Rough Guide to the Ooniverse

[Helvellyn]

As far as names go...

GalCop is generally only used to refer to the police, and the Galactic Co-Operative of Worlds is for the general organisation (although the manual does slip up occasionally and mix them). My personal view is that, therefore, the name GalCop is an informal one, because (a) it sounds it, and (b) it's spoofing the Co-operative for it's police force name.

The Elite logo should only refer to Elite. Imprint (IMO) gets this completely wrong. There's a reason it has "Elite" written on it, after all - it has nothing to do with GalCop, or the Co-Operative. Personally I also overlook the existance of the gold version, because it looks 'orrible and silly (especially with the added "whoosh" effect). It's a mystery to me why the original far better illustrations were only used on Acorn Elites. Thank you ArcElite for returning to it!

[Selezen]

See, now here we get inyo a problem with everyone's subjective, personal experience of Elite and the various versions.

Imprint is a canonical reference as it has been published within the context of the game (in this case, the Elite Plus version). The ArcElite manual is therefore also a canonical reference. The difficulty is that they were both created by third party developers after the fact, which is why I try to go for just the original BBC manual and The Dark Wheel as reference sources.

having said that, I try not to rule out any other material that has been published, including Imprint, the ArcElite manual (which I actually don't currently have a copy of) and the stuff from Frontier or FFE.

I think that as we're trying to incorporate as much as possible into the expanded universe of Oolite, we have to all come to an agreement as to what should be "canon"...

I'll write more on this soon, but I have to get back to my PRINCE2 training...

[Disembodied]

...we have to all come to an agreement as to what should be "canon"...

Ohhh... that's a tricky one. Really. Apart from anything else, "we" are not a fixed set! We can't expect to bind everyone for ever more with our decisions. That's what the Council of Nicaea thought it could do, and look at the trouble THAT caused...

However, that said, certainly for the Rough Guide I agree we need some measure of canonicity. A published Elite/Frontier/FFE source is about as canonical as it gets. But: I don't think we absolutely need to make the assumption that all canonical works are "true", i.e. the last, final, inflexible word on any given subject.

Sources should not be treated, in my opinion, as Revealed Truth. I'd prefer to see them as documents from within the game Universe. Often these are official works, products of governments and corporations. Others are works of fiction, or at least fictionalised versions of events which may have happened. They are not reliable. They are often, either deliberately or accidentally, misleading, wrong, or completely invented. Think propaganda; think obfuscation; think Hollywood History! If we're going to get properly under the skin of the game then I think we have to swallow this inherent uncertainty; the fact that, in a multi-species, multi-government universe, there are going to be a great many points of view, all pushing and elbowing for information-space.

At bottom, we -- those of us here, now, who want to contribute to the Rough Guide -- should probably make some sort of statement of Basic Truths. But I don't think we can confidently go much further than saying something like "Elite/Oolite, Frontier and FFE all coexist within the same universe, and they overlap physically and temporally. The differences between them are massive, however, and it's probably best not to dwell on them too much." Certainly for the Rough Guide, sticking to Oolite, and Oolite alone, is probably the best bet. Dragging in too much Frontier and FFE stuff would just muddy the waters to no good purpose.

As for the details: my feeling is, don't sweat them! Post-facto rationalisation has kept several major world religions going for millennia. I'm sure we can always wangle our way out of any corners we find ourselves in.

[Selezen]

Well said that man!

Anyway, as promised, here's more...

At the end of the day, Hellvelyn is right within his context. That said, I'm right within my context too, so who's to say who is actually, finally RIGHT?

No-one. Fact is that in saying that the manual "mistakenly" used GalCop to refer to the Co-operative is a half-truth - it's not a mistake as there is no fully defined correct answer to what the term "GalCop" actually is. The majority of pre-ArcElite players simply looked at the similarity between GALactic CO-oPerative of Worlds and GALCOP and just assumed that they were one and the same. One supporting element of the manual is that the police are named as the Galactic Police (with capitals and everything) right there in black and white:

‘Legal Status’ refers to your Galactic Police record. If this is CLEAN you have nothing to worry about, but as an OFFENDER or, still worse, a FUGITIVE you are likely to be attacked by police ships.

I'm using a lot of the research I did when making up the timeline on my site here, so apologies if I've used it somewhere else... Notable is that the use of GalCop in the manual can very easily be applied to either organisation in most cases as follows:

GalCop and the Lave Authorities allow practice docking and departure runs to all their space stations here, and you would be advised to take advantage of this facility

Your kills are photographed and transmitted by TS ComDirect to the nearest GalCop Federal Law Centre. Your rating as a combateer will increase in direct proportion.

