TJP
SOC-12
Well, what can I say, I'm a lover not a fighter.
I commend your piloting skills. How in blazes did you manage to win missions like saving the president's ship from Indie attack? I had my hands full just trying to stay alive after the Indie fleet jumps in, let alone protect another ship. Dodging gazillion missiles and PBC shots sort of took all my time - and time was a luxury that mission did not have. IIRC, that was the mission that turned me to the dark side and I started using cheats.
BTW, did you ever play Warhead? It was an old Amiga space sim from the same guy who was behind Independence War, Glyn Williams. An excellent game, very much like I-War (story driven, vector flight, etc.) and also very difficult (but that one I completed without cheating!). It was the spiritual father of I-War. It had a marvellous soundtrack, making full use of Amiga's high quality (for it's time) stereo sound and one of the most memorable space sim scenes - first contact with a Berserker (try offering a hand of friendship to an Ancients' Warmachine). That game alone was enough reason to have an Amiga...
In fact, Warhead was a big push towards hard(er) sci-fi in RPGs for me. Before that, I never gave much thought to how space flight might work or how space warfare would be. Star Wars was the way I'd been following until then, even in Traveller. Traveller's "hard space opera" approach had always intrigued me, but I mostly ran Star Wars-styled sci-fi campaigns then. Scientific realities were largely victims of technobabble (or ignorance). Nothing wrong with that, per se, space opera isn't that much about science after all (IMHO). But this had started to gnaw the suspension of disbelief in my imagination. Warhead opened my eyes to the possibilities of hard sci-fi. Hard SF was no longer a dull or stifling part of sci-fi, it was a road of possibilites. Truth is stronger than fiction. Amen.
