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

Dave Anderson

But the fuel rats don't retaliate. Oh, that sucks, not a real rescue, clear it off the active board and return to standby. They'll respond to the next call just as eagerly.

They also go way above and beyond. There are famous cases where they rescued explorers "outside the bubble", who were hundreds or thousands of light years away from inhabited space. Reaching them requires hours of real-time play, careful planning, and a very well outfitted ship.

Farce Majeure

@danderson does sound (from your description) that it relies on faster-than-light out-of-band communications.

Dave Anderson

When those calls came in, several people, who again I remind you get no rewards for this, signed up for an hours long trek out into deep space to rescue the stranded explorer. Due to the distance they usually dispatch more responders, just in case one of them miscalculates and ends up in distress themselves (e.g. warping to a star type that you can't refuel from, with not enough fuel to reach another star - that's how things go wrong for deep space explorers).

I dunno, I find that pretty neat.

Stu

@danderson that's a lovely story, thanks for sharing. I backed the Elite Kickstarter, because 8bit computing as a child, but I never did own a PC that could play it. Alas, the console port got nuked. Perhaps I'll get to it one day, bit it's nice to know this sort of collective exists.

Farce Majeure

@danderson (and in fact it sounds like it's faster-than-warp as well)

aburka 🫣

@danderson are many players full time rats? If so how do they support themselves and buy fuel to give out, is it like a collective? Or do they have wealthy patrons? Or are the rats more like independently wealthy players taking on-call shifts when they aren't out pillaging noobs or prospecting for space gold or whatever you do to make a living normally?

Dave Anderson

@aburka I believe many fuel rats do the thing as a primary reason to play the game, yes. Rats provide their own fuel, once you're past the very early stage of playing the cost of fuel is effectively zero so it's not much of a hardship, the trouble is just being in a location where you can buy/scoop the stuff.

So, more like experienced players (== fairly wealthy, owning fast ships that are ideal for ratting) donating their time and resources to give a leg up to others.

Dave Anderson

@aburka At least back in the day, very new players were common clients of the fuel rats, because if you're newer to the game your jump range and fuel capacity is lower, and you've not yet internalized the reflex to manage fuel properly. And so, new players run themselves out of fuel fairly frequently. I used to think of the fuel rat volunteers as people who experienced that back in the day, and are giving other players the leg up they got themselves from the fuel rats back in the day.

Dave Anderson

@vathpela Elite isn't really a hard sci-fi world (e.g. ships have "arcade" flight mechanics not true orbital mechanics), so I don't know that it comes up much. But yes, the world of Elite features FTL travel, and I think canonically also FTL communication. I mean empirically obviously since there's the fuel rats IRC and discord channel, but I think in-game there's also some amount of canon FTL comms.

Dave Anderson

Brought to you by the memory of learning about the fuel rats when I first started playing Elite:Dangerous, and then many game hours later having to call on their services when I learned that fuel scoops don't work on some kinds of stars, and was just dead in the water in an empty star system between two inhabited worlds.

And yeah, my experience was just like in the brochure. I honestly wonder if real life emergency responders pick up fuel rat dispatch shifts in their spare time, because wow.

Dave Anderson

The details are fuzzy, but I remember I was still a mid-level player with a ship whose main asset was affordability and opportunities to amass enough money to get the really nice ships.

I was rescued by an Anaconda, the third most expensive ship in the game according to the wiki. The insurance payment on it alone was more than my entire game net worth at the time. In naval terms, it's like a 300ft superyacht coming to the rescue of a rusty fishing trawler.

Dave Anderson

I remember it because seeing the Anaconda slowly pull up to a stop outside my windshield and fire fuel limpets (a) looked incredible in VR out the panoramic cockpit of my rubbish little freighter and (b) this was a player who clearly had the resources to do whatever they felt like in this game, nothing was off limits. And they chose to spend their evening hanging out at the IRC equivalent of the fire house with other like-minded people, running some gas cans to people in need.

That's just neat!

Khionu S :trans_furr_white:

@danderson (disclaimer, haven't read thread yet) I love the Fuel Rats, they saved me a couple times, and then gave me a lecture to make sure I didn't make that mistake again, lol

Jen :TransButterfly: :3hearts: :Green:

@danderson Can confirm. I had to call the Rats when I was halfway between the Bubble and Colonia, hundreds of light years from literally anything. It took me hours, maybe days to get that far.

A rat showed up in about half an hour, and didn't just throw me enough fuel to hop to a scoopable star, they topped off my tank, repaired the neutron-induced wear and tear to my friendship drive, and made sure I knew which star types are scoopable before throwing me an "o7" and heading out.

The Fuel Rats are, hands down, the best of humanity, and fear only the occasional cat-related learning experience.

Dave Anderson

@khionu I got the spiel when I got rescued as well I appreciated it at the time, even though it was all stuff I knew. Even following a script, the intent was clearly making sure you can get to safety and know how to stay safe, and it gave me warm fuzzies that people choose to do this for no reward, and spent time workshopping what might help and educate people

Dave Anderson

@SymTrkl hah, TIL the fuel rat procedures have changed since I last looked at them. I love the landing gear hack to disable risky close-quarters functions!

Also, of course, lol, due 2 cat. Love it.

Bret Mogilefsky

@danderson Note also the existence of the Hull Seals! One of my proudest parenting moments was watching my son, aged 10, take an interest and then a very serious role in the leadership of this spontaneous in-game mutual aid organization.
https://hullseals.space/about/

Morten Linderud

@danderson

One of the games I've played a couple hundred hours in is Foxhole. A MMO wargame with month long wars between two factions.

Regiments make up different functions of the game. Some do artillery, tank operations, boats, and so on.

However the regiment I played was FMAT which just does logistics to ensure the average player has access to everything in the game. Tanks? No problem. Wanna do artillery for fun? Sure.

Quite cool way to play the game.

Quite wholesome.

Miah Johnson

@danderson there is a similar group in EVE Online. Three is no fuel to worry about in EVE but if you go into a wormhole without a probe scanner and probes you probably won't find your way home. But the group EVE-Scout leaves emergency cargo containers with probes, and scanners so you can return.

EvE-Scout Rescue Cache :: EvE-Scout RescueEvE-Scout Rescue Cache :: EvE-Scout Rescue

(evescoutrescue.com)

Greg

@danderson cracking up at this story from the wiki, which states that one person spent literal months stuck in space until the devs released a ship that could reach him for rescue... and then the Fuel Rats declared the mission a "success", as long as you ignore that they left behind more people than they saved in the process lmao