Any exobiologists out there might be interested to know that, according to certain wacky sources, the military has captured an alien. There are Septeloids:
“The male non-human originated from the star system Delta Pavonis, 20 light-years from Earth where it was the 4th planet from their sun. It is roughly the same size as our Earth.”
“We called the captured alien Septeloids. That was the identifying alien species name given to them by the astrobiologists on our team. I have no idea how they picked that name as well as some of the other odd-sounding alien species names ending with the suffix of ‘loid.'”
“The travel time to Earth was 18 Earth months using a very complex propulsion system and time-space displacement travel mode. Back then in 1980, we could not understand the alien propulsion system and we never saw his spacecraft.”
And there are Trantaloids:
The source also reportedly stated to Martinez that the home world of the alleged hostile alien species, the Trantaloids, “is the third planet out from the star Epsilon Eridani in the constellation Eridanus at 10.5 light-years away. Although somewhat cooler and fainter than our sun, it is very similar.”
Something about this story was nagging me, besides the fact that it was such weird conspiracy story/ufology mishmash — and then I remembered. “Time-space displacement travel mode”? Epsilon Eridani? Delta Pavonis? Me and some fellow geeks obsessed over that stuff in my college years: we were addicts of an old board game called StarForce, in which you used time-space displacement travel to bop about the local stellar neighborhood, fighting aliens who were based on a few stars nearby…guess which ones? It was a nice star map that we played on, too, that actually had the coordinates of the known stars within (I think) 20 light years of earth.
The crazy conspiracy theorists are still around, but you don’t find games like that any more — this was 30 years ago, before computers took over gaming. I think I still have it stuffed away in a box down in the basement, unless mice have gotten in and eaten all the cardboard.
The best bit is their odd terminology. ‘Human months’ just sounds weird, like ‘what is this thing, the ‘month’, of which you hoo-mans speak?’
Of course you can find games like that. They even make new ones! Look up Twilight Imperium, for example. There are tens of thousands of boardgamers around the country.
I’m such a nerd– I’d play the shit out of that game!
Somebody should start an atheist board game and beers night.
I have that game.
Septeloids? Trantaloids? Nonsense! Anyone who’s ever played X-COM knows that it’s the Sectoids, Ethereals, and especially Chryssalids you need to watch out for! Keep your plasma rifle and blaster bombs handy!
Besides which that “human months” are completely arbitrary. Not every culture measuers time the same way, guys!
I have it too – two or three moving boxes full of old SPI and Avalon Hill boxed games stored in the garage. I also had StarSoldier, the “tactical” partner to StarForce, but I had it in the “flat box” format and the lids never stayed on those things so I lost a bunch of the components somewhere along the way.
PZ, I disagree that there are no good boardgames around anymore. I own tons! Personally, if you want a ridiculously complex but fun one, I’d recommend ‘Arkham Horror’. It has plenty of tentacles too!
Not to mention Epsilon Eridani has a couple of possible planets that astronomers know about — granted, both should be outside the habitable zone, but still.
I have both StarForce (Alpha Centauri) and StarSoldier, too. The flat box versions, from SPI. Always had problems finding other gamers, though. As far as I know, though, I’ve managed to keep all of the components together. I have more than 130 games boxed up in storage, mostly SPI and Avalon Hill.
I wonder how many of our fantasy games will, in five thousand years, be the inspiration for new religions.
Loved that game, and the humans expand into the galaxy sequel Outreach.
When Traveller came out in 1977, the first game my brother ran for me was set on that map using Larry Niven’s Known Space for the setting.
good times.
I gave StarSoldier away to a friend…I didn’t care for it much. I still have Outreach in the same box somewhere, though — that one was interesting, conquering the galaxy on a timescale of thousands of years.
