SST History by Ray Yeargin

SST History http://librenix.com/sst/history.html

18:30 March 14, 2002

The following was written in response to the outcry that arose when I
announced that I would be converting the Continuum of Chaos game to a
new version of the Starship Traders (SST) software that had, up to that
time, been running only in a test game at starshiptraders.com.

It was intended to be a short explanation of my thoughts on why the SST
software should be significantly modified yet again. However, instead of
a bit of background and context, it turned into a short, but nearly
complete history of the game lineage, leading into the real argument for
change only at the end.

Czarwars/Seawars/Tsarwars/The Last Resort/Starship Traders all were
changed, improved, and, once, completely rewritten in a new language in
pursuit of a better multiuser, telnet and html-based strategy game. And
the new variant, Starship Traders II, will probably itself lead to
something else eventually. Read on for a clue as to what that might be.,


17:00 March 5, 2002

In the beginning...

It was the fall of 1986. There was a BBS in Tallahassee called "The
Eagle's Nest" that ran Chris Sherrick's version of a game inspired by
Hewlett-Packard's "Star Trader", originally published in the "People's
Book of Computer Games". Chris' version was called Trade Wars 2, a
derivative of some other author's interpretation of Star Trader. I
forget who wrote that first version of Trade Wars. I never got the
chance to play it and didn't know anyone else who had ever even seen it.

Anwyay, I discovered that text-based, single-user BBS door game, TW2,
and _really_ liked it. It had such potential, yet it was so deeply
flawed and limited -- from my perspective. I was a programmer and had a
copy of Microsoft's QuickBASIC for my 8088-based Zenith PC. I decided to
write the game that I saw struggling to get out of TW2. TW2 was played
in a 99-sector universe, and was filled with aliens, called "the Cabal"
that would harrass the players and generally prevent the kind of
human-versus-human strategy game that I envisioned. My first running
version was two months in the making, 350 sectors in size, and, I
thought, a huge improvement over TW2. But, mostly, my game was
extendable. Enlisting the help of my wife, Lynn, and my friend, Scott
Anderson, we designed new galaxies and I added them to the new Czarwars
universe. Each of these new galaxies would be unconnected to the others
and would have its own unique structure. We drew each galaxy on sheets
of construction paper from which I entered them manually via a crude map
editor function of the game. Czarwars was designed as a stand-alone
bulletin board system (BBS) which would answer the phone for each
player, let them play, and then wait on the next player. The initial
games worked well and had 30 or 40 players per day in the one and only
game. Wormholes, black holes, pulsars, starbases, and many other new
features entered via that version. Every port and planet had its own
unique name then. It seemed that naming the ~750 ports and planets was
the hardest task.

I made a variant of Czarwars called Sea Traders. Sea Traders was,
functionally, exactly the same game, but was played in an ocean filled
with ships, islands, ports, and typhoons. Everything in Czarwars had a
corresponding item in Sea Traders to do the exact same function. Some
people really liked the oceanic scenario. I didn't like it that much but
it was a lot of fun to create.

Next, I bought a BBS, PCBoard, to host the game. I converted Czarwars to
a PCBoard-compatible 'door' program that could be entered from the main
BBS. I called this new door version Tsarwars, to distinguish it from the
standalone BBS, Czarwars. Somewhere along the way, it acquired the
ability to be expanded into a 4000-sector game. The top 2000 sectors
were an exact mirror image of the bottom, right down a clone of the
planet Cosmos in sector 4000. Various other enhancements were made as
the game evolved until the summer of 1993, when we moved to a new
telephone exchange area and, consequently, lost the BBS phone number
forever. That was the end of the DOS- based Czarwars/Tsarwars BBS and
door games for me. At that point, the game was strictly a local
phenomenon, since each player had to dial directly into the game. The
long distance calls that did come in were to download a copy of the game
to run locally in the caller's town. Someone actually downloaded it at
1200-bps from Australia once. It seemed to take hours. I remember hoping
that one of our many thunderstorms didn't come up during his download!
At its peak in the late '80's or early '90's, there were Czarwars games
running on about seven different BBS's in Tallahassee.

