ACC: Actual carriers created. A stat tracked by the INL servers, this is how many times you gave someone a kill that they then used to pick up armies. [Developed by Mark Noworolski] ASW: Anti-Scout Warfare, i.e. harrassment of the enemy scout bomber. A.k.a. anti-bombing. Borg: A netrek client that has some sort of automatic "cheat" feature, e.g. auto-dodge or phaser, cloaker display, etc. This is cheating (except on servers which explicitly allow it). [Perhaps named after Fil Alleva's character] Bronco-type server: A.k.a. vanilla servers, these are ordinary netrek servers such as wormhole.ecst.csuchico.edu or fisher.psy.vu.nl. Servers with small mods such as bigbang.astro.indiana.edu and calvin.usc.edu are considered bronco-type too, except by the purists. But definitely not Paradise servers, Chaos servers, Hockey servers, Dogfight servers, or Sturgeon (upgrade) servers. Named after bronco.ece.cmu.edu, a now-defunct server run by the great Terence Chang. Butt torp: Fire out the rear of one's ship; runner-scum. Chain reaction: The explosion of one ship killing a nearby teammate's ship, and so forth. Chung: To kill oneself by firing plasma point-blank at the wall. If you carry armies, most servers give you DI for this, and in any case it denies the kill to enemies. Named after Greg Chung, pioneer of this dubious tactic, who will never forgive me putting this entry here. Clear: To kill the defenders of a planet, so that a teammate (following close behind) can bomb or take it. Clue: Basic grasp of strategy. Core planets: Usually refers to the homeworld and four nearest planets of each system. However, the server has its own idea of what a core world is, which it uses to award double planet DI to an enemy who takes one, namely the homeworld and three of the four nearest planets. Alp, Hyd, Lyr, and Her are not core for this purpose. Cut: Make a sharp turn, especially to go to take a different planet than the one you had been headed for. Decoy: Fly deep into enemy space, perhaps cloaked, pretending to be a planet-taker, for the sole purpose of drawing enemy attention to oneself (and away from teammates). Ben Peal calls this the Magna Doodle tactic. A variant is the Rob Hill Memorial Decoy, where you do this while carrying armies just in case you get through. Det: To detonate enemy torpedos. DI: According to the authors, DI is "Destruction Inflicted." It is simply your (planets+bombing+offense) ratings x (Tmode hours). Note that it is possible to lose DI because your ratings are always relative to the global average. To achieve a given rank, you must accumulate a certain amount of DI before going over some number of hours. Or you can get promotions on double DI or quad DI with lesser ratings but more hours. [Terence Chang] Doosh: Kill a carrier by making a good play. Fake: In the context of planet taking, making a feint towards a planet, fully intending to cut to a different one when the defenders react. Fire-hose: Orbit a fuel world and fire continuous streams of torpedos. [Coined by Bean Peal] Flat: A planet is flat when it has four armies or fewer. See also kill-flat. Fly casual: Fly carrying armies in the same manner you would if not carrying. Free beer: Someone who is consistently easy to kill. Front line: The line of contention. E.g. in a close Fed-Rom battle, the Romulan front is Cap-Ind-Reg and the Fed front is Rig-Can-Org. Giving away kills: Giving the enemy kills is bad, of course, but this term is also applied to teammates, especially starbases, who wound enemies and hold them, allowing a teammate who can better use the kill to "steal" it. God: The server god is the person who set up and controls the server. He or She has great power but seldom if ever uses it. Hard-take: Effectively take and reinforce all in one trip. As opposed to taking a planet but leaving it at 1 army. Hero of Core: Someone who hides in his own core, ratio-scumming, sometimes retaking nearby planets, and talking trash. Hoser: Practice robot. Also a derogatory term. Hotel: Or Army Motel: the armies check in but they don't check out. A player who carries a lot of armies around for a long time and never manages to use them.. Iggy: HunterKiller, an Independant team robot appearing on some servers. So named because it is often the ship in slot 'g', on the Independant team, thus Ig. INL: International Netrek League INL server: Bronco-vanilla server set up for timed games. Games are normally 90 minutes, with a 30 minute sudden-death overtime, where the victory condition is owning at least 11 planets with the opponents owning no more than 8. Planets start at 17 armies. Ensigns can starbase. One player on each team gets captain's privileges, allowing him to start the game, pause it, etc. !kcamS: "Smack!" backwards, you get to say this when you phaser somebody's plasma right in his face as they fire it. Kill-flat: A team is kill-flat when they have no ship with a kill, other than perhaps their starbase. Last Planet Stand (LPS): Once they're down to one planet, most of them will likely hang around it, and it can be pretty darn tough to take, even if getting to that point seemed easy. Loaded: Carrying many armies (typically 5 or more). Mutual: Kill and be killed (usually in your victim's explosion). Newbie: Beginner Ogg: Suicide, Kamikaze. Attack a ship without caring about dying in the process. Especially, a cloaked approach to an enemy carrier or starbase. Open: A (momentarily) undefended planet. Open side: As opposed to the wall side. The region near the planets facing 3rd space. E.g. in a Fed-Rom war, the Federation's open-side planets are Beta, Ceti, and Organia. PWstats: Stats calculated by INL servers after the game. PW stands for Passing Wind, the character played by INL server hacker Mark Noworolski. They are: tpt (total planets taken), tpd (total planets destroyed), tpb (total planets bombed), tab (total armies bombed), tac (total armies carried), pad (percent armies delivered), fao (friendly armies ogged), eao (enemy armies ogged), tof (normalized average distance to enemy homeworld), eck (enemy carries killed), pck (potential carriers killed), tek (total enemies