I've seen it too... quite often, actually. First time was during the demo, I was just looking around with the mouse (admiring the purty pictures) at Pittsburgh, and I noticed a trio of cargo haulers heading towards the trade lanes... but for some reason they were drifting towards the planet... during one of their chatter-lines suddenly screamed and burnt up! I thought that was neat, but didn't know why it happened.

Saw it again just the other day while orbiting New Tokyo. Maybe it's the space equivalent of the Exxon Valdez.


Edited by - Morpork on 21-03-2003 15:32:21

Recently I was waylayed by liberty rogues as I left manhattan (nothing new), but I was way too tired to still be up playing. I realized that the sparks around the rogue I was tailing were because he was plowing into the planet's atmosphere, so I did a quick u-turn and gave a slight smile to his scream as his ship broke up around him.

Too bad I cut the engines for that turn and forgot to turn them back on. Like I said, I was too tired to still be up, and it took me a few minutes after my ship blew up to figure out just what bone-headed mistake I had made.

Don't drink and fly... LOL

Hehe, once I saw a trio of large transports attempting to moor by a planet at the same time. They kept circling around it, one looked like it was trying to mount the mooring fixture vertically, and the other two ran into each other, causing one to fall into the planet's atmosphere . It's also fun to fight fighters near a planet, with a few carefully placed shots it's easy to "maneuver" them into the planet's atmosphere.

in sigma 13, I was flying from the bottom right corner of the map to the upper left corner to get to a jump hole. In the middle of the map are 2 stars. I was following friendly corsairs between the 2 stars and figured it was safe. I used the GoTo method to go to my waypoint, then later, I got the msg that i was entering the corona of the star so I tried to head back but wasn't able to do so even with my 63 nanobots. I don't know what happened to the computer ships.

I know that the GoTo method usually goes around stars but I guess when there's 2 stars that are close together, it tries to go around one star and goes into the other.