That heyday was followed by three years of darkness -- the longest
period, by far, where the evolution of the game paused. Even during this
idle period, however, I thought about it, wished I had written it in C,
and considered how a multiuser, networked, version would work.

By the summer of 1996 I had been running Linux for a year and was
itching for a programming project. I had a Pentium PC and, under Linux,
it was a computing monster of a system. I missed Czarwars and now had a
powerful computer and a serious, networked operating system. I had long
since had my fill of MS's proprietary languages so I started the new
Tsarwars project from scratch in C. Like the first Czarwars, it took
about two months to get the first functional game running. This time,
however, I needed an Internet connection in order to make it work. Hayes
Computer Systems graciously allowed me to put my new server (Micron
Pentium 133, 64 MB RAM, SCSI controller, fast enough to support many
concurrent users!) on their floor beside the Tallahassee Freenet system.
The game came up in October 1996, and supported telnet over the
Internet. This time, it was properly multiuser so I added a radio to the
new design. Online battles were not supported at first, so all ships
were cloaked while the user was logged on and playing. When they logged
off, their ship winked back into visibility and they could be attacked.
Meanwhile, I worked on a web interface to the game. In December 1996, I
brought up the first web interface. It was all still a single executable
that now listened on two different TCP ports. Life was good. That
version brought us up to 64,000-sector games, a truly vast play area,
and automated the ability to run up to 250 games in a single instance of
the software with automatic promotions to higher-level games.

The only actual code that had survived from the DOS versions of the game
were the port and planet names, now assigned randomly and reused since
there were far more than 750 total ports and planets in the universe.

My first hacked together web interface was crude, but it mostly worked.
It wasn't nearly as smooth as the telnet interface but far more people,
even then, understood the browser and used it than a telnet client. It
didn't take long before most of the traffic was on the web interface.
Within a few weeks of the first web interface coming online, I announced
in the msg base that a new web interface was coming with various
enhancements and "a whole new look". I remember one of the objections;
"We like the game as it is. We don't want a 'whole new look'" wrote the
protester. I introduced the new version anyway. Later, that particular
objector allowed as to how the new version had turned out to be an
improvement. I learned one thing from that upgrade; if a change is
proposed to an existing, working system, someone will always object.

The first years of Tsarwars were full of rapid evolution for the game. I
thought hard before adding features, and even harder before removing
features. In the end, I added far more than I removed. Long-time players
will remember "toll fighters", "passworded fighters", Pulsars, sine
wave-based wormhole movement, and maybe even one or two varieties of
'ghost ship bugs'.

The game that came out of it, by the beginning of 1999, was a pretty
coherent and playable game. That's when I began designing a completely
new scenario, "The Last Resort". You can still type in "X TLRIntro" and
see the original welcome message to The Last Resort. TLR was and remains
my favorite scenario and I threaten to bring it back at random
intervals. [Don't provoke me. I'll do it... I swear!] TLR wasn't a
straight retrofit of Tsarwars. It was a new game that borrowed what code
it could and added everything else it needed. The recently-added
autopilot was integrated into the other navigation and movement commands
and the menu was considerably simplified. In TLR ports and planets
became small machines and slightly larger, semi-portable factories.
People walked around without conveyances of any kind and used microbots
to make and buy things, cash having been long since obsoleted since the
city was cut off from civilization. There were no galaxies or sectors
there. The game was played in run-down luxury hotels and individual
locations became hotel rooms. The abandoned machines and factories were
unnamed but took the name of their owner. The entire scenario from the
original Czarwars was gone. The only significant piece of any kind that
remained was, once again, the names of the ports -- now used to name the
many hotels in Io Resort. By that point, we had added live battles, were
up to 256,000 rooms in the city of hotels, the eXamine online
documentation system, and many other changes, large and small.

