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Topic: Kohr-Ah Ur-Quan Homeworld? (Read 82928 times)
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Frank
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BTW -- did the same guys really write SF as SC? I remember being struck by a similar feeling when I first played SC -- I played SF ages and ages ago -- but dismissed it as just genre similarity.
Is there any way to play a decent version of SF2 on the PC? SF1 has the fun Genesis version and SF2 has the fun Mac version, but SF2 PC has unplayably bad graphics (at least by my tastes, which can be quite forgiving) and sound.
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Art
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Although I appreciate your efforts to condescend to me -- really! -- I'm not even sure what you mean by: "Umm... the one I learned in fourth grade, and have repeatedly seen in science texts since then, and that is here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur" Surely even someone as fantastically educated as you was not learning about phylologies and clades in fourth grade. Given that Wikipedia (font that it is of all dubious knowledge) doesn't render an actual definition of dinosaur, it's not clear what you're pointing to. Are you pointing to: "Dinosaurs are animals that dominated the terrestrial ecosystem for over 100 million years"? Or "The term is a combination of the Greek words deinos ("terrible" or "fearfully great" or "formidable") and sauros ("lizard" or "reptile")."? Or "[T]his article hereafter uses "dinosaur" as a synonym for "non-avian dinosaur", and "bird" as a synonym for "avian dinosaur"."? Or "Dinosaurs are archosaurs, like modern crocodilians. These are set apart by having diapsid skulls, having two holes where jaw muscles attach, called temporal fenestrae." I'm tickled by the conceit that that was the definition you learned in fourth grade; tickled, but unconvinced.
No. In fourth grade I learned that the difference between dinosaurs and reptiles was that dinosaurs have upright legs that go under their bodies and reptiles don't.
This is mentioned in the article. I have seen it multiple places since then, even though I am not a biologist.
It wasn't until recently that I learned about the complicated stuff like cladistic vs. Linnaean taxonomy, and what archosaurs are, and so on, and I'm not sure I have that accurately. But the definition of "dinosaur" I know is simple -- it's something with reptile-like characteristics that has a stronger, more developed kind of limb joint than reptiles.
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Art
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Clearly I should register so I can just edit posts. Oh well. Fish had spines, then amphibians could walk on land, reptiles could raise young on land, mammals and dinosaurs had upright bodies powered by warm-blooded metabolisms and birds could fly and walk upright (and were also warm blooded). Well, of course this depends in part on the warm-bloodedness of dinosaurs, a topic still hotly (haha) debated (and, at least last I checked, leaning toward the exothermic school). But my point is that I'm not sure why this division is any better than talking about reptiles as a species of egg-laying, dry-scaled land animals with either individual teeth or curved (turtle-like) beaks and talking about birds as a species of egg-laying, feathered, flying animals with beaks. Dinosaurs then falls into the reptile category and birds do not. For my money, that distinction is the better one. There's a reason why dinosaurs were called "terrible lizards" not "terrible birds." It may not be the taxonomically ideal reason, but it is probably is a humanistically solid one. Birds, fish, mammals, reptiles, and insects are distinguishable by their skin as much as anything else (feathers, fish scales, fur, rough scales or tight scales, exoskeletons). If it turns out that dinosaurs were covered by feathers, I might be inclined to think of them as birds.
Does it really matter more what you're "inclined to think of them" as or what scientists find useful and actually use on a day-to-day basis?
There is a taxonomic clade called Dinosauria. Crocodilians aren't in it. This is an actual, official, standard definition.
And biologists almost always think things like bone structure are more basic and essential than things like the structure of skin. In any case fossils of feathered dinosaurs, like Archeopteryx, do exist. The existence of Archeopteryx and its relatives is what makes it difficult to draw a clear line between birds and dinosaurs.
Cladistically, of course, birds simply are dinosaurs, no question. They're just "avian dinosaurs". But they're definitely directly descended from dinosaurs, which in cladistic terminology makes them dinosaurs, just like we are reptiles because we're descended from reptiles.