StarForce by SPI, awesome game. I should have known you were a gamer, PZ. We used to play this and the other two in the trilogy of games. Sadly, the winner was usually one of the family cats who would sit on the board in the middle of the night. My favorite of the series was Outreach (the other was Star Soldier) Starsoldier was the tactical level game, StarForce, the mid-level and Outreach the Grand Scale game, more about colonization of the galazy than combat.
Outreach came with a map that was an accurate (for the time) representation of 1/3 of the galaxy.
You can still find copies. If you’re at all interested look for the box set of all 3.
Cats won most of the games around our house as well.
Yeah, finding other gamers was always tough. I started gaming around 7th grade, first wargame I owned was Starship Troopers. No one in my class played ’em, I was part of a group of older gamers for a while but they always played too late in the evening for a kid to participate.
Scientology?
This isn’t intended to be real, as far as I can tell. It’s a pitch for an incredibly crappy novel.
Look at the bar on the right of the story. The guy offers the film rights to his novels. He’s a writer. A terrible writer (he’s self published through iUniverse), yes, but a writer.
[url=http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_projectSERPO_a.htm]About Steve Hammons[/url]
[Quote]In his two published novels, “Mission Into Light” and the sequel “Light’s Hand,” a San Diego-based joint-service team of ten women and men research emerging special topics. This Joint Recon Study Group follows paths of discovery to help create a better world. Book, TV and film rights are available. Hammons’ movie screenplay combines both novels. Pilot scripts for a proposed TV series have been developed.[/quote]
Steve is a fiction writer who has found a way to promote his self-published Science Fiction books. This article is undoubtedly written more like a crappy story than anything else. And it’s written so poorly with so little creativity and intelligence.
Ugh. Let’s not give any more of our attention to this guy.
OMG. My older brothers used to drag me into their SPI games. They would meander into my room, toy with a unicorn for a few moments, and then casually murmur “Hey, um, we need someone to play France.”
They ended up owing me a lot of favors.
Well, I for one welcome our new Trantaloid overlords…
And every year my brothers and I go out and find some new boardgame to play – we tend to get together at Christmas to do stuff like that, and there are certainly good boardgames being produced still. The stores that sell them are getting harder to find, but the games are still there. One of my brothers also makes games – mostly zombie games and WWI strategy. Or the natural mix of the two.
I still have the game, packed away. Some 35 years ago, there were only two other guys in our small East Texas town who were gamers. Ah! the hours spent just setting up the game!
Sure it’s already been said, but I feel I must reiterate, all the same. There are new and wonderful boardgames coming out all the time. Video games simply have a larger market.
Wander around boardgamegeek for a while and take in the great bounty of games presently available.
Wow! The aliens have males! LIKE US!
What are the odds that alien races would evolve schlongs like our races!
The real question, though: “Is StarForce art?”
The same star systems are in use in the new Star Trek Online MMORPG..
Time/space displacement sounds a bit like the warping of space, too. Warp drive anyone?
True, but modern sci-fi would be shit outta luck if various alien species couldn’t get it on.
And I am totes treating this as ham-handed modern science fiction.
What’s a board game?
(j/k)
@ #3 The Atheist Community of Austin used to do that. It was a weekly meeting called Godless Gamers.
And of course they wear pants and the females wear skirts. It’s simple biology.
BTW, you don’t need to be face to face to play board games anymore if anyone wants to get a group together. There’s a program called Maptool that, though designed for RPGs, also works extremely well with board games. I wrote “Sorry!” and a Warmachine modules for it just to demonstrate to people that it wasn’t just for RPGs…. but no one paid any attention.
kaylakaze,
Actually, I would prefer the face-to-face style of board gaming, as I spend much of my time playing video games, anyway. And I’m too old school to buy into that MMORPG shit.
Seriously, if anyone’s interested, I’d love to do a totally nerdy atheist game night*.
*I only own one board game and it’s pirate themed. Hope that’s okay!
ODS: Yeah, but I’ve found it’s much easier to find people to play with on the internet than IRL.
