Note: "Privateer 3" is just a nick-name that stuck, among us.
No relation to Origin's old "Privateer 3" that was never released.
There are parts A, B, C and D; and each will be like a downloadable
expansion with its own name.
Part A's timeline follows the end of Righteous Fire.

Privateer+RF timeline spans about 7 months. (See Privateer/RF Timeline for the justification to ignore the “A year later” title at the beginning of the RF campaign.)

• 1 Part A (see below)
• 2 Part B (dates to be determined)
• 3 Part C (dates to be determined)
• 4 Part D (dates to be determined)

The military stint, spans 52 days till Blair drops the temblor bomb. (See Start of Military Stint for details.)

There’s another 20 days to Torgo, which I’ll give to the player for general trading and having fun.

I’ll measure 20 days by counting 2 jumps per day at 500 kps, and adjusting to 4 jumps per day if the player afterburns all the time. No plot-related things during that time, unless the player comes across a fixer, and therefore a side-plot.

After Torgo, the player gets an email, and the plot begins Part B, –faction-specific sub-plots. I’m not sure exactly when in the timeline Project Goliath happens, in Landreich, but I’m planning a big set of missions in Landreich indirectly related to Project Goliath.

I’m thinking this is happening sometime between January and March 2670.

One possible side-benefit of the Landreich missions is that a couple of Kilrathi who had been sold as slaves to some crooked human you kill, now say they’re bound to swear loyalty to you, and become your permanent wingmen.

Towards the end of Part B come the 2 Firekkan missions. In the first one you get the FireSky carrier. Firekkan Subplot 1

In the second, which goes into a Border Worlds mission, then into a Confed mission, and then unrolls all the way back, and you free Hunter Toth, and recover two Firekkan caernavens... Firekkan Subplot 2 ... you’ll get: 10 leech missiles A holographic fleet command table. Possibly two of the Firekkan pilots they’d lent you will choose to join your party permanently.

After you pay the second installment on the FireSky ship, Mr. Bird upgrades your ship’s software for free, adding a friendly fire inhibitor module to it. For some extra money he’ll offer to install an 8-seat simulator. This will be a great upgrade: While the carrier autopilots to some distant destination, you can go back to the simulator room with your other pilots, and practise your upcoming mission!!! I’m thinking of a possible mission to a distant planet far to the West; –a hidden system where the Varni that escaped the Kilrathi were given residence by the Confed. In appreciation, one Varni might also join your party permanently. Simulator time will count as experience points for the pilots in your party. If you keep them away from playing cards and on the simulator, they’ll become elite in no time, and possibly ultra-elite towards the end of the game, if you keep them alive, as well, of course.

A lot of flying in those missions. We should be going into May, 2670

Here there should be a couple of money-making missions, or else we’ll go bankrupt.

So, say June 2670.

We are approached by a pirate saying he has a message for you. A friend of yours wants to see you immediately at the bar in Nephele. You go there and you find not one but three friends of yours in a big hurry to go to Kilrah: Masterson, Monte and Monkhouse. You bring them to your carrier, which you left on orbit, as Nephele’s starport doesn’t have a strip long enough to land your carrier. After you set a course for Kilrah at maximum speed, Masterson, Monte and Monkhouse all meet with you in your ship’s bar, and explain a lot of what really happened during Privateer and RF, telling you the story of the Steltekers, which they are members of; telling you of the arch-enemy of the Steltekers, who is the one behind Belisarius Group and Y-12, as well as the Retros and Mandarins. And who possibly was manipulating Pilgrims and Terrans against each other, way back. Monte now tells you the idea of going towards Kilrah was simply to lose possible Y-12 agents following you. Pursuing ships are either too slow, or need to stop to refuel, so a long detour, specially through Kilrah, should do the trick. The real destination is a planet on the Western fronteer that appears to have Steltek remains. They will work at uncovering anything that’s there to uncover, and in the meantime, this will be your secret home-base, from which you’ll conduct many grey ops. They’ll ask you to always take a long detour through Kilrah before going to that base. You won’t need to go back there too often, though. From Kilrah, we’ll set course for Grovsner. From Grovsner we take the secret jump to Raxis, then New Detroit, Saxtogue and Oxford. At Oxford we pick up the last remaining cache of Steltek artifacts, and head West through mostly grey zone systems, past a number of pirate, retro and mob bases. The ships we pass are colored red, but they don’t attack, as per the unwritten code of conduct that governs the grey zones. Once we reach the Western end of the map we turn South, and finally reach the planet with Steltek stuff. Ah, before that we need to buy a shuttle, somewhere, as this planet has no spaceport, and only shuttles can land on planets without spaceports. You and another pilot escort the shuttle down just in case, but there are no enemies, so you go back to the carrier, taking the shuttle back. Masterson and Monkhouse stay on the planet. Monte comes back with you, piloting the shuttle. He’s taken a flight course and got a pilot license. You take the same route back to Tingerhoff, as per Monte’s instructions, where a pirate Talon wants to dock with you. Pilot is wearing a mask. Monte tells you to allow docking, then set course for Capella. Then you and Monte go to the bar to speak to the visitor. He takes off the mask and is Terrel. He explains more of the details about the extent of Y-12/Retro infiltrators within the Confederation. He installs a hard encryption/decription device in your ship’s comm unit, with which he’ll be able to safely exchange messages with Monte. He’s also been able to procure an Excalibur for you, which should be waiting in Capella. Now you have 2 medium fighters: Hellcat and Excalibur. 2 kats in Salthis. 2 firekkans in Rapiers. 1 varni in an Arrow, and a shuttle. Might as well have one kat take your Hellcat, sell his Salthi, and keep an empty slot for a second shuttle. Two will be needed, eventually, for boardings. Terrel tells you to consider this an advanced payment for the next four missions. By the way, Terrel was transferred to decomissionings. He pays for your missions with a bit of cash, but mostly with ships, weapons and upgrades. He’s playing along with the corrupt decomissionings bureaucrats that are selling ships to Kroiz and sending the money to Y-12 and its various covert operations, including political donations. He’s in the thick of it. And he’s also a Stelteker, but VERY secretly. He has an arrangement with Sandra Goodin, whereby she willingly lends him her secret codes, so that he can frame her, should he ever get caught. Should that happen, she’ll escape and go into hiding. She’s a Stelteker too.