However, there is one particular paragraph that I feel defends my point of view:

Remember: other pilots may be attempting to increase their own combat rating by attacking either innocent traders, or police Vipers (the ships of the GalCop Police Force).

Why would the supposed "official body" writing this training manual use the police force's nickname alongside a more formal name for that same force. Re-reading and expanding that paragraph as "the ships of the Galactic Police Police Force" makes no sense, but reading it as "the ships of the Galactic Co-operative Police Force" makes perfect sense to me. Also, the phrase "Coriolis stations are 'neutral' territory, controlled equally by GalCop and the Planetary Government" seems to point more to the Co-operative being the referenced body, since the police would not "control" the territory, but would rather protect or police it...

Finally (more because if I keep this up some of you will want to hit me) the sentence "Pirates exist everywhere in the galaxy, but cluster mainly around unstable GalCop worlds, especially worlds run on a feudal or anarchic system" again would be a statement more relevant to the Co-operative than the police, primarily because worlds are members of the Co-operative and not the police force and would therefore not be described as "unstable GalCop worlds" if GalCop referred to the police.

Interestingly, now that I've found my copy of the ArcElite manual, I found the following sentence:

The GalCop Federal Law Centre collate data from TS ComDirect photographs producing performance-linked ratings.

Oddly, this paragraph seems to make more sense if GalCop refers to the Co-operative rather than the police. In apparent contradiction to that, in the chapter entitled The Establishment, the Co-operative is referenced as "GalCo-op, not to be confused with GalCop", but an alternative definition is not given for GalCop. Just below that, in the section entitled Galactic Police, there is no reference of the contraction GalCop! Huh? INCONSISTENT!!! It seems that in every part of the manual except the Establishment chapter, GalCop refers to the Co-operative, but in that one chapter, the contraction GalCo-op is used...

However. That all said, there's no reason why, in an infinitely diverse universe, BOTH could be true. Whereas GalCop initially was a contraction of Galactic Co-operative, some inventive wag may have said "hang on, GalCops sounds like a funny contraction for Galactic Police, and has the benefit of being a pun on GalCop!" So, as time rolled merrily forward in the real world and the ArcElite manual described the police as GalCops, maybe the fictional timeline of Elite/ArcElite/Oolite introduced the same!

All I'm saying is that it's a big Ooniverse out there, and there's room for everyone's opinions. It's opinions, after all, that have made Elite and Oolite great, and given it such a rich expanded universe!

[Ace Garp]

I agree wholeheartedly that GalCop is shorthand for Galactic co-operative, and GalCops is the slang for their police force; although the singular GalCop appears to be used interchangingly depending upon the context.

What I wonder more though, is whether Braben & Bell ever envisaged people still discussing the finer points of their invented universe over twenty years after its creation.

Still not sure why Lave was stuck into the Frontier universe though - that kind of messed things up from a chronological viewpoint.
I always think of them as separate game worlds entirely, that just happen to share a lot of traits.

[ovvldc]

I think Bell and Braben never considered it in this much detail. I suppose Galcop just sounded fine for the police force. Makes a better soundbite than 'Galactic Cooperative of Worlds Law Enforcement Agency' (GCWLEA is useless from a marketing perspective).

Just my thoughts...

-Oz

[Selezen]

If you look close enough, you'll note that GalCop is never once mentioned in the actual game - it's just the background, manual and fiction that mention it...

In fact, the game only ever mentions one thing, and that's His Majesty's Space Navy (in one of the missions). So In the context of the game there is no GalCop at all - there is only an unnamed monarchy.

Putting Lave into Frontier was apparently (and this is unconfirmed) a last minute thing. Legends tell that Braben came up with Frontier as a completely separate entity to Elite, but someone came up with the idea of making Frontier a sequel to the earlier game and thus stuck all the old ships in there too.

Believe it if you like - I have no proof of this, unfortunately.

[Ramirez]

Given the many different nicknames the police get in real life, having GalCop as the single term for the Galactic Co-operative Police Force seems perfectly realistic.

It sounds like the Elite Federation as described in Imprint (I haven't read it myself) could be considered part of the Galactic Co-operative's space licensing authority. Pilots gaining their wings from this exclusive academy would be able to go on to command large commercial vessels (cruise liners, etc) or go into the police (GalCop) or the federal navy. In practice not all pilots with a Federation combat rating are actually working for the government so it wouldn't necessarily make sense to regard the avian logo as being the police badge.

