🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <20010118025359...@ng-cd1.news.cs.com>, Htn963 
<htn...@cs.com> says...

<snip>

> Can anyone name any other, just for my own curiosity?  Thanks.

There's the Mirage in Frontier: Elite 2. To get the ship, you'd need the 
following (from memory):

1. Elite Combat rating.

2. Rank of Prince (highest rank in the Imperial Navy).

3. User ident from the Sirius Corporation, which you get from the 
Managing Director.

You're supposed to fly to the edge of the galaxy, where you'll be 
approached by the flagship of the Empire. You'll get a message, and then 
you get the Mirage.

Nobody is sure how the rumour started, but there's speculation that it 
originated as a submission to the cheats section in an Amiga magazine (in 
the old days, some mags used to give prizes for published tips/cheats). 
The rumour reached the zenith of its credibility when it was included in 
Tony Dillon's mostly excellent book 'Secrets of Frontier Elite.'

There are, of course, a large number of things which show the rumour to 
be bogus.

* There is no reference anywhere in the game code to a user ident from 
the Sirius Corporation or even a means of getting one. However, it is 
possible for the phrase "Director such-and-such of Sirius Corp" to appear 
in the game, but this is as part of a randomly generated assassination 
mission.

* There is only one 'unidentified' model in the game - a Thargoid ship 
which can sometimes be seen derelict on the ground near research bases on 
photography / bombing missions.

* Which edge of the galaxy, which solar system? Not to mention the fact 
that you'd almost certainly either run out of fuel or your drive fail due 
to lack of servicing long before you got there.

* Getting the required ratings would take a *very* long time - thus 
making checking the accuracy of the rumour very difficult.

* Braben has gone on record denying that the Mirage exists (although he 
put a reference to a Mirage II in one of the journal articles in First 
Encounters as a joke).

If you do a Deja search in alt.fan.elite for Mirage you should get a load 
of stuff from the semi-regular debates on this topic.

-- 
Graham 'Jades' Thurlwell

Jades' FFE Site: http://www.jades.org/ffe.htm
The best Frontier First Encounters site on the net