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Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Princess Aisling Duval has revealed that she recently visited Imperator Hadrian Augustus Duval, leader of the isolationist group Nova Imperium.

The Imperial Herald published her statement:

"For some time, I have regretted my initial dismissal of Hadrian. Had I known that Arissa intended to carry out such a brutal purge of his followers, my approach would have been different."

"Although he has been labelled an enemy of the Empire, I found myself unable to ignore this new member of the Duval family, and so requested a meeting in the Paresa system."

"Another reason to make contact was to verify his claim to be Emperor Hengist's grandson. All the genetic tests were conclusive – Hadrian is indeed my cousin by blood."

"We have now opened a dialogue to see if there can ever be common ground between us. Perhaps together we can heal divisions within the Empire."

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Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Last weekend, Princess Aisling Duval hosted a diplomatic function at which Federal Ambassador Jordan Rochester was the guest of honour.

Although security at the event was tight, entertainment journalist Solomon Helios managed to obtain an exclusive insight for his programme.

"If you're wondering what happened to your invitation to the Princess's soirée, it probably ended up in the same black hole as mine. But I can still bring you a little peek from behind closed doors!"

"It's not unusual for the Imperial family to hold parties for visiting ambassadors. What is unusual is that on this occasion, Aisling invited all of Jordan Rochester's staff, including the captain and crew of his ship. Since the FNS Pioneer's commanding officer is none other than Vice Admiral Juno Rochester, one of Jordan's sisters, perhaps this was seen as an opportunity to meet a future in-law?"

"My contacts tell me that

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Princess Aisling Duval has publicly rejected the isolationist group Nova Imperium and its figurehead, Hadrian Duval:

"These extremists cause only division. Hadrian may well be the grandson of Hengist Duval, but that hardly makes him suited to the throne. Arissa has been silent for too long – she must act quickly to resolve this volatile situation."

Senator Zemina Torval responded:

"Much to my surprise, I find myself in agreement with Princess Duval. The notion of an independent pilot becoming ruler of the Empire is preposterous. I am confident that the Emperor will respond accordingly."

Despite this united front, Senator Pal Vespasian stated:

"Many senators are willing to recognise Hadrian Duval as Emperor-in-waiting. Nova Imperium is now a legitimate political movement with several million supporters. The only way the Empire will survive is by accepting the Imperator's proposals."

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Federal news channels have announced that the wedding of Princess Aisling Duval and Ambassador Jordan Rochester has been cancelled.

The statement came from Congress member Isolde Rochester:

"The planned wedding between my son Jordan Rochester and Her Imperial Highness will no longer take place. We have contacted everyone involved with the event and closed down all related projects."

The announcement follows anti-slavery campaigner Jarl Toredo's confession that he and Aisling Duval were romantically involved for several months. Toredo also claimed that the planned marriage was purely a political matter.

The cancellation was confirmed by the Imperial Palace on Emerald, but there has been no direct response from Princess Duval or Ambassador Rochester.

Political journalist Cassia Carvalho of The Imperial Herald commented:

"The fact that this news comes from Isolde Rochester gives weight to Jarl

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Anti-slavery campaigner Jarl Toredo has disclosed that he and Princess Aisling Duval have been conducting a secret romantic relationship, despite her betrothal to Federal Ambassador Jordan Rochester.

Entertainment journalist Solomon Helios gave full details on his programme:

"Following Jarl Toredo's resignation from Unchain, I offered to tell his side of the story. Although he declined a formal interview, he did disclose that he could no longer bear working alongside Princess Duval."

"He admitted that he has been romantically involved with the princess since their first meeting several months ago. It seems they both felt it wise to keep the relationship a secret."

"According to Toredo, the princess claimed not to have any romantic feelings for Ambassador Rochester, and insisted that the marriage was merely a means to advance her political plans. Initially Toredo accepted this, but it seems

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

*Pilots' Federation ALERT*
A fundraiser hosted by Princess Aisling aims to finance a support network for Imperial citizens affected by Thargoid aggression.
The Citizens' Relief Trust has been established in the Cemiess system, prompted by the loss of thousands of military personnel during the Battle of HIP 22460. She announced:
"While the Empire is focused on increasing its military strength, we must not forget the human cost of ongoing conflict with the Thargoids. Those who died in battle will be honoured by assisting the families and dependants left to mourn them. The Citizens' Relief Trust plans to establish support centres to ensure their financial and emotional needs are met."
"To raise funding, I have requested deliveries of Eshu Umbrellas, Xihe Biomorphic Companions and Chateau De Aegaeon. These luxury commodities will be auctioned or sold at a special gala I plan to host for Imperial

