The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I dreamed up the plot for Star Control 5 "The Pkunk Masters".

It seems that since the end of SC2 the Pkunk have been busy taking over the galaxy.  First it was the poor Yehat, enslaved under the iron panty-hose of their pseudo-mystical matriarchy.  Since then the VUX, Androsynth, Shofixti, Human, and Druudge have fallen under their sway.  Now its up to you, a lone wacky rhyming Thraddash, to save the galaxy from this (admittedly) wacky but (infuriatingly) non-rhyming death machine.

What, you say?  The Pkunk ships aren't good enough to make good bosses?   Just change the reincarnation probability to 99.9% and the world will ~tremble~ before them.

The Pkunks are just too busy to be hugging, snuggling and being happy all the time and they dislike violence etc. so I find this idea extremely unfitting for the Pkunk.

If there would be a "The <race> Masters", it would be humans or Chmmr.

StarCon 5: The Spathi Masters

Yeah...right.

I see the Druuge as a possible slaver race...They just need to deal with that recoil problem their ships are experiencing and maybe add some dynamo's so that you don't have to keep throwing crew in the oven.

Scanning for 'Sense of Humor'... .... No sign, captain.

<chuckle>

And they say I'M evil  :P

You are, for referring to me as "they".   ;)

But really Fsi-Dib, how could you not read this post as anything other than a blatant joke?

Hey David Morse, as long as we'd be playing a Thraddash, do you think we could also introduce ourselves to others as the "Fat Obstreperous Jerks"?  (in rhyme of course)  Perhaps we buddy up with the last remaining Dill-rat.  Those two together in one ship ... referring to them as jerks would not be a problem for other races.  Of course the Dill-rat would always introduce himself as "I am the last of the Dill-rats ... dwe the warshippers of Dogar and Kazan ..."

And if they combined their tech to make one ship, you'd have a cloakable ship with fire coming out of both ends.

Their call to battle would be "Burn birdies burn!"

Now that's offensive.   :P

-PsiPhi

Ha! The Pkunk being the conquors of the galaxy! That's funny! A rhyming thradash has to expose them. Funny! It could have taken a serious turn, but it's still funny!
How about the galaxy trying to tell him (our rapmaster thradash) he's paranoid, no one believing it. Then his suspicions get totally confermed. Somewhere there's these bad-assed pkunk running the whole show, even leading the other huggy fuzzy pkunk to ruin. Our our brave thradash piloting his highly modified "blue dart" joins with the black stripe spathi squadrin. They've long known about the evil pkunk. They equip MC Thradash with a weapon to pinpoint the problem and in a suicidal effort saves the galaxy, making some rhyming comment on the way out as he lights up a stogie. The universe is safe and they knew they were in danger.
See, humans or Chmmr taking over is to serious. Let some other series have the serious humans. Let's have a laugh, yawl!

If it has a "Parappa the Rapper" interface, I'm there.  :)

"Kick, punch, it's all in the mind..."

Like the Pkunk, I'm resurecting this thread, just to see what anyone happens. Flame me if you want, but I've been thinking the "Pkunk Masters" idea was a pretty good one that's been long forgotten. (Sure, lots of other threads have been long forgetten, but I haven't been thinking about those ones lately.)
Does anyone remember this thread? If you've never seen it, here it is again. Enjoy.

How about Elite/Privateer style Star Control and name "The Melnorme Traders" :D

And seeing as the Melnorme trade in iformation, we'd learn a whole lot about the SC universe as well, tons of cool info!

an utwig say's"whats that ultron tell captain zelnick to hellborne pkunk and who ever turns evil ok"

Idea!! The Pkunk told you that the Ilwrath became totally evil after becoming just a little bit more perfect.... RIGHT!!??
Let this happen to the pkunk. Would solve their hippy posture...

Update: [looks up topic] And the melnorme (ex- mael-num) want to help the pkunk, because it involves killin Ur-quan [/looks up topic]

I have to learn to keep track of topics...

After an absence of 3 months from the list, imagine my suprise on coming back and seeing my thread still in the top 10...

The Pkunk crashed my game tonight, clear sign that they are EVIL

Well, you can thank me for that one. This thread was dead for a long time. I had to set the search paramaters of the way back machine to find this one. However, I found it.



And it's funny to see what the new blood has done with it.

I'm thinking of resurecting other old threads to see what will happen, but I'm going to let this one cool off a bit first.

we need a starcon 3 first :)

I'm going to re-post this idea just so it's in the right place and flesh it out a bit.

What about you finding out the Orz are truely evil (consistant with what Fred Ford has said they'd planned), you get/build a anti-quasispace portal, go *below* and begin fighting the Orz, only to discover the Ur-Quan are already there and have been fighting the Orz for a long time, already. Humans temporaraly become a battle thrall to help the Ur-Quan, but at then end of the battle they have somehow put a figurative bit in the mouth of the fleet and you're stuck a perminant battle thrall.