Of course, scientists ought to use whatever classification system works best for them. While I, like Orwell, prefer pints and gallons and feet and inches to the metric system, I don't think scientists should use the English system. Likewise, I'm quite content with scientists doing whatever crazy things they want with *their language.* So, Pluto is a planet for me and will be so in coversation for at least several more generations, even if the concept of "planet" is not practically useful or logically applicable to Pluto. And birds will be birds, not reptiles. And starfish will be starfish, not sea stars. (Although I don't think that most people think starfish or octopuses are fish, though if pressed to assign them to some category, they might break down and do it.) And race will exist. And gender will exist. And so forth.
...Sure. But even in fourth grade most of us dinosaur fans were saying things like "Ichythysaurs aren't dinosaurs, they're marine reptiles". I don't think that this is a matter of something arcane that "scientists" use -- this is the actual definition ever since the term dinosaur was coined -- as early as the 19th century scientists had started classifying dinosaurs vs. reptiles and certain kinds of dinosaurs vs. others by the leg joints. The *public perception* is that dinosaurs were dinosaurs because they were very big. But the way the scientists saw it, this was a secondary thing -- dinosaurs were *able* to grow very big because of their different skeletal structures.
You're free to use the word "dinosaur" however you want in your daily life. But the stricter definition *does* trump the looser one.
Most people's definition of "fish", for instance, is either "things that live in the water" or "things that live in the water with fins and tails". A lot of people will carelessly call dolphins or whales "fish". But this is laziness -- there's no benefit in doing so. Most people who actually have studied dolphins or whales even casually know that they are, in fact, mammals -- it's a pretty simple, important piece of knowledge and once you know it you can keep things straight in your head much more easily instead of being confused every time you hear something about dolphins that doesn't apply to "other fish".
The thing is that the reason these things are "taxonomically better" is because they *make more sense*. You only lump together "big, old, extinct reptile-like things" in one group if you don't pay much attention to the members of that group. The shape and structure of dinosaurs is really quite different from that of other big reptile things. If you had a bunch of dinosaurs in cages along with a giant crocodile from the Triassic, you could *see* that the giant crocodile is a different kind of thing -- unlike all dinosaurs it creeps, it stays in the water, its belly drags over the ground. And you'd have things that didn't quite fit your definition -- say, really small dinosaurs four inches high -- that would clearly still be dinosaurs even if they weren't "big monsters".
Just like people call dolphins fish because they've only ever seen pictures of them. If they had a dolphin in their backyard it'd quickly become obvious how different a dolphin's lifestyle is and how different its actual shape is from that of a real fish.
There are plenty of terms that have no scientific use that you can use instead. Say "great beasts" or "ancient monsters" or something. Use the scientific term "archosaur", which was invented for this purpose (it adds pterosaurs and crocodilians to the mix). Just like if you really want to talk about something that includes dolphins and whales say "sea creatures" or "children of the deep" or whatever. Poetic license gives you a large number of terms to choose from -- you don't need to muddle actual scientific terms with strict meanings to do so.
To lay out another bias, I'm all for keeping the number of animal kingdoms (if that's the proper term; it's been a long time since high school biology) as low as possible, so putting dinosaurs in equal standing to fish and mammals and reptiles and birds seems like a bad solution to me. (So does saying that the "thumb" is not a finger or that arachnids aren't insects.) Shrug. We all have our biases.
*sigh*
Why is it asking so much to go with what is clearly written and used all the time by scientists? There isn't a "controversy" over this in reality -- people who have *studied* dinosaurs and know what they are talking about more than you or I have already created the taxons and recorded them and they're now in basic use and there's no way to change the terms around without causing trouble.
People used to think dinosaurs were just really big lizards because they didn't know very much about dinosaurs. Way back in the *nineteenth century* after they studied enough fossils they started thinking dinosaurs were different from reptiles. It only seems like an unnecessary wrinkle to you because you haven't spent much time studying dinosaurs.
FWIW, arachinds just plain aren't insects. They haven't *ever* been insects. The word "insect" comes from the Latin word for "divided" (like "bisect") and it refers to things with three-segmented bodies. Arachnids don't have a clear division of their body between thorax and abdomen -- they have a head and only a body -- therefore the people who invented the term "insect" never intended it to be used for arachnids -- therefore the reason arachnids aren't insects isn't because someone "invented" a separate category for arachnids to go into but because some people *don't really pay attention* to little bugs when they look at them and *lazily* lump things together into a category without thinking about it.
