Design Flaws

Due to the Kharakans' great advancements in technology (such as those required to manufacture hyperspace drives), their intercommunication radios have an annoying (but digitally perfect, no doubt) static hiss before and after every transmission. These radios are essential, however, for hearing any of the sound effects, since it is well-known that sound does not travel through a vacuum (such as space). Thus the only way the Player is able to hear the sound of gunfire, an ion beam, an explosion, etc is because such sounds are being picked up by the radio of the closest 'friendly' vessel concerned. Which makes you wonder how you manage to hear an enemy ship exploding...

Your pilots keep up a running commentry of the battle they are currently engaged in. Most of the things they say are pretty cool but often in the middle of a fight, one will comment "We caught 'em napping." This assertion is made whether your ships leapt out of a cloak field and assaulted the enemy fleet or the battle-ready enemy advanced steadily on your mothership and started blasting it before you noticed and set your fighters on the enemey, at which point they give the wildly innacurate phrase quoted above...

Strike Craft use fuel while travelling but Capital Ships have an inbuilt perpetual fuel source. The fuel of Strike Craft is used in a perculiar manner thus: A ship at rest uses no fuel (fair enough); a ship travelling at constant velocity does use fuel (why?); a ship uses the same fuel consumption when accelerating as when travelling at constant velocity (strange); a ship uses no fuel while decelerating (convenient). It is well known that a massive object will remain at constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force (ask Newton). In space there is no air-resistance so; while a ship is accelerating (angularly or linearly (positively or negatively)) it will have to expend fuel to assert the necessary force. But once it is moving in a straight line at constant speed, no more fuel is needed. Indeed, if more fuel is burnt, the craft will continue to accelerate.

While flipping in and out of HS in the early levels, just to get you used to the game, the cutscene between Lev02 and Lev03 tells you "Many major mothership systems are still incomplete". But she seems to manage fine as she is. And she doesn't change as the game progresses; merely the research team work out how to make new ships. They never invent a MS overhaul, upgrade, or whatever.

After Lev03 the team onboard the MS interrogate an enemy Assault Frigate pilot. This alien would have been happy to tell the Kharakans that their fleet had been ordered to exterminate Kharak. It isn't exactly a universal secret! Nevertheless, Fleet Intel says, "The subject did not survive interrogation". For the ship to be captured, it was approached by SC's which do not have offensive weapons, so unless he was allergic to tractor beams, the pilot would not have been damaged during that encounter. Nothing in the following sequence of events leading up to his interrogation would have necessitated violence (once captured aboard the MS, they were hardly going to try to escape; what chance would they stand?) So why did the subject not survive? Come to mention that, what happens to the 'subject's who pilot all the other ships I captured? Do they survive? I ask Sierra, "Why even put that line in the plot?" It doesn't add anything to the storyline (mayhap it was intended to show what a peaceloving race the Kharakans were toward a single, defenceless alien?)

The way in which the cloak-fields are activated and deactivated is buggy. If you have two CFG's next to each other; one active and the other not, then active the second one so that both are now covered by two cloak-fields, then deactive the first CFG, both ships become visible for half a second. Likewise, if Cloaked Fighters are within the cloak-field of a CFG and the CFG de-activates, the Cloaked Fighters become momentarily visible.