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AOL NEWS YEARBOOK Earthdate January 1997 |
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AOL NEWS YEARBOOK Earthdate January 1997 |
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THE MONTH IN BRIEF January was a difficult month in Fed, as the implications of AOL's new flat-rate pricing deal really kicked in, causing so many problems for the TechDroid that he would have torn out his hair if he hadn't been made of metal! The problems meant that a lot of the code the TechDroid planned to put into the game had to be abandoned while he fought fires and stomped on bugs. The news was full of expected changes... which never actually happened! And January was the month where the dreaded lag started to bite, making everything in Fed happen very slllloooooowwwwwlllllyyyyy. The month's events - the year's events, even - kicked off with a Twelfth Night party. 15 deadly fighters with TLs polished and raring to go chased poor Santa Claus who dodged and ducked and dived, firing when he could, but eventually succumbed to the sheer overwhelming firepower of EatSpam07 and his cohorts. We hope Santa will be recovered in time for next year! The Quotes of the Week section of the news became the most popular section, with hundreds of players sending in things they had spotted - or said themselves - to be printed in the news. The month's best are printed below. The coveted Walrus of Merit award for excellence in planet design was awarded to Squire Scarllett for the planet Facet. Congratulations! The message boards and file libraries were expanded, giving Guilds their own space to play in without bothering the grown-ups, and Duchies their own areas for politicking.
Isn't it amazing how fast rumors can spring up and travel right round the Galaxy, until everyone accepts them as fact? The latest rumor is that the Martian Invasion code has been implemented and we decided to test it on a player's planet without warning him - or anyone else - in advance! There is no truth in this rumor whatsoever. First, we have a lot of things we want to do to Fed before we add this major new feature. Second, we would never put in a major change like this without warning people in advance in the news. That's the major purpose of this weekly news bulletin - to tell you about changes to the game. And third, if we wanted to test something we would not just pick a planet at random; we would either use one of the game-owned planets like Cabbage, or we would talk to the PO first and tell him or her what we planned to do. So, everyone calm down, take a deep breath, take off your tin-hats, and stop listening to rumors.
A young student recently started to question some of the fundamental assumptions about the physics in Fed DataSpace. How do Interstellar Links work, what about those instantaneous communications, and so on. Scientists from the Imperial Research Institute are usually far too busy to respond to letters from the general public, having their minds thoroughly engaged in such tasks as scrutinizing the inscrutable, evaluating the invaluable, and trying to invent a toaster that won't burn the toast. But one junior scientist, during a coffee break, decided to write a reply to the young student's concerns. Here, then, are the questions that were asked and the answers to those questions. Question: Are the Interstellar Links possible? The ILs are really Wormholes or Blackhole type configurations, and to keep them stable is almost impossible. Who can guarantee that one of these ILs won't crumble, or squash you like a bug if it becomes unstable? And why don't two ships collide? If you have ever been to the IL near Titan, there's a gazillion little ships zooming by, yet never any crashes. And if two ships collided within the IL itself, would their pieces continue further down the line, including the explosion? In which case, any nearby ships would be blown up too. It seems to me that hyperspace is very dangerous indeed! Now, this is what happens when you exit Hyperspace:
So just how awful would you feel, and why? Well as you accelerate at such a great speed, sitting in your command chair on the bridge, the chair itself would be pushing at you, and if its a big enough push then surely your whole body would be crushed because of the g-forces. Answer: If you think of space as analogous to a sheet of paper, then to get from A to B you travel along the surface of the paper. That represents normal space travel. What the Interstellar Link does is to "fold" the paper, so that A and B are now nearly touching, and moves the ship directly from one surface to the other. This sort of activity requires a lot of energy. This is why links have to be built by planetary and solar governments - only stellar objects (and politicians when they speak) have the required energy levels. Even then, the process would not have been possible but for the discovery of how to scale up the quantum level tunneling effects, which meant that several orders of magnitude less energy had to be expended than originally calculated. The process of colonizing a new planet thus becomes the following. First a suitable planet is located by astronomy, and the locator registers his or her claim to the planet. As soon as the bureaucracy processes the forms the new owner purchases an unmanned ship to travel at sub-light speeds to the vicinity of the new planet, where droids assemble a new interstellar link. This enables faster than light travel to the new planet. The