Week 4 of 2024, Jan 22. Targets

Trying to think positive and not feel bad about the lack of sales. I want to post when there is an accomplishment, particularly something tangible.  I should promote my wares more, but I want to condition people that I have something relevant to report when I promote. 

1. Uploading the new 300DT ship model to DTRPG. 
1. Prepare the ships for upload and updating the Files. That will take a couple of hours of checking and zip and uploading.  
2. Mneme Space Combat - 
1. Update the Rules for the TENDER rules. Basically a Ship can carry up  Thrust and Jump if their Drives and Power Plant are up to it. These game changing rules are kinda a big deal since it makes ships more modular. Tendering habitat and cargo modules as well as explain how large volumes of material are Jumped into star system.  
2. 200DT Mining Ship Concept. Nicco and I will be working on the 200DT mining ship, designed to push or drag 400DT of asteroid. 
3. STL files of our ships. 
1. Ill be getting some On-the-Job-Trainees from Industrial Design, I hope someone them are interested in a paid side project of helping me convert my ships into STL files. Starting with finishing the Merchant Trader and testing it. Particularly a telescopic mini stand, that will allow some levels of elevation. 
2. I may have to train them in Blender and the workflows in blender. One of my other projects is FreeCAD and developing a process flow to set up FreeCAD and update it. This is a major project which I use the ojts for.  
4. Finding an OJT interested in being hired for my Random Character gen project in Github. I have 5 potential candidates. I will have to teach them the workflow of testing and deploying and then illustrating the workflow of the Javascript in Diagrams.net. That would take a few days (of multi hour sessions). Then they can start improving the character gen. 
1. When I finish the character gen: Random RAW and Step by Step but MNEME (making changes to make it automation friendly). i can proceed to the Mneme Variant Rules v2 where I stream line it and create Blender STL files of combat figs. 
2. Other Softwares. Migrating the Mneme World Generator into Javascript Web. 

Hopefully it becomes a fulfilling week, if i get stuff done. 

Update: the Internal maps of the 300DT Frontier Trader and Merchant Liner Done - Next Revamping the Asteroid Miner

Just excited as we are doing some finishing touches.

So the buyers have access to the Onedrive folder that has the latest and the prototypes Just need to note the Fuel Processors and Scoops.

300DT Frontier Trader editable files models and CC-BY-SA!!!

By Next Week Jan 22 I'll upload the model and the maps to DrivethruRPG (which is already available in the Onedrive Folder you have access to when you buy the book) . 

Now we begin work on the Asteroid Miner... which is not going to be RAW.

It uses a homebrew of Tender Mechanics - basically, your jump drive and fuel determine the amount of DTONS total you can jump or thrust with. So if you are a 200DT ship with a J-Drive and M-Drive C you can jump-1 and thrust-1 with 60DT of fuel. 

So Mining Ships "Tender" Asteroids much bigger than it and moves the WHOLE thing or Breaks up a large chunk to move towards its target destination. Its Mining Drones (increased to 2 from 1 and we will make a Model of it) will process ice and volatiles for fuel and supplies. They will have an umbilical.

So from 86DT of cargo its just 23 and the Mining ship is 88MCr - but this is designed to move stuff bigger than it. 400DT of  siliceous 11,200 Tons of material to be sifted.

The tender system will help explain how red and brown stars are built up to be Jump points for Shorter-ranged ships. As well as how a 400DT system defense boat got there.

GAME MECHANICS IMPLICATIONS: TENDER MECHANICS

Larger Engines and more MODULAR cargo. So afer the Asteroid Miner 200DT is the research Vessel (Merchant Trader 200DT hull with minor tweaks, the way Cargo vessels are converted to research vessels).  

We have a 200-400DT Habitat Ring, we will use Instancing in Blender that allows us to create a "Projection" of the Staterooms and Labs on the ring as you can make objects follow a curve - while the ACTUAL model will be flat so that Referees and Buyers can easily change and Manipulate the Layout of the ring. 

We will include the Habitat and Tender in Mneme World Generator because its a habitat! Its reasonable especially since buyers who made MWG silver are greatly appreciated. If your not into ships well you will be getting a free ship in MWG!  We will later on include the BOSCO after we hit Copper for mneme Space Combat (Remind me or feel free to call me out if I forget).  

OTHER MATTERS. 

Ill be running combat with Particle Beam Weapons mostly to see how effective they are over Beam Lasers.  At 3D6 damage its so much more effective than missiles, I want to test if I should check if I should Half damage at its extreme range (x0.5).  People pay for the product that its tested.  

Sorry for the late update, I only meet with Nicco for progress after my regular work. 