TLR ran for about 5 or 6 months until June 1999. Meanwhile, I was
planning to register the name Tsarwars.com but, alas, Star Wars Episode
I was coming out and someone bought up Tsarwars.com because it happened
to be a typo for Starwars.com. I hadn't noticed that so I had been in no
hurry to register it myself. Unfortunately, the new registrants seemed
at the time to be planning a website that I didn't want to ever
inadvertantly draw in a Tsarwars player so I decided to change the name.
That would cause much confusion, of course, so I also decided to change
the code at the same time. I converted the new TLR code back into a
Tsarwars scenario and renamed the whole thing Starship Traders,
registered starshiptraders.com, and turned off The Last Resort.

Even after converting it back, it didn't look very much like Tsarwars
anymore. In addition to the changes listed above, you had to have iron
to make fighters, hardware to make bases, and even alcohol to launch
graffiti. The port types got new names to be more consistent with the
new commodities that they offered, taken directly from TLR as they were.

This 'merge' of the new TLR back into the old Tsarwars scenario, with
the countless changes necessary to accomodate the new functionality, was
and remains the largest change to ever happen to the game line in a
single move. There were surprisingly few complaints, considering the
scope of the change which took about six months to initially write and
evolve. That change was about five times the code and functionality
change of the current proposed version change -- and it loomed larger
still because it affected a smaller code base. More changes were
incrementally added to the new "SST" game including player-made
wormholes, team-only games, custom ships, homing devices, damageable
defensive starbases, and many more.

Around March of 2001 I wrote the first 3D graphical client for SST and
added the crude beginnings of a client interface to the server software.
The client side of that project has since been taken over by Katrina
Kirellii and ported to Windows where it is seeing steady improvement.
The new Windows version will still compile and run under Linux, as well.

In June of 2001 I brought up the 1,000,000 sector version and began the
first persistent game, the "Continuum of Chaos". The new game added
16,000-sector galaxies and a variety of other small changes. The
never-ending "CoC" game wasn't claimed to be never changing; it was
instead the first game that I had ever started without a scheduled end
date. My plans were for it to grow and remain a viable game,
indefinitely. Many small changes have been made to the software that
runs that game, as it is the centerpiece game of the latest version of
the code. In the nine months since the debut of CoC and the
million-sector software, about 500 lines of code have been added or
changed in the SST code, and some unknown number of lines have been
removed.

Which brings us to where we are today. I have long felt that in creating
the customizable ships based on finely variable ratios between shields,
cargo holds, and combat computers, that I introduced a flaw into the
game. Players could build custom ships, but, in practice, there was
little commitment to a particular ship configuration. By making them
finely tunable, inexpensive, and cheap to convert again and again, I had
merely introduced more 'gotchas' for newbies. Mostly it would be newbies
who would attack a 20,000 fighter fleet without first unloading their
holds and adding combat computers. They would be making a silly tactical
mistake that served no real purpose in the game other than to add a way
for someone to screw up. That is not the kind of complexity that I want
in a game. This game line has been intended from the very beginning to
be a place where the universe imposes a few laws and player
determination, careful planning, cunning alliances, sneaky diversions,
and clever strategies are what separates and differientiates the teams
and players. I have no interest in making a game where there is no
purpose for combat computers and shields, other than a way to trip up a
clever, but inexperienced, player.

That is what I inadvertantly created in my last attempt at
differientiated ship types. That scheme had the virtue of considerable
flexibility and very low complexity. Unfortunately, it didn't accomplish
its goal. I don't know why it took me this long to address the problem.
The new version, 'SST2', was created specificially to fix that problem
by creating genuine tradeoffs between the ships and to make ship choice
and configuration a real component of strategy. The new devices are a
part of that strategy since they are a significant piece of the tradeoff
decision. Even after reading this quickie explanation, I don't expect
everyone to understand why I am doing this, and, yes, I know it will be
different. That _is_ the point. I think it will be a better game this
way at the cost of only a small amount of extra complexity. As you have
read this history, you must now realize that the game has evolved from
day 1 and has not stopped yet. No, this game isn't perfect and never
will be. However, I think it can be better. I think the difference
between a good game and an otherwise similar but bad game correlates
with the ratio between variability of strategy and detail complexity.
The better games allow wide-ranging strategies from a very few
components and functions. That, along with a minimum of arbitrary rules,
points in the direction where I have always tried to move this game.

