I found that I could preserve direct article links from the old Nuke site when I converted to Drupal by adding the following rewrite rule to my .htaccess:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^name=News&file=article&sid=([^&]+)$
RewriteRule modules.php index.php?q=node/view/%1 [L]