Ben Zwycky

That'll be this Saturday from 1830. Good work, Zane. If you can get some practise in with Omega on mp before then, then we can get him up to Level 3 very quickly, and we can start on some new level 3 stuff I've been working on (and a little level 4 for you). I noticed your impressive after action report from a month back. If you have any fp tricks to share, then put them in an L3 doc and we'll see if we can practise them sometime. What's happened to the logos? I can't see them. btw, Rip, you need to update your profile (or at least put the link in your sig to your UC profile)

Yeah, well the DSL will be set up and activated sometime within the next 10-15 days, what with demand for new connections and all, but that'll still be in time for the start of the season. Beware all our enemies. I see that You guys are all signed up on the team(we're the only team with more than one member listed) OK, so that's all of us from 1830-2100 GMT on Weekends and you three from midnight to 4am GMT Weekdays. That's pretty flexible, I'd say. If this other thing works out we may be able to make some other weekday times with a valid team (me and one other guy, who I'm working on) ISS is getting ready to rumble!!!! [ 01-11-2005, 02:45 PM: Message edited by: Ben Zwycky ]

Patience paid off. The DSL company I was going to apply to today just started a special offer- 12 month contract at 1024/256 DSL for 890Kc(40$)/month and reduced setup costs. I applied. I have my new monitor and desk, should have the new computer by the end of the week. Bring on the battle

Yeah, give him level 2, level 1 is for those who are too lazy to participate. Level 3 he can earn fairly quickly.

OK, the new season is upon us, and the fleet match time is a whole lot more flexible, so everyone post all the possible times you can be online to compete, so we can determine when we can put together a valid team. put all your times in GMT for ease of understanding I can make 1800-2100 GMT any weekday, 0800-2100 GMT on Saturdays, 0800-1500 and 1830-2100 GMT Sundays, except where arranged social events intervene (unpredictable) but I need at least 48 hours warning to arrange things for playing outside the 1830-2100 window.

OK, created a team for ISS. Abandon hope all ye other contestants muahahahaha!

OK, our shiny new fleet TS server is online and set up Whoever wants to know the password had better PM me. Thanks Remo

I'm waiting 10 more mninutes on server 2

alternatively, Prime fleet west TS server is also up.

The best man won

Next training session in 10 minutes. Nick's TS server seems to be down, ask Rip to give you a user account and password on his TS server, otherwise I'll hang around on server 2 for 15 minutes from 1800 GMT to 1815 GMT. Let's get lethal, people

That's Omega, I've been PM'ing him, he says he's ready to be active again and he's registered at iss.galcom.net. Give him level 1 clearance, would you? I'm working on someone else, too. We'll see how that turns out.

Interesting...

OK, anyone think they would make a good scorekeeper for the 2005 season? I was thinking Zane or Rip if you have time. Anyway, I propose a training session for Saturday from 1800 GMT. Any takers?

OK, time for a new roll call. Go to the fleet database, click on your name and click on the roll call option.

I'll wait for the detailed proposal before making any further comments or suggestions, as it doesn't seem to be helpful until things are clarified.

That all looks very good to me, and I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to implement in our fleet. I'm intrigued by the Campaign ROE's idea. I've been having problems creating an account at galcom.net, the confirmatory emails usually get to me after the 24 hour deadline. I'll try again after I've got DSL and can get online more than once a day. As far as the tournament is concerned, I'm sure whatever structure you come up with will be acceptable. Zane, don't be so negative. If you want to say no to a suggestion, at least suggest an alternative. Let's just take part and give it a go.

I'd like to look at your ideas for earning medals and rank. I'm sure they'll be appropriate for us as well, though if they include the academy, then ours will have to be adjusted to match our training program, since it uses a slightly different format. Anyone else have any ideas for graphical versions of the medals?

Zane and I once discussed some artwork to represent medals, which we would add to individual fleet sig animations, or place alongside to reduce file sizes. I still have some concept pics (I have an eye of andromeda and order of the universe concept pic somewhere, and had ideas for the planetary and combat shields, but ended up incorporating them into our marine and fighter wing logos, which I never published. Btw, if we're talking about training programs, ISS has a very powerful and effective training program up and running, which enables tehm to then become more and more valued members, but it happens behind closed doors, like most of our activities, because we're an intelligence fleet and it involves a lot of sensitive information that give us an edge. A prime example of it's effectiveness would be Commander Rip. He went from very rusty to star of the fleet tournament team final in about a month. I just wish more of our commanders would take advantage of it :sigh: I like the idea of a prize for the season winner, but maybe that's because I think I stand a pretty good chance of defending my title, and I'm not sure how willing people are going to be to pay to take part in the tournament(in whatever form that takes) I suppose it'd depend on how much and if they feel they might miss out on their chance to take part despite having paid for some reason, since disqualifying someone for whatever reason could cause some unrest, but that's another issue. The prize mentioned in that thread sounds awful tempting to me (since I'm not upgrading my graphics card this time round anyway) and I would be willing to pay 10$ or something to enter, but that's just me.