I mean, you can easily use a slang term that most people will be okay with, like "bugs", for both. (There is an order of insects that's specifically called bugs, but even scientists usually only refer to those as "true bugs" because of how widespread the vague term "bug" is.) If you want to be proper about it you can say "arthropods". If you want to exclude lobsters and crabs you can say "small, land arthropods". It's not that hard.
For purposes of communicating clearly in day to day speech, I think it's better not to call birds reptiles or dinosaurs coequal to the other kingdoms. Since last I checked the message board for an old, rather sophomoric game is most amenable to colloquial, not scientific, speech, I don't see why we shouldn't just speak in plain English.
You're thinkin of "classes", by the way. All animals are in one kingdom, the animal kingdom.
And, yes, that's me saying you should use scientific terminology correctly instead of guessing. Sorry. But "plain English" is plainer when you don't muck around and mix definitions through laziness. I'm not saying you should say "members of superorder Dinosauria" or use a big word or whatever -- I'm saying you should call dinosaurs *what dinosaurs are* and not misuse the term.
Would it be so offensive if I told you that the Gauls really were one specific group of barbarians in Europe and that you shouldn't use the word Gaul to just mean everybody who lived outside the Roman Empire, even though that's what ordinary folks who don't know anything about history sometimes do? Or to tell you that before Augustus Caesar it was the Roman Republic and not the Roman Empire, even though most people don't really know or care about the difference? Or to tell you that even though a lot of people say "Chinese" to mean all East Asians that such-and-such a person is actually Korean? Would I be quibbling then?
Come on. I'm asking you to accept that the people who use the term *most* on a day-to-day basis have an actual, working definition of it, and just because people don't know it doesn't mean the term doesn't *have* a definition, which is what you seem to be saying -- that it only has a "connotative" meaning. Just because you don't know something or your friends don't know something doesn't mean that that ignorance is acceptable and that speaking ignorantly is "plain English".
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Frank
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I find your increasing self-righteousness a cause for increasing amusement. That said, I'm not sure who's more foolish, the fool, or the fool who bothers engaging with him. (Foolish, here, used not to mean *stupid,* which I most certainly do not think you are, but to mean of poor judgment.) Oh, I could certainly up my scorn factor to try to match yours, but why I would want to try to insult you, when, as I've said before, I have high regard for the thoughtfulness and intelligence of your posts, I can't see. Why you want to insult me, I cannot imagine. Perhaps you think it ups your stock to try to mock me. Maybe it does. It strikes me that it makes you look absurd -- especially as you desperately use Google and Wikipedia to try to and look like you're an expert on taxonomy.
You live in a world where you can simultaneously claim that "A lot of people will carelessly call dolphins or whales 'fish'" -- a phenomenon I've never observed -- and that cladistic taxological terms "[a]re in basic use." I live in a world where people use dinosaurs as a short-hand to refer to the huge reptiles of the past, call animals with feathers "birds" but not "reptiles," and refer to gilled creatures as fish and aquatic mammals as mammals.
Your mistake is in assuming that because two usages have a similar degree of looseness (calling all huge old reptiles "dinosaurs" and calling all finned sea creatures "fish"), they are similarly sloppy. But that's simply not true. Sloppiness is using less precision than the situation demands. Here, we were talking about the creatures that were extinguished in the cataclysm that wiped out much of reptilian (or whatever you want to call it) life on ancient earth. Using "dinosaur" as a short-hand for those creatures is loose, but it's not sloppy, especially given our cultural context.
But I think that mistake comes from an overall bias toward beligerence. Your inability to perceive the more-than-slightly tongue-in-cheek tone of my last post (such as insisting that spiders will always be insects) reveals a lack of perspective. It's the same lack of perspective that left some people patiently examining whether the bugs under feet looked one way or the other, while the rest of us got on walking and going about our business.
