Bored Trellum Members Create New Sport

Started by members of Trellum’s government, in order to amuse themselves while they went through their daily trading/mining/lining routines, a new sport has been developed – involving tagging each other with ion cannons.

The rules are fairly simple, whoever had been tagged last was “it”, and you could tag players at any time, at any location. This resulted in large profits for the government, as players tagged each other while orbiting Trellum, generating fines. The game was picking up popularity until a new member of government attempted to tag the president’s CM with his gunship. Fortunately, his escape pod was picked up within the hour.

President e1ement reports that he has received so many distress beacons that if he received another, he’d personally go and kill the person who sent it out. Deals to televise the some-what dubious sport with the CSSN (ChosenSpace Sports News) have so far been unsuccessful.

Story Courtesy of Cpt. checkmateman, Marshal of the Trellum Republic

Practical Self Defense – Out and About Part 2

Special thanks to Cpt. Aposter

Read the first part of this post here.

Getting Away

Once you feel happy that the trail has been lost, spend the rest of your turns hopping through deep space. Do not go near any planets or other landmarks, and do not go towards what you consider safe ground. These could allow your attacker to pick up your trail later, whereas the point of the exercise is to ensure that if the find your trail, its should be near the beginning and thus they have to waste as many turns as you do following it. With luck, this should make their attack less effective even if they do catch up with you. If however, you are already short on turns, it can be a better option to just stay where you are and hope….

If you feel you may be followed later on, but not at the moment, try to run through busy planets on a regular basis. These planets have so many other ships running through them that your trail should be obliterated by the trails of other people.

If you do ever find yourself in a situation where standing and fighting might be sensible (your attacker has a faster or weaker ship than you) then consider trying to damage their engines first. This gives you the chance to run away that you might require later. If however you are short on turns and your attacker is significantly weaker, then maybe you should just go for the kill. In this situation be mindful of the huge bribe cost you can build when fighting above a planet, even if it is self defense.

That’s pretty much all I have to say on online defense. Keep your eyes open, and take some basic precautions, and you should be fine.

Practical Self Defense – Out and About Part 1

Special Thanks to Cpt. Aposter

Once again, I will remind people to remember the golden rule. Its always your choice on how much to spend on safety precautions, be it credits, turns or real life time. Spending any or all of these can make you safer, but can never make you safe.  Some of the precautions below may seem a little over the top. Please remember I am writing this purely from a self-defense point of view. Although these measures can save you credits for buying a new ship, they can also cost profits lost through over-alertness.

Out and About
How to prepare and watch for attacks when you are online, and what to do when they happen.

Security

A useful piece of preparation which you cannot buy from a shipyard is security. How much security you want or need is your own choice to make, but you need to ask yourself some questions firsts. Are you planning to defend yourself purely from attacks made to kill? If so, security is little use to you, apart from having some friends to go down with the ship while you shamelessly run for the escape pod. Are you planning to log off at a spacedock? If so you want as much security as you can get, although more on that later.

The main online use for security is deterring or fighting off pirate attacks. Many of the stronger pirates already have enough high quality troopers to kill pretty much anything you have. Not all though, especially since the supply of such troopers is limited, and many people want them. High quality security is available, and its up to you how much you spend, but I would recommend at least some.

There are three main forms of online attack to watch for, on the hop piracy, deliberate hits to kill, and newbies on a killing spree.

If you have followed my earlier advice, you should have no problem with the third of these. This is useful, because it reduces the amount of paranoia required to operate safely.

Practical Self Defense – Series by Aposter

Practical Self-Defense, or how to survive a bit more than you really should.

By Aposter, contributing editor

This is an odd assortment of tips on combat, weapon and upgrade choice, where to stay and other such things. They are written by a pirate, an assassin, someone who doesn’t necessarily do too much self-defense of his own, but knows how to pick a target. Ironically it doesn’t say too much about the actual fighting, since most people can work that bit out by themselves.

There is however, one golden rule: -

YOU CAN NEVER PROTECT YOURSELF ENTIRELY FROM EVERYTHING.

There are no guarantees in this game. If you bear that in mind while you are playing, you will probably work out the rest of this article for yourself.

