LINE NOISE News from Chez Diesel 23 March, 1989 BITZ'N'PIECES There have been more promotions apart from the two new Guildthings. Magius finally made JP last week, although it will be some time before he has the stats to attempt the journey to Hilbert Space. Flushed with his success, he got to grips with giving jobs to Poor People - and in the process actually HELPED someone! Star was the beneficiary of this unex- pected behaviour from Fed's nastiest person, collecting enough jobs to make him an Adventurer. Is Red-Eyes turning into a Good Samaritan, or was this just a momentary lapse on his part? Apart from the final implementation of the GM puzzle, a few other bits and pieces have changed recently. Commanders can no longer put rewards on others - good news for higher players, who up till now have had no way of preventing Obnoxious Commanders who didn't care about the consequences; however, Captains have more to lose and may think twice before making a nuisance of themselves. The DNI Computer is down, and the data files have been lost, so anyone waiting to be promoted to JP (is there anyone? where have all the Merchants gone?) will have to ask Our Illustrious Leader or a Conclave member for the information they need - unless they already know the answer to the puzzle! Players who have changed their Compunet IDs and then been unable to access their warehouses - Ensor and Gizmo had this trouble - should now find the problem solved. A great shock to all JPs - an Excess Profits Tax has been introduced on contracts, neatly plugging the bug which they had all been busily exploiting, but also making it far more difficult to move large sums of groats between players. If the payment for a contract (including any bonus) comes to more than 5K, the tax is levied at an extortionate fifty percent! Coming soon - Our Illustrious Leader has several plans up her sleeve for the future. You will be able to specify what sort of drink you purchase when you in Chez Diesel (Social Centre of the Solar System). Presumably, it will work something like the command - you type and that's what everyone will get! A very useful feature for the vindictive among you will be the command. You will be able to set your ship's computer to automatically fire at your selected victim every time your ships pass in the night. Vicious, but fun - Pegasus would have loved this! Our Illustrious Leader mentioned some months ago a new communication command allowing you to specify a group of people to send messages to - like a multiple tight beam. This will make plotting and scheming much easier. Hopefully we will see this soon. There have been rumours of some new SpyNet services, including a Spybeam Shield costing somewhere in the region of - wait for it - 50 meg. Phew! The next major implementation will be the planet-building tools for Explorers. Requirements for this rank will be to boost your stats to 92 all round. No more nasty puzzles to solve - just sheer hard work. Samantha is finally out of the Conclave! Despite not having set foot in Fed Data Space for months, she remained in the Top Six because her wealth was in cash, not in extra stats (which are valued at only half their purchase price). To redress this balance, Our Illustrious Leader converted her millions into stats and out she went! Helped by gifts from the other JPs, Spacehound took her place in the Conclave. I'm sure you all remember that Snoopy, the leader of the now defunct Alliance, decided on a personality change and as if by magic became Merchant Ghost. He's now had enough of being someone else, and has asked Our Illustrious Leader to change him back to Snoopy again. No-one appears the slightest bit interested. And finally, Omi is now six years old! Yes, it was his birthday last week. Unfortunately, he ate so much jelly and icecream and cake and sweeties and chocolate that he died of over-eating, increasing his insurance premium yet again.