LoAmi

Arcadia receives a repeating distress signal from an alien ship, and warps to its source. The source of the signal is found to be a system that recently underwent a supernova. The signal continues repeating, but the ship is nowhere to be found.

The away team identifies the badly mangled ship as the Daedalus class Icarus, which is quantum dated to be 800 years old. The search for the power source continues. Repairs continue on the ship, with the hole in the engineering area sealed up. Limited sensor access is made available through the subspace noise. Arcadia gets a first look at where it is on long range sensors.

Arcadia leaves the alien ship and heads to rendezvous with USS San Quentin, on new orders to give up Ens Swan to face charges for her earlier activities - even though the captain never filed charges. New crewmember Ens Brad Schmidt beams aboard. San Quentin leaves back for Federation space. Meanwhile, strange happenings in the science lab (creaking sounds, breaking objects, crackling forcefields) come to a head when a security team finds Ens Palto imploded.

Because a lot of our crew is away from the keyboard, we won't be running this week's Arcadia sim on 12/29. See you all next week!

One more bit: Coming in "knowing too much" often doesn't help because you want to see the solution in something someone else did on the TV show. Simming isn't a memory contest, and some of the most interesting simming comes when the story and solution are completely new.

48 hrs have passed. The children and teenagers on the planet use primitive communications technologies (radio, texting) to find the "Cat Lady", who they think is associated with what's been happening to all the adults. They also learn that pain turns off the effects of the zombie-infection. They lure the away team one-by-one (starting with Daena) into slapstick encounters, resulting in much hilarity and curing them of the affliction. The cured away team realizes that the captain and the vast majority of the crew are affected.

USS Arcadia will not be running its regular plot on Wed. Depending on turnout, we may do an off-plot sim.

The away team boards a train leading to the airport, touching and infecting whoever they can onboard. They notice that two children seem unaffected. At the airport, one gets off while the other is detained in an attempt to find out why they're unaffected. Great creepiness ensues. On Arcadia, a report comes in that the children in the school are uninterested in "playing tag."

You could also try Google Chrome. It's probably somewhat safer. (For the record, I'm still using Debian's version of FF 3.5, and it works.)

Hi, I haven't had any similar issues. It sounds like a browser problem. What browser, browser version, operating system are you using? Have you tried other browsers to see if you have the same issue? Does it happen when you press "Fast reply" or only when you type a new post or press "Add reply"? Until you figure it out, you can type your posts in a text editor and copy-paste it into the boards. Hope this helps.

Arcadia beams a small away team into a major rail station on the planet and begins infecting people, most of whom take no notice of the away team. One young person seems unaffected by the infection process and runs away.

Hi, Welcome to STSF. Try logging on to the message boards (like you are now) and pressing the "Live chat" button on the top bar on the page.

The captain, XO, bridge crew and others work to infect everyone on the ship. Those who realize something is going wrong and report it are quickly infected. Arcadia sets course for a nearby class M planet with approximately early 21 century tech level.

Apologies for missing last night's academy. I managed to get stuck working unexpectedly a bit too late to send out a message asking for help.

I don't think the history is as badly messed up as you think (although the lack of any institutional memory of anything the occurred in ENT is weird, it would have been hard to do anything in ENT without that happening). I don't remember (but might be wrong about) it being absolutely established that Q caused the Borg to come to Earth. The way I remember it was that Q flung Ent-D to the Delta quadrant in order to show Picard how dangerous space really is (and, in a nonsensical way, tell them to go home?). There, they encountered the Borg for (what they thought was) the first time. Later, the Borg attacked the Federation. We don't know when the original distress signal got to the Borg. In that sense (as pointed out in a later TNG episode), Q actually gave Picard an advantage in that they didn't first encounter the Borg during their invasion. As for Borg systems "materializing out of thin air" -- could this just be a replicator? In general, I remember finding Enterprise complete hit and miss (seasons 1 & 2), mostly miss (season 3) and pretty good (season 4). There were some good episodes, and some real duds ("A Night in sickbay" is the worst, I forget which season.)

My apologies for missing Monday's academy -- I'm away from home and my Internet connection went down and got back up about 1 1/2 hours too late.

USS Arcadia will be meeting on Wed night for an optional sim.

Yup. This looks like it might be a firewall blocking your connections.

I just went into the chat room, and it seems to be working. It works on Macs, as long as a Java runtime is installed. Try going to the boards (you're already here) and logging in with your username and password, then pressing the "Live Chat" button on the top of the page. If you get an error, copy the error in full and put the text of the error in this thread.

Wait... there's only one? (oh, and, Welcome, Uhura Jr)

Word of Ens Swan's newly acquired medical license arrives at Arcadia. Masks are distributed to the crew to try to avoid breathing the nanites, as more patients arrive in sickbay. Cpt Lo'Ami and Counselor Sema'J try to discover the psychological aspects of the common dream. It is discovered that the nanites multiply when in contact with water. Atmospheric humidity levels are reduced in the ship. Science and medical begin testing a theory that irradiating the nanites could destroy them -- if only they could find a way to also have the radiation not kill the crew. ChatLog.090422to090423.txt

"They" are probably computer programs that troll the web for forums, sign up for throwaway accounts and randomly post or PM. It doesn't surprise me that the same sets of spam names keep coming up in a number of forums. (Incidentally, known lists of spam names or spam URLs are the bases for some anti-spam blacklists. The disadvantage of such lists is that they are necessarily reactive, and there are so many spammers around putting out so much spam that their effectiveness is limited.)

Some sort -- potentially. But, likely not the familiar 20/21 century kind. I would also suspect that they're specialists' tools. I'm not sure that the economic argument would work, given that we don't fully understand the Federation economy. If you can obtain enough energy(!), you can produce anything (that's what replicators are all about). Phaser equipment is also probably far more common than projectile weapon equipment and has the economy of scale on its side. The projectile gun is also nowhere near as useful. A phaser can be used as a killing weapon, a dematerializer, a drill, a stun-gun, and to heat objects without otherwise destroying them; the phaser is also more accurate over a longer range. They probably didn't bring any weapons with them, and it's a lot easier to build an ad-hoc gun than a phaser. :-) The surprise about the use of them in the DS9 "Field of Fire" also gives us some idea of how uncommon projectile weapons are.

Agg, I ate half my post :-) Earth is not exactly a backwater, and presumably, when they need a weapon, they'd use a phaser. You don't see non-hobbyist or professional Earth people today using match-lock muskets, or for that matter, being intimately familiar with daily life in the 16th century. A lot of characters do have "hobbies" that hearken back to the 20th or 21st century. I'd rather ground my characters' frames of reference in their own time, but it's a personal decision.

Don't worry about it. For Arcadia, I usually use 5YYMM.DD, where YY=2 digit year, MM=2 digit month, DD=2 digit date of the simulation's time. I don't worry at all about the conversion to real time -- sometimes a stardate is 6 months passing, sometimes, it's a few hours. It's just a way of marking sim-time passing that's different from the Gregorian date. I don't like using Gregorian dates for a 24th century sim, because (1) I don't want to enforce passage of absolute time - characters age and get promoted at different rates, and there's a lot of parallel passage of different amounts of time going on in sims; and (2) [Earth-centric] Gregorian dates are rarely, if ever, used in the 24th century. I don't really care if a player uses a different format. If a player does choose to use Gregorian dates, I won't hold myself bound to them.