What happened to: 2 Parsecs from Sol

2 Parsecs from sol, was created and I encountered a serious problem for me - How to resolve space encounters. Around this time I discovered the movement rules didn’t exist in the CE SRD and there were many problems with the Encounter mechanics: Particularly range and Threat. 

If Space Combat was too lethal and outcomes forgone (when we measure firepower of the ships against each other) then its important that Players have PREVENTATIVE actions to feel in control and to have some agency in the story. If the Space Combat was a slug fest of attrition - it may give more agency but could be too tediuous and time consuming. So this was what Mneme Space Combat Tried to fix - the thing about it is that it’s not what people complain about except my self. I come from GURPS and i used to a heavily front loaded game, I also like war gaming and I like knowing the odds and I want to do the math to model it. If you know about Tier5 Mech Warrior Player you will find me breaking down combat into usable Heuristics (Like the Alpha of a Mech determines how much Mobility they need to be in a position to generate Opportunities to fire) and if you saw my older Airsoft Blog I did it when it came to Physical Performance and combat as well. I want people to feel like they can see the pattern or have a framework to understand the chaos of combat - for me when the Chaos of Airsoft became Sane and I was able to make sense of shots being fired, their direction, silence, and trying to predict enemy movement - I enjoyed the game more than when I didn’t understand it - even if Airsoft was very chaotic and had too many variables. 

So we made Mneme Space Combat, today around 21 books were sold since October. I had hoped more and that the demand and sales would allow me to hire more: 50 sales would have resulted to 300usd (6usd x 50) and I would have been able to make a down payment for the Freelancers - Students that I’ve taught when I take on OJTS from various schools who I teach about multimedia, programming and or 3d Modeling).  This is a hobby that I love so pretty much 100% of the profit goes back to the business.  Right now, instead of Buying TRPG books, all the money I would have spent buying the latest Mongoose Traveller Product or various other books goes to making this book more valuable. 

So now that Sales have slowed down I was thinking of making 2 Parsecs from Sol sell for 5usd and sale for 2.5usd. The AI revolution happened and we at first thought of making it with Stable Diffusion, but we held of against it. We have a version of the Book that uses AI art. Even Mneme Space Combat has an AI art version. Actually AI made art not matter - to an extent. When anyone can make Beautiful art - it ceased being special - especially the AI made ones. I taught my Industrial Design students Blender and Stable Diffusion and how to use the AI to prototype much faster with the AI and after teaching others to use SD - and I can teach people in GITB to make their own Character art. I used to be an Artist before I became an IT head and i love how AI made art more accessible - its just that what’s the point when the beauty of AI will eclipse all the hard work of an artist who spent hours making it. So I decided we will focus on things the AI has a hard time doing: DEPTH - ships, layouts, and engineering of the worlds and technology. 

I lurk in reddit and see all the AI art and see all the AI avatars and “AI girlfriends” and what can be done with Stable Diffusion. OMG - beauty = AI. beauty is FAKE. Every picture is now AI until I can tell its providence. I use AI in making Characters for our Saturday night games - we would generate Art as we gamed to help the other players visualize with a RTX 3090 24GB vram. I have a civitai account and learned to tell which model is being used but - when you make a book and you have to choose what Hours I will be paying for to make this book - Lets make something the AI can’t do. 

Adventures have lost their luster - I’m just fixing our H20AI and will train it to Referee as well and hope to create a small specialized one that can run off a CPU - basically a choose your own adventure AI. Like the books us Gen Xers grew up with, and in the philippine I could barely afford those books and had to borrow the books of friends. Now the Referee can join the adventure, now the Guys hanging out on the week end to game can have the AI run the adventure and everyone just enjoy hanging out. The AI will document and weave the narrative - posting the session outcomes. 

The output of GITB - as of current - the Mechanics, Models, and the Rules cannot be made by AI. The fluff can be made by AI, of course the overarching world building and demographic and economic and cultural trends will follow a writing style more than analysis - so that still is within the human vision for it. 

How can 2 guys from the Philippines make a great product, and people recognize this is special? What’s funny i’m so open that once I figure it out, I’ll tell everyone and since I’m so niche no one believe it. 

We will be improving the boats and creating the cutters and various other small craft. But far in the future. My break even is about past silver lolz

Converting to Other Blockchains - Vast Distances and Portable Wealth

Block Chain in 4AU or greater! in our Sol solar system, the problem is the distance from Luna or Mars or Jupiter and their corresponding blockchains. As 1 AU is 8 minutes, note that Sol with Neptune and Uranus - Ice giants and Saturn, they may be using different Blockchains per location. Pretty much acting like a currency. So even in Sol we will be having problems of speed of transaction completion. 

