I had the floppy disc version of SC2.  Never had any issues with the starmap other than trying to find specific stars.

However, that does bring something to mind - I do recall reading somewhere a while back that the *cough*pirated*cough* version had issues with the starmap...


Icemage

I didn't like SC3 either.  Lots of nonsensical dialogue, bugs galore, poor storyline flow and writing, all of the above.

What truly killed it, though, was the absolutely horrid combat.  The "3D" view was only good for getting yourself killed, and even in 2D mode the ships weren't even vaguely balanced.  SC1 and SC2 both have very few matchups that are effectively un-winnable with any combination of ships, but such a situation is the norm in SC3, not the exception.  It made for extremely frustrating gameplay, as you were simply forced to use certain ships to counter others due to the impossibility of hurting them (due to ship speed or defensive power).

Wow... the train has left the station and skipped the tracks.

[offtopic]
McCaffrey: I've read quite a lot of her stuff.  Older stuff is good, new stuff isn't worth the paper its printed on.  Her early work is much edgier and not so Pollyanna.  The Ship Who Sang, Dragonsinger, To Ride Pegasus, and the majority of the Planet Pirates series is good (the latter series being good due to the tempering influence of other authors).

Feist: Riftwar Saga is pretty good from start to finish for the first set (ending at A Darkness at Sethanon).  The following series were mostly hit-and-miss (more miss than hit), with the exception of the Empire series starting with Daughter of the Empire, which was much better than the rest of his works (again, like McCaffrey, I think the collaboration with Janny Wurts helped him here).  His standalone novel Faerie Tale is also interesting.

Robert Jordan:  Annoys me.  Greatly.  None of his characters are likable.  I'd like to take Rand, Elayne, Aviendha, Mat, and all the rest of those brats and toss them into an eternal pool of saidar.  In fact, the only characters in the entire series that I can stomach are Loial and Thom Merrilin...

Off the wall recommendations:

Neil Gaiman:  Sometimes better known for his comic book work on Miracleman and The Sandman, Neil Gaiman writes some truly interesting novels.  His three notable works in fiction are Good Omens (collaboration with the indominatable Terry Pratchett), American Gods, and Anansi Boys.  I can heartily recommend all three books.

Laurell K. Hamilton:  You'd almost have to be living under a rock if you read any sci-fi/fantasy and not heard of Laurell K. Hamilton and her Anita Blake Vampire Hunter novels.  But while the first four books of the series are excellent, her later sequels seem much weaker by comparison - but do pick up the first several books if you've not read them yet - they have great writing, excellent dialogue, and characters who have some of the snappiest patter I've ever read.

Jim Butcher:  Jim Butcher is the male equivalent to Hamilton, with a male protagonist in a similar sort of fantasy-is-real-life setting, but without the overemphasis on sex as a plot tool.  His Harry Dresden novels are all excellent, and his writing style and character dialogue are just as strong as Hamilton's.

Spathi Eluders are actually quite good ships, they're just piloted by cowards

Agreed, though I find that killing most ships with the Eluder to be too time-consuming to be worthwhile once you have stronger ships available to you.

You can take down nearly anything with an Eluder, but sometimes its a very long battle.  Maybe I'm just too impatient.

Seemingly, the lengths change when the orientation of the ships changes (this is especially prevalent for the SC1 ships, probably indicating a screw-up of some sort).

In the 320x200 graphics mode used by PC SC1 and SC2, the pixels are 20 % higher than they are wide. Does it make more sense if you take that into account?

It still doesn't make sense with this. The only one that actually changes by 20% is the Earthling Cruiser. The other change by much less, and the SC2 ships (besides the Vindicator) change either none or only a couple of pixels.

Actually, the old CRT displays that had the 320x200 resolution had pixels that were wider than they were high.  I suspect some of the variance stems from that in the original SC1 ships.

For that matter, I don't understand where the pixel readings in the original post were derived from. Examination of the source PNG files for the Ur-Quan
Dreadnought shows that it is 35x28 pixels when facing to the right, and 29x33 pixels when facing upwards.

