Union Space Corps

Union Space Corps
Total Population	Ranking Members: 583 Cadets: 129 Enlisted: 308
Date Formed	November 2021
Members
Leader(s)	Minister of Technology: ShadowLeviathan USC Star Commander: PorkchopGMX vilijur
Co-Leader(s)	Starblazers: Salamni ButterflyDreams Kairos indo2042

The Union Space Corps is a branch of the LittleBigPlanet Union Ministry of Technology with the mission of beta testing and operating the Union's Project Lighthouse custom LittleBigPlanet server. It is the largest division of the LBP Union with hundreds of members.

History

The idea behind the Union Space Corps was first conceived by former Minister of Foreign Affairs CCSocalGamer in several now-inaccessible NationStates factbooks sometime around or before 2017. The concept behind the USC was that it would serve as the Union's military arm in outer space. However, the idea has since been repurposed to focus on the Union's custom LittleBigPlanet server.

Origin

The idea behind the Union Space Corps was conceived in October 2021 shortly after the creation of the Project Lighthouse repository on GitHub. In a private Discord server on October 30th, Union Lead Protector M88youngling consulted CCSocalGamer, Apollo, and Rae Axelle about bringing back the Union Space Corps to beta test the custom LittleBigPlanet server being built by the Research and Development team.

Apollo gave several ideas for the program's structure, including that the leaders of the program should be named 'Starblazers'.

Deadlines Introduced

On May 1st, the Union Space Corps introduced deadlines for cadets to connect. This was in response to a realization that many cadets never moved forward with connecting to the server and were simply lurking on Discord. This later would take the form of three rotating cadet groups: Mobius, Mage, and Aurora. All three were based on Ace Combat, with Mobius being from Ace Combat 4, Mage from Ace Combat 7, and Aurora from Ace Combat 3.

Operation Purge

On March 20th, the Union Space Corps began plans for Operation Purge. This operation, scheduled for April 1st, tasked the USC with attempting to disrupt the beta testing instance of Lighthouse as much as possible to simulate an attack by hackers. Following the operation, the server was restored with a backup to roll back the damage.

Firmware 4.89

On May 10th, Sony released firmware update version 4.89 for the PlayStation 3. This resulted in difficulties for Union Space Corps explorers in connecting to PlayStation Network. To connect, they would need to update their console to the latest firmware version. However, if they do this, the Hybrid Firmware they have installed that makes playing a modified copy of LBP possible becomes inaccessible. This made it necessary for most USC members to wait until a new HFW or CFW firmware version was released. An alternative to waiting was to spoof one's software version when connecting to PSN. However, this was met with a bit of controversy due. Some on the USC considered spoofing to have a higher risk of getting banned by PlayStation Network.

On May 20th, Lead Developer Jvyden announced to the USC that new HFW and CFW had been released, enabling the USC to update and continue playing custom LittleBigPlanet servers.

Star Commander and Mass Generated Invites

On July 26th, Minister of Technology ShadowLeviathan appointed Starblazer Turecross321 to the position of USC Star Commander. On July 30th, Ture oversaw the deployment of a mass invite generation system. This system was powered by Jvyden's Moniku Discord bot. Previously, all accounts on the USC's beta testing instance needed to be created manually. This required instance admins to work through username requests and distribute temporary passwords. However, the Discord bot could distribute invite links to allow users to securely create accounts themselves while keeping the general public out of the server. The system will not be used during public release and is only in use for the sake of beta testing.

On August 19th or 20th, Moniku was discovered to have broken due to a loss in hosting. Enrollment was swapped back to the manual method following this. Experimentation has been underway by R&D's Zaprit, but these experiments have been flagged by Discord as being spam and the bot is awaiting appeal.

Increase in Enrollment Rate

On August 27th, Star Commander Turecross321 made the decision to increase the Union Space Corps cadet enrollment rate to 60 users per weekend. PorkchopGMX, after being promoted to chief star commander on October 8th, has planned to increase the enrollment rate to 80 cadets per weekend. This will first impact the October 15th enrollment.

On November 5th, Turecross321 resigned as Star Commander.

Operation Mimic

The entire Operation Mimic channel shown only to 105 volunteers.

Operation Mimic was a test of a new verification system created by LBPU R&D Lead Developer Slendy. Testing began on November 12th, 2022 using a personal instance of Lighthouse run by Slendy (codenamed 'BRUH'). Initially classified, the operation has since become declassified after its conclusion on November 18th. 105 USC Scouts volunteered for the mission. The mission was kicked off by a PowerPoint video published privately by m88youngling.

The tool, Union Verifier, requires users who register a new account with Project Lighthouse to prove that they own the account they are attempting to register. If they are using a PSN account, they must add a particular code to their account's About Me section generated by the website. If they are using the RPCS3 emulator, they must add a particular RPCN user as a friend. The need for Union Verifier grew as concerns rose about user impersonation.

Operation Mimic revealed that the new verification system worked as expected, with 40 of the 105 volunteers submitting a survey on the verification tool's performance.

