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For seven years, Captain Jean-Luc Picard commanded the U.S.S. Enterprise on our television screens, bringing to life some of the greatest stories in Trek canon. Now, later this month, Patrick Stewart returns to the role he made famous, in the brand new series, Star Trek: Picard. To celebrate this amazing moment in Trek fandom, we’re releasing a brand new bundle for Star Trek Online, coming on January 16th for 12000 Zen! Buying this bundle together gets you a deep discount on some items that were very important in Picard’s life, and includes a ship that’s never been offered for direct purchase before! Here’s the full breakdown of everything in the bundle: T6 Ship: Miradorn Raider T5 Ship: Galaxy Exploration Cruiser Retrofit T3 Ship: Constellation Class Heavy Cruiser Bridge Environment: Galaxy Class Ship Interior 1 T5 Ship Upgrade Token Ground Weapon: Replica Thompson Submachine

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For seven years, Captain Jean-Luc Picard commanded the U.S.S. Enterprise on our television screens, bringing to life some of the greatest stories in Trek canon. Now, later this month, Patrick Stewart returns to the role he made famous, in the brand new series, Star Trek: Picard. To celebrate this amazing moment in Trek fandom, we’re releasing a brand new bundle for Star Trek Online, coming on January 16th for 12000 Zen! Buying this bundle together gets you a deep discount on some items that were very important in Picard’s life, and includes a ship that’s never been offered for direct purchase before! Here’s the full breakdown of everything in the bundle: T6 Ship: Miradorn Raider T5 Ship: Galaxy Exploration Cruiser Retrofit T3 Ship: Constellation Class Heavy Cruiser Bridge Environment: Galaxy Class Ship Interior 1 T5 Ship Upgrade Token Ground Weapon: Replica Thompson Submachine

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We’ve been gorn to secrecy about this for months, but it’s finally time to announce the next step in our on-gorning Discovery expansion: Star Trek Online: Gorn of Discovery! We know you're gornna love getting all the gorntent you crave! Try our newest missions, “Here Today, Gorn Tomorrow!” and “Gorn with the Wind!” Defend the gornfields of Gornar in our featured TFO, “The Gorns of Navarrone!” “Gorn of Discovery” includes several other new missions: “The Gorn Identity” “Who Gorns for Adonias” “The Last Unigorn” And new TFOs: “Gorn Killers” “Children of the Gorn” And a fantastic new Gorn tutorial, “Where No One has Gorn Before,” plus the walking tour of Gornar, “Gorn Home,” in which you’ll meet the famous descendants of the Cestus III incident - the Osgornes. This update also includes an updated soundtrack, produced in partnership

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Every day, we get closer to the summer launch of the newest expansion to Star Trek Online, Victory is Life. But when the expansion comes, will you be ready? If you want a head start on everything the brand new Jem’Hadar faction has to offer, we’ve got some offers, available right now, to help you out. They’re called the Gamma Vanguard Starter Pack, and the Gamma Vanguard Pack, and here’s the breakdown of what they offer. You can pre-order both of these packs right now, and have your items drop as soon as Victory is Life goes live. We can’t wait for you to experience all of these new items, Captains. Gamma Vanguard Starter Pack (Click here to preorder the pack) The Gamma Vanguard Starter Pack contains several helpful items to start your adventure fighting the Hur’q within the Dominion. This Pack contains the following items: T6 Jem’Hadar Vanguard Dreadnought Cruiser Playable

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Last month, we asked you to submit your designs for a Propaganda Poster from your favorite faction – the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Dominion. And you sent us some fantastic work, really, truly incredible pieces across the board. We’ve gone through them with some of Star Trek Online’s artists, and the winner will receive a signed copy of their poster design, straight from Cryptic. There were so many amazing entries, we couldn’t show off just one, so we’re highlighting one from each faction, and one overall winner. Without further ado: Runner Ups Representing the Romulan Empire: Morishita! Representing the Federation: Joshua Inglima! Representing the Dominion: Lucas Jassgone! Grand Prize Winner Representing the Klingon Empire: Resdayn! Congratulations to all the runners up, and to our winner! We'll contact you via email. .share-footer a {

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Later this week, two brand new ships are coming to PC. The New Orleans class, updated in 25th century to the Lafayette Class, and the Klingon Empire's Ketha-class Recon Raptor, will soon be available for purchase in the C-store, both individually and as a bundle. In addition, the bundle will be 20% off for the first weekend it's on sale! You'll be able to find more about them in our stats blog tomorrow, but first, here's a look at the design and philosophy behind these new ships. Lafayette-Class Recon Destroyer Length: 382.6 meters Description In these trying times, constant conflict and ever-present hostility have made exploration and reconnaissance at the edges of the frontier an even more dangerous endeavor than normal. The Recon Destroyer has been designed in response to this galactic atmosphere, providing a distinct combat-focus to a ship that is otherwise dedicated to scientific study