killed), fck (friendly carriers killed), def (deaths by enemy fire), and acc (actual carriers created). Peace scum: Players who declare peace against the opposing team so they can fuel off of enemy planets. A worthwhile technique, but can have bizarre results when players on both teams are doing it. Phaser lock: Hit a cloaker with a phaser, thus determining the cloaker's position. Plasma scum: Anyone using plasma, especially if that seems to be their main goal. Planet scum: Sometimes used derogatively to indicate someone who is just trying to improve their planet rating without thinking of his team's welfare. (E.g. someone who takes an enemy core world for the double DI when he could have taken a more strategic planet instead.) But normally just refers to someone trying to take planets. Plink: Lob torpedos (at) from long range. Pop: When a planet grows armies. ++: Carrying, e.g. "R9++". More or fewer plusses represent an exact knowledge of number of armies. [Coined by Randy Dean] Quitter scum: Someone who quits out when facing certain death, to avoid giving the enemy a kill (and the satisfaction thereof). If there's no wait queue, the quitter scum can quickly re-enter, so this is occasionally a clever ploy. Rank scum: Players for whom ratings and rank are more important than helping their team. Usually they wind up helping their team by accident anyway. Ratio scum: Someone playing for ratio rather than to help their team. Reinforce: Beam armies onto a planet you already own, e.g. to bring it from 1 army to 3. The symmetric operation is to weaken an enemy planet. Res: Resurrect; i.e., re-enter after dying. Res scum: Kill someone right when he reses, before he gets a chance to move. MUCUS PIG was a master at this, and would taunt his victims afterwards and runner-scum them. Rewl: Rule. Win dogfights without giving ground. Take up residence at a contested planet and crush all comers. Also as a carrier, beat the defender dogfighting and take the planet. Role: A long-term assignment for a particular player. E.g. scout-bomber. Runner scum: Run away while fighting, hoping to be chased. If chased, the runner scum has a natural advantage in that torpedos don't reach him quickly, and his torpedos reach the chaser very quickly. Sometimes derogatory, because a runner scum might be ceding important territory or leaving a teammate in the lurch, and also because there's a feeling that if everybody tried to runner-scum the game would stagnate. Scarecrow: A player who stays in a dangerous situation even though he is out of fuel or badly damaged in the hopes of tricking an opponent into wasting time or even running. [Hugh Moore] Scout bombing: Bombing deep in enemy territory, especially with a scout. The usual idea is to try to stay behind enemy lines and bomb the armies that pop, and to run and/or cripple any enemy who chases you. Scout-dropping: Delivering two armies at a time to random enemy planets, using a scout. This seems to be a particularly powerful plan when one's team is ahead 13-7 or so. Scum: In the absence of a modifier, to take planets (or someone who does so -- scum can be a verb or a noun). Shadow: Or shark. Stay near an enemy, without cloaking, far enough to avoid being runner-scummed, but close enough that he or she can't safely orbit a planet. Shuttle: Pick up from planets and drop on the starbase or homeworld. Sling: What a starbase does to help teammates who want to fly from one side of it to the other; namely, tractor them in and then pressor them out on the other side. (Or on calvin, to touch a transwarping ship with tractor or pressor beams to bring him out of transwarp without his incurring the five second lock-up.) Slot scum: Someone who connects but doesn't play. A.k.a pizza scum. This is very bad; slot scummers should be banned. Slot scumming the enemy team to help your real team is out-and-out cheating. Smack: Hit with a plasma torpedo. Plasma scums seem to like writing SMACK! or :-* to the All board whenever they do this. Space controlling: As a role, this generally means dogfighting at the front and escorting, point-defending, and dealing with front-line armies as needed. Split damage: Take 1 point on the hull for every 2 points to the shields. Increases repair efficiency. Steal: (Lagg U folks call it "hork".) To steal someone's kill is to get the kill with one phaser or a couple long-range torps after your teammate did the hard work. To steal someone's planet is similar, e.g. he used 4 armies to destroy it, and you just drop 1 and get all the DI. Both are perfectly fine instances of teamwork, but some pople care about their stats. Stupid ogging: The strategy of slamming into and mutualling with any enemy ships in one's space. E.g. the Human Target style. A.k.a. offense scumming. Synch: Synchronize, e.g. for a starbase og. E.g. "synch on d" means to time your approach so that you reach the target at about the same time as your teammate in the d slot. Many ships synchronized comprise a wave. Third space: The section of the galaxy owned by teams with no players on them, e.g. Orion and Klingon space in a Fed vs. Rom game. Third space scum: Someone who takes over neutral space rather than working for a genocide. Disallowed by most servers these days. Tournament Mode (t-mode): Server mode when there are at least 4 players on each of two adjacent teams. Without t-mode it's just practice, not a netrek game. TOF: A stat computed by the INL servers, this is proportional to your ship's average distance to the enemy homeworld It's normalized to the rest of your team's distances, with 100 being the average for your team. Generally speaking, low tof is worth striving for. Stands for Total Offense, I think, although that makes no particular sense. Traitor: Someone deliberately working against the interests of his own team. Twink: A bad player, especially one who has been playing a long time and still sucks. Twink-bashing: Picking on the bad players, e.g. to get kills. Type scum: Kill someone who is typing a message. Wall side: The region near the galaxy side-wall. E.g. in a Fed-Rom war, Veg Alt Rig Cap Hyd and Ald are considered wall-side planets.