My ISP just put up a Tradewars 2002 server available for subscribers, so I figured I’d get my feet wet again after over a decade of not having touched the thing. There is an awful lot I’ve forgotten about plying the ANSI spaceways, but one thing I recall clearly is that there’s little more frustrating than trading in a perfectly good ship for a clunker. For most of your gameplay, you’re going to be either trading or stealing, both of which require you to move around a lot and have a lot of cargo capacity. For a small minority of circumstances, you will be fighting stuff.

There are several arguments to be made in favor of ships like the Merchant Freighter, CargoTran, Mule, and Starmaster, though it’s pretty much universally understood that the Corporate Flagship and Imperial Starship are the two best overall ships in the game. Getting into the finer points of these ships’ merits is beyond the scope of this article; you can do fine with any of these. The following ships, on the other hand, are simply to be avoided:

Merchant Cruiser

     Basic Hold Cost:   10,000   Initial Holds:     20 Maximum Shields:   400
     Main Drive Cost:    1,000    Max Fighters:  2,500  Offensive Odds: 1.0:1
       Computer Cost:   20,300  Turns Per Warp:      3  Defensive Odds: 1.0:1
      Ship Hull Cost:   10,000        Mine Max:     50      Beacon Max:    50
      Ship Base Cost:   41,300     Genesis Max:      5 Long Range Scan:   Yes
 Max Figs Per Attack:      750 TransWarp Drive:     No  Planet Scanner:   Yes
       Maximum Holds:       75 Transport Range:      5 Photon Missiles:    No

You start out with one of these, but there’s no good reason to keep it when you can trade it in for a Merchant Freighter on your first day of play and get more cargo holds, faster warps, and spare change right off the bat. It’s nothing special in a scrap and not efficient for trading.

Scout Marauder

     Basic Hold Cost:    5,000   Initial Holds:     10 Maximum Shields:   100
     Main Drive Cost:    3,000    Max Fighters:    250  Offensive Odds: 2.0:1
       Computer Cost:    5,200  Turns Per Warp:      2  Defensive Odds: 2.0:1
      Ship Hull Cost:    2,750        Mine Max:      0      Beacon Max:    10
      Ship Base Cost:   15,950     Genesis Max:      0 Long Range Scan:   Yes
 Max Figs Per Attack:      250 TransWarp Drive:     No  Planet Scanner:   Yes
       Maximum Holds:       25 Transport Range:      0 Photon Missiles:    No

She’s fast, but no faster than a Merchant Freighter, and with under half the cargo capacity. It gets great per-fighter combat odds, but only carries 250 of them. If you find yourself in a position where this is the only ship you can afford, trade up as soon as you can, and shame on you for not keeping a little money in the bank.

Tholian Sentinel

     Basic Hold Cost:    5,000   Initial Holds:     10 Maximum Shields: 4,000
     Main Drive Cost:   10,000    Max Fighters:  2,500  Offensive Odds: 1.0:1
       Computer Cost:   25,000  Turns Per Warp:      4  Defensive Odds: 1.0:1
      Ship Hull Cost:    7,500        Mine Max:     50      Beacon Max:    10
      Ship Base Cost:   47,500     Genesis Max:      1 Long Range Scan:   Yes
 Max Figs Per Attack:      800 TransWarp Drive:     No  Planet Scanner:    No
       Maximum Holds:       50 Transport Range:      3 Photon Missiles:    No

Sorry, it just isn’t worth the money. 400% fighter strength on the defensive sounds good but there’s just no fun to it. Worthless as a trading vessel, worthless as an attacking vessel. Just not worth the credits.

Interdictor Cruiser

     Basic Hold Cost:    5,000   Initial Holds:     10 Maximum Shields: 4,000
     Main Drive Cost:   50,000    Max Fighters:100,000  Offensive Odds: 1.2:1
       Computer Cost:  380,000  Turns Per Warp:     15  Defensive Odds: 1.2:1
      Ship Hull Cost:  104,000        Mine Max:    200      Beacon Max:   100
      Ship Base Cost:  539,000     Genesis Max:     20 Long Range Scan:   Yes
 Max Figs Per Attack:    15000 TransWarp Drive:     No  Planet Scanner:   Yes
       Maximum Holds:       40 Transport Range:     20 Photon Missiles:    No

If there’s an argument for the Tholian Sentinel, there may be an argument for the Interdictor. Would be a good attack vessel were it not for the prohibitive turns-per-warp stat. Its good personal transporter range makes it easy to leave behind, but it’s hard to justify spending over 500,000 credits on a ship you’re going to basically abandon somewhere.

I’m generally disinclined to buy ships like the Corellian Battleship or Havoc Gunstar in favor of the Starmaster, but I understand they have their merits.

