The freon background story
nrby
Join Date: 2002-03-05 Member: 270Members
Join Date: 2002-03-05 Member: 270Members
Let me know of any MAJOR problems with it (nothing picky like "uhh well technically a whale isnt a mammel eeeerr")
According to the ns IRC channel, NS is set *around* 2030 so thats where i got the dates from.
Hope you like it, questions/comments welcome.
-------------------------------------
ns_freon
Preface.
<b>The USM Heimann low orbit freight terminal was constructed during the United space mining operations 18 years ago to
accomodate the large number of ore freighters serving in the area around the tau-echelon moon cluster, 4 light years west of
the Allandri-ceti (LV-839-A) nexus.
The operation to mine the area, rich in silicon and iron ore deposits of a nearby dust and rock debris trail caused by the destruction of a
small moon many million of years ago was under the command of Lt.col Samual S. Wallace.
Wallace oversaw the entire operation of the terminal, in command of 4 Senior officers, 2 Junior officers and 150 technicians, mining crew and
peripheral personnel.
The station was designed to cope with 4 simultaneous ore freighters (each caperble of mining 400,000 metric tons of raw unprocessed ore) docking in
any of its 6 super capacity automated airlocks and ore transfer systems. During transfer (which could take anything from 4-7 hours) the ore freighter's
crew could disembark and get refreshed and refulled on the Heimann's lesuire facilities. The Heimann was able to store three-quarters of a million
metric tons of ore in either of its 2 gravity nets (using suspended gravity storage external to the facility) ready for collection to be forwarded to local
refinearies such as the USM refinary Rachtmann in a similar orbit near the Cobolt-insignia facility or the USS Bast refinary, 300,000 KM north of the Heimann.
Shortly after 03:30 SST June 18th 2031, the early shift in the Heimann's op's room recieved a response from the automated beacon* on board the
super-freighter "Van-Lawrence". (*Automated docking beacons were introduced as an automatic proximity alert procedure during super-class vessel docking to a
id the navigation of a ship too big to guide by sight. This was prompted by the 2024 USM Karl Marx tragedy, when an early version of superfreighter class
ships (still in its design infancy) collided with a docking arm of an orbital refuelling station resulting in the death of 1800 crew and civilians)
The beacon is all thats needed to control the auto-docking of the freighter to the Heimann by the ops staff, who are more than used to dealing with docking
a super-class ship on auto pilot to the station.
As the Van-Lawrence was guided cautiously towards the number 3 freighter-lock, The Heimanns ops-staff attempted to hail it's crew. It was not uncommon for no
response at this time, the regulated sleeping patterns of all USM ships and facilites to co-incide with local planet night/day cycles.
During times of alert or problems crew are awoken with a klaxon loud enough to wake aliens with no obvious "ears" in neighbouring galaxies...let alone a
mining vessel.
No response.
The Lawrence beacon fell silent, a small beep accompanied a large red light going out, an identical green light flickering on. The Lawrence was docked, and
all systems reported a successful dock. The enormous ore transfer arm extended out and docked with the freighters bow door under the belly of the ship.
A second Lieutenant Larry smith observed the small CCTV camera focused on the number 3 airlock. Nothing.
40 minutes passed, no contact with the Lawrence. Smith ordered the alert klaxon to be remotely started via the comms link in the docking arm. Another 10
minutes passed, still nothing.
Smith looked over to Staff sagent peterson, still hunched over his console, happy to finally get something to do during a particularly uneventful early
shift "alert the boarding party and wake Wallace."
18:24 SST, June 23rd 2031
The TSA carrier "valkarie-fall" launches a task force dropship to investigate the communications blackout with the USM Heimann. After docking with the Heimanns
personell airlock, they prepare to board. The large silver door roars and squeeks open, and a wave of stagnent air washes over the dropships inhabitants.
There is perfect silence, expect for a small distant siren in a far corridor.
"move out marines, get me visuals"</b>
<!--EDIT|n@rby|April 04 2002,11:57-->
According to the ns IRC channel, NS is set *around* 2030 so thats where i got the dates from.
Hope you like it, questions/comments welcome.
-------------------------------------
ns_freon
Preface.
<b>The USM Heimann low orbit freight terminal was constructed during the United space mining operations 18 years ago to
accomodate the large number of ore freighters serving in the area around the tau-echelon moon cluster, 4 light years west of
the Allandri-ceti (LV-839-A) nexus.
The operation to mine the area, rich in silicon and iron ore deposits of a nearby dust and rock debris trail caused by the destruction of a
small moon many million of years ago was under the command of Lt.col Samual S. Wallace.
Wallace oversaw the entire operation of the terminal, in command of 4 Senior officers, 2 Junior officers and 150 technicians, mining crew and
peripheral personnel.
The station was designed to cope with 4 simultaneous ore freighters (each caperble of mining 400,000 metric tons of raw unprocessed ore) docking in
any of its 6 super capacity automated airlocks and ore transfer systems. During transfer (which could take anything from 4-7 hours) the ore freighter's
crew could disembark and get refreshed and refulled on the Heimann's lesuire facilities. The Heimann was able to store three-quarters of a million
metric tons of ore in either of its 2 gravity nets (using suspended gravity storage external to the facility) ready for collection to be forwarded to local
refinearies such as the USM refinary Rachtmann in a similar orbit near the Cobolt-insignia facility or the USS Bast refinary, 300,000 KM north of the Heimann.