Basically what happens is, the problem is the speed by which a record, transaction and account can be verified. The solution is to convert values as you change Blockchain Domains. 

As distances become greater, the time for “the check to clear” takes longer. 

Basically a Blockchain domain is the reach by which the blockchain is reliable. When a transactions will take weeks or months to process, it’s best to convert the funds into a currency of a Blockchain that is closer. This means I will take 1 million credits from my Imperial Account and Transfer it to this Local duchy’s Blockchain, I may lose 2-10% but I dont lose months or weeks waiting for my transactions to go through.  I may have only 980,000 credits in the new block chain. But I need these credits to help me with transactions and conduct my business in that location. 

So we just came from Taiwan in Dec 16-21 and it reminds me of converting my Pesos to NTD, and then converting them back. The rest of our money is back in the philippines and credit cards allowed us access to these funds at the speed of light, but its the CASH - converting PHP to NTD that made me conscious of what would happen if we lost access to the internet and we needed to make monetary transactions. 

In GURPS this would be Finance, in Cepheus Engine this would be Economics or Finance science. and it is a Science, to understand how many Financial systems overlap, interact, and attempting to predict multiple interacting systems: like Biology, Ecology, and Economics.  

In Game Terms - you can just roll to see how much resources you have at your disposal or the Referee can make this a hook and the challenge. You can handwave it, as one of the many factors the PCs are juggling and thats the purpose of the powerful AI in the Ship’s is for.  You can just keep to assuming the PCs draw from a source of funds - but the Referee can arbitrarily say if it is accessible. The constraints become an unending source of adventure hooks. 

MOSS - Mneme Open Source CC-BY-SA scifi-setting - Interstellar Economies - Blockchain and Money Laundering

Wikipedia of Blockchain for basics

In the Mneme Open Source CC-BY-SA Sci-Fi setting (MOSS), takes inspiration from Daniel Suarez’s “Critical Mass,” blockchains play a crucial role in interstellar travel. In this universe, where Faster Than Light (FTL) travel exists, blockchain technology is adapted to the vast distances and decentralized nature of space travel. Computers on spacecraft, equipped with blockchain nodes, update the blockchain only when they are close enough to securely connect with another node.

You can say MOSS is a open distributed scifi setting. 

This blockchain system relies on various standards for validating transactions, incorporating sensor data that verifies the time and place of each transaction. This data includes stellar constellation positions, gravitational fingerprints, and records of transactions from systems tracking time and pace, and activities of the main star in a system. The ledger can validate blocks only if they meet these stringent criteria.

Other ways to track time for sensor validity is Solar Activity which can be viewed historically from another Star System. 

In MOSS, interstellar distances necessitate that ships’ transponders be securely connected to sensor systems. These transponders, or Black Boxes, are equipped with multiple redundancies in their blockchain processing, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the data. If a transaction lacks sufficient clarity or data, creating uncertainty, it is not executed, maintaining a status quo.

Over light-year distances, ships connecting with each other can verify transactions based on their previous locations. Transactions involving multiple parties are validated by the sensor data of all involved parties.

In cases where ships are cut off from the main blockchain, they start their own branch blockchain. Once reconnected with the larger network, multiple parties can add validation data to these isolated activities, integrating them back into the main blockchain.

Moreover, the Black Boxes don’t maintain just one blockchain. They handle multiple blockchains, analogous to different currencies. As long as a blockchain represents something of value (materials, services, etc.), it can be traded with other blockchains, similar to a currency exchange. This flexibility allows for a diverse and dynamic interstellar economy in the MOSS setting.

Criminals and Pirates dont necessary have a “Pirate” or “Underground” blockchain - the blockchain doesnt make those distinctions. Blockchains, while may have a name or a identifying code for who possesses what, this can easily be shuffled. 

Tampering with a Transponder to produce erroneous or false blockchain information affects all parties - you can say even criminals dont want the currency their are stealing to be worthless. Also that counterfiters try to accumlate legitmate transactions - will have a difficult time because all parties - even underground economies cannot have uncertainty and bad transactions. Even transactions are bad, as soon as they are discovered and detected the ability to have redundancies in place not just retroactively corrects wrong transactions but makes the entire economy of that block chain aware who did it. 

Because of the sensor data aspects, using the block chain in “Safe spaces” is key. Underground blockchains will transact in underground covert locations and may even not function once it leaves these locations, preventing any transaction. A pirate ship will transact with its prey ship, robbing it of its value for the entire economy to see as people release funds at gun-point. It will then trade commodities with other blockchains - to liquidate its prizes. Anyone who will try to trace where the pirates have gone will have to deal with variables of probability as “laundering” who has what happens a lot in Convert economies as blockchains only track ships and many proxy can be used to launder where these values go. 

