Andreah

I go through a lot of unslotters, but many are from pack drops. I still buy a fair number on the market. I imagine, probably from you, and I hope, close to your listing price. :D

Flippers are not evil. They do a mix of good and bad. Imo, often more good than bad, especially since inf is so easy even for lowbies to get (on my server, all one has to do is ask politely in help or broadcast and generally millions will shower down on you) and consistent supply and more stable prices are everyone's friends. While I'm at it, I will call BS on the idea that "listing for 1" helps anyone but marketeers. These get bought out by large standing bids or volume deal hunters. New players, casual players, and even many veteran non-marketeers buy stuff on the spot and usually pay way too much for it anyway, even if it's listed for 1.

I've noticed more volatility in some items than usual, and more extra-zeros showing up.

The Montana Incident, Conclusion. Associated Wireshare News Release. SPECTACULAR LUNAR IMPACT WAS ALIENS, VANGUARD SAYS On Saturday Vanguard held a press conference to reveal their findings from the recent spectacular space event seen near the Moon by observers on several continents. Vanguard raised an alert immediately when what looked like fireworks showered down on the the waxing crescent Moon, outshining the body itself at peak. A Vanguard spokeswoman, Ms. Talitha Laurent of the Etoilles, said a "gravitational space-anomaly" appeared without warning and then from inside it, fragments of a large spaceship of unknown origin appeared, already fully melted and partially vaporized, then impacted the farside surface of the Moon. The material was at so high a temperature it emitted considerable radiation, but fortunately far enough from Earth that no injuries or property damage resulted. Several Supergroups responded to Vanguard's request to investigate the impact sites on farside. What little they found beyond radioactive craters was determined to not have been of Earthly, neither Human or Rikti, origin. Vanguard surmises an alien spacecraft, perhaps peaceful, and perhaps not, suffered a catastrophe while attempting visit the Earth. No further evidence of gravitational anomalies or additional wreckage have been noted since. No matter who was attempting to reach Earth; for now, we can treat this as no more than a brilliant display of lights in the sky for those who happened to be looking up towards the Moon this past Friday.

The Montana Incident, Part III Present day, Lunar space, Earth Prime. A rupture erupted out of the darkness of space. Hundreds of meters across, it was as if a small black hole had appeared out from nowhere; gravitational lensing focused the light of distant stars around it, creating a beautifully bright arc, a starbow; until now only seen by astronomers, relativistic animators, and certain dangerously powerful metahumans. The center of the starbow was calm, utterly black, ... until it wasn't. A brilliant tear ripped across it; and then tore again across diagonally, and then again, and again, until the center was a shredded mass of lightning. The disturbance hit all the EM bands, disrupted TV and Radio, caused power outages across Quebec, triggered a Starstrider Alert Condition Red at Vanguard, itself a minor crisis, and caught the notice of heroes and villains alike. And then it came through. A shower of burning debris racing through at twenty miles per second as the starbow blinked out of existence. Minutes later the debris exploded spectacularly against the lunar farside surface. And then it was over. ** VANGUARD SPACEWATCH NOTICE TO METAS ** ** CODES STARSTRIDER, UBILICAL, NIGHTFURY, ALOGICA ** ** ALERT STAND DOWN TO GREEN ** ** DTG 210504032022 REF 23-44-A ** ** INCIDENT UIDOBJ-11-21 ** NOTICE TO METAS. RED ALERT OF 040322-1622UTC WITDRAWN. RESUME GREEN CONDITION. SPACE ANOMALY 23-44-A REMNANTS INSPECTED NEGATIVE THREAT ASSESSED. At 1622 UTC on 04 February 2022 a significant spatial anomaly appeared 4500 km trailing the orbit of Luna. Anomaly appeared as optically prominent gravitational lens surrounding dimensional rupture emitting 140 GW radiation in approximate blackbody spectrum for 150,000 Kelvin equivalent temperature. A large object emerged at interplanetary speeds, immediately broke to debris superheated by thermal radiation environment, then proceeded to shower down on farside surface of Luna at 35 km/second with significant angular dispersal. Several large fragments impacted and detonated; however, undetected fragments missing Luna impact can not at this time be ruled out. The debris field was inspected, and no debris larger than 0.18 meters was found. Significant new cratering found, with extremely high levels of residual nuclear radiation. Conclusion: alien space vessel emerged from warp or inter-dimensional transit, suffered catastrophic failure due to chaotic spinor shear, and was destroyed in energetic reactions with the rupture. This space vessel, now determined to be primarily titanium/steel/cobalt/carbon with significant heavy elements including Thorium, Uranium, Plutonium, and other heavy transuranics constituted minimum of 500 million kilograms. No organic material detected above trace levels. Meta organizations requested to alert Vanguard HQ/Intel of any updates. /signed/ ~T.Laurent~

