Thanks for the kind words - it was an incredible team effort, and I was only one of the team. I wasn't even part of the company originally. I joined them in time to get I-War ready for the US release. But I'd worked with them at the publisher, and I was a tremendous fan of the game, so when it came to getting a job with them - which entailed moving my famiy 200 miles, I jumped at the chance.
The lander - called an LST for Landing Ship/Tank was originally planned to be in two missions where you escort LSTs from orbit to a planet's surface. The intention was to use real orbital mechanics, but in testing it was found to be too confusing and the missions were dropped. The mission scripts were actually on the disc in the original release (not sure if they're in the deluxe version), and someone actually fixed them up and released them at one point as a mod. You can probably find them on the net somewhere.
The Dreadnaught was originally designed by Particle System's founders Michael Powell and Glyn Williams, and was brought to life by the artists at Particle, Andy Turner, Michael Todd and Matt Clark. The ships themselves were designed under the principle of 'form follows function', so the Corvette's hull is circular because it's built around the collider ring. You can see how carefully they thought it all out by looking at the cut-aways in the manual. The whole idea was to make a proper starship simulator, rather than the 'WW2 fighter in space' approach that other games had taken.
The engine cover on the back of the ship was originally designed to be a heat-sink with fins, like the heat-sink on a modern computer processor, but they changed it when they realised that it wouldn't work the same way in a vacuum. The cover is still known as the 'waste heat array' though.
Post edited February 15, 2011 by Ravenger