MOD:WCU:PR0

Privateer Zero Origins of the Steltek Hypothesis, and of the Church of Man.

Preface

This project began as part of Starlord's proposed "WC Zero". Starlord's original idea, actually, did not include any privateering; it was me (chuck_starchaser) who first proposed ties to Privateer within WC0. Starlord's idea was to play Ripper/Bossman (Chen) from McAuliffe to Custer's Carnival. But according to the Timeline, Ripper graduates in 2637; and that's a problem because McAuliffe takes place 3 years earlier, in 2634. I then proposed that perhaps we should make Bossman a privateer prior to his graduation. Starlord liked the idea, but Maverick later expressed reservations about playing Bossman, and particularly about mixing Privateer and WC gameplay paradigms. I felt we could work out the paradigm shift, but I also realised that, as a privateer, Bossman might be a pirate at the time of getting his Confed Flight Academy graduation, which would make absolutely no sense. At the time of this writing I'm still waiting for a response by Starlord to my email, but assuming he will agree, here I begin to put together a separate Privateer Zero page.

UPDATE:

Starlord just expressed a bit of sadness at letting go of the idea of combining privateering and fleet combat. I suggested to him that I feel the same way, and that perhaps the best way to go is to elaborate Priv 0 and WC 0 further, separately, and leaving open the question of combining them or separating them. So, officially, as of this writing, I'll be working on the Priv 0 storyline while trying not to preclude either possibility.

Game style

Privateer Zero is intended to be fairly similar in gameplay to Privateer and Righteous Fire. A few differences are noted, however:

• Base interiors to be similar in looks to the original Privateer but modelled in 3D and including more places to go:
  • A door marked "Concourse" leading to a space with all the additional doors as per below:
  • SIM: A door leading to an arcade-like place where the player can practise dogfighting or take gunner/pilot courses.
  • Militia: A place to get jobs advertised by the (local) militias
  • Confed: A place to get jobs advertised by the confeds (or by confed militias)
  • News: A place to read news and electronic magazines
  • Parking: Where ships are kept :)
  • Travel: A place to buy tickets to travel to other places aboard shuttles.
  • Administration: Where the base or planet's governor works. Most of the time, this door is locked.
• No jump drives: Back in the 2630's and 40's, jump drives were big and bulky, and could not fit in small ships. Note that in the 2660's a big change takes place: First the Broadsword appears in 2665, featuring a jump drive. The Broadsword is officially a "heavy bomber", though. By 2667, two more medium-small ships appear with jump drives: The Crossbow bomber and the Morningstar heavy fighter. This miniaturization revolution is completed by 2669 with the Confed's Excalibur, and the availability of installable jump drives for private ships, at least in Gemini. But, to get back to the pre-war era of Privateer Zero, the large size of jump drives makes them unsuitable for small ships, such that only medium size cargo ships like the Drayman, and frigates like Caernavens, can sport one. And what this means for gameplay is that, until the player owns a larger ship, he or she must rely on a larger ship to go across systems. This is not a problem, because most jobs for small ships are escort jobs, and the escorted ship must have docking space for its escorts, precisely to get its escorts across jumps. And the player can hire a cargo ship, as well... See next point.
• Cargo ships can be hired, like in Privateer 2.
• Escort docking expansion can be installed in cargo and other larger ships.
• If your ship has turrets, you can hire gunners for them (temporary or permanent).
• If you don't have a ship, such as at the start of Privateer Zero, you can get a job as turret gunner.
• New job types, such as exploration, and transporting passengers, a la Fronteer Elite.
• New buyable items, such as "treasure maps" at pirate bases.
• Multiple choice conversations: being able to ask pre-canned questions, etceteras.
• Date-keeping: The game will track current date by measuring per-cent of main plot achieved and fuzzily interploating across a model timeline; as well as counting jumps and judging by the player's net worth, prior to starting the main story. The object of tracking date is to synchronize news items that appear in electronic news and magazines, and to trigger the release of dated bar rumors. Dated bar rumors are those bar rumors that have the objective of providing hints to the player about what's going on. When a dated bar rumor is triggered, it is put into a priority queue of pending rumors the player should get to read at least once. As soon as the player goes to a bar and talks to the bartender, rumors from this queue are first served. Each rumor has a counter for number of times read, and queue priority is based on this number. Thus, rumors that have been triggered and haven't been read even once, have the highest priority. Rumors can also be triggered by an event, such as if the player does something specific that doesn't have a strongly attached date to it. And rumors can also be marked obsolete after they've been read for a third time, for example, or because of event-triggered or date-triggered obsolenscence.