Ha, ha. Jokes on humanity.

Finding the Ur-Quan in Orz space already is certainly an interesting idea. Perhaps make it hard, if not impossible to communicate between the two plains of existence, so that the Quan in *below* no nothing of their defeat up above, and so that you cannot have much/any contact with home. That'd put you in a new and weird enviroment, once again on your own without a goverment to answer to.

That said, I'm not sure we should venture into Orz space at all. What if sopmeone who enters it can never come back, because they now *smell*? Also, we'd need to think of soem way to implement *below* so that it's different, weird, spooky, and suchlike.

Have several starmaps. on a period of about a month, one map fades in and the previous one fades out. During the transition, it is harder to enter a system. If you're in a system when it fades out... heh heh... don't be in a system when it fades out.

I like that idea... Would these Starmaps be 2D, or should they be 3D? That'd make it even more confusing and, but palyability might suffer...

I don't think we should do anything that would make gameplay suffer. FF & PR3 never did. They made the starmap 2-d, dispite the fact that SC1 had a 3-d planetary system map for it's full game. (Note that SC1's full game was played in planetary systems, not on a starmap.)
They also dumped having you attack starbases directly. They were going to do it, but they tried it out and the gameplay sucked. So they cut it out.
Cloaking device? Some say that it was a corner cut, but Fred had said that it was actually cut because it didn't add anything to the game.
If you feel gameplay would suffer with a 3-d map, dispite the fact that I love the 3-d map in SC1 more than anyone,  I say it would have to be done 2-d.
My two hundreths of a dollar.

Yeah, but the thing is, I'm not sure. I always felt that the starmap in SC1 was good, but it could get bloody annoying, if one got lost somewhere, and found out the one had to retrace ones path three or for systems before taking a turn to a different direction.

The SC3 starmap IMO was even worse, simply because of it's size. But maybe there is osme way to make it clearer, and easier to use? Either that, or use several "layers" of 2D maps, with soem sort of conduit wormholes between them :)

Well, one way to make the map easier would be to have better filtering or zooming -- include only stars within a certain radius, then zoom in. Be able to measure distances between stars with a drag of the mouse.
Make it a continuous rather than a jump-based system, which made travel instantaneous and trivial.
Give the starfield structure. Stars are NOT evenly distributed in space; rather, there are clusters and clumps. If you can look at the map and see a bunch of stars near each other, then that will become a visual clue.
To aid in this, you might want to have an iconic representation of each cluster for when zoomed out or looking from far away -- perhaps a constellation image, oriented properly, or just an unoriented icon (relying on the relative positions of nearby clusters for orientation).

Also, have more than one way of viewing space! Not just a map, but also a closer view, perhaps 1st person. This view should not have an unlimited sight range (due to the *nggn*/ floating flashing thingies? White/yellow/red coruscating background, and ships and systems show up as black spheres or nearly-spheres) SC2 had a good diversity of views (though the close-view in hyperspace was AWFULLY close), and we can simply use the same basic visual idea, just with the ship able to move in all three dimensions.

ALSO, we could start with the existing hyperspace map, and perturb each of the stars a little in the third dimension, so that we are looking at the disc of the galaxy. Of course, it's supposed to be something like 1000 light years thick, which is pretty substantial. But that can be ignored. After all, the stars seen there are NOT every star in the galaxy, and so the SC2 map could be a thin slice of the galaxy...
Lukipela's idea is a good one, but getting from one to the next should be difficult, or perhaps possible only near the core. Perhaps the Precursors are on one of the next hyperspace planes up, having gone corewards and back out again (though WHY is still a mystery to me).

Lastly, I would suggest unhingeing the hyperspace speed of a ship from its combat speed. The VUX are hyperspace experts enough that they have their special warp-in; I doubt they would be as unmaneuverable there as they are in real-space.

I always thought the seuel game was supposed  to happen *before* the war so here's my take (along these lines):
First part of the quest:
You play a rogue human working on a trader ship (originating from earth).
For years you have been making deals with various races, including Androsynths.
The game starts as the alliance loses the last battles (you get chances to meet the last shofixty, captain burton and other various characters...), the androsynths have contaced you for this special mission.
You are to deliver to them a special precursor artifact, one that has a direct connection with IDF.
The artifact is supposed to be near the vega system.
Avoiding the advancing fleets of Ur-Quans and various suspicious fleets of Humans, Yehat and Shofixties you finally supply the demand only to disappear with the 'synths before paymant is collected.
Part II: now as the son of that rogue, you have served with Zelnick on his Precursor ship.
When earth is freed, you are given a new cruiser and sent to check some anomalous readings near the Orz's system when all of a sudden your dad's desterted ship appears out of nowhere.
Searching the still intact but vacant ship you find out what happened and decide to change mission. As this is an act of disobedience to the new alliance you decide to use the recovered ship with a few loyal followers and fill out the missing pieces.
Therefore you will have no support from any organization, and the enemity of the Orz.
The Ur-Quan in the anti-Q-space plot would fit here rather nicely too.

