Ganelon

Ganelon wrote some imaginative Oolite fiction, Carver's Anarchy describing an anarchy and its pirate community. He was also an active presence in the Oolite community between 2010 and 2012.

He had two Jamesons, Captain Carver (hero of his fiction) and the eponymous Ganelon (From here).

Ganelon of Rabiarce

• Commander Name: Ganelon
• Rating: Deadly
• Species: Human Colonial
• Home System: Rabiarce G2 (adopted)
• Legal Record: Usually very clean
• Occupation: Trader, Bounty Hunter, Knight of House Rabiarce
• Credits: Usually right around 2 million
• Ship: Cobra MKIII "The Storm"

• Profile: Ganelon was born and grew up as a "station brat" on the Diso main station. Dirtside was never home and is not his preferred sort of vacation area. He worked station and ship maintenance through his early years to be able to afford to attend the academy on Lave. He was a trader while building up his ship and account, then turned his hand to bounty hunting.

Eventually he was at a Feudal system and was approached to run a few errands for the Royal House. He later accepted a knighthood and swore his oath of fealty to house Rabiarce. Despite his "spacer trash" origins, he staunchly upholds his oaths as his main priority. Since he sees his priority as a knight to be the law in Feudal systems, his old attitude as a bounty hunting "Judge" still hold true. "A perp is a perp is a target." As such, he takes any opportunity to sweep systems clear of anything with so much as an "offender" rating. Obedience to GalCop authority and regulations comes after the previously mentioned priorities.

Captain Carver

Carver's ship

• Commander Name: Undisclosed, known aliases are Tal Thaddeus Carver, Commander Carver, Commodore Carver, and others
• Species: Human
• Rating: Dangerous (?)
• Home System: Lasoce G2 (adopted, actual system of origin undisclosed)
• Legal Record: Variable, but usually officially clean (one way or another)
• Credits: Undisclosed
• Occupation: Trader, Entrepreneur, Privateer, Pirate
• Ship: Griff Boa Prototype "Lady of Fortune"

• Profile: Carver is known to be an assumed name, and it is uncertain what the individual's original name might have been. So far as is known, he never actually attended Lave Academy, and it is assumed he "bought an identity", probably of some other pilot who had died recently and where the death was not yet recorded. The original name of license is marked "classified" in the Naval database, and the name Tal Thaddeus Carver is applied via an official "change license to historic family name" request made in an undisclosed system. It is alleged that Carver was originally from a wealthy corporate family and that he staged his own death and disappearance, but no actual proof of this is on file in any publicly available database.

It is rumoured that Carver actually has no official pilot's training, and possibly taught himself to fly and fight purely by the use of simulator software intended only for recreational purposes.

Carver is an anarchist and leads a community based on a pirate cove somewhere in the Lasoce system. His dubious official status as the commodore of the Royal Navy of the small and impoverished country of Rahooran on Lasoce Prime is the only definite document granting him any sort of title or authority. It is by that authority, however, that he claims the right to stop ships and demand that they stand down and deliver themselves up for his inspection, allegedly for contraband forbidden in "Rahooranian space". Some or all of their cargo is sometimes seized if it is proclaimed to be contraband. Those who pass such inspections are sometimes released to continue on their way or sometimes encouraged to accept an escort by Carver and his "fleet" of mis-matched but heavily armed ships. The fate of those who resist "inspection" or who refuse the offer of an escort can only be speculated upon.

It may be noted that a large amount of alloys have been found at the Salvage Yard that Carver uses as his "cove", and that a large number of escape pods are brought in by Carver or his associates, but they maintain that these are recovered due to legitimate salvage and rescue efforts.

Being an anarchist, Carver violently resists any efforts of GalCop to maintain a strong supervisory or regulatory presence in the Lasoce system and other nearby systems of the section of G2 sometimes referred to as "The Courts of Chaos". Carver has a long record of armed conflicts with GalCop Viper ships, though at this time his legal status is "clean". Carver and his crew as well as over one hundred other individuals are wanted for questioning involving the disappearance of a GalCop Sentinel station in the Lasoce system, but no major criminal charges are pending on them at this time.

Considered to be armed and extremely dangerous. Approach with caution.

Playing a pirate

Is getting away with piracy too easy?

I do play a pirate from time to time. From the practical standpoint, I can tell you that (when playing as a pirate) I don't give a Leestian tree grub's difficult-to-locate patootie about the points towards an Elite rating or the bounty. Neither of those puts any extra rum in yer grog. Scooping escape pods is more where the real money is. Big ships can have quite a few escape pods, and it's not at all impossible to make thousands of credits scooping them up and dropping them off at the main station. Now so far as being a criminal, why, you don't even have to be the one who shot up the ships they're escaping from. You just have to get there fast enough to net those little minnows and zip them back to the station. So the Escape Pod locater OXP is something I'd consider an essential piece of gear.

If that seems maybe a bit too cleanie-weenie for ye, well.. Think of it as ransom rather than insurance payments.

If you're a light touch on the trigger, you have the best chance of the crew and passengers jumping into the pods and abandoning ship so you can slip up and scoop their pods. But also, if the prey ship stays intact and there just happens to be a Dredger in the system (the Deep Space Dredger OXP), then you can use a salvage drone to tag the ship and escort it back to the Dredger for even more payout. Of course, you need a clean legal status for that.

