Long Range Scan: the 1971 galaxy, on the terminal it was written for

An independent rebuild of the 1971 starship patrol game. Eight by eight
quadrants of eight by eight sectors, three digits a quadrant on the chart,
courses round a nine-point compass, and a stardate clock that is the real
opponent.

The name and the nouns are ours and NOTICE.md says why: the mechanics are
free to rebuild, the trademarks are not. Raiders rather than the enemy from
the television programme, beams rather than the energy weapon, and every
sentence the machine prints written for this project rather than borrowed
from a listing.

This is the 1971 skin only -- paper, ink and a print head. The remaster and
the synth come next, and the tokens and the structured transcript are already
shaped for them.

NOTICE.md

@@ -0,0 +1,116 @@
+# Notice, credits and provenance
+
+## What this is
+
+An independent reimplementation of the starship patrol game that went round
+timesharing systems from 1971 and then every home computer of the following
+decade, written from scratch in TypeScript in 2026.
+
+## Credit where it is due
+
+- **Mike Mayfield**, 1971 — wrote the original, on a Sigma 7 at a college in
+  California, in BASIC, for a machine with no screen. An eight by eight
+  galaxy of eight by eight sectors, searched three digits at a time, is his
+  idea and it is a very good one.
+- **David Ahl** and **Creative Computing**, who carried the version most
+  people actually met, in the type-in book that put a hundred games on a
+  hundred thousand desks.
+- Every university terminal room and school computer club that passed it
+  along, which is how it got everywhere.
+
+This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone connected to the
+original, or with any television programme. No original source code was used,
+consulted or copied.
+
+## Why it is not called what you expect
+
+The 1971 game and its descendants borrowed their setting, and their nouns,
+from a television series. Those nouns are live trademarks belonging to a
+company that enforces them, and this is a public site with somebody's name on
+the footer.
+
+So the mechanics are rebuilt and the vocabulary is ours:
+
+| The original's | Ours |
+| --- | --- |
+| the ship, the fleet, the enemy | your ship, the Fleet, raiders |
+| the energy weapon | beams |
+| the guided weapon | torpedoes |
+| starbase, shields, warp, damage control, stardate | kept — generic to the whole genre, and to science fiction generally |
+
+None of that is a copyright question. Game mechanics are ideas rather than
+expression, and nobody gets to fence off an eight by eight grid. Names are a
+trademark question, which is a different thing entirely: it is about whether
+a reader would think this came from them. Calling it *Long Range Scan* and
+naming the enemy *raiders* answers that, and costs the game nothing — the
+three digits on the chart are what anybody actually remembers.
+
+## How this code came to exist
+
+Clean-room, and worth being specific about because it is what makes the
+licence below meaningful:
+
+- **The rules are not ours to own, and we use them freely.** Sixty-four
+  quadrants of sixty-four sectors, three digits a quadrant, courses 1 to 9
+  round the compass, warp 1 for eight sectors, energy that is also your
+  shields, eight devices that break. All of it is arithmetic that has been in
+  print since 1978.
+- **The constants are reconstructed from behaviour, not copied from a
+  listing.** How much a warp costs, how hard a raider hits at range, how long
+  a repair takes — these are in `src/game/constants.ts`, each with the
+  reasoning next to it, and the places where a judgement call was needed are
+  marked as judgement calls.
+- **The artwork is ours.** There are no imported assets of any kind. The one
+  drawing in the repository is `public/favicon.svg`, which is a scan grid.
+
+## The words on screen are ours, deliberately
+
+This is the part worth reading, because the obvious thing to do was the wrong
+thing.
+
+The published listings have memorable lines in them. Those sentences are
+their authors' writing, not a rule and not a fact — and a project released
+under a copyleft licence has no business licensing words it did not write.
+The two sibling games make exactly this argument in their own NOTICE files;
+this one never shipped with anybody else's wording.
+
+So every line the machine prints here was written for this project, and they
+live together in `src/game/constants.ts` where they can be checked. They are
+shouted because the terminal had no lower case, not because we are shouting.
+
+Two things are not original, and neither is a copyright question:
+
+- **`COMMAND ?`, `COURSE (1-9) ?`, `WARP FACTOR (0-8) ?`.** These are the only
+  sensible words for what they ask, and asking them one at a time is what a
+  printing terminal forces on you rather than a style anybody chose.
+- **The three-digit quadrant code.** `205` meaning two raiders, no starbase
+  and five stars is a fact about an encoding. There is no expression in it to
+  own, and changing it would break the one piece of shared literacy this
+  genre has.
+
+## One rule that is ours
+
+The original ends when the clock does. So does this. What is new is the
+frame: one to four captains fly one patrol each, in turn, and are ranked
+against each other and against the shared board — raiders destroyed, then
+days left, then torpedoes unfired. The reasoning is in `src/game/reducer.ts`.
+
+## Licence
+
+Copyright (C) 2026 John Coffey.
+
+This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
+the terms of the **GNU Affero General Public License** as published by the Free
+Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any
+later version — see [LICENSE](LICENSE).
+
+AGPL rather than plain GPL because the leaderboard is a network service: §13
+means anyone who runs a modified copy of this for other people over a network
+has to offer them its source. Running the game without the scores service is
+entirely supported and imposes nothing extra.
+
+This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
+WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
+
+*None of the above is legal advice.*