Video Game / Hardwar

There's a war going on out there. And it ain't easy.

The Future is Greedy

Hardwar (Also HardWar or HardW[a]r depending on how one takes the game's logo) is an obscure space planetary air-trading sim developed by The Software Refinery and released in 1998 by the British publisher Gremlin Interactive (Interplay for the North American market). Considered at the time a Spiritual Successor to Elite.

The game takes place in a city complex built among the craters of Titan. Misplaced Optimism is a dystopian slum, earning the label "Misplaced" following the abandonment of the formerly lucrative mining city by the various mining corporations that ran it, leaving all the workers behind with no means of escape. MO is being fought over by two rival factions, Klamp-G and the Lazarus Family; with various smaller groups thriving in the cracks. The preferred mode of transportation around MO are Moths: solar-powered speeder/aircraft crossovers available in a variety of models. It's this dynamic that makes the game interesting: During the day, Moths generally have no problem staying aloft and engaging in combat, but once night ticks around, energy starts to drain rapidly from the Moths' cells, leaving them stranded in conveniently placed LightWells while better equipped combatants tear them apart.

Like most games of the genre, Hardwar allowed players to focus on three areas: scavenging, combat or trade; in fact, each of the three original starter Moth setups was designed around one of the three. Traders would trade resources among the hangars of MO, pirates would try to hijack and steal the cargo from traders, while scavengers would either have to work fast to scoop up any dropped loot before the pirates could manage to collect, or by picking up the remaining pieces of scrap metal left behind from battles. As expected, players could then use their new wealth to upgrade the equipment of their Moths or upgrade to a shiny new Moth model. A patch added more starting setups, mostly easier than the originals due to much better equipment being immediately available.

It's also possible to own hangars by visiting the local estate agent. Hangars could then be managed to be private (for storage of spare Moths, clones and various other resources) or even opened up as public hangars to act as repair shops or stores, all for a neat profit for the player. One could even install manufacturing equipment such as distilleries, so it was possible to buy materials for goods at a cut price, manufacture the goods and sell them directly.

As usual, the plot was nothing to write home about, but had its moments. Most information was passed to the player in emails, or delivered by full motion video.

Hardwar still has a fair amount of community support. It also turned out that the game's multiplayer allowed for persistent online games to function, so a few such servers exist.

Notably, after the developing company went out of business, the game's original development team started making game mods for their own game, specifically the 'UIM' unofficial patch series, which sought to fix the issues they weren't able to before going under, and actually did a fairly good job of it.

The rights to the game were acquired by a development company named the Jordan Freeman Group and the publishing rights by both ZOOM Platform Media and Funbox Media Ltd. in 2021, with the latter company digitally re-releasing the game via the ZOOM-Platform.com website that year. These companies would then team up to release a Steam port of the game in February 15, 2023, 25 years after the original release.

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Here are some Trope Examples for you, Aviator:

• A Homeowner Is You:
  • There are real estate buildings that let you buy the various vacant buildings held up for sale in Titan. Even better, you can buy off a pirate hangar, which can reduce the number of pirates spawning in Titan (and making life easier, barely), provided that the specifically named pirate is killed and you quickly go to the realtor building to purchase his/her property before another pirate pilot spawns. The only buildings you can't buy are scavenger buildings and pirate buildings from out-of-the-way locations like the Mines crater, the Reservoir crater (since there's no realtor building) and Haven/Midway.
  • In the later patches, you can buy manufacturing kits from a building in the Downtown crater called Central Industrial and turn your home into a factory.
• Almighty Janitor: A literal example with the Scrubbers gang, a notorious crime syndicate descended from the city's old janitors and sanitation workers.
• An Economy Is You: Nope, not really. Generally speaking, while NPC aviators are happy lugging cheap, low-return goods around Misplaced Optimism, you have to make all the big hauls in order to get anything good. And hope that no one else buys that Largest Pod that you've been influencing a manufacturer to make for you.
• An Entrepreneur Is You: You could own hangars from the start, but only the later patches made it possible to turn a hangar into a capital-generating entity. Buy the proper equipment, install it, and you have a factory ready to make you rich.
• Armored Coffins: The Moths have no integrated Ejection Seat. Justified in the fact that the Titan moon does not feature breathable oxygen in the atmosphere despite the abundance of nitrogen and methane. People still manage to breathe in Titan within the confines of the buildings or their Moths due to artificial life systems built by the mining corporations before their abandonment of Titan. Otherwise, life is rather cheap in Titan and the inhabitants are lucky to have artificial life systems just to eke out a living in such a Crapsack Moon.
• Artificial Brilliance: Hardwar's A-Life system was literally years ahead of its time, to the point that many computers of the time had a lot of trouble running it. One of the main reasons the game still has a devoted fan following to this day is the vast amount of unpredictability and replayability built into its systems - and, of course, the many ways in which players can subvert them.
  • The NPCs: AI pilots are essentially just players, and were designed from the ground up to emulate actual human players - a task they accomplish quite well. The AI is divided into three layers, a piloting layer that handles actual vehicle maneuvering, a planning layer that handles long-term goals, and a decision-making layer that handles short-term activity. Each layer interacts with the other two constantly, and the interplay between them can result in some surprisingly complex emergent behavior. AI pilots are capable of planning out multi-step trade runs, prioritizing targets in multi-party firefights, deciding when to break and run during a battle based on their condition and that of any allies in the area, choosing when to refuel based on their future plans, and many other things. Their actual piloting skill is notoriously bad by modern standards, but overall the Hardwar A.I.s are extremely impressive, considering the game came out in 1998.
  • The world: Hardwar's game world is a fully realized, fully simulated, persistent virtual world that is all being updated constantly when the game is running, whether there are any human players there or not. Mines and farms produce primary resources, those resources are shipped to processing plants, intermediate goods are sent to factories, finished goods are sent to shops and consumers, and AI pilots buy goods from the shops. Factions and gangs patrol their territory, ship goods around, defend against intruders and launch raids on enemy resources. Independent pilots seek to earn as much money as possible, through trading, scavenging, bounty hunting or piracy. Taxis ferry new NPCs from their spawn locations to their place of employment/residence. The police fly around occasionally. Prices of goods fluctuate, shortages and surpluses happen, huge battles break out, territory changes hands, buildings are damaged and repaired... all unscripted, all emergent, and all with no player intervention.
• Artificial Stupidity: The piloting AI in most versions of the game is extremely predictable and easy to manipulate. NPC behaviour can be effortlessly exploited for enormous combat advantages.
  • They can't negotiate obstacles easily; if an NPC is following and shooting you, and you pass close to a building, pipe, bridge or any other large object, their collision avoidance kicks in. This causes them to do wide maneuvers around the offending item during which their fighting ability drops to zero. By the time they recover you've left them so far behind that they can't hope to catch up.
