NASA issues future space tech RFI

Anyone planning to respond and cite KiTE as a source don’t forget about proper attribution. Possible techs from this prescient comedy to include: energy-agnostic launch method; space junk detection, slicing, dicing and processing; “BIC” reusable orbit booster modules…and more!

Civ IV Tip #1: Beware the Culturally Strong Vassal Civ

[This is the first in a series of gameplay tips on the peerless grand strategy game  Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword. See below for series details.]

A rival civilization can win a Cultural Victory even it’s a vassal.

Even if it’s a CPU Civ and even if it’s your vassal and even if you lead in all other victory categories, you can lose. So check the victory condition screen often, not just to prepare for an attack on a potential cultural rival, but also so you know who notto take on as a vassal should the opportunity arise. This also implies that a vassals can win other victory type too, like a Space Victory. 

CIV IV: Destroyer vs. Galleon. No contest

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Note: This is the first of a series of tips in no particular order. We are coming to the end of a cycle of Civ IV play, started last year, when we realized we went through all of 2008 and part of 2009 without playing Civ I4. That was the year of Steel Panthers.  

The game set-up basis for these tips: Large, techtonic map, all options on and six CPU civs, Noble level difficulty, Ancient start and Standard speed.

Click the “Civ IV Tips” category for more (when as they arppear). These tips may appear irregularly but may also continue indefinitely, for what they’ll be worth. We may be playing this version of Civilization for years to come and we sense that this may be true for other gamer hold-outs as well. The next version, Civilization Vwhether it has hexes (interesting) or ranged fire (puzzling) or not, may get a look-see but we’re not optimistic about following it upgrade after upgrade as in past versions.  Even though there will likely be a store/disk version marketed, it sounds like you will have to registrer it online to play, and log in online every time you play, so this may very well be the last Civ version we play regularly after all these years.

2K games is shifting Civ V to Steam for DRM and bonus content. The DRM mean Digital Rights Management, translated it means  they will control the software in the name oif anti-piracy. We’ve seen Steam and recognize its advantages, especially for a game company. But we are not a member and may not become one. Perhaps it’s a bit old-school but we’re not attracted to the need to be connected to the network to be able to play a computer game on our own computer. Steam/2K Games and whoever else they share information with don’t need to know every time we fire up some title or other.

Once you sort out the installation of a software, should you have to depend on the speed and reliability of phone lines, the network, your ISP, the software company’s hardware and network, their ISP and who knows what all else to be up and running to work or play? This is the same reason we never installed “Final Draft” for writing.

Along with the blockbuster syndrome now infecting computer gaming, this may be a sign that, for us, the activity has hit the wall.

$1 Million Perfect Game Prize won in first 90 minutes

A 24-year old XBox Live player from Mobile, Alabama wins the 2K Sports Pitch a Perfect Game Challenge, and a million bucks, while hardly even trying.

Happy Free Comic Day: Jack Kirby Interview

“My inspirations were the fact that, I had to make sales, and I had to come up with characters that were no longer stereotypes. In other words, I couldn’t depend on gangsters. I had to get something new. And of course I…for some reason, I went to the Bible and I came up with Galactus.”  — Jack Kirby

Infinitybound – State of the Blog

Small adjustment of focus but not really a big change, just adapting to ever-evolving virtual weather conditions. The winds of the interwebs are shifting. But we’re not going away, so all you loyal fans – especially you Cabot, Arkansas – can keep checking in. The Kite Facebook page  for Kite: A Novel in Earth Orbit has become the primary outlet for space and Earth orbit and science fiction news and commentary. It’s open to everyone so please feel free to join. You’ll continue to see posts from there in real time in the right sidebar here as well.

Shifting that topic out is surrendipitous, since the experts advise your main site have a specific focus. We will continue to post our famous in-depth game reviews here and InfinityBound is still well-situated for when we finally pull the trigger on a publishing venture.

We will be striving to contribute smaller posts more in real time, mostly in the form of tips on the titles we’re looking at, old stand-bys that continue to take up our time, gaming news and commentary and perhaps previews of the reviews on which we are working. Next review should be Acgtunh Panzer: Kharkov 1943 by Paradox.

And of course, movies and writing. Well, so much for a specific focus.

Cheers!

Saturn’s hexagon effect demonstrated

Scientists here seem to avoid the answer that honeybees and wargame designers have figured out without fancy-schmancy doctorates in physics. There’s an inherent efficiency in the hexagon, as if it’s the shape you would get if you could divide a square by a circle.

Strategy Game Review: East India Company, Designer’s Cut

Channeling the great prestidigitator, film director, raconteur, wine pitchman and professional living-legend (now deceased) Orson Welles, InfinityBound will post no strategy game review before its time. So for you late-comers and you long-tail riders, here’s a much-belated look at a pretty good game that meshes a simpler trading type strategy mode a la Patrician II with real-time ship-to-ship Age of Sail tactics, make for a visually engaging and playable hybrid.

