teukros

Do any of the ships in Star Wars have Bussard Ramjets? 'cause Bussard Ramjets suck.

Under the Gun by The Sisters of Mercy, with Ofra Haza

No it is... for the life of me I can't figure it out... hopefully it doesn't happen again... and if it does I'll (hopefully) be able to restore from backups.

Well the Federation had no chance against the Borg as they were originally shown in "Q Who", I suppose the question must be, could the Empire have stood up to them? I'm guessing not. So let's call it a draw.

Oh, well... my adventures continue... once before Rebellion somehow "short circuited" (that's how I have come to think of it) and it was completely ignoring the TACTICAL.DLL in the Rebellion folder, it was only using the one on the CD. Sometime in the last few days it happened again, but this time with the ENCYTEXT.DLL. I actually noticed it first on my friends machine, he got some error message about it not being a valid windows file. So I rooted around in my registry for a while and eventually decided to just give up, uninstall and delete everything, and start over. The Rebellion folder had been in my Games folder since 1998. This time I installed it to where it thought it wanted to go, into the Program Files directory. So now I am re-entering data from my documentation and my main objective now will be to methodically go, step by step, backing up everything, and to put together a modest TC that other people can actually use, maybe even in two-player games! Duro and Sessawenna will still be misspelled. A lot of encyclopedia entries will be rewritten to be shorter. The ships will be butt ugly. And the Imperial starfighters will still fly backwards! (Geez I hate that) But this is the second time in the last couple of months that this has happened, and I still have no idea why...

Ah. Maybe someday I'll have a computer I can play KOTOR on...

I've never heard of pazaak (until now). Apparently West End came up with some basic sabacc rules, used some names that Timothy Zahn had dropped (like The Idiot), and voila! The card game Han Solo and Lando Calrissian were playing when Solo famously won the Millenium Falcon!

The Rider-Waite deck's pip cards are pretty darned distracting if you're just trying to play a card game (56 card rummy, anybody?) Old style pip cards just show the suit and the number, for example the nine of swords just shows nine swords (just like modern playing cards). But on the other hand, for the face cards, I think the Rider-Waite Major Arcana cards work out pretty well with the correspondences (and each pair's second card's optional name) I selected last night - for example, compare the High Priestess and the Chariot - there are obvious similarities. I also tried to fit it into the Star Wars Galaxy - for example, equating The Emperor with Order, and pairing The Evil One with The Old Order. Unfortunately (for sabacc) I am not aware of any Tarot deck that has old-style pip cards, and Rider-Waite style Major Arcana cards.

Which brings up an interesting question. Do the Sith apprentices take vows that they will not challenge their Masters unless/until they have candidate apprentices of their own? In other words, was Darth Vader honor-bound to not challenge the Emperor unless Skywalker was willing to be his apprentice?

OK, here's a wacky question: If he plops all of the modified .DLLs (ENCYTEXT.DLL, TEXTSTRA.DLL, GOKRES.DLL, and TACTICAL.DLL) into his main Rebellion folder, replaces his GDATA folder with a .zip of my GDATA folder, and also replaces into his EDATA folder any of my EDATA files which have been updated this century, does he need to bother with RebEd and the .reb file at all?

a simple point counting game with a twist: the Face cards have negative values. You want to have the highest score which does not exceed 23, or a score of exactly -23. Scores of > 23, < -23, or 0 are Bombs, which are bad (the player is forced to pay a penalty, usually heavy). EDIT: There's a Sabacc Online site. If you select the Casino Rules, the artwork isn't bad: http://www.ehnet.org/sabacc/