Would it be so offensive if I told you that the Gauls really were one specific group of barbarians in Europe and that you shouldn't use the word Gaul to just mean everybody who lived outside the Roman Empire, even though that's what ordinary folks who don't know anything about history sometimes do? Or to tell you that before Augustus Caesar it was the Roman Republic and not the Roman Empire, even though most people don't really know or care about the difference? Or to tell you that even though a lot of people say "Chinese" to mean all East Asians that such-and-such a person is actually Korean? Would I be quibbling then?
I'm not sure if here you're trying to suggest that *I* was refering to all barbarians as Gauls. Since historians refer to the group on which Caesar committed genocide as "Gauls" -- and Caesar himself used that term -- it's the term I use. I'm well aware he killed lots of other barbarians, too.
Likewise, I'm not sure if you're accusing me of refering to the Roman Republic as the Roman Empire, or just insinuating that I did?
Or that I called all Asians Chinese?
But yes, in a lot of circumstances, you would be quibbling. For example, if someone said, "Rome's empire was responsible for countless attrocities, such as the slaughter of the Gauls," and you jumped in and said, "Well, technically, that was the Roman Republic," it would be an example of a stupid, childish quibble aimed mostly to derail conversation and flaunt your own nitpickish "knowledge." This is particularly so given that "empire" need not be a title willingly taken on. Or is it fair to say that America isn't imperialist because we're a republic?
"No!" cries Art, when the French protest the war in Iraq. "We're expansivist republican, not imperialist! Get it straight! Anyone knows that!"
The degree of specificity called for is guided by context and by purpose. If we were talking about changing Roman culture and someone confused imperial and republican Rome, then your comments would be productive.
As I said a few posts ago, given the initial wording of my post, I think your correction of my use of dinosaur made sense. But a blanket rule that dinosaur ought always only to apply to certain big creatures (which we cannot properly, apparently, call lizards or even reptiles!) and not to others seems silly. And arguing that because the cognoscenti use a word a certain way it ought only to be used that way seems, at the least, elitist (not so bad there) but at the worst, impractical (a deadly sin, in my opinion).
Put otherwise, if you received a distress call that said, "I'm stuck a sea and have seen neither fish nor fowl!" I don't think the proper response would be, "Well, what about dolphins?"
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Frank
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"certain big creatures" should read "certain big, scaled creatures of prehistoric times"
Now I'm REALLY getting sloppy! Or else walruses are dinosaurs, too!
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Deus Siddis
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"BTW -- did the same guys really write SF as SC? I remember being struck by a similar feeling when I first played SC -- I played SF ages and ages ago -- but dismissed it as just genre similarity."
Yes, and the similarities are somewhat obvious to me too. I think the Ancients were way cooler than the Precursors, though.
"Is there any way to play a decent version of SF2 on the PC? SF1 has the fun Genesis version and SF2 has the fun Mac version, but SF2 PC has unplayably bad graphics (at least by my tastes, which can be quite forgiving) and sound. "
Yes, there are:
1) Download a Genesis emulator and a rom. (This worked great for me, but sadly I hate the genesis version with every fiber of my being.)
2) Download the Basilisk 2 Mac emulator and the Mac starflight 1&2 off of our site (starflightcentral.com).
3) Buy a genesis and cartridge or old macintosh (like the LCIII that I use) off of ebay for cheap.
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Deus Siddis
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"especially as you desperately use Google and Wikipedia to try to and look like you're an expert on taxonomy."
Hahaha, that's what I do all the time! 
To make myself feel better, I like to think that I'm a lightningly fast super central processing unit, which must use wiki and google as it's memory. In reality, I'm probably just dumb. 
BTW Art, us laymen (whatever you mean by that) do not call cetaceans and echinoderms fish (and it didn't take wiki or google for me to learn any of that, just high school biology and some interest in life's many forms). And if someone from another culture thought I was French of Lebanese, I wouldn't lose my shirt (only a jack ass would get so upset over something so ridiculous).
Anyway, I'm not upset, but I think super-precise, elitist intellectualism is no brighter than any old meathead who thinks bar fights are the ultimate test of one's self worth. I think the current definition of a dinosaur is pretty good (don't get me started on sponges, though), but it is not that valuable. Classifying *dead* species does not have many real life applications. It is just dishing out names for dead species (dinosaurs), using a dead language (latin).