Lee Brimmicombe-Wood here. Here’s a bit of pop culture trivia for you:
Q: The game StarForce was inspiration for the name of a well-known 1980s synth band. What is the name of that band?
A: The Human League.
Too bad we can’t have FTL for real
There’s also CyberBoard for PBEM (Play By E-Mail) games; ZunTzu, which is designed for war-games and can be used either for live games or PBEM; and Vassal, which is perhaps the most flexible but requires some Java programming to implement new game modules.
There are also a significant number of websites that feature playable implementations of board games. Perhaps the most popular is BrettSpielWelt, which is free to use and caters mostly to euro-games.
Nothing beats playing face-to-face, though.
I make video games for a living and board wargames as a hobby. Check out some of my games on Boardgamegeek. Search for Downtown, The Burning Blue, Nightfighter and Bomber Command.
By the way, StarForce is one of my very favourite SF games of all time. I have written a paean to the title here:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/517847/why-i-heart-starforce
We’ve got a local “war gamers association” that has groups ranging from board game players, to tabletop RPGers, to Magic: The Gathering* nerds.
I just can’t bring myself to deal with that level of nerditude. It would be much nicer just to have a group of friends over for some brews and a silly good time. Sadly, most of my nerd friends are of the video game variety and don’t want to cross genres.
*::shudder::
Since I moved to Sweden I find myself using this to play and keep in touch with UK gamers.
Epsilon Eridani is also quite young, less than a billion years. In keeping with that, it has a very thick debris ring, very high stellar wind, and a much stronger magnetic field than Sol.
Which means that any extant terrestrial planets might possibly not have cleared their orbits yet (Ha! That means they’re not planets, yet!) and are still in their late heavy bombardment phase.
So these Trantaloids must have evolved from prebiotic molecules to interstellar superpower in a scant half billion years, all the while under continuous asteroid bombardment (up to Ceres-sized crust melters every 100 million years or so), regularly blasted with enormous solar flares, and with whatever atmospheric protection routinely stripped away by the stellar wind.
They’ve got to be some kind of superspecies. No wonder they’re so dangerous.
Did someone say inscrutable alien propulsion system?
/plug
@#35, Vassal is clunky as all hell, though it does have some nice features. Thanks for pointing to ZunTzu. I hadn’t heard of it.
I have a suggestion for you PZ. Try Warhammer 40,000 if you want to expand into table top wargaming. It even has a human culture of fundamentalist religious types called, appropriately, the Imperium. (Though, to be fair, the religion in question is a little, shall we say, ‘post Abrahamic’. A fact that has caused some consternation among religious idiots in the UK).
You would probably like the Tyranids. They are not cephalopods, but lots of them do come with tentacles…
Ah, Warhammer 40K. A game about Catholic Death Nazis.
I once made a WH40K video game. I recall recording the voice audio for the game with ex-Doctor Who, Tom Baker, who had once been a monk. It was a difficult session with Tom being very awkward and I recall coming out with the ‘Catholic Death Nazis’ line in front of him. He gave me a look that I shall not forget in a hurry. It was a wonder I didn’t wither and die on the spot…
Actually, a species of sapient aliens having two sexes is by far the most plausible part of the whole story. Whether we should label them “male” and “female” based on similarities with Earth organisms is of course another question altogether.
I wonder if the Trantaloids are so named because they come from Trantor?
Ooh, Delta Pavonis, you say? That’s the star around which Caladan orbits in Dune (well, according to the semi-canonical Dune Encycolpaedia). Too bad that Caladan is the 3rd planet, not the 4th. Oh well.
percyprune @ 43;
Yes I recall the game. It was called ‘Fire Warrior’ and was told from the perspective of the high tech, neo-imperialist Tau race. No offence, but I did not enjoy the game. It made poor use of the source material in a rush to commercialism.
(geek)
Not really. It is a game set in a fictional future where religious extremism has all but destroyed humanity, and has lead to the creation of a highly oppressive species wide theocratic government. The game is not endorsing religious fanatacism, it is actually critiquing it.
