Backstory? Is there one?

[Captain Michaela Nul'dolaer]

So, I've been meaning to ask: what exactly happened to the 3 beacons? Were they hijacked or shut down? Also, what's with the ships flying out in the middle of nowhere (personally, I think it's funny). Is there any connection between these games?

[Ozzatron]

as far as I know there's no connection between any of the games, other than that Captain Successor is a remake of sorts of Captain Forever.
The Dawn Star (or Captain Jameson back in the day) had a rudimentary story in the help files, simply that "you're in a sector of space that's been taken over by pirates. Save everything and reactivate the beacons". Why you had to reactivate the beacons was never really explained, although they apparently have to do with Peacekeepers. Of course, we've all gone mad with fanon in the meantime. That guy with Willy Wonka as his profile picture had a pretty good overall technological backstory going, and if you dig through the other threads (this forum is hideously disorganized) you'll find that everyone has a different story to tell. In my mind, the three beacons are triangulation anchors for interstellar warps, and the aim of the game is to let the Peacekeepers warp in and turn everything to glowing dust, i.e. bring back peace. Of course, also in my mind, you should be able to go between a near infinite number of sectors, but that hasn't happened yet.

[Captain Michaela Nul'dolaer]

Duh. It's the middle of space, so why not Farbs' just create like a Minecraft-like sector generator?

[Vaconcovat]

Because the game is still in alpha, we only get one seeded sector per version, that way everybody who is testing/playing the game should have the same experiences. If somebody runs into a bug that occurred in a certain area, others (or farbs) can duplicate it in the same area on their game. If we all had randomised sectors, then bug reporting would be slightly harder. Farbs has stated that in the future, sectors will be randomly generated.

In regards to backstory, or lore, as far as i'm concerned each of the captain games exist in the same universe, each one is in a different region of space. Basically, the whole of the space community has broken down into chaos and the peacekeepers have been overrun. There are a few special ships out there, whose command mods have the special property of completely exploding an entire sector every time they are 'destroyed'. Of course, once they do that, they then re-boot. Each of the captain games (excluding the dawn star) is the pilots of these vessels seeking help to pilot their ships while they rest. The pilots don't want their ships to be exploding over and over again, killing thousands as they do, but they can't pilot the ships forever; they need rest. The captains, named forever, successor, etc have created remote terminals for the public to help them out, giving them remote access to their ships.

Some of this lore can be seen through the readme.txt:
www.captainforever.com/readme.php

[Captain Michaela Nul'dolaer]

Oh! Why am I so ignorant to the readme.php? So, it's a post-apocalyptic space RPG? Or something else? BTW, have you ever considered levels beyond Kilo?

[Captain Michaela Nul'dolaer]

Because they're here: cptforever.proboards.com/thread/189/beginners-requests-hints-tips?page=1&scrollTo=2162