SpaceSimCentral

Same here they do look a bit out of place.

I like this game. Using F6 to fine-tune the acceleration of some ships or you go crazy when accelerating and afterburner is useless. Is there any way to start with a specific ship, I mean without hacking the savegame ?With your little ship at the start you're no match againt any attack. You can start with any ship: - You go in the folder ship_temps and you make a backup outside this directory of the sdsh_taipan.temp and the file sdsh_xxxxxx.temp, which is the name of the ship you want to start.- You delete sdsh_taipan.temp and rename sdsh_xxxxxx.temp to sdsh_taipan.temp- Start a new game, save with F12, quit- Re-copy the backups in the folder and overwrite- Reload your savegame Once you have a savegame, you can with "Assets" in the Load Game menu transfer your cash in any new game you start. So you can buy the ship you want. XenonS

Is it possible to get ahold of Steve Chapman nowadays? I emailed the email addresses from the website as well as an email Alexey gave me.I really want to talk to him.

It's been a long time, more than 8 years, and I haven't posted here since, but I still play Ad-Astra, one of my favorite free space games. The UI is something to get used to, and once you have made the right 'Input' and 'Preferences' settings you can quickly get into this game. I'd like to give more insight and gameplay tips other than what has been discussed above.
1) Gamedev.net is gone, but you can still have info about the game and download it here (as for November 2020):
[url]https://www.a-astra.com/[/url]
Download link:
[url]https://www.heise.de/download/product/ad-astra-70091[/url]
Unfortunately the Gamedev.net webpage doesn't exist anymore, but it's in the Internet Archive; for Ad-Astra here is the link to follow the comments for this game (up to 2010):
[url]http://archive.gamedev.net/archive/community/gds/viewentry3476.html?projectid=379449[/url]
2) Starting Ad Astra in Windows 10
It's best to start the game with AdAstraDX9.exe (version 1.3c) instead of the provided AdAstra.exe, the CPU and GPU load will be lower.
If you have a 16:9 resolution monitor, if you set the video resolution to 1920x1080 you will see small UI fonts. To make them bigger set to a resolution of 1600x1900x32 for best viewing, the video quality of the game will not suffer much anyway.
3) Game Input options:
It's best to put the control method to 'Mouse Scrolling' , this will be the easiest way to control your ship. Also tick the 'Invert Pitch' and 'Invert Yaw' on the right side.
4) Preference Menu
The game is focused on combat and has a high difficulty overall, especially if you start with a small ship. You can set the pirates and aliens to be passive in the Preference menu which will avoid you to be attacked unless you attack them first. Later, when you are more accustumed to the game you can deactivate it again and it will take effect when you change star system.
5) Additional playing tips
The in-game manual provided in the main game folder is very helpful and contains some basic playing tips. Here some additional ones:
a) At game start you have a 'paper' plane, so be careful...
You must soonest get a good ship that can take a lot of damage like a Phantasm. Other small fighter ships are fast but they are made of paper in regard to what damage you can take, you won't live long enough with them. At game start don't overestimate your fighting power, dock often to evade enemies, get the advanced short-range scanner immediately together with the debris analyzer and replace your plasma cannon with a debris collector, then concentrate on debris scavenging which will earn you a lot of money at game start. You get even more money if you succeed in salvaging a ship that has the same small size than your Taipan starter ship, but you need to be lucky to find one. Fire-up your Long Range Scanner and look for "Wreckage" ships, those are floating in space ready to be salvaged, but be sure that ship is not much larger than your Taipan otherwise you can't salvage it.
b) Once you have a decent unit (money) count:
If your ship is too small to salvage a wrecked ship floating in space, then simply buy a bigger ship for the salvage purpose, once done re-buy your previous ship which will be in the Shipyard.
Don't rely too much on your canons when fighting other ships, your missiles are your best friends. Also be aware that 1 enemy missile can end the game for you...Never forget to launch anti-missiles once you get the warning signal, you can change the range of your advanced radar so you can clearly see incomming missiles. Get a ship with 2 or more separate missile launchers as soon as you can.
Have fun!
XS

Nice one XenonS, good to see that the game still working on modern systems.

Agreed
And also I have had Ad-Astra in the download area for years now too so it isn't lost to the world.