STGOD: A Dead Art?

[Dark Hellion]

Thanks Darkevil, that is exactly what I wanted. You have cat people, sit and watch a couple cats for a while and then extrapolate up. Start randomly cuddling with diplomats until they give you a bowl of milk, then crap in their shoes and act like you earned it.

And I get to get sleep this week, so my posts should become far more intelligent. If I sleep all week i'll only be a few weeks behind. Yah!

[Darkevilme]

I have a cat at home, she's so lazy she could be dead for days and we wouldn't notice until someone realized she wasnt turning up to eat her food. If i use that as my role model the chamaran ability to give a shit about the galaxy just became zero ^^

But yeah, i must reassess my species, then blow up ebil zealot spacerobots with nukes....*grins*

[Crossroads Inc.]

Speaking of NGTO all this time... Any luck contacting the other members Starglider?

As for "aliens acting like Humans"

I might be a bit guilty of that, But of course I have five times the amount of aliens to keep track of...

[Starglider]

Speaking of NGTO all this time... Any luck contacting the other members Starglider?

DEM, you and me are obviously still playing.
Acidburns is around but busy ATM and still catching up on the story.
Redleader seems a little busy at the moment but is definitely still playing.
Rhoenix left the game.
I received this PM from A-Wing_Slash five weeks back;

For the next few weeks my access to the internet is going to be spotty, at best. I'll still be able to post, but the'll be few and far between, and I was wondering if I could give you some proxy control over my fleet. Nothing much, just so that if shit goes down you could drop a reference to Bear ships taking part. Would you be up for that?

I said yes, but I haven't heard anything from him since.

I might be a bit guilty of that, But of course I have five times the amount of aliens to keep track of...

Well in your case they act like stereotypical furries instead of humans

[Crossroads Inc.]

Hey, I techniclly, only have ONE "furrie" planet... I have a:

A Planet of Religious Pacifist Dragon ludites.
A Planet of Heavy G, Orange bowling ball shapped Steampunk tech aliens.
A Planet of short orangeish 'humanoid' Perfectionist aliens with Giraffe horns.
A Planet of, for all intensive purposes, creatures resembeling "The Honeycomb" monsters.
And ONE planet with a Warrior Wolf race, and a scheming Cat race. There the only "real" furries so


Oh yeah, Ialso have an All Powerful Rampant Meglomanical AI, but he doesn't count as his own Race.

[Beowulf]

I'll point out that everyone so far (with two exceptions) have only seen my guys in hazardous environment suits.

[Nephtys]

So! I'm back from vacation and ready to cause more stirrups. I read the thread, but can I get the cliffnotes?

[Redleader34]

Nephtys, How do the STMC think, by the way. I've gone all Macross on one of your ships, BTW

[Hotfoot]

So! I'm back from vacation and ready to cause more stirrups. I read the thread, but can I get the cliffnotes?

A page or so back in this thread there's a decent summation of the game thus far. Beyond that, there's the current battle of the skullduggerous sorts.

[Dark Hellion]

I am a bit tipsy at the moment but I am very glad that I aired my complaint and got positive feedback. I did not mean for it to be a positive accusation but just a minor gripe that probably went mostly unnoticed.

I am overall very happy about the major events of the game (despite my precarious position) I was simply frustated by the occational OOC comments that seemed to mistake RPing with what the player should do. You write your race to make mistakes. The mistakes are what make it fun. They cause wars, mayhem, and the occational illicit sexromp (come on guys, we can NC-17 this in no time). If everyone plays perfect we don't have shit happen. I am glad that people are stirring up shit. I love Beowulf for his backstab. I would kiss you, but you have to buy me a beer first.

Love yall, good night. For now.

[Crossroads Inc.]

The bate is set!

Now I sit back and see just how hard it is to resist metgaming NOW!

MWA HA HA HA!

[Dahak]

Where was someone who fires a warning shot as a sign of respect?

Any sapient worthy of the name would hold back on such highly context-dependent gestures in a first contact situation - assuming otherwise really is Trek-writer levels of stupidity. Thinking objectively takes effort, but yes there really are game-theoretic objective axioms for behaviour in the same way that maths is an objective basis for describing reality. Any species capable of the scientific progress required to build FTL drives is capable of not acting like a moron, unless they are in fact insane (admittedly a popular choice in STGODs, because being rational about everything important is kinda boring).

