consumed by each employee and keeps a record, for all to see.
For more details of this excellent system, go to http://www.teabuddy.com/.
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