[Gamma_Draconis]

I don't know about any of you, but if Freespace 3 came out, I would buy it and play it regardless of who made it or how good it would be.

Thats pretty desperate. So if I were to make a ripoff of Asteroids and call it Freespace 3, would you buy it?

[BS403]

@Corvette: if you live in America, and the land is worth 2.5 million, you won't get that much. when you sell the land you will have to pay capital gains tax, unless you invest the money back into real estate within ~ 6 months. and capital gains tax takes damn near 50% of the cash. I'm judging by your local time zone that you live in america or canada, but maybe you don't.

[Polpolion]

I don't know about any of you, but if Freespace 3 came out, I would buy it and play it regardless of who made it or how good it would be.

Thats pretty desperate. So if I were to make a ripoff of Asteroids and call it Freespace 3, would you buy it?

By Freespace 3, I mean the third game in the Freespace series. So unless you also made Freespace 1 and 2, you would need to find a different loophole in my statement.

[akenbosch]

what if it were a derek smart production, with 3d support only partialy implemented?

[Unknown Target]

No.

And my god you are going to get roasted.

[corvette108048]

@Corvette: if you live in America, and the land is worth 2.5 million, you won't get that much. when you sell the land you will have to pay capital gains tax, unless you invest the money back into real estate within ~ 6 months. and capital gains tax takes damn near 50% of the cash. I'm judging by your local time zone that you live in america or canada, but maybe you don't.

Lets just say I had 10 mill total after taxes I had 5.5 mill and I want to spend 2.5 mill on the fs copyright

[corvette108048]

what if it were a derek smart production, with 3d support only partialy implemented?

Derek Smart could not make a good game if he tryed

[Unknown Target]

I swear, if I had 2.5 mil to spend I'd invest it in real space exploration

[CP5670]

Well, for one thing, I doubt the Freespace IP itself would cost that much. $100-200k is more realistic, as FS is far from a high profile series and was a commercial failure on top of that. However, as Flipside said, acquiring the rights would be pretty pointless in itself. Unless you buy a substantial stake in THQ, a $1.86bln company, you're going to have a hard time convincing them to make a sequel on the PC (they do console games only now) to a space sim (a nearly defunct genre these days) that didn't sell well.

[Jeff Vader]

I swear, if I had 2.5 mil to spend I'd invest it in real space exploration

Pardons for drifting off-topic, but I think the whole space exploration bull**** is pretty pointless, because

1. Mankind doesn't have and probably never will have the technological knowhow to travel beyond our own solar system
2. Our own solar system is dull. There isn't anything of interest here and, apart from Earth, there aren't any inhabitable planets.

Sure, some American hothead scientists state that we could set up colonies in the Moon or Mars, but that would require enormous machinery and installations to have even the slightest changes of succeeding. And even after that, who would actually want to live on a big, boring piece of rock, when you could as well live on Earth, where we have nice things such as oceans and nature.

I'd say **** the whole space exploration business. Let's save our own planet first, before even thinking about conquering the universe.

[Snail]

Hey it's that sensitive from the Starborn FAQ!

[achtung]

1. Mankind doesn't have and probably never will have the technological knowhow to travel beyond our own solar system

Lots of people never thought we'd have flying machines you know.  Same goes for going into orbit, to the moon, etc.

[Jeff Vader]

Lots of people never thought we'd have flying machines you know.  Same goes for going into orbit, to the moon, etc.

True, I admit that. But still, traveling beyond the Sol system, so to speak, with our current technology would require the crew to be in some kind of stasis, since the journey would take a buttload of time. And even then we could only hope that they'd arrive on their location safe and sound, would find something interesting there and could get back alive.

If we wanted to travel to, for example, Alpha Centauri in a reasonable time, we'd have to travel way faster than light. And as far as I know, that isn't happening any time soon.

I'm not saying an absolute no to space travel. I just think that we should first try to stop polluting, uncontrollable population growth and the conflicts within our species before focusing on the outer space. In short, let's first save our only home and after that find new ones.

