You are a history buff and interested in ACW, comps and gaming? You are interested in the future, science and man's progress too? You ever considered using your computer to maximum efficiency by getting into distributed computing to find that future? Then you should consider joining Picard's Charge.

We are a few players of Sid Meier's legendary Gettysburg! ACW strategy game (go to Gamespy if you want to join us) and their buddies online just using idle CPU time to find 'life' out there and engaging in other science projects to help mankind survive itself.

The team was founded by Tigher, one of UK's top crunchers, and Mad Matt from Germany in 2005 and always has been a very small team despite breaking into top 1000 way back in 2005, mainly because of Tigher's massive contribution. Currently we are trying to revive the team with a small number of modern comps, and we are already back into top 1000, with so far only two members!

If you are interested in joining, please have a look at our facebook page or our community and team forum. Due to the small number of active Gettysburg! players our forum does require log in. Our common forum language is English, our team is international and of course all nationalities are welcome.

As a small team without (so far) any high-end video cards, we always have to make a compromise between projects and credits. But we are trying to focus mainly on quality projects, most of them awarded with the rechenkraft.net seal of approval. At least we are trying to donate a respectable amount of credits to any quality project. Taking part in the monthly SIMAP challenge at BOINCstats is a real highlight for us. We even managed to challenge some large teams there. Another important highlight is World Community Grid, even if credits are low. We are trying to achieve as many run-time badges as possible and enjoy taking part in the x-mas challenge for WCG with all available cores.

We invited the BOINC community to celebrate our final SETI run with a challenge on BOINCstats.com. After five years on BOINC and an awful lot of time on SETI classic Picard's Charge wants to say good bye and thank you to SETI@home with a million team landmark. Everyone is welcome to join us and have a lot of fun.

Nowadays there are so many urgent and important scientific and humanitarian research projects that SETI@home will only play a backup role in our future plans. As always, everyone from the SMG (Sid Meier's Gettysburg!) community (and any other) is more than welcome to join us.

Finishing with one million credit points however is a tremendous landmark for such a small team and would have been next to impossible only a few years ago.

Thank you to all teams who followed the invitation to our Final SETI Run challenge. However, we are still working on finishing SETI with the million credit team mark, most due to the numerous scheduled or unscheduled server outages and validation problems, but also due to the SIMAP Marathon which is consuming the vast majority of CPU power this month.

We managed to attract one new member for Enigma@home, so there has been another project added. But it fits perfectly to our focus on history (decrypting unbroken Engima-codes from WWII). Thanks to Kai, Picard's Charge is represented there as well now. We won't have much computing power to support him there, but maybe we can find some other enthusiasts for this project.

More help always is welcome!