  • In tunnels they can't do anything other than flying in a straight line, including returning your fire or reacting to attacks in any way. They'll also do more wide maneuvers before entering the tunnel, and need a few seconds to regain their bearings once they exit one. This enables easy NPC kills if you can lure them in, and makes tunnels an easy escape route from fights turned sour. Even better, if they're carrying cargo, you can exploit a physics bug that prevents other AI pilots from going into the tunnels just to pick up that jettisoned cargo (see Wreaking Havok below).
  • Their choice of primary weapons is rather poor. They'll use laser turrets to whittle down your shields even as you blast huge chunks off theirs with the far more effective plasma cannon, while the few who have that weapon are able to kill shields just as quickly but then don't seem to realize that the plasma cannon has no hull-damaging effect whatsoever, and keep unloading it into their target with no appreciable results. Certain pilots such as Scavengers, taxi pilots, and Lazarus/Klamp-G pilots who don't fly in transport moths at least subvert this by using the laser gun and Sprat missiles to deal with their adversaries since the two weapons are able to cause reasonable hull damage in spite of inflicting relatively weak shield damage.
    • Averted with the Police. They own a moth that is every bit as worthy as their occupation proclaims and they have the actual sense to not only use their laser turret, but also fire their plasma cannon as well as launching whatever missiles they've got to take down an outlaw moth. Which would be good if they had the mental fortitude to actively seek out would-be offenders, that is.
  • They never go to weapons dealers to upgrade their weaponry and moths, no matter how much cash they have accumulated after trading in goods or earning bounty money killing outlaw pilots; therefore, their threat level - and by extension the whole game's difficulty level - doesn't increase as you go along (see Curb-Stomp Battle below). The only exception is the occurrence of freshly spawned pirates going to weapons dealers for one-time visits to install missiles of varying power after the original pirate NPC was killed. But that's as far as they can go: they'll never visit the dealers again after they've bought their fancy toys.
    • The faction transport moths as well as some trader moths do visit weapons dealers at times, but they're only there to haul cargo in and out, not upgrading their weaponry and therefore playing this trope straight.
    • Subverted with the availability of the Sprat missile. There's a major shortage of them by the time you begin a new game, and after a couple days have gone by, the stock completely dries out after they've been bought. This is the only missile in which AI pilots noticeably seem to install in their moths and use them in combat.
  • They never use advanced countermeasures such as the afterburner or holograms.
  • They take ages to enter hangars, having to position themselves properly and then slowly advance until they're in. They're highly vulnerable during this time, and if you interrupt their docking sequence (by, say, bumping them) when they're already in the airlock they can get stuck inside and eventually get blasted apart by the hangar's guns.
  • Once their energy reserves have been depleted in a firefight or by extended flight time, they'll flee to a nearby LightWell to recharge. During that time, they're completely vulnerable and won't retaliate until either their reserves are fully charged up or another Moth (either another AI pilot or you) bumps into them.
  • In combat, consistently flying very close and directly behind a moth (towards their 6 o' clock position) without bumping into it will easily spook the AI pilot into flying in a straight line. This severely hampers their ability to use their more dangerous weaponry on you and limits them to using their weak laser turret, of which you can easily avoid by consistently staying at their ventral section for as long as you're not near the ground so that the turret won't be able to shoot towards you, or not being able to fire back at you at all if they don't have a turret unless you change course and give them an opportunity to reset their combat position at their 12 o' clock. You can easily exploit this ability by having the enemy pilot fly straight into an obstacle or wall and finish them off while they're busy trying to regroup themselves, further reinforcing this trope.
• Artistic License – Economics:
  • The game's economics don't really compare well to anything that could possibly work in real life. For instance, narcotics and alcohol seem to be far more immediate needs to the population than, say, food. Granted, the world they live in is pretty sad and their lives bleak, but you'd still think survival would be more important than getting drunk or high.
  • The economic system sometimes has trouble even in the game, with several resources becoming very scarce very quickly, and requiring massive player intervention just to produce a few for the player's own use. Notably, pirates, after killing faction transport and/or independent pilots, scoop up the remaining cargo that their victims were carrying and then bring them into their pirate hangars, storing them there indefinitely and actually contributing to making the game's economy worse. This gives players a legitimate incentive to hunt down pirates on an almost regular basis in order to prevent them from harming the game's economy.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The 'Arms Dealer' starting scenario, which gives you your own hangar to start with (in the very busy Downtown area, no less), your own private monorail station to move around the city, a stockpile of sellable goods, a hefty bank balance, and easy access to some Player Mooks to hire... oh, and you're in a slow (albeit rather maneuverable) Moth with a weak power cell and no weapons or countermeasures except your laser, and there are a couple of heavily-armed, well-equipped rival arms dealers out for your head and they know where your hangar is. Good luck!
  • The pulse laser does the same damage-per-second to shields as the plasma cannon, but uses more energy and is harder to aim. It does, however, damage the Moth's weapons systems to the point where they can no longer attack you so that you can land the killing blow and laugh sadistically as your enemy turns to scrap metal. Also, it actually does do damage to a Moth's hull, but the effect is almost negligible (it takes a VERY long time to destroy it) that you're better off using your regular laser gun instead.
• Big, Bulky Bomb: At a certain point in the plot, it becomes necessary to blow up a thick tunnel-blocking wall. A nuclear missile is fitted to the player's moth, but it's so big it can't fit in the standard hardpoints so it just hangs off the side of the cockpit. When that fails, an even bigger one is fitted.
• Body Backup Drive: A patch added the ability to buy a backup for the player in the form of a clone. The clones that you can purchase are available in a building in the Downtown crater called Clone Farm (in the unpatched version, it was simply called Vacant 0039, which existed as a possible purchasable hangar from the crater's realtor building if you bought all the hangars for sale there). Installed in a hangar, the clone will activate if the player dies, retaining all of the player's properties (minus the Moth in which they died). It's never really explained how the PC's mind gets transferred to the clone, though. This is a convenient way to avoid the usual Permadeath in the game, but if the player dies and has run out of clones, then the game is over.
• Boring, but Practical: The basic laser gun isn't terribly effective at stripping shields and it won't aim itself, requiring you to do old-school dogfighting; however, it has the fastest rate of fire in the game, a low energy drain, and once the shields are down it damages the target's hull, so in the hands of a competent player - i.e. not the game's AI - it's a very effective weapon and remains so throughout the game.
• Bounty Hunter:
  • It's a mildly profitable profession, and you can check the Police's or a faction's wanted list to see who's responsible for being on the wrong side of their business. There's no "dead or alive" system implemented in the game, given that this is a unique kind of flight simulator; they simply want their enemies dead.
  • If you end up being a pirate and manage to evade the police for a while, pirates themselves will start targeting you in an attempt to collect the price put on your head.
