>>22080667
Sup/tg/ of the last thread is here:
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/22076049/

As the anon who first bumped that poor, dying Internet Space Thread by pointing out the location of 4chan, I feel kind of proud.

>>22080667

These threads just make me want to make a setting out of Megaman Battle Network

>>22080667
Foolz.us of the last thread is here:
http://archive.foolz.us/tg/thread/22076049/

Let's see if we can get some crunch in this shit.

How would we actually make a system to play in this setting? What races and character classes are there? What's the general "Feel" of it? What is there to do?

I think last comment of the old thread was something about the Webspace you travel between systems in being filled with ads.

Perhaps Searchlight engines need to "buffer" before they can activate and send you into a new system? In particular the engines on certain entertainment-oriented craft like those made by the Youtube Shipyards are notorious for unexpected and inconvenient buffering.

>>22080769
Well, would we really need to make a system, or would something like Traveler work for it?

>>22080866

Traveler'd probably work pretty well.

You'd need to go into the ship-jumping bits though. Maybe make the length of time you get stuck jumping based on a system's "ping" or something.

Other than that, it's just coming up with some basic statlines for the differing races. Which is pretty easy, since there're a fair number in the core book, which gives a good idea for what's reasonable. I think there were rules for making up your own, too, but it's been a while.

>>22080777
So, Webspace travel comes in three varieties: There's the Hyperlinks, Searchlight travel, and the ancient Arpa Network dialup gates.

Hyperlinks are short, quick jumps between adjacent systems, branching out from that system's Site, a machine or natural point in space-time that allows entry into the Web using an HTTP drive. Hyperlinks are effectively wormholes connecting site to site, and are also known as Tubes. Internal hyperlinks within a site can also allow for short-range teleportation. The Web is named as such because the network of hyperlinks seems to form a "web-like" shape.

Searchlight Engines are huge beacons, similar to the Astronomicon, which are powered by large machinery orbiting around or perhaps attached to stars. By tuning your ship's drive to a certain Searchlight Engine, it is possible to download the coordinates of a non-adjacent system from the Engine's database and then use the Engine as a beacon to navigate freely through the Web hyperspace without getting lost in its strange geometries, allowing one to simply bypass the hyperlink network and avoid stopping at sites. However, use of a Searchlight Engine to navigate allows the megacorporations that control each Engine to scan your vessel and spy on you during your journey. A Searchlight Engine - based ship must charge up, or "buffer", before your HTTP drive may enter the Web, and it cannot enter the Web from within a gravity well, though it is otherwise not restricted in exit points. Any HTTP drive with the right attachments may use a Searchlight Engine.

>>22080946
The old dialup Arpa Network gates are effectively Stargates; one "dials up" the correct address on them, and your ship is transferred from one system to another. There are very few Arpa Network gates, and they are only found in ancient, ruined systems from over two thousand years ago. They were built by the Ancients, long before the Eternal September and the discovery of the HTTP drive. They are much slower than normal Web travel.

Web travel is not instantaneous, although I don't believe we've come to a consensus on how slow it should be.

>>22080810

Viruses, eh? Yeah, they can be a bitch to get rid of.

Luckily, there're a good few houses out their that make their living hunting 'em down. Houses Kaspersky, Norton, and McAfee are some of the bigger ones, but there's a fair few smaller houses too. They got varying costs, and some of 'em are pretty bad at their job, but still: Better an overpriced virus hunter occasionally going off on some innocent schmuck than your ship and all the crew dying 'cause a bunch of viruses have gotten into your drive core, I say.