And now for something completely different: Sabacc! Rules taken from http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4928/sabacc_instructions.txt Using a single Tarot deck to play Sabacc by teukros (Ross Starkey) Original equivalencies (using two decks to make one constructed deck, presumably defacing one deck's Ace cards to differentiate ones from Aces): Sabacc Tarot Sabres Swords Staves Wands Flasks Cups Coins Pentacles 1-10 I-X 11 Page [This is the most confusing conversion.] Commander (12) Knight Mistress (13) Queen Master (14) King Ace (15) Ace Idiot (0) Fool (0) Queen of Air and Darkness (-2) The High Priestess (II) Endurance (-8) Strength (VIII) Balance (-11) Justice (XI) Demise (-13) Death (XIII) Moderation (-14) Temperance (XIV) The Evil One (-15) The Devil (XV) The Star (-17) The Star (XVII) I propose: Sabacc Tarot Sabres Swords Staves Wands Flasks Cups Coins Pentacles 1 Ace 2-10 II-X Warrior (11) Page Commander (12) Knight Mistress (13) Queen Master (14) King Ace of Staves (Archetype of Fire) (15) The Tower (XVI) (Fire) Ace of Flasks (Archetype of Water) (15) The Moon (XVIII) (Water) Ace of Sabres (Archetype of Air) (15) The Magician (I) (Air) Ace of Coins (Archetype of Earth) (15) The Empress (III) (Earth) Idiot (of Nowhere) (0) Fool (0) (no element) Idiot (of Everywhere), or The Mob (0) The World (XXI) (all elements) Queen (of Air and Darkness) (-2) The High Priestess (II) (Water) King (of Water and Light) (-2) The Chariot (VII) (Water) Endurance (-8) Strength (VIII) (Fire) Rebirth (-8) Judgement (XX) (Fire) Balance (-11) Justice (XI) (Air) Order (-11) The Emperor (IV) (Air) Demise (-13) Death (XIII) (Water) Execution (-13) The Hanged Man (XII) (Water) Moderation (-14) Temperance (XIV) (Fire) Good Fortune, or Unity, or Peace (-14) Wheel of Fortune (X) (Fire) The Evil One (-15) The Devil (XV) (Earth) The Old Order (-15) The Hierophant (V) (Earth) The Star (-17) The Star (XVII) (Fire) The Sun (-17) The Sun (XIX) (Fire) A pair of face cards are identical for gameplay purposes, e.g. The Evil One and The Old Order are identical, and the secondary name (and any secondary illustration) are purely esthetic. If one were to draw The Old Order it would be perfectly proper to say that he had just drawn The Evil One, and if he held The Old Order and The Evil One in his hand it would then be correct to say that he held both Evil One cards. The Lovers (VI) (Air) and The Hermit (IX) (Earth) are placed aside (they make a rather poignant pair). As noted in the West End rules, a "sabacc" is a hand containing an Idiot, a 1, and a 2 (or a perfect 23). I have several suggestions to build on that... 1. The 1 and the 2 must both be of the same suit. 2. Suit or elemental sabaccs: the Archetype of an element, and two face cards of the same element. A pair of identical face cards (e.g. both Moderations) beats non-identical face cards (e.g. Demise and The Queen) 3. The total value of the hand (all four cards) must not be over 23 (or under -23, or 0)! 4. A player may only play a sabacc if he calls. If another player calls he calculates the simple point total of his cards. 5. Optional tiebreaking rule: Sabres beats Coins, Coins beats Flasks, and Flasks beats Staves. Elemental Correspondence stuff taken from "The Fool's Quest" http://www.moderngypsy.com/tarot/tables.html

Hey Jahled, I'm sure you've heard of Numero? EDIT: Still listening to the Evanescence: "Lies", "Away from Me" and "Eternal" (from Origin).

Hmm, "all of the above". Just what I was thinking. I'm a little concerned about the TACTICAL.DLL (it's just so BIG) would it work okay if he just installed the MC-40a and Golan III models? What the heck is that DLLENTRIES.TXT file for anyway?

