impulse 101 up until 2.12 iirc. Good times. ^_^ Also, servers used to allow any vehicle to be created, regardless of research status. So if you made custom scripts for vehicles, you could build them at any point in the game, with any weapon. Nuke APC's are very powerful.
It was cool once. After the 187th time someone called it, I was fucking sick of it. It had to go. And I did that before I even became a developer as well.
Fun fact: It's still in the map. I just changed the entity firing to kill the model instead of start it off though. I can't remember if I used that version you linked Jephir, or the version where the button was in the lift.
The other day I found out since I had to reload my OS from a backup like two years ago I have the client install files from when I actually played empires. Apparently it was 2.23-2.26, and then 2.28. So I wasn't around for this Also? I really need to clean up my computer.
You can still find them. I found a 1.0 install which I used to look at the original models a year or 2 ago. They should all be on ModDB.