A better explanation for this phenomenon would be to look at the scaling that occurs as the ships "turn".

I suspect that the ships were all drawn in either the "face up" or "face right" orientation originally (I assume "face up" and I'll talk about why in a moment). 

As I mentioned above, facing upwards, the Dreadnought is 29x33 pixels "face up".  In its first tilt to the right it is 30x33, then 34x31, 35x29, and finally 35x28.

If you look at the PNG files carefully, they painstakingly provide similar shadowing and detail at every angle - not always proportionate, but very deliberate nonetheless.  I suspect the "bloat" on pixel size has less to do with any error, but rather a deliberate attempt on the part of the artist(s) to maintain a smooth transition for the eye as the ship rotated on-screen (bearing in mind that these pixels were much larger and not perfectly proportioned as today's pixels tend to be).

Since the pixel "bloat" occurs as the ships from SC1 transition from "up" to "right", I would wager that the original blueprint was created in the "up" position (borne out also by the ship display in the right hand panel, which was probably used to model the first battle image for each ship).

This is kinda funny :-)

It's a game, and not a sim by any means. Are ship lengths important? Do we plan to run a D20 Star Control campaign sometime soon? Or maybe a GURPS module?

I hope not. That could kill any chance of Star Control 4 ;-) 

I have no clue what any of this means. Could someone enlighten me?

D20 and GURPS are both references to pen-and-paper role playing games along the vein of Dungeons and Dragons.  D20 is a reference to the published rules that govern the latest incarnation of Dungeons and Dragons (version 3.0 and later), and GURPS is the Generic Universal Role Playing System which has been published for about two decades by Steve Jackson Games.

UQM is a (almost perfectly) faithful reproduction of Star Control 2.  As such, you won't see "new campaigns" or modifications to the original content.

But indeed support Toys for Bob in their bid to create a new Star Control game!

That's a strange thing I just noticed, why is a nuclear war-head called a "Peacekeeper"?

"Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum." - Vegetius, from
Epitoma Rei Militaris

Translation from Latin into English: "Whoever wishes for peace, let him prepare for war"


Icemage

If using a large ship scale, I'd say that each melee 1on1 battle is just an abstraction of large space fleets engaging, say a thousands of Shofixti Scouts against a couple of Kzer-Za Dreadnaughts... kind of like the many hundred fighters and torpedo planes against Yamato or her sister ship. This would fit better with the epic nature of the game.

That rationalization works OK in SC1, but remember that you have just the one capital ship in SC2, not to mention there are numerous battles where you are specifically fighting a single enemy, such as the first Ilwrath you fight at the beginning, the Slylandro Probes, Tanaka (and Fwiffo if you screw up and make him fight you).

Once (and only once) I killed an Avatar with a Guardian in comet mode. It got stuck in one of the Avatars wings, and destroyed it in just a few seconds.

You can reliably defeat an Avatar with a Guardian simply by laying a cloud of bubbles for the Avatar to blunder into, saving some energy for Comet mode.  Fly away from the Avatar at all times, drop the cloud (leaving maybe 1/3 of your energy), and fly around and behind the Avatar and continue flying to counteract the (inevitable) tractor beam.

OT: Incidentally, I don't think it's a coincidence that the capital ship crew sizes are '42' on all of them. Another nod to Adams, maybe?

I hope my insights have not been too off-base. But now I am going to go, hunt down, kill, gut, clean, prepare and consume a cigarette and some coffee.

Might be an interesting question for TFB sometime if someone can ever corner them again (particularly since they might be more talkative, with their current campaign to get a new Star Control title released).  I think it's very likely, though it could also be a case of accidental design, since those side profiles with the bars exactly fit into the original 640x480 screen size.

---

I wouldn't try to read too much into any of the ship sizes. 

One must remember that:

(a) Most of the ships were originally designed and drawn in Star Control I, long before much, if any of the backstory for Star Control II was created.  I am sure they were sized and scaled based on the tactical implications within the Melee mode of SC1, rather than conforming to any set relative size ratios.

