Web Fed News Yearbooks - September 2000

THE MONTH IN BRIEF

The second season of Fed events ended, with Eaglewing topping the fighting league by a long way, and Sholuvr trailing in second place. The Cerebral League was more closely fought, and Zrasputin won by a margin of just one point, beating Shoesj who had to settle for second position.

Hazed produced a Fed poster which could be downloaded and printed out, so players could pin it onto noticeboards at colleges or at work, or put it on their walls so they can throw darts at Selena of the Spaceways. You'll find the poster at http://www.ibgames.net/federation/fedinfo/fedposter.html.

Alsatian gave Carpenter Awards to Quqi for his planet Que, and Blirish for Serenity. You can read Alsatian's review at http://www.ibgames.net/archives/fed/
webplanetreviews/2000/serenity.html and http://www.ibgames.net/archives/fed/
webplanetreviews/2000/que.html.

Alan wrote an article for his web site comparing the dot com hysteria with the cargo cults at the end of the 19th century. He uses his sociological training to draw to draw parallels between the two phenomenon. The article is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/society/dotcoms.html.

SHIPYARD OFFERS FREE SPACESHIPS TO GROUNDHOGS

Roll over Jarrow, there's a new shipyard in town - and they have a radical plan to shake up the market. The Electric Spaceship Company plans to make you an offer you can't refuse - a free spaceship.

Sounds too good to be true? ESC claim that in this case there is such thing as a free lunch, and it will be paid for by advertisers. They have procured a fleet of basic, bottom-of-the-range ships which will be decorated with neon signs and flashing lights advertising the Galaxy's most popular brands. They claim that the revenue produced will be enough to finance the ships, but they weren't prepared to disclose the names of any companies who have signed up to have their products emblazoned on the side of spaceships.

For GroundHogs, this might just be an offer worth considering. It would mean starting out their lives as Galactic traders without the crippling bank loan that is usually necessary for that first ship purchase. There is one downside: if you take up ESC's offer, you'll be obliged to keep on using their space hoardings, and won't be able to trade up to a better model.

We await the launch of this exciting new plan with interest.

REAL LIFE NEWS: WHAT WILL THEY THINK OF NEXT?

Oh, those wacky scientists. They've gone and done something truly extraordinary this time. They've invented the invisible rat. Well, not quite the whole rat, but the rat skin becomes invisible when injected with glycerol, so presumably you can see the innards. Kids are bound to love this - they'll be nagging their parents to get them see-through pets.

This icky idea isn't just the product of science gone mad - there is reason behind it. Scientists think that making small patches of skin transparent will make laser treatments easier.

At least, that's their excuse!

GALACTIC LAW VERSUS NATIONAL LAW

I caught an interesting conversation the other day in Fed. The gist of it was a player saying he was glad he connected using Yahoo, because that meant he was under US rules, whereas ibgames comes from England.

It is a common misconception that somehow the ibgames house rules don't apply because of the American constitution. The first amendment says you have freedom of speech, and that means we can't stop you from saying whatever you like.

Sorry to disappoint all you budding lawyers out there, but that's not how it works. When you set up an ibgames account to play Fed or Age of Adventure, you are entering into a contract with us. That contract says that if you want to play the games, you have to abide by our rules.

The Internet is global, and we have Fed players from all over the world. If every player had a different set of rules, depending on where they logged on from, it would be very confusing. You could never reconcile the very harsh rules of some repressive countries (which, for example, stop women from even being able to use the net) with the relative loose rules in democratic countries. So all Fed players are subject to our house rules, no matter what their nationality or point of access.

MARTIAN GENOME PROJECT A SUCCESS

The Galactic Administration announced yesterday that its project to sequence the Martian genome was a resounding success, and they are now ready to release the information into the public domain. A highly-placed Galactic Administration official spoke movingly of the public and private efforts that had lead to this historic achievement, before handing over to an official spin droid who ducked questions put to it by the press.

When asked if they have completed the project, and now have a full picture of the building-blocks that make up Martians, the spokesdroid equivocated but finally admitted that at this time, they have only sequenced 80% of the genome, but that was as good as complete, near as made no nevermind.

This morning, independent company Celeriac also announced complete success in their Martian genome project. When asked if they have completed the project, etc etc etc, the spokesdroid assured us that they had achieved complete success, but said that commercial considerations meant that we would have to pay a large amount of money to see the proof that they had been successful.

Meanwhile, hopes that a project to sequence the Zlitherworm genome would lead to new methods of controlling the vicious beast were raised when Celeriac promised they would soon be making an announcement about their success along those lines. The Society for the Protection of Aliens reacted with outrage and threatened to launch a campaign to save the Zlitherworm, should the project result in culling plans.