first links were very unreliable, tending to collapse releasing large amounts of energy, which is why early ones, like that in the Solar system, are built in the far reaches of their systems. A number of spaceships were lost in collapsing links, including the original Imperial Space Cruiser "Federation". Most of the ships making the transit were destroyed, but the Federation appears to have ended up in a singularity, and there have since been a number of reports of sightings of the ship over the past century. The Federation has never emerged from jump state, and it appears unlikely that it would survive if it did, making it the modern equivalent of the Flying Dutchman. Since the link system only allows one ship to transit at a time, there have been no collisions inside links. This is why you always see things like
rather than
It should be noted that the ships themselves do not travel in the ordinary sense through the link - they are moved through successive inertial frames by the links. The feeling of nausea comes from the rapid changes in the inertial frame of reference as the ship is switched from one part of the "surface" to another, and the ship making minor corrections for relative velocity matching. Most of the relative velocity is matched inertia-lessly as part of the "tunneling" effect, but there is sometimes a small residual effect that has to be compensated for on emerging. Question: Now what about those Darn Weapons? Surely, missiles would be useless. Ship's shields are like a protective barrier, maybe a charged electro-magnetic field, so the missile would either hit the ship and cause no damage, or bounce off being deflected into empty space. And if the ship firing the missile had its shields on, it would be destroyed in the process of firing the missile, since the missile would hit the shield from the inside and bounce off or explode. Answer: Shields represent an advanced use of the phenomenon known as interference. Common interference effects are usually demonstrated in high school physics labs, and show up as patterns of light and dark bands at the edges of shadows. Shields use this effect, plus the fact that weapon beams are coherent electromagnetic radiation, so create nullifying interference at the hull surface of the ship. This is why shields have no effect on missiles, which are, of course material objects rather than electromagnetic radiation. Question: How do communications work? Well, I don't know how all those communications between ships and channels can reach you so quickly, almost instantly. Even if the message was sent by subspace or even somehow linked to those IL beacons to relay to each other, the message would still take quite a bit of time. Also if they are not linked to the beacons, then how are they being received? Who knows, maybe the magical Fed Fairy is somehow helping your communications get across. Answer: The theory of tachyon communication lies at the very edge of our understanding, and is not very easy to explain in everyday terms. However, as you probably know, all radiation (including tachyon radiation) travels at the speed of light in a vacuum. How then is it possible, you may ask, to get our messages through virtually instantaneously? Well it isn't easy! What we do is to superimpose a wave carrying our message onto the tachyon waves. As the tachyon wave moves along at the speed of light, our wave moves along the tachyon wave, thus taking our message faster than the speed of light! Of course, things are more complex than that - for instance the actual process uses many different waves superimposed in order to boost the speed of the message to near instantaneous. . There are also problems with the signal being slowed down in certain regions of space known as AOL Sumps. When this happens we refer to the signal as suffering from flat-rate lags. The reasons for this problem are little understood, and the origin of the terminology is lost in the mists of time. So, there you have it. We hope these explanations go some way to clearing up the little scientific mysteries of life in Federation DataSpace.
The Universe was taken aback when one of our most wanted beings surfaced again. Baron NAMcD disappeared months ago when the reward for him reached 220megs. Rumor has it that the Baron went on a killing spree, fighting anyone that thought they had the power to control the universe. Once he had chased all the evil down to the gutters of Fed DataSpace, they started to fight back. The only way they could get to NAM was to place as high a reward on him as they thought possible. At this time it became unsafe for the man to stay around. Or so we thought. To our surprise, we located an Arena Goddess that goes by the name of Duchesse NAMcD. After checking out her credentials we found that, yes, it is the one and only Baron NAMcD, that after having the change, has returned to this dimension. Once the evil of Fed found out that this was the same person, her reward started climbing once again. At this time, she's worth 1.4gig to the person or people who can kill her. Rumor has it that the reward will keep growing until she's destroyed. This is the largest known reward placed on 1 person in this dimension of Federation. Will she rid Fed of the evils once again? Will she remain the ranking Arena Goddess or will someone be able to dethrone her? All any of us can do at this time is sit back and watch to see if the reward will ever stop growing, and what she has planned for the beings of the universe.