I think the game is successful judging by the type of players that it
attracts. The new version of the software represents a continuation of
the very approach that got the game to where it is.

Classic News Post from OMGN: SST: The Last Resort Round 2

SST: The Last Resort Round 2
By: Charles Rector | Game Announcement | 1:58am, September 8, 2005
Round 2 of the Starship Traders game at The Last Resort at ioresort.com has begun today.

Here are the settings for this round:

__Game0 settings__
119: day game length
On: players can move machines
On: players can move bunkers
Off: jetpacks open TransportTubes
5: days production is machine capacity
1330: percent productivity bonus here
4000000: Rooms current game size
4000000: Rooms maximum game size
2400000: units energy issued per day
Off: wargame option - prevents first half attacks
20: active packs per 4000 Rooms causes expansion
0: percent of rep points captured on player kill
Off: reuse same map in future games
15: maximum level of bunkers
15000: price of a #1 securitybot
12: maximum gang size
0: minimum gang size

SST on Wikipedia

Starship Traders (RPG)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wiki letter w.svg
This article is an orphan, as no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from related articles; suggestions may be available. (February 2009)
Starship Traders (SST) is a free text based massively multiplayer online roleplaying game in the vein of the classic Star Trader style of games. SST was created in 1999 by Ray Yeargin.

Contents  [hide]
1 Starship Traders development history
1.1 Czarwars/Tsarwars/The Last Resort [version I]/Starship Traders [version I]
2 Starshiptraders description [1]
3 Economics
3.1 Computrade
3.2 Autoscoop
4 List of Game Servers
5 Notes
6 External links
Starship Traders development history[edit source | editbeta]

The inception of Starship Traders can be traced back as far as 1986.
Czarwars/Tsarwars/The Last Resort [version I]/Starship Traders [version I][edit source | editbeta]
The best summary of the development history from 1986 to 2002 is this article written by creator Ray Yeargin.
Starshiptraders description [1][edit source | editbeta]

"Starship Traders (SST) is an online, multiplayer webgame where players play independently or form teams. When you enter the game you'll be issued a starship with cargo holds, a lot of fuel, and a little cash. By hauling commodities between planets and ports you can earn microbots (money) which you can use to buy fighters, upgrade your ship, build a bunker, make starbases, or buy other handy items. You can use your fighters to attack other players' ships, you can mine a galaxy with attack-mode starbases, or you can guard key sectors with defensive starbases. Or, you might join a team and, together with your teammates, attempt to dominate a large and lucrative galaxy for your exclusive use. Or, perhaps you might prefer to join the war of resistance and help topple the ruthless overlords of the universe..."
Economics[edit source | editbeta]

Players produce revenue by purchasing and selling three types of commodities at ports. Each port buys two types of product, the third type it produces itself. Planets give away large quantities of free product, however, the planets purchase no product themselves. SST provides built-in tools to help new (and lazy veteran) players automatically make trades: Computrade and Autoscoop. Both Autoscoop and Computrade use more fuel than if their actions had been performed manually.
Computrade[edit source | editbeta]
Computrade will automatically purchase product at a port, move to another sector and sell said product, looking out for the best prices. Computrade will perform up to 16 trades at a time depending on the player's title. Lesser titles will be able to perform trades fewer times per Computrade. Computrade's command shortcut is 'C'.
Autoscoop[edit source | editbeta]
Autoscoop will pick up free product from a planet and sell it at a port in the same sector. Autoscoop requires the player's ship to be equipped with a Planet Scooper. Autoscoop's shortcut command is '$'.
List of Game Servers[edit source | editbeta]

starshiptraders.com the original gameserver, shut down since January 2005
The Last Resort: A Holiday In Hell ("official" successor game to original Starship Traders) - running since 15 January 2005
Starship Traders: The Extended Last Frontier (fan-run gameserver using previous Starship Traders codebase) - running since at least 30 December 2005
Notes

SST Alternate Yahoo! News Group

http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/SST-Alternate/


SST-Alternate · Starship Traders & The Last Resort News

From the Official Description:

Description

CHECK OUT THE GAME at http://ioresort.com

A unique combination of trading, strategy, and roleplaying.

