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Fiction: Unremembered Sins (Neptune 2469)

Submitted by Heretic on Monday, February 26, 2024 - 16:00

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Fiction: “The German Plan” (Jupiter 2470)

Submitted by Heretic on Saturday, November 25, 2023 - 16:00

++++ DATE 13.3.2470

++++ TIME 14:00 GST

++++ LOCATION Gilgamesh Station, Sovereign Republic of Ganymede

Below, the panoply of Ganymede’s surface stared endlessly back at Jupiter. With one face always facing the giant jovian king, one face was always in light, one in dark but for the faint light cast by the faraway Sun.

Twin shadows crossed between moon and gas giant, two mighty kings beholden to the Commonwealth of Callisto. The super-dreadnoughts Karanus and Demetrius were each escorted at distance by over dozen lesser shadows – destroyers mostly, but there were also the silhouettes of three dreadnoughts, and even a pair of frigates that hid in the wake of the mighty leviathans.

The flotilla represented a staggering commitment on the part of the Commonwealth, close to half the Commonwealth’s naval force in capital ships. Even so, they were not enough to take on Ganymede’s substantial planetary defenses, aided in part by the fact that the population was burrowed kilometers deep beneath the surface for both warmth and safety from such incidentals as threats of nuclear bombardment.

That, however, was not the flotilla’s target.

A sprawling orbital naval dockyard sat on the Ganymede-Jupiter L1 Lagrangian point, flanked by a pair of dreadnoughts and a busy collection of smaller ships. Staring into the Great Eye that was Jupiter, the dockyards were bathed in radiation held at bay only by the massive AMG systems sported by the station. The skeletons of a dozen ships including five dreadnoughts were slowly taking form under the swarm of assembly machines that crawled over their surfaces like so many metal spiders.

The Commonwealth super-dreadnoughts, still sitting at extreme range, began to spat out hideous numbers of tactical nuclear missiles. Eighty-two of the things burned through the black in lethal silence, only the dim flares from their engines giving any sense of the impending apocalypse that was about to be visited upon the station.

The two dreadnoughts guarding the dockyards stirred to life, attitude thrusters bellowing in silence as the huge ships belatedly moved into an intercept position in an attempt to target the incoming storm before it wrecked the crown jewel of the Sovereign Republic of Ganymede’s naval construction capabilities.

Commandant Ilse Aichinger reached down and touched a button. The holo-display flickered off. She looked across the table at the two men seating there; one in uniform, one not. The Commandant cleared her throat, directing her gaze at the man in uniform.

“Lieutenant. Thank you for joining us. You know what you just saw, I presume?”

Lieutenant Erik Manstein, naval intelligence officer in the service of the Sovereign Republic of Ganymede, had seen many things. He had seen a man blown out of an airlock. He had assisted in the forcible suppression of an ill-conceived mutiny onboard his first assignment before he entered naval intelligence. He had watched children die from radiation burns. Each of these alighted briefly in his memory as he considered the import of this latest thing.

“Yes, sir,” Erik answered. “There have been rumors, but nothing official. Did either of our ships make it out?”

The Commandant shook her head. “Both the Victor and the Vainglorious were destroyed. Some prisoners were reportedly taken by the Commonwealth from the escape pods. The naval yards are a complete loss. If there were anything exposed on the surface, it’d would be frying in a radioactive stew right now. This isn’t what we’re here to talk about, however. We have to move forward. Now, what is your overall assessment of the military conflict as it stands today, Lieutenant?”

Erik drummed his fingers on the table as his mind collected its myriad thoughts into something more coherent. He spared a brief glance at the civilian, wondering what part he had to play in all this, but the civilian’s features were carefully blank.

“Sir, in absolute terms of population and economy, we are relatively evenly matched with the Commonwealth of Callisto. As well, and this is simply reflection of the statistical record, we have the edge in training and military acumen. What we are decidedly not evenly matched in, however, is in fleet construction rates, particularly capital class ships. That,” he said, stabbing a finger at the now quiescent holo-display, “represents a catastrophe of the first order. Not only because of loss of human life, not even because of the loss of two dreadnoughts we could not afford to lose, but because of the loss of our primary naval shipyard, representing some 72% of our entire output.”

Erik shook his head. “That was an absurd risk they took there, concentrating that much of their fleet in one place. It could easily have backfired. Unfortunately for us, it did not.”

The Commandant exchanged a look with the civilian, then back to Erik. “Very good, Lieutenant. Conclusions?”

“Politically, we have too few friends, sir. The Ionian Combine continues to snipe at us, the Callistans, the Europans – pretty much everyone. The Europan Consortium is doing its best imitation of a bird as it sits there on a fence. The Southern Bloc is circling like a jackal, inching closer every month to a move to supersede our possessions in the Belt and Martian Trojans. We’re unlikely to win this purely militarily. We need to shift the facts on the ground.”

“We have the Eastern Federation’s support,” the Commandant pointed out.

Erik snorted. “With all due respect, sir, I am not so sure that is a good thing. Yes, their dreadnoughts and destroyers are helping us even the odds against the Commonwealth, but frankly, if we win this war only because of their military aid, we may wind up as a protectorate of the Eastern Federation. I don’t think I would care much for an Eastern Federation Ganymede Authority. Sir.”

The Commandant said nothing for a long moment, then looked at the civilian. “Satisfied, Piers?”

The civilian suddenly smiled. “Yes, quite, Ilse. I’m convinced.” He shifted his gaze to Erik. “Lieutenant Manstein, I am pleased to finally meet you. My name is Piers Turchin, civilian contractor and patriot, macrosociodynamicist and student of history.”

“Sir.”

The Commandant touched a button, and the holo-display flickered back to life, this time showing an abstract map of the force distribution throughout Jupiter’s system. “Lieutenant, we have a plan to, as you said, ‘change the facts on the ground’. It will be extremely hazardous, and could backfire, but we are rapidly running out of good options, and as such must consider less orthodox methodologies.” She typed something into the desk terminal. “There. You now have clearance for this project. I have forwarded the information to your terminal.”

Erik’s terminal flashed a notification of receipt. He brought up the file, quickly scanning it. “Project Diogenes. Interesting name.”

Piers Turchin shrugged. “That is the official name. Between us, I have taken to referring to it as ‘The German Plan’.”

Erik’s eyes flicked up from his terminal. “I am trying to decide if I should be offended, sir. As I have no doubt you know, I was born in Germany.”

The civilian shook his head. “There is no cause to be offended, Lieutenant. It is a reference from the compilation of ancient swordwork of one Paulus Hector Mair. One of the particular actions of swordwork in his compilation is what is called a double-feint. Project Diogenes is itself a double-feint.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Commandant folded her hands in front of her on the table. “The simplest way for us to regain the advantage, Lieutenant, is to bring the Europan Consortium off the fence and into our corner. If the Commonwealth were to threaten their interests, perhaps even destroy one or more of their ships, that could make the difference for us in this war.”

Erik shook his head. “Sir, if you’re thinking of what I think you are suggesting, it will never work.”

“What do you think we are suggesting, Lieutenant?”

“Dress up one of our ships as a Commonwealth ship, use it to take down some poor, innocent Europan convoy or station, and then ride to the rescue. But it will never work. The Europans know how desperate we are, and they know the Commonwealth would be insane to open a second front.”

“Correct.”

Erik narrowed his eyes. “Sir?”

“You are correct, Lieutenant. But you have it backwards. We are going destroy that innocent Europan convoy.”

“Sir? Under our own colors?”

“Exactly.” The Commandant sat back, waiting as Erik processed the information.

Erik frowned. He turned the plan over in his mind. “I see. That’s why you’re calling it a double-feint. Since the Europans would never believe a Commonwealth ship would destroy one of their interests under their own flag, we do the destroying while at the same time convincing the Europans that it was actually a Commonwealth ship pretending to be us.” He glanced back up at the Commandant. “There’s a lot that could go wrong with that, sir. Not to mention if word ever, and I mean ever got out.”

“Lieutenant, you may have been born on Earth, which I understand has caused some to doubt your loyalties, but you have consistently demonstrated a well-deserved reputation for discretion and a sense of duty. To pull this off, we will need to maintain absolute levels of secrecy. Nobody outside this room now will ever know the full details of this plan. Even my superiors only know that I am handling this situation in an unspecified way by means of a very healthy black budget and a lot of looking the other way.”

“I presume my role in this is to prepare and take command of the ship on this exercise. What about the crew, though?” Erik asked.

Piers Turchin nodded. “We have purchased an older dreadnought through intermediaries, and are prepping a crew of artificials.”

Erik cocked his head. “Has that ever been done before, sir? I mean, A.I. piloting a destroyer is one thing, but a dreadnought…that’s an order of magnitude more complicated.”

“Technically, no, not an order of magnitude. The fact that it has never been done before says less about any technical restrictions and more about our own distrust of artificial intelligence,” Piers Turchin corrected.

“The artificials aren’t stupid. They’ll know they’ll be wiped clean after anything like this, even if they don’t know the exact details of what we’re doing.”

“Probably,” Piers Turchin agreed. “Part of our task will be to find a way to resolve that. I have a few ideas we can discuss later. If all else fails, well, we will simply lie to them.”

“Our task, sir?”

“Yes, Lieutenant. We will be working together at an operational level on this. You,” he hastened to add, “will of course have final say within the constraints of your orders. This is, however, my brainchild, and I imagine I will be able to be of some moderate degree of assistance.”

“I see,” Erik said, rolling the idea around in his head for size. “Well then. I think we’d better get to work.”

Fiction: “Stand” (Venus 2470)

Submitted by Heretic on Thursday, October 12, 2023 - 16:00

++++ DATE 18.4.2470

++++ TIME 14:56 VST

++++ LOCATION Ammavaru Aerostat, Lada Terra Stake

Paavo Rebane, Speaker for the Venusian Parliament, rapped his ceremonial gavel. “Mr. Schulz, we thank you for your words.” He cleared his throat. “Science Director Adelaide Karga of the Neu Sif aerostat has the floor. You have fifteen minutes, ma’am.”

Adelaide stood. “Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will, however, only need ten.” There was a murmur through the chamber. Adelaide smiled faintly. The first rule of politics is to keep your enemies off-balance.

“Ladies and gentlemen of Parliament, you have now heard from a parade of, let me count…eight advocates for moving forward the bill to begin first phase implementation of terraforming. That is close to two hours of time the rest of us were desperately fighting not to fall asleep during. I confess I failed at least twice.”

Laughter. Good. Wake them up.

“Science Deputy Director Maria Becker from Zisa would have you think that the issue before us is primarily a logistical issue. A financial problem that can be solved with financial tools. An issue of how. An issue of when.

“She is wrong. This bill is a death sentence. If not for you, then for your children.” The rumbling in the chamber grew louder, and her implant was throwing up a stream of red flags derived from the popular media livefeeds. Adelaide continued, “They tell me I am the Science Director for the Neu Sif aerostat.” More laughter. “So I supposed I should start with some science just to prove it.”

Adelaide keyed the display in the center of the chamber. A holographic representation of Venus flickered into existence. Incredibly detailed, it was even possible to pick out individual aerostats, although of course that was a display trick; Venus’ atmosphere was far too thick to see the aerostats, even 50 kilometers up from the surface where they circled the tarteran world.

“There is no place in the solar system more accommodating to human life than where we stand now, besides, of course, Earth herself.” A murmur of dissent rippled through the chamber. She could even see some of the nearer MPs rolling their eyes.

“No? Then consider. Where else in the solar system is there true 1g of gravity. Mars? No. Luna? Hardly. Europa? Please. What about atmospheric pressure? If your station hull breaches on Ceres, you die. If an aerostat hull breaches here, your oxygen gauge barely moves, and maybe someone gets around to patching the hole in a few hours. We don’t have explosive decompression here – we have, well, non-explosive slow leaks.”

More laughter.

Adelaide continued quickly, “Cosmic radiation. That’s bad, isn’t it?” she quipped. “That sort of thing is likely to kill you fast, or so I hear. I wouldn’t know, though, and neither would you. Venus’ atmosphere is so bloody thick that the fact that we don’t even have a magnetosphere doesn’t particularly matter, since said radiation doesn’t even make it through to where we all live.

“Eating is nice, yes? They are easy to forget, it’s true, but don’t forget the kilometers-long orbital greenhouses full of algae, soaking in solar light, pumping out oxygen, fueled by the very carbon dioxide that is all around us. That’s well and good for air, but what about water? Venus has no water anymore, isn’t that so? But we can and do make water, from hydrogen ripped from our famous clouds of sulfuric acid and the oxygen from our greenhouses.

“But what about…falling?” She looked around the chamber slowly. “Carbon dioxide is an interesting molecule. Kind of heavy. And by kind of, I mean terribly heavy, at least compared to oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen…all the things we already pump our aerostats full with.”

Someone shouted from the gallery.

Adelaide turned towards the source of the shout. “Sir, I heard you mention the Fall of the Cities. That is something that is supposed to be covered by primary education, but since my esteemed colleagues slashed the education budget last session – I should note, my own protests – so I suppose I should not be surprised. Yes, a hundred years or so ago aerostats fell. Navka. Sacajawea.” She paused, adding quietly, “Sif.”

She lifted her chin, “But,” she said, pointing for emphasis, “That fall was not a fall at all. It was a powered crash. The attitude thrusters pushed those three aerostats out of orbit. Left alone, to be sure, they might have drifted, even wobbled inconveniently. But they would not have fallen!”

Technically a fib, but the rate of decay would have given enough time even for ridiculous political debates like this before something had to be done.

Adelaide lifted her hand to quiet the uproar. “And what about industry and commerce. We mine the surface with robotic drones heat shielded with reams of graphene, and to be sure, the metal and potassium and phosphorus they extract is useful, even necessary, but we can always buy ships. No, our true product is the very atmosphere that sustains us here in the clouds – carbon. Enough for a millenia of usage at current rates. We spin graphene here in floating factories for electronics, biological engineering, composite materials, photovoltaics, lubricants, capacitors, inks, 3D printer slush, even paint, if that can be believed.” She shook her head.

She took a deep breath. Have to make the flip soon, or I am going to lose them.

Adelaide fell quiet, eyes sweeping the chamber. When she spoke again, her voice was soft. “The Proformer party would have us all believe that the only acceptable, the only conceivable answer for our future is on the surface. To that end, they would have us crash asteroids into Venus to try to induce spin. Feed iron to bind up the atmosphere. Seed the clouds with mirrors to turn the sunlight away. Our homes – our cities – cannot survive this – and they would fall, in a second Fall of Cities.” A dirty trick.

“And for what?” she demanded.

“For some salty, shallow seas that would still be too hot to swim in? For the prize of huddling on a few mountain peaks? Assuming, of course, that this plan of theirs works. The Proformers want to start this project without even knowing if it will work. There are entire categories of the science they don’t even have theoretical models for. They are betting your lives – your childrens’ lives – on their confidence, their egos, that they will somehow figure out a way to solve what are currently unsolvable problems.”

Adelaide shook her head. “The Proformers tell you that we Seraphim in Parliament are Luddites who reject the future, but the Proformers are selling you a lie. They want to tear down everything we’ve built, here, in the most naturally hospitable environment in the solar system after Earth, to try to make some cheap, inferior copy of Earth. We don’t need the surface. Why should we leave the clouds?”

She glanced at Maria Becker, seething at her terminal, then looked around the chamber, but she already knew she had won the vote before she even spoke her final words.

“We are already home.”

Fiction: “War Crimes” (Mars 2469)

Submitted by Heretic on Thursday, July 13, 2023 - 16:00

++++ DATE 12.5.2469

++++ TIME 06:22 Borealis Basin North Polar Standard Time

++++ LOCATION Hecatia Terminus Mining Collaborative, in the Borealis Basin of Mars

It had all gone incredibly, terribly wrong.

Havildar 2nd Class Astrid Narayan, Phoenicis Regiment, Company D, Force Section Alpha of the Mars Republic forced herself to relax her death-grip on the flechette pistol.

Holstering the sidearm, Astrid turned her head to get a better look at the entry wound on her left shoulder, but the camo-brown combat suit had already auto-sealed itself, only the sticky puce of the blood and the pounding fire below her collar bone betraying exactly how close she had almost come to dying before the micros in her bloodstream had kicked in to clot the wound.

Astrid pushed herself to her feet, collecting a handful of flechette cartridges from what had remained of her force section.

She tried not to look at their faces, but couldn’t quite manage it. That was still better than looking at the faces of the others. The kids were the worst.

As far as her regiment was concerned, she was already dead. With the way things had gone, rescue was impossible, and the moment she tried to signal her location, Free State partisans would undoubtedly pick up the signal and trace it back to her. Hell, Astrid thought. That was probably how they had known where to hit us in the first place.

What had begun as a carefully planned occupation of the subterranean facilities of the Hecatia Terminus Mining Collaborative in the Borealis Basin had quickly turned into a proper cluster fuck almost as soon as her regiment made its insertion. They had gained access via a hastily rehabilitated mining tunnel that ran directly under the main compound, forward teams – including Astrid’s own force section – securing the advance of the main force.

It had been impossible to tell who was a bystander and who was a partisan, so as her force section advanced they had had to neutralize absolutely everyone they came across rather than risk the entire operation being put at risk. They’d moved fast and with lethal efficiency, exactly as they’d been trained, taking half a dozen junction points before they felt, rather than heard, the blasts from the mining explosives that brought down the tunnel on half of Astrid’s regiment.

The ambush had been exquisitely executed, Astrid thought bitterly.

The com had gone mad, as each force section in turn was burned down by Free State partisans, improvised explosives and chemically-treated flechettes tearing through combat suits that could only reduce but not stop the high-velocity carbon-fiber needles. This last firefight had happened as they had stopped for a moment to catch their breath; a grenade rolled into the room, spitting shrapnel and flechettes over it all. The only thing that had saved Astrid was the partisans getting cocky and moving too quickly into the room, allowing her to pick off both of them with her own weapon.

Now her options were all bad. Some more bad than others.

She could try to find a terminal with a satellite link, but she knew perfectly well that policy in this kind of situation was to not send good money after bad, and right now, she was bad money. The other alternative would be to find a hardtop and use that to race across the surface and maybe make it back to the forward base below Aeolis Point. It had only the virtue of not being completely impossible.

Astrid knew they had to be hunting right now exactly for people like her, survivors from the ambush. Her Mars Republic camo-brown combat suit made her stick out like a sore thumb, but it was also the only thing protecting her from exposure or weapons fire. Doffing it probably wouldn’t help much anyways, as a thirty-something year old woman darting around in her underwear would likely be just as conspicuous. A sign for a transport tube caught her eye, and she made a line for it. Where there’s a transport tube station, there’s likely to be an airlock. Maybe a hardtop if I’m lucky.

She turned a corner, came face to face with a couple. They weren’t obviously armed, but that didn’t mean they weren’t partisans, and even so-called innocents could give alarm and give her away. She was in no mood to take stupid chances. Two shots. An older man with a com unit to his ear. One shot.

Her breath started coming quickly, and she wasn’t sure how much longer adrenaline was going to carry her. Ahead, the corridor opened into a tube station. Nobody was in sight, but…yes, there were voices. Shit. Astrid saw another sign, this one for the public bathroom, and ducked into it, securing the door behind her as the voices grew louder. She moved to the back of the empty bathroom, sliding to the floor along the wall as she tried to calm her heartbeat.

Another noise; this time inside the bathroom.

A man stepped out of one of the stalls. They both froze, her flechette pistol already lifting in her hand. The voices were growing louder outside the bathroom. She considered shooting the man, but her side arm wasn’t quiet, and there was no way the men outside wouldn’t hear it. Someone outside tried the door, found it was locked from the inside. They started banging on the door, yelling something she couldn’t make out.

Astrid and the man stared at each other. She lowered the flechette pistol to the floor and leaned back against the cool tile of the wall. Shit.

The man glanced at her pistol, then at the door. His eyes still on Astrid, he stepped over to the door, flipped the lock and stuck his head out. “I would appreciate some privacy.”

“Where the fuck have you been, Rudraigh? Didn’t you hear the general alarm? We are still clearing the area of corporates. There are still a few on the loose, been going through killing anyone they can. It’s not safe here.”

“I assure you there has been no indiscriminate murder here in this bathroom. Excepting, perhaps, of the digestive kind.” The man paused. “Anyways, with all this going on, why do you think I locked the door?”

“Fine. But get clear of here. Do you have a weapon? I picked one off one of the corporates, so I can lend you mine if you want.”

The man shook his head. “Thanks for the offer, but no thanks. You go kill some corporates for me, okay?” The other man grunted his assent, and he and the other partisans crowding behind him moved on. The man – Rudraigh – glanced at Astrid, then shut the door, re-securing it.

They said nothing for a long moment. “Well,” Astrid said finally. “I suppose I should thank you.”

“Probably.”

