Starflight

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Created on Monday, 16 March 2015 12:55

Written by KTP

Starflight:  A journey into roach engineers, strip mining, and space racists.

The ISS Longinus was prepped for its mission of exploring the vast universe while Captain Bossman looked over the personnel files of his brave crew. Stu was going to take his role as Science officer with the android Robocab in control of navigation. Roach, our insect-like Velox engineer, was in charge of cargo and trying to keep the ship in one piece when we inevitably piss off a fleet of warships. Wizliz took the role of our Thrynn comm officer. This reptilian officer will ensure that the elegant languages of the vast cultures of the universe will get translated to mongoloid. This is not Wizliz's fault. It's just that Bossman thinks Class 3 shields and multiple weapon systems on the Longinus are cooler than adequate crew training. Last we have the talking plant Greenpea of the peaceful Elowan race who will serve as the medical officer. It's Greenpeas's job to patch us all up when we fuck up a landing or if crew members get hurt when a fleet of eight murderous Mechan ships decide that our luxury of breathing is being revoked. It is up to the brave affirmative action crew of the Longinus to explore this universe and ultimately save all known life from the cause of the mysterious solar flares that are wiping out vast systems. The brave crew does a heroic job of fucking this up royally.

I want to blow this ship out of the stars, but it's a warship. I grovel appropriately to the other captain.

Starflight was a space exploration game that seemed to be forgotten by the wayside. In the game, you are given a ship, a crew, and an ATV to explore a huuuuuuge area of space filled with a multitude of solar systems, planets, and alien races inhabiting the spaces in between. There was a plot that you could pursue, but even that needed exploration since the clues and hints were hidden in the 800 planet map. This map came with the box and it was fucking intimidating for a twelve year old, but that was the draw. Being able to touchdown on each of these planets to search for minerals, ruins, or artifacts was amazing for the time. Encountering each of the alien races was pretty awesome too having to hail them and choose how to handle them. The shitty part was that certain races were immediately hostile to you if you had crew members of a certain race aboard your ship, namely the Thrynn and the Elowan. Everytime we met, it would start cordial until they scanned my ship and saw Greenpea and Wizliz holding hands on the bridge in a symbol of intergalactic tolerance and understanding. Of course they opened fire and the Longinus had to murder them in the cold reaches of space. This happened every fucking time we encountered their races and their salvage turned into a trail back to the ISS space station. That was part of the beauty of the game. Drop you and your ship into the void with no direction and see what adventures you make from it.

This was the starmap. Every colored pixel is a system. In all those systems are (mostly) planets to explore.

After what could only be the twentieth time of murdering space racists, the bodies and repair costs kept piling up. Greenpea and Wizliz got the fucking boot as the intolerance of two races was threatening not only the safety of the crew but jeopardizing the mission. They were replaced with humans that had specialized training. Robocab got the boot too since I could now afford a trained navigator with all the plutonium I was offloading and was replaced with what I can only imagine as the rain man of space navigation. I thought about what transpired and pondered for a moment if I was the space racist, discriminating against alien races that had their own prejudices cast upon them. Fuck it. Space isn’t going to save itself. The ISS Longinus set out again to brave the universe and was at peace for some time until we slammed into the gravity of a planet rich with platinum and subsequently exploded by a race of fish baptists we pissed off earlier. Fuck space.