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By Hal McKenzie
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Unitel's starship design
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Unitel Northwest of Portland, Ore., which is marketing a design for a spaceship it claims "will provide mankind with the first practical interstellar transportation system," is developing an interactive computer game to simulate the projected starship's travels throughout the galaxy. The game includes visits to simulated alien planets and encounters with extraterrestrial civilizations.
This approach appears aimed at getting funding and feedback from cyber-game buffs to help produce the actual craft. The company e-mailed a bulletin board flyer to supporters to put up at university bulletin boards including a description of the game and tear-off stubs with an e-mail address (dre1101@yahoo.com) for comments and questions.
Unitel's starship purports to use electromagnetic propulsion for short-range interplanetary travel and elastic "tunneling" for "interstellar travel throughout the universe" based on quantum physics theory. The tear-drop design and many features of its operation are based on an actual UFO sighting that Unitel CEO Larry Maurer and his friend Michael Miller experienced in 1981. (See story in Extraterrestrial archives, July 14 and 15).
According to a Development Quote written by Andrew C. Moore, the game, called Silver Tear, "is primarily an ultra-realistic simulator" that will mimic information from sensors in a projected real craft. "The environment will be filtered through a special encapsulated software layer that will imitate data input from real sensor equipment. … In fact, the entire game will be designed with the intention of eventually becoming a real hardware control interface."
The game will rely on "real astronomic data available on the Internet" from government and educational sites, supplemented with imaginary data from the game's designers to simulate unknown planets. "Silver Tear will calculate the range of possibilities as accurately as possible and all imaginary data will be constrained to a scientific range of possibility, thus no impossible or even unlikely imaginary data will be generated," Moore writes.
"In order to make game play as much fun as possible, Silver Tear will feature space faring extraterrestrial civilizations. A lot of reports of encounters with extraterrestrial beings have been recorded over the last 75 years or so, much of it available on the Internet. The game will use this information to randomly generate various encounters based on supposedly real alien species, such as the "Grays" and the 't'Zintli.'
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