Because blockchain computers are design to track dizzying amount of transactions, how values are transfered from one party to another can be analgoue (a phsyical transfer). the records can be made to look like typical resource extraction transaction - when miners introduce capital in the form of raw materials in the economies.  

With all this complexity, you can just have this all happen behind the scenes. The Referee can just focus on the Assets, Expenses, Recieveables and Liabilities of the crew. 

what i did wrong - lessons learned for 2024 from 2023

There is very scant data for me to analyze, when it comes to learning what sells. the Mneme world generator I know sells as it hits silver this year. As for what will drive more people to adopt it, i can only guess accessibility.

So I have high praises for Seth Skorkowsky as when ever he reviews an adventure, he polishes it so much that I feel tempted to buy it immediately and run it. He cleans the maps, identifies plot problems (inconsistencies that will stall the game), and various other insights - I'm sure its not just him but his players pointing out errors in the writing. 

What Seth does is make the game more accessibile. I think thats what it all culminates as there is less and less reason why I or anyone should not just buy the product. I want to do what he does - and the really nice way he corrects it without turning people off the adventure. 

Well I want to do that to Cepheus Engine - coming from GURPS and having people have a hard time getting into GURPS - Cepheus engine fixes that by being more accessible. Not only are you able to make an adventure in Cepheus Engine - but you can publish that adventure. If your players really like it to the point that they leave reviews - then you have a great source of validation.

So what can I do to make Cepheus Engine more accessible - 

1. well provide Creative Commons Art and Ships 
2. tools to speed up character creation, ship creation, world creation
3. tools to create scenarios someone who wants to improvise and challenge themselves (using RNGs). 
4. accessible sample settings - not just any other setting but the open source setting which complements the tools and rules. 
   

Of course why didnt it work with Mneme Space Combat? I think its because space combat is not often done. I've read no complaints about space combat rules of any other CE system - and no one is perfect.  I have to guess, specifically conscious of my pain points when I run a CE game.

Mneme Ship Combat Update: 300DT body is done - for Art and when done moving on to Research Vessel.

First off, Happy New Year (from those of us in the Philippines at GMT+8). 

So the merchant liner and the frontier trader are for art. This means Nicco is creating the PPT map by rendering it in blender, formatting the transparent layers, and marking the legend and what each part of the ship is. Then I will upload it. 

A recap: the 20, 30, 50, 70, and 95DT Small craft are all created. I realized I failed to put it here in the spreadsheet. I'm going to have to update the Mneme Space Combat book, and I will start putting the art of the ships in the book as well as having a better way of showing the jam-packed number of ships the Product in DTRPG offers. 

you can see this is not a good way to show the ships. We are going to use Diagram.net and create a table of the ships. 

The Research Vessel was overlooked.  Give me and Nicco till Feb to get to this. 

The 200DT Habitat Ring + 100DT Tender with a Model-B M and J Drive is able to give it TP-1 and J-1. This is going to be a Feat in Blender since we will make a 2D Map that will interact with the 3D Ring - using Instancing. Instancing allows the models in the 2D map to affect the models in the ring without going into the tedium of manipulating the ring. Give Nicco and me about March to finish this. 

The 200DT Habitat - has the 20DT Launches that are designed to perform the Orbiter Role (the ability to land in a terrestrial planet). 

I will honor my commitment to make the rest of the CE SRD Common Ships and then some key ships that I can squeeze in with my budget. Although they will all be TL9!!! (because the BASE version of this ship would be the most available and HIGHER TLs are rarer). 

 TENTATIVE - as committed as a 2-man operation can be. 

TL9 RESEARCH VESSEL 200DT	JAN	2024
TL9 TENDER 100DT (B-M DRIVE, A-JDRIVE)	JAN	2024
TL9 HABITAT RING 200DT	FEB	2024
TL9 SYSTEM DEFENSE BOAT 400DT	MARCH	2024
TL9 SURVEY VESSLE 300DT	FEB	2024
TL9 YACHT 100DT	FEB	2024
TL9 CORVETTE 300DT	MARCH	2024
TL9 DESTROYER 800DT	MARCH	2024
TL9 SYSTEM MONITOR 1,000DT	APRIL	2024
TL9 LIGHT CRUISER 1,000DT	APRIL	2024
TL9 HEAVY CRUISER 2,000DT	MAY	2024
TL9 DREADNAUGHT 5,000DT	JUNE	2024

Whenever we have to remake the ship's profile (Silhouette) and keep it reasonable, that takes a lot of time. more than 2 versioning and prototyping. But we try to reuse it when its reasonable like the 800DT destroyer, 1000DT monitor and Light cruiser should have a fairly similar profile/cross section.