A friend just tried installing my TC on his laptop and it wasn't a howling success... the only file I sent him was the .reb file which is 274 kb. OK so I wasn't expecting the models to make it since my TACTICAL.DLL is 16 MB. But the behavior which I observed was weird.... The only changes I've made have been settings, encyclopedia entries, and a couple new cards, all changed with RebEd; changes to the ENCYTEXT.DLL and TEXTSRA.DLL, made with ResHack; And some new models (and the Battlestations program). So when he used RebEd to load my TC it said "String too long: Truncated" three times. Oh you've just GOT to be kidding me, I said. The card title "Golan Arms Defense Platform III" had been truncated. Okay maybe that one was a little long. And the planet Duro was back to its old misspelled name, "Duros". But the Sessawenna Sector was still correctly named... and strangest of all, the T.I.E. cards had all been renamed from e.g. "T.I.E. Interceptor Squadron" to "TIE Interceptor Squadron" (no truncation but no periods either). So of all of these things, what do I need to send him? A. ENCYTEXT.DLL B. TEXTSTRA.DLL C. GOKRES.DLL (I have no idea what this file is for, I've never edited it directly) D. TACTICAL.DLL (or would it be easier to have him install the Golan III and MC-40a models himself and tell him that any other models are optional? Is this even possible?) E. DLLENTRIES.TXT and DLLENTRIES.BAK F. A .zip of the entire GDATA folder G. Any recently modified EDATA files H. Anything else... And will he need to download and run the Battlestations! program himself?

Well... Sith and Jedi are two Schools... but I'm still not comfortable with the idea that Sith = Dark Side and Jedi = "Light" Side (and I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that the Force has this Light/Dark duality). My take on it is, the Dark Side (or the Dark Path) basically means that a Force User lost control and went nuts...

Hey Jahled, I lost three thousand dollars worth of vinyls years and years ago. All classical. A high quality vinyl is a very fine thing indeed. I still have fond memories of a boxed Philips set of Handel's Organ Concerti. Of course a high quality CD is also very good. And crap vinyls and crap CDs all sound like crap. There's something to be said for CDs though. They're small and light and with a modicum of care can remain essentially pristine for years, regardless of use. Just imagine if computer technology had, somehow or other, gone in the direction of recording data on vinyl disks... all of us trying to keep all of our vinyl Rebellion disks working after all of these years of using them...

Well the Sith will try (to be masters of and not mastered by) the Force. I was wrong late, very late, last night when I implied Sith = Force addict. Neither Jorus nor Joruus C'baoth were ever Sith, but Joruus C'baoth was a Force addict. Nevertheless I would imagine, that since Sith do not make as big a deal out of being calm and emotionless as Jedi, and since they will resort to Force use in circumstances where Jedi would not, that they would be more at risk of going down that Dark Path.

A little bit of a resource bottleneck isn't a terrible thing. It just means that the GenCore (or whatever) that was supposed to take X days to finish will end up taking X+Y days to finish. If Y is a small number, who cares? But if it is larger than X, you've got problems. Highlight all Construction Yards. Not the active ones... all of them. Visit each one and make sure he is doing what he is supposed to be doing. Do the same for your Training Centers and your Shipyards. Maybe you have eight or nine small shipyards on formerly neutral worlds which, when they joined your side, you ordered them to build X-Wings because you didn't have anything better for them to do. Or something. Those refined materials have got to be going somewhere.

People used to say the same things about Quantum Mechanics. Hmmm I know a little bit about String Theory and it's interesting if largely speculative, but I don't see how it invalidates e.g. Lorentz Transformations...

Depends on which side you're playing. If you're playing the Imperials it won't make much of a difference because the computer cheats, cheats, cheats to do everything in its power to make sure that the Rebels win. But if you're playing the Rebels and you kill all of the Imperial researchers, it should have some effect.

I'm just loving the whole concept of lightsabers as fashion accessories.

Hey Aenivae, you forgot to include pink as a choice for lightsaber color!

The same time they (re)discover the superiority of vacuum tube based audio equipment.

Well of course it's all fantasy, and one man's fantasy is as good as any other's. The important thing is, does he tell the story well? In reality, we're all trapped inside relativistic prison cells that we cannot break out of. Non-priviledged frames of reference imply that superluminal transmission of information (of which FTL travel would be an example) is not simply impossible according to our current knowledge, it is Prohibited.