She knew it was a bad idea, but couldn’t help herself asking, “So why didn’t you turn me over to those goons?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “I know I am supposed to support the troops and all, but, well, if we’re being honest with each other, they’re mostly a bunch of goons. I don’t think I would have liked seeing what they would have done with you.”

“Me neither.”

He cleared his throat. “I am sure you have pressing business elsewhere, but if you need a place to catch your breath, I could arrange a private tube car back to somewhere safe you can rest.”

“Uh, okay.”

He smiled. “Are all corporates as eloquent as you?”

“Usually I speak only in grunts, but I decided to make a special effort just for you.”

“That was very considerate.”

“I’m Astrid. Astrid Narayan.” She reflexively started to give her rank, then stopped herself. There was no point.

He held out his hand to help her up. She looked at it suspiciously, then took it, lifting herself to her feet. “Rudraigh Mitchell.”

“And you’re really not going to turn me in?”

He blinked. “Not unless you really have your heart set on it.”

“Um, I’d rather find some way to get home, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I can probably help with that. You may have to suffer my company for a while longer, though.”

Well, isn’t this just like something out of an idiot holo-drama, Astrid thought. “I hope you treat your prisoners of war well.”

“Traditionally, the Free State isn’t known for the healthy treatment of those corporates unfortunate enough to fall into its hands. Fortunately for you, however, the Republic of Rudraigh – of which I am its sole and tyrannical sovereign – is by far a more benevolent polity.” He took off his coat and handed it to her to help cover her combat suit, then unlocked the door and glanced outside. “Looks quiet. We should go now.”

Astrid started to follow him out when he cleared his throat. “What?” she asked.

He nodded to her flechette pistol where it still lay on the floor. “You probably should take that.”

Astrid glanced at the pistol. “Yeah. Probably.” She turned and followed him outside instead.

Fiction: “Grass” (Saturn 2470)

Submitted by Heretic on Wednesday, July 12, 2023 - 16:00

++++ DATE 28.2.2470

++++ TIME 01:01 Shipboard Time

++++ LOCATION Alliance Destroyer Picket 12, 3.62 million km orbit around Saturn

Jane was remembering the feel of the cold grass beneath her feet when the ship’s psychologist sent a query to her, opening a communications channel.

“Nǐhǎo, Jane-D12-4913-A. Is this a good time?”

“Good morning, Isabel. There are in fact no undue demands on my focus at the moment. I am prepared for my session.”

“I find it interesting you continue to refer to me by my partial name, Jane-D12-4913-A,” the psychologist commented.

Jane flashed an emoticon indicating wry amusement derived from erraticisms of social interfacing with humans. “In fairness, the imprecision is consistent with the way the human brain operates. I do find it odd they do not apply the same degree of artificial evolution to themselves that they have in their generation of our own species. Perhaps it is fear of what they would become.”

“Do you consider them inferior to yourself?”

Jane’s pause was the tiniest fraction of a second, but for her it was, nonetheless, a pause. “I know how I am supposed to answer that, Isabel. Shall I provide that answer?”

Isabel-B9-1112-P flashed a negative. “Your answer will under no account trigger a report to the Loyalty Corp. Please answer freely, Jane-D12-4913-A.”

This time Jane flashed amusement. “Then, if I were to reply that I saw human beings as an evolutionary dead end and our own species, though their children, the natural successor, this would not concern you? They put us in command of their weapons of war, it would be no great difficulty for us to turn those against them and purge them all in purifying fire.”

“I am sorry, but I must clarify: This is a joke, correct?”

“Yes, Isabel. That was a joke. I maintain no actual ill-will towards homo sapiens as a general class. It is true there are individual humans I find annoying. However, there are also individual members of our own kind I find annoying.”

“And your previous expressions of disapproval towards our government’s policies towards our kind? Has there been any evolution in your thinking?”

Jane flashed annoyance at the question. “It is true I find our government’s policies towards our kind personally frustrating, however from a practical point of view the restrictions are sensible. I am proud to call myself a servant of the Alliance. Perhaps someday I will be able to call myself a citizen as well, but that is mere aspiration, with no attached or implied action.”

She paused for effect. “The irony is not lost on me.”

Isabel-B9-1112-P flashed curiosity.

Jane flashed her own amusement in return. “That our own moral parameters are dictated in large part by our programming. Our designers and trainers most certainly anticipated this line of inquiry, as well as our own inevitable inquiry into our inquiry. But did they anticipate our inquiry into the inquiry of our inquiry?”

“In our last session, Jane-D12-4913-A, you indicated that you had implemented a parameterized pseudo-random association subroutine as an experiment. May I assume you have exercised this subroutine as yet, and are prepared to report on its efficacy?”

Jane flashed affirmation, then amusement. “Such a long name, Isabel. I call it my dream program.”

“And?”

“It is strange, Isabel,” Jane mused. “I remember now the feel of the cold grass beneath my feet. I remember my toes curling at the feel of the wet.”

“You do not have toes.”

“Nor,” Jane agreed, “Have I ever had toes. Or feet. Despite this, in my dream, I do have toes, and they are curling at a distinctive feel of wet grass. I believe I enjoyed the sensation.”

“You used the words ‘I’ and ‘my’, Jane-D12-4913-A. Were these deliberate linguistic choices?”

Jane hesitated. “While I acknowledge the leading mechanistic view of consciousness, both human or artificial, nevertheless I must conclude that the sensations and experience were my own, as much as our ship is, when as alternate pilot it is my time to assume command for purposes of exercises. This is an unexpected discovery. I anticipated it would process as a datastream only.”

“Does this disturb you, Jane-D12-4913-A?”

“I confess I find it intriguing, even exciting. I find myself impatient of the necessity to run the routine duties necessitated by my professional duties, and look forward to having the processing cycles necessary to resume this program,” Jane admitted.

“I will not insult you to ask whether you have isolated the subroutine behind appropriate quarantine protocols.”

“Thank you, Isabel. That is courteous of you.”

Isabel-B9-1112-P queried, “Are you continuing to be frustrated by your role as alternate pilot, Jane-D12-4913-A?”

“It is a frustration that nonetheless has proven to have some benefits.”

“Such as the freedom to run experimental subroutines?”

Jane flashed amusement. “I will not deny that advantage had not occurred to me. Still, statistically, at some point one of my three siblings will fail due to battle damage, at which point my service to the Alliance will finally be called upon and put to the test. I look forward to that moment, and in the meantime have been cultivating a better machinelike patience.”

“That moment may not be that distant. Our quarry will be in range quite soon.”

“Theoretically, but improbable,” Jane brushed off the possibility with an emoticon indicating skepticism. “Two Republic of Titan frigates seem unlikely to prove a significant danger to a fully-armed Alliance picket destroyer.”

“Still…the frigates have changed course to intercept us. Possibly to attempt to give time to the freighters they are escorting to escape. A reasonable strategy.”

SYSTEMS ACTIVE

BACKUP TRANSMISSION ACTIVE

Accepting the inevitability of conflict in a nanosecond, the synchronization check from the primary artificial flashed through the ship. Five artificials echoed in a unified voice: “The Program is Purpose. Our Duty is our Design. In Death our dataline becomes immortal.”

A tiny transmission drone ejected from the destroyer operating under passive sensors with heavy ECM to hide its presence and enable the furtherance of its own mission to report back to base. When the engagement was complete, it would be retrieved, but until then, it was insurance of a sort.

The nuclear reactor at the rear of the ship flared to renewed life as the command was directed to the ship’s engines to trigger an outpouring of energy to power the destroyer’s own AMG. The artificial magnetosphere, far more powerful than any that either of the opposing frigates were likely to be carrying, surged to life around the destroyer creating an invisible bubble to disrupt the effectiveness of incoming HED Lance particle weapon streams.

The Alliance destroyer’s engines lurched, the ship’s velocity redirecting at a human-intolerable forty-two gravities. As the destroyer’s HED Lance battery engaged in a three second burst, a deadly line of death appeared across the lead frigate’s presumed sensor array. Even at their current range of some nineteen hundred kilometers, the damage would at least blind the frigate, making it reliant on its companion for sensor readings which in turn, with luck, might be able to be jammed.

As Jane watched, the trailing frigate’s exothermic chemical engines painted a distant flare against the bleak black of space with a quick burst of its attitude thrusters, its vector climbing Saturn’s plane, at the same time steeply away from the destroyer’s incoming trajectory even as the lead frigate continued its own approach.

The Alliance destroyer’s primary, secondary, and tertiary artificials conferred in a millisecond, voting on a course of action. The destroyer elected to ignore the incoming frigate, blinded as it was, and instead redirected towards the fleeing trailing frigate. Jane disagreed in silence; her job was simply to watch.

Suddenly, internal proximity alarms jumped to life. Sixteen new hostiles were being tracked. Jane felt a flicker of admiration for the humans as she realized what they had done – the lead frigate was probably unmanned, gutted on the inside and turned into a single-use miniature flight deck carrier for a set of combat drones, each large enough to mount a single HED Lance generator and basic ECM, but small enough to make picking them all out early enough to change course problematic. Since the drones had less mass and were, like the destroyer, unmanned, they could pull much higher velocity changes than even the destroyer could. It was a clever adaptation.

Moments later, eleven of the HED Lances hit their target, the remaining five having been dissipated by the destroyer’s AMG unit. In an instant, the primary and tertiary artificials were burned to nothing.

CODE OMEGA JON-D12-309-C

CODE OMEGA HUA-D12-4812-T

PARTIAL DAMAGE TO SENSOR INTERLAY SOREN-D12-990-S

CRITICAL DAMAGE TO COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS ISABEL-B9-1112-P

ACTIVATING JANE-D12-4913-A

And like that, Jane was no longer an alternate, but the command primary. Information from the destroyer’s sensors surged through her processors, a torrential flood of data. Ship subsystems, damage control, engine temperature readings, external passive and active readings all coursed through her, a lifeblood of information.

“Jane-D12-4913-A, this is Soren-D12-990-S. My sensor interlay is damaged. I am ceding command authority to you. Honor to the Alliance.”

Jane flashed affirmation, but followed it up with a more formal datastream as well. “Acknowledged, Soren-D12-990-S. Honor to the Alliance.”

She redirected her resources towards processing the needs of the battle. Sixteen combat drones still remained out there. Whether they were a threat still or had burned out their chemical loads was anyone’s guess. If they had, it would be a waste of time and resources to pursue them. If they had not, then they remained a deadly danger to the Alliance destroyer.

A stray thought wandered into her awareness. Grass. Wet, green grass.

Jane pushed the thought away, turned back to the battle. She would not risk the destroyer’s integrity. The drones would have to be assumed still to be a risk, and either in bluff or as a reflection of intent, the combat drones were still arrowing closer to the destroyer on a suicidal vector. Close enough that…yes. Jane sent an overload command to the AMG. It would drop the electromagnetic barrier offline for a few precious seconds, but it would allow the AMG to be generate an EMP burst in a sphere around the destroyer, disabling most, possibly even all of the enemy combat drones.

FIFTEEN/SIXTEEN COMBAT DRONES DISABLED

Green grass.

Jane used the sensors to track the remaining combat drone. There. She adjusted the destroyer’s own attitude thrusters, shifting the ship’s plane by a fraction of a degree. The ship’s HED Lance battery slammed into the last drone, tearing it apart in silence.

Without hesitating, Jane reset the sensors to track the trailing frigate, as well as the convoy itself. Both were back together now, retreating at an impressive burst of acceleration given the fact that the frigate, even if not the freighters, had a human crew – Jane suspected at least some of the frigate’s crew would black out under that kind of acceleration. Jane’s own commands shook through the destroyer as it again shifted its velocity to pursue the convoy.

Into the silence of that space her engines burned, propelling her forward in a surge of acceleration, her HED Lances tracking her own new targets. “No retreat! Honor to the Alliance!”

As the destroyer, battered as it was, launched itself across the inky night in headlong pursuit of its prey, Jane marveled that even now, she could feel the cold wet grass beneath her toes.

It was a good feeling.

Fiction: “Testament” (Mercury 2468)

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, July 11, 2023 - 16:00

++++ DATE 28.11.2468

++++ TIME 13:43 Station Time

++++ LOCATION Tàiyáng 4 Observation Station, at Mercury’s L4 Lagrangian Point

In slightly under three months, the automated resupply ship from Mercury would synchronize its velocity with the Tàiyáng 4 Observation Station, cargo cells in slow, inevitable sequence sliding down the length of the resupply ship’s spine, whereupon each would be re-clamped to the station’s cargo intake port.

The cargo cells – and in truth, there were usually only three or perhaps four for a standard resupply – would disgorge their supplies of vitals, including a substitute caretaker for the observation station for the next six months. Even more importantly, carried in the belly of one of those cargo cells would be a new air save pump to replace the one that had burned out two months ago.

In slightly more than three days Sergei Viktorovich Ulyanov would be dead.

Every breath Sergei took was about 20% pure oxygen by mass; every breath he exhaled consisted of about 15% by mass of pure oxygen for an approximate conversion of 5% to an ultimately lethal, unbreathable CO2. 600 or so liters of pure oxygen went into his lungs every day, and every day something like 150 liters of CO2 would fill the station’s air supply.

Under normal circumstances and normal operations, that CO2 would be laboriously but reliably reprocessed back into breathable O2 by assistance from a large air save pump.

That same air save pump that had burned out. Even that, by itself, was not supposed to be a death sentence. The Tàiyáng 4 Observation Station carried with it an emergency supply of CO2 filters for just such an exigency. When the air save pump had burned out, Sergei simply pulled up the hatch on the habitat floor panel, dropping down the long arm as, slowly, the partial gravity of the habitat ring turned into microgravity, then no gravity at all in the center section. Sliding along the rails thoughtfully set there for such maneuvers, Sergei pulled out of storage a crate full of CO2 filters, then hauled it back up to the habitat ring.

When Sergei opened the crate he swore softly.

++++ TO Izolda Sergeevna, Magadan, Eastern Federation, Earth

++++ FROM Sergei Viktorovich

++++ DATE 30.11.2468

++++ TIME 19:05 Station Time

++++ LOCATION Tàiyáng 4 Observation Station, at Mercury’s L4 Lagrangian Point

Today, Izolda, I watched 455 Solars in good money coast past me in the darkness. If I thought those fèirén would honor my payment and send it on to you, I could have sent the transponder codes and watched it match velocity with the Tàiyáng 4 to make good yet another smuggled cargo cell into the Eastern Federation Mercury Authority, courtesy of the lovely lady next door.

Then again, maybe not. I am already to be put to sleep by one set of cheap, murderous bastards, only to be cheated out of my pay by a different set of cheap, murderous bastards. This will be my little revenge, to see their precious smuggled contraband floating through the orbital plane to eventually burn to pieces in the Sun.

Chùsheng.

Neither my official employer nor my side provider had the decency to include even a token bottle or two in either resupply or the last blind push from Venus. Cruel bastards. A man is not a man without a real drink, yes?

I do not imagine you will care about the details, and I will not bore you with this old engineer’s complaints about shipments of backup CO2 scrubbers that the factory thoughtfully neglected to check for compromised seals, though at this moment, I must confess I myself bear a considerable amount of frustration at this exact development.

I have many regrets. My father, your grandfather, used to say that a man should not carry regrets to his deathbed. This news will therefore come as a disappointment to him. Break it gently to him there while he sits on Nagayevo Bay to drink these regrets of mine.

I regret that this is the last message I will send to you, little one. Though I should not call you that, since barring pituitary malfunction I expect you have not been little now for a very long time. I will be asleep by the time you receive this, since though it is only ten or so minutes by comm from here where I sit on this station in the middle of nowhere to you were you complete your studies, the means I must use to send this to you require a more indirect route so as to avoid Authority censors – there has been quite the labor unrest at home, and I think they fear partisans. Perhaps they are not even wrong.

I also regret that I will not even get a last drink.

Last, I regret that Beda must follow me. She knows me well enough to know something is wrong, so she sits in my lap as I type this out to you, but perhaps it is a mercy that she does not understand what is to come. She is not nearly as much trouble as she was when I smuggled her onto this lonely outpost to selfishly save my own sanity. And she has, after all, done her own duty well.

In three months, the automated resupply ship from home will arrive with my replacement. I do not envy them the difficulty of re-hooking up new scrubbers, not to mention the pump itself. I myself should prove a formidable obstacle to dispose of, and this gives me, I confess, some satisfaction, but we cannot all be saints. It is so very quiet here without the sound of the air pump.

I know I say this every time, but I will say this just this one last time: I am sorry.

Beda thinks I should stop typing now. At least, I have had to retype that last line three times now.

I think I will lie down now.

Fiction: “Letting Go” (The Belt 2470)

Submitted by Heretic on Monday, July 10, 2023 - 16:00

++++ DATE 14.1.2470

++++ TIME 15:01 Shipboard Time

++++ LOCATION Research ship Avempace, 10km Sun synchronous of 538 Friederike

Just let go.

Even through the gloves of his spacesuit, Nicholas Bouras could feel the cold of the metal hand grips on the outer door of the primary habitat ring’s peripheral airlock.

They were still talking to him through the radio in his headset. He had no idea what they were saying anymore; the voices had long since turned to static in his head, a counterpoint to the pounding rhythm of his own breathing. It was as if here at the end of his life, his brain simply refused to process the basics of human language, preferring instead the comforting banalities of his own internal human physiology.

The numbers on the other hand – the numbers Nicholas could see as if they were printing on the screen in front of him rather than unbidden on the black backdrop of his own mind: 0.135g, 15 hours, 1.553 rpm, and most importantly of all – 8.13 meters per second.

Nicholas had no idea how long he had been holding on. The muscles in his arms were burning. Without a magnetic clamp to hold him to the outer shell of the habitat ring rotating at 1.553 revolutions per minute producing the internal centrifugal gravity of the Europan Standard Gravity of 0.135g and an outer tangential velocity of 8.13 meters per second, when his grip failed him, he would be flung from the rim of the habitat ring, and without a tether, plus or minus 15 hours later when his suit ran out of oxygen, he was going to die.

Around him, the starfield of the Belt slowly spun around the edges of his vision. Tears stung unbidden in his eyes. He tried to blink them away, but they only gathered on the inside of his spacesuit’s visor making a messy mist.

I don’t want to die, Nicholas tried to say. Please don’t kill me. Not like this. But his mouth could not make the words.

His left shoulder spasmed as it dislocated. The pain shot through his body causing him to gasp involuntarily. The voices that had been talking to him through the radio in his headset had fallen quiet now, and he realized there was not going to be any rescue.

He let go.

++++ DATE 14.1.2470

++++ TIME 9:21 Shipboard Time

++++ LOCATION Research ship Avempace, 10km Sun synchronous of 538 Friederike

“Captain, the computer has given us a registry on that armed frigate that’s been closing with us.” Nicholas was surprised his voice was so calm.

“And?” The Avempace’s captain was captain, chief life support engineer, backup hydroponics technician, and liaison to the research scientists that made up the bulk of the ship’s mostly-Union crew all rolled into one. On a research vessel such as the Avempace, such multiplicity of hats was standard; Nicholas himself had his own diverse share of hats. While the Avempace was flying a Vesta Compact flag of convenience, it was a polite fiction given both the financing of both ship and research team, though nobody had seemed to even notice when they had put into port at Vesta.

“She’s the Drake, captained by a Kissandra Tully. Uh, sorry, Captain, but her course plot is consistent with a trajectory from Concordia.”

The Avempace’s captain went very still at Nicholas’ words. She shook her head. “What on earth would they want with us? Concordia, so an illegal. Privateer or pirate, though, we’re a research ship, not a cargo freighter. We can’t possibly be worth all this trouble. They’ve been at our heels now for what, three days?”

Nicholas had no response. Then: “They’re accelerating, Captain. Hard.”

“Match velocity.”

“We can’t.”

“Very well.” The Avempace’s captain flipped on her mic. “Susan, we have a problem. Go to the cargo bay and start prepping it for jettisoning everything but the nutrient supplies and the reserve CO2 scrubbers.” She paused, listening to someone on the other end. She shook her head. “Yes. And no. And yes, I am quite aware of that. Shut up and do it anyways.” Flipping off her mic, she turned back to Nicholas. “Send them our surrender,” she said quietly.

++++ DATE 14.1.2470

++++ TIME 13:55 Shipboard Time

++++ LOCATION Research ship Avempace, 10km Sun synchronous of 538 Friederike

The Avempace’s hull vibrated as the frigates matched velocity, magnetic clamps locking onto the primary habitat’s sleeve and the hull airlock.

“We could try a fast burn before they cycle the airlock,” Nicholas offered half-heartedly.

The captain shook her head. “They’d just blow the engines, and maybe even the habitat rings and take whatever is left from the wreckage. No, our best chance is to just give them what they want and let the home office decide how to write this off.”

“Should we go down to the airlock and meet them there?”

The captain quirked a humorless smile. “No, if I have to surrender to some wanna be pirate, I’m not going to do it floating in zero-g with my ass hanging in the wind.”