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Great job, everyone! Once again, hundreds of Wingnuts have come together to pull off a successful crowdfunding campaign! The finally tally was $24,300, which is more than 50% over the $16,000 target. This means that a live orchestra will be able to record the entire Wing Commander album in Budapest and it will be supplemented by a live choir in Salt Lake City. The entire project will come to more than $40,000 when combined with a separate mega donation from Matt Hiltner, so Wingnuts will truly be in for a treat. When all is said and done, the effort will include reprintings of the prior albums on CD as well as vinyl editions of both orchestra pieces. This will be a collectible set for the ages! Even if you're only interested in hearing the final product digitally, it will surely be a treat. Composer George Oldziey has already started placing deposits to secure time with the musicians later

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We're now just a bit more than three days away from the conclusion of George Oldziey's campaign to create a new Wing Commander album with a live orchestra. Just since this past weekend, the project has added another $1,000 to approach $19,500. With only a few more days left to go, is $22,000 possible? The project has already crossed the minimum $16K threshold, but we'd love to see it hit the $22K stretch target to add a live choir as well. Wing Commander fans have shown up in force many times before, so it's certainly possible!

Here's some samples of George's wonderful 2019 jazz album full of Wing Commandar bar music. A handful of reprinted copies are up for grabs as part of the new album campaign:

George Oldziey · Wing Commander Bar Music!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Wing Commander composer

George Oldziey

has another update on the progress of his

album campaign

. He's still diligently working on sending out the discs that backers ordered, but the timetable has been slower than he'd have liked. He has had some exciting distractions, however! In addition to moving from Austin to LA, he's had a couple of major professional jobs to attend to with great results. The full update is below:

Greetings all! I just wanted to apologize for the slowness of delivery on this phase 1 of Volume 2 campaign. I did complete recording the bar music and delivery of digital files and score pdfs. But I still owe some of you physical CDs as well as MIDI mockups of the (hopefully) soon to be recorded orchestral music (pending success of a subsequent phase).

This has been a year of huge transition for me and my wife Suzi. I've been spending most of my time in LA trying to kickstart

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Newsfeeds and ICE-casts have reacted to Aegis's theory that the Thargoids have purposefully captured tens of millions of living humans.
Eyewitness testimonies provided by independent pilots have given credence to this theory. Citizens' Chronicle featured the following account from Imperial auxiliary Commander Luca Redondo:
"It was a sickening sight, watching Scythes hunt down survivors. A part of me wanted to start blasting the escape pods rather than let those poor people be eaten, or experimented on, or whatever the hell the Thargoids want them for. There was nothing my squadron could do to save them, not without risking the refugees we were carrying. I don't think I'll be sleeping well for a long time."
Many reporters have interviewed people still waiting to hear from those who once lived in Thargoid-occupied systems. Vox Galactica has published several such stories:
"My ex-husband took our

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Today we've got an updated look at the exotic Double Helix design that Klavs is experimenting with. Instead of a static image, this time we've got a subtle video where it ominously hangs in space. It's both beautiful and eerie at the same time!

Playing with the Double Helix spaceship again, fiddling with camera angles & focal lengths to make the ship appear to shift and stretch in slightly unsettling ways. It all happens probably too slowly to notice, but then maybe that's the poinnnnnnt.

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Dad holograms are the rage right now which means it's time to talk about Merlin! There are a lot of takes on Wing Commander but one of the most most unexpected is that it would've been better with a holographic wizard talking you through the plot. And that wizard was… Merlin!

Merlin was said to be the 'interface' to Blair's Portable Personal Computer (PPC), a 16" tall holographic wizard who can appear to provide needed information. Kind of like Alexa or Siri… or the Great Gazoo.

And Merlin was IN THE MOVIE as filmed. Freddie Prinze Jr. shot scenes where he talks to a 1/6th scale action figure. The plan was that the second unit would shoot (or CG) a hologram to composite over the doll (like Jabba the Hutt in A New Hope).

Merlin is half Attack of the Clones C-3PO-style comic relief and half tool for providing extremely important exposition. He appears throughout the film but has four important scenes which

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Shout out to Origin’s 1993 “CD-ROM Edition” graphic. That’s how you know it’s a CD-ROM Edition!

They went with a much more subtle version from 94 to 95. Wings of Glory is so handsome!

And by 1996 you didn’t need to advertise that a PC game came on a CD. It shows up on the European Wing Commander IV box but not the domestic release.

