The first thing to realize about TREK73 is that it was played on an ASR33 Teletype something like this. Its from the rotary phone era of computing.
You can’t play the original BASIC version of TREK73, but it has been ported to other platforms. One way to play it is to run the DOS version on DOSBox. If you run TREK73 on DOSBox, crank the emulator speed down as low as you can stand – about 10 is good for the full effect. Remember that back in the day this was running on a HP 2000 timeshare system.
Once you have DOSBox installed and TREK73 running, put in your name and select one enemy vessel.
The funny names are from the DOS version. With the LHS progam, it was always the Enterprise and a selection of original series adversaries like the Klingons and Romulans. The enemy ship names were Bismark, Centaur, Draddock, Forbin, Kreiger, Schlurg, Trakka, Varnor, and Warrior.
There are 32 commands, but you can win a simple game with only a few of them: lock/load/fire (1-4, 9), position (12, 13), and course/speed (16). When you get more advanced, you can send out some antimatter probes (10, 11), scan damage (17, 18), or drop shields and drain the phasers into the engines so you can escape (19). The bluffs and ruses can be fun, but why bother to initiate self destruct when you can detonate engineering immediately (21)?
The first thing that you need to do is find out where you are with a position report (12) and position display (13). Angles are 0-360 with zero degrees at 3 o’clock, 90 degrees at 12 o’clock, etc. Distances are in millions of meters. If you are good with angles and distances, you can get by with position report for everything except photon torpedoes, which only show up on a position display as colons. The Enterprise (or Kongo here) is a plus sign, enemy ships are indicated by the first letter of their name, probes by an asterisk, and the detached engines of the enterprise by a hash symbol.
We’re the Kongo heading 0º at warp 1 indicated by a “+” at the center of the display. The enemy ship Chivalry is the “C” at the left bearing 184º and course 140º at warp 1.
Now change the Kongo’s course to 180º to face the Chivalry using “change course and speed” (16). Did the LHS version really require both helmsman and the navigator to carry out this command?
Set the speed to warp -5. Why the negative warp? We’ll face the Chivalry but move in reverse and that will buy us some time to get things set up. Why not set course to 0º and warp 5? Due to a design flaw in Constitution class starships, the engine nacelles block weapon fire to the rear. Or they do when a plus sign fires colons at a capital C.
Next: lock phasers (3) and photon torpedos (4) and load the torpedo tubes (9). You can use the first letter of the ship’s name in the lock commands. In general, phasers are good from 0-1000 and photon torpedoes from about 1000-5000; farther and they will miss and closer they will hit you, too. Probes are slower than photon torpedoes but track their target and can contain more antimatter pods. They can be good for taking out multiple enemies, but if you miss you are out a lot of antimatter pods.
This took 3 turns or 6 seconds of game time, but the Chivalry is just starting her attack.
Chivalry is gaining speed and starting to close on us, but we have a little bit of time so let’s scan the enemy.
Enemy phasers and tubes are locked but not loaded. “Fuel capacity” is the number of antimatter pods and “fuel remaining” is the number of filled antimatter pods. Each torpedo has 10 pods, so a full volley is 60 pods. Efficiency indicates the energy being consumed per second and regeneration indicates the energy being generated each second. You don’t really have to worry about any of this unless you want to drop the shields and drain the phasers into the engines and run.
Take another position report and display.
The Chivalry is at 5200 and closing as she accelerates past warp 8. Time for a couple of torpedos.
The Chivalry is now at a distance of 4500 at warp 9. The torpedoes are about half-way there in the position display.
Torpedoes 1 and 2 detonate as we fire tubes 3 and 4. On the LHS teletype, the bell would make a satisfying “ding” on each shield hit.
Better reload tubes 1-4 instead of firing tubes 5 and 6. Chivalry fires three of her own torpedoes but they detonate when ours hit.
We’re down to 73 antimatter pods and, even after all of those torpedo hits, the Chivalry is still closing at warp 9.
Fire two more torpedoes.
We take a couple of torpedo hits, but its too late for the Chivalry.
Victory with only seventeen casualties. At LHS, this might have been a 20 minute warm-up game and resulted in a few feet of teletype printout to be rolled up and put in a shoe box to look at later.