Around 10 to 15 years ago, I bought a bunch of 'big box' 1990s flight sims from ebay and Amazon that I missed when they came out but were still somewhat available and Fleet Defender was one of them. The idea was that 'one day' I'd get around to actually get them working.

This thread has brought that day for Fleet Defender, but instead of digging out my USB floppy drive I just bought the game again from GOG.
I'm not sure what the Gold version offers apart from the Windows multimedia stuff that came with the CD version.
As mentioned earlier, the multimedia parts won't work in Win10 unless you are running the 32 bit version.

I have a bit more luck with Linux, where at least MMINTRO.EXE runs, although there was a problem installing the media player with default Wine settings so the videos don't play yet.

The main problem I've having though is with the 320x200 resolution while flying. With the defaults which is all I've tried so far, full screen is quite painful to look at, and windowed mode is far too small.
So, I look forward to seeing some good compromise settings. There may be some Dosbox settings or addons that can help with upscaling although I fear that the visuals will be too dated for me to appreciate the features of this sim.