To be honest I had tended to consider the Elite Federation as an fairly independent body, more of a pilots' club, as I didn't think its reward system based on kills was in line with the Co-operation's principles of peace and fair play. However, reading up on the Wiki, the Co-operation seems to be much more of a defence and security organisation like NATO rather than the UN, and so it wouldn't be surprising if one of its training facilities has a more combat-oriented (and potentially rather murky) backgound.

[Selezen]

The Elite Federation are pretty mysterious as far as the official texts go, and that's something that could/should be reflected in anything that gets written into Oolite, really...

Although they are officially recognised by Galcop, and may have started out as part of that body (where the Elite rating could have been incorporated into a pilot's profile) they could now be a semi-autonomous organisation with ties to GC. They could incorporate personell and concepts from many other organisations, including the police, Navy and maybe even Feds and Imperials (hence why they use similar concepts in Frontier and onwards). They might even have ties to (gasp) the Dark Wheel!

I'll write something up when I get a chance... Promise.

[Disembodied]

There's an interesting possible dynamic between the Co-operative (made up, one assumes, of representatives of all the different member planets) and interstellar pilots. To what extent are starship commanders part of a different polity? Some might consider themselves to be loyal citizens of this or that planet: others might feel no allegiance whatsoever to the world of their birth. Let's face it, we're all our own bosses, and do pretty much what we want, where we want. You could, taking an outside view, see us as members of a separate, dissociated, amorphous and anarchic network, whose members owe little to the Co-Operative and even less to the individual planets. We trade largely, but not exclusively, with the Co-op, and most of us stay mostly within Co-Op laws, most of the time. Some of us will even chip in to help out the police or Navy when circumstances are right: but generally, we do as we please, unco-ordinated and uncontrolled.

The Elite Federation might be ... what? An attempt at forming a pilots' Union? A forum for communicating pilots' concerns to the Co-operative? Mind you, I don't pay any subs and nobody asked me for my opinion on, say, TeraScreen placement at the witchpoint! Maybe the self-selecting and naturally limiting nature of the "Elite" part is a way to keep the signal-to-noise ratio at a reasonable level, though, and the only way of producing any kind of representational body which no-one can (or wants to) argue with. Are all members equal, or are some more Elite than others? Are there Elite pilots out there who aren't members of the Elite Federation? Do you have to be invited, after you become Elite? Is it self-selecting, or is it only open to Co-operative nominees? Are there members who aren't Elite pilots, but who have some other talents? Can you get kicked out? Are there perks? Responsibilities? Special hats or funny handshakes?

[Selezen]

Ooh, I like this!!

Space Pilots are like any large body of people in the world now - a loose alliance of people linked by a common frame of reference. Like lorry drivers, taxi drivers, commercial pilots, administrative assistants, web developers etc. What makes them all common is that they fly a ship. Other circumstances could be far and wide.

In my writings and meanderings, I've always considered pilots who have qualified through the Lavian academy to be registered as Naval reserves, thus available for military assignments. As such they are already loyal to several bodies: GalCop, GalNavy, EF, themselves and thier homeworld. Loyalties may differ on occasion, but that's no different to the real world. Employees of the NHS can often be members of several other bodies, such as UNISON (the Union for non-clinical staff), a Nursing body or some such. One day, somehting might happen in the workplace that UNISON doesn't like, then the staff member's loyalties to the workplace will be pitted against loyalty to the Union. So there can be conflict. Again, if the Navy decide to activate a pilot's reserve status and bring them in to do a mission, then the pilot's loyalty to the Navy will be expected to take precedence (at least to the navy officers) over loyalty to self (profits etc), GalCop and homeworld (although naval officers will use the excuse that by serving the Navy you are serving GalCop and your homeworld...).

If you believe everything you read in the Flight Training Manual, GalCop sponsor a pilot to qualify as a pilot at a facility in the Lave system. They then arguably provide a free ship with an insurance policy. Nothing has ever been clarified about what GalCop expect from this! Do they take an invisible cut of your profits? Do they call it an extended loan, but don't pi$$ them of or they'll take your ship off you? Or do they just cut you loose and say that it's OK, you're helping the economy, and by killing pirates and stuff you're helping clean up the spaceways? Who knows? Maybe if you stop paying them they'll send Hesperus in a black suit to reposess your Military Laser!

As for the EF question, as far as can be made out from official texts, GalCop registered pilots are automatically registered with the Elite Federation. It's entirely possible that Galactic Federation or Achenar Empire pilots could be registered with the Elite Federation too. Independently taught pilots may have the choice to register with the EF, as will anyone from any organisation as long as it's not hostile to the Elite Federation itself. Using an example from ArcElite's manual, it's possible that membership of key people in the Elite Federation is what led to the creation of the Tri-Alliance (which I have decided is made up from members of GalCop, the GalFederation and the Empire).

