Those who have played FS 1 & 2, and those who want to play FS 1 & 2. I have now moved from the former to the latter. I got both games at once. Now, after finally completing both in order and doing the walkthrough for FRED, I am excited to become part of the FS community. So, how many people, while playing through the first game, thought that they were destined to lose? The Ancients' messages seemed, to me, to parallel the story I was playing so well, that I figured it must be the story of the Earth. Anyone else get that, or was I just stupid? I figured it out before the end, when in-game we found the Ancients recording device. But before then... man. I was all confused.

That was the point of the Ancients cutscenes That was one of the things that think FS1 did incredibly well storyline wise. I mean, when you think about it, it was pretty cliched, but little touches like the Ancients monologues brought a new zest to it IMO.

Welcome aboard Good to see a new FS2 fan

Hehe, the debates over who and what the ancients were/are could go on forever, believe me, when a game is this old, people have time to develop a lot of theories. I suspect a lot of those theories are a lot more intricate and interesting than whatever Volition had planned for the series.

The whole FS2 story is a great one, getting all the more bitter as time continues, I suppose part of me will always wish I knew the ending, but it wouldn't ever live up to my expectations

Wow.

I've played through some missions on here, and... wow. Those are awesome.

So, looking through the models list, I noticed a lot of Star Trek models that say they have "no table". Can someone explain this, and what can be done to make the models usable? For that matter, how do I import a model into FRED at all? I tried placing some things in the "models" folder but they don't show up in my dropdown menu. Any help anyone can provide would be great (even if it's just pointing me at a tutorial that I have overlooked). I've got some ideas bouncing around in my mind bases on the models I see in the downloads list, and it'd be nice to see some of them come to fruition, even if I only end up putting them together for my own playing... just depends how good they turn out.

I know, I must seem like every n00b who comes in with ideas of Battle of Endor style missions, with the Shivans V The Borg and the Empire and everything else one can think of. The project descriptions that go "and, and, and, and, and, and" until you want to be sick. I've designed missions for other games and I know how this makes your eyes want to bleed. Trust me, I won't hurt anything sacred unless it never gets off of my own harddrive.

EDIT:
Sorry, one more question. I've had to get all my files from someplace else because whenever I go to download a file from the Campaigns section, I get some weird search engine page saying the file I want isn't around. Kinda like this one:
http://www.sectorfiles.com/contents/complete50.php
So, what's the deal here? Some of the other files are mirrored on another site, but not the campaigns. Why is this so? Did we lose our server space for the files or something?

The table file (more specifically the ships.tbl) is the file that allows the game to realise new models have been added.

That's why simply adding the trek ships to a folder will have no effect. The game won't even know that they are there unless one of them accidentally happens to match the name of something already in the ships.tbl.

My FAQ has a simple explaination of how to get started and links to more detailed guides so it might be worth taking a look there (and at the wiki on HLP, links are also in the FAQ). Pay particular interest to the modding section. Especially the bits on table editing.

That said I do believe that there are a set of table files for the trek ships knocking about somewhere

Yep, even Hunter made a table(s) for trek ships shp.tbl I think, not really sure and, I know of a weap.tbl in a zip, can`t remember the name of the zip though. got it somewhere on a cd, or harddrive, um maybe not this pc though since it my new pc, that i`m very happy with.