Voted. What's wrong with the medals themselves as rewards? I'd just love to present Rip with his medals. Create a new thread for that, Dreada. We can discuss that and other realted issues there.

Couldn't agree more. It just really connects you to the others in your team, and you work together like a real unit. Here's to next year!

OK, I found a place that sells a good-looking LG monitor for less than the place I was looking at (that was out of stock of LG monitors: itÔÇÖs an LG 17ÔÇ£ L1730S contrast ratio 550:1 / 250cd/m2 / 12ms If this is a good one to go for then itÔÇÖll save me almost 100$ and allow me to aim a little higher with the rest of my configuration. IÔÇÖve also been considering the socket 939 version, since it allows the use of four memory modules at once, and the 939 winchester core has a much improved stability and heat issues, whichÔÇÖll come into play if IÔÇÖm going to leave it running a lot. Being a more expensive motherboard, IÔÇÖd have to go for the 3200+ to keep within my budget, because there was a big jump in price to the 3500+ last time I looked. Now, as far as memory is concerned I have some options which I would like peopleÔÇÖs opinion on: 1. 4x 256MB CL2 2. 2x 512MB CL3 + 2x256 MB CL3 would this have greater bandwidth than option 3, or cause problems by having diferent size modules? 3. 3x 512MB CL3 3. 4x 512MB CL3 (most expensive option, obviously, but I can just about fit it in my budget, or go very slightly over. At the moment IÔÇÖm leaning towards option 2, if there are no problems with that, since thatÔÇÖll allow me to have bigger hard disks. Another issue is the case/power supply. If I order it from a local on-line store, IÔÇÖll have to specify this as well. Are there any special requirements for AMD 64 processors? Should it be a P4 approved one, or will any do? Is Sweex, Gembird, Chill, Ultra Power, Eurocase, Aopen or Fortron a good manufacturer for power supplies (those are my options)? What should I look for in the case itself?

Yeah, thanks for taking part guys, I'm looking forward to a little rest and then getting ready for next season- bigger, better and scarier. Thanks to Marvin for a great final match I was sooo nervous before we got started, but I had to live up to our reputation as Galcom's elite praetorian guard, now, didn't I? Be afraid, if you are an enemy of Galcom, ISS will find you... If you want to be the best, join ISS!!

Well, after a problematic start, Rip put in an outstanding performance, especially given the fact this was only his second time at a fleet match and his first representing ISS. He got the Insurgent shuttle first in the second match to square the series while I was sitting in Rovarix like a fool instead of going back into Galadran to defend our shuttle. Then in the tiebreaker he finished off both Insurgent ships in his respawn vessel, tieing up the number of kills at 2:2 (Chavik was so focused on finishing me off after my stupid mistake that Rip was able to finish him off soon afterwards, and it seems Shohashi had been progressively crippled earlier by both our hostile intentions, enabling Rip to level things). This won us the championship because our prey were more valuable than theirs. It was a good team performance, we combined firepower relatively well to soften up our targets, but both made some mistakes which very nearly cost us dearly. It was a nail-biter right to the end. He still has a lot to learn, but is making very good progress, and I take great pleasure in promoting Rip to Level 3 Security clearance. Only one more kill to go to get you to Level 4, and automatic promotion to a Level 5 position for being the first to reach level 4. Congratulations, Commander Rip! Your new security protocols have been sent. The individual finals were a different story. Again I made a silly mistake in both matches, each costing me a life, the stupidest was leaving the Castrin region in my match with Chavik, otherwise I would probably have got through without losing a life. The match with Marvin was a closer match The first round went very smoothly, two kills without my shields being breached, then in the second came my little error of judgement, which Marvin capitalised on to do serious damage to me before losing his first life. My armour was at 90% but my engine was destroyed, spilling my radine tank into the void. I decided to self-destruct rather than try and face him using only my solar reactor, conceding the kill. Then came the big showdown. If I killed Marvin, itÔÇÖd be all over. If he killed me, itÔÇÖd go down to a third deciding round. Marvin jumped towards me and battle was on. We ducked rolled and weaved, surging and braking, firing, jamming and dodging, each vying for the tactical upper hand, with lagging issues on the server adding to the confusion, the duel went on and on into overtime, then we disengaged and jumped to opposite sides of the region. Marvin was first to recharge his jump engines and jumped towards me. That cost him dear and I made no mistake this time. Match over, after 4 hours of combat in total and at 20 past midnight, I could finally get some sleep. Quite a night! Anyway, thereÔÇÖs still room for improvement and a lot of tricks still up my sleeve, weÔÇÖll be ironing out the mistakes and upping our effectiveness ready to meet the stronger challenges for next season. We'll be ready. Be afraid

I'm here on Prime Fleet West bang on time, as is Rip, but no-one else is around. ISS is as ready as it's gonna be, bring it on!