>>22080953
One may also travel through the Deep Web using a TOR device. The Deep Web is not limited by distance, although one must know the exact coordinates of the place one wishes to link to, and travel is much slower due to the twisty geometries and constant convolutions of hyperlink tubes through the Deep Web. Entering and leaving the Deep Web is very energy-intensive, but it is impossible to track. Owning a TOR entry device is not illegal, but is subject to intense scrutiny from government and corporations. The Deep Web is the preferred travel method of the raiders and barbarians who assault civilized systems, making it necessary for smaller worlds to cling to larger ones for protection. It is also rumored to contain "Ghost Sites" - sites completely inaccessible from the normal Web, but which can be accessed through TOR if one has the coordinates. They are suspected to be the bases of the raiders and hotbeds of illegal activity and secrets.

>>22080946
Hyperlink networks are also quite a bit faster than browsing via a Searchlight Engine. As such, series of tubes connecting major trade hubs and other important areas can be the backbone of empires and civilizations. The Map in the OP is a (sadly unlabeled) map of Hyperlink trade routes.

>>22081005
House Norton can go fuck a hole in the spacetime fabric.

Turns out they offer an undisclosed Piracy Intervention False Tracker System, or PIFTS, that supposedly just helps give you further protection, when in reality it's a tracking subroutine. More than one dissenter has "vanished" after trying to uninstall their Norton AV module, especially when they mess around with the PIFTS directly.

Anybody here remember the "I Love You" virus in the elder's stories?

Turns out some of the Archivers believed it originated in the hold of a Cam Boat pleasure ship a few thousand years back, and managed to infect a significant portion of the entire net before it was stopped. Scary shit, especially the calling card. I can't imagine what the few uninfected were going through near the end.

>Dat repeated phrase echoing throughout the ships speakers, from hundreds of messages said in dozens of voices, all chanting at you despite your blockers and filters turned up to maximum.

>I love you

>I love you

>I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love-

>+CONTACT LOST+

>>22081222
So, by this idea, Viruses are pretty much mind-rape parasites? Their natural habitat is living in the neural tissue of the rare weird shit that lives in Webspace, but it can also take control of ordinary living thing and control its behavior like a more specialized toxoplasmosis?

>>22081269
And some of the Deep Web people and those on the sites in the seedier and more lawless corners of space breed them for shits and giggles as weapons or strange jokes, creating ever larger, stealthier, and more powerful viruses. The largest, Stuxnet, was able to slip into important engineers of the weapons program of the Domain of Allah and cause the machines they designed to fail, while simultaneously encouraging them to leak classified research back to the creators.

>>22081302
The Deep Web, on the other hand, is inhabited by elder horrors.

>>22080905
I'm thinking that you'd need something like Traveler, with a bit more Shadowrun.

File: 1355737291442.png-(651 KB, 1366x601, huh.png)

Huh.

You know, we've been talking like this is a fairly normal space setting with colonized planets and maybe a few dyson spheres for the biggest sites. But that's not really in keeping with the variant sizes. So what if they're ALL dyson spheres? The little ones are "normal" ones with a single star in the middle and a surface at earth's-orbit distance away, more or less. The huge Googl-sized ones are giant many-leveled spheres with dozens or even hundreds of stars orbiting around inside of them.

>>22081885
There had better be a place called Sursamen.

>>22081885

The differences in scale there would be difficult to explain concisely, but basically, you are not going to get multiple stars in a single Dyson sphere unless you're building it on a binary and trinary system to begin with.

Space is big. Our hypothetical Dyson sphere would probably be somewhere between 60 and 100 AU across.

The nearest star to the solar system is 4.2 lightyears away.

That is two hundred and sixty THOUSAND AU distant.

Not plausible. You're getting into The Ship Moves territory here.

>>22081663
The site is as of the end of 2011. It was still thepiratebay.org then.

>>22081929
My thinking wasn't that the spheres were built around stars in their natural positions, but that the stars were moved into appropriate positions and orbits to suit the needs of the constructors.

Also a "normal" dyson sphere, one scaled such that habitation areas are earth's distance from the sun, has a radius of 1 AU.

>>22081915
Literary nods, ho!

File: 1355739941533.jpg-(304 KB, 1200x864, Google it you mongoloid.jpg)

>>22081222

>>22081222
The guy who made the virus get to be mentioned in computer lessons in my country. In a way he is one of the most achieving techy my country has ever produced.

