It came up in a discussion about (capital) ship controls but apart from that...

Matrix Games / Destroyer Studios discontinued the game and turned it loose as open source.

What followed was... Starshatter Open

Pass up a free space game? I think not! =)

I just discovered this game, and Gazz's old explanation doesn't do it justice. It's a space combat sim with that holy grail among sim games: a dynamic campaign! You start out flying a starfighter but as you progress through the proc-gen missions (where the strategic AI will be moving fleets around to fight each other) you can rank up to command larger vessels up to a carrier battlegroup. As Gazz said, it's free and open-source, although at least for now his link doesn't appear to be working, so here's a link to Bay12 with a more in-depth explanation of the game, and an alternate download link since Bay12's is the same as Gazz's.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=130628.0

https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/file ... ing-storm/