long-range-scan/NOTICE.md

# 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 and the music are ours.** There are no imported assets of any
  kind. Every mark on the remaster's sensors is SVG generated from the game
  state in `src/components/TacticalView.tsx`, and every note is generated by
  the synth in `src/audio/`. The only drawing in the repository is
  `public/favicon.svg`, which is a scan grid.
- **The synth is shared with its siblings.** `src/audio/synth.ts` is the same
  engine as the one in [lemonade](https://git.coffeylabs.org/jcoffey-dev/lemonade) and
  [wumpus](https://git.coffeylabs.org/jcoffey-dev/wumpus) -- same author, same
  licence. What is written for it here is new.

## 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.

## The music is ours too, and this is the same argument

The score is not the television theme, or any part of it, or a paraphrase of
one. It would be a strange sort of care to rename the enemy and then quote
sixteen bars of somebody's music. Every note in `src/audio/deepspace.ts` and
`src/audio/tunes.ts` was written for this project.

What it borrows is the idiom, which belongs to nobody: brass in a major key,
a melody built on rising fourths and fifths that holds its top note longer
than a pop tune would dare, strings moving one chord a bar, timpani. That is
how film and television have said "space, and it matters" since the 1950s,
and it is older than any of them -- it is Holst, and before him Wagner.
Nobody owns a perfect fifth.

The 1971 skin plays the same theme as a three-channel chiptune, which is a
claim about history rather than about the original: the game itself was
silent, played on a printing terminal whose only instrument was its own print
head. What the chiptune represents is the port it would have got when the
listing followed everybody home, and `tunes.ts` says so at the top rather
than leaving it to be assumed.

## 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.*