East India Company (EIC) is Paradox Interactive’s early-Age of Sail commerce/naval combat simulation that puts you in control of one of the semi-private 17th/18th-century enterprises that established, organized and exploited trade in parts of Africa and Central Asia for their respective crowns and countries.

One of the reasons we were so determined to review it is that it meets the criteria for open-ended strategy game that InfinityBound so favors. We had hoped to review EIC when we first installed it on our own PC last year, since it looked like we met the minimum system requirements. Then we saw how badly the game ran.  Jerky and draggy, it was also non-reactive, requiring you to click on commands two, three times or more. A most unpleasant gaming experience. The NVIDIA GeForce 6150 on the motherboard of my off-the-shelf desktop PC just didn’t make the grade. And it’s an unfortunate indicator of what we can expect from games to come. Graphics RAM is where the rubber meets the road in games these days and the exact requirement of 128 meg, which my machine met, wasn’t enough, even with the preferences dialed down. 

When we got temporary access to son Leo’s graphically blazing home-built HD outfit we immediately installed EIC.  What a difference 500 megabytes of graphics RAM can make. The game ran like a charm, and best of all you only had to click on stuff once.

So since getting the game there have been some add-ons, including: Trafalgar, Pirate Bay and Privateer. The version we ended up reviewing here is the Designer’s Cut, which adds islands to the tactical maps and various other improvements to the visuals and to the multiplayer experience.

In the strategic game you make all major decisions for an East India Company operating out of one of the major European maritime trading powers, starting in the 17th Century. You build ships and add them to fleets of up to five boats each, then send them around the Cape of Africa to India and environs for silk, tea, spices or other goods. Or they can trade closer in for diamonds and ivory, among other things, on the coast of Africa and its offshore islands. You’ll be competing against the  other companies of the sort, those from England, the Netherlands, Spain , Portugal and France. Even the Holy Roman Empire (the loosely organized German states) can engage in trade, even through they weren’t quite a maritime power.

The trading is straightforward on a beautifully rendered strategic map. You’ll know which ports will earn you a  profit for which commodities, unlike many trading games where you have to guess or keep notes. This is only right, since the operatives in such companies made it their business to know where the best trades would likely be. Along the way you’ll have to cope with pirates and other random events, like ports closing suddenly due to disease and/or your ships being quarantined. And goods aren’t limitless, so even though you know you can turn a profit somewhere, you may show up to find they are fresh out of their main trading item.

The scenario you choose will also pose challenges, divided into primary and secondary goals: import a number of tons of some good, or conquer a city or destroy enemy ships of a certain number by a certain year and you’ll be rewarded by the crown. Missing the mission will end the game, but as long as you meet the goals you’re free to pursue any other strategy. The advantages gained by the goals will accrue to your benefit in any case.

You’ll build ships of the expected types:  various merchantmen and galleons and, of course, the ship that gave the name to a category, the East Indiaman, as well as frigates and ships-of-the-line. They’ll come assigned with a captain, but you can dismiss him and assign another. You’ll have complete control over who commands the fleets and will be able to shuffle ships from fleet to fleet depending on your needs of the moment. Captains and crews gain experience over time and through encounters, and captains can earn special skills.

Ground combat to take cities are abstracted. The software will match your strength against the enemy’s, factored in that number and quality of marines and sailors, strength of fortifications and of ships present. You’ll either take the city of not, and losses will be applied accordingly. It is possible to lose ships in city assaults.

When your units encounter an enemy ship or fleet at sea you’ll be taken to the tactical game. Your fleet and the enemy’s will see each other at the horizon. The encounters can be at any time of day or night and many different sea and atmospheric conditions. Sometimes you’ll wish to avoid contact with a stronger enemy but the speed of the fleet’s slowest ship dictates so there may be times when you cannot. Once on the tactical map, depending on the wind direction, you may be able to flee, or close with the enemy if you feel like you have the advantage. The sky and sea vistas in the tactical game here are another beautifully executed aspect of the game.

The  tactical game has two modes: RTS (Real Time Strategy) and Direct Command. In RTS you control your ships from above — although you can zoom in fairly close – using simple point-and-click, as well as commands for organizing the fleets into groups as per other games of the type. The sail controls, unfortunately, are no more detailed than other games in the genre, with three settings: no sails, combat sail and full sail. One feature the game has that most others do not, though, is crew. The decks of your ships have men scurrying about, a welcome touch.

In Direct Command mode you can get right down on deck with the gun crews (in a frigate or other type with an open gun deck.) The TAB key lets you change your view and the WSAD key combination will steer the ship left-right and change the sails. From here you can give the order to fire the great guns, and from close-in you’ll experience the virtual sound-and-fury and the sometimes startling battle effects. The damage model is particularly excellent, once eliciting an audible gasp from your reviewer when a ball burst through a sail and the sail behaved as you’d imagine a slack sail would, first a sudden radical unslackening then puncturing, leaving a hole.