This is the Starship Traders / The Last Resort / Space Tyrant community portal. Here we talk about the game we love, not the technical aspects of the graphical client or server (that has its own group).

Be sure to check out the various sections (files, links, database, etc.) There are a number of helpful resources for new players included here. Feel free to post in-game news (war reports and such), ideas about the game community, articles, links, tips, etc.

[Above: an image of the entry page of the new server at ioresort.com]

-cracken01, Group Moderator since June 2004

[15 January 2005 go to http://ioresort.com for the new 4 million sector/room game!]

Un-official SST Website

From:  http://www.angelfire.com/games2/starshiptraders/index.html


This page primarily upkept(barely) by Illqo

News

Under Construction (itll probably be under construction forever seeing my past examples of HTML usage)Hopefully ill be getting this done faster -nope still taking my time it seems

Jan 3 ,2001=Seems the world made it to a new Century yeah, uhh added a few additions to the Most Wanted Site something i have forgotten to do these names and descriptions are copied dir from my email account so don'nt complain please, also when you write a description please do a better job(you will see what I mean when you read them)

Articles

How to Con
CON


Pages

Most Wanted(a.k.a who im mad at this week)
Most Wanted

Links to New and Old Sites Galore(well not yet but im getting there)
Links

Tricks
Tricks




How to CON:

Now as you read this article you are going to think less and less of me but well that doesn't bother me to much since most of the people on SST I get along with is because im just as sneaky and coniving(sp?) as this article will make me sound.

The true secret to a good con as i will call it is to never let the person your conning know anything true about yourself if your online this is easy since you can be anything you want to be without worrying to much about the consiquences(sp?. What I mean by this is that if you a guy tell the person your female if you want to since people expect girls and guys to think in different ways (a.k.a. guys lie all the time but their not good at it girls hardly lie but they are really good at it). Also lieing aobut your age is easy as well most people in SST have no idea what age I am (38 or am I? see it works) and thus they don't know what to expect from me if i am a young brat (9-15) i must have only a few thoughts on my mind (food and sex mostly) if I am 16-21(food, sex, and a job to take care of my car) or if im 22-30(job,food,kids -mayby, sex) thus in this way people are going to make judgments about you that could give them insight on your actual person not just your persona just as ILLQO (me) acts like he is somewhere in his 70's sometimes but at other times acts just like a bouncy 5 year old this allows me to take some freedom from my characters persona and allows me to create other persona's that people cannot in any way trace to me.

Now I know what you thinking aobut now "how is this going to help me to con others while i play" well here's how if no one expects you to act in a certain way you can act in other ways to get people to act in the way you want them to you can change your entire personality if need be just to fit one person you need to use or abuse at that time. Now if your still listining after all this bullshit that i have just spat out you are trully worthy of being a information trader just like me.
And Finally here is how "Have Fun Messing With Other People's Heads!!!" hehehe--have fun with this newly learned skill of conning others and you may one day just like me be despised and hated by every other player online.