The Montana Incident, Part II Two years later; RSS Montana, Orbit of Ceres. "And there it is again. Octopole shear on the ecliptic axis, out of phase by eleven degrees." "They sent something through past Earth, again." The Captain stroked his beard. "Whoever they are, they know gates better than we ever did, but the rest of their tech is ... surprisingly ... weak. Electrochemical batteries? Heh. Do you have anything up on detectors?" "Negative, Sir. But I have a bird inbound, and it will do a stealthed close approach of the intruder's trajectory in three minutes -- we'll get a precise metric off the resonance remnant." The intel officer's tone was apologetic; but it hadn't been his fault. The Captain thought back to those frantic days at the end. Everyone in near Earth space had gone mad. Kinetic strikes, rad beams, ultra high yield nukes; they'd used everything they had. Against the Brits, against the Ravaging, and against the planet, generally -- even a Delta Bomb. Damnable Brits, he though to himself. They did this to us. To everyone. Even our people, they finally, really did it; those maniacs; they blew it up. Worse, his ship wasn't there. Maybe the Montana would have made a difference, and maybe it wouldn't. But he and her crew would never know. And now, they were stranded. "Damn them all to hell", he whispered. The Montana, a half-million ton first-of-class blastship, on space trials in the asteroid belt, with its incredible nuclear salt shockwave drive, cutting edge drive technology too new, too dangerous, and too secret, to test near Earth. A leap ahead of the Brits, it; and its class of new ships, could have changed the balance of power in space, and eventually, on the Earth as well. Now, she, her crew of nine hundred Space Force officers and enlisted, and the small Super Force science and security detachment were alone. The last living people in the solar system. In this dimension, he thought. The head of his Super Force team, Doctor Philadelphia, knew things, and he'd been letting some of it come out now. There were experimental gate systems left in the solar system -- in fact, one at the Pallas Asteroidal Research Station. All they needed was a clean read on the dimensional resonance of a destination. After that, they had the power to spin up the Pallas Gate, and the good Doctor was confident they could make it big enough and stable enough for the Montana herself to wade through under thrust. If there was one thing Montana had to spare, it was power. And the good Doctor, why he'd invented half the exotic technology of the last century, he wouldn't fail them.

Interlude, The Dead Cold of Space On Earth, a stunning spasm of nuclear detonations were taking place. Hypersonic missiles flew, red-hot from friction, in the lower atmosphere, virtually invulnerable to space attack and terminal point defenses, and delivered huge warheads to successive tiers of smaller and smaller cities, destruction and clouds of fallout in their wakes. Apart from the Ravaging infection, Earth was dieing. In space, two massive stations were all that remained. One, at L5, sported the Imperial Jack, blazoned on its hull and at every access hatch. Crew frantically worked to perform damage control, to secure supplies in bursted cargo sections from drifting into deep space, and to repair and reload the Tartarus Device, the main reason the station had been lofted into place years ago. The Tartarus was a scaled up variant of a Nemesis orbital radiation projector; 24 of which used to be operational in geosynchronous orbits around the Earth. They were dead now. Too exposed, too small, too fragile to survive long in the all-out war that had been raging for months. But they had seared huge swaths of the enemy's homeland sterile down to the bedrock before their supplies of nuclear pits had been spent; or they had been destroyed by counter battery fire or space-marine assault. The Tartarus was vastly more powerful, able to operate for longer periods, and had both narrow and dispersed beam projection modes. From L5 it had wide, defensible approaches, and views of large sections of the Moon and over the course of a day, the entire surface of the Earth. A war-winner, or so it had been thought. Tartarus had been running in rapid attack mode, cycling pits and high intensity sterilization beams, up to a half gigaton per second at full power across high value enemy targets in near-Earth space. On wide aperture, it could hard kill American stations in seconds; sweeping the skies clear. But the primary magazine was exhausted, and the secondary rotor rails were damaged. Crews labored frantically to get the magazine in place. Time was short, there was one more American station to kill, and it was half buried on the edge of the Moon. Worse, it too had a radiation projector. Moonbase Omega. The halls were silent. No air flowed through them. Here and there, crumpled spacesuits lay strewn about. Most with broken bodies inside them. The Moon had been hit hard by kinetic and radiation attacks, and the moonbase had taken several swipes of hard-kill radiation from the British's Tartarus weapon already. The environmental systems had failed, letting the oxygen out, early in the fight. Most of the American Space Force personnel had made it into their suits, and then the radiation went high, higher than their shielding and the meters of regolith the station was buried in could stop. Everyone was dead. But consoles still had status lights. Computers still ran. And his station commander's desk, Space Force Lieutenant General Matthew King's dead hand rested near a safeguard panel, where he had pulled back six safety interlocks and pressed the master emergency buttons. His console panel lit brightly with red letters, highlighting and pulsating. EMERGENCY LOGISTICAL OPERATIONS ENGAGED! AUTONOMOUS TARGET SELECTION MODE ENGAGED! FREE-FIRE WEAPONS RELEASE AUTHORIZED! Deep under the moonbase was an industrial node. Mining shafts dug deep into the core of the moon, robot drills reached remote deposits of metals, and transuranics. Automated conveyors brought these to refineries, and these led to furnaces, fast breeder reactors, and automated assembly systems. New fuel rods returned to the reactors to continue their power generation. Spares and energy packs went to repair robots. Hot radioactive pits cycled up to the radiation projectors, and these continued to fire without end. Omega's crew won their race against time. The secondary pit magazine was remounted, and the weapon could be fired again. Tartarus swept its beam across the American moonbase yet again, and the deadly radiation swept through the halls with deadly effect. If only there had been anyone alive left to kill. Lights on the consoles flickered, and some even failed. But the computers that ran the station were kilometers deep, and would not stop. In their turn, the base's radiation projectors fired again, striking the British station full on, killing every living soul. Intense neutron flux hit the remainder of the pit magazine's store, and they sympathetically detonated. Space around the Earth was dead. Targeting radars still swept the sky around the Earth and Moon, finding nothing.