Left-click the slide show for full-screen mode.

We have minor quibbles with some interface awkwardness in the homeport screen and we came across a consistently reproducable crash in the  loot screen (after a victory, when trying to add a surrendered ship to a full fleet) but other than that the design is solid. 

Many decisions similar to establishing and maintaining the real far-flung trade seem to be reproduced (tip: try to make Cape Town yours) and so the game succeeds as a strategic simulation.  You can set your trade routes and let the traders go about their business, while monitoring your progress toward achieving the goals of the current mission, while also perhaps simultaneously taking command of a combat fleet to cruise around the map keeping the trade routes safe, looking for likely enemy targets or pirate fleets. It’ll be your own choice to emphasize the strategic or tactical game, where EIC is at least equal to any of the pure sailing titles out there and better than some.

And yes, it is moddable.

Summary: East India Company is a beautiful and playable strategic/tactrical hybrid, but make sure you have plenty of graphics RAM.

Space sails to combat fight future debris

Here’s a team in the UK with a technique for clearing space debris. It’s not meant to clean up existing junk; but when deployed at the end of the orbital life of a new structure this CubeSail will provide drag  in the micro-atmosphere of Low Earth Orbit and hasten and control its descent.

But a good idea for a business.  They may sell a lot of space sail.

Black Velvet: taste test of the Bismarck Cocktail

“Black Velvet” was mentioned in Massie’s Dreadnought as the the name of the “concoction” Otto von Bismarck favored in his younger days as a minor diplomat, before his geopolitical triumphs: the smacking down of Denmark in the Schleswig-Holstein affair; showing Austria just who called the shots in the Germanosphere; and treating the French like the soft cheese they had become in the Franco-Prussian War, not to mention unifying the German states into a Prussia-dominated nation.

Black Velvet was a mixture of stout and champagne, but the passage that mentions it has no other details, whether on proportions or which went in the glass first. So we were on our own. We used Guinness and Freixenet, a low-end Spanish champagne-like variety that’s a coupla bucks closer to real champagne than Great Western, and also keeps the whole affair European.

A pint glass was used and the base experimental starting ratio was three parts stout to one part champagne. Poured the stout in first and then slowly topped with the bubbly. Immediately it frizzed the perfect Guinness head over the top. A quick sip to prevent too much overflow was all champagne. Once it settled we stirred it gently with the handle of a wooden spoon and then had a first real taste.

The strong character of the stout was completely neutralized. The sensation was a mixture of hard and smooth. The stout provided the body that champagne can never have, and the champagne added a shimmering gloss that had, however, lost all fruitiness.

Second glass was more stout and just a topping off with a dash of champagne. Same effect. Apparently no matter how much you add, the dark nutty taste of the stout goes away, and what you’re left with is a full-bodied Teutonic non-fruity champagne. If the Germans had invented champagne, this is what it would be like. Makes a kind of sense.

Some notes on Bismarck: Not an intellectual by any stretch he was rewarded with vast estates for his victories, and in the house on one of them he filled the basement with all the books given him over the years, none of which he ever read.

Later in life, though he had few friends, he kept his fondness for food and drink. “On the rare occasions when Bismarck entertained, guests were astonished by the lavish table spread by the Princess and the courtesy and warmth exhibited by the Prince. Visitors arriving at ten p.m. would find awaiting them Brunswick sausages, Westphalian ham, Elbe eels, sardines, anchovies, caviar (usually a gift from St. Petersburg), salmon, hard-boiled eggs, cheeses and bottles of dark Bavarian beer. Bismarck appeared at eleven.”

He also suffered from insomnia. “At night he slept poorly or not at all. Often he lay awake until seven a.m., then slept until 2 p.m. Lying in bed, he mulled over his grievances. ‘I have spent the whole night hating.’ he said once. When no immediate object of hatred was available he ransacked his memory to dredge up wrongs done to him years before.”"

When his work redrawng the map of Europe was done, Bismarck had no dreams of world domination. “The years after 1887 seemed anticlimactic. The moments of daring calculation, of dramatic victories snatched from probable catastrophe, were over. ‘I am bored,’ Bismarck said in 1874. ‘The great things are done.’”

At one point he confessed to what might be diagnosed today as multiple personality disorder. “Faust complains of having two souls in his breast. I have a whole squabbling crowd. It goes on as in a republic.”

Source: Dreadnought, Robert K. Massie

Secret Pentagon Mini-Robo-Shuttle preparing for launch

A design that NASA turned over to the Pentagon, th X-37B is preparing for a test launch. Space.com calls it a spaceplane, but I don’t think it qualifies for that designation unless it takes off and lands on its own. This one will leave the surface in the nose of an Atlas 5 booster.