This should place us at about July 2670.

Anyways, Now Monte and Terrel reveal more about the plan. We’ll have to become official enemies of the Confed, so we might as well become pirates first. To become pirates we need an invitation, and to get an invitation we need to attack merchant ships with regularity. So we’ll start by disrupting Kroiz’s business by attacking any ships carrying weapons and fighters from Confed decommisionings to Kroiz’s bases, and attacking any ships carrying gems from Kroiz’s bases to Confed bases. After, say, 8 such missions, we are approached by a pirate asking us if we’d like to become members of the Brotherhood. We say yes, so he gives us 2 missions. If we pass them, he sends us to a secret pirate base where we’re given 2 more missions. After passing them we get Brotherhood membership. Now we can use any secret pirate base as a base of operations. But one base should stand out for being very well protected and that should be the best..

Probably September 2670.

Second set of grey ops is to conduct missions against a political party running for Gemini elections, totally retro-infiltrated. The candidate isn’t even Retro, honestly, but just a Kroiz lackey. Some of these missions will be to uncover dirt on the party, followed by an attack on a secret base belonging to the candidate. Then destroying the candidate’s own FireSky ship, full of party VIP’s, and then systematically killing all ejected people. By now we reach -100 with the Confed, but the individual Confed pilots love us and cheer for us when we pass by, even though their ships look red on the radar. By the way, one of the missions uncovers a corrupt polling agency that was reporting very high numbers for this party, in preparation for a vote-count fraud. We have to infiltrate a building of GNN where Monte, who used to work for them, hacks a computer and puts all the information into the outgoing wire news queue.

October 2670?

Third part of grey ops is missions against Confed infiltrators. High officials. Secret Ops bases. Y-12 people and assets. These missions should be really hard, as these installations and mobile targets will be miltary in nature, well defended. We might need to use some of our leech missiles.

November 2670?

Last few missions in Part C would involve commercial interests cooperating with Kroize and/or Y12; and we could renew attacks on Kroiz’s shipping. Good thing about these attacks on shipping is that they pay for themselves. Large loads of gems and stuff. We should get many, many millions of credits. Monte says “See? I told you. I couldn’t pay you for your services but you’re slowly getting rich while helping the future of Humanity. Stick with the plan and I guarantee you: You’ll be the richest person in all of the Confederation.”

December 2670

Last mission, bridging to Part D: At a Y-12 base on Mars the Steltek artifacts Monkhouse excavated, plus whatever else Y-12 found after the closure of Mars Sita, are kept. Terrel provides us 50 Marines. We need to buy another shuttle, as each fits 25. Terrel also gets 2 cloaking devices for us, to be installed in the shuttles; as well as anti-spaceport missiles that fit into normal missile tubes. In this mission we have to do a full-speed flyby of Mars dropping the cloaked shuttles, attack all starports on mars with the special missiles, then fly around the Solar System a bit to get all Confed forces to chase us and pull them away from Mars, while the Marines do their work. Only small, fast ships can catch up with us, and we’ll need to engage them as they come. After doing our loop, we come back to Mars to pick up the shuttles and escape. We do a long flight all around Kilrah, before going to where Masterson and Monkhouse are. They’ve picked up all the Steltek stuff they could find, and now come aboard our ship. The Marines were discontent confeds who are now permanently with us.

January 2671.

We go East to a pirate base to buy Exploration equipment; from there to a kat pirate base. We Monte gets off there, where he will try to get other exploration equipment. You leave the carrier there and take the Excalibur to go to Ryganon to speak to Cross. (You need cloak because you’re public enemy no.1, and going to see Cross with a comet tail of Confed ships behind you makes no sense, does it?)

See Cross

Later Monte suggests you take the Excalibur to have a look at Kroiz’s secret base. What you see there is absolutely awsome, like half dozen Paradigms, half dozen Khamekhs, dozens of cruisers, destroyers, frigates and corvettes, hundreds of fighters. But no FireSky ship, and no space elevator station. And there’s only one planet. Anyhow, Monte says “All that just to get you. Such madness... We got homework to do.” Later he says the reason he wanted you to go there was to find out if his mole in Kroiz’s empire was a true mole. Apparently it is. Numbers pretty much match. He also picks up Tayla, who in turn suggests we get Lynch.

(We could call this the end of part C.)

The buildup of the secret colony should take two or three years, and include probably 100 or 200 missions. It gradually transitions into a fleet build-up. We should be ready to confront Kroiz directly by the time the Black Lance story is ending. Then there might be a few extra missions to really wipe out anything that’s left of Belisarius, Y-12 and Kroiz collaborators, and finally an attack on secretmost Confed R&D facility, where they have the original Steltek gun, the real one, which they’ve been studying. Find the gun, take it, then we find they are producing more Black Lance clones, so we just wipe out the whole facility and everyone in it. This should happen after Tolwyn hangs himself.

A sequel to this story could take place entirely in the Tri-System, and explain where all the pirates in Privateer 2 are coming from.