The Montana Incident Briefing Room J-9, Sublevel 34, Montana Buttes Atomic Research Complex, Final Off-Ramp Review prior to authorization of Project Sky-Thunder. "Senators, Secretary Rodgers, President Zamora; I will let Doctor Philadelphia summarize the Montana." "Thank you, Major Winters," the man in the Super Force uniform continued "... the truly innovative feature of the Montana is its nuclear-catalytic salt shockwave impulse drive. This has been tested in miniature one-tenth scale in-cavern at Farside Station, and achieved full Initial Operational Capability, meeting thrust and stability with at least ten percent margins over design. Slide three please." An exploded view projection of a large spacecraft appeared. "The Montana uses three full scale systems, each on axis of center of mass for redundancy. The Salt Shockwave drive uses a high pressure supersonic flow of 90% enriched uranium tetrabromide accelerated by radial synchrotron transducers to trigger a second stage injection of cold thorium salts. The flow passes through a force-pinch using a quantum foam membrane generator. At this point, the fission reactions take place, with the uranium fission causing thorium to breed plutonium and other transuranics which then catalyze a sustaining reaction. Critical density is achieved, but the zone of criticality from thermal neutron emission cannot move up the flow faster than the flow leaves the pinch, and we have a stable, standing catalytic shockwave. Next slide please." Another slide comes up, showing a line plot of a number of black and white curves crossing each other in a complex fashion over a gridded backdrop. "As you can see, when a perturbation in the reaction causes it to increase power output, the pinch throat is strengthened, and increases the velocity of flow, which decreases the reaction rate. If a perturbation occurred to decrease the reaction rate, the opposite would happen, and there is a point of stability controlled by the rate of power draw off the MHD's. All that is necessary to shut the the drive down is to decrease the thorium salt injection rate from the source, or to bleed more power off the MHD system, which normally provides for the ship's mains, or the high capacity DN/E 'direct-nuclear/electric' converters, which charge the tertiary plasma mounts. Each of the three drive systems produces approximately fourteen thousand gigawatts of sustained output, or roughly three kilotons per second. Specific impulses which can be achieved by these systems are, as you can imagine, two orders of magnitude above our current best nuclear thermal drives." "The drive can be operated with open throat at low pressure for pure standby power, or opened up to 110% full military power, with energy to sustain the salt flow and forward rad-beam projectors, with capability for a pulse forward catalytic-wave-motion detonation with induced third stage hydrogen fusion, which will require a 75-second drive systems hot restart to restore the quantum foam membrane, but throws a fifty-megaton blast forward as a less than one-degree dispersion spinal mount weapon. During the hot restart, the ship can continue to fight with secondaries and tertiaries off capacitor power. Montana will also have limited conventional armaments, gatling plasma anti-space mounts, long range hypervelocity missiles, full orbital and planetary bombardment capability, and the elite Red Leopard Squadron in F-39 space superiority fighters, and two marine boarding impact-shuttles. Total crew complement is 915. Next slide, please..."

I repeat this to anyone I care about. Even if you're buying your set IOs, it's better to convert your reward merits to converters/boosters and sell them for cash than to spend the merits on recipes. They work so hard to get their merits and then basically throw half or more of them away. Just don't do it!

This is an excellent and easily followed basic money-maker. I'm going to use the share in the three-dots to link this to my Supergroup's Discord. Nice work!

I predict we will get one day of Spring on Feb 14th. Then, back to the cold dregs of Winter until next year.

