In this continuity, JFK's presidency overlapped with an alien invasion, so I'm sure he was being presented with even more psychotic designs. The Orion Battleship was probably just the tip of the iceberg.
Quite possibly, but it's some iceberg if the Orion Battleship is the tip!
It always amazes me just what NASA managed to achieve with slide rules and pencils in the 50s and 60s.
I did think of spinning off at Kennedy for what became TerraGen Dominion, but decided not to, for reasons that will become more apparent later on. Or are already figureoutable to anyone who's looked up which namelist has Idmé Hencaal in the CANS namelist mod. That probably gives away the whole AAR actually.
I've heard of that game, but I didn't know it had a ship designer. I also did not know it had a third and fourth sequel. I'm assuming that's where some of the ship designs in Life 2.0 came from? I'd definitely be interested in seeing a Battlemaster gunship re-created in that game.
The original model is from Kerbal Space Program running the OPT spaceplane parts mod. Because both game and mod have been updated several times since then, so it's no longer possible for me to build the ship, let alone fly it.
I was thinking that it looked quite KSP; once I saw the resemblance it immediately came across as "oh, they forgot the RCS thrusters". Hope you don't mind, but I did add them here. I'd have also gone with front winglets as well if it was one of my designs, but I tend towards making my KSP aircraft too acrobatic as they're more fun that way. But then I also but a 220 m/s jet-propelled formula car thing which could fly if it managed to get airborne. You could land it by activating the DRS with the way it shifted the aero balance. It was a fun thing to drive, as long as you had unbreakable parts on. Otherwise...
Anyway, as a first draft:
A few bits do need a little more tweaking, the colour scheme definitely clashes on the wings, but it's quarter-to eleven at night here. I also couldn't figure out where the turrets were, and getting the colours right is way beyond my skill with the game anyway. Tried to replicate the shape.
Galactic Civilisations has had quite a few sequels now; the newest one is the one I've been using for the relevant Life2.0 pictures. The series has had a ship designer in 2, 3 and 4 in the game, with 4 having the best implementation - they've put the models for planets into the ship designer, so you can do Attack Moons and Behemoth Planetcraft.
1 didn't have a designer as such, but the ships were all text files, so you could customise and reuse models. The devs did release the sprite to .mdl file convertor tool they used after release, but it's not a user-friendly tool.