Besides, as I've said before, english is a primitive, half-assed language with many rough grafts from other tongues (like french and latin), and it is ever changing and evolving. So using it perfectly is not that rewarding, just use it for what it is meant to do -- communicate information to other people. I was just joking about the dinos and descendents thing, it really doesn't make a big deal when you're talking about whether or not the Ur-Quan still have a homeworld (which they do  ).
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Frank
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@DS -- The Genesis stuff would just be for SF1, right? I've played through that before, although a refreshed wouldn't hurt. Mac emulator would be for SF2? BTW -- Mobygames simply has a "special thanks" to PRIII; are you sure he worked on the game as a writer?
@Art -- On my way home from work, I came up with what I think is a pretty good example of my general point about precision in language. (As I noted above, with regard to my specific reference to alligators early on, you were right to call me on them not fitting in with dinosaurs as I had suggested they did.)
Here's the example:
Every little kid learns early on that tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables. As it turns out, this is actually a pretty fruitless (hehe) distinction, because there isn't a division between fruits (the ripened ovary of a flower, a factoid I didn't just Google, but only because I've had this discussion before) and vegetables (which lack a technical definition, but are basically just the edible part of a plant). But say that the child-like distinction holds.
So you are hired as a stocking clerk at a grocery store and are told by the manager to go lay out the tomatoes. Unfortunately, there are no labels (bad grocery store) except for "fruits" and "vegetables." Where do you put the tomato? Following your logic, I think the answer would have to be in the "fruit" section. But a good grocery store -- indeed, every grocrey store I've been to -- puts tomatoes with vegetables (often near garlic, which is neither here nor there).
The reason is that when we're preparing food, "fruit" is a shorthand for "plant matter eaten as a sweet snack or after a meal" and vegetable is shorthand for "plant matter eaten during a meal." (Now here's where you niggle -- "But dessert is part of a meal too!")
That's why children are amused by tomatoes being fruits, because they are a fruit that defies fruitiness. They know that tomatoes fit better with vegetables -- and that they would find them in the "vegetable" section.
So a customer comes, looks for apples, bananas, peaches, plums, oranges, and so forth, and finds none. He comes up to you and says, "Sir, there's no fruit here!" If you respond by pointing to a habanero chili hanging above the greens, you deserve a punch in the face, not an accolade for the precision of your language.
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Deus Siddis
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"The Genesis stuff would just be for SF1, right?"
That's right, there never was a genesis SF2.
"Mac emulator would be for SF2?"
Starflight 2 AND Starflight 1. One thing about running the mac SFs on basilisk or a modern mac system, is that sometimes the sound does not work (maybe there's a way to make it work, but I haven't found it). The easiest thing would probably be to run it off an old mac (that's what I do), using system 7 or so. If you don't mind paying a little for a mac w/OS7 or already have them (or maybe you have a bunch of old mac games that you've been dying to replay), then I would suggest that path. If you don't care about the sound and don't really want to pay anything more for a run through SF2, then basilisk might be the answer. Note that there might be a way to get the sound to work on a modern computer system, I just don't know of any and never really tried (because I already have that LC3).
" BTW -- Mobygames simply has a "special thanks" to PRIII; are you sure he worked on the game as a writer?"
Did you see that link that Moronic Maria gave a couple pages back? In that doc, PR3 says that he worked with Greg Johnson and a few others to write SC2. Also, if you go to mobygames and look up SC2, you'll see that Greg Johnson is on the credits under both "Additional Design", "Special Thanks To" and "Writing / Dialogue / Story".
So I don't know how much of a part PR3 had in Starflight, but I think Greg Johnson was a major part of Starcontrol. BTW, in case you don't already know, Greg Johnson was part of the core team that worked on Starflight and Starflight2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula.
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Frank
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@ meep-eep -- Well, in this case, I don't think our debate is so much over a lack of clarity on definitions -- even under my definition, the point I was making was wrong -- but rather a debate about definitions themselves, i.e., whether a tomato can sensibly ever be classified as a vegetable (under the false dichotomy). But it's a point well taken. Usually, in serious debates, I do try to provide definitions of controversial terms.