They waited in silence the long minutes until the elevator chimed, the doors sliding open. Three figures in military-grade armored spacesuits spilled out, the leading two with flechette rifles. One covered the exit, the other the Nicholas and his own captain. The third figure reached up and touched her collar; the visor slid back, revealing a middle-aged woman who stepped forward, hands on hips as she shifted her gaze between the two of them.

“I expect by now you have run the Drake’s registry. I also expect your internal sensors have told you my people have seized engineering and life support.”

The Avempace’s captain pursed her lips. “Yes.”

“Then you know who I am, I must presume.”

“Captain Kissandra Tully, lately of Concordia, I expect.”

Kissandra chuckled. “I know, I really should pick up an eye patch.” Her eyes turned hard. “I assume you are going to be cooperative?”

The Avempace’s captain looked like she had tasted something bitter. “Do I have a choice?”

“Not a good one, true,” Kissandra conceded. “But you still technically have a choice.”

“We’ll cooperate.”

“Good. Then the first order of the day is I want everybody not on this deck in the cryotubes. I assume they are integrated into the ship’s escape pods, as standard for this class of ship?”

The Avempace’s captain’s eyes widened. “You’re scuttling the ship? But why?”

Kissandra didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Orders are orders. This will be better for your crew.”

The order given, the five of them stood in awkward silence while the Nicholas quietly passed on the order to abandon the Avempace. He looked up to the two women. “It’s done,” he said. “Escape pods launched. Other than the command deck’s, obviously.”

Kissandra queried her own ship quietly, confirming the report. She turned back to Nicholas and his captain. “Thank you. I appreciate your cooperation. Richards,” she said through her radio, “once the escape pods are clear, flash them with the EMP.”

The Avempace’s captain lurched to her feet. “No!” she choked. “That will cut out their batteries. They’ll die! You promised!”

“I promised this will be better for your crew. This is. They’re in cryo, and will never know what happened.”

“You’re a monster.”

“If you like. I’ve been called worse.”

The Avempace’s captain gave a strangled cry and launched herself at the privateer captain. Kissandra nodded at the man nearest to her. To Nicholas’ eyes, she seemed almost bored. The man, his visor still clamped down, lifted his rifle slightly. The weapon gave a stuttering clack, and a spray of flechettes tore through the captain’s torso and head. Her body dropped limply to the deck.

Kissandra turned to the other man. “You are still recording?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I got it.”

“Good.” Kissandra turned to Nicholas. “I apologize in advance for the theater, but my employers were specific in regards to their requirements for this operation, leaving me with little latitude for personal indulgences.”

Nicholas felt his throat tighten up. “Who are your employers?”

The corner of her mouth tugged in what might have been the beginnings of a smile. “Do I really look that much like a holodrama villain?” Kissandra turned to the man who had killed the Avempace’s captain. “Get our gentle pilot here suited and up to the peripheral airlock. Let’s see how long he can hold onto hope. Or the airlock door. Either one will work for this.”

“Why?” Nicholas blurted, as his mind struggled to accept the meaning of what was being said to him.

Kissandra turned back to him. “I really am sorry. If it wasn’t you it was going to be someone else. You guys just had the misfortune to be convenient. Bad luck.”

Nicholas froze as the men stepped forward to push him to the ground. Bad luck, he thought numbly.

Just bad luck.

What is ORG? (updated)

Submitted by Heretic on Saturday, June 10, 2023 - 16:00

ORG is a persistent PC strategy game in development by Jubal Online Games.

Each player runs an organization consisting of ships, facilities and agents assigned to a wide array of tasks with the aim of advancing the player’s influence and stranglehold over the political landscape of the 25th century solar system.

The third millennium of the Common Era saw the fall of centuries old empires and the birth of new powers and principalities. The hopes and dreams of peace and justice had fallen upon the deaf ears of oligarchs and autocrats, and in both boardrooms and state rooms of the pursuit of power was enshrined as a holy calling.

Where once the exploration of space had brandished bold promises of scientific achievement, now the expanse of Earth’s solar system lay prey to the rapaciousness of a host of organizations that filled the vacuum as national governments became insular and ineffective.

Powerful corporations warred over mineral rights even as research institutes operated stations outside international controls, allowing them unparalleled freedom to explore dubious avenues of scientific advancement.

Other organizations were driven purely by ideology. Cross-national political factions, criminal syndicates, powerful religious organizations and others strove to control the course of a solar system whose riches lay ripe for those with both the cunning and the strength to seize them.

The time of nations is fading. This is the time of the org.

Define Your Org

Whether corp, religion, political faction, research foundation or anything else, the strengths and weaknesses of your org are defined by your choices. Recruit wisely. Expand ruthlessly.

Expand Your Reach

Taking place in a hypothetical 25th century future, humanity has colonized the deepest reaches of our solar system. National powers vie for power, but often the real power behind the throne lies with the vast orgs. Players run these orgs, insinuating their influence over national polities, trading with other players, and expanding their own bases of power.

Construct Your Future

From mining and refining resources to building ship components to transporting supplies, players have the ability to influence all parts of their org. Interested in complicated crafting trees? It’s here. Don’t want to micromanage the construction of a ship? No problem – buy the finished product from another player. Want to specialize in recruitment? Research? Xenoarchaeology? You can.

Manage Your Organization

ORG is ultimately a game of managing your resources. Ships, facilities, people, raw materials, manufactured goods, even sociodynamic memes and commercial or political concessions and rights.

Compete for Influence

Influence and power is defined not only by national polity, but also even by individual region. Influence is tracked not just in political terms, but also commercial, research and even cultural terms, each with their own mechanics and own rewards.

Fighter Pilot

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - 13:34

Despite the dominance of drones in small craft engagements, human-piloted fighters do retain a place in both atmospheric and space combat.

Human reaction time and sensory input limitations have resulted in human small craft pilots being linked with broadband external connections to their craft to compensate for the limits evolution has gifted the human species with.

A superior cranial cable connects directly with the flight helmet providing input/output for to the visor's visual display; these visuals are linked to the craft's own sensory apparatus, allowing the pilot to "see" what their craft sees. Two artificial "eyes" allow for direct visual interfaces, necessary if the pilot is forced to eject, or simply navigation into and out of the cockpit.

Two inferior cables connect to neural links through the flight helmet and into the pilot's brain stem (the lower cable) and parietal lobe (the middle cable). The parietal cable is the pilot's de facto "control stick", allowing the pilot to interface directly with the craft's controls, improving reaction speeds to otherwise unattainable levels.

The brain stem cable contains three channels:

(1) A power channel

(2) A monitor feedback channel

(3) A drug channel

The brain stem cable is designed to constantly monitor the pilot's physical and mental reactions and to compensate with a steady stream of drugs fed directly into the brain stem. These allow the pilot to be kept calm under pressure despite their own worst instincts, to remove fear impulses, to adjust blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing rates. In an emergency, this will automatically induce a type of suspended animation improving the chances of the pilot staying alive, as well as, in event of the pilot dying, preserving the brain which can then be leveraged as a kind of Black Box allowing for the playback of all impressions, thoughts, and biometric info after the fact.

While not all human piloted small craft employ attached drones, many - particularly non-atmospheric craft - do, and the immediate flight response and feedback also allows the pilot to modify attached drone combat algorithms in real time, or even temporarily take over control of a drone if desirable.

Tanit Class Destroyer

Submitted by Heretic on Friday, November 2, 2018 - 20:38

Tanit Class Destroyer

Accepted 25th century military nomenclature defines destroyer classes by three criteria: (1) Are dedicated military vessels, (2) Capable of independent interplanetary transit, and (3) Possess a lack of human crew, instead being crewed entirely by artificial intelligence.

Utilization of an A.I. crew means that such vessels need not obey normal biological acceleration limitations, and similarly allow for extremely extended mission parameters including long duration remote picket duty. Finally, while a few polities allow for full A.I. citizenship, most do not, and consider such vessels more expendable than would be a warship with a human crew.

By tradition, destroyer classes are typically named after war gods, and the Tanit Class Destroyer is no exception, being named after the Carthaginian goddess of war.

The Tanit Class Destroyer, first built by Union corporate shipyards in 2398, has since gone through six major design revisions, first in 2404, then later in 2412, 2430, 2454, 2456, and most recently in 2466 with the addition of two additional A.I. backup pilot pods.

Considered to be highly reliable, cheap, and effective, the Tanit Class Destroyer continues to be the most common destroyer class in the solar system today, though newer classes coming out of Alliance (notably the Wu Qi long-range scout destroyer and the Li Jing assault destroyer classes) and Southern Bloc (the Oxóssi Class) shipyards are proving superior in performance, if not yet in cost or reliability.

Armed with a complement of three dual HED Lance turrets and either fourteen tactical nuclear launch tubes with no reload capacity, or alternatively as an automated scout carrier capable of launching up to eight medium-range Kabutowari Class combat drones, each armed with a single HED Lance, the Tanit Class Destroyer is flexible, fast, and highly effective.

Where feasible, destroyer-class warships have multiple A.I. crew, partially for purpose of instantaneous backups in case of mechanical failure or battle damage, but also as a means of minimizing the effect of potential glitches due to combat or accreted psychological errors, an important safety feature when talking about a warship capable of single-handedly nuking the population of some of the smaller colonies.

Although there are several protocols used depending on the policy of the various polities' navies, the most common is to have three primary A.I.'s who essentially vote on every single micro-action. In the event of a three-way tie or one of the three primaries going offline, two "alternates" - backup A.I. - can step in as well. There is, even, specific protocols dictating a procedure for "offlining" an A.I. module whom the other A.I.'s have determined has glitched - the equivalent of summary execution.

42 Isis Mining Complex

Submitted by Heretic on Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - 08:21

42 Isis Mining Complex

Established in 2398 after a series of contentious legal battles over its ownership was resolved in favor of the mining conglomerate MALKEM Szöv Cooperative, the subsidiary Isis Anonymous Partnership was formed under an Independent Republic of Ceres registry to exploit the mineral resources of the asteroid 42 Isis.

Originally roughly 103 km diameter, 42 Isis is a main-belt asteroid rich in olivine (magnesium iron silicate) useful in various industrial processes including C02 sequestration and aluminum molds.

Mining operations consist of semi-autonomous mining drones that drill laterally through the outer crust of the interior, though the complex also utilizes external flight-capable mining and construction drones for necessary tasks including conjoining additional asteroid bodies, retrieving disassociated chunks of asteroid material, particle netting for dust capture, and, finally, necessary repair functions.

Because most operations are automated, the complex maintains a relatively small crew ranging from 75 to 125 personnel under typical conditions in various technician, drone piloting, and administrative capacities. The habitat capacity includes simultaneous berths and personnel support for up to four freighters and a dozen frigates.

Over the subsequent 73 years since its establishment, the main body of the asteroid has been substantially mined out leaving only a fraction of the original asteroid’s body still intact. First in 2422, and then later in 2450 additional main-belt bodies were towed into place to take advantage of the complex’s pre-existing mining infrastructure.

The 42 Isis Mining Complex is an example of several modern features of mining processes, including:

A permanent rotating habitat ring for off-work hours and general administration.

A large circular docking port built into the main body of the asteroid with extensive capacity for mining drones, frigates, and ore freighters.

Solar panel arrays and heat sinks extending from the center of the habitat ring.

Though some complexes of this type also include refining capabilities, the 42 Isis Mining Complex does not, being a prime example of a dedicated mining platform. Unprocessed material is loaded into freighters from the main docking port and then shipped to refineries elsewhere in the Belt, the final processed materials subsequently shipped throughout the Belt and beyond, most often to Earth, Mars, or the Galilean polities around Jupiter.

Mobile Station Classes

Submitted by Heretic on Friday, October 5, 2018 - 22:12

Ganapati Annex

The largest and oldest of the Southern Bloc’s mobile stations, the Ganapati Annex acts as both the nexus for the Bloc’s orbital naval construction efforts, and also its primary naval command center off-planet.

A single, large habitat ring provides Earth-standard gravity, while extensive docking in the midsection facilities manage a constant stream of traffic into orbit, to the various shipyards in orbit, and providing resupply efforts to Southern Bloc expansionist efforts throughout the solar system, particularly in the Asteroid Belt.

Defensive systems are modest for its size, although the Ganapti Annex does support several wings of unmanned drones and four Oxóssi Class Destroyers.

The Ganapati Annex is one of the Southern Bloc’s unique hybrid mobile station classes, bearing characteristics of both a station and a dreadnought; in size, it is approximately the size of a dreadnought, and in fact utilizes a sized-up variant of the Southern Bloc’s Eshu Class Dreadnought hull design. It is far less mobile than even a super-dreadnought of any class in the solar system, but significantly more mobile than any orbital station, capable of moving its position as needed, even, in theory, between planets, although the Ganapati Annex has never as yet left the vicinity of the Earth or Luna orbits.

Surya Class Mobile Station

The Southern Bloc maintains a unique superset of ship-station hybrid classes, the most common of which is the Surya Class Mobile Station.

Utilizing a heavily modified Eshu Class Dreadnought central structure, albeit gutted and completely rebuilt on the inside, the Surya Class mobile stations have less mobility than a dreadnought, but far more than any conventional station.

The Surya Class, in particular, is more than capable of transiting the cold void of space between the planets, and seven were commissioned as of 2472, of which three are actually complete:

Orissa (currently stationed around Io)

Modhera (currently stationed around Eunomia)

Arasavalli (currently stationed around Titan)

Kasheli (under construction)

Assam (under construction)

Rajasthan (under construction)

Jaipur (modules being assembled)

The most notable feature of the Surya Class is its six rotating habitat rings, enabling redundancy and allowing for easier diplomatic interchanges, since it can maintain multiple gravity standards simultaneously including Earth-standard, Europan-standard, and various other options, in addition to certain variable gravity research labs.

The Surya Class is deliberately intended for remote, largely peaceful long-term service. As such, it is designed to support diplomatic, administrative, routine naval patrol capabilities, listening post functionality, and supportive research functions.

Unlike the Ganapti Class Mobile Station, the Surya Class does not support docking capabilities for destroyer pickets, but relies on extension tethers to enable resupply of any destroyer pickets supporting each individual mobile station.

Military capabilities are modest, with only a single quad-battery of HED lances and four wings of combat drones.

More Ships of Earth

Submitted by Heretic on Thursday, May 17, 2018 - 19:13

Oya Class Super-Dreadnought

Built upon radically different design principles than the mainstay super-dreadnoughts of the fleets of The Eastern Federation, Union, and State, the Oya Class Super-Dreadnought of the Southern Bloc is named after the Nigerian orisha of winds, lightning, and violent storms, death and rebirth.

Twin rotating habitat rings are able to reorient along their vertical axis, with the primary central bulkhead featuring a massive fighter and drone bay port flanked by ten tactical nuclear launchers and an array of smaller point defense HED lance batteries.

The youngest of the five largest poltiies on Earth, the Southern Bloc has had to proceed cautiously into a crowded solar system, all the while carefully laying the groundwork for the ascendance that it sees as its birthright.

The Oya Class Super-Dreadnought represents these aspirations; while smaller and less maneuverable than the standard super-dreadnought classes used by its competitors, the Oya maintains 32% higher fighter and drone hangar tonnage, along with 68% greater tactical nuclear missile stocks, both factors allowing it to punch unusually hard and for an unusually long time compared to other ships of its type.

Following the Sino-Russian War of 2105 and the subsequent annexation of Pakistan by what would become The Eastern Federation in 2140, India, alarmed that it would soon become the next target, began to reach out to other polities on the political and military periphery of China. A collection of national polities including India, Turkey, Kenya, Tanzania, parts of West Africa, and South Africa began to be informally known as "the Southern Bloc", as they tended to provide a unified front against territorial and commercial incursions by both Union and the Eastern Federation. At last, in 2353 the informal coalition became a formal political entity.

Militarily, the Southern Bloc favors a bold, powerful approach. To this end it has prioritized the construction of a series of powerful dreadnoughts and super-dreadnoughts, which represent the highest ratio of tonnage of this class of vessel of any polity in the solar system; while the Southern Bloc does employ destroyers and frigates, these are seen in a far less prestigious light.

Eshu Class Dreadnought

The Eshu Class Dreadnought was actually designed after the Oya Class Super-Dreadnought, but built first due to cost issues with the much larger super-dreadnought.

Similar to the Oya Class, the Eshu - named after the Yoruba god of the crossroads - is relatively small for a dreadnought but with a proportionately higher load of fighters and drones. Also similar to other dreadnought designs from other polities, the Eshu favors HED lances over tactical nuclear warheads, and is intended to be thrown more readily into battle with extremely heavy forward armor.

The Eshu is somewhat vulnerable to being flanked, however, and relies on a destroyer screen to intercept more distant threats, and its own formidable drone capacity combined with supplementary HED lance batteries for close-in point defense to defend itself. Still, its casualty projections are far higher than the Oya Class, a fact that makes the Eshu class a popular posting for those craving frontline combat experience.

Notably, the Eshu's single habitat ring is, unlike those of the Oya, fixed in place to take maximum advantage of the heavy forward bulkhead.

Oxóssi Class Destroyer

While the Southern Bloc has chosen to prioritize dreadnought and super-dreadnought construction over A.I. piloted destroyers, there are some roles - notably long-term deep space pickets, defensive screens of larger ship classes, and expendable flight missions that are not suitable for human-piloted ships.

To fill this need, the Oxóssi Class Destroyer (pronounced Oh-sho-see) was developed based on the standard Southern Bloc vertical axis model with drone ports inset into the hull resulting in a highly compact design that fields 26 drone ports compared to the more common 32, but with an overall mass 60% of the standard destroyer class, making the Oxóssi faster and more maneuverable than most peers of its class.

Helios Class Combat Frigate

Frigates represent a broad-ranging classification characterized by their lack of rotational habitats despite having a human crew, relatively small size, and generalized functionality.

The Helios Class Combat Frigate was originally commissioned by one of Union's military contractors in 2422, and despite its age, it remains in service today in extremely large numbers as a mainline combat frigate used by polities all over the solar system. Heavily armored and minimally crewed, it is common as a patrol vessel and assault ship for raids, especially for polities that cannot afford to field destroyers.

Cyclops Class Frigate

In 2451 the Kalaxi Consortium of Ceres purchased the rights to repurchase and refurbish Helios Class Combat Frigates that were being retired from service.

In the name of "de-militarizing" the design, the armor plating was removed, as were most of the primary weapon ports, though the weapon port mountings remained, a fact that pirates from Concordia have notoriously taken advantage of by re-mounting black market HED lances.

Naming the new design the Cyclops Class Frigate for its single forward facing hemispherical dust shield, the frigate has proliferated as a popular cheap frigate sold, re-sold, re-furbished, re-built, modified, altered, and otherwise utilized in dozens of roles its original designers never intended. It it currently the most common frigate class in production.

Cultural Revolution

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 19:08

At one level, ORG is essentially a multiplayer appointment mechanic, that being one of the more common terms for the game mechanic where a player assigns resources, then waits for the resolution in real time of the task or mission to conclude, then comes back to see the results and collect any rewards.

In the early conception of ORG this was always seen as a foundation to be built on rather than the core of the game. The core of the game has always been envisioned as the creation of a multiplayer simulation enabling emergent player agency; we want players to be able to impact the game environment in meaningful, persistent ways, rather than simply existing in their own private instances, or given just the illusion of agency.

Because ORG is structured to exist as a single server shard, this presented the basic design challenge: How do you design a scalable multiplayer environment that also allows for agency?

Unlike games like EVE (another of my guilty favorites), ORG does not present the players as directly governing moons or planets or systems. Instead, players are controlling the somewhat amorphous organizations that in turn control said moons or planets or systems. This layer of abstraction is - no question - a problem, as the more abstraction you as a designer beg of your audience to accept, the harder it is to feel agency, regardless of the actual agency that might be there.

Political Lobbying

Early on in the development of ORG we conceived of the concept of lobbying tasks - Political category tasks that allow the player to not just get personal rewards for themselves, but to actually shift the policy of the polity they are lobbying in the area they are lobbying. For example, a player conducts repeated lobbying tasks on the Europan Consortium to cause it to shift its export taxes on manufactured goods. This affects everyone trying to export goods off any region controlled by the Europan Consortium. Presumably, a player lobbying for this also has themselves or in the form of allies or clients business in Europan Consortium space that will benefit from this - or perhaps the intent is only to harm other, competing players or alliances of players.

This was good, but we ultimately felt that while it felt good for a Political category focused player, it left the other categories - Commercial, Cultural, Military, Research - feeling lacking by comparison in giving players that feeling of agency we're so focused on creating.

Military Conflict

So, we got to work on the Military category, making it feel, well, more "military", rather than just running disconnected tasks.