Excellent take on the maps D_999. I would rather have them in 3D as well, and your ideas would make for a userfriendly map, which still is "weird" enough to incorporate *below* I especially like the idea og Nggn blocking your view, meaning you can have very few visuals, and essentially navigate "blind".

I'd prefer a plotline where one is sent out as a representative of the Alliance, but being a rogue has a few advantages as well... It'd mean you don't have to worry bout ethical repercussions (like the infamous and not to be named sequel). However, it does kinda shoto down the ending of SC2, since the Captain is supposed to be at least partially involved in all this. And he's a figure we all know and love, because, well, he is us. Interacting with the Captain playing as someone else, that'd be weird.

Gill, androsynth would not trade with humans. Period. Anyway, we hadn't made alien contact until the Chenjesu came along, right?

Luki, that propostion was for normal hyperspace AND *below*.... though perhaps we could make *below* 2-dimensional, and that would be freaky after being in a 3-d hyperspace for so long. ;)

the idea was to meet some of the characters of the SC2 game or those mentioned in it as another person and see them in a different perspective.
Like, meeting Zelnick as a person on his command deck, what if he's a pompous yet kind person like Picard or is he more of a jester like Dylan Hunt (from Andromeda).
This, although removing the "continuity" factor, adds another depth to the game and the characters and makes the previous game even more fun (when watching a remembered scene from a different angle).
For example, the hero could be the one crewman surviving the encounter with fwiffo on pluto. And thus we could renact the entire scene.

oh, and androsynths would trade with anyone if that one had what the 'synths wanted, they would seek to doublecross him if he were human, but would not turn a good deal away for racial hate.
And the events happened at the previous war, so everyone knew about the races from SC1.

Before the war, our only alien contact was the Androsynth, and they were OUT of there, completely gone. We didn't hear from them again until the hierarchy threw them at us.
During the war, we would probably not be trading with the battle thralls.
After the war, we were slave-shielded.
By the time we were released, the Androsynth were supplanted by Orz.

Ok, you didn't get me right.
The renegade part means you have no connection with the earth government, no affiliation no endorsements, no love.
This means you're allowed (or not allowed but are doing it) to travel freely amongst the stars and races and give humanity a bad reputation (this means the lead character not you as a person).
During the war, you couldn't account for every single human around and not all humans would fly a cruiser, only those working in the service of earth govt.
Therefore you *could* find humans traveling around in different ships, although the Quans did put a stop to that after the final defeat.
Before the defeat, the situation was dangerous, but you *could* manage to get around if you were fast and devious enough.

I'll go with Deat_999 on this one. Before the war, there was no contact with any other alien races. During the war, humanitys only interaction with the alliance was through the supplementing of combat forces. Maybe we had trading ships as well, who knows? But I doubt there were very many in operation, seeing as the main effort of humanity was to fight the Quan. Also, there aren't that many places humans could go if they abandoned ship on an alien planet. First off, any alien meeting them would immideatly be curious to what they were doing there, and not in their ships. Second, the other alliance mebers probably require very different enviroments to survive

The Chenjesu are rocks that feed off sunlight, the Mrnhrrm are robots, the Syreen would mix your mind up good. It'd probably be impossible to mingle naturally with any of those races. Maybe the Shofixti and Yerhat have the same requiremnts as us, but everything on a Shofixit world would be quite small, and the Yehat are a clan society, where anyone out of place is noticed staright away.

So even if we assume someone manages to build a private ship during a time of crisis, when Earth shipyards will probably be geared to spew out as many cruisers as possible, they still couldn't blend in anywhere....

oh, shoots! I was rather fond of the old "rengade with no obligations" game idea... well... another one bites the dust then... back to the drawing board.

But you wouldn't see Nggn in normal space, would you ;) Here's another idea to feed on. To make *Below* even freakier, should there be some sort of "storms" or "curents"? If you cross one of these you get swept away with it, twisted around a bit, thrown off course. This might work better with a 2D map where it would be easier to see, but it mght be cool in 3D as well. Read this idea way back on TW boards, sounded interesting to me.

by "normal hyperspace" I mean, like, the red backgrounded hyperspace -- not normal normal space.



I like that -- Alternately, we could have the full map of *below* be a complicated three dimensional figure, on which you traverse the surface. Kind of like walking on the walls in Descent. We'd keep our two dimensional perspective on the local screeen, but on the map it would look weird, like a tree, or something.
I am concerned that basing a game on non-euclidean geometries would, ah, cause some problems. But maybe not. After all, Asteroids and battles in SC are on effectively on the surface of a torus - a geometry which is non-Euclidean. It's not like this *below* system would be travelling in the three dimensional surface of a FOUR dimensional object -- and of course there's always the autopilot to get you going in the right direction ;)