Now, if I were to see maybe a big Lynx transporter and some big cargo ships in an unescorted convoy crawling along, I might fly on past them. I'd go a couple scanner lengths along the spacelane to make sure there weren't any Viper patrolling that could interfere and then double back to attend to that fat convoy. It'd be a point of profit and pride to not actually kill anybody, since there's no insurance payouts for a hold full of corpses. Sure, I could pop the hulls of those ships and get a few points towards and Elite rating.. But that sort of rating is thousands of kills away, and salvage pays good money right here and now.

Other than that, well there's shiny creds to be made "running blockade", though that's more of a privateer or contrabandisto (points at El Viejo) sort of work than actual piracy. If a system just happens to have some need for medical supplies or weapons for collectors, sports and self defence, then it can be profitable to make runs with that sort of merchandise.

Most of what I've explained here requires keeping a clean legal rating at least most of the time. The Anarchies OXP has some options for that as well as many other loverly things for a pirate or privateer or rebel against the corporate p0olice state to explore. It does add some stricter rules and makes it a bit harder to keep a clean rating, but it adds enough advantages to still be very worthwhile for the creative potential brigand or freebooter.

Now, my point in all this, is that you can't really even call all those space-for-brains NPCs you get jumped by as you're cruising along "pirates". Bah. They're just a bunch of addlepated wastrels that probably have been sniffing the laser coolant and grabbed the wrong joystick, if you know what I mean. A real pirate wouldn't be likely to fire on a single Jameson in something like a Cobra. A small ship doesn't have enough of anything in the cargo bay to be likely to be worth the bother, and if the Jameson can fight at all... Well, even having to use a single missile on them would pretty surely eat up any possible profit from attacking them.

Piracy/privateering/freebooting isn't really about being trigger-happy in an "iron-ass" ship. For pirating, I fly a cargo ship (Griff Boa proto) that only has a single laser. It's almost "stock", and is a long way from "iron assed". Sure, it has turrets, but those are mostly good for keeping off hardhead missiles. I need the big cargo bay, some passenger berths, and my wits more than I need a war-wagon.

Now if you want to talk fair, what I'd like to see is a Viper having to survive to turn in a report. It kind of takes the fun out of the old saying: "Dead Vipers file no reports." :wink: (From here)

---

Fiction

• Vakume Danserz (2010) on the Oolite BB. Not quite a story, in my opinion. A vignette, perhaps. Included in Alien Items, the official Oolite anthology.
• Carver's Anarchy (2010) on the Oolite BB. This might be the first installment, or it might be the only story about Carver and his crew that I actually get around to finishing. [Comment: This a now an 8 chapter short story giving imaginative insight into an Anarchy]
• Derelict 2011 on the Oolite BB. Marooned in witchspace!

Almost Fiction!

• Treasuroid

---

Musings about Elite

See Classic_Elite#Comment

---

OXPs

While not publishing any, he was influential in the development of Graffiti Asteroids and of Armoury OXP. He also had views about the cooling of lasers ingame (see Laser Cooler (Issues)), and about Über-ness regarding game-balance.

---

Overhead Panel

I do agree that having a control panel that's a computer graphic and has switches that don't do anything is a bit redundant. But I could hack a usb gamepad and build functional switches into the physical overlay for the screen I was talking about. At present, I already have a "control panel" keyboard (also relabeled and re-mapped) mounted over the monitor at a comfortable angle to reach up to. An overhead control panel. That way all I usually have on the desk when I "fly" is the joystick and a nostromo pad (so I don't need the mouse). But I'd still like to have a functional "instrument panel" separate from the "main viewscreen".

In the pic there's a graphic of a control panel because I happened to have one loaded, but for the concept I'm talking about, all one would need would be the displays themselves. The physical overlay that would sit on the monitor screen to provide the bezels would just cover any other graphics anyway.

I'm not a big fan of the default HUD, I'd prefer things laid out a bit differently. But that'd be a concern that'd be a bit down the road for me at this point. I'm just considering possibilities.

...

That's my Oolite overhead control panel so far. If you see any ideas you can use, great! It's obviously kind of a WIP, as you can tell from the mixture of styles and ages. The areas taped over in black are where I plan to remove keys and cover the holes with either metal or plexiglass/perspex with labels for the "buttons". At the moment, it's functional enough, since I know where everything is, but eventually it'll have labels. I'm also thinking of pulling the keys under the "systems overview screen" so I can put in a thin bezel and a clear plastic cover for the "display". Some of the panel is "just for looks", like the whole MFD and the "raise and Lower" buttons for landing gear we don't actually have. LOL

Anyway, it's an ok 10$ control panel for a 400$ spaceship. :lol:

...

... The basic idea comes from this guy who does it for flight simulators.

I've just been adapting the basic idea to Oolite and a couple of sims I play. He doesn't have setups for spaceships, or I probably would have just bought the artwork and just been done in a night. LOL He's got some really cool ideas that can be adapted though, for folks that might want a bit of a simpit.

Oolite isn't a simulator, but if it makes anybody more comfortable to think of having an actual control panel as "really cool arcade controls", well that works too! (From here)