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Although this is a semi-humorous page, it also holds some seriousness to it. The discussions we end up having about the same topic over and over again begins to wear thin after a while, so please also take to heart the reasons as to why we're not making a particular change.

This, along with other variations separating the general mischief or other cases from the view of the client is one of the more popular suggestions new rats make after a while. Although there is merit to the theory of lessening "noise level" for the client, there are a number of practical and sociological reasons we have not done this:

Such a system would require the client to understand more of the concept of IRC.

IRC is perfectly suited to what we are doing, but it is for many an archaic system, and the concept of channels and moving between them is not readily apparent to them. The system we have in place now places them in the rescue channel, and pretty much serves up all the information we need from them in one neat package. The only thing the client is left needing to understand is when they are being adressed by name. This is, for the most part, quite simple.

Moving clients and rats into separate channels costs time. Time is O2. O2 is life. 

Quite often, even if the client isn't on Emergency O2 when they reach us, they can be very close to it. The more time we spend doing anything but getting the client into low power mode, and sending rats on their way to meet the client, the higher the chance is that we get a Code Red case. And although we deal with those quite well, they are the shortest route to problematic rescues and client loss.

Even if we automate placing the client and dispatcher into new channels automatically on arrival (or when the rats have been assigned), it's a complication to an otherwise simple system that may (And probably will) prove more detrimental than it is effective.

Separating the clients and the rest of the mischief from the rescue workflow is dull!

Although #fuelrats on a busy night is a challenge to keep up with for dispatchers, and clients MAY at times find themselves in a room where 3+ other clients are being dispatched, the experience they take away from it is generally more 'Wow! These guys are such pros!' than it is 'Boy, this place is a mess'. #FuelRats is also our training ground for new rats, allowing them to see how we operate. Separating out the rescues into channels that contain only the dispatcher, the client, and the active rats leaves a complete disconnect between the mischief at large and what we are actually here to do. Ratting is very much a spectator sport, and removing that is likely to see us lose rats very quickly.

We can! But only as an exception, not as a rule. Ever so often we get a client that for some reason or another can't get on IRC, and we deal with them there. But Discord will not be our main rescue channel.

But why not? IRC is OLD and archaic!

So is the TCP/IP protocol, but I'd like to see you do without it. IRC may be old, but it is by no means ready to be put out to pasture. It is an actively supported platform, and backends more processes than you might think. (Did you know that Twitch chat is powered by an IRC server? I bet you didn't know.)

Discord is new and shiny, yes. But it is new and shiny in manners we don't need to do what we do. We do not need inline images or emoticons. We just need a stable, secure communications channel with our clients, with customization options. Discord is neither:

• Secure (Anyone can create a user and join our discord server, and we have no way to determine if someone is who they actually say they are)
• Customizable (There is no way for us to integrate the API and our bots in the manner IRC allows us to)
• Stable (Discord downtimes not only happen, they are in fact common.)

That sounds like conservatism!

Nope. It's just using a hammer to beat in a nail, rather than a fancy 600 dollar nailgun. And the nailgun might be prone to failures we can't control, and we can't mess around with its settings, and..

In short, Discord is great for a ready-to-run chat server for your friends and your guild. Much of what we've accomplished today is possible only because we have complete control of the servers and software that runs our systems. Discord does not offer that. We also have far better moderation tools and security features at hand to prevent griefing and spammers.

But using Discord would enable us to do rescues by voice!

Why on earth would we want to? Imagine a voice channel filled with rats and clients, and a dispatcher trying to make sense of that? That would be a horror show without equal. No, IRC provides us with a textual medium with asynchronous chat capabilities. We'll take looking back two lines in scrollback over "Could you repeat that?!" any day.

No. Even though it is possible to do this (With a LOT of finagling, including having to make Rats give us access to their API key, which we won't ask for), being in-game is not a determining factor for whether you want to go on a rescue or not. Nor would it be possible to implement on the XBox side.

The one way we have for semi-automated jump calls is RatTracker, which is currently in development (SLOW development at that). We will not:

• Make the dispatch board have fields where you can enter where you are and your jump range
• Let the bot track where you are through the API
• Otherwise automate who gets sent on rescues based on their position.

Being sent on a rescue requires you as a rat to positively confirm that you want to go by calling jumps.

So Canonn Research Group was awarded a megaship, The Gnosis, as a reward for a Community Goal. They will be using the ship as a mobile base for research and study, but there are limitations. The ship can only be moved once per week, can only jump 2,500Ly per week and has no shipyard so you can't leave ships there to travel if you wanted to.

Beyond those limitations what would we use it for? A mobile base for fueling operations more than likely. And where would we locate it? In one of our rescue hot spots like NLTT 48288, towards Quince, towards the Pleaides or near certain Community Goals.

As an example, particularly for the 1st three locations, without a megaship a CMDR runs out of fuel, contacts us, gets rescued, gets debriefed (and educated) and hopefully we never see them again in our channels looking to be rescued. Now put a giant base in their path, what happens? They get low on fuel, don't know any better, luck into finding the megaship and refueling, never learning about fuel scoops, KGBFOAM, route filtering or plotting. Then we move the station in the future to some other hot spot, and those CMDRs who are used to it being a certain location run out of fuel, and it's ironically our fault that they needed to call us. It's a PR nightmare waiting to happen, with little benefit that anyone has been able to provide other than "we deserve it for everything we've done", which isn't exactly a very Rat-like attitude to have anyway.

It's also believed that future megaships will not have ship docking capabilities, so their only use would be as advertising that we own a megaship and for use in manipulating the BGS.

Megaships can jump once per week to a maximum distance of roughly 450Ly. Therefore moving a megaship from one end to the other is in itself a 2-week process.

2 February 3304 Update - FDev has announced that they will release the Squadrons update in Q4 of this year, which will include Fleet Carriers. At this time it's unknown if/how a Fleet Carrier is different than a Megaship. We will continue to be involved in discussions with FDev and looking at potential uses as the update is developed.