Most Wanted List

Number 1 most Wanted

For This Test Only me ILLQO the Information Trader

Look out for this old trader he smiles at you and may tell a few jokes but lately it is belived hes gone senile or just plain mad since hes begun to preach the Tsarwars CHAOS theory from the old 001 days

Number 2 most Wanted

RAY YEARGIN

Of course Rays in this list I mean who doesn't want to kill ray at least once in their players lifetime, if you do kill ray please contact me to have your name put in lights on my "Who Killed Ray This Week" page (a new idea)

Number 3 most Wanted

Katrina Kirelli

Considered very insane and also one of the most dangerous players to ever have formed in the game Katrina is still alive and kicking(though we wished she wasn't)if you bag this Killer you will have the same status as someone who has killed ray

Number 4 most Wanted

TSKI

My old enemy is still around (well not exactly a enemy but still a force I once clashed with), while becoming older TSKI has lost some of his original punch but still is known to become very powerfull in times he needs to be kill him and ill thank you personally

Number 5 most Wanted

VINYL TRIXTA

Because he is just like you. A very evil and twisted player

Number 6 most Wanted

Name: Cloudia Strife

Description: Switches teams at will. Hunts down all players who are annoying, kill him, or finds in his trade routes.

For your name and description to be added to this list (votes can be taken when i finally get around to making the page for it) please send you name and description (or someone elses) to my email address illqo@hotmail.com

Links Page

These are the links to old and new pages as i find them or create them also i will put the older tsarwars links on this page since a few of them still work and are pretty funny

Ray's Fine Creating StarshipTraders 

My Orginal TsarwarsPage

Note:  None of these links work anymore.

 Well here are a few tricks I have seen over the years to most of you reading these will be old news but to the few new members to the SST/Tsar family these could come in handy

Free Warp

If a non team member friend needs help in destroying a large foe heres what you do to get 2 uses out of one crystal(or whatever its called now) use the crystal to warp directly to where the enemy is and help destroy him after the battle have your non team member friend plant a few fighters and then attack these fighters of course in your battle options is flee or reatreat or whatnot click on this and you will be taken back to the sector you originaly warped from

Black Holes

Black holes are not just for jumping from gal to gal but can be used also as hidey holes to gain access to the inside of a black hole 1 or 2 things can be done one of which is to use a crystal to jump into it of course but if your usually poor like me this is not always the easiest or best option another way to enter a black hole is to get your fuel very low down to the point where you only have 1 or 2 more moves left and your can fly into one and instead of warping you will just enter into it easy as can be

If you have any new tips that you feel should be added to this page please send them to my e-mail address at illqo@hotmail.com

SST Blog

From:  http://archive.omgn.com/news.php?Item_ID=2658&Offset=0&Order=desc&Game=882



Starship Traders Blog Started
By: Charles Rector | Game News | Game Data | 8:32pm, September 14, 2005
So I have started up a blog at http://sstworld.blogspot.com/ mainly to
put up game history and documentation. A lot of this is already
available in the Files section here, but making it possible to read in
a web browser should get it better exposure.

Not much up yet, but feel free to visit or direct newer players there.



Note:  The blog evidently was deep-sixed for at that URL there is a half-baked Chinese poetry blog.

Earthrise

From:  http://archive.omgn.com/nexus/?p=458#comments


Earthrise
Without a shadow of a doubt, the single best fansite for the long-running space strategy browser based game Starship Traders is Earthwise. It has the most comprehensive list of ST related links in existence.

Here’s some info on the webmaster from the website:

I have been playing Starship Traders since October 2001 and have had a great deal of fun and dealt with a lot of …ummm “interesting” players since then. My best-know game alias is “Starlion.” I have also been the owner/ moderator of the SST-Alternate Yahoo Group since June 2004.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 3:39am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Earthrise”
cracken01 says:
September 19, 2005 at 1:02pm
Thanks for the link, but honestly that page is just something I threw together one day.

The links page at SST-Alternate (http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/SST-Alternate/links) is more up to date, and yes they are publicly accessible to all.

