Surly's Vision

05 Jun 3301CMDR Surly Badger

I'm a grumpy old fart; not the leader type. I chose the title "Rats" because my mental image is something like a bunch of scruffy squabbling warf-critters who mightswarm out to board a weakened ship - mostly to help but also perhaps to relieve them of excess weight in the form of valuables. "Vent that palladium and you'll beable to jump farther (nudge) (nudge)" I wouldn't want to be at the top of a hierarchy like that because your tail gets chewed a lot.

But: thank you for the idea.

This thing is going to evolve (I hope) and I'm concerned that it may become unwieldy (if it does, it'll evolve more) My original vision was that someone wouldfriend all the rats and we'd go find them. But that's a lot of friend requests (Thanks CMDRs for your amazing ratlike squeals of support. I salute in your generaldirection. You bring a tear to my beady little remaining eye!)

I think a couple things:

  1. This is just going to become a long thread for now. If someone need fuel and posts here, we can swarm to help, or fold our arms and watch them die. Either way,it'll be entertaining. So I suppose we just keep an eye on the thread and if there's a call for help, we'll evolve our response.
  2. As future game-play evolves we will evolve with it. Someone needs to experiment with refuelling in 1.3 and make some official recommendations for a procedure,whether there are any "gotchas" or things we should watch for. I don't want to go 10 kylie just to blow up the person I am rescuing and I certainly don't want toend up needing rescuing myself.
  3. I don't want to do a set fee for rescue; I'm going to rescue people for the pleasure of rooting through their underwear drawer in their cabin when they're notlooking. My opinion is that having no set fee allows for some fun role-play. Will you get cheap assistance, fast assistance, or good assistance? You won't get allthree.
  4. We will need to evolve (via discussion in this thread) our methods and recommendations for both the rescuee ("stay with your ship. pray." I love the sign!) andFuel Rats: how much to bring, whether to show up armed or not, etc. That will evolve as well; like proper rats we will remain nimble, selfish, and bitey.
  5. I am concerned that someone might conceive the idea of wasting a rat's time by summoning help to where they aren't. That's why I cooked up the 'friend' idea.I would enjoy it highly if someone summons me to help and tries to dry gulch me. If you think rats bite, try a badger. I intend to show up in at least an A-ratedClipper with fuel and plenty of missiles and beams. If it means I make a few extra jumps getting there, so be it.

I go through bursts of RL busy and often check the forums via airport internet and smartphone; if I miss something, it's no surprise and if you think I missedsomething I shouldn't feel free to PM me or throw a wet, chewed-up cigar at my head.

06 Jun 3301CMDR Surly Badger

(Some respectful disagreement here; I think you're asking the right questions, I'm not sure my answers are the ones you're looking for. I am not an authority,though...)

I came up with the name "Fuel Rats" in part because of a cartoon I saw long ago, of a "desert rat" - a rat in the desert selling water. It seemed like a good visualand I picture the Fuel Rats as an anarchic collective of wildly disparate CMDRs who have their own reasons and agendas and who sometimes compete and sometimes gougeand other times are nobles. When you call on the Fuel Rats you may get an Imperial Noble in a Clipper or you may get a "used goods re-allocator" from the docks ofLave, in a T-6 held together with broken dreams and beer cans. In that sense I imagine us reflecting the overall randomness and nastiness/glory of humanity.

My ventures as a used goods reallocator and black hole mapper have been very successful so I am rolling in credit (right now) and I cannot possibly drink all mycredits if I convert them to beer, so I'm doing this for fun. And for the opportunity to do a bit of role-play!