• Broken Bridge: All routes into the Port crater are blocked off early on in the storyline, and getting in becomes a major plot point. Fortunately the crater is bereft of useful hangars, so its loss is irrelevant if you're not following the story.
• City Guards: Police Moths fly around on patrol, and will pursue you relentlessly if you make the mistake of shooting them. There are also variants of the Police Moths called Police Guards who come out of their respective crater's stations to pursue an outlaw pilot who occasionally flies too close to their buildings. Kill one, and an enforcer will be sent out.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: A minor example in the cargo pods fitted into moths that actually help distinguish what type of pilot is flying inside their moths.
  • Brown-coloured Smallest Pods: Primarily used by Scavengers flying in Hawk Moths and don't represent a threat to others, but can annoy regular human players by attempting to undercut them for certain valuable cargo dropped on the moon crater from a firefight like Alcohol and/or Narcotics by getting to them first. There are also Silver-Y Moths fitted with these but they are strictly associated with construction firms in Titan such as Riverside Construction, Fred's Builders, etc...
  • Blue-coloured Small Pods: Generally found on Faction-specific Moths such as Transports and are seen hauling cargo to various weapons dealers and/or faction-specific buildings.
  • Yellow-coloured Medium Pods: Always featured as the standard pod of Pirates.
  • Yellow-coloured Large Pods with red lines in front and blue lines in the back: Only found in Research Moths and are curiously unused by the other classes.
  • Red-coloured Largest Pods: The standard pod of Traders.
• Commonplace Rare:
  • CompComp (short for Computer Components), Gems, and Ore. CompComp is a byproduct of Gems, and the latter itself is a highly valued item for the production of many other products in Misplaced Optimism. Subverted with Ore; while it is rare, it is not as valuable as Gems are because it is only important for the production of two items, SheetMetal and ExMetal. Only the latter is considered an important commodity because the former, SheetMetal, can be produced with the extremely common Scrap Metal and at larger quantities than with Ore. Both Gems and Ore can only be found at the Prison Mine in the Mines crater, which is rather out-of-the-way from the other craters and is next to the dangerously pirate-infested Haven and Midway craters. This makes cargo runs to that particular crater highly dangerous because of the high number of pirates swooning around those places.
  • The Sprat missile. It is the most commonly used missile in Misplaced Optimism due to its relatively cheap price and simplicity and is in high demand by practically everyone who wishes to use it in combat. There's already a major shortage of these missiles at the start of the game, and after about three passing days or so, they're practically out of stock in shops unless you, the player character, bring them back to availability in the shops by purchasing large amounts of SheetMetal and Explosives, and have them sold and manufactured in the respective factories that produce it or your own factory if you have a munitions manufacturing kit installed in your hangar.
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • The Underkill bomb has a very fast traveling velocity and has this cool effect of vertically encircling an enemy Moth for a couple seconds and then exploding under the Moth. However, it's essentially the missile/bomb equivalent of the plasma cannon: really good shield-killer and systems wrecker, virtually no damage to the hull. Worse still, if the Moth is next to a building or is flying really low near the ground, the bomb will dissipate harmlessly. Plus, like all missile-based weaponry, it uses ammo and is rather expensive per stock.
  • The case could be made that all missiles, save possibly for the Groundbase, the FireBurst, and the Devastator in a few tactical situations, are cool but fairly useless: given their price, the tendency of enemy Moths to drop flares that counter them fairly effectively, the clunkiness of the weapon selection interface and - most importantly - the fact that none of them has an effect that can't be replicated with a couple seconds of sustained fire from primary guns, there is very little motivation for a player to acquire and use them.
• Cool Plane: The Swallow. Every other Moth in the game is strictly function-over-form: trading Moths are wide and heavy, armored police Moths are basically large square-ish crates of hurt, and even the more aerodynamic fast fighters still retain a definite boxy look. The Swallow instead has clean, streamlined lines that make it appear elegant and quite different from everything else. It's also the only moth to have moving flight control surfaces.
• Crapsack Moon: The city of Misplaced Optimism is aptly named. About 90% of the population live in massive, cramped, overcrowded arcology towers with no effective government and what little control there is being exerted by criminal syndicates. If you're lucky enough to get into flight school you can end up as one of the remaining ten percent - moth pilots, who never have a steady income, rarely have homes beyond their aircraft, and constantly have to worry about the police, the major factions, the smaller gangs, pirates, scavengers, or getting caught in the crossfire of a battle between the aforementioned groups. It's not a question of 'if' a moth pilot will die horrifically in battle, but 'when'.
• Crippleware: The game's demo had the entire gameplay map in it, but restricted you to just one of eight craters by closing the exit tunnels. After a few years the game was officially made free via a patch that removed the barriers in the tunnels.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Tends to happen often after a while, as the player can upgrade his craft quickly and the enemy pilots are hampered by the AI's reliance on weaker weapons and inability to rapidly negotiate fixed obstacles and tunnels. Given a modicum of competence from the player it's perfectly possible to fight any one enemy, no matter how powerful, with the weakest moth in the game and win easily. Fighting only becomes difficult when the player is simultaneously targeted by more than one enemy (fairly easy to achieve), or by several missile-armed enemies in sequence.
• Cutting the Knot: During the mission to destroy the "special part" in the Port crater, you usually have to contend with two Lazarus Guard moths that are watching over the dropped part, which earns you a place of being on the Lazarus faction's wanted list should you choose to do so. However, there is an alternate, if hidden, way to approach the mission. It involves going to the Port crater and waiting near the entrance of the weird looking Mass Driver building until the in-game clock hits 0600 hours. Once it reaches the allotted time, a podded Lazarus prototype moth will then come out of the entrance. Just when it is about to leave, quickly obstruct its path by bumping into the moth several times until the airlock destroys it for failing to exit the entrance. The "special part" will come out of the destroyed moth and the airlock will also shoot at and destroy it, causing the mysterious static field to appear in the crater. This bypasses the appearance of the two Lazarus Guard moths and won't get you flagged for being an adversary to the Lazarus faction for trespassing the cordoned down Port crater when they're around but it also won't get you the monetary reward from Klamp-G because of that. The alternate method must be done after the cover up mission involving the strange alien moth in the Downtown crater is completed and after one day has passed, as the research moths will eventually have concluded their work on the alien moth and you will receive a new message at 0200 hours which details the discovery of fusion technology from the strange moth. Since it is time-based, it is a one-time opportunity, so if you forgo the alternate method, you'll be forced to contend with the aforementioned Lazarus Guards. You better hope you have done a little Save Scumming for the alternate method if you want to continue the plot without angering the Lazarus faction or else you'll have to start a new game all over again lest you don't mind getting on the Lazarus faction's bad side.