(b) If we're looking at relative sizes, there are tons of items in SC2 that don't compute.  Orz marines are significantly larger than Ur-Quan Dreadnought fighters (come to think of it, they're faster than the fighters, too, since they can Gravity Whip... not to mention being able to take much more damage).  And thinking about how it's possible that a single alien crew member can kill an Orz invader with a sidearm when it can take a direct hit from, say, a Syreen Penetrator's main gun and still keep on trucking makes my head hurt.

Regarding the Precursors and their weaponry, let's not forget that all of the military powerups you can locate in SC1 are "precursor artifacts".  Seems to me like they were fairly heavily leaning towards militantism.

One myth I think I've seen bandied about is that it is possible to earn enough credits by trading Bio data to the Melnorme, etc. to find out why the bridge turns purple.  I'm fairly certain it isn't possible.

Regarding Arilou vs. Chmmr myth, as I recall, it is theoretically possible, with perfect flying skills against the CPU (not a human) to win a fight against the Chmmr Avatar with an Ariloulalay Skiff, but it would take forever.   I'm fairly sure the Arilou laser has just a fraction more range than the satellites do, so if you can stay out of danger range of the Chmmr (not too terribly difficult since the Arilou's reactionless drive makes it the only ship in the game that is immune to the Chmmr tractor beam effect), you could plink away at the satellites... very very slowly... then find a way to close in by forcing the computer to gravity whip around a planet.  Actually doing this would be virtually impossible, however, since your margin for error is basically zero.

The glory Device is antimatter? Where does it say? The Utwig bomb is anyways.

No where apparently, not even in the SC1/SC2 manuals.  :/  I guess this is fodder for the SC Myths thread.

I'm fairly certain the only time the technology behind the Glory Device has ever really been mentioned in SC1/2 was the story about what the Shofixti did when the Ur-Quan fleet arrived in their system: they used a modified Glory Device to make their sun go nova.

While this is speculative only, the Wikipedia article on antimatter-matter interaction is estimated to produce 134 times the energy of a standard fusion H+H -> He fusion reaction.
 (reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter )

Additionally, most of that energy is produced as kinetic energy.  It's close enough within the realm of science fiction to say that a large scale introduction of antimatter into a star could conceivably cause it to go nova.

In other words, it's at least a plausible explanation, though how you would go about acquiring that much antimatter is an open question.

As noted above, UQM is a remake of Star Control II, and plays almost 99% identically, which is a huge tribute to the skill and dedication of the people working on this project (granted, they had the original source code released by Toys For Bob, but I understand the original code wasn't very stable and had a lot of holes which had to be retroactively fixed).

Icemage

I'll echo the above comments and say the Sa-Matra is pretty easy to defeat with the Pkunk Fury, but I much prefer the raw power of the Utwig Juggernaut, as it is effectively immune to all of the Sa-Matra's attacks, can wipe out the shield generators in only a few volleys of fire, and can easily take out any remaining fireballs/green floaty things while taking zero damage in return.

Another fun ship to use to take down the shield generators is the Ariloulaleelay Skiff; fly in, zap a few times and teleport out.  Rinse. Repeat.  Getting rid of fireballs and green floaters after the shields are down is a lot trickier, however (this is also an issue for the Pkunk Fury).


Icemage

Despite the rampant krypto-revisionism (which I fully agree with, mind, as I find SC3 to be about as related to SC2 as Highlander II: The Quickening was to the original Highlander movie), I like the plotlines described, though there are some logical holes:

- Zelnick may be tactically brilliant, but why would the Androsynth need him if they're getting assistance from the much-better-at-predicting-the-future Ariloulaleelay?

- Where does the Vindicator Mark II come into this?

- I've always thought that most of the ships from SC3 were absolutely worthless.  Poorly designed, annoying to talk to, play with and fight against.  Rather than reviving all (or even most) of the races from SC3 (come on, the galaxy is huge, but twice as many newly discovered races?), it would have been better to add just some of races to replace deceased ones (Ilwrath, Thraddash, et. al.), and give the existing ones a fresh coat of paint, in terms of deeper storylines, and upgraded technology.


Icemage