Gameplay/Archive/Brainstorming the Order

Historical design source — not current gameplay instructions. Jason Reskin supplied brainstorming the Order.doc on 24 October 2026 as an additional source for Gameplay. It proposes an arrival and service sequence from a transfer terminal through training, banking, vehicle purchase, and outfitting. The discussion is reconciled in Gameplay's guidance section.

The source is a Word binary document. Its unchanged local copy and extracted text are retained. The source file's last-modified timestamp is 28 December 2004; this does not establish authorship or the date every passage was written. All 12,240 characters of the main document text were extracted using its text-piece table. Paragraph line endings are normalized for the text below; Word formatting is not reproduced. Wording, spelling, and illustrative rules are retained. The text begins with "appear on the planet" and ends after the proposed parts/mods shop; no introduction or continuation has been invented.

The terminal start, neural training, character-based vehicle handling, player dealerships, gravity shuttles, insurance example, and universal rental-return proposal are historical ideas. Consult Gameplay, Demo Limits, Flight Simulators, and Rusty's Rentals for the reconciliation and documented constraints.

Original file SHA-256: B101057CCA401C34770F03F1DFDEA60E22D79717A681347410DB3008E61D5BA3.

Extracted source text

appear on the planet in the terminal of a transfer station, freshly released from a stasis tube aboard a “pod” the atmosphere here is hectic feeling, the sound a busy airport terminal, people standing around  looking at departure and arrival times, it is as if you were arriving in Tokyo after a 13 hour flight, and things  are a bit hectic.  From within the terminal there are 5 separate rooms and an exit
Lounge area: here you are able to meet people, talk to them using text or voice over, contact people at a communications station(like a phone) at their ship or whatnot.  It is also where you are able to relax, increase your personal MENTAL HEALTH stats, or watch the latest headlines come in from around the moon and elsewhere’s.
Cafeteria:  Here you can eat after you’ve landed, or before you lift off, which increases your PHYSICAL HEALTH.  Also, meet with people as in the lounge.  No communication stations.
Ticket Counter: Located in the center of the facility, here you book passage on flights, rent a vehicle whether it be ground or air and are able to look up flight departures and arrivals on the overhead displays and desk mounted monitors.
Departure/Arrival area:  Where you wait for boarding, decide whether to board or not, look out the windows at the flights coming in and so forth.  Meet with people here as well.  Also, if you are a first time player, you will be asked to go through a briefing, here you will be given as part of your colonizer’s kit, a PDA with updatable objectives.  This will allow the user to kind of keep track of what they should do next, if they wish.  To begin with it will say something like, Proceed to Hyper-learning Center for Skills training.
Entry Foyer:  Here there are information displays, maps for purchase, ads, classifieds, Com Stations.  As Personal Communication Devices have a range limited to the tech-environment level it is immersed in, Com Stations provides a much longer range, allowing the user to contact persons aboard their spacecraft, within a certain range of the moon.  Also here you can buy foodstuffs, and digital papers, which can be part of your inventory and are automatically updated when you come within a certain range of a Universal Communications Module.

