Lunar Boom Town/strategywiki.org

Initial Contact
Dear strategists, game players and space technology enthusiasts:

I will learn as quickly as I can about your site (http://strategywiki.org/wiki/StrategyWiki:Guide/Scope) so I can improve your perception of the applicability of your valuable resources to accomplishing overlapping specific goals. Bear with me a bit please while I get orientated adequately to communicate effectively.

Regarding specific points

Criteria for inclusion 1. The game play is mixed up in chunks of fun usable play suitable for very inhomogenous skillsets if the play is self managed or coordinated effectively. For example, one could start by playing the Virtual Airport game that will be available for free from a linear queue as soon as allocated resources become available to exercise each task necessary to send the CD out. This is indeed a very nice if a bit buggy dunfunct product. It was created by a pressional consulting firm, mine, but was never put into shipping because I could not approve such a buggy market for young minds easily crippled from being cheated by frauds claiming to have a fun game worth hundreds of dollars of play time only to deliver some worth pennies in the aggregate. However, used carefully supervised by knowledgeable engineers and developer like myself and others it can be fun, free, and useful in responsibly managed playsession. So we are deconstructing the game into it constituent pieces so we can put safety interlocks between play activities to guarantee an upper bound on how backly someone can hurt themselves other others with our product. I can afford to send your evaluation board or agent a copy of the Virtal Airport so you can verify things are as I have stated. So that is one game. Now get into the role playing by assigning people missions and tasks within the concept of an engineering simlation trying to determine best way to do something in a parallel safety interlocked fashion so nobody can easily cheat anyone else of anything of much value before breakers blow and stop the uncompensated for value being delivered to the cheaters or simply careless or otherwise incompent or incapable of meeting agreed responsibilities ... after anyone can get hit by a (bus, lightning, or asteroid) at almost any time. Please provide a mailing address and I will eagerly get the VAP disk (playable without installation on hard drive if that is your preference, some remaining bugs sometimes prevent proper execution if incorrect win95/dos executable is attempted), at this worst case the individual animation files which can be used for same purpose by picking the best clip of the approximately ... 100 available to meet assigned task responsiblys. If is then of course up to the game master or dungeon master to adquately find compromises to salvage the value of the situation appropriately. There are several other game components and documented activities online to make this a rich tool for many who will not otherwise have access to any of these capabilities because they can never get started and thus eventually earn enough cash or admiration that they can buy the excellent expensive tools available or find a sponser willing to donate their cause.

2. Excellent! Irwin Consulting was registered and operated in the State of Oregon as a sole proprietorship owned and operated by me. We were a successful consulting firm providing various engineering and computer services on both a signed and verbalized contract or agreement basis for approximately a decade. Aproximate range of operations {1992 startup to 2002 bankruptcy}, you understand this is a draft and I am working from memory. Most of the records have been destroyed now since typically many tax records are routine flushed after three years. We held ours until just shortly, maybe a year ago and now their are only fragmentary example kept for myself to help me remember what I learned so I can better next time and prosper. If necessary we can come up with adequate verfication of dates, licenses, registration, etc. For example: Oregon Secretary of State's office should have records confirmed registration of the business and authority to conduct business under name "Irwin Consulting". Likewise the state should be able to confirm that I had my engineer-in-training license. This should provide credibility such that it is believable when I testify that specific game development and play tasks and related necessary research and technolgy development was taking place for approximately 3x5x(50%) ... at least 7.5 effort years or fifteen thousand manhours were expended to create best play experience we could. The other game component we import under various license restrictions I can only evaluate just as any player until I have modded with them a bit, and then lookout!

3. Vap reached the point of flea market sales along with Urquan Masters. I do not have precise records but I would estimate that I sold from prices ranging from a quarter to a dollar about 4 of each, they seemed to split the market appeal to the kids and peoples who window shopped or stood there and played them about 50/50 which give me a warm feeling of satisfaction considering the smashing success Star Control was before the owners recycled the faded past gold disk into the commons via a very successful port. However, this is only anecdotal as I was not priveleged to watch the customers wear out their interest only that briefest play experience of a few minutes to hours as the individuals each struggled in their own way to experimentally learn enough to have fun playing the game and wish to take it home.

4. VAP is not rated, I am unaware of ratings of other potential components. I would assume that Star Control was rated at some point if the systems were in place while it was at its peak. Lunar Boom Town is a very recent startup activity which is transparent and online as much as possible, obviously it is impossible to document entire development process because people do so much thinking and prototyping in an effective synergizing sets of group teams and activities that it is clearly impossible to document everything online. Inevitably there is information hiding in distributed team due to the shear fog of massive quaunties of creative analog variants being passed around through a digital medium. The permutations are a bit boggling when I really stop to think about the challenges groups of disparate sizes face when attempting to cooperate in sharing tools and techniques. Perhaps your people can help us acquire some insight into ways to meet this criteria or find ways to meet the implied requirement to the satisfaction of your group. Maybe best thing is to simply start the process of getting reviewed and if we can get rated or certifed even though as a development activity we have a chaotic flux of change. Perhap the rating organizations would have ideas that would be helpful in meeting their desires and concerns that the risks can be managed effectively.

5. Likewise I can write some letters and send some messages to see if anyone is interested in looking us over. Lunar Boom Town is getting some attention in a couple of google sci.space.* groups. Perhaps if related groups exist for game development I can seek some attention there and generate the data you require.

6. Since Lunar Boom Town by defintion has a larger installed base than star control (here I assume urquan masters1 < urquan masters2 & urquan masters0=star control retired and frozen no longer growing proven registered base  therefore by definition as a superset including urquan masters and others Lunar Boom Town easily meets this inclusion criteria.

Regarding the criteria not applicable to consideration, if I understand properly I should proceed to http://strategywiki.org/wiki/StrategyWiki_talk:Community_Portal and initiate a conversation or discussion.

I will post this draft at Lunar Boom Town portal and link to it and post in the applicable sci.space.policy groups as well as post similar content to my personal blogs and soon to be started engineering notebook to begin facilitating the public dialogues.

Thank you all for your time and consideration regarding the Lunar Boom Town Web Portal.

sincerely, Michael R. Irwin mirwin@[advogato.org, wikipedia.org, wikiversity.org]

intended distribution includes but is not limited to: sci.space.* Wikiversity strategywiki.org

Mirwin 06:54, 27 November 2007 (UTC)