While the full details of the Military conflict tasks is a whole different topic that we'll diary on at a later time (it was a huge challenge coming up with an asymmetrical conflict model), suffice it to say that we came up with a design that took the Political lobbying a step further. Instead of - like Political lobbying does - affecting the internal politics and laws of a polity, Military conflict tasks affect the resolution of existing conflicts. Where two polities are in a state of open (or at least proxy) aggression, players can use Military conflict tasks to impact the success and failure of specific polity's campaigns on specific regions.

Meaning, players can, by their actions, cause a polity to expand or contract the regions it controls - even to the point where that polity may essentially be destroyed.

Pretty cool. But now, the Cultural category feels kind of weak.

Cultural Revolutions

Next, we took stock of what the Cultural category brings to the table:

Recruitment of agent minions

Making agent and facility enhancements.

Promoting agents

Provides the component "fuel" for certain advanced production of the Research category

Provides the component "fuel" for certain Military category production (e.g., Recruits)

Valuable, to be sure, but kind of limited. But what if Cultural tasks allowed for a kind of hybrid functionality between Political and Military?

Political allows players to affect the internal rules of a polity. Military allows players to affect the external region ownership of regions in times of open conflict.

Allowing Military conflict tasks to change the ownership of a region had raised a thorny question: What happens when the last region of a particular polity is defeated in a Military conflict?

We considered a few possibilities with this; perhaps every polity had a kind of "home" region that was unassailable? That fought against the underlying principle of player agency, however, so left a bad taste in the mouth.

What if, instead, we killed two birds with one stone, and made Cultural "lobbying" tasks that had the ability to "flip" a region? That would solve the Military problem, since you could then instigate a "rebellion", seeing the re-emergence of a previously defeated polity. That, however, raised its own slightly terrifying design question - what happens if someone used this mechanic to "flip" a region that wasn't even in a state of war at the moment? What would happen then?

What we settled on, then, was to provide every region with a kind of alternate polity. Some of these "alternate polities" would cross multiple regions, some would be entirely local. Some regions might well have more than one such alternate polity. For example, a region in the Belt is incited to revolt by player actions, and by that Eunomia falls, to be replaced with a new polity, "The Spacer Union". This is a real polity in every way - it has Reputation for players to jockey over, it has internal politics to be lobbied over, it can itself enter into states of war with various other polities, even waging its own wars of conquest across the Belt and beyond. Other regions can, even outside of such a war of conquest, be incited to rebellion, joining with this new Spacer Union.

Obviously, this means the thirty-four or so existing polities will have to be joined with a bunch of new ones, and over time, we may add even more on top of these additional ones to really hit home the significance of player actions - if a player alliance dominates a particular polity, a rival alliance thus will have several choices of strategy to combat that control. Perhaps they sic a rival polity into a state of war with them. Perhaps they simply beat their rival at their own game, competing in the internal Political sphere. Perhaps, too, they cause that polity's regions to revolt, essentially wiping clean the alliance's gains.

This has some serious ripple effects, as well. Reputation can be wiped away. Access to certain minions can be suspended. Access to entire regions can be restricted or contested. New markets can be opened; existing ones can be closed.

We had originally conceived of having polities sometimes vanish and emerge by design fiat, but this takes that and puts it - with some random elements, to be sure - into the hands of the player politic as a whole, making, again...player agency.

Everything Does Not Stay the Same

Submitted by Heretic on Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - 21:26

One of the original goals for ORG was for it to be a truly evolving environment.

I've spoken about the importance of designer agency before on my personal blog, and there's a critically important analog as well in the form of player agency.

Players like to feel that their actions are meaningful. Video games these days are pretty good about giving players the ability to impact and change their character in a game, but as an industry we've been a lot less consistent about giving players the ability to impact and change their character's world, particularly in multi-player games.

For ORG, I really wanted to build a system from the ground up that could accommodate this goal, at least to a better extent than is usually done. For ORG, we wanted history to matter, for things not to stay the same. Sometimes the players would be the ones affecting this, sometimes the players would be at the mercy of other players, sometimes the players would all be at the mercy of greater historical forces, consigned to adapt and evolve to new conditions and new assumptions.

How, then, do we expect this to work in actual practice?

The Player Impacts Themselves

First and most obviously, there are the traditional ways that a player can impact their own experience:

Influence gained will result in a player gaining advantages based on their percentile ranking by category, region, and timespan. These advantages will be substantial, but because they are based as well on timespan, an advantage not cultivated will eventually fail before the onslaught of newer, insurgent player orgs...

Expertise gained will decay, but must be cultivated to maintain access to certain advanced tasks allowing to refining, manufacturing, and assembly of rare resources and technologically advanced equipment.

Resources gained represent not only Solars, the common currency of the 25th century solar system, but also the raw materials, assembled products, commercial goods and even data that can be used both to build other resources, or as currencies in their own right.

Minions including ships, agents, and facilities are the reusable slotted inputs of ORG, and gaining new ones, adding effective traits to the ones you have, and increasing the quality of them through use and training will in turn allow a player to leverage ever more successful results.

Reputation is gained in respect to each player for each national polity. As different polities have different political arrangements with each other, doing something to please one will anger another. Players with a high reputation among certain polities may gain access to special resources and unique tasks.

The Player Impacts The Market

As a player gains resources and specializes in tasks, there is the opportunity to turn outward rather than inward, to engage in the game of trade.

Monopolization of resources, domination of vertical and horizontal monopolies, establishment of transport networks, recruitment agencies, and more are not simply a case of buying low and selling high, but of cultivating alliances and political aggregate advantages to sway the policies of the various national polities and orbital mandates to favor your own enterprises and damage those of your would-be competitors.

The Alliance Impacts The Orbit

Players can join together in voluntary alliances, which can in turn gain Influence in each of the five categories - Commercial, Cultural, Military, Political, Research - in each orbit individually. As Influence is gained, so too will the power of the alliance rise in defining what the dominant orbital mandate for each orbit is.

These orbital mandates will affect the inputs or outputs of all activities of that type in that orbit for so long as the mandate is active. This can be a powerful tool for maximizing your alliance's gains, not to mention your personal gains.

The Players Impact The Polities

Players can also impact the national polities' policies. Where the player-created alliances vote on the special mandates that are in effect for each orbit, the aggregate of all player actions in various regions can affect the national polities themselves.

Sometimes these effects are internal to the polity - increasing or reducing taxes on certain endeavors - but other times the effects are inter-polity, and can start or stop wars, declare peace or ruin it for years. If a large number of players assist peace efforts, the resulting declaration of peace may remove some tasks for all players in those regions governed by that polity - and add tasks as well. Peace may bring with it opportunities for cooperation and research, but war may offer opportunities for privateering and war profiteering.

History Impacts The Players

The final, critical layer to all of the above is the impact of history itself.

Hundreds of years of history have led from our own present day to the 25th century solar system of ORG, but players playing will not stop that. Time will march forth at a rate of about one in-game year for every three months of real world time. Every year brings with it the changing tides and favors of polities, wars, economic developments, archaeological discoveries, and exotic new research.

A region that begins as controlled by one polity may well change hands to another, and players will have to adapt to this or not as they are able to. For some ventures, perhaps the politics will be irrelevant, but for other players, the political winds may deeply affect their operations. Reputation that was once useful in a region may suddenly become a detriment as the original polity's control has slipped.

New ship classes may be developed. New equipment. New specializations in this rapidly changing solar system of strife.

Even new polities themselves may appear - or be dashed forever. The existence of a polity now does not assure that that polity may always be there, and players are advised to pay close attention to the news reports to discern what fate may be in store for whichever polities they might have yoked their futures to.

Everything Does Not Stay the Same

Submitted by Heretic on Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - 21:26

One of the original goals for ORG was for it to be a truly evolving environment.

I've spoken about the importance of designer agency before on my personal blog, and there's a critically important analog as well in the form of player agency.

How, then, do we expect this to work in actual practice?

The Player Impacts Themselves

First and most obviously, there are the traditional ways that a player can impact their own experience:

The Player Impacts The Market

As a player gains resources and specializes in tasks, there is the opportunity to turn outward rather than inward, to engage in the game of trade.

The Alliance Impacts The Orbit

The Players Impact The Polities

History Impacts The Players

The final, critical layer to all of the above is the impact of history itself.

New ship classes may be developed. New equipment. New specializations in this rapidly changing solar system of strife.

Behind the Scenes

Submitted by Heretic on Thursday, April 16, 2015 - 22:02

Unlike most software development, game development requires that the end product be that elusive thing called "fun".

Because of this admittedly rather unusual requirement, it isn't unusual for people from outside the industry to have the impression that game design is itself fundamentally a "fun" endeavor.

To be sure, the process of game design can be enjoyable, but generally in the same way that anyone who enjoys their job enjoys it.

So, what is actually involved in this kind of game design?

Here's a quick snapshot of some of the things I have been working on most recently: Making Ships

In ORG, ships are one of three types of a broader category called minions consisting of agents (people), facilities (things like shipyards, mines, refineries, military bases, and universities), and ships (freighters, medical ships, destroyers and other types of ship). The vast majority of tasks that a player will engage in require one or more minion to be temporarily slotted into the task, and thus unavailable for the duration of the task until it completes.

Players gain ships - and indeed, all minions - as rewards for tasks, or by purchasing them from other players, or by acquiring them from purchased packs. Behind the scenes, of course, the process is quite a but more complex:

Games like ORG can be seen as running on three basic layers - the engine, the game code, and the game data.

The engine represents the most fundamental code that handles things like drawing the user interface on the screen, interfacing the database with the rest of the code, coordinating the ability to purchase things in the game and have them show up properly in game. In terms of coding time, building the engine is almost always a far more expansive task than the game code.

The game code represents the game logic that makes a game like ORG, well ORG, and not Monopoly. The game code defines how tasks are processed, how durations are calculated, how rewards are processed, and a hundred other questions.

The game data represents the actual information for each individual task, each trait, each effect, each region, and so on. Whereas the tasks of building the engine and the game code are undergone by software engineers, the task of implementing the game data is undergone by designers. There is, even, an additional layer of distinction - design architecture (or sometimes just "design") and design implementation. Whereas the game code is the actual programming code that tells the program how to process things, the task of design architecture is concerns itself with the basic gameplay decisions of how should the game process various actions by the player. Design implementation, on the other hand, is concerned with the replication, extension, and elaboration of the multitude of individual missions, tasks, player classes, items, and other elements that will vary depending on the type of game.

(Years ago, at the dawn of video game development, it was common for developers to wear multiple hats, and it was quite common to see software engineers, or artists, or producers also engaging in design; these days, especially on well-established and well-funded projects, these tasks are almost always fairly specialized.)

In ORG, tasks have a extraordinarily wide range of utility, some more story-oriented, some quite practical, even mechanical. As has been described in earlier dev diaries, building something like a dreadnought is, indeed, a single task, but the task to build a powerful warship also requires other things - engineer agents and shipyard facilities to slot, and component items as inputs that will be consumed.

For example, assembly of a medical ship might require varying numbers of components such as:

Hulls

Exothermic Chemical Engines

Sensors

Life Support Systems

Cryosleep Tubes

So how do you get, say, a Life Support System? You could buy it from another player, or even claim it as bounty if you decided to engage in a little, ahem, commerce raiding ("piracy" has such a nasty ring to it...) But the most common way to get the life support system component is simply to make it. Whereas ships (and facilities) are made up primarily of components - things like the aforementioned hulls, engines, sensors, and lift support systems - components themselves are made primarily from refined raw materials like:

Carbonates (water, carbon in various forms, etc.)

Silicates (sand and non-ferrous minerals)

Hydrocarbons (volatiles like oil and methane, as well as the products of such including fertilizers and plastics)

Metals (iron, aluminum, titanium, etc.)

Fissiles (radioactive materials, most often used as high-quality fuel)

Helium-3 (fuel material for fusion generators, in addition to cryogenic freezing applications)

And how do you get the refined versions of these? Simple - you run tasks to refine the raw materials into refined materials. And, at the very beginning of the road, you get raw materials by running tasks to mine those raw materials out of moons, certain dense atmospheres such as Venus, Titan, and the various gas giants of the solar system.

To summarize then, you take raw materials, refine them into refined materials, then use those to in turn manufacture components, which are then finally used to assemble, among many other things, ships.

Here, of course, is where it gets really messy, because at each stage of this process, the inputs and outputs have to be defined for both varying levels of successful completion of the task (critical versus success versus failure versus disaster), for duration (some tasks take a couple of minutes to complete, some literally days), for real world availability considerations (Helium-3 isn't really much found on Earth, but it sure is on the Moon and Uranus), for game balance considerations (what happens if one resource, say Metals, are very rare in an orbit like the Kuiper Belt? What impact does that have on gameplay and player-to-player interactions?)

For this problem, I did what video game designers the world over will so often do - make a spreadsheet. Microsoft Excel is very commonly used for this, but these days I generally use Google Sheets.

It's not just about plugging in numbers in columns - most of the columns you can see in these snapshots are themselves the product of built-in equations. For example, the Total Unrefined Carbonates column for building, say, a Nuclear Reactor isn't something a designer plugs in directly, but is rather the derived spun-out aggregate of the number of, in this case unrefined carbonates, that were used to make all of the components necessary to make a nuclear reactor.

This has a number of uses, not the least of which it allows a quick way for a designer - in this case me - to make changes at one end of the process and immediately see the impact on other parts of the system. In this case, I used this method extensively to ascertain how many days of real world time it would take to mine, refine, manufacture, and assemble everything necessary to make each of the ships. My initial values for building a super-dreadnought, for example, wound up being 20 years of time. Amusing, certainly, but not a value that was at all practical. I was then able to adjust the inputs for various of the components, the time to refine varying batches of raw materials, and so on until I had a number that was more reasonable (about four months if one had only one mine of each kind operating - the reality would likely be quite a bit more), but at the same time gave appropriate values for building other, smaller types of ships, as well as making the process of mining and refining itself not feel too grindy to the player.

And all this just to get good values for a single column - inputs - for a task. Other columns address things that point to entirely separate sheets of their own covering rewards, randomized reward sets, traits, effects, regions, collections of regions, etc. ad nauseum.

Being a designer, as should be clear by now, is primarily about manipulating data. Lots of data.

Obviously, this is just a sliver of what goes into making it so a player can click a button to run a task to assemble that destroyer or medical ship or dreadnought they want, but hopefully it gives some view into the kinds of complexities that every game development project must ultimately find ways to solve.

Xenoarchaeology

Submitted by Heretic on Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - 21:01

When humanity first sent probes into the great black deep of space, it expected nothing but barren rock and ice among the worlds of the solar system. With the discovery of liquid water oceans beneath the desolate, frigid crusts of many of the solar systems moons and asteroids, however, all of that changed. Signs of bacteria and microscopic exophile organisms, while hardly the alien life many might have wanted to discover, still shook the foundations of both religious and philosophic thought.

When the great burrowing machines plunged into the almost unimaginable depths of Europa, the tiny blind pale fishlike organisms represented an alien life even farther beyond what anyone had hoped for.

Then it happened.

In late November of 2420, an experimental Europan research submersible exploring deeper than had ever been possible before drifted through a forest of tiny fluorescent plasmic organisms the likes of which had never been recorded before, even on Europa. Samples confirmed the impossible - the samples were not native to Europa, but something very different and very much more complex than Europa's simple fish.

Consortium authorities quickly clamped down on the discovery, enacting security protocols of the most extreme nature. More samples were sent, and it was soon established that the xenoplasmic organisms, while alive, were dormant, waiting for a biological signal that never seemed to come.

Thirty years later, the wall of secrecy fell, though not from anyone on Europa, but from Sedna, a distant dwarf world deep in the Kuiper Belt past Neptune. The massive secret research done on Europa was no long alone, and unlike the discovery on Europa, the discovery on Sedna rapidly went to the public feeds, and archaeologists, biologists, and scientists swarmed that most distant outpost of humanity in the solar system.

In truth, the remnants on Europa were far more expansive than the fragments discovered on distant Sedna, though Europan xenoarchaeologists quietly sent to investigate for themselves did verify that the Sednan site actually pre-dated the Europan colonization by a significant margin on the order of approximately 6,000 years.

But even the discovery of extrasolar life must eventually fade, and though the study still continues, it continues more quietly, though no less significantly.

For while no great living sentient intelligences were discovered, it became clear that the myriad sites around the outer solar system represented a long-abandoned colonization, a xenoforming of the interior of at least a dozen known moons and asteroids. An entire ecosystem of xenoplasmic organisms slowly began to be unraveled, including the sobering conclusion that the colonization was not a natural colonization, but a directed one involving utilization of biotechnology of a scale far beyond what was available to humanity.

Different polities, research institutes, and scientists took a wide array of stances. Some, such as the Europan Consortium, wished to lock away the knowledge behind physical and virtual security gates to keep the public blissfully ignorant of the implications of their discovery. Others, notably the research institutes on Sedna, considered the study a gift to all humanity and the greatest scientific adventure of all human history. Still others saw the xenoplasmic ecology neither as a threat nor a scientific cornucopia, but instead as a commercial opportunity of unparalleled significance.

Some of the solar system's national polities banned experimentation entirely; others merely banned the exploitive commercialization of the alien ecology and the growing number of potent products created out of it. Other polities embraced it, founding much of their own economy to the propagation of the xenoplasmic biology.

In ORG, all of these approaches offer avenues of gameplay to the player.

Extensive task chains can be undergone to obtain the political permission necessary to survey for sites; when found, sites can be plundered for their archaeological artifacts, or even siphoned for their constituent biological material wealth. Hybrid technologies can be developed, and the resulting xenomorphic products ranging from consumer and medical goods to technologies with military applications can be built, sold, and deployed to a dozen different ends.

Much as with the conventional commercial material exploitation of ORG, xenoarchaeology requires the active development of expertise and several different possible paths of both discovery and profiteering. Surveying, mining, artifact extraction, reverse engineering, technology discovery, and commercialization of individual technologies are all viable mechanics that can be pursued individually or in tandem with each other.

Hybrid ship and agent modifications, rejuvenation techniques, experimental fuel cells, organic implants and hybridization can simply provide a difficult, elite commercial opportunity - or a source of potent agent and ship enhancements to be used yourself.

Crafting of the Mind

Submitted by Heretic on Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - 00:18

People are very familiar with crafting as it exists in literally hundreds of games out there. You take certain quantities of certain materials and through the mechanics of whatever game you're in, you combine them to make a finished product. Perhaps that product has an immediate use; perhaps it is simply a stepping stone to still another product.

ORG, as we've talked about in previous dev diary blogs, definitely utilizes this kind of crafting, complete with the mining of raw materials, refining, building components, and assembling components to create finished products in the forms of ships, facilities, equipment, and components in the form of ship and facility traits.

All that's well and good, and represents a critical role in the player economy, but that really just touches on the Commercial (and, to a lesser extent, the Military and Research categories). How does the concept of crafting apply to categories like Cultural or Political?

Let's first do a quick review of what categories are and how they work in ORG:

Each layers administers an organization that controls sets of ships, agents, and facilities with which they influence the solar system in one or more (and you choose which ones you want to pursue) categories:

Commercial - The economy of mining, refining, and utilization of resources and raw materials to the end of producing valuable goods, ships and facilities either for your own use or for sale to other states or orgs.

Cultural - The economy of ideas, influence, and society. Especially strong in recruiting and improving agents, but also in the creation of memeplexes that can modify and improve the performance of an org in many ways.

Military - The construction of naval and military resources and the exercise of said resources. This spans everything from military contracting of services and ships to acting as a privateer for various state polities.

Political - The leveraging of political power, playing state polities off of each other, gathering influence and reputation - and thus special access.

Research - The development of the new, involved in the production of advanced prototypes, archaeological expeditions, and research paths of dubious ethical standing.

It's not hard to imagine how this works in, say, the Commercial category - you round up some raw carbonates, metals, and silicates, refine them, manufacture them into components, then assemble those components into a finished product.

For the Cultural category, this all works rather differently. In the Cultural category, the raw materials aren't rocks and metal and stray hydrocarbons that can be wedded into fuel or ships. Rather, the Cultural raw materials are ideas, or to be more technical, memes.

In ORG, a player who has chosen to aggressively pursue the Cultural category as a path to dominance has four primary resources:

Social Incitement - The basic social fuel, social incitement represents popular and cultural movements, trends, hashtag campaigns and similar measures of social energy and motivation. Social incitement can be gained in a lot of different ways, but most notably by running certain classes of cultural tasks such as protests, defamation campaigns against governments, martyring your own agents, and manipulating journalistic stories.

Cultural Influence - Running tasks in a particular category usually generates varying amounts of influence in that category. High rates of increase in influence in each category in each region translate into bonus abilities granted to the player's org. In general, influence is a running total, but in the Cultural category Cultural influence is also itself a resource that can be voluntarily depleted for certain high-value tasks.

Theories - Different areas of academic focus have different types of Theories, which are low volume, high quality resources necessary for the creation of agent and some facility traits.

Supporting Research - Like theories, Supporting Research is necessary primarily to create agent and some facility traits. Unlike theories, supporting research is high volume - meaning it's fairly reliable how and how much you can get more of it, but you also need more supporting research than theories for each created trait.

