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Engaging in battle when the combatants are moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light would be problematic at best. I recall reading a novel (Antares Rising? something like that) in whcih humanity was fighting a race called the Riall (I think) and they engaged in battles similar to the way eddy describes the fighting in Lost Fleet, racing towards each other at tremendous velocity and firing their weapons as they come.

Taking a quick look around on the net I see quite a few products, but most seem to be too big for this particular application - I found one that actually lets you record to the chip directly from a PC via media player, but it is almost as big as the whole model. There are some smaller ones, but they are single message only, which would be boring, and you would probably need a chip programmer to set up the voice chip.

BTW Wall, your in-game style model looks pretty good - later maybe you might want to tackle the model on the Strategy Guide cover, and the TRO model.

Huh... there goes that explanation. Well, if you can have geysers on the Moon, why not lightning? 

You know, another thing that has always bugged me... the cool way the thumper whirls the Czar off the ground in the intro movie. Why couldn't it work that way in the game? It would be so much more useful.

The white Sabre is way cool - love to see a port of that to bz1.

When they started making the intro movie, it is possible that they hadn't even created the S-Power models yet, that would explain why they used L-Power models. Since they had a release date target to meet, they probably didn't want to wait around until the last minute for the final model concepts to get started on the intro cinematic.

With rifling at that twist rate either the projectile would come apart inside the barrel or the barrel would disintegrate.

Yeah, I remember doing that - I THINK that if you are in wireframe mode, and hit CTRL-E to back out to normal mode, then hit CTRL-E again, you will be editing the HGT file in texture mode, though I can't remember for sure - I've only done it by accident.

To avoid such smelly situations in strat games, you can play with the barracks option turned on, so there are latrines available. 

It was George Sutty that wrote the BZ1 editor code, according to the mapeditor doc. They must have cranked out the documentation in a hurry and missed listing some of the editor features.

Speaking of the editor, if you get around to general improvements later, I would REALLY like to see that ramp making tool become functional.  Boy, that would save a lot of time.

That little tidbit has been in my IA tutorial for a long time... didn't you read the editor section? 

Another undocumented feature is that CONTROL-Z will undo changes in wireframe mode - very handy if you are glooping a big cliff or hill section in and make a boo-boo. How many changes you can undo seems to vary with the system and the size of the terrain you are undoing - maybe linked to available memory (?) usually it seems to undo 1 or 2, maybe 3 on my older win9x system.

I think they had to make the pilots a bit large just so they would look good in the game.

You know what the BZ pilots remind me of - those little Lego spacemen you used to get in the moon vehicle kits way back in the 70s. Same basic style, squared off legs... maybe the modeler for these was a Legos fan. 

No, if you are in SHIFT-F10 view (satellite style view) while editing, you can rotate buildings by right clicking on them, holding down the mouse and then moving the mouse to spin them around to where you want them.

I would say BFT is fairly on the money as far as dimensions go - the Golems have to be at least 20 feet high. As far as weight, I wonder if due to biometal construction they aren't a fair bit lighter then conventional tanks of the same size - the hover ability lends credence to that idea. The recycler must be a heavy mother, though - they must have had some killer rockets to lift all that tonnage into orbit.

You can rotate buildings around in SHIFT-F10 mode while editing - best to do on perfectly flat terrain tho - otherwise you can end up with tilted buildings... 

If you were going to make more than a few, it seems to me that making a good mould and then using plastic injection to make the models would be the way to go. That way, you could always make more on demand later. You could leave a hollow space in the model for for a simple voice module too, as Av suggests - with a snap on cover and a hidden button the models could be made to play the original voiceovers.

Hmm, I could see having a complete set of these in a nice box, like the Tonka Toy sets of old...

Yeah, this only works for single-player, and it has to be set up by the map author at that. Cool effect, though.

Setting up a working shield complex in either SP or multi regardless of whether its a beam type or M-Curtain style shield would be problematic - there is the question of orientation. You'd have to set it up so the shields would orient themselves properly - the constructor does not do this. Also, for IA missions, the AI would have to be programmed to attack the shields to bring them down, and know not to cross the beam line beforehand. Insofar as an M-Curtain type shield goes, the AI will not attack any building class on purpose, it just hits stuff that happens to be in the way of vehicle - GT targets.