Guest post by Liam from Endless Sea of Stars
Spacefaring is not for the faint of heart. There are so many ways to die out in the endless void, it’s mind-boggling. Your ship can fail you, or crash into something, or get a puncture you can’t repair. You can get attacked by pirates, or wander across a battle line, or encounter an alien species that’s hostile to humans. You can even miscalculate your destination and end up nowhere near where you meant to be, out of fuel and without power. Now, with the proper safeguards and precautions none of those things should happen to you.
For example, if you have all the latest charts and boundary data on your system, you should be warned and in some cases full-on locked out of any battle zones, and a warning would be triggered if a hostile ship approached you. It all comes down to proper systems design and maintenance, really, and it’s exceedingly simple if you take the time to get everything sorted before you head out into the abyss of space.
First, take stock of your operating language. That could be anything from TreeEnt to Mastiff or anything in between. My favourite is LineFree, myself, because it’s so flexible, and you can manually update every portion individually. [Note from Jeanie: I’ve cut out three paragraphs about each language for you. You’re welcome.]
Once you’ve established what you’re working with in terms of language, you should look up the most stable version from the systems database. They each have their own, so you’ll have to check it out based on your own system. Now, I didn’t say the most recent version, because there’s a convention where the most recent version is patched almost out of existence over time, just to make it stable enough to use. Remember, your life is going to depend on these systems, and patching remotely is very hard to do on some systems. And you don’t want to install the wrong patches. You kinda have to know what you’re doing before messing around in there.
Come to think of it, your best bet is probably just to bring your ship to me and let me take a look at it. I’ll get you sorted out.