One important question of the survey was "were you able to register an account that you didn't own?" Out of the forty users who submitted surveys, only two claimed to have verified an account that wasn't theirs. When asked for further details, one of the two respondents responded, "I don’t know what any of this means so I’m putting positive stuff." Thus, this response was invalidated by USC Star Command. The other respondent did not elaborate further, meaning that no useful information about a potential vulnerability is known as of yet.

Several beta testers expressed concern about the possibility of RPCN users snatching accounts on the instance before longtime PSN users could register an account. As of yet, this issue has not yet been fully addressed, but it has been agreed that in the case of a dispute, a server administrator would need to resolve the issue manually. It has been suggested that the LBP Union would give preference to the PSN user over the RPCN user where possible, or whichever of the two accounts are older.

Holiday 2022 Enrollment Pause

On November 15th, Lead Protector m88youngling announced that the Union Space Corps would be pausing enrollment until January to give USC Star Command time to rest and focus on exams and school. The last enrollment of the year took place on November 18th. Aurora Cadets in this enrollment were given extra time to connect.

However, on November 19th, Star Commander Vilijur was locked out of her account after sending cadets their temporary passwords for Beacon. This resulted in Star Command shifting to a Discord ticket system to receive user email addresses to email them the necessary account information.

Operation 8492

In late December, 2022, the USC began secretly testing a new registration method that uses NPTickets instead of IP authentication. This involved a secret cadet group called Grabacr and required that Beacon be made open to the public in secret. Starguard assisted in blocking unauthorized users from connecting. The operation was cut short on January 3rd after the mission was leaked by a Scout.

Operation Purge 2

On January 22nd, 2023, the USC conducted a stress test of Beacon. This resulted in significant downtime due to a rate limiting issue that was documented in a blog post. The vulnerabilities have yet to be patched.

Operation Hydra

On February 18th, 2023, The USC yet again began a stress test which would be the last private beta stress testing.

Public Beta/Operation Daredevil

A picture of the Lighthouse after the public beta announcement.

At the special announcement at February 19th, 2023, Public beta would be available at March 6th, 2023 with the public patching channels (Ground School) becoming available at February 25th, 2023.

Structure

The Union Space Corps is organized similarly to other teams within the current LBP Union, having a hierarchal three rank system. However, the scale of this branch is far greater than in other areas of the Union.

Ranks

Members of the Union Space Corps are organized into the following ranks,

1. Star Commander: chief of the beta testing program. Takes responsibility for cadet enrollment, promoting new Starblazers, and making decisions that dictate the direction of the USC. Advises the Minister of Technology and coordinates with Research and Development leadership. This administrative team is spearheaded by the chief star commander.
2. Starblazer: assistant leaders of the Union Space Corps. They are responsible for onboarding enlistees as cadets, promoting members, and organizing efforts to help get cadets connected to Lighthouse.
3. Surveyor: scouts may be promoted to this rank if they are observed to be exceptionally helpful at advising cadets on how to setup and connect to Lighthouse.
4. Scout: the base rank of the Union Space Corps, these are beta testers who have successfully connected to Lighthouse and are able to play and create on the instance. They are encouraged to help cadets get connected as well.
5. Cadet: these are USC beta testers in training who have not yet connected to Lighthouse. There are six active cadet groups.
   1. Mobius: One of the original three cadet groups and the first cadet group.
   2. Mage: One of the original three cadet groups.
   3. Aurora: One of the original three cadet groups.
   4. Centauri: The Centauri group is one of the three newer cadet groups from February 11th
   5. Aether: The Aether group is one of the three newer cadet groups from February 11th
   6. Gryphus: The Gryphus group is one of the three newer cadet groups from February 11th
   7. Grabacr: A cadet group with the purpose of testing the newer account registration.
6. Enlisted: these are Union Citizens who have volunteered for the Union Space Corps but have not yet been selected for beta testing.

Enlistment

The Union's instance of Lighthouse is not ready to accept public account creation just yet, so the only way to onboard beta testers is to manually create their accounts and add roles to them individually on the Union's Discord server. This is a tedious process that is difficult to do in large numbers. On March 1st, 2022, the Union Space Corps began accepting enlistment from citizens from the LBP Union Discord. Members with the citizen role could volunteer to join the beta testing effort by clicking on a reaction on Discord in the #settings channel. Every week since March, the Space Corps has been taking ten randomly selected enlistees from the waitlist. These selected enlistees become USC Cadets.

Ground School

Before becoming full USC Scouts, cadets must learn how to set up their system to connect to Lighthouse through a system called Ground School. This may be either through real PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Vita hardware or they may use an emulator like RPCS3. An instance admin such as an LBP Union Protector or R&D Lead Developer must create the accounts of the new cadets via the Lighthouse admin panel. They distribute the temporary passwords to the cadets as well so that they can sign in and set their own password.

Once a cadet has successfully connected to Lighthouse, they must inform a Starblazer on Discord so that they can receive the roles that they need to report bugs and join other discussions about beta testing.

A work in progress model of what the USC space elevator might look like in LBP3.

Trivia

If comparing the Union Space Corps' number of ranked members to other clans like Khorne Empire and Knights of Valor, it would have the largest verified population of all time.