But the point is, and the one I think Dark Hellion was trying to make, is that what you think of as sensible heavily depends on your culture.
The warning-shot, for instance, could be the most sensible thing to do for a species because of their history, so why shouldn't they do it? (And start shooting YOU for not giving a warning shot because it's a huge insult...). You call it insane simply because it is insane within the boundaries of your thinking and cultural guidelines. There is no intrinsic insanity in it and no galactic "Thou shalt not fire shots of repect" rule.

There is no "objective" thinking in this, because you simply cannot just put your cultural baggage away and think like another species and what they would do. As mentioned, even for current Earth you need highly trained specialists to think and understand other human nations. And if you've been abroad, you know that there are a lot of things you do that are perfectly sensible to you which, at best, will make the other nation's people laugh at you.

[Hotfoot]

The bate is set!

Now I sit back and see just how hard it is to resist metgaming NOW!

MWA HA HA HA!

Who is Harold, why does he have space, and what does the mets game have to do with it?

[Starglider]

But the point is, and the one I think Dark Hellion was trying to make, is that what you think of as sensible heavily depends on your culture.

What you /intuitively/ think of as sensible depends on your culture and more importantly species. But logic is logic. Nations taking it seriously do not just wing it, unless they are a hell of a lot more impulsive and irrational than humans.

You call it insane simply because it is insane within the boundaries of your thinking and cultural guidelines. There is no intrinsic insanity in it and no galactic "Thou shalt not fire shots of repect" rule.

No, I call it insane because there is no strong first-principles justification for it but there is a fairly strong case /against/ it. I've read a lot of this kind of analysis with regard to working out what the behaviour of de novo AGIs will do and done some of it myself. Everything is /not/ relative. There /are/ absolutes.

occational illicit sexromp (come on guys, we can NC-17 this in no time

I threatened to use the STGOD as an excuse to make people read furry porn by having characters discuss vital plot information while having sex, but just about everyone in the SDNET room at the time said they'd lynch me if I did.

The bate is set!
Now I sit back and see just how hard it is to resist metgaming NOW!

Looks fine to me; presumably you piggybacked some info onto that last comms pulse and had already had the encryption keys to decode the message as it traversed the NGTO relay station it was aimed at. But since the attack is still ongoing, you won't know what happens to the Pirate & League fleets yet, and realistically it should be a while before anyone can respond to that.

As for the probes I was under the impression no one really knows where Kitaka space is - though presumably lots of scout ships have mysteriously disappeared without a trace when attempting to that region of space (there may be quite a few such regions though).

[Dahak]

But the point is, and the one I think Dark Hellion was trying to make, is that what you think of as sensible heavily depends on your culture.

What you /intuitively/ think of as sensible depends on your culture and more importantly species. But logic is logic. Nations taking it seriously do not just wing it, unless they are a hell of a lot more impulsive and irrational than humans.

Why is it logical about not giving of warning shots as greetings? Just because from your point of view, it is. But for another species, it is the logical thing to do. Maybe because they are a deeply honour-bound society and not doing it would go against their whole cultural and mental stucture? Or another myriad completely alien ideas.
I don't see how you can decide universally what is logical or not, or what is sane or insane when it comes down to behaviour, from a completely seperated culture and historical background.

You call it insane simply because it is insane within the boundaries of your thinking and cultural guidelines. There is no intrinsic insanity in it and no galactic "Thou shalt not fire shots of repect" rule.

No, I call it insane because there is no strong first-principles justification for it but there is a fairly strong case /against/ it. I've read a lot of this kind of analysis with regard to working out what the behaviour of de novo AGIs will do and done some of it myself. Everything is /not/ relative. There /are/ absolutes.

And how do you arrive at your conclusion of these absolutes...? Why should "not giving warning shots as respect" be one of those? And why should every species, with a completely different history, culture, and background arrive at the same ones?
I don't say it wouldn't be an insane thing to do, but I know that I say it with my cultural baggage in mind.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Who is Harold, why does he have space, and what does the mets game have to do with it?

OK, so I missed an "A" in there, however techniclly, if I understand Dark Hellion correctly, "Xylyx" is the all powerful God race his people are working to over throw... Not the direct name of his race.

As for the probe off toward Beowulf. Your right that no one knows "Exactly" where he is, but I would imagine RUDI has enough information to make a good educated guess.

[Beowulf]

As for the probe off toward Beowulf. Your right that no one knows "Exactly" where he is, but I would imagine RUDI has enough information to make a good educated guess.

The best generally available information on the Kitaka is that they're somewhere north of Sol. Every time the Kitaka has met with a power, they've tried to disguise the path the ships would be taking. Given that they've been cloaked ships doing such, it's not hard to do so.

Space is big. It's likely it'll search but find nothing but empty space.