Privateer Zero Universe and Background

The map includes the entire WC universe map (LOAF's map), from Avalon to Landreich; however, most of the story takes place in or near Gemini. Many of the systems in Gemini won't have been settled, or even explored yet. Thus, there will be a need to be able to add systems, jump points and stations as the story progresses. Also, at the beginning of Privateer Zero, pirate bases Drake, KM-252 and Pentonville are, perhaps not entirely inaccessible, but at least off the official maps. The jump points are there, but they don't show; --neither on the map, nor in the HUD, unless someone gives you the coordinates. (NOTE: The fancy display of jump points as blue balls in space is an HUD projection by civilian ships' nav computers. Jump points are NOT visible to the naked eye. In fact, military ships traditionally don't make use of such fancy displays, as the Confed military prefers to rely on buoys to mark jump point locations.)

A lot of stuff is happening that the player may never come to realise or understand without analytical effort. Here I will explain what's going on in detail, and therefore you should NOT read it; as it may be a terrible spoiler (an even worse spoiler than reading the plot, in fact; this is like a god's perspective of all that is really going on; no secrets whatsoever). Having said that, if you are contributing to this project you may have no choice but to read it ;-( ...

Characters

• Deiter Lang: "Spice merchant", food tycoon, influential among the pirates based on Drake, Sherwood. Main distributor for the planet Palan, both for its food and spice products. "Spice" isn't just any spice, though: When people say "spice" they mean "THE Spice". A nut similar to nutmeg, used in fine cuisine, but whose concentrated extract is used in the production of Ultimate. Spice grows in very few planets, in the entire Confederation; --Palan being one of them. Besides Ultimate destilleries in secret pirate bases, the main consumer of Spice is exiled Pilgrims in hidden systems. Damien Lang made his fortunes in piracy and racketeering, but is now trying to become a food and spice tycoon. Later in the story, Deiter forges a truce between the Drake pirates and the Merchants' Guild, acquiring greatly favored status with both parties, helping him choke off Romulo Lynch's access to cheap food, and drastically cutting his profits. Much later in the story, Deiter launches a crusade to try to acquire Steltek artifacts. Some day, Deiter Lang's son, Damien, will take over Deiter's food empire, after his father's violent death.
• Romulo Lynch: A business tycoon, but fair; a man of his word, and not a gangster at all. (The same will not be true of his young son, Roman, or of his nephew, Regis, when they grow up; but that's far in the future...). Mr. Romulo Lynch has gradually acquired a near monopoli in Gemini's asteroid mining industry. His first company, Lynch Mining, legally owns almost half of all asteroid mining bases in Gemini, including over two thirds of those producing gems and iron. Iron's main consumer, however, is the Terran Confederation, for the production of durasteel, which is what most ships are made of, in pre-war times. This is a bit uncomfortable for Mr. Lynch, in the sense that just as he has a near monopoli of production, the Confed has a near monopoli of consumption. This is not the kind of "free market" paradigm that's good for stable profits; it's an unstable situation that can lead to stalmates or deal breakdowns. And the Confeds have a Secret Service that's known to be dangerous. Therefore lynch would like to "diversify", while at the same time softening the immediate impact of floating prices of ores on Confed shipyards: Rather than try to get total mining and refining monopoli, Lynch plans to go into banking and lending, so as to be able to legally lend money to the Confed. He will at some point start a company called Lynch Trust, such that he can let the prices of ores rise and fall as per offer and demand, but be able to say to the Confed "Uhm.. The price of iron is higher this week than it will probably be next week, but I can lend you the difference, and you can pay me back when the price goes down". The trick will work, --too well, in fact; but he will get greedy and try to hook other parties on credit also. But his more serious problems will commence after he founds the company Lynch Shipping. He will fall out of grace with the Merchants Guild... which will cause the price of food at the bases he controls to rise, affecting his mining profits. He will try to address this problem by taking control of Bronte Corporation, a non-producing, food-producers' consortium, based in New Detroit...