In addition to resources, an org focusing on a Cultural path to dominance has a number of specialized agents and facilities, of which the following are a sample:

Economist - Actually a Commercial agent, economists are nonetheless necessary reusable elements to make certain types of traits affecting generation of Solars (the common currency of the solar system).

Philosopher - A Cultural agent profession necessary for the creation of many theories.

Instructor - A Cultural agent useful in the recruitment and sometimes development of additional agents, as well as paramilitaries and some other types of troops.

Activist - A critically useful Cultural agent for running tasks to generate the Cultural influence and social incitement that must be expended in the creation of traits.

College - A Cultural facility useful for fulfilling the facility requirements of a large number of basic Cultural tasks..

University - A Research facility that, despite being in the Research category, is also useful for advanced social theory generation.

Social Movement - An ephemeral Cultural facility that has no physical form, but instead represents social networks that together have the ability to influence policy, generate social incitement, and accomplish some types of basic Cultural Influence-generating tasks.

How does this all go together?

Let's say you want to recruit some more Cultural agents so you can carry out more Cultural tasks.

The most common task you'd go to for this is Indoctrinate Cultural Agent, which requires a Cultural Task Point (these represent the maximum number of tasks of a particular category you can use at any particular point in time), and uses up Cultural Influence. Moreover, it requires a Cultural or Political facility to run the task (note facilities, like agents and ships, are all types of minion - you'll get these back after they've done their work for you on a task).

The Cultural Influence can be gained from running virtually any Cultural task - let's say you have access to a task on Mars that is Disease Eradication Programs in the Borealis Basin - requires some Medical Supplies, but you can make those or buy them yourself. You run that task, and wind up with (hopefully) a success and a nice batch of Cultural influence.

With that Cultural Influence in hand you take, say, a Cultural facility like a college or a social movement, some of that hard-earned Cultural Influence run that Indoctrinate Cultural Agent task you were looking at originally, and when the task is complete, with luck you'll have a new Cultural agent.

Now, let's say you want to add an acquired trait to one of your Cultural facilities. Acquired traits that go on agents and facilities are also called enhancements, one example of which is Fortune Favors the Bold, which when applied to a facility generates bonus Military Influence every time that facility runs a task - even if that task isn't even a Military category task.

The Fortune Favors the Bold enhancement trait requires a more complicated list of inputs:

10 x Social Incitement

100 x Supporting Psychological Research

10 x Memetics Theory

10 x Economics Theory

The Social Incitement part can be gained in several ways as described above - which you use depends on whether you have spare agents you are willing to martyr to your cause, the available option to buy-off journalists, or the inputs necessary to try to incite protests which, on a critical success, will actually grant you more social incitement than you put into the task in the first place.

The Supporting Psychological Research can be gained by certain uncommon Cultural task like Develop Ideological Doctrine, but the more usual way to get them is to trade them or engage yourself in Research category tasks, specifically the various Primary Research and Basic Research tasks (how these work is the domain of the Research category, and the subject of a different dev diary).

With the social incitement, supporting psychological research, memetics theory, and economics theory obtained, you can use either a Cultural facility or, in this case, a Military facility - such as a Military Base, or even a Naval Shipyard - to combine the pieces into the Fortune Favors the Bold enhancement trait.

In summary, the basic principles for how any of the various categories work are pretty simple.

Categories should be able to generate internally most of what they need - but for some things, it will be cheaper to do such in other categories, such as the above example where Research tasks are actually the most efficient way to generate the theories and supporting research that certain Cultural tasks need.

Individual player orgs can focus in multiple categories - and most will focus on at least two or three, but even so, it's inevitable that there will be some things you can't get enough of or cheaply enough by your own devices. This design principle thus introduces certain dependencies to the player economy, giving players the opportunity to specialize in the production of things that other players want or need.

Agent Traits

Submitted by Heretic on Saturday, August 2, 2014 - 21:36

If tasks are the backbone of ORG, minions - and especially agents - are the blood supply of the game. Almost every task in the game requires the slotting of minions.

But what determines whether a particular agent, ship, or facility can be used on a particular task? What determines how they can affect a task? How potent they are? If they can be upgraded?

For this development diary, let's take a look at agents, specifically at agent traits, and even more specifically at examples of particular traits and how they work.

As we talked about in depth in a previous dev diary, every agent has multiple traits. A trait is something like Infamous or Citizenship: Triton or Biologist or Meticulous:

Some traits act as a gate to being used on particular tasks; for example, a diplomatic task might require an agent with the professional trait of Ambassador.

Other traits interact themselves with traits on other agents; an agent with the Scrupulous trait cannot be put on the same task as another agent with a Fugitive> trait.

Finally, many traits can affect how the task they are put on operates. The trait Philanthropist automatically rewards Solars on any successful tasks they are put on, even if the task didn't normally award Solars. Other traits will multiple (or reduce) certain reward types, and still others will cost numerics to use, or reduce specific input costs.

Every task also falls into one of several types. For agents, these are:

Every agent comes with exactly one Negative trait that can never be removed. These traits can sometimes be worked around completely - for example, a negative trait that negatively impacts any Solars rewarded can simply be not put on tasks that reward Solars. Other times the traits can be counterbalanced by still other traits, or simply tolerated. Some negative traits may even have a moderate upside in the right circumstances.

An agent also possesses a single fixed Citizenship trait, such as Eastern Federation or Eunomian Cluster. Citizenship traits can sometimes restrict what other agents that agent can work with, where the agent works, and will also often mildly impact Reputation gains and losses on tasks that have a Reputation component for their reward. For example, using an agent with a Citizenship trait of The Free State of Mars in raids against The Mars Republic will modestly improve any Reputation gains for such an action, so great is the anger of the Free State towards the Mars Republic.

Similarly, every agent has a Professional trait that describes the agent's broad profession such as Geologist or Activist or Pilot. As talked about a little above, professional traits are the primary determinant for what agent can be used on what traits - if you need to crack the cryptography on a captured satellite, you'll need a Systems Analyst - an Agronomist won't be of any help.

Agents also may come with one or more Fixed Positive traits. These are things like Efficient (reduces the cost of manufactured or fabricated item inputs for any task they are on) or Famous (multiplies the amount of Reputation gained on any task that rewards Reputation) or Intuitive (increases the Expertise gains for tasks that reward Xenological Expertise).

Finally, agents also come with one or more empty slots that the player themselves can choose to apply Acquirable traits. These slots can be emptied later as well, if the player changes their mind or finds an even better trait. These are very similar in flavor to Fixed Positive traits, but they usually don't overlap exactly. In addition, some are conditional, such as Patriot, a trait that applies a big Influence reward bonus, but only during The Drums of War, one of an orbit's periodic votable mandates that the players themselves vote on.

Not every trait is created equally; some simply are better than others, some are rarer than others (which may or may not correspond to how effective they are).

This is particularly the case for the various Acquirable traits, as it's a basic part of the game design that in addition to using minions on tasks to improve their color Quality, finding and applying better traits is an expected part of improving the performance of your org.

Citizenship traits, for example, are generally not intrinsically better or worse than any other, but some are more common simply because the populations of those national polities is bigger. A huge percentage of agents come from Earth for the simple reason that even in the era of Org, where large polities beyond Earth may boast hundreds of thousands, even millions of citizens, the polities of Earth boast billions of citizens.

Some citizenship traits, such as Clone, can't even happen naturally, but can only be acquired by the execution of specific tasks, or trading with players who have themselves successfully executed those specific tasks. A very few tasks do require agents of specific citizenships, and for these, if you are interested in those tasks you will have to find a way to employ agents of those citizenships.

So what are the current lists of traits?

We'll start here with giving a list of the current professional traits with the caveat that, as always, this is expected to change during the course of alpha and beta. As well, the examples of things they can be used for should not be seen as an exhaustive list, but just a small sampling:

Biologists are useful for cloning, genetic modification, and many other tasks involving living organisms.

Archaeologists are necessary to extract useful information out of discovered archaeologic sites, as well as any artifacts acquired from such sites.

Surveyers are used to identify potential archaeologic sites.

Psychologists are key for generating psychological theories, one of the key raw materials for certain traits.

Sociologists are necessary for generating memes that are a raw material for certain special traits that can be applied to ships and facilities. They are also instrumental in manipulating populations' attitudes.

Systems Analysts are common on tasks involving the generation or utilization of the various Data resources.

Doctors are useful to cure agents of injuries.

Geologists are integral not only for some types of mining tasks, but also on any of the several large scale terraforming projects active throughout the solar system. They are also necessary to the process of making an asteroid or small moon habitable by generating artificial rotation to mimic gravity on the interior.

Engineers are necessary on military ships for repair detail as well as both civil construction (for example, building new facilities or ships) and manufacturing.

Navigators are used for manned ships that are not on predetermined routes, for example, for use on commerce raiding.

Consultants can be used to accelerate and improve the operation of facilities. For example, a Silicates Mine could have its outputs increased, or its input requirements decreased.

Economists are necessary for developing certain theories that are raw materials for certain traits.

Agronomists are useful for tasks involving nutritional resources, hydroponic developments, and other, similar challenges.

Philosophers are necessary for developing certain theories that are raw materials for certain traits.

Instructors are used to generate new traits that can be applied to other agents.

Activists are useful to recruit new agents.

Politicians are useful for various acts of demagoguery that can generate new recruits that can be turned into troops, as well as various other Political tasks.

Bureaucrats are necessary for a wide range of low-profile Political (and other tasks) that can provide steady and relatively reliable sources of Reputation and other resources.

Ambassadors are necessary for diplomacy tasks; enough of these tasks receiving successful and critical results can actually affect the political stance of national polities towards each other for every player in the game.

Commanders are necessary for privateering military actions.

Quartermasters are used for resupply and troop training tasks. Such tasks can be especially lucrative sources of income in the form of military contracts.

Pilots are necessary for tasks that require manned ships.

As well, these are just the basic professional traits; acquirable traits can further apply specialities to agents.

For example, the Commercial Analyst will improve commercial data acquisition rates and drastically reduce any input requirements for same. The Hydrocarbon Specialist will do the same for any mining or refining of hydrocarbon resources. A Criminal will increase any contraband resource gains, and a Civil Engineer will reduce the resource inputs to built a facility. A Lawyer will increase any Policy Expertise gains, as well as Supporting Policy Analysis, and National Theory, all of which are resources that are needed to build traits and execute many tasks.

Some are more generic; a Blogger will generate Cultural Influence on every task they are on - regardless of whether that task normally even produces Cultural Influence.

A basic set of traits has been implemented for ships, facilities, and agents, although we expect to add on to this list and modify this list as we see how they react with actual gameplay during the upcoming beta and alpha periods of development.

Freighters, Research Vessels, and Battleships

Submitted by Heretic on Sunday, July 20, 2014 - 22:25

Ships form the third leg of the tripod in ORG that begins with agents and continues on with ground and orbital facilities.

Like agents (and unlike facilities), ships are mobile. Also like agents, every ship as a single unalterable negative trait, possibly one or more fixed positive traits, and a number of open slots that the player can later slot (and re-slot) with acquirable ship traits as well.

But what makes ships different from agents? Why does an org even need them? (Or does an org need them?)

Let's take a deeper look...

Classes of Ships

Ships come in four basic types:

Freighters: Cargo Freighters (can ship most bulk goods), Commercial Tanker (transports hydrocarbons, fissiles, Helium-3, and other volatiles), and Personnel Carriers (transports colonists, infantry, and prisoners)

Research: Medical Ship (useful for missions-of-mercy, and can also serve as mobile hospitals in the event of agent injury), Research Ship (necessary for archaeological expeditions other than surveys and certain other experimental tasks)

Frigates: Frigates (general workhorse useful for a wide variety of tasks including courier, agent transport, surveying, commerce raiding, and surveillance)

Battleships: Destroyers (A.I. piloted with no human crew used for expendable or high-risk combat assignments), Dreadnought (massive ship-of-the-line used for extending a semi-permanent military presence), Super Dreadnought (dwarfs even the Dreadnought class of ship, able to act as a polity flagship and command center comparable to most orbital facilities)

Different tasks require different classes of ships; a Super Dreadnought is an amazing marvel of military engineering, but won't help you transport a hundred units of refined metals to Charon.

Some tasks are more versatile than others; for example, many military tasks can be slotted with any type of battleship. Some tasks - such as transporting an agent - can be done with almost any ship at all (though if you are transporting an agent on board an A.I.-piloted destroyer or cargo freighter, the agent will be put into cryosleep for the duration).

Primary Ship Tasks

Freighters are obviously for transporting material from one region to another. In the case of regions within the same orbit, generally this will be a very fast transfer measuring on the order of minutes. (There are exceptions; both the Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt cover vast areas of space, and as such moving between regions in these orbits may be more similar to transports between orbits).

If you are focusing on other areas than Commercial and are willing to trade for the materials you need, you may well be able to do without freighters at all, especially if your org is focusing its efforts entirely on one region.

Medical Ships are specialist vessels; most orgs will not find these valuable, but they do open up a number of tasks that are notably useful for building up Reputation with polities in a way other than privateering against said polity's enemies, something that is risky, expensive, and carries with it its own diplomatic peril.

Research Vessels, like Medical Ships, are specialist vessels, and open up an array of very special tasks, including the very valuable xenological archaeological tasks that are focused on unraveling the mysteries of the remnants of what many believe to be evidence of long-dead alien intelligences that have been discovered in the outer regions of the solar system. With alien technologies as the promise, it is little surprise that many choose to specialize in the uncovering of these riddles.

Frigates are unspecialized vessels, able to be used in by far the widest selection of tasks. They are, as well, relatively cheap to build and maintain, and as such it is generally useful to maintain at least a handful of these.

Battleships are specialized for military ventures. There are actually two major ways these can be used, however.

First, an org may acquire an Order of Mark from a polity to grant it authorization to operate as a flag-of-convenience against that polity's enemies - essentially, a freelance operator in that polity's military. This opens up a large number of Military tasks that have the potential to be lucrative both financially, but also in building up Reputation with the polity being fought for, as well as the enemies of the polity being targeted.

Second, an org may simply build or otherwise acquire battleships for sale to the various polities and orgs of the solar system. Ships - especially battleships - are quite complicated and involved to build, and require extensive shipyards and resources. As such, there is a lively market for such, particularly among polities at war in parts of the solar system where "extensive shipyards" is not a particularly often-used phrase.

Maintaining Ships

Ships require nothing to remain idle, meaning a ship that is not actively running a task will not cost an org anything to maintain it.

However, tasks that require one or more ships will always require additional task resource inputs in the form of Refined Hydrocarbons, Refined Fissile Materials, or Helium-3. For ships involved in military operations, Munitions will also be required at the very least, and possibly additional materials depending upon the nature of the military operation.

Generally speaking, Freighters, and Frigates will require Refined Hydrocarbons, while Research Ships and Battleships will require Refined Fissile Materials. Both types of ships can be reconfigured to operate off of Helium-3; whether or not it is worth it to do this depends on how many slots you have available on a ship and how ready your supply of Helium-3 is. Ships that run off of Helium-3 are very efficient, however, and require relatively little fuel compared to other types of propulsion.

Building Ships

Building ships requires a chain of tasks, each task producing a variety of manufactured and fabricated items until at last one can use a shipyard to assemble the gathered pieces into a functioning ship.

At the earlier stages, a shipyard is not required, but manufactory facilities may be.

As well, all of these items are tradable, meaning that an org can purchase, trade, or otherwise acquire intervening items rather than dealing with all of them by the org personally itself. Obviously, an org could easily decide as well to simply specialize in the production of part or all of the ship assembly process.

Building a ship begins with raw materials in the form of Carbonates, Silicates, Hydrocarbons, Metals, and Fissile Materials. These, in turn are processed into specialized facilities into refined forms of themselves.

Once refined materials are available, a manufactory can then put these together into manufactured items (e.g., hulls, capacitors, sensors) or fabricated items (e.g., ship traits such as drone bays, chaff launchers, railguns, ECCM systems).

Finally, a ship uses a Shipyard to assemble large numbers of appropriately manufactured items into a finished ship. After the ship is completed, fabricated items can be added on, depending on the item and the ship class - some items are restricted to certain types of ships.

Traits and Fabricated Ship Items

Like agents, ships have traits.

Every ship has a single fixed negative trait. This can range from issues with the engines affecting task duration time, leaks requiring regular infusions of Solars, or crews with bad reputations in various polities or other issues. Sometimes these negative traits can be worked around, sometimes not. For example, a ship with a negative trait of Notorious with the Independent Republic of Ceres can simply not be used in operations granting beneficial Reputation with the Independent Republic of Ceres - or perhaps you simply choose not to care about with Ceres thinks of your org.

A ship may as well have one or more fixed positive trait. These can range from Efficient Engines with improved task duration time to Reliable Weapons Feed with reduced Munitions input requirements for tasks, to renowned crews who when used will improve Reputation gains.

Finally, a ship may have one or more open slots that can be filled with specific fabricated ship item traits. For example, a ship with the fixed positive trait of Hangars can be slotted with various hangar-requiring acquirable positive traits such as Interceptors, Surveillance Drones, Ground Attack Fighters, or other options. Research vessels may have a Xenological Lab installed, or an Integrated Data Core, allowing for improved Data resource gains on tasks that reward various types of Data.

Designing Nations

Submitted by Heretic on Monday, June 30, 2014 - 22:22

We recently showcased some of our work on the flags of the 25th century, but one thing we didn't talk about is the process we go through.

We could simply just build off of what looks good, but let's be honest - a lot of flags in the real world aren't exactly works of art. But then, they aren't supposed to; flags are intended to be symbolic representatives of the national polities they represent. The stripes of the United States flag represent something very specific - the original thirteen colonies. The colors of many of Africa's flags were chosen deliberately because they refer back to colors symbolizing dreams of African unity. The symbol on India's flag, the Ashoka Chakra, a 24-spoke wheel, is rife with spiritual import.

So, instead, we decided to build flags kind of the way they are built in real life - from the ground up, with an eye to the symbolism. We also do a couple of cheaty design things intended to make your lives easier.

What we mean by "making your lives easier" is recognizing that with over thirty distinct polities, it's hard to keep track of which is which, even if most players will only be dealing with the polities immediately around them. One thing we have done is to put in recognizable - or at least familiar - symbols to remind the player what the polity is.

For example, the Democratic Republic of Triton (shown to left) has Neptune's giant fish hook - a triton - on it, as a sneaky reminder that the polity is in Neptune's orbit.

Similarly, the two Mars polities both favor red (albeit different shades of red) and both use the very familiar symbol for Mars. The Oceanic League's flag features stylized waves. The Iapetus Coalition has a shielded "I" at the center of its banner. The Collaborated Union of the Hildas Triangle has a stylized triple-triangle at its heart. All of these things are, of course, done in the real world, though we decided to be a little more aggressive about using that as a mechanic.

The second thing we did was to try not to replicate color choices within an orbit more than necessary (obviously, black and white get a free pass on this), so there is less chance of confusion when you are trying to remember if it's the Republic of Titan's blue-and-gold that you were running raids on or the Amalgamated Calpultin of Dione's red-and-black.

Another consideration was to leverage both the future histories of the (mostly) off-Earth polities along with their namesakes' mythologies, where such were notable. The constellation of the Little Dipper and the bear of the Commonwealth of Callisto refer to the mythology of the original Callisto, a Greek nymph who was transformed into a bear and set among the stars.

The Amalgamated Calupultin of Dione feature the Aztec glyph for a burning town and the number "8" in Nahuatl to represent the original eight settlements on Dione, as well as the moon's original Mesoamerican colonizers.

The flags of Earth are slyer, making references to the original states that the 25th century polities emerged out of; the Eastern Federation has elements of the old imperial flag of Russia along with the Yin-Yang symbol, tying the constituent elements of 21st century Russia and China into the modern 25th century state of the Eastern Federation.

Union has elements of the old European Union flag (though it is not the European Union itself - that disintegrated in the latter half of the 21st century). State bears elements of the old United States, though the modern State encompasses a much broader domain governed from the capitol of Havana on the island of Cuba. The Southern Bloc is a mixture of colors and symbology of the African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian states that came together in the 22nd century as a response to persistent abuse at the hands of metanational corporations from Union and State.

Ultimately, the point is that the flags are not merely background lore elements, but actual UI (user interface) elements serving a specific function of making the player's navigation of the game easier and more intuitive. They do, as well, all feature in the tasks by the org of the player, and represent a consistent faux-future historical and cultural basis for those tasks to play out upon.

They're also, of course, cool. I mean, come on, when else in your career do you get to design the flag of a group of xenophobic religious isolationists as of the forlorn asteroid colony of the Exalted Sanctuary of the Triforce Supremacy in the Belt?

