This morning for no obvious reason, I remembered the Fuel Rats | Hacker News Reader

This morning for no obvious reason, I remembered the Fuel Rats

hachyderm.io

176 pointspanic22 comments

Inactive Fuel Rat here.

What they are saying is dead on. We will do what we can to rescue you, and the skill of some of the Rat's pilots is second to none. (I won't claim that of myself. But one of The Rats usually holds the Bubble -> Colonia speed record.)

The number of stories you end up with ratting is amazing... it is a wonderful thing to do. Especially when you have it all in Elite. Why not help others. Rescue can pretty challenging. And losing a rescue... really sucks :( (Code Reds - They are out of fuel, and on O2.)

"We've got fuel, you don't. Any questions?" - The Fuel Rats.

Shameless plug for my Python app that automates pasting routes with neutron stars, that boost your jump range, from https://spansh.co.uk/ into the game, which is used for some of those records to my knowledge. It was one of my first "real" project and it shows, at least I now know that Qt is pretty great in Python for cobbling something together.

https://github.com/Numerlor/Auto_Neutron

Already using it fine sir, and yeah... it is used for record setting ;)

I know I set one with it... I'm pretty sure Rav uses it. Many Rats do.

Years ago I ended up in a system with a star I couldn't refuel from and was S.O.L. I had vaguely heard of the Fuel Rats[0] and did a google to see if they were real and contactable. I put in a call to them and about an hour later a kindly pilot turned up, refuelled me and off I went with a warm fuzzy feeling. I was very grateful. It reminded me of happy times being in a corp in Eve with your comrades helping each other out.

Being reminded of this might make me give Elite another go.

[0]: https://fuelrats.com/

Thanks for posting a link to the site; their Grafana dashboard was cool to see.

I wish I had known about this when I gave up on the game. After a really frustrating time trying to figure out how to progress in the game, I was given bad advice to buy some contraband alcohol in one system with the last of my money and try to sell it in another. It was advertised as a sure thing. It was not, as the contraband was confiscated (I should have seen this coming). I couldn’t find anything to do or any way to make money, so I tried to make it to the next closest station. Ran out of fuel in the middle of literally nowhere, shut down the game and uninstalled.

Great lesson for life if anyone ever gives you "sure thing" financial advice :)

Reminds me of EVE, which similarly had a libertarian dystopia design but evolved into something a bit more civilised through the efforts of players. One of the most well-known and successful diplomats was an actual US state department guy (who was sadly killed on his day job doing diplomacy in warzones).

Specifically, he was killed in the Benghazi debacle.

Eve similarly has Signal Cartel (and possibly some other corps too), who offer free assistance to pilots trapped in wormhole space without a way to scan down an exit hole.

I’m not really into politics, but I always thought one of the main arguments of libertarians was that you don’t need government mandated social programs because people would help each other out on their own. So maybe it still is a libertarian design?

The ingame groups ended up creating structures that look quite like governments. It felt almost like a recapitulation of real frontier history. Which is something that always felt self-defeating about libertarian ideology to me - like, we know what happens when there are no rules and governments, people make them, and without a government you can't stop that.

I’m not sure these structures are exactly like governments, in the libertarian sense. Do they demand taxes from people in their area? Do they set arbitrary laws?

yes

It's a self defeating aspect of the specific rightist-style framing of libertarianism that many people end up buying into, including the drafters of the Bill of Rights. IMO this was Gödel's loophole he referenced but never elaborated upon, as it's right in line with his work in logical contradictions.

Defining freedoms as a bunch of basic primitives that merely "the government" is prevented from infringing, and narrowly defining coercion as something that only the government is capable of (legally) doing is a broken framing. Layered complexity will make it so that other entities apart from the bona fide "government" are able to exercise significant actual coercion, and then infringe upon individual freedoms. And then using the broken definitions you will be told you are not actually being coerced, but rather choosing to "voluntarily" interact, and so your rights aren't actually be infringed.

The only way libertarianism makes sense is to define rights in terms of ability to exercise individual freedoms with respect to coercion by anyone else. This looks messier, but only because it puts the inevitable conflict front and center to be immediately resolved by equitable judgement about the amounts of coercion. The broken framework just pushes this logical conflict into the background, leaving it to continue growing as societal complexity does.

In that respect, sure; however, there's also a lot of lawlessness without repercussions there, like year(s)-long long-cons where people climb up the corporate ladder to eventually empty out said corporate's wallets and assets.

Sure, the player character involved will be marked for life, but they can just move the assets to a new character and nobody will be the wiser.

That said, the game was (or seemed to be designed) that the bigger alliances should be fighting for terrain all the time, but as it turns out they recognize it's mutually beneficial to not wage war. I remember reading about when they introduced titans, and that they were stupid expensive and involved to make (took like a month or so? plus all the raw materials). But the alliances scaled up, stocked up, and now there's hundreds if not thousands of the things and they rarely, if at all get used and lost in combat. So there's no "sink" of those things. I haven't heard of any major conflict involving titans since B-R5RB [0], but looking at that article there was another one in 2020 apparently that was a bit more costly ($378K in real money).

The problem that Eve has is also its unique selling point, it's all one big universe, so there can be battles involving over 6000 people in one system. But the game's internal clock slows way down, meaning that inside one system time moves at 1/10th of what is out there, also meaning that it feels like reinforcements can arrive within seconds or minutes instead of how long it should usually take. And they still do a once per day server shutdown for maintenance, but idk if these battles continue after that, or if they suspend shutdown during these big fights nowadays.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_B-R5RB

His name was Vile Rat. That was a weird, sad time.

This is actually a lovely story. And not surprising.

People are naturally cooperative. Yes there are crap people in the world, but mostly not. Left to their own devices, people are kind.

Sadly, institutions such as government, religion, etc also exist, that seek to exercise control over individuals. "For good people to do evil things, that takes religion" or other overt control systems. Nice to see an example of the opposite.

It's really interesting to see your comment in the context of another thread in this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42113511

I remember those guys. Guys in my old squadron told stories about them like it was in-game lore.

Elite Dangerous always had an amazing community. Flying spaceships is amazing but you can actually become part of something big in this game. Flying with a squadron is the most fun I've had in years.

I stopped playing after they dropped console support. I honestly thought the game was going to shut down within a year or so after that. I just looked it up now and it looks like development picked up again. Maybe I should start playing again...

I had never heard of them. What a great re-telling.

This is so wholesome. Really a testament to people’s ability to self-organize.

I do wish they accepted (in-game) tips/donations though.

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