• Young Lemuel Monkhouse and Masterson: Freshmen Oxford students. They look a bit crazy, hippyish, and firmly believe the Steltek Hypothesis (and talk about just nothing else); and insist that artifacts and remains of the Steltek have been uncovered by the dozens, but that the Confed keep supressing the news and confiscating evidence. Legends about the Steltek have survived among the Varni and Mopok: The Steltek learned, from painful first-hand experience, that most civilizations will eventually self-destroy; that the key to avoid self-destruction is to exercise restraint and control their own technological advances. Although they live in isolation at the core of the galaxy, the Steltek try to help other civilizations wisen up, by using "agents", which are supposedly robots made to resemble a typical member of the civilization they infiltrate. The work of the agents is benign, Monkhouse and Masterson believe; and amounts to raising public awareness. The Steltek have achieved physical immortality, and don't aim to conquer other civilizations, because they believe that diversity is good for the galactic ecology. They do, however, collect genetic samples of races they encounter, and had been doing that with humans long before the latter became space faring. Monkhouse and Masterson want to help the Steltek agents by spreading the word about the Steltek, and their story; and have founded a small club, called "The Steltekers' Club". So far, at the beginning of Priv Zero, they are the club's only two members.
• Miss Smithers: Librarian at Oxford and friend of Madamme Silverspring.
• Madamme Silverspring: A rich widow who is one of the main funding benefactors of Oxford. She's taken a liking to these "kids", --Masterson and Monkhouse; and is willing to pay for whatever services they need in the pursuit of their interest in the Steltek.
• Andropolos Belisarius: An officer within the secret Black Ops branch of the Confed. No one knows his age, or about his past; few know that he even exists, let alone seen him face to face. He appears to believe that only through constant war a technological race can evolve and prevail. He founded the Belisarius Group, of which group almost no one has yet heard about, except its own members. Andropolos is believed to be able to read minds, and is said to have killed former members of the Belisarius Group for lying to him, even about some insignificant detail. The group is small, in numbers, but highly efficient. They were active instigators of the Pilgrim War. They are planning to instigate a war with the Kilrathi, but presently, ironically perhaps, are trying to delay the starting time of the imminent war, --as they believe the kilrathi aren't a strong enough oponent to guarantee a lasting war. First they want to set up a spy network to help the kats out, should they need help. This spy network, drawn from pirates and secret service officers, will later be known as the Mandarins. Andropolos had the forethought that, sooner or later, funding for Black Ops would dwindle. He therefore works on a way to generate covert income for Black Ops, by setting up a corruption ring within Decomissionings and selling supposedly mothballed ships in the black market. The most difficult part is money-laundering; but eventually Menesch comes up with the means and the will. When funding for Black Ops finally does dwindle, Andropolos supplements the incomes of those agents that join his cause, thereby gaining personal control of Black Ops. "Y-12" is merely a nickname for agents in Black Ops that are Belisarius members and elite pilots; and do black ops on Belisarius' behalf.
• Craig Bodeno: Administrator with the Exploratory Service, headquartered in Basra, Palan. Well dressed, soft spoken and amiable on the surface. He has the power to control which explored systems are put into the official maps, and which are to remain hidden. He is Secret Service, and a member of Belisarius Group. His main job is to climb up the ladder of power in the ES and remain a sleeper there until his help is needed. But later in the story he will become a bit of a spy-master, keeping tabs on the Steltekers Club.
• Young cadet Leanne Mullings: A fresh recruit with the Confed Militias, her kill scores are rising so rapidly that some of the more senior officers with the militia decide to frame her in order to end her career. Their plan succeeds and she has no choice but to become a fugitive and a pirate. In Drake, she meets Deiter Lang, who helps her get a new identity, as "Lynn Murphy", in exchange for her becoming his personal pilot/body-guard. After Deiter's death, she finds a job with the Merchants' Guild, and will, decades later, become the Lanes and Safety officer.