• Cyberpunk for Flavor: The game has a few elements of Cyberpunk but does not technically fit the description of being a true Cyberpunk work. There are no mega corporations ruling the economy of Titan since most of the business is operated by smaller independent companies and supplanted by traders, and most of the gameplay takes place in the cockpits of Moths. The two major factions of Misplaced Optimism, the Lazarus Family and Klamp-G, are more organized crime syndicates than MegaCorps, and their respective sub-factions, the Skinners and Scrubbers, are explicitly referred to as gangers.
• Cyberpunk Is Techno: Well, the game's not that Cyberpunk but the soundtrack consists of electronic acts from the Warp Records label, which ranges from techno to ambient to even drum n' bass. As an added bonus, the moon's only radio station is called Hardwarp FM and even has the label's logo.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • The AI really likes to use the laser turret, and will often do so even when it has better guns available. But the turret only does piddling damage to shields, so duels between NPC moths often become convoluted air ballets with a lot of weak laser fire being exchanged until one of the two eventually, finally, succumbs.
  • The pulse laser is at the opposite end of the scale: it deals great shield damage and is the only weapon to disable a moth's weapon control system, but it deals very weak hull damage that it will take about more than a full minute in real time to destroy a moth with it. Additionally, its high energy consumption makes it impractical to use for extended periods of time unless you have a Fusion Cell.
• Debug Room: The God Hangar, which also allows you to cheat yourself money and equipment. Oh, and to instantly vanish from the game world at will... yeah, online use isn't liked very much.
• Deflector Shields: Before you can start hurting a Moth's hull you need to take down its shields. Some weapons are better at depleting shields and others at killing what's underneath them - and the best shield-depleter has no effect on hull at all, forcing you to vary your tactics.
• Destroyable Items: Dropped cargo can be destroyed by shooting at them a few times. In multiplayer, this can be a useful strategy to prevent other human players from nabbing the cargo of their choice and get rich afterwards. Also, if cargo is dropped over a body of water, that cargo won't be obtainable as it submerges quickly under the water and disappear for good. The airlocks will also shoot at dropped cargo if a moth with a pod was destroyed while still inside them and it was carrying cargo. This is also an important task to perform in one of the early plot missions, which involves a "special part" dropped in the Port crater.
• Determinator: The police enforcers. Once one is sent to catch you, it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you're dead. Kill it, and another will take its place. This can go on for a while, since after a few upgrades the player is able to win against any one enemy in the game, but sooner or later an enforcer is bound to catch you right after fighting someone else has depleted your shields...
• Disaster Scavengers: The NPCs that fly moths (usually a Hawk moth but varies in different versions of the game) fitted with the distinctive brown-colored Smallest Pod fit this description rather lightly: a more apt name for them would be Disaster Moon Janitors and/or Crater Rats. They will sniff out any cargo dropped down to the crater floor after a firefight with a couple of moths has died down regardless of whether they had cargo pods, annoyingly complicating efforts for players to nab the cargo of their choice. Unlike most examples of this trope, the scavengers will sell the cargo to a nearby trading post in order to increase their profits. Too bad that even though they'll get rich selling off the loot they've found, they'll never even once think about upgrading their weaponry at a weapons dealer. Not only that, they also, along with pirates, won't go to tunnels to pick up dropped cargo there.
• Disc-One Nuke: Later patches added easier starts as an Anti-Frustration Feature, and at least one of those gives you a fusion cell from the get-go - whereas in the normal game it's only available fairly late. This completely sidesteps the problem of having to manage your power while every other Moth has to regularly recharge at a LightWell; along with the aforementioned predictable behaviour by the AI in combat, at this point you could only really die if you were trying.
• Earn Your Fun: The later patches allowed you to choose up to 7 career paths instead of the default 3 featured in the vanilla release. Depending on which career path you choose whenever you start an entirely new game, this can either be gloriously played straight or subverted. For example, starting off as either a trader/scavenger/aggressor will pit you in a weak Silver-Y Moth with various low-tech equipment and provides a challenging and slow undertaking to earn quick money. On the other hand, choosing to be a corrupt cop or agitator will give you a powerful Moth with a Fusion Cell and high-tech equipment (Police Moth in the former, Neo Tiger in the latter. The former also is equipped with a Largest Pod for your trading/scavenger needs) and therefore provides a breezy, uninhibited beginning if one wishes for entrepreneurial pursuits and does not have to worry about grinding for money.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: During the endgame's epilogue video, Xavier Lazarus is shown with a special joystick and starts pushing a single button which triggers the eventual self-destruction of not only his hightower that he resides in but somehow the entire Titan moon as you escape into outer space barely intact. How a single kill-switch can vaporize an entire moon like that with one press of a button remains a mystery.
• Easter Egg: Due to one of the developers having a very bad experience on a Lord of the Rings chat room, attempting to name the player character 'Gandalf' will result in the game asking you to "Please insert a name that is not inherently sad". It won't let you continue until you change it.
• Easy Logistics: Averted. Everything must be built, or stocks run out. In order to build something, a suitable hangar must have the resources, which in turn must be delivered by hand from the hangar that produces them, which in turn... Basically, the game's stock of Largest (Cargo) Pods will run out within minutes of starting the game, and more have to be manufactured (in fact, there's only 2 left in a building in the Alpha Crater called Breaker Maker 3). And aside from stumbling across an unowned Swallow Moth in a hangar, the only way to get one is to feed a Moth manufacturing plant with just the right combination of materials. However, getting the materials required to make the Moth can be very confusing as it doesn't tell you which materials are needed to build it so you're going to have find the list and the instructions in the primary community site here.
• Emergency Cargo Dump: NPC moths with pods can and will drop their cargo if they have taken sufficient enough hull damage in order to try and save themselves from their attackers. You can do this too under the same circumstances. A viable tactic is to jettison your valuable cargo into the tunnels and then eventually get it back after dealing with an opposing pirate because due to a physics bug or engine limitation covered in the Wreaking Havok section below, pirates and scavengers are completely unwilling to pick up dropped cargo in the tunnels. In multiplayer, you might as well forgo this tactic against human players because they will not show any mercy even if you jettison your cargo once they decided to target you at their pleasure.
• Energy Weapon: All primary weapons in the game fire bolts of energy.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Near the end of the game, plot events cause every AI player in the game, no matter how far they are from you, to head straight for you with single-minded purpose. The main reason for this is that you're trying to leave the moon in the only spaceborne vessel that recently landed in the seemingly abandoned terminal in the Port crater, and every citizen in Misplaced Optimism found out and now are trying to stop you from getting there. They all want out of the moon too.
• Featureless Protagonist / Hello, [Insert Name Here]: At the start of a new game, you can name your player character any way you want (although there is one exception, see Easter Egg above), but the game FMVs will refer to you as "aviator/flier" and you never utter any spoken line or even distinguishable sound during the videos. Your name is displayed on the message box interface and the hangars that you have purchased, but the in-game model for your character flying inside the cockpit of the moth of your choice is the same gender-neutral pilot model that is used in every other AI pilot model flying NPC moths to provide immersion.