After renting a car, they are transported to the car itself, with the toggle option of the camera being 3rd person behind the car, or mounted directly on the windshield, looking forward with a wide angle lens.  The PDA has given them direction and to find their way a HUD is overlaid on the screen on top of everything else, to simulate the idea that while you are driving you are glancing at the map.  The HUD will show the faint outline map of the city building footprints and the location where they should go.  The map should be zoomable on the target selected whether it be destination located on the map, or the person themselves.  As they pass by buildings that we have registered as actual functioning buildings with names it should display it on the screen somewhere, perhaps over the building as you drive by as part of the HUD.  However, it will not permanently mark the building on your map as a waypointed building unless you park in the building officially.  This way they might have seen a cool building but unless they waypoint it manually into their PDA, it will remain a vague thing until they have to visit it for some reason.  The PDA should also allow them to ask a few simple question like, How do I?--- get a loan, drive a car, etc.  whatever we wish.
The car leaves its garage, and pulls out.  It needs a brake, accelerator, and easy steering mechanism. I don’t suggest using the keypad, but instead use the mouse for steering so you can adjust the severity of the turns.  The left mouse button can be for accelerating and the right for braking.  Which can become a reverse if you hold it down long enough for it to stop the car and then back up.     There should be two different overlays that can go on at any one time no matter what vehicle you are in, the vehicle’s overlay, which simulates your knowledge of the vehicle’s most simple displays, and your personal overlay which shows personal stats, inventory, etc.  A vehicle’s overlay is only simple display of absolutely the most pertinent information and should not necessarily be a true HUD as if it’s being beamed into your eyeballs, but instead simulates the person’s AWARENESS of information.  We should do this because obviously our SIM isn’t going to be as detailed as a person actually sitting in a cockpit or car.  So they should be able to get out of drive/fly mode or whatever and switch to a personal mode to allow them to click on screens and things to show the screen close up like we talked about, but then when they aren’t zoomed up, they have a sort of ghosted image of the main info on their monitors to show their awareness of the main facts.  It becomes their subconscious in a way.  But that way they can function without having to glance down all the time, but it will be advantageous if they do because they will be able to get all the information and do detailed info gather, like scanning, targeting, etc.
The car is moving through the streets, the person is following a map which is either fixed on a waypoint, or if set on the car itself, will rotate about the axis of the car which always points up, with the map moving around it.  There should be a speed limit display, since we don’t have signs, and if they break it, should alert the driver. The driver goes to the training facility first.  The actual waypoint where they must go is a HUD target that is setting right where they need to drive to, which will be a parking area or garage door.  It shows the building’s title and when the car is stopped appropriately, should ask if they wish to enter.  If yes, then it goes to the menu for the facility.  It’s like the options screens.  That’s another thing for both Christina and Wade, they love the options.  I think that Wade could probably just play with the options screen on some games and be happy.  Here they are able to perform basic training and skill acquisition.  The more advanced the class type, the more expensive it will be.  For instance, a skill in medicine might be more expensive than the skill of banking, so classes would cost more.  However, it is immediately gained because of advanced Neural technologies.  The menu screen, here and for all buildings, should have an explanation about the facility and what it does and what you can do there.  Also every category will need an explanation as to what it is, how much it costs, and what the requirements are.  For instance, if you want to be a great weapons repair person, you will need to take basic craft engineering first so you can do basic repairs on your ship. Then if you want to advance someday after performing successful basic repairs, you can come back to shift up a level or whatever. However, you can move up a level through paying an extraordinary fee to interject false experience memories into your mind which are required in order to even be trained, then you still have to pay the training fee to learn new skills.  By performing a certain number of successful repairs, you automatic earn enough experience points to naturally be ready to learn new feats.  Okay- so here you are able to learn and get ready for the basics.  Later on, if they want to learn advanced things like Propulsion Design and Augmentation, then they have go to the Higher-learning district to find the school there. It will force them to explore the city and so forth. And then we can also interject the blackmarket versions of the learning process which will give them abilities not able to be found in the standard schools.
Once they have a standard set of skills, they go to the bank to create an account, they go there, similar to the school, pull up, menu, make an account.
Now, they must get an exploratory vehicle.  They are told through the PDA about 3 places they can go to, or however many there are, a Unistellar dealership, and a couple of private ones. There can be ones which are owned by users where they can buy an inventory wholesale from U.I. or someplace, and then sell them on their lot which is out of town somewhere.  There should be a couple of standard transport units which are always listed with the company’s price so that comparisons can be made, somehow they should be able to enter the Lot’s location to see how faw away they are, and if they are a user based business, there should be a contact number where they can contact them to ask questions like why travel outside the city just so I can take 10% off the blue book price, or something like that. If they do decide to leave town to purchase a vehicle they could try driving there, but they may run out of gas, (so the car should have an available miles to drive indicator based on the gas amount like a lot of modern cars have)  They should therefore also be suggested to travel to a transport station where they can book a flight, whether by user or not.  Actually the user, if owning a vehicle selling Lot, could provide FREE transport between their lot and the transport station VIA a semi-AI craft which goes between here and there, not an normal aircraft, but a gravity craft so that it doesn’t have to worry about airfoils or aerodynamics, or anything, because being a semi AI craft it could probably just lift off the ground a set height take off in the direction, maintaining altitude using gravity to ignore the usual problems and then set down easy at the LOT.  Of course, if they use a U.I. Lot in the city they can just drive there. 
U.I. Lot:  They’ve driven to the Lot, parked their car in a parking module. We can say there is no parking on the streets in case of sandstorms (  Now, there CAN be spacecraft for sale here, but is strongly suggested that you get a certificate to fly one, otherwise you might spend a lot of money only to have your ship needing repairs after it crashes.  At the U.I. Lot there should always be a gravity driven vehicle, an airplane, a VTOL airplane, and a couple of cars.  There should be a cool menu screen which shows the vehicle in a 3d display which can be rotated about by the user, show its stats, pricing, previous owners, mileage, special features/add ons/ customizations, etc.  When paying for the vehicle, it can be paid either out of pocket or from the account.  Out of pocket is risky because if you crash with the money, it’s gone, however, it is untraceable, so if you want to have a vehicle to perform less than legal acts, you could do so.  (also I think we should have you able to buy insurance if you want to.  It would make it nice if you crashed and totaled your ship and only have to pay 200 credits a month or something like that)
Once you purchase a craft you are told that you can have it outfitted, and given the locations.  Okay- so now you have a craft.  No matter what you have, you need to get a kit that will allow you to do what you need to do. So we go to a Kit supply store, a Moduleshop. Oh yes, their car.  If they’ve flown to a user’s shop they’ve flown out of a transport hub in which case they’ve returned the rental vehicle to an official facility.  It doesn’t have to be the same one, just a registered U.I. or gov. facility. If they come to own a vehicle at some point they will need a place to keep it.  If they’ve brought it in an E-10 then they keep it inside, or if not, they can have it parked in a garage somewhere for a fee.  Or they can bring it back home with them, and put it on their property whether it’s in a garage of theirs or not for FREE. 
It might take them awhile to get to the shop depending on their adeptness with the vehicle.  If they have spend money on vehicle training at the school, they will handle the vehicle better, and will continue to handle it better and better the more they use it, up to the vehicle’s own innate handle maximum. A flying vehicle’s shop will be on the outskirts of town for safety most likely, Or in the case of an advanced parts/mods store, it might be in the industrial district, which the user really wont’ know about until they are more advanced in which case they’ll be more safe to fly anyway.