• Benjamin Galliot: Young employee at Exploratory Services, at the start of the storyline. A bit crazy. When Craig Bodeno receives orders to watch the Steltekers Club, he promotes Ben to Administrative Assistant and sends him to penetrate the Steltekers Club. Ben enrolls at Oxford, befriends Masterson and Monkhouse, and promises them he can get access to ES ships and jump point analysis equipment and computers, to help look for Steltek remains in unexplored systems. Later in the game, the Belisarius Group are concerned about the Steltekers' rising popularity, and ask Bodeno to use his plant to control or derail the Steltekers' Club. Ben at first tries to moderate Stelteker ideology. When that fails, he gets instructions to go the other way and turn it into an extremist ideology, opposing all technology. When that also fails, he splits the Steltekers and founds the Church of Man, changing his name to Father Bennegelli. He no longer answers to Craig Bodeno. Craig thinks his spy has gone crazy, but what has actually happened is that Belisarius have taken direct control of him. Much later, when he comes to know that the Steltek actually exist, and to understand the intentions of Belisarius, he refuses to cooperate, so they try to kill him and replace him with an engineer from Black Ops Research and Development. Ben escapes to the Fariss Quadrant, where he meets Deiter. Deiter helps Ben get a new identity, Hunter Toth; and learns from him about the Steltek. Deiter then launches on a crusade to try and obtain Steltec relics, believing that they can give him an edge in trying to iron an arms deal with the Confed. All he ever obtains is a fragment of a Steltek tablet full of symbols, and for that he will pay with his life.
• Young Warrant Officer Terrel: Boss of Confed Decomissionings Division at a Confed base in some system in Avalon. When asked by the Secret Service to write off ships as having been recycled that were actually being siphoned off, he requests transfer. He is refused transfer, so he threatens to blow the whistle unless transfer is granted. Transfer is finally granted, but then he fears for his life, so he hires a privateer to escort him to his new base, Perry. This will be a difficult mission, as the attacking Black Ops pilots are aces.
• Menesch: Lawyer, and former Secret Service agent, had been hired because of family links to important people; fired for his ineptitude. His gift for speaking out of both sides of his mouth and promising the full moon to more than one party, leads him first to mediating deals between enemy factions, and later to politics. His political career gets heavy funding from shady quarters within Confed. Money laundering is an art and a science, and what better way to do it than to have a corrupt guy at the top of a whole administrative chain? He gets elected, with a bit of ballot fraud, to governor of a planet; --in the same system in Avalon where Confed Decomissionings has the space station where Terrel is Warrant Officer. Then he begins a gradual trade of Confed Talons to pirates, --at the beginning only accepting pay in gems, but eventually accepting any form of payment; and he gets caught, thrown out of office, and charged with corruption of every sort. He escapes across Gemini to the Grovsner Colonies; --a legal heaven for pirates and Mandarins. During his stay in Grovsner he meets Mandarins who in turn introduce him to Khal. He is also noticed by Belisarius agents, who, much later in the story, will propose to him to become the arms supplier for the Retros. While he was in office in Avalon, and accepting only gems as payment, pirates become very selective in their merchant shipping attacks, looking for cargos of gems above all else. It is at this time that the Merchants Guild decides to refuse transportation of gems for Lynch, and Lynch decides to found Lynch Shipping; --at the beginning just to get the gems moving, but later to save costs on iron shipments as well, leading to the Merchants Guild cutting him off, etceteras. But, to get back to Menesch, he keeps his fingers on the illegal ship trade from the safety of Grovsner. By 2667, when the false peace or armistice with the Kilrathi is signed, he foresees a huge surplus of ships being sent for decomissioning, and decides to come out of hiding to take on the offer to become the Retro supplier. By then, however, Roman Lynch and Damien Lang (the sons of Romulo Lynch and Deiter Lang, respectively), have become direct buyers of decomissioned ships, and the Confed bureaucrats at Decomissionings refuse to give him priority for the full surplus. Those bureaucrats are unknowingly controlled by Black Ops and Belisarius, who would have ordered them to give Menesch the priority he sought; but things happen too fast: Menesch takes their refusal to be final, goes back to Grovsner, asks the Mandarins for a meeting with Khal, and irons out a deal for Salthis. After all, the Kilrathi should have as much of a "ship surplus problem" as the confeds, he figures. Peace comes to an end, but Khal keeps his side of the deal, and shipments of Salthis begin in 2669.