The design team has a principle that ‘there are no good guys’ that they apply across 40K and its fantasy cousin, Warhammer. No faction consists of shining paladins of ultra-righteousness. They all have really, really nasty (or at least uncompromisingly pragmatic and self-interested) sides. In the case of the Imperium, they like to burn entire worlds that fail to observe the Imperial Creed (basically the deification of a powerful post-human ruler who is perpetually on a form of life support). The Adeptus Astartes (or Space Marines, but not in the generic, all-American sense) are genetically engineered super-soldiers who function as the Imperium’s genocidal enforcers. Think Star Wars Storm Troopers only an order of magnitude more competant and brutal.
If you actually read far enough into the background, you discover the irony that the Imperium was created 10,000 years earler in the fictional timeline as an atheist project to replace all gods with a more rationalist, non-superstitious world view, but the ideal was corrupted by the ambition and megalomania of some of its principle exponents, and in the wake of the ensuing civil war religious obscurantism created the Imperium of the 41st Millenium.
(/geek)
Apoplogies for the blockquote fail @ 46.
Day saved.
Everyone knows the life-bearing planet in the Delta Pavonis system, Resurgam, was scoured clean of life, including its sentient population, the Amarantin. As far as intelligent beings in the Epsilon Eridani system, well, since us humans haven’t founded Yellowstone yet, there is just a single crashed Grub, trapped in its ship, there.
Some time back I came up with an alien race for some sci-fi stuff I was working on. I called them the Alanii and said they came from the fourth planet orbiting Delta Pavonis. They were like a race of vaguely smug elves who lived for a: learning and b: sex. They were terribly fun to work with. I gave them a recorded history dating back 180 million years and a creativity level roughly the same as that possessed by algae. Fun times.
StarForce? Pah… boardgames can never be art.
At least 80% of fictional babies on TV and characters in movies are male, so that ratio probably holds for interstellar aliens as well, as a subclass of fictional personages.
Fortunately, I haven’t the foggiest idea what this thread is about.†
† Not strictly true. I do recall getting the Avalon Hill cataloges(?) as a teenager, but never actually got or played any of the games.‡
‡ And except for Rogue, Star Trek, and a few other ASCII-based classics, never really bother with computer games either.§ ∅
§ Guess that means I’m a boring old fart.
∅ One highly useful use I found for Rogue was measuring how drunk I was. I don’t recall the precise metric now, but it was something like “I must be abe to reach level 13 before I attempt to drive home.” Getting that deep down took skill/experience and care/attention and co-ordination/sobriety…
I loved Outreach. The only problem with it was each game took forever to play.
My favorite board game was Freedom in the Galaxy. It was a blatant ripoff of Star Wars but it was fun. It was actually a war game with a science fiction setting rather than an SF game. At the start of each turn an event card was pulled. I particularly liked the one which read “The Emperor is in a rare mood. The Empire may commit an atrocity on any planet.”
Bashing computer games again. :D
But of course board games are alive and well, as a casual look at the board game geek site will tell you. The local secular group gets together every-other week and plays various board games.
You’re not required to enjoy the game. However, I’m proud of it and am fairly happy with the use of the source material. When every other developer was proposing yet another Space Marine title, our bid did something different and got the contract.
Yes really. I spent a lot of time with the creative leads at Nottingham.
Yes. Really.
There’s a reason for that. It was SPI’s candidate for a Star Wars license, and when they didn’t get it they just filed off the serial numbers and published it anyway.
percyprune
Fair enough.
If you say so. It is not the line taken by the likes of Gav Thorpe or Jervis Johnson, at least not officially, but if you have heard it ‘from the horse’s mouth’ so to speak then I will take you at your word.