Someday I am planning to make a real Starship Traders fan website using the materials archived at the SST-Alternate Group; the blog at http://sstworld.blogspot.com/ is just a testbed to see if a blog can be used as an easy content-management system or not.

cracken01 says:
September 19, 2005 at 1:04pm
Active link to the SST-Alternate links page:

http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/SST-Alternate/links

Starship Traders on the Brink (May 25th 2007)

From:  http://archive.omgn.com/nexus/?p=721 :


From the SST-Alternate Yahoo! News Group:

Hello All,
I know many of you that read this will have no clue as to who I am,
but that is ok. I am simply making this post to find out what is
generally considered as a good SST game setup. The current game is in
a miserable state with very little activity. It is my opinion, that
unless something is done soon, this game will die. I understand that
many of you do not play in the TLR round because of your dislike of
the format. Here is my thinking isn’t a little discomfort ok, if it
keeps this great game alive? I know that TLF is still semi-active,
but that game has been closed to new ships, and thus most new players
that could add to our little community are lost because there is so
few people in the other game to help them pass the “newbie” stage. If
real world issues are preventing game time, that is ok and even
comendable–it is a game after all. However, a vote on a good set of
game settings would be greatly apreciatted. I hope if have not taken
too much of anyone’s time, if so I appologize.
Talon Jasra

House Forsaken in SST

While at least 2 HF members, PresBMK & myself, played in Starship Traders, we did so as individuals, not as an attempted clan or to use the official SST parlance, a team.

Aaron Swartz was a Scumbag

Hacking is the same thing as breaking and entering one's home. As Declan McCullough wrote back in the late 1990's, there is no such thing as "hacktivism", only vandalism.

What gets me about this case is the way that his father has been acting. He talks as if MIT committed a great sin by alerting law enforcement to his son's crimes.

He was recently the subject of an article in the Chicago Sun-Times as saying that MIT needed to apologize for its actions and to do what his son wanted them to do: make journal articles and academic journals free of charge. Given the fact that academic journals are pretty expensive to publish, if they were made free, pretty soon there would be no more academic journals around.

Aaron Swartz was a scumbag no different than kidnappers and other kinds of violent hoodlums.

Changes in the SST Game Announced in 2002

From:  http://librenix.com/sst/announce.txt

Hello Traders,

For those of you not familiar with the new version, this is a 
brief overview of the differences:

1) Ship types: There are a total of 19 different ship types
   in 4 levels.  The first level of ships includes only 
   the Corvette, the ship everyone starts out with.  A 
   Corvette will hold 60 cargo holds and has 5 equipment bays.
   That is sometimes abreviated as Corvette [60:5].

   The second level of ships are: Schooner [70:15],
   Frigate [80:10], and Transport [90:5]. To upgrade from
   a Corvette to one of these costs 100,000 microbots.

   The third level of ships are: Battleship [100:25],
   Destroyer [110:20], Cruiser [120:15], Liner [130:10],
   and Freighter [140:5].  These upgrades costs 200,000.

   The (10) fourth level ships have the same capacities and
   base names as the third, but add either Stealth or
   Hyper capability -- but not both.  Hyper ships have a
   permanent, rechargeable rocket booster and can warp to 
   other galaxies for 20,000 grams of fuel. Stealth ships
   are not visible to launched scouts (although deployed 
   spies can see them) and, while logged on, are not 
   visible to other players.  They are cloaked --
   but only while awake. Note that you can attack a
   cloaked stealth ship, if you can figure out where it is.
   Use the telnet attack command ( type the letter 'A' )
   while in the same sector as the stealth ship to attack.  

   Either of these upgrades costs 400,000.  You can 
   downgrade from this level to the same type of ship you 
   originally upgraded from.  Then, you can upgrade to a 
   different stealth or hyper ship type.

   The new ships have slightly fewer cargo holds than the
   traditional ships, but are more efficient.  The fuel use
   properties are completely different from before.

   These new ships fight back when attacked, even if they
   have 0 fighters.  Their ability to fight is based
   on their type, their shields, and to a small degree,
   on their combat computers.

2) There are ten new pieces of equipment to add to the
   existing ones (shields, combat computers, homing devices,
   and rocket boosters).  Some only give you access to old
   features (a Statistics Module lets you do Player listings
   and Facts of commerce.  Others in this category are 
   Scout Launcher, Player Pager, and the Tractor Device that
   lets you move planets and ports.) The totally new devices
   are: Planet Scooper (auto trade out planet/port pairs)
 Planet Locator (find planets from anywhere)
 Navigation Module (find BH's, Neutrals, TP's)
 Sector Scanner (see enemy bases, fighter fleets, 
    automatically avoid bases when computrading)
 Homing Device Launcher (leave HD's in sectors)
 Black Hole Orbiter (lets you enter BH sectors)

3) Shields and Combat computers are now five times as
   powerful, four times as expensive, and you are limited to ten
   of each regardless of how many equipment bays your ship has.

