Written & compiled by Lizard and JORDAN, with material from the COW reference manual (written by a whole ton of people), the NEWBIE Manual (compiled by Jonathan Shekter aka KillThemAll!), and NEWSGROUP posts.  

Some statistics and technical notes were obtained from newsgroup posts by "Harry Karatassos" <hk0x+@andrew.cmu.edu>, "Terence M. Chang" <tc2i+@andrew.cmu.edu>, "Grey Elf" <markiel@callisto.pas.rochester.edu>, and "Herbert Enderton" <hde+@CS.CMU.EDU>.  Ship statistics and other technical information can be different for different servers.

What is Netrek:
Netrek is a 16-player graphical real-time battle simulation with a Star Trek theme. The game is divided into two teams of 8 (or less), who dogfight each other and attempt to conquer each other's planets. There are several different types of ships, from fast, fragile scouts up to big, slow battleships; this allows a great deal of variance in play styles. Netrek is set up as a client/server combination; if you want to play, you'll need the client binary for your machine (most are X-based). There are clients available for win32 NT/95/3.1, linux, freeBSD, Macintosh and other UNIX based machines.

Purpose of Game:
There's more to Netrek than just ships flying around and blowing each other away. The actual goal of the game is to conquer the galaxy. As a shorter term goal, a team must conquer the planets of the other team. This genocides the team, and all its players are forced to quit or change to a new team. (Note that most if not all current servers restart the galaxy after one genocide.)