• Game-Breaking Bug: If you decide to wage war against the police and start killing enforcers en masse, the game will eventually run out of pilots for them (after about 80 have died) and crash.
• Game Mod: Several, virtually all of them unofficial patches that add features or change various aspects. At least one, the UIM series, was actually made by the game's original dev team after the company went out of business.
  • Hex-editing a savegame allows you to add the Death Ray to your moth's weapons. The weapon is normally present in the game as the one the hangar airlocks use to get rid of ships that stay in them for too long, but isn't normally available to purchase.
• Glass Cannon: The Moon Moth can mount various powerful weaponry in its medium-sized weapon bays and is the smallest Moth to fit a laser turret. It also boasts great maneuverability (engines only determine the speed of a moth, not maneuverability), but average speed. However, it cannot take damage really well, and in extended dogfights, unless that pilot is really skilled, it will often lose and turn into scrap metal. The Moon Moth's performance suffers once a cargo pod is attached; if fitted with the Largest Pod, it becomes the slowest Moth in the game (more so than a Largest-Pod-equipped Death's Head).
• Grand Theft Prototype:
  • Evidently because having a Swallow made is so hard, the game also creates three unoccupied Swallows that sit in their parking spots forever - unless, that is, a player gets in and flies off. The game code never considers the moth to be properly yours, but this has no effect on gameplay. This is only available in the U2.04+ patch.
  • There's also an option for multiplayer servers that makes it possible for people to steal owned, unattended moths. It's disabled on most servers, but on those which allow it, stepping out of your moth for any length of time in a public hangar could easily result in someone flying away with it.
• Gray-and-Grey Morality: The Lazarus Family, the faction formed from The Remnant of the amoral mining corporations that stranded the colonists on Titan in the first place, and Klamp-G, the faction descended from the coalition of labor unions that fought them, are for all intents and purposes identical at this point, with neither one being clearly 'good'. The mysterious man in the intro of the game even says that in Titan, "there's no good or bad and you don't ask questions. All you want is a piece of the action and everyone wants a piece of you."
  • Evil Versus Evil: Once you advance later in the game, it turns out in the plot that the two factions not only resort to tactical nuclear weapons to destroy each other's bases as well as ending up poisoning the moon's only reliable source of drinking water with their nuclear-powered vessels, but they end up using remains of human beings to bolster their already powerful arsenal. Eventually, this turns into a struggle for total military control of Titan. Initially, both factions try to dismiss these incidents as none other than field tests and experiments but when a hysterically disgruntled citizen who was victimized by the factions' meddling of human life in Titan spills out the beans about their true motives in the moon's radio station building, the factions had no choice but to formally confess their own true plans to the public.
• Greed: The underlying theme of the game is about getting rich in the many ways possible, even if it means performing unscrupulous methods such as pirating innocent pilots for their cargo. The game's title even has the moniker The Future Is Greedy.
• Guide Dang It!: While there are many items in the game purchasable from the spot, getting the materials required to produce a certain commodity is another story. The game never tells you what items are needed to produce a specific product and you'll get lost in how to do so. There's a list of items that can be found in the main community site here and the list of businesses that buy and sell specific products here.
• He Knows Too Much:
  • Syd, who happens to be Psycho Bob's technician as well as a munitions expert that runs the secondary Psycho Bob's weapons shop next to Trade Central, eventually ends up being incarcerated by Klamp-G forces and sent to Prison Oubliette for his knowledge of the true nature of the fusion parts and the escape vessel. When you do meet him there, he is in pretty bad shape after being roughed up by Klamp-G's goons. He tells you to go to Lazarus Hightower to meet up with Xavier for one last time where he will inform you to go to Syd's workshop which contains a specially hardwired, yet unarmed moth that will help you escape the Titan moon. Just as Syd barely finishes giving you the vital information, he is eventually shot dead by the spokesperson of Klamp-G, who gleefully lectures you about the spotty future of Misplaced Optimism and you potentially ending up being another casualty like Syd is.
  • At the end of the main plot, you also end up being hunted down by everybody in Misplaced Optimism for knowing about the spaceborne escape vessel that has landed on top of the seemingly abandoned terminal in the Port crater that will provide you the only means of escape from the Titan moon.
• Human Resources: The trade in human remains to the aliens for Fusion Cells and other valuable tech. It's also implied that the local pizza delivery restaurant has a new type of meat in their meat feast.
• Improbable Piloting Skills: You're the only one who has such skills, since the AI pilots in this game have such predictable patterns that you can easily outwit them even in their best days. However, your moth is limited to pitch and yaw maneuvers as there is no ability to perform a full roll maneuver in this game (as you're limited to 70 degrees rolling right or left), so performing evasive maneuvers is rather limited. In multiplayer, human opponents will have the same piloting skills as you do, so don't expect to utilize the same strategies dealing with them as you would with AI pilots.
• Infinity -1 Sword:
  • The plasma cannon is an incredibly useful weapon for stripping shields and it can be found at nearly any weapons dealer near you. However, it's pretty much useless as a hull damaging weapon so you had better switch to your hull-eating weapon of choice if you have it. Also, it drains your moth's energy reserves at a moderate pace so be wise to manage your cell's condition or else you'll be forced to take a trip to the local LightWell (unless you have a Fusion Cell).
  • Cell #3 is this when compared to the non-Fusion power cells for your moth. Until you get the Fusion Cell, Cell #3 is pretty much the only essential power cell to install in your moth because of its excellent energy reserves, fast recharging rate when refueling at a LightWell, and having a reasonable energy drain unlike Cell #4 (which is considered an unusual case of Shop Fodder).
• Infinity +1 Sword: While not a weapon, the Fusion Cell essentially eliminates any need to go to a LightWell thanks to its boundlessly recharging effect. It won't be available until you advance deep into the game's plot. That is, destroying the special part in the Port crater and cause the two gangs called the Skinners and Scrubbers to appear. These two gangs fly transport moths that will sometimes carry Fusion Parts, which are essential components needed to make the Fusion Cell. They are easily preyed upon by Pirates because of this, and you have to be opportunistic in acquiring those parts. Otherwise, you'll have to play far deeper into the story to acquire one. On the other hand, in later versions of the game, you can potentially choose to start off with a Moth equipped with one and not have to drudge out the storyline to acquire one later.
• Interface Screw: The first thing that happens when your Moth starts running low on energy is that your HUD starts to fade. Better find a LightWell quick.
• Intrepid Merchant: Traders and potentially you if you choose. Faction Transports are somewhat like this, but don't technically count as they're hauling goods for their respective factions that they belong to.
• In-Vehicle Invulnerability: Your Moth can get shot, missiled, sucked into the ground by an inverse-gravity-generating rocket, careened against tunnel walls, smashed against buildings and rammed by other Moths, without the player suffering any ill effects.
