not experienced in some multiple of real time and appear almost instantaneous (theories range from suspended animation to extreme time dilation). A hyperspace jump leaves a visible remnant, a "hyperspace cloud", at the entry and exit points. These are visible for some hours afterwards, ostensibly making it possible for pirates and assassins to track a ship through hyperspace, arrive at its destination first and attack without police intervention. Sooner or later the player will run into enemies, most likely in the form of space pirates. The different star systems have differing government and social structures, meaning that some systems are safer than others. The Core worlds are usually the safest, with anarchic systems being the most hazardous ("Riedquat" and "Phekda" are amongst the most notorious anarchies in the game). Combat is handled completely realistically. In practice, this means both ships taking slingshot thrusts at each other, lasers being fired constantly at each other, until one of the ships is destroyed. All enemy ships destroyed count towards the player's combat rating, starting at "Harmless" and progressing towards "Elite". The game's copy protection was worked into the game in the form of police spot-checks, making sure the player is the legitimate owner of his ship. At certain intervals in the game, the police would ask the player to "please enter the first letter of word X, row Y on page Z" of their ship's manual (which the game manual ostensibly was). If the player entered a wrong letter on three occasions, he would be arrested and his ship impounded, at which point the game ends. Comparisons with Elite Frontier has more advanced graphics than Elite, but this is mostly due to the differences in the underlying computer platforms, as the Amiga, Atari ST and IBM PC offered much more power than the BBC Micro and Commodore 64. The graphics engine was advanced for its time, featuring curved Bézier surfaces, and texture mapping in the PC version. Frontier operates on a very large scale compared to previous games, and most games since. It is, for example, possible to do realistic gravitational slingshots around supermassive stars and large planets, and in the same engine fly close enough to the ground to read the (accurate) time from the face of a clock. Frontier built on Elite differs in other aspects as well. It is possible to freeform seamlessly land on planets, something not possible in