They also had something called a CD>Hard Drive release. These didn’t have any CD-specific enhancements and instead just installed the disk version without all the swapping.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Spacedock has produced another slick sci-fi lore video, and Wing Commander gets some nice mentions this time out. Rather than focus on one specific ship or element, the subject here is the broad concept of pulsars across franchises. The Wing Commander Movie's pulsar jumps are mentioned as is the pulsar-focused plot in WC Academy's episode Expendable. Pulsars are also seen in places like the Wing Commander collectible card game as well as the losing Blackmane series of WC3, although they're not mentioned in this clip. Thanks to FekLeyrTarg for spotting this one first!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi opens with Blair being reduced in rank and assigned to a backwater Star Base called Caernaven Station in the Gwynedd System. Ever wonder what the inspiration for the base itself was? Director Siobhan Beeman tweeted: "The Confed starbases in WC2 were inspired by two things: the Cylon basestars from the original BSG, and Starfleet Headquarters from the old "Starfleet Technical Manual" from Franz Joseph Designs." We thought it would be fun to look at both Wing Commander II's Star Base AND the history of the two classic science fiction designs that inspired it.

Star Base - Wing Commander

The Confederation Star Base is a massive space station outpost seen in a number of different places in and around the Enigma Sector. The base is 1,200 meters wide, masses 230,000 tonnes and carries four flak guns and a full complement of fighters. A script document reproduced in

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Since everyone is now an expert on space patches I thought it might be fun to share a thread of the prop ones made for Wing Commander! This first one is used on all of the uniforms in Wing Commander III:

It’s called the ‘combined forces’ emblem because it was worn during the war by all branches of the Confederation military: marines, army, space navy and, yes, space force. It also had a blink-and-you-miss it cameo in the Wing Commander movie!

Wing Commander IV updates this to the post-war ‘Unified Space Command’ patch. They also designed new patches for the Union of Border Worlds and the Black Lance which appear as loyalties shift!

Wing Comnander Prophecy continues to use the USC patch and adds these unit emblems for the Midway’s fighter wings. These only appear on the leather bomber jackets that are occasionally worn between missions.

Three unit patches (Tiger Claw, Concordia and Pegasus) and a general

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In anticipation of all the Hellcat love planned for tomorrow's episode of

All Wings Considered

,

Klavs

has cooked up renders of both the

Grumman

and

Douglas Aerospace

versions. They're a couple of beauties! For all the other big fans of these craft, tune in Thursday for a full rundown on these trusty birds - and much more!

How timely, my very favourite airplane! And look what I happen to be working on!

Just please don't fall into the trap of saying that the F6F was developed in response to the Zero! The contract for the Hellcat was signed in June 1940, prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and when the US knew very little about Japanese capabilities! And the first F6F flew only a few days after the Akutan Zero was recovered! #hellcatpedant! I have many other interesting Hellcat facts that aren't in the wikipedia article if you're interested, or want more images! I have done a stupid amount of work on

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Our weekly

All Wings Considered

show is off to a great start! LOAF and Dundradal have been coming up with tons of content to share each week, but they're also actively reaching out to viewers for what else they'd like to see. Feedback on what's been done so far is much appreciated, and they're also especially looking for questions to fit in the Ghorah Khar Talk segment. So if there's any burning topics that you've been waiting for a panel of WC experts to answer, hit the comment link and let us know!

We hope everyone is enjoying All Wings Considered as much as we've enjoyed making it. We're starting this thread to ask what the community would like to see on the show as well as any questions or feedback you have. Please feel free to include any questions, suggestions, and ideas you may have.

If you have a question you want to see answered during Ghorah Khar Talk, please let us know!

Happy Wing

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Artist Alan Gutierrez has posted another one of his fabulous Wing Commander scenes commissioned for the Wing Commander Customizable Card Game. It was mirrored and used as the art for the Magnum Launch card. It's hard to tell if this was just due to image processing, but there are possibly some very slight differences between the two scenes: the ceiling structure is more pronounced in the recent posting while the light reflections on the deck appear slightly more distinct on the card. Mr. Gutierrez notes that this scene was likely the inspiration for a similar fighter launch scene he did a few years later for Steve Jackson Games titled X Wing Fighter Scramble. You can find links to some of his other Wing Commander items below and plenty of other nifty sci-fi scenes here.

From the card game "Wing Commander" commissioned and published by Tracy Hickman & Margaret Weis, 1995

A "Luck" card, it was the

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Tonight’s little project: a spreadsheet of all the ship graphics that appear in Privateer 2’s booth and which palette they use! Find the full link here (second tab).