Back on Virtue, a few of us used to buy Prestige for supergroups for the asking just to burn the inf away. I'm sure that happened elsewhere, too.

I agree -- Heck, I'd put inf in a Bank even if it was impossible to take it out! :D

Often what might superficially look like another marketeer trying to muscle in by "price+1" is just some ordinary player trying to get a few at a good price, and those can be waited out easily enough.

I've noticed what looks like more "one-upping" going on recently, too.

I've been trying a bunch of variations on these, trying to get one key to select a nearby ally and then perform Rejuvenating Circuit, Insulating Circuit, Empowering Circuit, and finally, Energizing Circuit. I just can't get it to work right unless it's on five separate keys without loading bind files, even though it was almost trivial to get Speed Boost and Increase Density on one of my kins. I even tried the simple case of just two of the circuit powers. In the best case, it selects the nearby ally, fires the first power in the series, and leaves that first power queued up a second time. Subsequent presses of the key will only ever fire the first power, even though it appears the bindload for the second power has succeeded. I suspect that these circuit powers are attack powers, even though they target allies, and attack powers seem to have some (many?) safeguards built into the macro/bind system to prevent just this kind of one-key-does-it-all approach. Speed boost and Increase Density must not be in that protected class, and as pure buffs, don't get that kind of treatment. Can anyone confirm this? In the mean time, I've put each of my four circuit powers on separate keys. It's no big issue, but I wish there was clearer, more complete, original documentation for the bind system.

One of my marketeers works in the salvage market. Higher volume, but lower margins.

There's never money to do it right, and never time to do it over.

To be honest, in the last few years I've started to really like unstructured and triple-store databases. Databases have never been the core focus of my work experience; which is likely true of many developers. All the more reason not to try to homebrew them. And I think that applies to many other things we might want to use. These subsystems are things people put careers in to, not a couple of nights hopped up on jolt cola.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you write your own subsystem in-house instead of getting a cots or even open source version to use. Those both can be a hassle, but they're worth it in the long run. Partly you're not reinventing the wheel, and partly you get a wheel that's reasonably round. As I understand it from previous threads, the auction uses an in-house coded heap or binary tree of some sort to implement the bids (and offers on the other side) as a priority queue. This is potentially fast at getting the absolute highest priority (in this case, priority is price) element, but not satisfy it the way of, say, a properly formed SQL query where it would have been easily restricted to the highest bid price from a user other than the offeror; and so you get this particular bug. I'm sure it's fixable even in the current code. But exactly where, and how, to do it? That now requires very specialized understanding of this code. And after the changes, one need to perform rigorous testing on it, and that's complicated because it's detailed, possibly very complex and poorly documented low level code you're fooling with instead of a simple SQL query string, where you know the database will retrieve the results if the query is properly formed, and knowledge of query syntax is common as dirt and queries are easy to inspect and test.

And if the game were to go a complete redesign of this magnitude, we'd go deeper into the attack calculations than just trying to band-aid hard caps on folks. I'm a fan of conjectural design changes as a means for understanding the game better and also for forums entertainment, but as a matter of practice, I'm against almost all of them because even if they would narrowly address the problem they're aimed at, they usually would break vastly more things. It's like medicine, "First, do no harm."

I assumed it was that you couldn't sell if your own bid for an item is the highest outstanding bid. It does the query, find the highest bid, sees that it is yours, and since you can't sell to yourself, it doesn't go through. Then it stops looking. So even if there are bids, it wont' find them. However, it could be as Yomo described too. A little experimentation could clear it up I would think.

Enemy_gm ??? Nice. I agree the enemy ranks would be very useful, but maybe too useful!

I'd really like to be able to select the nearest actual player, even if they're not my teammate. These slash commands use these keywords (from the unofficial wiki): I'd like to exclude all pets, not just my pets, so a keyword like "notpet" would be great. While we're at it (if we're at it), being able to limit players to "leaguemate" as well as "teammate" would be nice.

In general, having more ways to customize and work with our friends lists would be good. I'd also like to be able to add a reason to an entry on my list why why they are there. Sometimes I forget why I put someone there, and the notes system doesn't do it for me. I want to see the reason right there in the list. Finally, while we're wishing for stuff, I'd like to be able to set a sunset on people I add to my ignore list. Seven days, a month, a year, forever? Maybe that could at least show the date when I added them to it. I'd also like to show some degree of friendships. We have the stars system, maybe a few free-form ratings like that. Stars, Hearts, Clubs, and Spades. Someone might have four stars because they're great leading groups, but I give them no hearts because they really aren't a friend of mine, and I give them three clubs because their builds are fairly impressive. Then I'd be able to choose which of the four ratings I see displayed on the hud. But this is really just dreaming, because it's not that important for the degree of effort I suppose it would take. And then, it's amazing how many active players don't even know you can add notes to people and set stars already.