• It's Up to You: Played straight in the story missions but averted in the main game - if you have your own building and install manufacturing equipment, it's possible to offer to buy the raw materials, which will result in NPCs supplying you with goods entirely without your intervention, at which point they're automatically processed and the finished items are offered for sale.
• Jack of All Stats:
  • The Hawk Moth combines speed, maneuverability, toughness, cargo carrying capacity, and weapon capacity into one package in the above average territory. This versatility is what makes it essentially the workhorse Moth in Titan and by far the most popular among all the pilot classes that don't expressly need a firepower-oriented Moth - so much so that at least two thirds of the Moths in the game are Hawks.
  • The Neo Tiger Moth is essentially a slightly more upscale version of the Hawk in that it has even greater top speed (the second fastest Moth in the game after the Swallow) and cargo carrying capacity while keeping the same stats that the Hawk possesses. The only tradeoffs for the Neo Tiger are reduced maneuverability and mediocre hull ratings, preventing it from being a true Lightning Bruiser.
• Joke Item: The Starshells are essentially flares that don't provide any defense against missiles and only serve as illumination particles for night time operations and/or entering the Haven and Midway caves. They are of no practical use whatsoever and are a waste of valuable credits so much that they are essentially Shop Fodder. In multiplayer, they at least get some partial use as a "greeting signal" by other human players who aren't in a hostile mood.
• Karma Houdini:
  • In the later patches, there is an NPC named Smokie China, who hangs around the Alpha crater. He pilots a Swallow Moth, the game's most powerful Moth, and the only pilot in Titan to do so. His Moth is fitted with a medium pod, which is noticeably the standard pod of all pirates in Titan. However, killing him results in you having a bounty put on your head by the Police, as the Swallow Moth seems to be invisible to radar. The only ways to kill him without being credited for it are using a Devastator and/or Groundbase missile, bumping him to death, or getting him stuck in the airlock of a building, which will blast him into pieces quickly.
  • Prior to the later U3 beta and UIM patches, pirates were exempt from police retaliation whenever they attacked and killed innocent non-faction moths such as scavengers and traders due to the developers not having the time to implement the specific programming codes yet.
• La Résistance: Klamp-G to Lazarus. Later in the plot, the former becomes no different than their opponents and they're just as vying for control of the moon.
• Lead the Target: Subverted, you don't have to lead at all - all primary weapons have limited auto-lead capacity (occasionally bordering on Homing Boulders), only requiring you to aim in the general direction of the target. The laser turret doesn't even require that, as it can rotate fully.
• Lensman Arms Race: This becomes a plot device later in the story. After you destroy what appears to be a special piece of machinery in the Port crater, in the ensuing confusion, a Klamp-G research moth comes in and scoops up the remains of an apparently alien vessel that exactly resembles the one featured in Downtown. One day later, Klamp-G finishes researching the vessel and then starts producing these same vessels of their own to compete with their rival faction in a test of power. Things escalate later when the two factions start using tactical nukes against each others' buildings and cause major collateral damage in the process. What a way to make things worse, aviator.
• Lethal Joke Character: The Silver-Y may be the smallest and weakest Moth in the game in addition to being unable to mount a Laser Turret (the latter issue making it one of two Moths to share this particular drawback, the other being the significantly more powerful Swallow), but thanks to how the game's AI works, it can gain an edge over its adversaries with a plasma cannon and laser combo to quickly decide the outcome of a battle. Since you are the only really skilled pilot in Titan, even the Silver-Y can represent a legitimate threat to heavily armed and faster Moths.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • The Swallow Moth. It outdoes every other moth in the game when performance is taken into account, even when fitted with the Largest [Cargo] Pod. The only real drawback is that it cannot fit a laser turret thanks to an engine mounting placed on top of the Moth, so pilots have to treat it traditionally like a real old-school fighter plane.
  • To a slightly lesser extent, the Police L-2000 Moth. It combines the speed of the Neo Tiger (albeit with a slightly lower top speed) with the toughness of the Death's Head (albeit with a slightly weaker hull) while boasting a large enough weapons capacity and excellent maneuverability to take on several Moths in a dogfight. One of the reasons why the Police are so good in dogfights is because of their Moth, if only they weren't so down in morale to begin with.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: Not a problem with modern computers, but on the machines, Hardwar was originally intended to run, it took a while for it to generate the world at game start. The producers lampshaded this: if you press CTRL while the game is loading, the message changes from "Initialising world" to "Testing patience".
• Loan Shark: Misplaced Optimism has two companies that allow players to borrow money from: MisOp Finance in the Downtown crater, and Charlie Wadsworth in the Riverside crater. Once a loan has been taken, a mail notification will tell you that once the deadline has arrived, you must pay back all the money that you've borrowed. Fail the first time, and you'll get a stern warning that you must immediately go back to the building that you've borrowed money from. Should you ignore this warning and let another day pass, an enforcer in a Death's Head Moth will come out and attempt to kill you until you pay back the loan. Needless to say, this is generally treated as a novelty among players because they can easily get rich in many ways in the game.
• The Man Behind the Curtain: Despite his frail, elderly appearance, Xavier Lazarus from the Lazarus Hightower is apparently the man pulling the strings of all of the major factions in Misplaced Optimism, including the Lazarus Family. He downplays this trope by being rather affable and is confined in an iron lung. It is revealed in his last meeting with you that he can intercept transmissions from any place in Misplaced Optimism and that the mysterious messages from the Port crater and the subsequent trading of Body Parts and Fusion Parts by the gangs were his plans all along to get you out of the moon in one piece. Apparently, he contacted Syd to secretly hardwire a Moth with a special shielding device to protect its pilot from being fried by the mysterious static field that you caused after destroying the special machinery part in the Port crater; this comes at the expense of having the Moth completely unarmed in order for the device to work and fit in conveniently. Later, as you enter the Moth and make your escape, you attract the attention of everybody in the Moon and cause them to come after your head; apparently, Xavier's manipulation of communications also eventually resulted in having every pilot providing you as a target and attempt to prevent your escape. In the epilogue of the game, he is seen carrying a special joystick that apparently causes the gradual self-destruction of the entire Titan moon while you escape intact.
• The Metric System Is Here to Stay: Averted, as imperial units are used in the game, most notably when flying inside your Moth; speed is measured in MPH, and both distance and altitude are measured in feet. All this despite the game being developed by the British company The Software Refinery.
• Mighty Glacier: The aptly named Death's Head Moth, the heaviest Moth in the game. It's as slow as a Moon Moth and has average maneuverability, but it has the thickest hull rating and the largest number of weapon bays out of any other Moth, making it practically suited for combat. It's generally unsuitable as a trading Moth because of its already slow speed, and fitting even a small pod on it can greatly diminish its speed even further, making it possibly the slowest Moth in the game (a Moon Moth fitted with the smallest engine unpodded is even faster).
