Reminds me a bit of the game Retaliator, when I was 12 a class mate earned himself a night of "pick your own time to go to bed at camp" because he could show the teacher how to land. [0, the landing is at the very end]. I think at the time nobody knew what key to hit to deploy the landing gear (and flaps, though I think you could land without flaps). And since it was all copied stuff there was no book, no internet...
Gosh, I miss the aesthetics of vector games of this era. My absolute favourite was Armour-Geddon (on the Amiga), which because I'd pirated it I barely had any clue what to do but.. it was still fun, and so beautiful. And fast!
I know there's Tiny Combat Arena from 'Microprose' but its development's taking a while. I'd dearly love to know if there's anything else of that contemporary ilk out there today.
I loved them too. During that era I got to try some kind of flight simulator on a Silicon Graphics. Smoooth shapes, extremely high resolution, must have been lots of tiny triangles, and nice shading. I remember thinking, this is the future, can’t wait to get this in personal computers!
Nah, instead almost two decades of muddy lores textures on lopoly models.
I guess now we are finally there, with raytracing in games. But I would still like to see the nontextured aesthetic make a comeback.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYwcrxbhiLs