The Ships: RKF-6C | HF-27 | STM-3 | FAS-2B | MMS-4A | MHA-1 | PF-12 | MDS-3A
The Weapons: Overview | Autocannons | Railguns | Plasma Guns | Missiles | Rockets | Mines | Plasma Torpedo | Grunts | PIDs | Radar Countermeasures
The Story: Original | Planetary Raiders?
Planetary Raiders was a persistant, realtime 3D galaxy simulator where thousands of players from across the world could make a career of trading, piracy, and warfare in their own personal starship.
That was the plan. In practice, the project was temporarily* shelved during a very early beta stage when its parent company, Interactive Creations, merged with Interactive Magic and most of its staff were re-assigned to the creation of Raider Wars. Ironically, even though it was meant to be a simplified combat-only introduction to Planetary Raiders, Raider Wars ended up more developed, better realized, and longer lived than its ancestor ever was.
Information about it isn't easy to find, and I never played it myself, but it's weirdly easier to scrounge up than information about Raider Wars... It can even still be downloaded from a few places, but with its eternal offline status and semi-requirement of Java, it's both not very exciting and pretty vile.
This section only exists to loosely document a novel bit of Raider Wars' history. It'll never go any deeper than absolute basics. For more information, click on the picture to download its helpfile.
The story of Planetary Raiders...
Planetary Raiders takes place in a distant star system not very different from our own. The inhabitants of the planet Osis were at the stage in their development where the corporations that ran their society had nearly depleted the planet of natural resources. Initial attempts at space travel had proved frustrating at best. The people knew there was an entire system filled with resources, but there was no feasible way to get at them. Just when it seemed that things could not get any worse, a visitor from another system appeared with what seemed to be salvation for the people of Osis in the form of a new spaceflight technology called the Jump Drive. Jump Drive equipped ships could make journeys that had previously taken months or years in a matter of moments Calling himself the “StarMan”, the alien supplied jump technology to the corporations at an incredibly low price, asking only for the option to purchase a portion of the materials that the jump technology made available.
The rush to exploit the system was on. Fleets of corporate ships spread around the system, often clashing with each other over exploitation rights to a particular place. Just as things began to settle down, the government of Osis built their own fleet of Jump Drive equipped ships in an attempt to regulate the system. The corporations, which had until this point enjoyed free reign in space were not too pleased at the Osis government’s attempts to regulate them. Bitter fighting and chaos ensued. The StarMan made a small fortune supplying weapons to the corporations and the government.
Things are a bit more settled in the Osis system these days, but only barely. The government leaves the corporations alone for the most part, only occasionally butting in to their affairs. Jobs in space are plentiful… there is always work to be done.
You begin your “career” in space as a military pilot. The Osis government will provide you with a ship, supplies, and a regular salary. You may decide to leave the military and strike out on your own. You might pilot a ship for a corporation (most pay better than the military) or pilot your own ship as an independent freighter or fighter pilot. There is always a demand for qualified escort pilots. You may decide that the idea of preying upon the independent or corporate freighters suits you better. You may not want to be a pilot a ship at all, but work your way up the corporate ladder and eventually run your own corporation. You’ll find that there are any number of ways to make a living in space.
*(Temporary in the same sense that Raider Wars was taken "temporarily" offline. It quickly became permanent.)