Ship Showdown 2956: the Mole owes me three points

Fifteen picks. Thirty-two points on the table. Twenty-nine of them collected, which sounds respectable right up until you notice that the three I lost all came from the same mining vessel, which had one job and declined to do it.

The Perseus won, beating the Ironclad Assault in the final. The Ironclad had earned its way there properly, seeing off the Hermes, then the MTC, then the Corsair, which is a genuinely tidy run for a ship whose entire personality is "box, but armoured". The Corsair and the Clipper carried the exploration and underdog brackets exactly as expected. The M80 handled the Shiv without ceremony. The Railen turned up, did the alien thing, and was promptly removed from the premises by a warship roughly the size of a small municipality.

None of that is the interesting part.

The Reclaimer, and the small catastrophe it caused

The Mole lost to the Reclaimer in the first round.

I want to be fair here, because on reflection this is defensible. The Reclaimer is a salvage cathedral with a crew, a claw, and genuine presence. The Mole is a van that eats rocks. If you are voting on which one you would rather be standing inside during an emergency, the Reclaimer is not a controversial answer.

But I had not voted on presence. I had voted on the Mole, repeatedly, and with feeling, all the way to the semi-finals. Which is the thing about a bracket that you forget every single time you fill one in: the picks are not independent guesses, they are a chain of promises about a future that has not happened yet. Get the first one wrong and everything downstream is not so much incorrect as fictional. Every box in that quarter of my bracket after round one was a prediction about a ship that had already gone home and put the kettle on.

The scoring was kinder than the experience. Because the semi-final pick was the Perseus, and the Perseus does not care who arrives to lose to it, the damage stopped at three points: one for the first round, two for the second. Three points is nothing. Three points is a rounding error. I have thought about it every day since.

Nobody doubted the Perseus. Nobody.

Here is the remarkable statistic from the whole exercise:

Eight members of the United Space Confederacy filled in a bracket. Eight of them had the Perseus as champion. Not most. Not a comfortable majority with a brave contrarian holding out for the Idris-P. Eight out of eight. Fifteen matchups produced arguments, side bets, and at least one heated exchange about the Carrack vs. Corsair, and then all eight of us independently arrived at the same conclusion and moved on.

There is something almost funny about a prediction game where the largest prize is the one nobody had to predict. The final was worth a quarter of the entire board, and it functioned less as a question than as a formality with points attached. If you want to know why the leaderboard came down to the middle rounds, that is why. The top of the bracket was settled before anyone clicked anything.

Next year, properly

This year's showdown was a small thing run inside the USC, mostly to find out whether anyone would bother. Eight of us did. So next year it gets built out.

The plan is two brackets running at once. A universal bracket, open to everyone, one leaderboard, the whole community arguing about vehicles simultaneously. And org-specific brackets alongside it, so your org has its own pool, its own standings, and its own insufferable winner.

The part I am most interested in is the prizes. Org officers will be able to set their own, ahead of time, visible before anyone locks a pick. What that means is entirely up to the org: a ship, a pot of aUEC, first refusal on the next mining run, or naming rights over something nobody wants named after them. The point is that the stakes are yours to define, and that they are announced before the picks are locked rather than invented afterwards by whoever won.

The universal bracket will most likely carry some Hangarworks giveaways of its own, including Fleet and Pro access. Details closer to the time, once I know how many people turn up and whether the leaderboard survives contact with them.

Until then, the Perseus is champion, the Reclaimer is on notice, and the Mole and I are not currently speaking.