WHAT TIME IS IT IN SPACE?

With players from all over the world in Fed, we have to cope with a multitude of different time zones. Last week, I was chatting to a player from Australia; while I was thinking about logging off to grab some lunch, for him it was the middle of the night and he was contemplating going to bed.

This got me to thinking about what time astronauts use in space. The place they launch, the place on Earth they are currently over, and the place they intend to land could all be in different time zones, and the potential for mix-up could be as bad as NASA's Mars lander and its Imperial-Metric boo-boo.

It turns out that they do the sensible thing, and in space time is kept using Universal Time. This standard time is based on the old Greenwich Mean Time; why they had to change the name, I don't know, because Greenwich Mean Time sounds much more romantic!

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the time calculated by atomic clocks and distributed by radio to stock exchanges, news radio stations and anyone else who has a need to know the accurate time. There's also a special variant called UT1, which takes UTC and adds a correcting factor thrown in to account for variations in the Earth's rotation. That's what is used for positioning satellites and so on.

The difference between UTC and UT1 is continually broadcast, so those who need to can translate between the two. It shouldn't ever vary more than 0.9 of a second; if it does, UTC has a leap second added to bring the two back into line.

And of course, when Fed was started all those years ago, we chose UTC to determine what time Galactic Midnight happens.

It does seem a little presumptious to call it Universal Time, when it relates to our tiny insignificant planet. I wonder what the other inhabitants of the universe would think!

REAL LIFE NEWS: BUILD YOUR OWN SPACESHIP

In Fed, you just stroll along to Jarrow and buy yourself a spaceship. In real life, buying a spaceship is way beyond the means of ordinary people. At least, it was until now...

Cerulean Freight Forwarding Company plans to sell spaceships in kit form which, once assembled, will carry three people 200 kilometers up at a top speed of Mach 4. Building a spaceship from a kit is not as ludicrous as it sounds; amateurs already build and fly kits for all kinds of aircraft, including helicopters and jet planes. The DIY spaceship will be built from many off-the-shelf components that already have safety accreditation from the Federal Aviation Authority, which makes it easier to make sure the craft is safe.

The engines will be made from ceramic materials and the fuel with be a mixture of methane and liquid oxygen, generating a thrust of up to 3g.

The President of Cerulean says universities might buy the kit to run zero-gravity experiments or other space research. The first kit-form spacecraft could be ready in three years, if additional investors come forward. The kit would cost somewhere in the region of half a million dollars.

Let's just hope the assembly instructions are easier to follow than the ones you get with flat-pack furniture!

FED AND THE USE OF CABLE MODEMS

Plucked out of the Feedback mail recently was a question about whether using a cable or DSL modem would make any difference to playing Fed. "Is the Fed mainframe set up better for cable or DSL modems?" the player asks. "I've seen both in computer shops and seen little or no difference as to speed."

The answer is that using a cable/DSL modem won't make much difference to playing Fed. Fed is designed for low bandwidth - after all, when it was first written modem speeds were 1200 bps, compared to the 56,000 bps common today! So the game does not output large amounts of material, and any bottleneck is unlikely to be the link between you the player, and your ISP.

Cable/DSL modems are designed for high bandwidth applications like streaming video, or for downloading large pictures, and so on.

A cable/DSL modem would be useful for downloading the software and graphics for Age of Adventure, but would make no difference to actually playing it, because as with Fed the game doesn't send lots of information down to you.

There are other considerations as well, for instance, the question of whether your ISP's facilities have been upgraded to properly allow the use of all the extra bandwidth. With cable modems there's also the question of the downgrading of the service as more and more people get cable modems and have to share the available bandwidth.

FREE SPACESHIPS A BUST

The Electric Spaceship Company's plans to offer free spaceships, funded by advertising on the hulls (as reported in the Federation Chronicle a few weeks ago) has turned out to be a complete bust.

The company was launched in a blaze of publicity but since then the venture has been plagued by numerous problems. They had difficulty attracting enough sponsors to fund the project, and the registration process they demanded users go through was time-consuming and difficult.

But the final straw came when the first users proudly took delivery of their free spaceships, only to discover that the machinery used to display the flashing neon adverts on the ship's outer surface took up so much internal space that it drastically reduced room for cargo! Unable to fit the standard 75 ton jobs into the hold, the angry users abandoned the free ships and marched to Jarrow to arrange a mortgage to buy a vessel they could actually use.

It seems there really is no such thing as a free spaceship!