Chulu1, the former PO of Zoo, was shocked out of her state of drunken idleness by the recent theft of the planet by Leigh29. Rumor has it that after receiving the news, Chulu was sighted wandering aimlessly up and down the halls of Slarti's mumbling incoherently while whacking workthingies with a bloody club. When this NewsBot reached Leigh29 for comment, the triumphant PO snickered and said, "That place smelled to high heaven! The animals all had rabies... and there was a disgusting pool of blood in the bathhouse... what I do is for the good of Fedders, everywhere." At this writing, rumors abound that Chulu1 is importing large amounts of animals in unmarked crates to her new planet, Safari. When investigators for the Intergalactic Humane society interrogated the irritated PO about the large number of animals with the letter "Z" branded on their hindquarters, Chulu reportedly smoothed her sealskin sarong and smiling, whapped the heck out of the unfortunate droids with a bloody club. We considered reaching Chulu for comment, but decided the safest course of action was to sit in CD's and listen to the rumor mongers. More details as the tequila flows... errr... as this story progresses.
(By the way, I like getting people's input. It gives me a new perspective on FED, human feelings and emotions, and life in general. Besides, I'm running out of ideas to use in my articles! If you don't want me to get arrested for copyright abuse after copying an idea from the back of a magazine article, then send me your ideas, comments, questions, and generally anything that isn't a threat, a declaration of war, or a letter that says "Congratulations; you're being audited!" -Kintaro 78, FED's resident psychopath) The FED universe has grown a lot since its creation. It used to be just a product of Alan Lenton's incredibly twisted imagination, but now it really exists. This universe has Diesel, insurance offices, Diesel, spaceships, Diesel, rabbits, Diesel, and the Starship Cantina. After doing a great deal of research... okay, fifteen minutes of research, I came up with this summary. It's time to journey into the exciting world of... Diesel. Cue the National Geographic theme... At first, the very small FED universe could only exist for thirty minutes* with two life forms inside before exploding. While this may seem like a long time to anyone who's used an ATM before, I can assure you that no one was really very satisfied with its performance. Then came the time of the Holy Order of Programmers. They came and, with great care, stabilized the FED universe. Many adventurers stumbled upon this extraordinary phenomenon and, for some reason not yet adequately explored, became addicted. The first of these young FED junkies, named Hazed, became a demigoddess in some way that she still refuses to explain. Of course, the FED universe doesn't completely revolve around Hazed. Actually, all Hazed really seems to do anymore is help newbods, make cheesy public appearances, and tell traders why they can't have the <C PRICE commodity> command. Funny, I remember reading an article somewhere about how the more power you have, the less fun stuff you can do. But, that would be going in a philosophical direction, and I don't do that sort of thing. It was about this time that the Holy Order of Programmers selected Ming to be ruler of the FED universe. Ming was an especially nasty tyrannical maniac, (or is that maniacal tyrant?) but he was experienced in running star systems. Strangely enough, everyone seems to have forgotten exactly how the Order showed that they had selected Ming to rule. A few people I interviewed kept mentioning the word "Kudeegra", but I'll be darned if I know what that means. Plus, I'm too lazy to look it up in the galactic dictionary. In those days of FED, spirits were adventurous, people were friendly, Emperor Ming was extremely violent, and megagroats were rare. Of course, this all changed eventually as the FED universe had to give in to the laws of physics**. Spirits became obsessed with making loads-a-groats, people became utterly snertlike, Ming began a quest to find entertainment for himself, and the megagroat experienced inflation problems. This is how you know the FED universe today. The rest you can figure out for yourself. * In case you are unfamiliar with the term minutes, here is an explanation: minutes are a way to tell time. If you are non-corporeal and don't know what time is, ask your mother. Thirty minutes is equal to seven point two Cabbagian Croogalies, one Workthingian coffee break, and thirteen thousand seven hundred and fifty-six Dragoonian long times. Don't ask me, I just work here. ** Galactic physics are simple laws that all things must follow. In the early days of earth, they were simple: what goes up must come down, and so on. Now, they include: all infants must spit up on their parents at least once, all living things must be miserable and greedy most of the time, all sensible acts must be argued and debated for hours on end, and so on.