Moving swiftly on….

At the shipyard

Ship choice is something I don’t dwell on too much, since its should be down to each individual player to make their own choice. What I will say, however, is that it is worth picking a ship with 1 gun slot on it. Why? To deter raptor pilots. More will give you more protection, but invoke the golden rule before spending lots of cash on extra protection.

SHIELDS are the single most important upgrade, from a self defense point of view. Get the best you can afford, even if it means going into debt. Shields increase the difficulty of an “on the hop” piracy hit exponentially, as well as giving you better assassination and offline protection than the equivalent cost in guns would.

Cloaking shields are worth a thought for the defensive player, although they give no protection in a physical sense, in actuality the protection of being invisible is pretty large. Note that you are still detectable by a very persistent player. And try not to get into fights, the repairs on armour are irritating.

Armour is obviously important. But how important?? The answer is it depends what you might be facing. Against a CM or other large warship, armour is little protection from the rail guns which will chew through it like a juicy fruit. But if you are envisioning smaller fights, against smaller opponents, the extra protection may be worthwhile, if for nothing but to burn up their turns, and survive until the spacedock shields go up.

GUNS are obviously important, and I would recommend even a miner getting one or two of the best guns they can load. But ultimately, the golden rule suggests that you shouldn’t waste too much money, unless you want to get into fights.

ION CANNONS are worthless for self defense. Who is going to cringe at a gun which won’t damage their hull? How can it protect you offline? While a good offensive weapon, especially for pirates, I wouldn’t load these onto a freighter like so many do.

On the other hand, discovering that a raptor attacked your offline self, and your ship blew it to smithereens, is always entertaining.

Other upgrades: – targeting is useful, but not 100% necessary. The same can be said for nanobots, which do not actually repair you, but accelerate your shield recovery time. Worthless if you don’t have shields, obviously.

HARDPOINTS are also available, although at this moment in time, the only one worth talking about is a trail generator. For just 100 extra turns on a jump, you can send off ion trails in all different directions, confusing any pursuers. This is an extremely valuable piece of equipment.

FIGHTERS are a bit of a problem… how much do you need them? The only time they are useful is when another person attacks you with fighters. Only people with lots of fighters use them much, so the protection you can slap on your ship might not be worth it.

If you have cash going spare, buy fighters. If not, don’t worry too much.

That’s about everything to say about ships and upgrades.

Next installments; “Out and About” and “When you log off”

Image by The Animaniac, Scifi-Meshes.com

Prolix Government Overthrown

President Miasma of Prolix, and the rest of the Republic members were killed following a coup that left the government in anarchy.

Miasma was in an FR-Mark XI in a space dock orbiting Prolix. Sources say that Cpt. Artemis, of Dahir, and Cpt. Inpu, of the System Lord Alliance are primary figures in the event. Both Dahir and the System Lord Alliance are pledged to the Black Rose Alliance.

Rx_79_Gundam claimed responsibility for Miasma’s death.

Aside from the destroyed Mark XI (value, approximately 2 billion credits, 5,000+ points,) there was relatively little damage; all outposts remained in control of Prolix with the except of the space dock where Miasma was killed, which is now in control of the System Lord Alliance.

Cpt. Inpu has informed CSN that the space dock is now a shipyard.

Cpt. Stealth is the favorite in Prolix’s upcoming election.

Leader of Lax Council Self-Destructs

Rex Olson, High Lord of the Lax Council, self-destructed recently as a sign of good-faith, after his ship was heavily damaged. On the Galactic Comms, he agreed to self-destruct his CM-5000. No real confirmation on whether his escape pod was rescued.

Cpt. Sirus Voxx took command of the Lax Counci following Olson’s demise. Voxx declared peace after declaring he was in no way related to the rebellion incited by his leader.

Shots Fired Above Lax – Half of Lax government members killed

4788.50 CE – A number of ships operated by Lax government members were destroyed, recently, in quick succession. Details are sporadic, but losses are reported to be at least on FR-Mark XI, along several light freighters or corvettes.

The primary motive of the attack appears to be retribution, in return for treason and slander on the part of Lax’s ruler, Rex Olson.