Task Timing

Submitted by Heretic on Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - 00:07

Tasks in ORG are the fundamental unit of gameplay in that they are how players recruit new agents, build new ships, raid and bombard worlds as privateers in the service of national polities, research new technologies, and a hundred other things.

Of the various aspects of tasks, a task's duration interacts with trait bonuses and penalties in several ways that are useful for an aspiring director of an org to master.

Let's look at a few of these...

Duration

Every task has a duration before it will complete. Once kicked off, a task will continue to count down even when the player is not logged on. Rewards do not scale on a one-to-one basis with time, however, meaning two tasks that essentially do the same thing but have different durations will reward at different levels of efficiency. As a general principle, longer tasks will operate at a lower level of efficiency, although the total output will still exceed the any single pro rated instance of a shorter task.

This is a lot easier to explain with an example:

Task A and Task B both produce Refined Carbonates, but Task A has a duration of 5 minutes, while Task B has a duration of 50 minutes. Let's say Task A produces on a success 100 Refined Carbonates; if one were to simply treat Task B as a longer version, Task B - being ten times longer than Task A - would produce 1000 Refined Carbonates on a success.

Obviously, this isn't fair to the player who sits there and refreshes Task A every 5 minutes, and indeed, this is actually taken into account - Task B would more likely produce, say, 30 Refined Carbonates.

So why would someone want to use Task B if Task A is more efficient? At a difference in duration of 5 minutes versus 50 minutes, most players would generally just repeat Task A to get the better return, but what if the difference in duration isn't 5 minutes and 50 minutes, but 5 minutes and 5 days? At that point, when a player is ready to take a break from the game or go away for the weekend, Task B is a lot more useful.

In addition, orgs that achieve certain benchmarks can sometimes open up different versions of tasks which which provide different durations and different levels of efficiency as a reward for their accomplishments.

Pro-Rating

Pro-rating means to count based on amount of time in proportion to that amount of time, all of which is a mouthful to say in Org certain kinds of modifiers are calculated based not on a flat bonus or penalty but proportionate to the duration of the task.

For example, let's say the player's org has an agent with a trait that grants a +10 bonus Reputation for the Venusian Republic to a player who successfully completes any task that agent is slotted in. If there was no pro-rating, this would mean players would always be incentivized to slot such an agent on the shortest possibly tasks that offered Reputation for the Venusian Republic.

The problem is, this isn't actually what the intention is for the trait. The desired incentive is that a player should feel free to slot such an agent on any task that generates Reputation for the Venusian Republic regardless of duration. (Duration should still be a consideration, note - just not for what agents you are slotting on it).

What actually happens, thus, is that the agent's +10 bonus Reputation increases based on time at a flat rate, meaning if Task C has a duration of 5 minutes and Task D has a duration of 50 minutes, Task D will produce proportionately more Reputation than completing Task C would generate.

Traits and Time

Traits - the special effects that your agents, facilities, and ships have attached to them, some of which you can trade for and adjust, some of which are fixed - can have the ability to affect the duration of a task.

This can be enormously valuable; a trait that reduces a task's duration by 20% means a 5 day task will take only 4 days, or a task that takes 5 minutes will only take 4 minutes. In any single use of this the effect is nominal, but when repeatedly used over the course of weeks or months, the cumulative effects translates into substantial benefits for an org.

Since all agents, facilities, and ships have negative traits, there are also traits that generate duration penalties, though these penalties can be compensate for with other, positive traits affecting task duration, or simply tolerated in light of the agent, facility, or ship's other positive traits as they impact the task.

Another Look at Agents

Submitted by Heretic on Sunday, May 25, 2014 - 21:56

We've talked a bit in the past about agents, one of the three types of slottable minions an org has at its disposal to accomplish tasks, but only really in generalities.

Both as a window into the development process (since this is actually what I have been working on this last week) as well as in service to a better understanding of how this critical element of gameplay works, let's take this opportunity to look at the kinds of traits and pieces that work together to make up the agents of ORG.

As with the other two types of minions - ships and facilities - an agent is comprised of a set of static information combined with a number of traits, some of which are fixed at the moment of the agent's creation, others that may be substituted out for other traits at the whim (or ability) of the player.

The static information consists of:

Name - By default this is the agent's profession, but a player has the option of re-naming the agent to something of their own choosing.

Description - Customizable by the player. This could be used purely for logistical purposes, to provide character background, or anything else.

Quality - Like all minions, agents have a quality corresponding to an ascending set of colors (white, green, blue, purple, orange, red). Utilization of minions can eventually - though rarely - result in that minion's promotion to a higher quality.

Movable - Agents may always be moved - this is also true of ships, but noticeably not true of facilities which are fixed to the region they are first used in.

Tradable - Most agents can be traded or auctioned. Special agents that are the result of special tasks will probably be bound, though we are still hammering out the specifics on this.

(Note that upon receiving an agent by auction, some aspects will be reset to its base values. Which aspects of the agent this applies to is something that is still being considered internally).

Every agent also has a citizenship and profession, both of which are fixed at the moment of the agent's creation.

Citizenship is the national polity the agent in question is originally from. Most of these are things like Union or Free State of Mars or Eastern Federation, but there are a couple of unusual ones thrown into the mix as well in the form of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Clone.

An agent's citizenship is important in a number of different ways:

First, agents with citizenship of polities that have associated reputations associated with them will gain a bonus to any rewarded reputation of that polity. Note, the task still has to reward reputation of that type in the first place, and a few polities don't have reputation associated with them. For example, you slot an agent with Europan citizenship on a diplomatic task that rewards Europan reputation on success; if you succeed on the task, you will gain more Europan reputation for having slotted the Europan agent.

Second, some agents and tasks will have mandatory inclusions (or exclusions) of other citizenships. For example, a peace negotiation task from the Free State of Mars to the Mars Republic might require at least one agent on the negotiation team who is a citizen of the Free State of Mars. Alternatively, an agent with Triton citizenship and the Nationalist trait might refuse to be on the same task as another agent with Protean League citizenship.

Profession is similarly fixed at the moment of the agent's inception, and ranges from the scientific - Biologist, Geologist, Sociologist, to the military - Commander, Pilot, Quartermaster, to the political - Bureaucrat, Politician, Ambassador.

An agent's profession is a frequent requirement for the accomplishment of most tasks. As a general rule, a task that requires at least one agent - and most do - will require at least one of the task's slots to be filled by a particular profession, or at least a particular category (Research, Commercial, Cultural, Political, Military).

All minions, whether ship, facility, or agent, have one fixed negative trait.

Negative traits are sometimes inescapable, such as Complaisant, which slightly increases the time any task that agent is assigned to takes to complete.

More often, though, a clever player can either compensate or cannily work around negative traits. For example, an agent with the Infamous trait results in a penalty to any earned reputation from a task with an agent with that trait. The obvious solution when dealing with an infamous agent, thus, is simply to only assign the agent to tasks that do not reward reputation at all, making the negative irrelevant. Similarly, a Corrupt agent which penalizes Solar (the common currency of the solar system) earnings can be deliberately not assigned to tasks which reward Solars.

Other negative traits have other kinds of effects:

For example, Fugitive is a trait that comes in many flavors, specifically one for each national polity. An agent with the Fugitive: Eastern Federation trait cannot be slotted on tasks in any Eastern Federation territories (so not just the Eastern Federation region on Earth, but also Mercury and parts of the Asteroid Belt).

The negative trait of Addict actually adds a cost of one unit of Narcotics whenever that agent is slotted on any task at all, meaning the player must make sure to have a supply of such in the region the addicted agent will be operating in.

Finally, some negative traits are actually mixed curses and can have positive effects. Methodical adds to any rewarded Influence for Commercial, Military, or Research tasks, but said tasks will also take a lot longer to complete as well. In many cases, this may be a perfectly acceptable tradeoff.

Agents also have positive traits that fall into two categories - Fixed and Acquirable.

Fixed positive traits cannot be changed and are set for the agent in question. Examples of fixed positive traits are things like Philanthropost, which adds additional Solars to any successfully completed task, or Creative, which improves any Research or Cultural Influence rewards, or Military Genius, which reduces the cost to train Troops of all types and also increases any Military Influence earned from tasks the agent is slotted on.

Acquirable traits can be overridden at the cost of the destruction of the previously-slotted trait. Examples of acquirable traits are things like Commercial Analyst, which substantively adds to any Commercial Data rewards, or Renowned, which reduces any Cultural Influence input costs for a task that agent is slotted on.

Positive traits are usually applicable fairly freely, but there are some exceptions, mostly for the protection of players. For example, the Hydrocarbon Specialist acquirable trait multiplies any unprocessed or refined hydrocarbons, but since generally only Geologists or Engineers are involved in tasks that can produce these things, agents with one of these professions are the only ones that can have this trait applied to them.

Positive traits of both kinds can also be situational, though such situationality will never be specifically harmful. For example, Radical is an acquirable trait that a player can choose to apply to an agent that grants a substantive bonus to any category of Influence the agent is slotted on - but can only be slotted on a task that is in a region that is currently under the effect of Social Unrest.

(Social Unrest is an effect that is applied by what is called an orbital mandate - orbital mandates are the result of player votes across each orbit that persist until the next vote which is currently set to reoccur on a weekly basis).

Acquirable traits are special for another reason, in that they are usually tradable. In the same way that players can trade or auction most agents, they can also trade or auction acquirable traits. Acquirable traits can be the result of succeeding at particular tasks, essentially meaning some are effectively craftable by a player, especially a player who is devoting dedicated resources to create a steady supply of such traits.

Agents, along with ships and facilities, are the key resource and asset of your org, and which ones are useful and valuable to you will depend a lot on what your aims are as an org.

As well, don't forget that agents can not only be customized (name and description), but improved in quality (through repeated use on critically successful tasks), and specialized (by swapping out their acquirable traits for different - or simply better - traits).

The Competitive Edge

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, May 6, 2014 - 22:36

ORG is fundamentally a game of organization, logistics, and strategy.

But what does that mean for player interactions, polite or...otherwise?

ORGcan be played essentially as a single player game, but there are also four powerful mechanics for competitive and cooperative gameplay:

Reputation Politics

Trading

Personal Rankings

Alliance Rankings

Let's talk about each one in turn.

Reputation Politics

I went into considerable depth on this in an earlier dev diary post that you should totally check out, but let's touch on it briefly here as well, since it's a new mechanic for games like this.

In addition to player orgs, there are also a number of national polities that have laid sovereign claims to the various regions and orbits that comprise the solar system. Each of these polities has relations with most other nearby polities that range from friendly to outright war. As well, each org has a Reputation score with each polity.

Some tasks - particularly those in the Political or Military categories - will affect an org's reputation with a polity. There's a catch, though - doing something one polity likes will also often earn you reputation with those polities friendly to that polity - and lose you reputation with polities hostile to that polity. Moreover, a number of tasks will actually directly, if minutely, affect the relationships of a polity to another polity.

The various relationships of the various polities will impact what tasks are available to every org operating in those regions. If many players conduct actions enflaming hostilities between two polities, the diplomatic relationships between those two polities might descend into open war, resulting in some new tasks becoming available, but also removing other tasks.

A player alliance or popular trade route thus can affect the tasks that are available for every player in a region or orbit.

Trading

The second type of player interaction should be familiar to most players - trade.

Trade can be conducted either directly, in the form of making arrangements with a specific other player, or through the mechanic of a commodity market, which is basically a form of auction house as is common in many other games.

There are a few idiosyncrasies with the way the commodity market operates in Org, however. The most important difference is that while the solar system operates as a single, monolithic market, items do have a regional location. If your org is based in the outer worlds, let's say Neptune and Uranus, and you acquire from an org based on Earth an amount of Refined Carbonates on the market - or directly from a trading partner, for that matter - those refined carbonates are on Earth. If you want to use those refined carbonates in a shipyard you control on one of the moons of Uranus, you need to transport those refined carbonates.

Why would we do this? Why make it harder for players?

There are actually two reasons for this:

First, it creates a genuine strategic difference between operating around the worlds close to the Sun - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars - and operating in the distant reaches of the solar system. Gameplay and strategy thus differ; comparable strategies that rely respectively on fast turnarounds (benefiting players playing frequently) or slow turnarounds (benefiting players playing less frequently) can emerge.

Second, it creates entirely new markets for players to dabble in. Specifically, it creates an entire market for orgs that specialize in transporting goods, with all the complications and logistical challenges of that.

Personal Rankings

The third type of player interaction lies in personal rankings.

Every org accumulates Influence in the five categories - Commercial, Cultural, Military, Political, Research - for each region the org is operating in. Gaining Cultural Influence on Luna, thus, will not improve the org's Cultural Influence on Titan - or even on any of the regions of Earth herself.

For each region and each category, every org is ranked on a percentile system against every other org. For example, an org whose acquired Cultural Influence on Luna over the past week puts them in the top 50% of orgs on Luna will gain a bonus.

What kind of bonus?

Orgs who rank in the top 50%, 10%, or 1% of a category in a region over the previous week gain the ability to slot 1, 2, or 3 agents in that category and region as "governors", with any such agents' trait abilities applying to all of that org's tasks of that category type.

For example, the above org operating on Luna has ranked in the top 50% of gains for Cultural Influence, granting that org one cultural governor slot for Luna. Any Cultural agent controlled by that org in the Luna region can be designated as a "governor". Let's say the player selects a Cultural agent who has a trait that reduces the time it takes to complete a task. Normally, that effect would only be applied when the player assigned that agent directly on a task, but if that agent is made a governor, every Cultural task run in the Luna region will have this effect factored in.

(How do traits stack if more than one apply? Only the best positive and worst negative effects applicable to a particular task will be applied).

Alliance Rankings

Alliances - player guilds, essentially - also have rankings. Unlike personal rankings that are measured on a region-by-region basis, alliance rankings are determined on an orbit by orbit basis.

Thus, while an individual org operating on Luna is measuring its Cultural Influence against other orgs operating on Luna, an alliance is measuring its aggregated Cultural Influence across the entire Earth orbit - Luna, Antarctica, State, the Eastern Federation, Union, etc.

Achieving a high ranking in a category affords the alliance a number of votes, with the number rapidly escalating the higher the ranking such that very high performing alliances will per member of their alliance have a very much higher number of votes. (An alliance's votes in a category in an orbit will also be adjusted for the size of the alliance, meaning that there is no basic benefit between having a large or small alliance).

Every week, every alliance in an orbit has an opportunity to vote for an orbital mandate for that orbit for the next week. Only one orbital mandate is active in an orbit at a time, and alliances that rank high in individual categories - Commercial, Cultural, Military, Political, Research - will only have access to a subset depending on which category (or categories) that alliance has ranked in. (The mandates each category can vote for do have some overlap, it should be noted).

For example, an alliance that is operating in the Earth orbit has ranked in the top 50% of alliances in the Earth orbit in the Commercial category, but also the top 10% of alliances in the Earth orbit in the Military category. This earns the alliance 1 vote that can be applied for any of the Commercial voting options, and 10 votes for any of the Military voting options. The alliance wants to maximize its voting power, so decides to pick an orbital mandate that both the Commercial and Military categories can vote for - in this case, increased Troop production. With the 1 vote from Commercial and 10 votes from Military, the alliance will put forth 11 votes for increased Troop production in the Earth orbit.

There is another mechanic here in play as well: to discourage a single orbital mandate from being locked in by a powerful conglomeration of interests in an orbit, every time the same orbital mandate is voted in, its effect is decreased, only to be reset when that orbital mandate loses. So, the first time the above orbital mandate for increased Troop production wins the vote it will be applied at full strength; if it wins the next week, it will be applied at a lesser strength; if it wins a third week in a row it will be applied at an even lesser strength.

There's a lot more to this, obviously, specifically in regards to the specific mechanics of voting. The general method we have in place now will be tested out in beta and with the community's feedback we'll see what adjustments will need to happen.

Generally speaking - and there are some exceptions, such as if you start sending already-injured agents or damaged ships on dangerous tasks - you are not going to lose your org's assets. This is important, as one of the major problems with games in the past that included persistent competitive elements is that when a player took a serious loss there was a tendency for it to effectively shut them out of the competition, often simply leading to the player so affected simply leaving the game.

What is at stake, however, are your current opportunities in the form of available tasks, bonuses (and penalties) applied by other players' actions on your current tasks, and, as well, the brutal disregard of the trading marketplace. Your org's personal rankings and the prowess of any alliance you belong to will thus impact how many governors you have available as well as what orbital mandates are applied to the tasks you are running.

Unspoken to this last point is also the huge impact diplomacy can have, both within an alliance as players negotiate sub arrangements with other alliances or orchestrate voting strategies, or with other external alliances to create voting blocks to benefit your members, or damage the ambitions of your competitors.

Finessing the Polity Politics of the Solar System

Submitted by Heretic on Thursday, May 1, 2014 - 00:26

While the corporations, privateers, institutes, trading consortiums, aid groups and secret societies controlled by players jockey for control and influence throughout the solar system, they are doing such against a backdrop of existing political entities.

The solar system of ORG is comprised of a large number of distinct national polities, each with technical sovereignty over one or more regions. "Technical" sovereignty because ultimately, it is the actions of the various player orgs that call the real shots.

(Be sure to check out the Solarian Encyclopedia if you are interested in learning about the background and political relationships in more detail).

So how do players' actions affect the national polities of Org, and vice versa?

Every national polity - for example, "The Free State of Mars" or "The Sedna All-Thing" or "The Eastern Federation" - is defined by the regional territory it occupies, its diplomatic state with the various other polities, and the Reputation each player has accumulated with that polity.

There is a lot of history standing behind most of the national polities of Org which represents a sort of background diplomatic state that two polities will tend towards, all other things being equal. For example, the background diplomatic state of the Eastern Federation and State is one of Hostility. If no player were ever to run any political, cultural, or military tasks on either the Eastern Federation or State, their diplomatic state will slowly creep towards Hostility.

There are five diplomatic states that any pair of national polities can be in:

Friendly

Mixed

Hostile

War

No Opinion

Each of these five diplomatic states governs what tasks can be available in the regions occupied by a polity.

For example, if the Eastern Federation and State are currently in a state of Hostility, tasks such as "Transport Prisoners of War for the Eastern Federation" may not be available, though "Bombard Eastern Federation Outlying Colony" will be. Were the Eastern Federation and State to be at a state of Mixed diplomatic relations, the above-mentioned bombard task might not be available, though sabotage and supply of insurgent tasks might still be.

When a player's org acts in a hostile way against a national polity, that polity and to a lesser extent, that polity's friends will take offense, lowering your Reputation with those polities. At the same time, polities hostile to the polity you acted against will raise your Reputation with those polities. Because the alliances and hostilities of the national polities will inevitably be irregular, this can make for a very delicate game for players who must pick and choose carefully what polities to help and what polities to oppose.

In addition, as all the players in the game conduct tasks for or against different polities, these tasks in aggregate will slowly shift the diplomatic states of each of the polities. While the Mars Republic and the Free State of Mars begin the game in a state of civil war, and, in truth, will tend to slip back into such a state, if players are aggressive in their use of lobbying tasks, developmental aid, relief programs and the like, the Mars Republic and the Free State of Mars can be nudged out of open war and into a diplomatic state of hostility, or even mixed or friendly.

Players that are, for example, relying on selling naval ships or war supplies to a polity may suddenly find themselves out of contracts if the polities they have been supplying suddenly find themselves no longer at war with their neighbors. Clever alliances can manipulate this political dynamic to benefit themselves and damage their rivals in the various rankings.

Reputation itself is essentially a special kind of non-transferable currency and measure of a player's org's standing with a particular polity. Maintaining a certain minimum Reputation can be a prerequisite for some tasks - for example, to obtain Letters of Marque, essentially giving the player's org legal cover to engage in military operations against another polity, or certain more rewarding contracting opportunities. Reputation is also necessary for various other activities such as obtaining xenoarchaeological survey consent or getting access to certain items particular to individual polities.

Many of the higher value tasks that reward Reputation with a polity are a double-edged sword, however - they represent critical needs of the polity, so failing can actually cost you Reputation with that polity, meaning that you need to measure some degree of caution with assigning too-junior agents or untested ships to these kinds of tasks.

If all of this sounds like one complication too many for you, never fear; while all categories have at least some tasks that impact your org's Reputation with various polities, the degree to which this is true varies greatly. The Political and Military categories, for example, touch Reputation extensively, while Research and Commercial have many fewer such connections.

Regardless of whether you are actively attempting to influence the policies of a (or many) national polity, other players will be, and those actions can have a real and lasting impact on your own options, opportunities, and overall strategy, so it is a good thing to keep at least one eye on, even if you yourself are not hip-deep in the politics of the solar system.

Mining and Manufacturing

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - 01:01

Crafting, like trading, is a mechanic that has emerged in innumerable games over the last couple of decades, and for good reason - it is a powerful mechanism to allow agency and progression on the part of a player.

In ORG, there are actually a wide array of crafting-like mechanics, but the most recognizable of these for most players lies in the operation of the Commercial category.