• Money for Nothing: Once you fit a Cargo Pod and Drone onto your Moth of choice, it's only a matter of opportunity until you start gunning for the nearest most valuable pillage found on the crater floor after a firefight with a Moth or going after the Moth who still has that particular cargo you're looking for if you're of the pirating type. Once you collect that pillage and sell it off to nearby buildings who are interested in a particular good, depending on the find, you can get rich quickly without having to grind for money by bounty-hunting pirates. However, this trope really comes into play if you have bought your own hangar and manufacturing kits to produce your own goods. Once you start manufacturing items and make them open to the public, soon other pilots will come to your hangar and buy that much-needed item in order to sell it off to other markets while giving you the dough in return handsomely. Eventually, money will become so trivial as a concern for you that you will never have the feeling of being penniless in Titan. The only thing to stay alert of are pirates who love to ruin your days by interfering with your cargo runs.
• Money Spider: Killing a pirate moth (i.e. any moth equipped with the conspicuous yellow-clad medium pod) usually rewards you a bounty of 500 credits. These bounties add up whenever a pirate kills a specific moth (i.e. any moth from the major factions), or repeatedly kills innocent traders and/or scavengers (mainly for their valuable cargo on board). Unfortunately, bounties are limited to 2000 credits (four "innocent" kills), making it difficult to be a full-time mercenary.
• My Nayme Is: The plasma cannon in-game is spelled with the letter K in the 'cannon' part. Maybe the developers thought that the letter C would be too American...
• Ninja Looting: When a Moth blows up, any cargo it was carrying is dropped. Now, it might have been the attacker's intention to collect the cargo for themselves, but try and tell that to any scavengers that may be combing the crater floor. This can be exploited by the player: wait for a fight to end (invariably with the explosion of at least one moth), and you can nab the cargo yourself. You can even exploit the rudimentary physics engine and grab it before it falls to the ground.
• NPC Roadblock: This can happen very easily among public-use hangars, especially if you make a hangar very popular among the NPC population where a certain type of good is in demand. Pilots take several seconds to park their moths in a hangar, and if a hangar's remaining parking spaces get completely filled up, the NPC pilots waiting outside will get stuck in an infinite queuing period until one of the pilots parked inside the hangar leaves; depending on the pilot parked inside, they will sometimes wait inside indefinitely for unknown reasons until the AI programming them randomly decides it's the right time to leave. This is particularly evident in the latest U3 beta patch, which screwed up the game economy and caused many traders to line up to buy wares that didn't exist.
• One-Hit Kill: The Devastator missile, which kills an enemy Moth in a single shot regardless of shield level. The drawback of this weapon is its very slow traveling speed, which can be exploited by countermeasures and/or deft turning. However, this is subverted if you use it on a Moth when inside a tunnel; it only merely causes minor shield damage due to a bug.
• The Pardon: Described in the main community site as "amnesty", covered in two pages. This is when you've offended the Police or a particular faction by doing crimes just to get on their bad side and then do something for them to grant you a reprieve. The most obvious example is attacking their particular Moth. You'll have a price put on your head if you attack or, goodness forbid, destroy a Moth belonging to a particular faction or destroy trader and/or scavenger Moths as well as taxi cabs. The easiest way to solve this is to destroy a pirate Moth (i.e. any Moth with a Medium Pod). This will clear your record immediately once you've killed the pirate. However, if you're in a pickle with any faction other than the Police, it becomes more complicated. You'll have to observe one of their transport Moths being attacked by that particular pirate. This is the break you'll need: target the pirate Moth and destroy it to clear your record. Once done, all is well for you in Titan.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Obviously averted, as pirates can be seen attacking innocent traders and/or scavengers for their valuable cargo, as well as having the fortitude to attack transport moths from the major factions for the same reasons. You, too, can fall victim to pirate attacks for whatever cargo you have in your hold even if you only carry as much as about 10 bits of scrap metal. Then again, you also can be a pirate, though you will suffer the same consequences as they have done so (i.e. being wanted by the police, the factions, etc.). Eventually, someone's going to have to tip the balance of life in Titan...
• Player Mooks: Later versions allowed you to hire them, assign them aircraft and equipment, and have them do stuff for you, like flying escort missions, killing specific targets, transporting cargo between your hangars, selling goods to other hangars, or keeping your manufacturing operations supplied with raw materials.
• Point Defenseless: The faction buildings have laser turrets that should, presumably, protect them, but they are of no threat at all to even the lightest Moth in the game.
• Pointless Civic Project: Misplaced Optimism has a rather extensive monorail system that unfortunately serves no purpose in single-player gameplay other than touring around the city. It gets some use in multiplayer for human players who have lost their moths if the 'steal unowned moths' option is turned on by the server master. Despite what Xavier Lazarus tells you about optionally using the monorail to escape to the abandoned terminal in the Port crater, you are unable to activate the endgame FMV sequence with it if you actually do so. The only way to achieve the endgame is to fly in the specially modified moth moored in Syd's Workshop in order to properly progress the plot.
• Police Are Useless: Played with. They can actually handle petty crooks like pirates and smugglers rather well but are so horribly outmatched by the big factions that they pretty much just stand idly by and let them do whatever they want. A mod that enables the Police to do about their business with no drop in morale was made so that the game would have more immersion and lessen the threat of pirate attacks. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in the patches after U3.00 Beta #5 and before U3.00 Beta #4, so for now, you'll just have to stick with pirates endlessly pursuing valuable cargo from traders/scavengers/faction transporters/etc. without fear of being attacked by the Police. This was recently fixed in the 'enhanced2' patches, part of UIM v6. Among the various improvements in these patches, the Police are now finally able to patrol Misplaced Optimism with absolutely no drop in morale. Now pirates are no longer exempt from getting away with their crimes and will get subjected to karmic retaliation without the player's intervention.
• Ramming Always Works: The game doesn't register kills if they do not happen via direct weapon hits, so wise management of one's shields can allow for consequence-free killings by simply ramming the target until they blow up.
• Recursive Ammo:
  • The Swarm missiles split up into four smaller missiles which robotech on the target, minimizing the effect of anti-missile flares.
  • The Fireburst bomb launches several explosive energy balls that deal massive damage to a Moth's shields and engines, further confounding the effect of countermeasures.
• Respawning NPCs: After a Moth is destroyed, another will take its place. In the case of pirates, they will keep respawning after being killed until you buy off their hangars, provided you know their names. The major reason for respawning pilots is the Cabs that fly around the city: they pick up pilots-to-be and send them to their newly provided Moths to get to the skies. Destroying Cabs (which gets you in trouble with the Police, by the way) prevents them from respawning.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Despite opposing the Lazarus Family and painting them as power-hungry monsters who want control of the moon and its resources, it's heavily implied that Klamp-G is no different than Lazarus when their ambitions are revealed much later in the plot. They are just as hungry for control of the moon as well and don't seem to care about improving conditions in Titan. See Evil Versus Evil
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: One crude but potentially very useful strategy in the game is when an enemy has targeted you, you can fly near another moth (often by bumping into it first), and then cause the enemy's stray shots to hit that moth instead of you, thereby joining the fight to stop your would-be killer. This can be very effective if you want to escape a dogfight, or even better, appease a faction that you've offended. Especially when you've gotten into the wrong side of the Police and/or the Klamp-G/Lazarus factions, you can use a moth (mainly a Pirate moth if you don't carry cargo) as bait so that you can kill the bait moth for amnesty.
