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In the mid-1980's, the FASA corporation, under license from Paramount, created a hex-based combat simulation game for the Star Trek universe and its famous starships, which also supported a related product (Star Trek: The Role Playing Game). Star Trek: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator was similar to other products on the market at the time (namely Amarillo Design Bureau's "Star Fleet Battles"), but not nearly as complex or overwhelming in rules and scope of play.
I was not the most avid player of either game, due to several reasons. It was difficult to get people to sit for several hours, learn the rules, roll a dice, mark up a sheet, and argue about where a cloaked ship really was and where it was facing when it was fired on. I didn't really hang with a crowd that was into that kind of thing.
Around 1990 I began to play around a bit with the QuickBasic language for DOS. The idea for automating the processes for playing STTCS by letting the PC take care of most of the housekeeping chores of game-play came into being, and I spent much of my free time during the Gulf War (between combat sorties) putting my mathematics and trigonometry education to good use. Instead of hexes, I would place the ships and stellar objects in a quasi-realistic 2-dimetional space, with full 360 degree maneuvering. The computer would take care of many things, leaving the players to strategize.
Needless to say, with diskette-based PC's still heavily in use at the time, with all their limitations, it was a very time-consuming and tedious programming task for a hobbyist, and I shelved the project, saving the enormous amounts of data and QuickBasic subroutines that I had laboriously built.
During the intervening time, my path was taken well away from programming. FASA had lost their Star Trek license, and STTCS faded into memory.
In 1996, during a lull in my employment, I obtained MS Visual Basic, and began to learn it on my own so I could continue my long-lost project. Alas, moving and re-employment soon got me away from it again.
In 2002, with another nice period of an unintentional sabbatical, I took my most recent copy of Visual Basic and bore down hard on getting this self-imposed albatross off my back. Even though the Interplay corporation had taken the rules (somewhat) from Star Fleet Battles and made a real-time simulator (Star Trek Starfleet Command, 1 to 3, plus some add-ins and lots of fan-made modifications), I still believe there is a need for human-to-human competition and strategizing in non-real time. Starfleet Command doesn't give you that kind of time to think about what you're doing before you do it, and we are not all highly-trained combat strategists.