>>22082034
>filename
IT DIDN'T HELP

And what of the Root Domain Name Systems, the very core of the entire Web Network? Without the central systems, not even Inter-System Hyperlinks would function.


But really, is there any plan to include the Root DNS servers, or the massive routers that underpin the Web's coordinate system and depend on the root servers?

So, anybody remember the PC game Freelancer? You might want to give it a look for ideas, or maybe not, idk. I'm kind of useless on the creativity side and I'm lazy, so I'll leave that shit up to you guys.

Bumping for interest.

>>22083806
Bumpan for space.

Maybe stuff like Flash, Java, and Silverlight are all competing omni-mods, capable of a wide array of operations and uses, but being at risk of viral infection or hacking because of their ubiquity.

>When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

>>22084724
Speaking of which, what the hell should Microsoft be?

Almost everyone uses their computers and document/spreadsheet programs, but their browserships, searchlight engine, and Silverlight are universally looked down upon or derided. Should they be like a shadow company that tries to hide the full extent of it's reach in order to appear less threatening to more powerful companies like Google?

>>22084785
>implying I use microshit

>>22084833
And thus, the hipster adventurers of deep space are born. I use Linux too, but I'm not a faggot about it.

>>22084785
Microsoft would be a ship component manufacturer - you may be using the latest Chrome hull, but the screws, the bolts, the metalwork, what holds your ship together is the underlying system, usually made by Apple, Microsoft, or a few indie developers, for rarer ships.

>>22084833
Okay, so what the hell is Linux then?

Like you order your "Free" linux ship, and a week later you get a box the size of a small building, 10,000 assorted parts of varying sizes, an allen wrench, and a sheet of paper simply saying "Good Luck."?

>>22084875
Speaking of hipsters, they should probably be like vapid information junkies in this setting, drifting between the spheres of Instagram, Twitter, tumblr, etc, with the occasional pilgrimage to Wordpress. Not a threat in the slightest, but annoying a group of them can result in them swarming and attempting to overwhelm your ship in a similar manner as ads in hyperlinkspace.

>>22084883
>10,000 assorted parts of varying sizes
Yeah, that should just about cover the engine. Unless the parts are already assembled, so you're just plugging components together.

Also, I read that next part as "an alien wrench".

>>22082436
1. Save image (or not, your choice)
2. Go to images.google.com
3. Drag and drop the image into the search bar
4. ???
5. SORCERY (pls don't burn me).

>>22084955

Or use 4chanx extension

>>22084984
I like a minimalist 4chanx. Plus, the damn icons keep getting added to the download roster when I use DTA-1-click.

So what would be the in-universe equivalent for a power outage? Like some kind of warp storm or something, with entire areas of the net going dark perhaps?

>>22085485
Maybe. Perhaps there are various religions based on what keeps the hyperlinkspace flowing, like the Cult of Comcast, Temple of the Verizon, Shadow of Time-Warner, etc.

Most people don't care too much about them, but representatives of the various religions will kill each other over the slightest excuse.

>>22085485
Everyone is dead and in hell, possibly for months.

I don't know if this has been discussed but wouldn't the mobile phone browsers a form of mini browsership. An innovation in recent centuries the first mini browsership was the PocketWeb.

Mighty Google has the Android while countless independents have created their own.

>>22087143
perhaps its some sort of drone ship you fly throughout the web that has some sort of video feed? maybe a scout ship?

File: 1355783583069.jpg-(1.23 MB, 1440x2040, 1291466991445.jpg)

This is your ship components table.

>>22082647
They're part of the ancient Arpa Net that the Web transport system is built on. The HTTP Drive and Searchlight Engines fundamentally involve tying in to the still functioning Root system and the mysterious thing known only as the D-N-S.