In theory there could be thousands of pilots out there who would be Elite (at least by the scale of thier kill count) but are not members of the EF. Just as likely is the scenario that the EF could include members from agencies across the 8 galaxies who are not related to GalCop, but as long as thier kills are recoded and sent to the EF, their rating increases. They'll get thier Elite badge just like anyone else, but it might look different to an Elite badge gained by a GalCop member. It might use the organisational logo of whatever agency they work for, or it might even be a family crest! The one thing in common is that somewhere on it will be the word ELITE!

EDIT: as promised, I've started to document my own take on the EF, which you are all welcome to plagiarise into the Wiki or the Rough Guide... Find it here: http://hughesd.co.uk/elite/elitefed.asp

[Disembodied]

Interesting! There's currently one bone of contention, though, between the EF and the Co-operative (or at least the police): the EF simply record kills. They don't provide any information to the police of who killed who. If you destroy an innocent trader, your kill rating goes up -- but your legal status will be unchanged, unless the police are there to witness the crime.

This represents a serious breach between the EF and the police. What could have caused this? Presumably, there must have been some serious falling-out between the two organisations. Possibly this was a result of the discovery of the "galactic" wormholes. We know that making a galactic hyperjump clears a criminal record: this suggests that informational transfer between the various sectors is pretty unreliable. It would be galling to be a genuinely Clean trader who arrives in Sector 2, who is attacked by, and kills, a pseudo-"Clean" pirate, only to be labelled an Offender. A rash of such contested "offences" would rapidly throw the whole police-reporting element into disrepute. Or maybe there used to be a lot more laws, when there were fewer planets with a more cohesive legal system; but as the co-operative expanded it had to become more pragmatic, as it tried to integrate ever more existing customs ino the statute books.

I can see the EF becoming restive, with increasing demands for more information from the police: eventually it might have built up enough strength, wealth and influence on its own to break away from police control. With the looming Thargoid menace, the demand for effective combat pilots began to outweigh the need to control piracy. Power would swing towards the EF: the Navy would rather have morally questionable pilots who could take on the bugs, rather than law-abiding citizens who would need more protection than it could provide...

[Commander Mysenses]

Real men don't read manuals

[Cmdr. Maegil]

Real men don't read manuals

What about real blue-feathered avians, are they allowed to read manuals?

[Selezen]

Interesting! There's currently one bone of contention, though, between the EF and the Co-operative (or at least the police): the EF simply record kills. They don't provide any information to the police of who killed who. If you destroy an innocent trader, your kill rating goes up -- but your legal status will be unchanged, unless the police are there to witness the crime.

That's a good point. Maybe there's some sort of understanding between the police and the EF - maybe the police jurisdiction ends at the limit of thier patrol sensors! That way the records can be stored but not used unless the circumstances demand it.

For example. Commander Selezen is a two faced bugger (no personal comments please): when he's within the range of a police patrol or a station, he's good as gold. All clearances in good time, all paperwork in order, the epitome of good behaviour when another ship is there.

However - as soon as he's off the beaten path, he turns into the quintissential bad guy. Anything's fair game if it wanders into his laser sights. Passenger transports, cargo ships, anything, as long as it's carrying cargo or something of value. Each time he blows another innocent ship out of the stars, it's recorded on the EF database alongside the legitimate targets he's killed.

Now comes his day of reckoning - Selezen is caught by a police cruiser in the last seconds of blowing away a cargo ship. The police open fire and blow him away, but he ejects and gets towed to base. There he stands trial for suspected piracy. In this case the legal department can call on the records of the EF to see whether or not the charge holds weight or whether the incident was a one off or just a mistake. In Selezen's case, he's screwed.

In this way, it puts the commander in another position to make a choice about his life. He knows that he could get away with it, but if he gets caught, then the evidence of his past life is there to stop him from lying.

It's all to do with how a society works. Piracy is bad in the public eye, but behind closed doors, where the suits whisper the words that mortal men are not meant to hear, it is said that the more prolific combateers will be more of a resource and more malleable to suggestion if the threat of exposing thier oh-so-secret actions is put on the table.

It's an interesting thought. You can uphold the word of the law and be safe and secure, or you can succumb to the temptation of the quick buck, knowing full well that somewhere, the evidence of your shenanigans is there for all to see, hanging over you like a pendulum axe...