It’s October 22, 2009. Time for our buddies at Microsoft to release their newest, sexiest operating system. And here I am not using it. A few simple reasons:

Sexiness

Windows 7, despite what people may tell you, is an operating system. It manages the resources of a computer, such as the memory, storage, input, and output. Whatever Steve Jobs tells you to the contrary, this is just not exciting.

Utility

I already have an operating system on every computer I own. All of my computers work. This really is more a lack of a reason to upgrade than a particular reason not to.

Fear

Not much of a motivator compared to the others, but time-honored principle of “If it ain’t broke, don’t break it” is a factor. Everything about my current setup works, so there is probably greater risk in changing than in leaving well-enough alone. This isn’t meant to be a criticism of the quality-assurance folks at Microsoft, but rather my confidence in them.

Not only do I not want to have to wrangle with my system to make something that used to work for me run again, I really don’t want to go to war to fix the strange stuff my wife uses (like spreadsheet software). The intrinsic frustrations of troubleshooting aside, it undermines the perception in my family that I am any good with these electronic thingamajigs.

Peer Pressure

I work at a place where our servers run Linux. Several of my friends own Apple products of various descriptions. We tease each other about such things. It’s merciless.

Pig-headedness

This is a serious factor in a lot of my decisions. I picked up Vista Home Premium a while ago, and found I rather liked it. Hell, I even appreciate the much-criticized admin authority auth bongs. They make me much more comfortable with letting my three-year-old near a keyboard.

Cost

Windows 7 Home Premium costs $199.00. This brings up some sub-points:

• I’ve got bills to pay.
• I could buy a netbook for what it would cost to buy a license for my home system and existing laptop.
• If I had $199.00 burning a hole in my pocket, I’d much rather spend it on booze. Or booze and a copy of Tropico 3.

The Real Reason

I’m lazy. There is nothing about the newest version of Microsoft Windows that budges me out of my OS inertia. I am presently an object at rest on such matters. All my devices work to my satisfaction, all the software I want to run works properly, and I fully expect this to be the case for at least as long as I’m satisfied with my processor speed (which may be several years with that Core i7 I’ve got under the hood on my home system).

Best of luck with your new OS, Microsoft.

Several months ago I saw somebody mention a new mail client that had much better threading behavior than most. There wasn’t any description of the behavior itself, nor any reasoned critique of what is wrong with how mail clients like Outlook Express or Thunderbird handle threads, but I was intrigued, so I went to check it out. A beta copy of Postbox was soon running on my laptop, and would shortly end up on my home and work desktop machines.

There are supposedly a number of Social Media / Web2.0 reasons to use Postbox, which explains the presence of a Facebook button that I never clicked. Other features I didn’t get much mileage out of (your results may vary) include a sidebar when viewing a message, containing contact information (ooh, a silhouette where the photo I don’t maintain of my coworker would go!), a listing of all attachments and external links in the message. This proved mildly useful maybe twice. Maybe I’m just old and set in my ways.

The real selling point here (selling point? more on that in a moment) is the threading, though. Take for example the following mailing list discussion with over a dozen responses, first in Mozilla Thunderbird:

In Postbox the whole thread is displayed as a single item by default. Selecting that single line will display the whole conversation formatted much like you’d expect from a mailing list digest. No expanding a thread into a big messy tree is necessary, but if you feel you need to pick out a single message from the discussion, everything’s presented cleanly and sorted by whatever criteria you are currently sorting the folder by (in my case this is nearly always chronological, but hey).

A small touch that I rather appreciated with Postbox what that old threads will display by the date of the most recent reply, not the date on which the thread started. This worked very nicely for me; it is a behavior familiar from web bulletin boards in which people will frequently “bump” a topic to the top of a forum and thus revive a discussion. I’m not in the habit of deleting mail as I read it, so getting to a new post in a week-old topic would frequently involve some digging around. Not efficient.

The only problem I ran into with Postbox was the new-message alerts. I was repeatedly notified of unread messages as though they were new. I may have retrieved a new message five minutes ago, but that does not mean I necessarily read it. To have a pane appear notifying me of new messages while I’m in another application is a useful feature. To be repeatedly notified about the same unread status message from some automated system I don’t actively care about at the moment is just a nuisance. A minor nuisance, one I’m willing to live with.

Then the dealbreaker: a notification that I had 14 days to register my copy.

I don’t normally think of myself as a cheapskate. I am not in the habit of clipping coupons or attending short-term pricing events at local retailers. I’ve been known to occasionally purchase brand-name acetaminophen.That said, I’m not in the habit of paying for stuff that I’ve had free-of-charge for years. I can switch back to the mail client that came with my operating system and be reasonably content. I can switch back to Thunderbird and be quite content. I like Postbox, but I can’t value it at $39.95. I wouldn’t pay that much for a web browser, either.

I recommend Postbox 1.0 as a mail client for anybody who is operating on a somebody-else’s-money basis.