Your radar only gives terse "blips" with identifying numbers, updates at maybe only 1 or 0.5 Hz, and you have to manually send and recieve IFF codes to determine if they are hostile or not. You have an armament of nuclear missiles, but they must be aimed carefully and you need to remember to open the payload bay doors before firing. Perhaps you also have a gigawatt laser that needs to be carefully charged before firing, and can easily overheat. All the interfaces are in monochrome, and use obscure abbreviations wherever possible (SS RNG 10M KM V -1.05 5.41 0.21 ACC 2.5 G).

If you are performing an ortillery strike, you need to carefully place yourself in orbit (full newtonian physics!) and launch your bombs very precisely. If you hit the target, you don't actually see the result; it's obscured beneath many layers of atmosphere. You are rewarded instead with a terse readout: "PRI TGT DESTROYED. EST 4.5 MDEATHS."

Because of some of the boredom related with travelling thousands of km, I am contemplating having all the gameplay take place within orbit of a planet.