[achtung]

I understand, and agree with you to a point.  Just, never say never. 

[TrashMan]

 

[Grizzly]

THQ needs to buy the rights from Interplay...

I'd say **** the whole space exploration business. Let's save our own planet first, before even thinking about conquering the universe.

I think those space expleration people already knew our planet was doomed, and therefore search for others..

[Jeff Vader]

K. I ain't not sayin' never no more.

[Snail]

Can the humans, once they discover the Starborn, just say "no" to the Starborn's influence? Sure, playing along with the Starborn gets you rewards, but c'mon, only the most selfish people imaginable would further the destruction of their own race!

But the Starborn are far more subtle than that. They’re not going to tell one of their ‘game pieces’ what the ultimate point of the Great Game is. (It’s not annihilation of the race, BTW, merely destroying human civilization. Although annihilation could easily happen. The SB don’t want to waste all those years of manipulation if they don’t have to. They know that human civilization will re-emerge from a new Stone Age and that they’ll eventually be able to play another round of the Great Game – after all, it’s happened before.

It might work more like this: The SB find a Sensitive born to a powerful Earth family (powerful because of the works of previous generations of Sensitives). They start influencing him when he’s a boy, telling him how beautiful the Earth is. The Sensitive becomes a Mother Earth activist. With continuing ‘help’ and his family’s fortune, he starts to gain political power. He becomes the advisor of Kings and Prime Ministers on the subject of the environment. He might even become a Prime Minister himself. Along the way, he’s accumulated followers – some are lesser Sensitives who ‘know’ he’s right about everything, others are Normals who like what he’s saying. Some of them consider themselves “men of action”.

Naturally, the SB don’t stop helping him there. Now that he has real power, they change the tone, telling him that the people living in the Martian colonies are somehow wrong. It’s wrong to live under domes when beautiful Mother Earth is available to all. Slowly, he begins to feel that the Martians are actually evil and his advice starts to put the Martians in a poorer and poorer light. Over time, he comes to hate the Martians and, directly and indirectly, he influences a sizable portion of the Earthers to agree with him, including his ‘men of action’.

At some point, a situation arises where one of his ‘men of action’, maybe a Capship captain, is in a position to either help or hurt some Martians. He hurts them. Tensions build. Rhetoric, especially the Sensitives’s, gets louder. Someone pulls the trigger and humanity finds itself in civil war. The SB sit back, share a bowl of metaphorical popcorn, and enjoy.

I think that Lobo is that hippie.

[jr2]

@corvette108048:  I think that if you wisely invested that money, you could then have enough money to do whatever you wanted and more, I'd imagine.  I mean, even putting it all in a high-interest savings account (like a CD or somethin) would give like 5 - 7% interest, right?  If you invested in a few good companies like Google & THQ, and some others, then you'd be all set.  Too bad KMart is back up... if you'd invested in their stock when it crashed, you'd have more money than you knew what to do with now.  XD

[Jeff Vader]

I think that Lobo is that hippie.

Ok, maybe some of my statements fit that hippie description but there are a few flaws in your theory:

The Starborn Hippie Dude	Lobo
Is Sensitive	Is rude and annoying
Is being influenced by some aliens	Has other mental problems
Has outside help and a family fortune	Is rarely helped and hasn't even seen a fortune
Gains political power and influences bigwigs	Has no political agenda and is always rejected when presenting his ideas
Has followers	Is generally avoided
Thinks Martians are evil	Didn't even know Mars was inhabited
Causes a civil war	Is highly insignificant and cannot make a difference

What I was saying is that I don't understand why humans should ruin this planet and justify the whole thing with the word 'profit'. Some of us are actually trying to live here. And if you call me a Starborn frakkin' hippie once more... I will come and eat your cookies.

As a side note, some highly powerful Starborn/Administrator/Moderator could move our space travel debate somewhere, since it has nothing to do with the symbol combination F, S and 3.


Edit: Now that I thought of it, there might be something true behind this Starborn thing. At least it would explain how someone like Bush got to be the president of the U.S. Creepy.