  • Rat: "Yo! Gotcher fuel here!" (jumps into system)
  • Noob in Orca: "Oh, thank goodness!!! It's amazing that you came to rescue us!"
  • Rat: "Not so fast. My kid's going to university on this."
  • Noob in Orca: "What do you mean?!"
  • Rat: "You wouldn't happen to have 20t of palladium bars on ya, would ya?"
  • Noob in Orca: "No! We're just a sightseeing cruise ship!"
  • Rat: "Uh oh. (thinks) Are any of your passengers really good-looking?"
  • Noob in Orca: "This is extortion!!! We're 10kylie from human space and you're extorting me!?"
  • Rat: "We call it 'encouraging good service' and 'customer relationship management' (in background: 'friendship drive... charging...'")
  • Noob in Orca: "WAIT! WAIT!!! Would you like to be part owner of a cruise line?!?!?"
  • Rat: "(cancels drive charge) Now... we are talking..."

Let's keep this simple and anarchistic and evolve if and when we need to. Students of history here may recall that during the early days of fire departments,fire-suppression was a competitive business and it was not uncommon for firemen to get in huge fights over who would put out a fire, while the fire burned. I can seea bidding war between rats while the 'customer' listens and fumes.

Originally Posted by lexraxCan people be trusted to pay up for services rendered and NOT TURN ON YOU AND KILL YOU after you have filled them up ( *IF* they have that capability) ?

That would make for interesting game-play. We can't "name and shame" on the forums but if that ever happens I'm sure we'll discuss it and maybe the next personI refuel, the cost will be: "if you ever see CMDR so-and-so, attack them for me." I do my exploring in my Asp, The Longshot, but I'll do my refuelling in acombat-geared Clipper. If it means it takes me a bit longer to get there, well, the customer can wait. I want to show of my Clipper's excellent paint-job.

Originally Posted by lexraxAre we going to have some sort of Code of Conduct , Rules for people in this refuelling group ?

I'm not a fan of rules. Perhaps we should keep it simple:

The Fuel Rat's Code of Conduct:

  1. I have fuel
  2. You don't
  3. Any questions?

I think we can all follow those simple rules, no?

19 Nov 3301CMDR Surly Badger

Robert Paul Wolff, in his classic "In Defense of Anarchism" lays out a position he calls 'philosophical anarchism' - a political philosophy that checkmates the legitimacy of the state by opposing it with the autonomy ofthe individual. Wolff's view of anarchism is not the 'anarchy' of a zombie apocalypse television series, or the fevered imaginings of Friedrich Nietzsche, it's adoctrine ofself-discipline. In Wolff's anarchism, the autonomous individual asserts "I do not need to be 'led' thank you very much, I've got this." There is no need for a state, or for rules, because the autonomous individual is sensible and mature enough to realize their own self-interest, and that ispeaceful co-existence and mutual support. Humans are social animals and have evolved to depend on eachother; as one of my biologist friends once said, "A solitaryperson is not fully human." In the universe of Elite Dangerous, this is especially the case - humanity has migrated to the stars and has created a vast far-flungweb of dependencies. Even the most hard-core deep space explorer needs the dock rat that maintained their ship, the researcher who designed their frame-shift drive,the construction worker that assembled the orbital, the hydroponic farmer that grew their food. Anarchism is not the collapse of social dependencies; it's anacknowledgement that the autonomous individual is ready and worthy to participate fully in human society without needing 'encouragement' from the strong hand of apolice-state.

In fact, one of the tragedies of Nietschean nihilist anarchy (Henceforth I will call it 'anarcho-nihilism') is that it inevitably devolves into a dictatorship.Many Earth societies went through dark ages that eventually coalesced around the biggest thug on the street, who was usually granted the title 'king' and theirthuggish goons usually stood by ready to make up an 'aristocracy'. Philosophical anarchists look at this in horror because they realize that a nascent aristocracyis hardly going to result in liberty - it's just trading one form of oppression for another, endlessly. When a philosophical anarchist says "I am an anarchist" theyare not saying "youcan'tgive me orders!" they are saying "youdon't need togive me orders!" Because the philosophical anarchist realizes that the collective they are establishing is their only protection against eventual oppression,Hobbes' war of every man against all others, or Nietzsche's chaos from which the ubermensch will claw his way to the top. To become ruler.

