The download link was defunct, but I managed to dig the file from archive.org. I've uploaded it to my webspace and it'll stay there until I lose the space. That'll happen sometime between 2013 and 2053.

So, here's a working link: http://koti.mbnet.fi/tuukkar/uqm_fin_099.zip .

Easily:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdjt6Bl5qdY
Your’s is just cruel this is just slapstick. 

What the hell? I mean seriously?

After the first incident, why wasn't he fired or sued? Oh well, his incompetence was finally paid off by minute 7.

Possibly because the video is an official fork lift training video? It wouldn't make much sense, if the video would just end right away..

If only you could go to the center of their sphere of influence and repeat into the hyperspace caster, "it's not your fault..."  Then both fleets would degenerate into crying messes and head coreward to "see about a girl" 

Hey, that sounds like a good plot for a future SC game!

I also spot the X-Com sounds, but I fail to see any Star Control relevance.

Remember how you went and got yourself killed and the green dudes got pretty pissed off? That's what we're talking about.
Also, our great leader Paul Reiche III has said that the dude is a hypnotoad. If you use a lot of imagination, it does indeed look a little bit toadish

I've never before played UQM or SCII and I'm having trouble in the very beginning of the game...once I find Earth, get threatened, I decided to run away to some random planetary system nearby. I get attacked by the weird drone things and then die...it is so tough to move the ship around to fight them since they are so much faster. Are all fights like that? 

Also, its really tough to understand what I need to do. I mean, I know i need to get to Earth, but once i get yelled at, then what?

What makes you think the drone is actually going to summon somebody there? Maybe everyone's fled and there's nobody out there to come kill you and the drone's just fooling you. Whenever there's something that feels dangerous, just save the game and do what they just said you should not do. If you end up losing an ally, load the savegame and solve the situation differently
If you die while escaping anyway, what's the point of escaping?-)

And then.. Absolutely great hearing we've got new blood among us! Days of jubilation!

Maybe they are able to use Sa-matra from HyperSpace. The black ships are there only as spectators. And possibly to protect sa-matra from you.

--------------- --------------- --------------- ---------------
SPOILER WARNING! Spoiler on the next line.
Anyway, the date can be prolonged by sending the utwig and the thraddash to harass the kohr-ah.
SPOILER WARNING! Spoiler on the previous line.
--------------- --------------- --------------- ---------------

You should make that happen and while at it, you can also explore. That way you will also find many incredible things you otherwise wouldn't.
And isn't it quite easy to patch UQM into ending 1000 years later than it normally would?

Then again, the references don't have to be 100%. It's possible that they have taken strong influence from SC2, but have then altered the species a bit 1) in order not to be complete copycats and 2) to make the species fit better in their game. But this is only a possibility, a theory. Having never played any HLs, this isn't actually very important to me.

Just my two (euro) cents (so that they don't lose their value)

I did a quick google and this is what I found:
You need a PC gamepad. Any cheapass thing should suffice. Probably, the cheaper, the less weird technology it's got and the easier it is for you to use.
You take the 3DO controller apart and replace its innards with the PC gamepad's innards. Now just connect the 3DO controller's buttons to the same parts of its new innard where the similar-ish buttons used to be connected in the PC gamepad.
As a result you have:
1 piece of useless PC gamepad shells (just throw it away)
1 piece of useless 3DO controller innards (just throw them away)
1 working 3DO controller with PC gamepad innards in it. (don't throw this one away)

The theory is very easy, just solder solder tralalei. The only possible problem is that the PC gamepad's innards might not fit inside the 3DO gamepad. If that happens, then just saw off the end of the 3DO gamepad and let the innards stick out of it. It will look bad, but you will anyway be looking at the screen, not at the controller.
Apparently you don't have to know a heck of how the 3DO controller's pins actually go. Just make sure you check how the PC gamepad works before cutting all the cords.
Apparently a little school kid could get this kind of operation right

This information was found from the following websites:
http://www.gamesx.com/ (the left hand side menu has lots of interesting stuff in it)
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.video.3do/browse_thread/thread/545ffdb9c82a40d5/ff563a70d0e95f33?lnk=st&q=3do+controller#ff563a70d0e95f33

For googling technical information http://groups.google.com tends to yield far more usable results than http://www.google.com/ .
Groups.google.com searches from the Newsgroups instead of the HTML Web.