The only board game I miss is Car Wars. It was perfect for high spirited, drunk gaming. DUI with armoured, laser toting cars was great fun.
blf #53. My little gaming group also used computer games as a sobriety test. Mind you, it was for the opposite purpose. The best one was a helicopter simulator, the rule was if you could get the thing in the air without crashing you had to have another drink.
They missed out germaloids ;-)
StarSoldier was more fun when you played the First Contact scenario SPI published in their house magazine. That randomised starsoldier abilities, throwing in a fun bit of uncertainty as to your opponent’s capabilities.
The reason that Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis (along with Tau Ceti) keep reappearing in SF, gaming, (and UFOlogy) isn’t hard to fathom. If you look for the closest star systems that have singleton (non-multi star systems) similar to the Sun in output, those are the stars you get. We know life can come to exist in a system with a single star, who knows whether the same is true of multi star systems. Take the Centauri system as an example: Alpha is very Sun-like, a G2 star (the same as the Sun) with mass 1.1 compared to the Sun and 1.3 of the Sun’s luminosity, but what does the presence of Beta, a K6 with a luminosity about a third of the Sun, do to planet formation not to mention the orbital mechanics and environments of any planets that might form.
Epsilon Erdani is a K2 star with a 0.3 solar luminosity and a 0.8 solar mass that is 0.8. Tau Ceti is a G8 star with 0.44 solar luminosity and 0.82 solar mass which is 11.9 light years from Earth. Delta Pavonis is a G6 that is a near twin to the Sun in terms of mass and luminosity. Sigma Draconis is about as far away as Delta Pavonis, albeit in a very different direction, and is a 0.4 solar luminosity, 0.86 solar mass K0. Altair is a giant 16.7 light years away with ten times the luminosity and 590 times the mass of the Sun. Everything else nearby is either a multi-star system or a star with at best a few % (often less than 1%) the Suns output or both. Stars with too little luminosity may end up with “goldilocks zones” that are too close to the star to be good candidates for life to start.
Thus it could be that Steve Hammons is cribbing from “StarForce” or it could just be that he did the same homework that the designers of that game did. Use of the term “Time-space displacement” is suspicious, but not conclusive since mucking around with space-time in various ways is the basis of most, if not all, of the theorized potential loopholes to the speed of light limitation.
The dead giveaway is where Hammons quotes (indirectly) a source as saying: “they possessed the human shape, form and basic anatomy”. The idea that an independently evolved intelligent being would have anything like the human form is so unlikely that we need look no further for clear evidence that the whole thing is a fabrication.
I used a scan of the Outreach galaxy map to teach my daughters primary school class about the structure and scale of the galaxy. Later I sent a printout of the latest map of our galaxy for the class to compare the changes the new data provide, including the bar across the galactic hub.
including the bar across the galactic hub. – dannystevens
That bar serves the best pan-galactic gargleblasters you’ll find anywhere!
If I recall correctly, ‘Car Wars’ was a product of Steve Jackson Games of Austin Tx. Steve was a friend of mine years ago.
Coincidentally, I finished one of Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space novels last night that had Epsilon Eridani as a setting. No Septeloids, just Inhibitors and Shadows to worry about.
Yep, Epsilon Eridani has a very busy inhabited system. Star Trek’s Vulcan, and the world that Babylon 5 will be built in orbit around (Epsilon 3, with the Great Machine buried below), are both there, among many others.
See Wikipedia’s “Epsilon Eridani in fiction“.
And here’s Winchell Chung’s beautiful site, Project Rho 3-D Starmaps, open to the “Stars in SF” page, with SF starmaps and coordinate tables for your convenience.
@Neon Elf
Oh yes, Alastair Reynolds, a late discovery of mine, cheered greatly by the news he has signed a new deal to produce iirc 10 new books. Happy, happy, joy, joy.
It is probably from him that I found Epsilon Eridani familiar, not being much of a board gamer (though we did play a lot of Risk! at university, a bottle of Ouzo was compulsory).
You mean “the reality based old board game called StarForce…” ;-)