@ DS -- Ah, I hadn't heard Greg Johnson's name before. Truth be told, I played SF1 a long time ago ('91 I think) and SF2 about the same time. SF1 I played through but only with heavy reliance on the hint guide (I was pretty young / lazy at the time, as opposed to now being older / lazier but better at games). I don't think it really registered on me as a great game. It's only after having enjoyed SC2 so much that I want to go back at try out SF.
I had actually worked (pretty seriously) on a SC/SF clone for a while, so I had tried replaying SF, but I found the old DOS graphics / sounds too much to bear. I really do like SF's RPG elements though, something that I would've ported over to my clone concept.
How is SF3 coming, by the way? I've been following it for what feels like a decade now, eagerly hoping to get to play the same game with updated graphics. If you guys succeed, it will be the second greatest indie project dream of mine (the first being the completion of any of the various X-Com remakes; X-Com was also being cannibalized for my clone -- the research and base-building elements, mostly).
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Deus Siddis
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"It's only after having enjoyed SC2 so much that I want to go back at try out SF."
We'll I don't want to take anything away from SC2, because it has a very fun combat system and some really funny lines and delivery (spathi, umgah, kohr-ah), but I still very much think Starflight is the best (of all games, actually). Maybe that's because I played Starflight in my childhood, or maybe it's the darker, more in depth, more realistic feeling universe. But if you like SC2 even though you find it somewhat shallow, you might like (or relike) Starflight and maybe the lighter Starflight 2. BTW, do you still have an old mac to run it on?
"I had actually worked (pretty seriously) on a SC/SF clone for a while,"
Was there a website for your project?
"How is SF3 coming, by the way? I've been following it for what feels like a decade now, eagerly hoping to get to play the same game with updated graphics."
We hit a few speed bumps, but things seem to be moving again, nicely. I feel a little sorry that people have had to wait so long (and continue to wait), but I think that with 2005 technology, SF3 will be much better than it would have been five years ago. Hopefully we'll just have clear sailing from here to the release. BTW (I can't stop using that abbreviation ), we changed our site address to www.starflightcentral.com a few months ago. Going to the old site address will no get you anyplace, anymore.
And just so everybody knows, I am the only ass hole who works on the Starflight 3 freeware project. Don't judge it based on me.
Sorry if this is off-topic, Meep. And I don't want to take anything away from you guys, you've all done a fantastic job bringing one of my top 5 favorite games of all time, into this millenium.
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« Last Edit: August 30, 2005, 06:14:56 am by Deus_Siddis »
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Frank
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We'll I don't want to take anything away from SC2, because it has a very fun combat system and some really funny lines and delivery (spathi, umgah, kohr-ah), but I still very much think Starflight is the best (of all games, actually).
My recollection of SF was that it was very good but had a much less tightly-wound plot than SC2. I remember sort of vaguely bumping around various side plots, getting a Spemin mind-control device, then making a certain discovery about fuel (left vague to avoid spoiling), then fighting a battle or something, and then the game just sort of winding down. There was an ending text scroll but no termination of the game, and all that was left to do was to fly to some nebula where there were super powerful ships that always killed me, and then be killed by them.
By my recollection, things were darker, but not that much darker. I mean, the Spemin were pretty ridiculous, the races were all pretty stereotyped and somewhat less interesting than SC2's (with less backstory, too), and the fuel issue, though somewhat mindblowing, didn't seem to have the same tragic arc as the Ur-Quan subjugation.
That said, I played SF1 when I was young and I don't think I gave it its due, and I played SC2 first without any walkthrough as a kid, then when UQM came out and I was already steeped in the game's arcana. I mean, I still think it's pretty goofy that such serious conversations are had about the game, but on the other hand, it's pretty mind-boggling that there's so much texture to the story.
I think a major aspect of SC2's light-heartedness is the voice acting. I played it first without any voice acting, and took the whole thing much more seriously. When the Dnyarri sounds like a boor, the Thraddash like boars, the Orz like hopped up surfer dudes, the Yehat like cheesy highlanders, etc., it's hard to take the storyline very seriously. The text itself is so filled with tragedy (albeit also with wildly implausible aversions of tragedy) that it's really pretty dark. Particularly, the Ur-Quan arc (which is echoed, or presaged, by the wonderful Githzeraki / Ilithid Planescape story) and the Syreen / Mycon arc really, really impress me.
