Ok so I am having trouble remembering the name of a particular PC game.  I'd like to see if you can come up with the title for me:  
 
The game was a space adventure game where you flew your ship to other worlds looking for resources and other life.  The "aliens" had ships also and you could attack them, visit the planets they lived on etc, and even form treaties and trade resources with them.    
 
In battle depending on how poorly you fought your ship would get damaged, there was a little console you could click on that would show your engine and the parts that were damaged etc.  I think it was called a "spin drive" the damaged parts would turn an orangish yellow and depending on the damage you couldn't fly anywhere until they were repaired.  
 
I once got pretty far in the game and had defeated a few "alien races" and had a couple of treaties with others, until I picked a fight with someone I shouldn't have and my ship was damaged beyond what I had the means to fix.  My only option was to use the escape pod... which of course ended my game  
 
Does this sound familliar to anyone?  
 
HELP I want to find it again!  
 

Um...  Freelancer maybe?  I know what you're talking about, but I'm also having trouble remembering.  Going to think about this for a bit and get back to you.

Definitely not Freelancer.

Also not Master of Orion...
 
Don't know the title either, but hopefully thi'll help you narrow down the list.
 
It wouls also help if you told us *how* old this game is... i.e., what kind of graphics did it have? What OS did it run on?

skyroads, descent, fury, alien crossfire/alpha centauri, elite, escape velocity, sundog:frozen legacy, wing commander: privateer, X: beyond the frontier, starflight, star control, iron seed??  
 
maybe one of those lol

Homeworld?  (just a guess)

damn, that sounds really familiar for some reason but I'm drawing a blank.

Star Trek????????
 
J?K...
 
Never heard of it.

MMMH sounds damn familiar to me as well.
 
Only 2 I can think of are planets edge from new world computing and Hard Nova from EA. Between these 2 and 550's list its made me think of some damn happy times

This thread was obviously started to torture us.  It's like when we can't remember a word we want to use mid-sentence and everything just stops.

Yeah, it definitely isn't Freelancer

Was it Nomad? Now that was an *awesome* game.

Nomad!  Hahaha
 
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strateg [...] ?id=408357

I HAVE IT!  Your game is called LIGHTSPEED.

It sounds to me like the star control series perhaps?

jp550 with Lightspeed for the win!

Wow guys I leave for the weekend and get an entire list of games to chose from.... Lightspeed sounds like it might be the winner...
 
As far as the post about OS and graphics etc goes...
I am guessing that it was probably around Win 95 maybe early Win 98  
 
as for the other games listed here those are all excellent games as well..... spent hours on starcon and the like....
 
Hey JP550 how did you arrive at Lightspeed?

Oh yes I have done my searching now and you are indeed correct Lightspeed is our WINNER!!!
 
Thanks guys

haha I actually haven't played any of these games before.  I spent about 15 minutes searching on wikipedia and then i found it.  I knew that it was the game cause it had something about spindrive.
 
I'm glad i could help
 
take care

Starflight