Organizations

• AVR Ships: Ship sales and repairs, Gemini monopoli, headquartered in New Detroit. In spite of its monopoli status, their situation isn't as good as it might appear. Few ship buyers have enough patience to save money towards a Centurion purchase while avoiding the temptation to get a cheap Talon in the black market; and sales of Orions and Galaxies have been dropping as more buyers prefer to buy Demons from Enigma, or Draymans from Sol. Another problem is their inability to finance purchases: Most financial institutions avoid financing ship purchases, in light of the high risks involved, given the extent of piracy in Gemini. Shareholders of AVR ships feel they are being unfairly taxed, and unfairly regulated. They are not allowed to sell Talons, as Talons were never approved for sale to the civilian market. They are not allowed to sell imports, such as Drayman and Demon, or second hand ships, for that matter, on the pretext tho help Gemini-based manufacturers. They aren't even allowed to lower prices, based on the argument or offer financing
• Belisarius: See Andropolos Belisarius, above.
• Rondell: Founded by the original settlers of Palan. Over time, one client comes to dominate their exports: Deiter Lang. At one point they become alarmed that Lang appears posed to buy Rondell, and they decide to IPO the corporation as a public company, and so hopefully put it out of his financial reach. To their dismay, Lang buys most of the shares at the IPO. The trend of producing less food and more "spice" continues. Many citizens of Palan feel queasy about their spice output being mostly for Ultimate production at pirate bases. On the other hand, they enjoy the fact that their planet and system is largely spared from piracy. Later they feel equally ambiguous about Rondell's growth and its acquisitions of many other food producing companies around Gemini; and the growing use of slave labor at those other agricultural planets. On the other hand, they enjoy the full employment that Rondell provides at their own planet. Being often mentioned as the planet with the largest share of business with the Merchants Guild is a source of pride that helps forget the other details.
• Bronte: A food producers consortium created by non-aligned food producers to help each other remain out of the tentacles of growing Rondell. Its largest marketshare member is Beto Food Corp. Later in the story, Romulo Lynch first becomes their benefactor, and eventually owns Bronte. That's after Lynch's falling out with the Merchants Guild.
• Corcoran: Corcoran was a small refinery until Romulo Lynch became its main shareholder. It was his first step in a plan to monopolize the production of durasteel from iron ore. His action caused share prices of refineries to more than double over the next month; but Lynch quietly abandons the plan, though he keeps his Corcoran shares, if only for the sake of controlling Liverpool. His change of heart came when he realised that having a durasteel production monopoli was of little use, when the Confed shipyards had a near monopoli of consumption... After the ousting of Governor Menesch, Roman Lynch convinces his father to try and fill the vacuum Menesch left behind, and to get into the illegal arms and ships sales. Romulo Lynch was reluctant, but finally acquiesces with his son, after the latter argues that Pentonville pirates will be at a relative disadvantage to Drake and KM-252 pirates, otherwise. Romulo Lynch doesn't have a "deal" with the pirates of Pentonville (yet), but there's a bit of an understanding: Lynch, directly or indirectly, pays for the salaries of the Liverpool and New Detroit local militias, as well as those of many asteroid mining bases. If the Pentonville pirates attack Merchants' Guild shipping rather than Lynch Shipping, the militias are much more likely to aim at an angle and miss. But Roman Lynch has something else in mind he doesn't share with his father: He's been pondering about the problem of production monopoli versus consumption monopoli, and thinks that the black market of Talons is a way of capturing part of the consumption monopoli, and grabbing the Confed in a vise. But I was speaking about Corcoran and got sidetracked...
• Confeds (political branch): (research needed)
• Confeds (military branch): (research needed)
• Militias (confed): These are the guys that do the contraband checks. While pirates all around are attacking Draymans worth millions of credits, these fat militias all they seem to care about is a box or two of brilliance in someone's cargo. Why? Because pirates are the main buyers of illegally sold Confed Talons; that's why. Confeds instruct their militias to put on a public show about doing something about the pirates, but to really do nothing about them. Well, as individuals, Confeds would choose to do something about pirates, but the bureaucrats that give the orders are infiltrated by a mixture of Secret Service, Black Ops and Belisarius agents. Secret Service and Black Ops are themselves penetrated by Belisarius. And few Confeds are willing to stick their necks out to Y-12.
• Militias (local): Local militias are paid for by the local adminstrations of stations and planetary bases. Local administrations are low budget, typically their revenue coming from landing fees. Badly trained and badly equipped, unless local corporations agree to support them.
• Mercenaries Guild:
• Merchants Guild:
• Exploratory Service:
• Pirates (in general): The most salient difference about Priv 0 vs. Priv 1 pirates is that Priv 1 pirates use Talons almost exclusively. At the start of Priv 0, pirate Talons aren't very common. Pirates have whatever kinds of ships they were able to steal or buy. Talons can only be obtained by stealing them from militias, which is not easy: you have to first disarm, then cripple the ship, and finally board it or tractor it into a larger ship. Most common ship among pirates, at the start of Priv 0 is the Tarsus; and to bring their Tarsus across jump points they have to have a jump-capable ship... --usually a Drayman, but occasionally a Caernaven.
• Pirate base Drake:
• Pirate base KM252:
• Pirate base Pentonville:
• Secret Service: Originally an arm of the Confed political branch to keep tabs on the Confed military, but currently serves the highest bidder; often Belisarius.
• Y-12: A group of elite Black Ops operatives that are also Belisarius members; they carry out black ops on Belisarius's behalf.