I've played RT3 off and on since about 3 months after it came out. I've found both the H&B website and forum only just recently, and all I have to say, in one blanket expression of gratitude (for all the hard work and excellent mods) and surprise (I didn't know that this game had such a following) "WOW!"
I don't consider myself a writer, but I usually can be found scribbling words for a StarFleet Command Fan Fiction forum. One day I'll get up to writing something about the rails, which is really one of my better passions.
I grew up with a father that absolutely had to have an HO scale layout. We weren't rich by any means, lived in a crappy 500 sq ft apartment, but that layout always seemed to be moving freight around its many loops and turns. This isn't what hooked me into railroads, however. It was a trip to a rail museum when I was 5. Too young to remember where (I want to say San Diego, because I think we went to the zoo right after), or exactly what was there, I became hooked sitting in the engineer's seat of an old steam loco, giggleing and ringing the bell.
Over the years I haven't had time or room to build much of a layout of my own; nor have I settled on a scale. I did have a VERY nice LEGO (Go figure?) railway planned; I had the Super Chief, their version of the Amtrak Metro, an old steamer with era specific consists, and a few rail related buildings. Money got tight, I got married, and moved around some, and someone decided that they wqanted to steal the whole thing
. Just my luck, the same year Lego discontinued those products (I was saving up for the 5 express cars for the SC), too. I picked up their recent RC train, but its just not the same.I do have a pair of box kits, and HO Alaska Railways (I don't have the box in front of me to be sure) and an N scale GN switcher with some freight cars (also a box kit). Eventually, one of those will probably be in whatever layout I get into, just as soon as some other things are straightened out first.
My lack of an at home layout lead me to RT2, RT3, and MSTS. It satisfies the cravings for the home layout, but nothing can replace the feel of sitting in that big chair, nor the sound of plastic wheels cruising over tiny rails.
Below is a snippet from one of my more recent works. I'll provide links to the main forum or individual stories of mine, if requested. I'm not advertising my work, just letting you see what I can do with a compy.
Czar "Hello, again!" Mohab
Silently, the torrents of cast off stellar matter passed before Cerberus as she drove head long to the sound of the ever beckoning beacon. The local star finally gave up the ghost, and in the transformation from red giant to white dwarf, expelled its life blood out amongst its own solar system; regurgitating billions of years worth of collected and fused matter in the blink of an eye, creating a beautiful new planetary nebula in its wake. This solar system was the target of Delaware’s research.
Delaware wasn’t the small science vessel of the Oberth line; Starfleet had sent along more researchers and scientists than would fit in that class’ small but capable hull. No, Starfleet had sent along one of its finer ships-of-the-line, a Miranda hull modified with enough lab space and sensor suites to make any starbase’s chief science officer envious.
The planet that Delaware had orbited was an anomaly, there shouldn’t have been any sentient life there, let alone the vast cities that plastered the planet’s surface. And yet, despite all the logic, all the reasoning behind why they didn’t belong, there they were. Or, more accurately, there they had mostly once been. Cerberus scanned the log buoy, read Delaware’s notes, and with her own eyes, came to the same conclusion: The inhabitants of this planet had just moved in, relatively speaking, and were moving out when the star’s end came. Delaware couldn’t figure out where they had come from or where they were going, let alone how this non-space-faring culture was going about going from place to place.
Delaware only knew the sharp, shattering pain of crippling explosions from within. She knew only the heavy feeling as the planet below grabbed her, and yanked her down. She’d given in to that fight, turned her own nose planet-ward, thrown off her excess baggage and prepared for the end of the long fall. Its not the fall that kills you someone had said inside the troubled craft. It’s the sudden stop at the end. Shields had failed. Hull plates burned red with atmospheric friction. Silence, that ever painful silence. There was no sudden stop, just a structure crunching jolt that shook the ship as she skidded along the planet’s surface. Delaware had inside her the same construction techniques of all the standard Starfleet vessels that had come before her, the ability to save those who would inhabit her, protect them from harm, when called forth to do so. In this case, it was planet fall.
High above, Cerberus called down to her fallen comrade, looked through the blue-green nebula and grey-white clouds, down to see her fallen comrade. Delaware herself was dead, long past being flight worthy, long past caring about anything. Her final act had saved her crew and her passengers. Her life sacrificed so that others would live. If she’d had feelings or thoughts of her own, surely they would have cursed the radiation preventing the use of life pods. They would have ****** the coincidence of the explosion of the star and the explosion of her heart, the electromagnetic interference that prevented transporter operations, and the shockwave further damaged her propulsion systems. Everything happened at once, it seemed, dammed to fall to the planet, cursed to die away from her home, her friends. That was the fate of the Delaware. There was, of course, one thing that her corpse could tell the men and women who would search her, the one thing that the voiceless ship could speak. And that would be, “Why?â€
Cerberus stopped calling, stopped searching. She angled herself to enter the atmosphere, and with an unspoken grace, descended. This is a new one for me, her captain had said. But now I’m glad we got the landing system installed. The same system used on troop transports, the ships that would bring planet wide death from the muzzle of a phaser rifle or thousand. Now, though, Cerberus was on the move, to rescue what and who she could. She’d called back to the fleet for assistance, her hull not capable of holding so many men and women at once and for so long. She’d be the ferry, get them in the sky and to where the transporters would work.
With much more grace than her friend, Cerberus landed on four thick landing struts, protruding from her lower hull. Next to her, the body of Delaware lay broken, crewers climbing on her hull like ants, waving the rescue ferry down, as if Cerberus couldn’t see the giant trail dug by the downed craft and would miss it entirely without their aid. Once she came to her resting spot, she spilled forth her crew from within, watching the skies for more help.