[Starglider]

The vanguard unit of the Pirate attack was only a few hours from it's target

This would be skipping over a critical event if events were occuring on my original timeline. There's two ways to reconcile this; push the definition of 'a few hours' or increase the effective speed of the ships. I'll compromise.

[InnocentBystander]

RedLeader, you realize you've got a laser gun pointed at a loudspeaker, right?

Also... why are diplomats being let into the coalition building with firearms?

[Thirdfain]

This would be skipping over a critical event if events were occuring on my original timeline. There's two ways to reconcile this; push the definition of 'a few hours' or increase the effective speed of the ships. I'll compromise.

For god' sakes, this is taking forever. How about you just PM me your overall intentions and we can work this all out at once rather than stabbing away in the dark?

Oh, and PS: Crossroads, your probes are all over the place, but frankly, I don't see why. It takes dozens if not hundreds of massive, manned, un-stealthy facilities to provide even moderate tracking coverage in the Polish Republic. A single tiny stealth-probe would only be able to track FTL signatures over a fairly small area, and unless the ships passed nearby, it wouldn't be getting much more information than "big ship" or "little ship." Also, if it's sucking in all the quintillions of FTL-comm messages from a trillion sources which criss-cross the Core territories on the 'Net, the private comm corporations, the encrypred military bands, the top-secret tightbeams, and re-broadcasting them to some home base for analysis, well, you'd have better spent some points on that bad boy is all I'm saying.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Oh, and PS: Crossroads, your probes are all over the place, but frankly, I don't see why. It takes dozens if not hundreds of massive, manned, un-stealthy facilities to provide even moderate tracking coverage in the Polish Republic. A single tiny stealth-probe would only be able to track FTL signatures over a fairly small area, and unless the ships passed nearby, it wouldn't be getting much more information than "big ship" or "little ship." Also, if it's sucking in all the quintillions of FTL-comm messages from a trillion sources which criss-cross the Core territories on the 'Net, the private comm corporations, the encrypred military bands, the top-secret tightbeams, and re-broadcasting them to some home base for analysis, well, you'd have better spent some points on that bad boy is all I'm saying.

All its doing is listening. Each probe has an advanced AI that determins if something is "useful" They arn't pulling in EVERY transmission that floats by, only ones that might be useful. As for encrypted bands, that would be too overt and put them at risk of being discovered. If i am going to crack a miltiary network, I'd send a speciallized starship to do it.

As for having only "One" probe per area, im not out to gather intel of ALL polish, or anyone elses space, its just a snap shot, a very quick Sampeling of one location and ara to see what it hits.

For right now the Probes are simply recording anything 'interesting' and sending it back to RUDI (hopefully without being noticed)

That sound better?

[Thirdfain]

Rock on! totally cool.

[Starglider]

For god' sakes, this is taking forever.

Yeah, I wanted to co-ordinate with White Haven first, plus chronologically this should be happening well after the FEA-Kitaka battle. Unfortunately White Haven seems to be busy and its taking (real time) days to chase down those last FEA ships.

Never mind, I've gone ahead anyway.

How about you just PM me your overall intentions and we can work this all out at once rather than stabbing away in the dark?

I'll post all the planning materials after the battle.

Crossroads, your probes are all over the place, but frankly, I don't see why. It takes dozens if not hundreds of massive, manned, un-stealthy facilities to provide even moderate tracking coverage in the Polish Republic.

Maybe he's hoping to pick up something useful in the aftermath of this attack - it'll take a while for those probes to get into position after all.

A note on comms; I'd expect basically everyone to be using one-time pads for their fleet transmissions. You can fit at least terabytes of random noise on a data crystal, enough for a fleet's normal ship-to-shore communications for any reasonable cruise. Really huge amounts of data like detailed scans probably use advanced block ciphers with a one time key encrypted using the one time pad. The only realistic way to compromise this sort of comms is to have your intel services steal the pad - or have an agent on the ship compromise the comms system - but intercepting the beam will reveal ship location and probably type (if it's a known signature).

[Dark Hellion]

When my embassy on earth becomes completed it will be doing similar things to the Earth sphere transmissions, monitoring which ones are routine and when one isn't it will prioritize it and then send the encrypted file to the decrypters at home.

Note that this isn't going to be done in any exceptionally sneaky manner. The Heralds consider it par for course, and fully expect others to do it too.

[rhoenix]

Bloody shit, I just can't stay away, even though I won't be able to post or plot as much as before.

Consider my resignation retracted. The Golden Sky Combine is not dead. (Even if I have to read quite a bit before I start things again)