Artemis - Star Trek Bridge Simulator

[Cramulus]

Artemis is a Star Trek Bridge simulator. It's played with 6 people in the same room. It uses five to six laptops/tablets/mobile whatever.

Each laptop is a different control station: communications, helm, weapons, engineering, science... and then there's a captain who doesn't have any controls, but is basically the ship's brain, coordinating the different officers. You hook one laptop up a TV which acts as the "main screen".

You play a mission that lasts 10-20 minutes, then everybody switches stations. It's REALLY REALLY FUN.



gameplay footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9Q2X32hZNk

[Cramulus]

some station examples:






Here's the engineering display. When the ship gets damaged, you have to dispatch repair crews and hope they don't catch fire or get sucked into space.

You can overclock certain stations by rerouting power from other stations. So when your ship gets into a fight, the engineer can take power away from the warp drive and reroute it to front shields and lasers. When systems overheat, you have to dispense coolant to cool them down.




Here's the helm station, for the guy who's driving the ship. The captain will give you a heading, such as "180", which means turn the ship (basically) south. You have sliders for the impulse drive and warp drive.


Here's a view from outside the ship which you might see on the main screen:

[AFK]

That's awesome!

[Nephew Twiddleton]

This does seem pretty cool. I haven't watched the vid yet because I had to reboot my computer. Working on it now.

[Suu]

Oh. Shit.

I know what the next Providence meat-up will be.

[Cramulus]

it's seriously the most fun I've had playing a computer game in MONTHS. I'm trying to get a party together tonight to play it again.



That's the weapon station. You can load and fire a few different kinds of weapons (homing missiles, nukes, mines to screw with a ship that's behind you, etc). Your ship's science officer will scan the enemy ship and determine which type of laser will work best against their shields. Then the weapons officer sets the ships lasers to that setting for maximum damage.

As you're fighting, the communications officer may be able to get the enemy to surrender. Last time we played, we had a trigger happy weapons guy who would fire just one more missile after the captain gave the cease fire order. Oops, blew them up after they surrendered!






Here's a little of what the comm station looks like. You have to request docking when you're refueling at a space station. You can communicate with other nearby ships to call for aid or send them into battle.


If you get enough people together, you can actually run two different ships, with two different crews, in the same mission. That also allows you to do ship versus ship PvP.


There's also a "game master" mode, where an additional person can control enemy ships, add more ships to the world, and send private messages to each station. When we were playing last weekend, we played for a while with a GM sitting in the next room, creating little challenges we had to solve as a group.

The whole room was filled with dumb star trek jokes. The comm officer hit the RED ALERT button for things like "I'm out of pretzels". At one point, the captain gave an order to ram a friendly ship and the engineering officer said "screw that, I resign" and powered down the engines and left the room. The captain says "Ensign, you're promoted!", and some random person was thrust into that chair.

again, REALLY FREAKING FUN

[tyrannosaurus vex]

this game


this is what computers were invented for.


i'm sure of it.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

I'm having trouble running youtube, it seems.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

I'm having trouble running youtube, it seems.

Malware. Problem solved, loading now.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

That looks fun as hell.

[The Johnny]

I dont really get StarTrek... BUT OMFG THAT SOUNDS FUN, it reminds me of "Tie Fighter Vs. X-Wing" only instead of a single fighter as part of a squadron, you all team up to control a capital ship.

[Telarus]

Super interesting

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Upon further collaboration with picklesgf and villager were thinking of combining this with an away team larp. Weve never larped before so i might hit you up on the basics for that too.

[Golden Applesauce]

My buddies at work get together and play that occasionally. As a social event it's really good, but the gameplay itself gets repetitive real quickly.

Edit: except engineer, whose job is 100% pure stress.

[Don Coyote]

And none of my friends are Trekkies.....