4) Bunkers are different.  They no longer store holds, CC's, 
   or shields but will now store fuel.

5) Neutral fighter fleets vary by galaxy.  Some galaxies will
   have very few, very small fleets.  Other galaxies will have
   very many, much larger fleets (up to fleets of about 1800).

6) There are probably 20 minor changes.  The largest of those
   are: there is a small antimatter charge for using the 
   autopilot.  You can no longer attack allied fighters or AA
   bases. Planets productivity goes up with the port prod. bonus,
   ship types show in 'other players', and rankings. Refunds on
   traded in equipment are now down to 50%, and the prices of
   all equipment (except HD's and boosters) is about 10,000.
   Bunkers are limited to smaller sizes (10 in the test game).
   The menu has changed slightly to accomodate the new devices
   and commands. The Jettison leaves a tiny amount of debris
   in the sector.  Homing devices will sometimes stick to your
   hull even if there is an HD already on it.  In that case,
   the old HD on your ship falls off into the sector to stick
   to some other passerby. Several minor bugs have been fixed
   as well, and there are probably a few other new bugs to 
   make up for that.

The test game runs at http://starshiptraders.com:4080/ and
you can telnet into it at port 4023.  Don't bother to log into
the test game to access the new features, however, since the
newest version also runs in the main games at:
   http://starshiptraders.com/
and
   telnet://starshiptraders.com:23/

House Forsaken is Dead

In the early days of Solar Empre, June-October, 1999 House Forsaken was the mightiest clan in the game.  At least that is until the likes of the Evil Empire, TalkHouse & the Trex Mercenaries showed up.  Even then, HF's position was strong enough that in January 2000 SE creator/developer/operator Bryan Livingston awarded them their own SE game that was admined by HF members.  HF was also a multi-game outfit that also had strong clans in other major online games such as at Battle.net and in Everquest.

However, HF succumbed to hubris and became too big for its britches.  This happened in March, 2003 in the game of  TDZK that was created/developed/operated by HF members Jerle & Hotaru.  In that game 2 HF members, one of whom named Hyperion had played SE under the name of HY and who had originally  been a HF recruit in SE (and if a certain story is true played SE with HF back in late 1999 under the name of -=WindKull=-), were caught brazenly cheating.  In a related incident in the same month, Hyperion committed treason by destroying a HF planet (Planet OMGN).

Since HF prided itself as being a clan that claimed to have honor at the very core of its being and repeatedly used the idea that it was a honorable outfit in its recruiting that was firmly opposed to cheating, one have thought that the HF leadership would have come down hard on the cheaters.  Instead the opposite happened.  The leadership acted as if nothing bad happened and that, if anything, the real culprits were those who brought the cheating to the attention of the clan.  Additionally, the leadership failed to provide even the slightest discipline to Hyperion for his SE treason.

The end result of all this was the mass resignation of almost every member of the HF Browser-Based Gaming Realm (about half of the membership of ) and with that the single most active unit within HF ceased to exist.  From that point on, HF went into a state of decline and fall and after years of being little more than a glorified "forum clan" has ceased to exist.

SST Intro

Starship Traders, or SST as it was commonly known, was originally a BBS game that flourished during the 1980's & 1990's.  It made the transition to the Web as a Browser Based Game (BBG) and for a while had a players base that numbered in the thousands despite an interface that made it difficult for a lot of folks such as myself to ever really get immersed in the game.SST ultimately took the Open Source (OS)  route that, as with the the case of other OS games such as BlackNova Traders, Promisance & Solar Empire, led to multiple servers and ultimately killed off the game.