Shortly after 03:30 SST June 18th 2031, the early shift in the Heimann's op's room recieved a response from the automated beacon* on board the
super-freighter "Van-Lawrence". (*Automated docking beacons were introduced as an automatic proximity alert procedure during super-class vessel docking to a
id the navigation of a ship too big to guide by sight. This was prompted by the 2024 USM Karl Marx tragedy, when an early version of superfreighter class
ships (still in its design infancy) collided with a docking arm of an orbital refuelling station resulting in the death of 1800 crew and civilians)
The beacon is all thats needed to control the auto-docking of the freighter to the Heimann by the ops staff, who are more than used to dealing with docking
a super-class ship on auto pilot to the station.
As the Van-Lawrence was guided cautiously towards the number 3 freighter-lock, The Heimanns ops-staff attempted to hail it's crew. It was not uncommon for no
response at this time, the regulated sleeping patterns of all USM ships and facilites to co-incide with local planet night/day cycles.
During times of alert or problems crew are awoken with a klaxon loud enough to wake aliens with no obvious "ears" in neighbouring galaxies...let alone a
mining vessel.
No response.
The Lawrence beacon fell silent, a small beep accompanied a large red light going out, an identical green light flickering on. The Lawrence was docked, and
all systems reported a successful dock. The enormous ore transfer arm extended out and docked with the freighters bow door under the belly of the ship.
A second Lieutenant Larry smith observed the small CCTV camera focused on the number 3 airlock. Nothing.
40 minutes passed, no contact with the Lawrence. Smith ordered the alert klaxon to be remotely started via the comms link in the docking arm. Another 10
minutes passed, still nothing.
Smith looked over to Staff sagent peterson, still hunched over his console, happy to finally get something to do during a particularly uneventful early
shift "alert the boarding party and wake Wallace."
18:24 SST, June 23rd 2031
The TSA carrier "valkarie-fall" launches a task force dropship to investigate the communications blackout with the USM Heimann. After docking with the Heimanns
personell airlock, they prepare to board. The large silver door roars and squeeks open, and a wave of stagnent air washes over the dropships inhabitants.
There is perfect silence, expect for a small distant siren in a far corridor.
"move out marines, get me visuals"</b>
<!--EDIT|n@rby|April 04 2002,11:57-->
Comments
I'm definately not the guy you want to get advice on writing from though...
My only potential problems with it are around the dates. While it's very dramatic to be able to spit out real dates, I just don't know if we're ready to "commit" to these dates. Perhaps Jeff will come around and enlighten us.
Now if there was an easy way to integrate the story with the map. Maybe a standardized entity in the ready room that would bring up a glowy-green scrolling text display with the backstory on it?
<!--EDIT|Flayra|April 04 2002,12:22-->
We should probably get a convention on the technical aspects of the NS universe...
Or is it okay if one ship uses a warp drive, the other one goes into hyper/sub/transpace, and a third makes a run for the local stargate?
<!--emo&:D--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':D'><!--endemo-->
How will backstories be presented in-game, if at all? NS is trying to avoid menus and such after the game has started, so will maps still start with "this map is made by n@rby. The USM heismann low orbit freight etc..."? And if this is so, I really hope that this introducing window will be looking very stylish. Maybe it could look like the commanders view, having much of the same style.
Something that might be cool to implement in NS would be the ability for mappers to make a monitor or something in the readyroom which would tell the backstory of a map. <!--emo&;)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=';)'><!--endemo--> Not to unlike poke646. (future beta?)
Back to your story n@rby, wouldn't it be better to find a way to avoid exact dates? The official story as far as I remember doesn't have any dates. I guess Flayra & company would have to answer that.
[Edit]Oh, I didn't read Flayra's post before posting this, I honestly didn't. It feels so weird posting about something just to discover other people have posted the same thing while you've been writing your own reply. I still can't believe I was suggesting about the same things as Flayra at the same time as him. :/ [/Edit]
That's a damn good idea...
Something the commander can press that brings up the text in a scroll box, hell you could even add a picture or two.
I vote for the entity in the ready room.
<img src="http://csnation.counter-strike.net/barney/personal/docked1.jpg" border="0">
<img src="http://csnation.counter-strike.net/barney/personal/docked2.jpg" border="0">
I had always thought that, if a backstory were short enough, that there could be some kind of narration in the readyroom. Of course, that would require a MB or 3 of mp3, and a good voice. But for the sake of size and functionality, a specialized entity that could read text from a text file and scroll it in the readyroom would be perfect.
Sorry but I gotta bring up a question real quick regarding dropships:
What do you put on the bottom? On the top? Would you suggest a simple texture? Or fans or pipes or what?
It would be great to give it such a 4th dimension, something other than "another map on a creepy installation"
"Charlie, do you remember that time we fought at the battle of <s>Naboo</s> the uber-31337 mining station?? After that we fought at teh semi-31337 starbase and kept those alien from trying to take the mining station the second time! That was soooo cool!"
But this could be something to work on for the final release. After a few betas and lots of levels it's much easy to manage the story and stuff like that than before anything is released at all.
Something the commander can press that brings up the text in a scroll box, hell you could even add a picture or two. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span id='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
problem with this being only the commander can see the background info. I would think a narration in the readyroom would be best. Difficult to do though, with a narrator and stuff . . .