c-base - the amazing space station

[housetier]

Some of you might know I am a member of the club c-base e.V. (import the root certificate from cacert.org to avoid error messages from good browsers). Our goal is to reconstruct a space station that crashed 4.5 billion years ago. It is directly under the city of Berlin in Germany. Reconstructing not only means to restore buildings or make the facilities work again, it also means to bring back to live the old and lost culture of the former inhabitants of the space station and to restore the lost knowledge we find in excavated data storage items.

What we do (totally incomplete)
So the c-base builds things and cultures. We throw parties and hold conferences, also Aliens (non-members) can rent those parts of the space station that has already been rebuilt for parties and conferences.

Big Events
One of those conferences from Aliens was the Maemo Summit 2008, which was sponsored by Nokia of Finland. We had over 250 developers listening to three parallel tracks; they also brought the wireless network we had set up for them to the limit. It was a huge event, one of the biggest in the 12-year history of c-base e.V.. It was also the best - all the Alien guest we had on board were amazed, blown away, avid, or simply stunned by our club. Among those Aliens were managers from Nokia, one of them even agreed to be interviewed. So that is an outside voice speaking about Nokia, Maemo and the ultimate impression c-base has left on him.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears
Why I mention this? Because my name is mentioned in the interview! When you listen to it, he says that I had been working 24 hours a day "which is basically insane". My job on board the space station is that of an event manager, so I was indeed working day and night to get "my people" whatever they needed. It was extremely exhausting so I think I deserve the praise and the fame too


There are more videos about c-base to be found on youtube and vimeo, I will try to dig them all up and post here. That will give you even more weird pieces of information about our space station.

Please do not hesitate to ask questions! This club is very dear to me so I will be glad to talk about it. Also, if you want to hold a conference, a meeting, a hackfest at an extraordinary place in Berlin, please just send an email to [email protected]

[tomos]

sounds great housetier
Any pictures of the space(s) ?
whats the deal with the "space station that crashed 4.5 billion years ago" 

[zridling]

One of the coolest communities I've ever seen, and what an amazing vision. I always knew there was something different about Berlin! Nokia is pretty smart to see its potential and recognize c-base's technical contributions.

Question 1: Who came up with this vision for c-base and its mythical origins?

Question 2: Where are the fembot portals?! 

The videos are cool, and if you haven't visited housetier's blog recently, it's worth learning Deutsch for!
http://nrrd.de/dasbuch/

[40hz]

Am I the only one that's confused by this?

[housetier]

sounds great housetier

-tomos (October 16, 2008, 08:40 AM)

It is great! :-)

Any pictures of the space(s) ?

There are a lot, however they are spread across several servers and services. You will find bunch on flickr and we used to have our own gallery but someone broke it during upgrade. I have been tasked with collecting all the different sources of c-media, but it will take time and I haven't even started yet so I can't post specific links as of yet.

whats the deal with the "space station that crashed 4.5 billion years ago" 

There is an article in the English wikipedia about our space station. And even though the URL says "C-base" it is important to always write it in lowercase: "c-base"!

AFAIK the word "space" has more than one meaning in the English language: one is the universe and the other meaning is that of a smaller designated area such as a room. This works very well in German: space means "Raum", which is the same as Weltraum (universe) and "Raum" as area or room.

Now, the space station is both a transgalactic transport vehicle (well we aim to restore the engines so we can take off) and it offers space for its members and associates to do their thing.


(This one is going to be tricky) The space station c-base clearly is from the future which is why it crashed 4.5 billion years ago.

For projects to succeed on board they must be future compatible, and we have mustered chronicle services to reinforce this rule.

[housetier]

Who came up with this vision for c-base and its mythical origins?

-zridling (October 16, 2008, 12:50 PM)

This piece of information is not available to me, we are still trying to decipher the memory crystals we found in the probe "Siri" which was ejected just before the crash and which has a complete (we hope) backup of c-beam's data. c-beam is the board computer of the space station; it is functional again insofar as it announces the time every hour, and it can relay messages via a text2speec interface.

Where are the fembot portals?!

Prof. Kirsch is our main researcher. He has (re)built and created several alien robots already. Some had to be taken apart immediately, some commited suicide and some still won't move after all these years, so we put them up for display. But even so we cannot yet tell the gender of a robot, and we are not even sure if they have genders at all, or how many there might be.

[mouser]

Sounds like a wonderfully fun project.  Perhaps you may even uncover some alien software or software blueprints that some coders here on DC might help you to reconstruct..

[housetier]

libavg was developed by one of our members. In the showcase on libavg.de you will find more references to c-base.

A couple of scenes for several movies were shot on the c-base as well ("Tatort: Tod einer Heuschrecke", to name just one). And just last night a team from the local TV station came by to shoot for a short documentary.