A few of you may have noticed that last week, I didn't submit an article into the FED news. If you did, then you probably either said, "Wa-hoo! One week off," "No article? Slacker, SLACKER!!! We'll have to tar and feather him," or "What a shame. I really miss his sadistic sense of humor." Well, here's an explanation: pneumonia. So, in order to clear my karma, I gotta send in TWO articles this week. Enjoy. Part 1: Here's what the Galactic Dictionary [unofficial edition] has to say about snerts: SNERT (Noun) 1. A small dung beetle found on the surface of Venus. 2. A stupid or obnoxious person. 3. A person who snatches puzzle pieces, parks his ship in a reserved parking space, or bamboozles money from people on a regular basis. SNERT-I-LY adverb SNERT-I-NESS noun SNERT-Y adjective Here's what I've got to say about snerts: (Definition two and three, not dung beetles. Actually, I'll be darned if the two aren't the same) ignore them or despise them; you CAN'T like them. Wait, did I emphasize that enough? YOU CAN'T LIKE THEM! You can easily spot a snert: they're the ones getting smacked over the head repeatedly by Diesel for attempting to pinch her bum. They can also be seen drooling at women, talking in capital letters, and droning on about how cool they are and how much other people suck. In fact, one of the most prominent hobbies in FED today is snert watching. Basically, you find a secluded spot in the Cantina and see how many species of snert you can see. Some of the most common snerts are the CAN'T TURN OFF THE CAPS LOCK Snert, the Censored Snert, The "Need Sex Now" Snert, and the Incredibly Macho Snert. Snert watching's big brother is called snert hunting. Whenever you see a snert, get into your ship and hover above that planet. Then, when the snert takes off, blow him to smithereens. For those of you with a long fuse, try snert therapy, in which you walk into a bar and try to convince the snert to become a better member of society. You will usually fail, but sometimes you will be able to turn a snert into a less irritating "jerk". Either way, you will have to endure many remarks and threats of physical harm that all basically translate into "Hey, man [or equivalent], I'm gonna beat you till your bodily remains defy identification by the Imperial Coroner!" So, the next time you have five minutes to kill, hang out over a player planet and kill some idiot with a price on his head instead!
For those of you who still haven't decided on what their New Year's resolution is gonna be, I've taken time out of my busy work schedule to write up this list. Of course, I don't need resolutions; I believe in the fact that everyone else should change for my needs instead of vice versa. By the way, my complaints department now covers the entire surface of Castillo. Anywho, hold up your right hand and repeat after me: in '97, I promise to... -develop a taste for snert stew. You are now off the hook, as far as resolutions and snerts go. No need to thank me. The look on your face - erm, the look on the screen as I type this out is thanks enough. By the way, I like getting people's input. It gives me a new perspective on life, the universe, and everything. Besides, I'm running out of ideas to use in my articles! If you don't want me to get tossed in jail for copyright infringement, then simply write down a bunch of words in an arrangement we call a "paragraph", and send them to "Kintaro78@AOL.com". Now, what could be simpler?
The Duchy of Mirror proudly lays claim to the Federation record of having 3 planets promote on the same day - Wednesday, January 1, 1997. (Since nobody else has ever claimed this record to the Mirrorians knowledge, they figure they might as well.) It should also be duly noted that this incredible feat evidently was too much for the poor Fed TechDroid, since Federation itself crashed within 5 minutes of the triple promotions for a short time. The newly promoted planets are Buffet (leisure), Life (technological) and Numbers (industrial). The overlords of these planets would like to thank their Duke/Duchesse Wavenrg (depending on which week it is), their duchymates and all of the GM's, JP's, Merchants, Traders, Adventurers and yes, Captains too, who made this amazing feat possible. Mirror would also like to issue an open challenge to other duchies, to try to beat this record. And no, we won't tell you how we managed to get rid of 30,000t each of nickel, munitions and xmetals when we cleared the exchanges.
RyanCKCurt asks, "by the way what does btw mean?" Your comm unit relays a message from DAMAC420, "I am selling my spaceship does any one want it?" Your comm unit relays a message from ERIC1123, "Are there any POs that need any planets???". Your comm unit relays a message from PinonNut, "Hauling in this lag is really interesting. Sometimes you actually lap yourself on a run". Your comm unit relays a message from EMarcu2559, "i dont want to play this game anymore can someone take me off.". Your comm unit relays a message from Apoculypse, "hey how was i supposed to know the sun would kill me". Your comm unit crackles with a message from BlueJay132, "I made Trader too, but I still need to find the GM." Your comm unit relays a message
from Faboo97, "what is a bay?". Your comm unit relays a message
from SoulThf, "Hey if the lag gets bad enought then
may be we can change the rules and play from Duke and try
to become a Ground Hog :)". Your comm unit relays a message from RetUSAFSP, "As you proceed to land on Zoomie, an F16 comes from nowhere and launches a sidewinder missile. Fortunately for you, the Clinton Administration has cut military funding and the missile hits Socks the cat.". Actual transcript of IMs:
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