When a website is "created", the actual in-universe happening is the discovery of a jump site in Webspace by robotic scout ships and explorers crawling the deep networks of the DNS, and its subsequent colonization and exploitation.

Also, the "coordinates" of a Site are defined by its IP Address and a series of alphanumeric characters; the "name" of a Site typically comes from an attempted pronunciation of these characters. So Wordpress is actually, technically, called "72.233.104.124-WRD-PR5-(COM)", indicating that it's located at those webway coordinates, has an official designation code of WRD-PR5, and is most suited to habitation by the Com-Sill species. The name "Wordpress" comes from trying to pronounce WRD-PR5.

Tumblr, on the other hand, would be "66.6.36.9-TUM-BLR-(COM)", and so forth. Not all worlds derive their name from their official designation code in the great Dorotevsky-Namin Survey catalog; for instance, the 4C-Habitation Network only picked up the first two digits of its designation code, the origin of Google's name is shrouded in mystery (its actual code is B4C-RUB), and Something Awful is named after a legendary anecdote regarding what the first settlers said said upon landing.

The Site "108.174.106.20-DFE-OJM-(COM)", commonly known as Isup, is a relatively small system housing just 23 billion inhabitants, off in the southwest of the Google Cluster. Isup is a rather obscure system, but what it is known for is its enormous observation systems and communications hubs. Whenever a Site goes down due to warfare or disaster, whenever the Web is disrupted, whenever whole systems mysteriously go dark- Isup is the first one to know what happened.

Hey guys, what about bandwidth and the supposed shortage coming up (and the soon to come caps for D/Uploading stuff?
Or pirates and torrents, for that matter?

>>22090518
pirates are just that; pirates. they steal your money with a vacuum type of weapon designed to vent the craft of oxygen and kill the crew.

...And don't you ever fly to the dreaded sector "78.47.200.67-G0A-T5E". Things there are not meant to be seen by human eyes. Old navigator knows what he says, younglings. Have a good sail!

bump

What would shock sites like goat.ce be? Something like a planet someone carved or terraformed to be some hideous image, or something like a reprogrammed and corrupted adbot?

>>22092203
Shock Sites are corrupted Sites, whose Gate coordinates have somehow twisted and turned in on themselves. They're known to be connected with the dark horrors of the Deep Web somehow; they seem to be junctions where the Deep Web has "punched through" and its twisted geometries have warped the normal Web. Nobody knows what precisely lies within them, but any who enter them develop severe mental trauma.

>>22092300
I went to the Deep Web once. It was a cursory recon expedition sanctioned by a research team after years of tests. The raiders and pirates we saw were alarming, to be sure, but I suppose the nice thing about the Deep Web is that nobody bothers you if you don't bother them. We were floating along through the layers of the Great Onion, and then we passed the final barrier. That was when things started to get... strange... There were impossible angles, our ships recursing on ourselves, one moment we'd appear in one area of realspace, and the next we'd be twisting back into the Deep Web and we'd pop out somewhere else. You can see realspace just fine from in there, but they can't see you. The strangest thing wasn't the pathways themselves, it was that we would pass these... locations. These places didn't exist in realspace. They're just unaccessible from the other side. We passed several of them in our passage, but we didn't dare stop. As we passed them we saw strange creatures. Most of them were just repeating lines of code, which we have over here, but these were....wrong somehow. They shouldn't exist. They can do things that we never dreamed possible! They were beautiful. I even let one of them on the ship. I love him. I love you too. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

>>22092203
There normal sites that have been hijacked by terrorists.

What will the races be? Different ISPs?

>>22098850
ISP's should be either a supplier of some kind, or maybe a regulatory commission.
Consider what ISP's are: they provide access to the Web; without them, you can't use the Hyperlinks or the even receive the ACK packets from the Searchlights. They also maintain the actual hardware that the Web operates on, the routers and switches hidden in the layer of the Web most never see, the packet layer.
They are the ones who repair the Network, who maintain it, and who demand a toll for their services.