Hopefully this was of any help. I am not an expert in this matter myself, I just repeated what I learned in the interesting twenty minutes I spent for this

Samatra and the Preccie vessel haven't necessarily originally been developed as battle platforms. The game hints every now and then that the shaggy ones used the ships for space mining. Maybe Sa-matra was there for conveniently exploding moons or asteroids of certain size? If the project is very large, then use the Preccie bomb instead - with the cost of a much rougher result. The Flagship is probably just some kind of crew transportation vessel or similar. Maybe it's used for harvesting what Sa-Matra and Preccie bombs have produced? Remember that most of its weapons come from the Mael Num descendants. Why would the Preccies have built such a puny weapon for their ship if it was built for fighting?
Sa-Matra is also not necessarily developed by the Preccies, but it might be a relic from some race that lived hundreds of thousands of years before the Preccies and were a lot larger than the tiny shaggety-shag-shags.

And don't forget Mark II, dudes! That's Preccie too, isn't it?

And to make it a bit easier figuring out where Syra is its starsystem, think Earth. I don't think it's the 3rd rock, but otherwise everything's very earth-like in it.

Thanks it was that - the voice was set mute, don`t know I haven`t checked it - music was also muted - propably because my sister played this game with her own music from itunes - those are the signs of newbieship . I must say that I am little disappointed with voices - thought that I would hear original gibberish alien speech instead of english-speaking aliens.

Thanks for the help Drakkus I own You a beer .

I prefer dark Belgian ales, but also like stuff such as Rauchbier, many Baltic beers, almost all products by Baltika and Scottish ales.
I currently live in Espoo (think Helsinki), Fi, EU, but am moving to Berlin in February.
I'm looking forward to the beer! If you are unable to meet me personally, you may send the beer via mail. You will get my address by asking me in a PM.

Hello all, been lurking for a while but registered just to post this.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071214/ap_on_sc/japan_fearless_mouse

I guess the relevance to Star Control is obvious

But you know, the BSS is only a rumour, a legend. They only exist in some weirdish stories.

That worked just fine on my OSX.
Maybe you forgot to increase the speech volume in the sound configuration menu in the game?
By defauit the speech voiume is muted, probably because the voice acting is slightly unprofessional.

And if you aren't able to get the voice to work at all, don't feel bad about it. I switched then on, tried talking to a few races and then just deleted the file right away.
If you can't get it to work, but want to hear the stuff anyway, change the file suffix from .uqm to .zip and unzip the package. You should find a bunch of ogg files in there. You can play them with Winamp and be horrified without bothering to tramble around the game trying to get the useless sound to work.

I know that SC3 is vastly inferior to it's predecessor(s). I had a copy back in the day, and never beat it... don't recall why, anyways, I'd love to get it and run it on XP, if it's possible. I'm pretty sure I could find a download for the game, the question would be getting it to run. I've made attempts at this kind of thing in the past with older computer games, and each time i got a heaping helping of phail for my efforts. Though, it seems that at least a couple of people here have been smart enough to get it to work. Any suggestions?

Use dosbox. That's a dos emulator. http://www.dosbox.com/
On Macintosh you must first mount a drive before being able to do anything with it. I think that works in the windows version of dosbox by saying:
mount c c:\

After that you'll have a nice dos window on your screen. Gulps a hefty amount of processor power, though.
My download of SC3 is still only 75,5% finished, so I haven't been able to check if that really works on Dosbox. But I have no reason to think it won't.
Wish this helps.

Just some more technical ideas I thought of before I noticed the age of the thread. Many might be alredy done, but I thought I could just as well write te stuff here. Maybe they'll be of help:

Rainbow planet shape:
Make them sometimes a spiral, sometimes a star, always have a different geometrical shape for them!

ZoqFotPik telling the coordinate: Just make the computer add a star randomly on the line that goes through both the Glowy bits star and the Frungy star.

Coreward could mean anything, it is easy imagining it to work according to some freaky dimension. That's how I originally thought if it, anyway
And since the Ur-Quan prolly must be in the middle anyway, coreward is of course the direction from Sol towards the centre of UQ sphere

Where Tanaka comes from can be defined so that the route goes through a rainbow world in someone's sphere. Just define the code so that one sphere must be around one of the rainbow worlds and then define Tanaka's origin to fit that logic. Constellation names can be included dynamically in the code.

These ideas of defining some stars atop the randomly generated starmap shouldn't cause problems, because 99% will remain random. If you make sure the defined stars are not atop other stars and that they will steal names from their neighbours (if there are any), choosing the first unused Alpha/Beta/Eta/blah prefix, you will not have any problems. (you may also define certain star systems "protected", in order not to mess with them. Whole predefined star systems (looking like a snake that has eaten an elephant, for example) can be rotated and randomly assigned in some part of the starmap.