• Shop Fodder:
  • The Big Six of MisOp Shop Fodder: Starshells, Matters, Triggers, Body Parts, Furs, and ConstMat (short for Construction Materials).
  • Oddly enough, Cell #4 is in this category as well. Why? While its description ostensibly states it as the best regular power cell, its draining output is actually by far the fastest out of any power cell despite its fast recharging rate when refueling at a LightWell; this makes it ill-suited for extended combat and is best left as a trading item.
• Shout-Out:
  • One example to the 1995 movie Hackers. When you start the game a few special pirates are generated. They are no different than the others except for their names, which are those of several main characters in the film. When they're inevitably killed they're replaced by respawns with dynamically-generated names, making the shout-out of limited duration.
  • The Hardwarp FM radio station building in the Downtown Crater clearly is a reference to Warp Records and even their logo is an exact facsimile of the music company's version.
  • There is a software shop in the Riverside Crater called 'Software Refinery', which is the same name as the video game company that was responsible for developing this game until their untimely liquidation in December 2002.
  • A few of the building names in Titan are named after the actual offices in Leeds, where Software Refinery is located.
  • Pirate NPCs will, at random, be sometimes named Ciaran in the given name part, after Ciaran Gultnieks, who was the lead designer of the game.
• Skybox: Subverted in that the game has no real visible sky. Apparently, Titan has a very dense atmosphere, so everything beyond a few hundred meters is hidden in a sort of pinkish mist. Looking up merely lets you see a few low-hanging clouds, then more mist.
• Space Trucker: Though the game takes place on the Titan moon, the Faction Transports (faction moths equipped with the Small Pod) and Traders (independent moths equipped with the Largest Pod) qualify.
• Subsystem Damage: Every Moth's hull integrity indicator is its main health meter (the zeroing of which will result in Critical Existence Failure), but there are several indicators for subsystems - engines, weapons, electronics, and such. Some weapons damage one particular subsystem leaving the others alone, which is relatively useless to the player but very annoying when you're hit by one and (say) your Moth slows to a crawl because your hull is still strong but your engines are shot.
• The Syndicate: The Lazarus Family and Klamp-G. The Skinners and Scrubbers work for their respective factions as lesser gangers.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: As the plot advances, food suddenly flourishes in a rather suspiciously high supply, and then eventually Titan's reservoir of fresh water becomes contaminated. It turns out that the two factions were liberally using their nuclear ships to irradiate the moon's only known water source and in turn contaminate the food produced in the hydroponic macro factories just to increase the production of food. One of the plot-important characters contracts radiation sickness from the contaminated consumables and later dies as a result of the factions' meddling.
• The Taxi: Misplaced Optimism has such a service for your ferrying needs, in the form of Moon Moths. However, it's generally treated as a novelty among many players unless they're using multiplayer.
• Trick Bomb:
  • The Power Leach missile does no damage whatsoever, but it'll attach to the target moth and drain its power cell, forcing it to drastically slow down and flee to a LightWell to recharge. This can only be done once a moth's shields are out as firing the missile when it still has shields is effectively useless.
  • The Trojan is a viral bomb that disguises itself as a cargo of "minerals" to fool would-be scavengers into picking it up. Then when it's scooped up into the pod, the bomb activates itself the second the drone enters inside the pod with it and blows up the entire moth. It serves as a novelty Schmuck Bait weapon in single player games, but in multiplayer, this can be a good way to distract other human players by befuddling their radar, especially if they don't have advanced software to differentiate between other blips in the radar console and if the player in question possesses lesser piloting skills.
• Vader Breath: During the cutscenes with Xavier Lazarus, the effect presumably comes from either your breathing tank for your off-screen pilot helmet or the iron lung that Xavier has on his bed. Oddly enough, it sounds almost eerily similar to the original effect that Star Wars utilizes.
• We Buy Anything / We Sell Everything: Trade Central and any building with the words "Trading Post" in it. Also, Reservoir Trading.
  • In the later patches, you can turn any of your hangars into one, with or without manufacturing kits.
• Weak Turret Gun:
  • The laser turret is probably the weakest of the primary weapons for a moth, but at least it fires fast and has an auto-tracking ability that minimizes misfiring incidents against non-hostile moths.
  • Exaggerated even further with the turret-mounted faction buildings (see Point Defenseless above): they are so weak and fire every five seconds that even the Silver-Y moth can breeze past by without taking so much as a caress on its shields. Forget breezing past - you can park in front of a turret and expose yourself to its fire, and still suffer no damage whatsoever. Even the weakest shields recharge faster than what one laser bolt every five seconds damages them.
• Weapons That Suck: The Groundbase missile creates a cone of gravitational inversion that sucks the target moth to the ground, giving impact damage proportional to the distance of the dive and trapping it in place for a few seconds, plus impairing the AI's ability to fight for another few seconds after the effect ends as it regains its bearing. Also, it is one of only two weapons that don't get you credited for a direct kill, the other being the Devastator missile.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: As with most other commercial/fighting games, there's so very, very much to do outside of the plot that the programmers included an option to start a game entirely without it, just so you can play for the hell of it.
• The Workhorse: As mentioned above, the Hawk Moth. It's by far the most popular moth in Titan because its versatility makes it suited to all of the pilot classes who aren't looking for a combat-oriented Moth to go on with their daily lives.
• Wreaking Havok: The physics engine can be exploited for considerable profit. For instance: catching dropped cargo is made a lot harder by the presence of other scavengers in the game world, getting their drones to precious jettisoned cargo boxes before you. However, when a drone is ejected its speed gets added to that of the originating moth - even if it's flying in the opposite direction. This makes it possible to fly at breakneck speed at cargo boxes, deploy the drone right when you're above them, and nab them before they even reach the ground - often stealing them right under the nose of NPC drones, who are ejected by their ships with zero additional speed.
  • If you manage to lure your enemy into a tunnel while he/she still has cargo, you can exploit the physics engine by taking the cargo after killing him/her. For some reason, once the cargo is dropped in the tunnels, no scavenger or pirate would even bother to go there to pry it out of your hands, presumably because they don't want to risk collisions with other moths in the tunnels. Which leaves the lion's share all for you. This can be a ridiculously easy way to get rich in the game without using the God Hangar, especially if that cargo is highly valuable like alcohol, narcotics, etc.

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The future used to be something to look forward to.

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