WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS
Earthdate February 2003


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FED FUNNIES


OFFICIAL NEWS
by Hazed


What was in February 2003's Official News:

THE MONTH IN BRIEF
TRIGGER ABUSE FOR FUN AND PROFIT
FROM THE POSTBAG: INTEREST RATES

THE MONTH IN BRIEF

Fed events were overshadowed during February by the terrible Columbia shuttle tragedy, which was destroyed as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. While reading news reports that morning, I found a link to a poem called High Flight. It was written in 1941 by a 19 year old spitfire pilot, and it was one of the favorite poems of Sharon Christa McAuliffe, who died in the last shuttle disaster. It's a reminder of why the astronauts were up there.

You can read the poem at http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/276.html.

Galinfenner took over the running of the Fed events team, and immediately set about revitalising things, introducing new events, recruiting new event hosts, and advancing his plan for Galactic domination.

February 2, as you all know, is Groundhog Day. This is the day when we catch all the Groundhogs that come into Federation, and ask them to give a forecast of the weather in the Solar System for the next year. We keep careful note of what they say, and then a year later we compare their predictions to what really happened. If they were right, they get a job with the Galactic Administration's Meteorological Department. If they were wrong, we hunt them down and kill them.

Valentine's Day... awwww!... saw a special romantic puzzle planet, which could only be solved by a couple. The planet Love had all kinds of romantic places to explore with your Mr/Ms Right, including a boat ride through the tunnel of love. First to solve the puzzle were What and Legolas, who won boxes of chocolates.

Speaking of Valentine's Day, and couples, and what couples like to get up tp: did you know that snogging involves around 40 different facial muscles and consumes three calories a minute? And that our mouths contain about 100 million bacteria, 5 million of which are exchanged in a snog - including those responsible for colds, flu, meningitis, hepatitis and glandular fever. It's so romantic to share!

TRIGGER ABUSE FOR FUN AND PROFIT

Following my recent article about annoying other players by triggering their triggers, I received an email from Thalya explaining how she'd exploited someone's triggers to gain promotion:

Not that there aren't a million more inventive tales of trigger abuse with all of these silly bots lying around, but I do have a fun one that happened quite recently if you wish to share it.

I, being Guild Mistress Thalya at the time, was pondering a way to get myself a poor person to haul the requirements for me. I noticed another GM on at the time and that he had an Adventurer hauling for him. I also noticed the Adventurer was on auto mode though, and blindly taking the jobs and delivering them. So, when the timing was right, I slipped my own in, and did so back and forth and so on... Before the Adventurer took the time to look back at the screen and notice I'd already had the majority of my hauling requirements finished. ;)

-Thalya

PS: Afterwards the adventurer had quite a good laugh at the whole thing, and didn't seem to really mind all that much as they made hauling profit from it all anyway (I pay my poor people well).

She doesn't say what the other GM thought about this! Certainly it was very enterprising of Thalya, but it's not something to be encouraged.

FROM THE POSTBAG: INTEREST RATES

We here at the Federation Chronicle pride ourselves on answering the questions that you, dear readers, send to us. Such as this one:

What is the current interest rate in Fed? Who sets it?

Well, this isn't a question people worry about through sleepless nights. The interest rate in Fed is of little relevance to most Fedders, since once past the first few ranks no-one ever has to borrow money. In fact, you will find there is only one occasion when you have to pay interest, and that's when you buy your first ship and become a Commander.

The good people at Jarrow Shipbuilders are always happy to arrange a loan so that GroundHogs can become upwardly mobile. They do this through a sister company, Jarrow Mercantile Bank, Inc. Obviously nobody reads smallprint, they just sign the credit agreement without worrying about what they are committing themselves to, but since Jarrow have a monopoly on the sale of ships to fledgling wannabe haulers, even if you did disagree with the terms you couldn't exactly take your custom elsewhere.

In fact, Jarrow are very careful not to mention interest rates when they arrange this loan for you. In order to figure it out you have to do some investigative work. Which is what we newsdroids excel at!

When you buy your first ship, you get something fairly primitive. Not the smallest possible ship; that's intended as a basic runabout with no cargo facilities. But the second smallest ship, with absolutely no trimmings. You get a cargo space of 75 tons which is considered optimum for the first-time hauler. The amount of the loan you are given by Jarrow is a round 200,000 groats.

What if you could buy the ship without a loan? Well, as a GroundHog you can't because you don't have any cash. But once you've made your mark in Fed DataSpace and piled up some groats, you could buy an identical ship for cash. Normally, nobody would do that because who wants a tiny little ship when you could move up to something bigger and faster? Well, we newsdroids would. It's all in the name of investigative journalism. And besides, we can charge the cost of the ship to expenses.

To buy an identical ship to the starter special flogged to newbods, would set you back 105,400 groats.

At first sight, that's quite a difference. The loan is almost double the actual cost of the ship. We're being scalped!

But hold on, there's more to this than meets the eye (or equivalent). Remember that the loan is designed to be a long-term one, paid back over time. You pay 10% of the cost of any job you complete towards the loan. The payment you get for completing jobs from the workboard varies, but let's say the average job pays 2,000 groats. Jarrow gets back 200 groats for each job. Ok, with the super-fast automation that some people use, they can run through enough jobs to repay the loan in just a couple of days, or even less, but that's certainly not guaranteed. In fact, Jarrow have no guarantee new Commanders will even do one job. Lending money to unknown GroundHogs, who have no credit history and no track record, is a risky business. It's not as if Jarrow can repossess the ship if you fail to pay up! And even if they could, the resale value on one of those starter specials is very poor: Woodspring Ship Auctions could only find a bidder willing to pay 52,700 groats when we sold off our test ship - roughly half the actual cost of purchase, and a quarter of the loan value. And that was a ship in good condition, barely used; imagine how much less it would fetch if you had not looked after it, had scratched the hull, even written it off completely by driving it into an asteroid! So they really are offering a pretty good deal.

Oh, and don't forget, Jarrow throw in your first insurance absolutely free. Maybe they aren't such heartless loan sharks after all!


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