The game I worked on never had a website. It has a lot of design docs, particularly a huge series of race descriptions. The race descriptions, which include ship designs, missions, etc., are somewhat embarrassing now that I realize just how derivative they were. The one thing that was really solid about the game, I think, was the capital ship and combat models.
The basic conceit was that you would be able to design your capship in a fashion akin to X-Com's base design (meaning, laying down modules in empty squares) -- that is, in two dimensions rather than just in one. So it would be a top-down cutaway of the ship. You'd lay down different types of modules, which would include crew quarters, research labs, engineering bays, weapons closets, then the standard SC2 type stuff (thrusters, storage, etc., etc.), and also hangars and exits from hangars.
Combat had two elements, a turn-based strategic part where your fighters were effectively icons (although the game was 3D) and your capship was a big, mobile base. Each race had two types of fighters -- heavy fighters, which could do good damage to capships, and light fighters, which could beat heavy fighters. (In practice, there was high diversity and not every heavy could hurt caps and not every light beat every heavy.) You launched fighters from your hangars.
Heavy fighters could shoot cap ships (when in range) during the turn-based mode. Capship weapons (when in range and within firing arc) could fire on any fighter. Fighters could be moved (in free 2D, i.e., not tile-based but distance-based) and every fighter exerted a zone of control. When a fighter entered another fighter's zone of control, that fighter could choose to initiate combat (but only during its turn -- if that makes any damned sense).
Once the dog-fight began, it went to an SC2 style real-time top-down sequence. But unlike SC2, the dog fight map was circumscribed. If a fighter left the area, it "fled" the battle and the other side got to move the fighter wherever it wanted within a certain range.
When you targeted capships, you would be able to target the component you wanted to fire upon, though you had to fire on the outermost components before working inward. As components took damage, their effectiveness would fade.
In addition to fighters, capships could also launch troop pods, which could fired upon by other capships or attacked in the real-time mode. Troop pods that fled did not get to be moved by the other side (thus meaning you had to kill them to stop them). Troop pods would have no offensive capability.
(More on troops in one sec.)
Finally, within capships would be icons (in this case, real icons, not 3D models) of the crew, consisting of engineers (who could repair damage), scientists (who were useless in a fight), pilots (who were useless in a fight but which you might not want to leave in a hanger bay if it was going to be destroyed), and soldiers. Each crew class would also have officers, somewhat a la SF, somewhat a la Master of Orion II.
Okay! So, when a component took enough damage, it lost pressure and any crew in it not equipped with environmental suits (i.e., all but certain soldiers or crew members of a robotic race) would die. So, you had to move crew around to avoid getting killed (usually by moving them inward). Now, here's where the troop pods come in. When those hit your capship, or yours hit their capship, you could move troops into the other guy's zone. These troops could do various things, including kill enemy crew, destroy unlaunched enemy fighters, and destroy components.
So, the idea would be that during the fight, you'd be moving crew around trying to send engineers to repair damaged components (but evac'ing them when it looked like they were going to blow), rushing troops to repel boarders, using light fighters to screen off the heavy fighters and heavy fighters to dish out the pain on the enemy capship.
The problem with this design, which ultimately was one of the death knells of the game, is that it made battles enormously complex. This would be good if all the game were was a scifi ship-to-ship combat simulator. (Maybe.) But the problem is that combat is simply a regular but not sole element of SF/SC2 style games. If every battle involved this much maneuvering, the player would never get anywhere!
Really, what killed the game was two things -- my lack of ability to understand core gameplay concepts (something that takes a lot of time to learn) and our total lack of manpower. There were only three of us working on the game, while pursuing other things. As things wound up, we proved pretty successful the three of us: I went on to some grand law school success and to work as a game writer for TimeGate and Bioware; the programmer got a huge scholarship that ultimately matured into natural language processing work through a DARPA program; and the artist is now a luminary at Animal Logic, Fox's in-house 3D effects studio down in Australia.
But our chimeric, ambitious, derivative, overly-complex clone never really got much beyond a working dogfight system and ship editor, a few ship models and skins, a number of race designs, and some hundred pages of design docs.
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