Was the part about the Kilrathi being a relatively young spacefaring race developed late in the series development? The idea of Kilrah's importance would depend on the age of the empire so I'm wondering when this was developed and how much of it made its way to the writers.

I don't know, would it have? Earth & Beyond only lasted two years, but then maybe nobody really cared enough about it. Star Wars Galaxies lasted eight years, which is still only a third of UO. The only other game I can think of with the same longetivity is Tibia, another roleplaying game from...

On a related note: do you know if Exo-Squad was ever translated?

How are the animations stored? Some of the planets have animations on the background, as opposed to characters.

That makes sense now especially given the popularity of the remake, but I wonder what the case was in 1998.

I haven't read the Heart of the Tiger novel in some time, does it really not go into any more detail about the TCS Leningrad connection? Strange to bring up such an obscure reference to Hobbes in a story primarily about him and then not pursue it further. Unless of course this is completely...

Space Battleship Yamato also has a similar name in Korean, so it makes sense that the series would be renamed to capitalize on that. Or does it? I'm not sure how popular Yamato was in Korea. Apparently it was aired but heavily localized and under different names, due to a government policy...

It's still not too late! The Confederation project has made fantastic progress in only two months.

I guess at the time there just wasn't the incentive. They didn't think that what they were doing was of more than academic interest and the idea that you could use them to recreate the engine was farfetched, years before OpenXCom and Rollercoaster Tycoon. And I've found in general that a lot of...

I typed in TCS Paradigm Shift and it gave me this. Kris is definitely earning his pay. It gave me a start because I thought it was the Talon model from the old Reckoning mod, but apparently it's from a fan film that was never completed. Looking at it it's actually quite close to the original...

The Drayman model originally being a cruise ship makes sense, though after thirty years I can't see it as anything other than a Drayman now.

Could have fooled me; I didn't notice the connection at all but looking at the art style now your touch is definitely there. I'm happy the game seems to be doing well, sitting just a few points off Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam. Quite aside from Howard's connection or the Origin lineage or...

I'm pretty sure we have no idea.

Isn't that the same ship that appeared in ads?

By the way, if you want to read the Privateer section in text format (and without pictures) you can do so here: https://www.wcnews.com/articles/art64.shtml

Happy 142nd birthday!

I remember when I was working on the old Reckoning mod for Freelancer (which turned 20 years old this month!) I modded the cruise engines to go twice as fast, like how in the novels the ships would shut their hydrogen scoops off and accelerate Newtonianly. Not quite 14000 KPS though. It would...

Yeah, it seems like the kind of thing that's more interesting technically than practically. There comes a point where something is so tiny that it really isn't usable. Something I'd really like to see run is the clockworkPi uConsole. This thing has a 74-key keypad and a mini-trackball so...

These are really nice. We never got to see the underside and back in the film, wish that we had. Do you know if the other ships of the fleet in the final cut were Concordia models?

I wouldn't recommend it, they're not designed for it. This was at the very beginning of 3D design and they were intended for very small prerendered images. I don't think it's even technically possible, a lot of them are essentially collections of basic shapes rather than single meshes.