When I started the Fuel Rats there weren't any other Fuel Rats to talk to (picture me, sitting in a bar in Veach Hub, Atins II, talking to a circle of empty mugsof Insty-Bruu, while Mossfoot tried to decide whether to call station security) so I made decisions by myself. One of those decisions, which I hope never to regret,was to structure the Fuel Rats so that there was no hierarchy, no leadership, nothing but the bonds of cooperation and companionship. It's an idea I lifted straightfrom Epicurus (341–270 BC) though Epicurus eventually couldn't resist the urge to create a hierarchy ... and guess who he put at the top? As I watched the Insty-Bruucool I formulated an idea I've floated here, before:

The Doctrine of Individual Excellence
Simply, it defines the bonds between the individual and the collective. Absent authority, and absent need(1) the best reason to do things with the good of thecollective in mind is because the individual is strongest, and so is the collective, when the individual is being awesome in the name of the collective. Those ofyou who feel the slightest shred of pride at saying "I am a Fuel Rat" understand what I am talking about, here. By associating yourself with The Fuel Rats you'reenhanced. You're cooler. You're probably even a better pilot. If you've ever wondered how it is that Kerenn is two jumps from anyplace, it's simply becauseKerenn's a Fuel Rat and Fuel Rats are awesome like that. Therefore, so is Kerenn. And Kerenn's mighty deeds under the Fuel Rats' banner(2) make the entireFuel Rats collective more awesome. To live in accord with the doctrine of individual excellence, it's simple: make yourself your best by making the collectivebe the best. If you think about that for a second, you'll see that the doctrine of individual excellence is diametrically opposed to the selfishness of theNietzschean ubermensch, who has no concerns except "what's in it for me?" Under the doctrine of individual excellence, your decision-making process ought toinvolve awesomeness, humor, steely-eyed cool under pressure, Snickers Bars, doing your paperwork, and finding CMDRs that need fuel and firing limpets at them.

If you find yourself saying to another Fuel Rat "We're an anarchy, you're not my boss" or something to that effect, you profoundly fail to understand what it meansto be part of a team, and to bask in the awesomeness of your team's accomplishments. In the Fuel Rats nobody is anyone's boss because we're all responsibleindividually to help the rest of the collective.

The structure of the Fuel Rats collective is designed to maximize individual autonomy while maximizing our strength to act as a collective. I am constantlyawestruck by the incredibleemergent team-workthat the Fuel Rats show. You watch DISPATCH putting together a rescue around a CASE RED and it's not hierarchy on display: DISPATCH is coordinating because ithelps, and they have accepted a tremendous responsibility with no authority - and the Fuel Rats in the rescue allow DISPATCH to coordinate the rescue because,after all, someone has to, and having a steely-eyed Fuel Rat DISPATCH talking a client through a rescue looks and sounds awesome (and is comforting, besides!)The way we're structured to allow for emergent team-work means that you don't need Surly Badger, or any other Fuel Rat to decide what's the right thing to do:that's your job. That is philosophical anarchy. It'sanarchy with responsibility. Earth's ancient samurai had a saying: "Death is light as a feather, Duty is heavier than a mountain." Our self-chosen duty to fire limpets at people is why we'llfly 25,000ly to do it.

Because of misunderstandings about the word "anarchy" I have edited the 'About' section on the Fuel Rats site to no longer refer to us an an 'anarchiccollective.' Another reason I did this is because the in-game description of the Fuel Rats is as a 'collective' and I think that emphasizing our collectivenature instead of our non-hierarchical nature is probably a good thing. We still have no leaders. We still are a collective.

If someone says, "We're a collective, you're not my boss" you can reply to them one of two ways:
"We're a collective, we're all your boss."
or
"We emphasize individual excellence; you are your own boss and you should be more demanding of yourself than I ever possibly could."

I salute you all,
Badger

(1 - in-game, we don't actually need anything. So how do we appeal to an individual's enlightened self-interest? We need something external to the relationshipbetween the individual and the collective: we need the plaudits of others and our personal sense of aesthetics!)

(2 - memo to self: banner, dang it. We need a banner)