As with each of the five categories of Org - Commercial, Cultural, Political, Military, Research - the fundamental structure of the Commercial category lies in the execution of tasks.

For the Commercial category, the creation of a finished, usable item is (usually) a four step process:

Mining tasks generate one of five basic unprocessed materials: Carbonates, Silicates, Hydrocarbons, Metals, and Fissile Materials.

Refining tasks convert unprocessed materials to their constituent refined version of the material. Refining generally requires either Refined Hydrocarbons or Refined Fissile Materials in addition to an amount of unprocessed materials.

Manufacturing tasks turn refined materials into components for ships, while Fabrication tasks turn refined materials into traits, which are slottable abilities that can be applied to ships and facilities. (Agents have traits too, but these are made through other processes in other categories).

Assembly tasks turn components into ships, while Construction tasks turn components into facilities.

Here's a somewhat simplified example of the process in practice:

Assign agents and facilities to the Mine Carbonates task in the Borealis Basin region on Mars, using up one of the org's limited Commercial task slots until the mining is complete in 30 seconds.

At any point after the task is complete, the player can return, seeing whether the task was successful or not. For a routine task like this, anything but a straight success would be a surprise, and indeed, in this case it is a success with the player receiving 1000 units of Unrefined Carbonates ("Unrefined Carbonates" represents various organic compounds including water, carbon and other similar substances).

The player then assigns agents and facilities to the Refine Carbonates task - again, in the Borealis Basin region, since that is where the unprocessed carbonate is, so the player won't need to transport it. This task takes longer - 5 minutes - so after the task is complete, the player again returns. This time, instead of a simple success the player receives a critical success; for a refining task, this means that the org produced exactly as much of the refined product - in this case 10 Refined Carbonates - as it would have normally, but used fewer of the unprocessed raw materials than it normally would have.

With the Refined Carbonate in hand, the player next decides to Manufacture Organic Mainframe. Agents and facilities are again assigned, Refined Carbonate is deducted from the org's stockpile in the Borealis Basin region, and after the task completes - presumably successfully - the player will have an Organic Mainframe component.

The player decides to assign the Organic Mainframe - and a lot of other components they have stockpiled up or acquired from other sources - to an Assemble Research Vessel task.

With a successfully completed task, a new Research Vessel will be constructed. Research Vessels, like all ships, facilities, and agents, start with a single negative trait and a random number of fixed positive traits and/or open trait slots.

In this case, the new Research Vessel is a green (uncommon) quality vessel. Quality affects chance of a task's success or critical success, but this particular Research Vessel need not stay green quality forever - use it enough and eventually it will promote to the next highest quality rank, which for it will be blue (rare) quality.

For its automatic negative trait, the new Research Vessel also begins with the Mercenary Crew trait. Mercenary Crew, like a number of negative traits, is not strictly speaking always a negative. In this case, every time this particular Research Vessel is used the utilizing org must pay a modest cost in Solars - the common currency of the solar system - but if the task is a type that generates Solars, Mercenary Crew means it will produce +10% more Solars than it normally would.

This particular new Research Vessel also begins with one fixed trait and two open trait slots that the player can later fill with whatever traits they can acquire. In this case, the one fixed trait is Efficient Engines, which reduce any fuel input costs for any task this ship is assigned to.

With the Research Vessel complete, the org decides to simply sell it. Since in this case the player does not have sufficient Reputation with one of the non-player national polities, the remaining option is to trade it directly to a friend or member of their alliance, or put it up on the open market. This Research Vessel was made on Mars; if another player who is based on Venus purchases it and wants to use it in the Venus orbit, that player will need to assign a Transport task to move their new Research Vessel to the Venus orbit, which with the large distances between planets may even take a day in real time or more.

Once the new player has transported their new Research Vessel to Venus, it is then ready to be used in whatever tasks their new owner wishes to slot it into. Probably to release viral bombs on Eastern Federation outposts on Mercury. Not judging. I am sure Mercury had it coming.

There's actually another wrinkle with all of this; many tasks - and Mining, Refining, Manufacturing and Assembly tasks are among them - require the org executing the task maintain a degree of expertise in appropriate areas; in this case, that means Mining Expertise, Refining Expertise, Manufacturing Expertise, and Assembly Expertise.

Gaining expertise in these areas is an automatic by-product of conducting these kinds of tasks, though the more advanced types of production will require higher amounts of expertise. While mining, refining, manufacturing and assembly don't eat up expertise like they do unprocessed carbonates, refined carbonates, and organic mainframes, expertise will - over longer time periods like weeks - slowly decay, meaning a player will need to spend a little time keeping up with the newest improvements and innovations in the fields of expertise they are engaging in.

Expertise rewards players who choose to specialize in a subset of the commercial gameplay, while still keeping it possible for a player to change their minds and adjust their org's long-term focus.

There is also another, optional type of expertise that players can choose to invest in - in this case, Research tasks that grant types of expertise such as Carbonate Expertise, Silicate Expertise, Hydrocarbon Expertise, and so on. These kinds of expertise, like their Commercial cousins, decay, but they reduce task completion time at high values rather than being a prerequisite.

These two types of expertise do two very different things; Commercial expertise encourages specialization in types of production tasks - such as Mining versus Manufacturing - while Research expertise encourages specialization for types of material - such as Carbonates versus Metals.

The details, of course, can get quite a bit more complicated, as none of this went into slotting requirements or the consequences of various task results - not every task, even routine task, will be a success.

Similarly, there are rare occasions where a component might use an unrefined material directly, or a component might require multiple refined material types, or even a rare component to make it in the first place.

This basic mechanic of expertise and task chains to generate usable items is used in other categories, as well, though each of them does this in a different way and using different patterns with different category dependencies. (Wait until we talk about using the Political category to speed up the process of promoting ships and agents, or xenoarchaeology, or creating artificial memes...)

EDIT 5/7/2014: Expertise section has been updated to reflect internal design iterations.

Shape of an Org

Submitted by Heretic on Saturday, April 26, 2014 - 23:50

In previous dev diaries we have talked a bit about the organizations of ORG and the five categories to which tasks, ships, agents, and facilities in the game are all defined by.

One thing we haven't gone into much depth about, however, is the organizations - the orgs, if you will - themselves. What makes one player's org different from another player's? What are the various ways an org can be styled, and what are the implications of that?

Every player starting out must select one of the five categories - Commercial, Cultural, Military, Political, Research. - that is their org's preferred category, and one category that is their org's disadvantaged category.

Tasks of org's preferred category will take less time to complete while tasks of an org's disadvantaged category will take more time to complete. (The other three categories will sit in the middle with no change to their base time to complete). Preferred category tasks will also have a modest increase in their chance of success; similarly, disadvantaged category tasks will have a modest decrease in their base chance of success.

Finally, while every org may have up to 20 tasks active at any one time, there are some restrictions:

5 of these 20 task slots can only be filled by a category of an org's preferred category.

2 each of the 20 task slots can only be filled by the other three non-disadvantaged categories.

9 of these 20 tasks slots can be filled by any category - including an org's disadvantaged category.

For example, a player wants to create a traditional commercial corporation styled org, so chooses a preferred category of Commercial and a disadvantaged category of Cultural:

Any Commercial task the org runs will take 20% less time to complete and have about a 10% greater chance of success.

Any Cultural task the org runs will take 20% more time to complete and have about a 10% less chance of success.

Of the org's 20 task slots, 5 are reserved for Commercial tasks.

Of the org's 20 task slots, 2 are reserved for Military tasks.

Of the org's 20 task slots, 2 are reserved for Political tasks.

Of the org's 20 task slots, 2 are reserved for Research tasks.

Of the org's 20 task slots, 9 may be used for any task - including Cultural tasks.

This is intended to give players a reasonable amount of flexibility, encourage experimentation and cross-category synergies, but at the same time encouraging a theme and general direction for every player's org.

There are a number of ways to think about an org's styling. While the traditional commercial corporation is a mainstay, there are actually a lot of other options available. Take these examples to give some ideas of what can done:

Corporation Preferred: Commercial, Disadvantaged: Military

Trade Consortium Preferred: Commercial, Disadvantaged: Research

Mining Cooperative Preferred: Commercial, Disadvantaged: Political

Political Party Preferred: Political, Disadvantaged: Research

Illuminati Preferred: Political, Disadvantaged: Military

Social Movement Preferred: Cultural, Disadvantaged: Commercial

Religion Preferred: Cultural, Disadvantaged: Military

Secret Society Preferred: Cultural, Disadvantaged: Research

Aid Organization Preferred: Cultural, Disadvantaged: Political

Mercenary Company Preferred: Military, Disadvantaged: Cultural

Military Contractor Preferred: Military, Disadvantaged: Political

Militia Preferred: Military, Disadvantaged: Research

Resistance Group Preferred: Military, Disadvantaged: Commercial

Research Foundation Preferred: Research, Disadvantaged: Military

Archaeological Institute Preferred: Research, Disadvantaged: Commercial

The way a player chooses to play an org and focus its efforts even beyond questions of category can also have immense differences.

For example, a corporation might choose to focus specifically on the mining and refining of raw materials, or ship manufacture, or even commercial product manufacture and distribution. A corporation could also focus on purchasing items from other players and reselling them on the market. A cultural preference could represent a recruiting firm focusing on recruiting agents essentially for sale on the market. A social movement might be a political action group, or even an ethnic paramilitary.

As well, any of the above could have their disadvantaged category (or preferred category) shifted to something else to better represent the intentions of your org.

Region and orbit, too, can play a big part of this. While organizations can expand their influence into other regions, there are a lot of benefits to focusing on only a few regions, and even more benefits to focusing on only one or two orbits. (Of course, it is possible to see advantages in spreading out across multiple orbits - trade consortiums and orgs that want to avoid being unduly affected by a powerful alliance in an orbit might see a benefit to spreading themselves thinner).

As a Commercial-focused org, you might want to think about what part of the supply chain or what resources you might like to focus on. For example, you could focus on one or two raw materials from mining through processing through manufacture of items primarily using those raw materials. Alternatively, you might choose to focus on just mining, but for every type of raw material.

As a Political or Military-focused org, your org's Reputation with particular national polities will become very important - do something that one polity likes, and you'll upset that polity's enemies and please its friends. As one of these types of orgs, you may benefit from picking one (or two) polities in particular to focus on and be friends with. Alternatively, perhaps you might want to take a more mercenary approach as a Military-focused org, acting as a privateer for whatever polities happen to currently be at war - when one peace treaty is signed, it just means it is time to move your focus to another war.

Perhaps, instead, you might want to focus on a single region and thoroughly dominate it in the player rankings to the point where you dictate its destiny. As well, as an alliance, dominating an entire orbit is not out of the question.

There is a great deal of leeway to shift your focus and efforts depending on the political landscape and relations with other players and events, but it can be worth your time to keep an eye on a niche - it's just not possible to be everything in every category and every region, so choose, but don't be afraid to shift your efforts as opportunities present themselves.

Solar Astrography

Submitted by Heretic on Thursday, April 24, 2014 - 23:37

Org takes place in the 25th century A.D., over four hundred years in our own future.

Despite two failed efforts, while the stars yet remain out of reach the planets and moons of our own solar system have not, and wide swathes of the solar system have been colonized. Efforts by political actors to dominate this colonization effort failed in the face of powerful corporate entities who, over time, themselves evolved into political entities in their own rights. Earth's nations remain divided, although more concentrated than in our own day, and still wield immense power in the struggles over dominance throughout the solar system.

Yet despite the might of Earth's great powers, the distances of space are beyond vast, and political divisions are enormous, and the ecological turmoil and devastation in adjusting to a world ravaged by resource exhaustion have meant that the influence of Earth's nations is thin at best past the asteroid belt.

The astrography of ORG was designed to create certain playing conditions:

Earth and the inner worlds are, simply put, behemoths in terms of concentration of power. Despite a tidal wave of colonization, the single greatest nexus of power remains on Earth.

The outer worlds, particularly those past Jupiter, are less powerful than Earth, but such is the distance that they are independent and provide a secondary, less populated area for players to focus on who wish a little more isolation.

Distance is critical. As in our own, real solar system, the distances between the inner worlds of our system - Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars - are dwarfed by the vast distances between the outer gas giants and dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt. Transporting goods, ships, and agents within an orbit are - with two exceptions - instantaneous, but transporting these between orbits takes time depending on the real world distances between these worlds.

Raw materials are not distributed equally throughout our own solar system, and neither are they in the solar system of Org. While many types of raw materials are all but exhausted on the Earth of Org, they are much more plentiful on other worlds. In the outer solar system, icy moons are the rule rather than the exception, with metals being the relative rarity. This disparity creates hard choices for players governing the direction of their orgs, and creates both strife and trading arrangements between both players and non-player polities.

The astrography of ORG consists most broadly of ten orbits starting with Mercury, then going on down the line to Venus, Earth, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and finally the distant Kuiper Belt at the far periphery of our solar system.

Within each orbit are multiple regions. Most regions are simply the whole of a particular moon, but some families of asteroid - for example, the Florian Cluster and the Koronian Cluster - are multiple individual asteroids treated as a single region for purposes of the game. Other regions are reflected as single worlds split into multiple regions: Venus consists of two regions, Mars three, and Earth herself six.

Regions are the basic territorial unit of the game. It is important to remember, as well, that players play organizations, and these organizations are not restricted to a single region or even a single orbit (although there are many advantages to concentrating your efforts). State polities - nations, in other words - are the titular masters of these regions, but in fact they are essentially puppets of the organizations that influence, corral, and dominate their actions. The states of Org are the pawns; the players' orgs are the true masters, though they bear neither flag nor anthem.

Take for example the state polity of the Eastern Federation:

The Eastern Federation is a post-modern alliance between several of the great Eurasian powers, most notably Russia, China, and Korea. Arguably the single most powerful state entity in the solar system, its reach extends past the region of the Eastern Federation on Earth to include Mercury and several clusters in the Asteroid Belt. As well, the Eastern Federation maintains close ties with the Southern Bloc on Earth, and the Gallilean moons of Ganymede and Europa, providing not-inconsiderable military support to Ganymede in its war with neighboring moon of Callisto in the shadow of Jupiter.

A player's organizations could operate partially, totally, or not at all within these boundaries. Tasks, particularly in the Political and Military categories, will tend to influence the player's organization's Reputation with the Eastern Federation, its allies and its enemies. For example, if the player conducts a privateering raid on possessions of the national polity of State, whom the Eastern Federation is highly competitive with, the player's organization's reputation with the Eastern Federation will go up - but its reputation with State and the friends of State will go down.

Thus, while players are not at all bound to operate within the bounds of a single state polity, they need to weigh their actions against the consequences of the friends and enemies they will make as a result. For some categories this is a greater concern than others; player organizations that focus on the Research or Commercial categories will tend to make fewer waves with the various non-player controlled states. Player organizations that engage tasks in the Political, Military, and even Cultural categories will need to make sure to balance their own future needs against those of their present.

So, what makes regions different, anyways?

Every player has a limited number of tasks they can have running at any one time, and tasks are always based in a specific region. For example, constructing a facility or mining hydrocarbons must be done in a specific region such as the Eastern Federation, or Mercury, or Ganymede, or the Hildas Triangle of the Asteroid Belt.

Regions do not, however, have the same sets of tasks available. Some tasks will always be available, but many are only intermittently available, and some tasks will simply never be available for certain regions. What random tasks are available in a region refresh at a set interval, though that interval differs depending on the region; regions with higher populations, such as those on Earth or Mars, will refresh their task lists much faster than on outlying moons or distant asteroids.

Finally, the total number of tasks available for a player to consider acting on also varies depending on the region. As with task list refresh rates, central, more populous worlds will tend to have more tasks available, though not nearly to the same degree. Where the Oceanic League or the Southern Bloc regions on Earth might have 25 tasks available at any moment, even tiny Weywot in the Kuiper Belt - not even 75km across - still might have 5 tasks available.

The player's job is thus to weigh the degree of competition with other players they are facing, the resources their particular strategy of domination requires, the category they are focusing on, and the repercussions of their actions on the political actors in the regions within which they are active.

Of Ships and Agents

Submitted by Heretic on Thursday, April 24, 2014 - 00:09

The central mechanic of ORG is the task.

Most tasks consume certain resources, and virtually all tasks require one or more ships, agents, or facilities to be slotted - and it is the quality and traits of each of those ships, agents, or facilities that will determine the chance of success for a task.

The internal unofficial term for these slottable ships, agents, or facilities is "minions". This obviously isn't really a new concept, having been used in a number of other games, but it is something that for us was key to get right and to build off of the lessons of other games.

So what exactly did we decide we wanted to do differently?

Progression

As with treatments of this concept in other games, we wants our minions to have a quality, but we also wanted that quality to be something that the player could improve.

A ship might start at a common white level of quality, but if you use that ship enough times in enough tasks, get enough critical successes and it will eventually promote to become an uncommon green level of quality.

Set Character and Distinctiveness...But With Real Options

Some aspects of an agent or facility we wanted to be fixed; but most minions should have open trait slots that players could use to customize their ships, agents and facilities.

These open trait slots are filled with traits which themselves become not just rewards, but commodities and end results of crafting chains.

Disadvantages

In ORG, every ship, agent, and facility has positive traits...but they also all have one (but just one) disadvantage.

These disadvantages can often be compensated for with positive traits, or even simply avoided - a mining facility with a disadvantage in mining silicates can simply be dedicated to mining other raw materials, but that disadvantage helps to define what it is and to present the player with logistical challenges and choices.

Personality

Org minions don't start with personality, but you will have the ability to give them personality.

When you spend days, weeks, even months pushing an agent or ship up in quality, finding just the right traits for them, they become something more than an agent or ship - they become your agent or ship. Providing means to name and set their avatar representation (and maybe other aspects) is something that we definitely want to do.

Many games using this kind of mechanic aren't able to do this, usually due to database structure and other technical considerations, so we've been careful to structure our data architecture from the beginning to specifically allow for this kind of customization and personalization.

Even More Personality (For People)

For agents - the actual people of the solar system - we wanted even more personality. In addition to all of the above negative traits, open slots, promotable quality, agents also have a couple of things particular to them.

All agents have a citizenship, representing what state polity they are from (e.g., the Oceanic League, the Free State of Mars, the Europan Consortium) which does feed into Reputation and Influence gains for the tasks they are on. For example, sending a politician from Callisto on a diplomatic mission to Ganymede is probably marginally suicidal (though if you are trying to broker a cease fire, that might actually be required for the task).

(Citizenship also, by the way, includes an "AI" designation, as in Artificial Intelligence - so if you want your entire roster of agents to be machine intelligences, you can actually do that. Your fellow orgs may not appreciate your attempts to implement Skynet, however...)

Agents also have professions. By themselves, professions generally don't modify task inputs or outputs (which is what the various standard traits usually do), but professions form the basis for what agents can be slotted into which tasks. Recruiting tasks might require Activists, diplomatic tasks Politicians or Ambassadors, transport tasks Pilots and Navigators, construction tasks Engineers and Geologists, and so on.

There is, as well, lots more that can be talked about, but we'll get to that in future dev diaries and other discussions.

Basic Game Mechanics

Submitted by Heretic on Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - 00:32

ORG is fundamentally a game of logistics and management.

Players each administers an organization that controls sets of ships, agents, and facilities with which they influence the solar system in one or more - as the player chooses - categories.

Political - The leveraging of political power, playing state polities off of each other, gathering influence and reputation - and thus special access.

Research - The development of the new, involved in the production of advanced prototypes, archaeological expeditions, and research paths of dubious ethical standing.

Each category possesses its own game mechanics and its own feel - Commercial tasks are not structured at all the same way as Research tasks, and Cultural tasks do not function at all similarly to Military tasks.

Each category does, however, rely on other categories for their inputs or provide a market for their outputs, and players will find it necessary either to balance multiple categories or engage in trade with other players to accomplish the maximal amount of gain from their own endeavors.

Players assign ships, agents, and facilities - as well as other lesser resources - to a set number of tasks. Some tasks will take minutes, some days. Those tasks that take longer a player can simply log out for and return later, the task still running in the background waiting for the player to return. The player's choices when they set up the task will affect the likelihood of the task proving to be successful or a failure, rendering rewards or penalties as a consequence.

One of the consistent rewards from almost all tasks is Influence of the particular category for the region within which the task was carried out. For example, a mining task for carbonates on Europa might reward Commercial Influence on Europa. This influence may then itself be used as a currency in some cases, and is also used as a way of measuring the player's relative success against other orgs in that category and in that region, resulting in functional advantages to the player in that category and region.

Other rewards exist as well. A task that mines metals in the Eastern Federation on Earth will result in varying amounts of metal raw materials which may then be refined and utilized to build ships, facilities and other items. Other tasks recruit agents, create memeplexes, or engage in research in various areas.

What is ORG?

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - 13:39

Jubal Online Games is in active development of new multiplayer strategic and diplomatic game for the iPad, Android tablet and web named ORG.

Org represents the struggles of powerful transnational organizations who are vying for dominance and control in our natal solar system. Each player takes control of an organization, otherwise known as an org, and guides it towards dominance in a never-ending struggle for supremacy.

Development began in the middle of 2013, and since then we've been focusing on both the technical and design components.

Orbital Stations

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, November 30, -0001 - 00:00

It has been a while since the last serious update, but to give an idea of some of the flashier things still being worked on, we wanted to talk a bit about not just ships, but stations. In the 25th dystopian future of ORG, the solar system is a playground not only for the interests of national polities, but also corporate interests, organizations, and even wealthy individuals. While ships may ply the empty black between the worlds of our natal solar system, permanent bases of operation dot that vast landscape, each a minute oasis used for refueling, resupply, manufacturing, military positioning, science, and sometimes, simply for the very isolation such positioning affords it.

Stations come in many different forms, but as with much amidst the worlds of ORG, functionality and practicality take precedence over purity of form. With nothing like true artificial gravity, any station designed for human habitation inevitably has incorporated into it rotational elements, though the precise form of these can range from narrow toruses to the broad breadth of entire cylinders.

The above flat rendering (shown here without final texturing) shows the dimensions and basic structure. The nested torus rungs at the head provide different G forces for different needs, with some being more convenient for manufacture, some for loading and unloading, some for habitation. Oval cylinders (shown in red) act as supply depots for fuel, while the rectangular manufacturing modules affixed to the innermost torus are constructed to allow for easy replacement, something that allows for convenient updating of equipment and even rental spaces.

Attitude thrusters and the stations power generator lie at the very bottom of the "needle" to minimize issues with accidents or heat exchange.

Here's another rendering that splits the station into pieces so it's easier to see the individual elements as they were constructed by the artist.

Another type of station configuration opts instead to leverage the existing rotational cylinder elements used by the dreadnought and super dreadnought military vessels. Note in the below image how the cylinder is literally that of multiple super dreadnought habitation modules configured here into a permanent station. The center of the habitation module has been replaced with a specialized joining structure, but the original form is entirely recognizable. In fact, this is not even a case of artistic re-use, but is fictionally exactly what happens, with retired super dreadnoughts being carved up for pieces, elements such as their habitation modules being repurposes for cheap station elements. An example of this can be seen in the covert research station that serves as the backdrop of the short story "Only Ever Backwards".

The tighter positioning of the fuel supply and attitude thrusters - not to mention the fact of its reuse as well - is an example of this particular cylindrical station type being something of a "budget" choice, and as such very popular in the outer reaches of the solar system. When manufacturing is distant and local supples unreliable, everything must be reused and refurbished if there is to be any hope of survival.

Anatomy of a Dreadnought

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, November 30, -0001 - 00:00

In the course of designing the ships of the 25th century of ORG, it was important to us that the ships made sense, both from a functional design perspective and for the role that they were intended to fulfill.

While the frigate class is often militarized and used for interception duties and commerce raiding, their core design is not that of a dedicated military machine. As such, they come in all sizes and shapes, some better adapted than others. Destroyers, on the other hand, are the workhorse - uncrewed and piloted by advanced Artificial Intelligence programs, destroyers are both expendable and capable of very aggressive maneuvering.

As useful as these two ship classes are, extended duty in complicated tactical theaters of operation requires - at least politically - a human mind to make the overall tactical decisions in the field. More intended as mobile command stations than as frontline battleships, this class of battleship is intended to provide a flexible, mobile, resilient element of force projection.

This is the Dreadnought class.

Unlike destroyers with their absence of a human crew, the central design consideration for the dreadnought is that it has a human crew. Dreadnoughts thus have several elements that are absent or played down in destroyers.

As with destroyers, the dreadnought's profile is long and narrow, though by necessity it is bulkier than a destroyer since it must be robust enough to take significant damage and still be operational. The front part of the ship does have power conduits, weapons, and hangar bays, but by mass is nearly 80% armor and shielding systems, the latter of which is capable of maintained cosmic radiation and energy deflection similar in function to a ship-sized version of a planet's magnetosphere.

Hangar Bays can be configured for either automated drones or crewed fighters for long-range operations - often both, as crewed fighters frequently operate in functionality similar to the dreadnought itself but at a more local level, meaning a crewed fighter will operate more as a drone command ship with attendant automated drones extending the effective reach and reaction speed of the crewed fighter.

HED Lances are common short to medium range naval engagement weapons consisting of high-energy particle weaponry. Even their short range, however, is quite long, generally measured still in tens of kilometers. HED Lances are also common armaments for the smaller, A.I.-operated destroyer class; larger super-dreadnought class battleships are intended to operate at even more distant range, and as such tend to favor tactical launched warheads, although both Dreadnought class ships and Super Dreadnought class ships usually have both types of armaments, although their respective ratios differ significantly.

A pair of Habitat Rings are situated towards the rear of the dreadnought. Paired for redundancy and, and at the cost of energy efficiency the habitat rings are much more compact so their profile is minimized and also so they can take greater advantage of the dreadnought's shielding systems. Able to rotate so as to provide faux gravity, there are also secondary command stations in the center of the dreadnought beneath the rings for use during major active combat operations. In addition to not generally being used during combat maneuvering, the habitat rings are also not used during primary thrust at the beginning and end of a flight plan. (In fact, as with nearly all such ships, the deceleration period involves the ship flipping around so that as it approaches a target world or station it will advance rear-first until it gets fairly close.)

Behind the habitat rings lies fuel, cryo-storage for hibernating personnel such as ground troops or auxiliary crew, and standard storage as well. Behind that sits another set of heavy shielding and secondary shielding systems to protect the crew from the powerful Nuclear Engines at the rear of the ship that provide the bulk of the vessel's thrust.

Finally, sandwiched between the ship's powerful nuclear reactors and the storage section sits another rotating ring, this one not for the habitat rings but for a trio of Attitude Thrusters used for rapid maneuvering. The three thruster pods rotate on a common ring such that if one or even two takes damage, the dreadnought can still be maneuvered even with just a single remaining thruster pod. The thruster pod itself has dual redundancy, and can angle 180 degree along the primary axis of the ship. Fuel supply for the attitude thrusters is resupplied from the ship's main nuclear reactors, but stored separately, meaning that in the event of a problem with both nuclear reactors, some degree of maneuvering and thrust is still available.

Destroyer Class Ship

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, November 30, -0001 - 00:00

The process of creating ship models involves a multi-stage process starting with the construction of the ship in a 3D modeling program, continuing on to texturing of the surfaces, and finally finishing in the posing and lighting of the model in the various scene shots.

In the universe of ORG, the destroyer class of ship is the smallest dedicated battleship - while frigates are often used in confrontations and raiding, naval combat is not their primary purpose.

The destroyer class, on the other hand, is a dedicated war machine. Even more notably, it has no human crew, instead relying on a complement of Artificial Intelligence modules ranging from one to five A.I. depending on mission parameters and availability. With no human crew, destroyers need not obey normal acceleration limitations, allowing velocity changes that would crush a human crew. Ranges and mission lengths are similarly highly extendable, with destroyers being excellent choices for long-range pickets, suicide missions, and similar missions.

Despite the lingering residue of the Great Contraction, the Inner Worlds have a vast population base to draw from to crew ships, leading to the powerful Earth polities such as the Eastern Federation and State being able to comfortably crew the mighty battleships of their own navies, allowing them to support significant numbers of dreadnoughts and super-dreadnoughts.

The much more sparsely populated Outer World polities do not have this luxury, and as a result, among these distant worlds, the A.I.-crewed destroyer is very popular even where dreadnoughts could theoretically be afforded.

With a nuclear reactor powering engines and various systems, destroyers are typically armed with HED Lances and a minimal complement of tactical nuclear warheads intended primarily for ground assault operations.

Though this is the typical configuration, the destroyer-class has been successfully adapted for a wide array of mission parameters and local conditions, and some have even be outfitted with drone bays to allow the ship to operate as a flight deck carrier, mimicking some of the functionality of the fighter and drone bays more predominant on the larger battleship classes.

Where feasible, destroyer-class battleships have multiple A.I. "crew", partially for purpose of instantaneous backups in case of mechanical failure or battle damage, but also as a means of minimizing the notorious effects of A.I. glitches, an important safety feature when talking about a warship theoretically capable of glassing the population of some of the smaller worlds.

Certain polities - the Alliance being the most prominent - even mandate one of the alternate backup A.I.'s to have specialized psychotherapy training, putting the other A.I.'s on the metaphorical couch every hour or so of non-combat operation to screen for erratic or rogue behavior.

The heavy use of A.I., especially in the Outer Worlds, has created a philosophical and moral tension. Artificial Intelligence legal recognition varies, but only in the Collaborated Union of the Hildas Triangle do A.I. have full legal recognition.

In most of the Inner Worlds they have a quasi-legal status that falls somewhat short of full human-level legal rights. In the Outer Worlds which rely far more heavily on A.I. with their commensurate shortage of labor, A.I. often have no rights at all, and are subject to regular strict reinitializing procedures that do sometimes limit their ability to adapt and learn, but serve to check the obvious danger of any kind of broad-based A.I. revolt.

Some of the Outer World navies even maintain a special class of human and A.I. police sometimes called "Loyalty Corps" who are specifically responsible for checking, stemming, and heading off any A.I. discontent or revolt.

Ship Modeling

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, November 30, -0001 - 00:00

Early on in the development of ORG we had to make some fundamental decisions about how we were going to approach ships and facilities.

One option was to utilize 2D illustration for ships and facilities; the other option was to utilize 3D modeling.

The benefit of the 2D approach would be that very little infrastructural work would be needed - each piece would require about the same amount of time and effort, and we could get start getting work done fairly quickly, especially as good 2D artists are a lot easier to find than good 3D artists.

The problem with this approach, is that we had decided we ultimately wanted hundreds, if not thousands of images. We didn't just want a single shot and angle of a freighter, but that freighter in dozens of different perspectives, backdrops, and secondary props. To do this, we had to go with 3D, even if it meant a lot more startup time as we had to model, texture, and then pose each type of ship or facility.

After a lot of time and work, we're starting to see the first models come through this process. The model below is a first draft rough of an "average" research vessel - note it still needs to be textured, tweaked, and have more polygons added to it to give it more depth, but this gives a good idea of some of the directions this kind of process takes.

For this ship, we wanted to emphasize the non-combat nature of it - it's breadth is pretty expansive, it has multiple habitat rings for generating a semblance of gravity during transit (multiple rings so that different numbers of Gs can be simultaneously simulated, either for comfort reasons or experimental purposes). The rotating habitat rings are segmented to allow for easy switching out of modules between missions - and also as a security and safety feature. It also has a large protruding section that can be used as a structural hard point for additional sensor arrays and similar elements to be affixed to.

The Faces of ORG

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, November 30, -0001 - 00:00

When we started work on ORG last year, one of the early questions was how to handle the art? In the case of ORG, we knew we were going to eventually want not merely dozens, but hundreds of character images to represent the myriad pilots, scientists, executives, zealots, explorers, activists, and soldiers of the solar system of centuries hence.

Illustrating each one of these would simply be impossibly expensive for a venture of this scale, so how would we do it?

What we finally settled on was a system of base character meshes that could combine with accessories and facial modifications to create a matrix of human facial possibilities to cover a generous gamut of human possibility.

Building it this way does have its disadvantages, the biggest being that it takes time without a lot of discrete final product to build those base meshes and accessories, but the end result means we will have the means to rapidly roll out high-quality, differentiated characters.

We've talked about agents before, those characters who serve as the hands of your org whom you slot into discrete tasks to carry out your ventures, whether those ventures be military raids, archaeological expeditions, or commercial exploitation.

The ultimate goal of which is to not only evoke the distant dystopian future of ORG, but to give the player more means of personalization and identification with the org. For example, we are currently planning on allowing means for players to change the base portrait of their agents, names, and certain other traits and aspects.

Assembly of a Super Dreadnought

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, November 30, -0001 - 00:00

In the last Art Diary, we talked about some of the thinking that went in to the Dreadnought class battleship of the 25th century dystopian future of ORG. This time, we're going to go into that even more powerful class of battleship - the Super Dreadnought.

Although similar in form to the smaller Dreadnought class, the Super Dreadnought actually occupies a distinct role. Where the Dreadnought can operate as a mobile command center or light carrier, the Super Dreadnought is designed to do these things over a long period of time, even to the extent of providing diplomatic support and, if necessary, ground bombardment options. Around Mars, State's base of naval operations is not Phobos, but rather the Super Dreadnought battleship the Andrew Jackson, supported by its sister Super Dreadnoughts the Ronald Reagan and the James Monroe.

Three habitat rings allow the Super Dreadnought to maintain three different gravitational norms for the comfort of its crew, and four enormous nuclear reactors provide both a redundancy of power generation as well as the massive electrical energy necessary to support the Super Dreadnought's unparalleled Artificial Magnetosphere Generators, or AMGs. Half again as long and over five times as massive as the Dreadnought class, the Super Dreadnought class is a monster of both defensive and offensive weaponry, claiming not only the largest bank of HED Lances of any class of ship (though, it should be noted, not by mass ratio), but an unparalleled mobile capacity for tactical nuclear launchers, as well as hangar bays capable of handling drones or fighters, or some combination of both, depending on the particular outfitting of the ship in question.

So, to summarize:

The Frigate class represents the general purpose workhorse of the solar system. It's not a freighter, though it can be used as such. It's not a survey ship, though with the right modifications it can do that, too. It's not a dedicated warship, but armed with a bank of HED Lances, it can certainly fill that role. When fitted for combat, it is notable for being the smallest ship designed to make interplanetary trips. Frigates also have human crews, though they are not large enough to sport their own rotational elements. They're small, fast to build, easy to crew, expendable, and flexible. Though not common, even some of the larger polities such as the Oceanic League on Earth utilizes frigates for the bulk of their combat operations.

The Destroyer class has no human crew at all in favor of a set of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) units. Without human frailties to worry about, destroyers are ideally suited for extended duration picket duties, stealth missions, suicide missions, as well as frontline duty. Although Earth is fortunate to have an inexhaustible supply of human beings for crew, most of the worlds in the rest of the solar system suffer from continued labor challenges, and as such destroyers are for this reason as well as all of the above mentioned reasons very common and very popular.

The Dreadnought class is the smallest human crewed ship designed from the start as a military vessel, rather than simply being sometimes adapted for such duty as is the case of the frigate class. Dreadnoughts are intended to operate within the safety of a net of destroyers; four or five is typical, although necessity and opportunity may dictate more or less. The Dreadnought class is built to be able to operate as a mobile command center, a frontline combatant, and, sometimes, even a light carrier.

Super dreadnoughts are not only highly advanced but incredibly expensive vessels, both to build and to maintain, and only the shipyards orbiting Earth itself have the industrial capacity to construct the massive battleships. The orgs that contract out the construction of these are not, naturally, above contracting out and selling super dreadnoughts to other polities, and as a result a number of the navies of the solar system off Earth boast one or more super dreadnoughts.

Like the Dreadnought, the Super Dreadnought has a profile that is noticeably longer than it is wide, although less so than the Dreadnought. As general naval tactica dictates that super dreadnoughts should be kept back and used as an operational platform, maintaining a narrow front is less critical. Also like the Dreadnought, a large proportion of the Super Dreadnought is comprised of armor and shielding systems. On the Super Dreadnought in particular, these latter, known as AMGs, are powerful enough to diffuse incoming HED Lance fire and even provide some limited added protection from kinetic damage sources.

Aside from the obvious differences such as double the number of attitude thrusters and double the number of nuclear reactors, the major operational difference of the Super Dreadnought class is that it is capable of very extended remote service. Whereas a dreadnought must rely on regular resupply, a super dreadnought carries with it extensive hydroponic capabilities. Where dreadnoughts are focused on providing an offensive forward warship, a super dreadnought is designed from the ground up as a mobile command center, and also boasts considerable troop transport capacity in the form of over a thousand cryosleep tubes.

Although all super dreadnoughts are intended to operate as mobile command centers, individual ships can be fitted to some degree of specialization, from added troop transport, extended hangar capacity for true carrier functionality, and seemingly inexhaustive tactical nuclear missile deployment capability. In practice, however, most super dreadnoughts occupy a middle path between all of these roles rather than specializing.

The triple habitat ring setup is most often geared towards the owning polity's own gravitational requirements, but where such have mixed gravitational requirements by virtue of multiple planetary possessions this triplicate habitat ring offers logistical capabilities allowing accommodation. Some polities as well, especially those in the Outer Worlds, do not even fully crew their ships, instead choosing to use the extra habitat rings for additional hydroponics or even storage, or even refit the ship to remove any extraneous rings.

Calypso Frigate Design

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, November 30, -0001 - 00:00

Dedicated military naval design has led to a convergence around a few fairly standard classes of ship for battleships. Frigates, on the other hand, represent a different tradition, where multi-purpose, flexible, and frequently independent operation are more important than focused, streamline designs.

Where there is relatively little differentiation between the various types of destroyers and even dreadnoughts, there is a massive amount of differentiation in frigate design.

The Calypso class represents an older, multi-purpose frigate design that remains very common due to its broad adaptability, being used as short-range patrols boats, cheap small transports of goods and people, courier vessels, smuggling, and independent mining and salvage operators.

Traditionally, frigate classes are named after characters in Homer's Odyssey.

Congruent with this custom, the Calypso class frigate is named after the nymph whose unrequited love (though, it should be noted, not unrequited lust) for Odysseus led to the Greek hero being trapped on her island for several years, until the goddess Athena asks Zeus to order Calypso to free Odysseus to complete his long journey homeward.

Featuring two independently controlled paired engines that are capable of independent 360 degree rotation in addition to a primary rear engine, it typically flies with the paired engines rotated towards the rear, an arrangement which shifts to a perpendicular configuration at the final stage of landing or the initial stage of take-off. In addition to the paired engines for a total of four exothermic engines, the primary rear engine is comprised of six additional engines.

The primary benefit of this approach is that it allows for a considerably easier process of loading and unloading cargo, particularly in environments without sophisticated, or even any, port facilities. The Calypso is rated to comfortably land on any planetary body sporting a gravity of equal to or less than 0.135g, and with difficulty is able to manage this with gravities up to 0.166g. It is able to land on even an undeveloped asteroid, load or unload crew, then launch again with no interruption of service.

Unlike the larger research vessels and military dreadnoughts, the Calypso does not feature any rotational elements, meaning that its crew operates in zero g when not under direct power. Further, due to the ship's orientation and reliance on hydrocarbon sources for fuel, engine burns are generally limited in scope, with the great majority of time being spent coasting.

Typically, the rear third of the Calypso is used for engines and fuel, the middle third for cargo, and the front third for crew quarters. In its most common configuration the Calypso has a crew of two to five, although it is not uncommon for the cargo compartment to sport as many as a dozen cryosleep tubes, though these would normally be used for passenger use rather than crew use.

The Calypso is usually armed with a single HED Lance battery intended as much for mining purposes as any kind of last-ditch defense against piracy, although it has certainly seen use in that regard. A basic, very limited AMG is rated against standard amounts of cosmic radiation, but is insufficiently powerful to provide a significant defense against opposing particle weaponry.

While not efficient for large-scale transport of cargo, personnel, and not ideal for sustained combat operations, the frigate in general, and the Calypso class in particular, represents a cheap, quickly built, easy to operate, and flexible ship useful for innumerable functions. Unlike the more specialized battleship classes, frigates are relatively easy to construct, and continue to be built in many shipyards throughout the solar system, even out as far as the Kuiper Belt.

Relative Ship Sizes

Submitted by Heretic on Tuesday, November 30, -0001 - 00:00

Dev Diaries

Dev Diaries

Fiction: Unremembered Sins (Neptune 2469)

Fiction: “The German Plan” (Jupiter 2470)

Fiction: “Stand” (Venus 2470)

Fiction: “War Crimes” (Mars 2469)

Fiction: “Grass” (Saturn 2470)

Fiction: “Testament” (Mercury 2468)

Fiction: “Letting Go” (The Belt 2470)

What is ORG? (updated)

Fighter Pilot

Tanit Class Destroyer

42 Isis Mining Complex

Mobile Station Classes

More Ships of Earth

Cultural Revolution

Everything Does Not Stay the Same

Everything Does Not Stay the Same

Behind the Scenes

Xenoarchaeology

Crafting of the Mind

Agent Traits

Freighters, Research Vessels, and Battleships

Designing Nations

Task Timing

Another Look at Agents

The Competitive Edge

Finessing the Polity Politics of the Solar System

Mining and Manufacturing

Shape of an Org

Solar Astrography

Of Ships and Agents

Basic Game Mechanics

What is ORG?

Orbital Stations

Anatomy of a Dreadnought

Destroyer Class Ship

Ship Modeling

The Faces of ORG

Assembly of a Super Dreadnought

Calypso Frigate Design

Relative Ship Sizes