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The Ferengi have seen the return of the Dominion, Odo, and the Hur’q as the opportunity of a lifetime. Using Gamma Quadrant supplies and Ferenginar’s own munitions factories, they have come presenting a medley of new armaments for the Alliance’s disposal. Not surprisingly, the Lobi Consortium has also joined in this cause and brought the fruits of their endeavors. The following are some of the brand new items in the Deep Space Nine Lock Box – Holographic Deep Space Nine Bridge Officers to join your crew and away teams. A Vanity-Only Ferengi Shield, allowing a player to take on the visual look of classic Ferengi ships, capable of dropping from the Weapon pack. A Lobi Hunter Ground Set based on the Tosk Hunters in the DS9 Episode, “Captive Pursuit”. Ferengi-Inspired Outfits Based on the attire of familiar DS9 characters, see below for more details and images. The Deep Space

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Anniversary Promotion & Free Fly Details

Take to the skies!

Citizens,

To celebrate the release of Hurston, Star Citizen’s first explorable planet, and commemorate our anniversary, we’re launching a Free Fly event of unprecedented magnitude.

From Nov 23 through Dec 1 you’ll have the chance to try out every flyable ship and operable vehicle in the game for free. Here’s how it works:

During the promotion, anyone can join Star Citizen’s Persistent Universe for free. You’ll be able to experience Star Citizen first-hand, but to get out there and start exploring, you’re gonna need a ship.

Starting on November 23rd, every day, a different ship manufacturer in the game will make its entire flyable fleet available for a 24-hour test flight period.

There may also be some surprises in store for those of you who make the trek out to Hurston and see what Lorville’s all about, as well as some fun interactive

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Happy Anniversary, Captains! Nine years ago, Star Trek Online launched out into the universe. It’s been a heck of a ride so far – we’ve battled the Borg, walked the surface of Deep Space Nine, welcomed our friends in the Romulan Republic, the Dominion, and the Discovery Eras into the fold, traveled back to the days of Captain Kirk and Commander Spock, and battled the Hu’rq alongside the stars of Deep Space Nine. Now, as we look towards the future with a brand new season and the continuation of the Age of Discovery, we want to celebrate with you and show our appreciation for all the Captains that protect the galaxy of Star Trek Online. Each day of this week, we’ll be giving away a brand new surprise gift. All of these gifts will be accessible for one day only in the in game C-store. What are we giving away? Check back here each day for information on today’s prize, and how you can claim

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The 10th Anniversary Update is coming ever closer, and as is tradition, we want you to walk away with some free stuff! From now until January 29th, there will be a new giveaway every single day! Log in every day to claim something new, and don’t forget to grab our new Starfleet 2399 uniform from Star Trek: Picard as well! Our first giveaway opens the doors of the galaxy for you. From now until 10am PT, January 25th, log in to receive five Master Keys for free, once per account! .share-footer a { margin: 20px 10px 10px 0; background: url(d7afaaa14e96d0d973f76157ae31ec5b1466398539.png) no-repeat 0 0; opacity: .5; display: inline-block; height: 60px; width: 60px; padding: 0; border: 1px solid transparent; -webkit-transition: opacity .3s; transition: opacity .3s; } .share-footer .TI { background-position: 0 20%; } .share-footer .YT {

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The Confederation Fleet has been well outfitted in DefianceIndustries' animated WC universe, and now the Kilrathi have arrived in force too. You can find an impressive force of Kilrathi capships depicted here, including the all new Ralari model. They're escorted by numerous wings of Dralthi and Grikath to round out the ensemble. It's not a fleet you want to mess around with!

Hi Kat lovers! It didn't seem right to have a nifty Tiger's Claw render and not give our Kilrathi brethren some love. It's a 4K wallpaper, so feel free to adorn your monitors should you feel so inclined. You might also notice a new ship in here, just sayin'.

You can also get a quick peek of the fleet in action here:

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DefianceIndustries has managed to insert another animated-style Wing Commander ship to the original WC1 engine. This time it's the Hornet, and the process turned out to be a little bit trickier than the Tiger's Claw import. The results are very cool though!

On the subject of a larger conversion pack, Defiance has some thoughts on how to integrate the different fleets. Some of the ships, like the Tiger's Claw, Scimitar or Fralthi are directly depicted in the cartoon show. But there's no Rapier or Salthi - would a WCA Sabre or Sartha be a good replacement? Check out the proposed swaps and share what you think would be a good fit!

So I continue my playing around and started working on fighters. Fighters are different beasts a bit from the WC1 capships as they have to be scaled appropriately (if you render the sprite too large, they appear giant in the game). My experiments yielded the best results at

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Bazooka Joe

has published an interesting Wing Commander themed music video. It's three minutes of fighter scenes stitched together from Wing Commander Academy to the tune of "Know Why." Wing Commander fan videos like this were common a while back, but they've fallen out of vogue in recent years. It's not really clear what the theme or motivation for this clip was, but it's more than just the intro paired to random music. Someone spent some time editing together all the combat, so here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Wing Commander Know why music video

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Here's a spectacular experiment conducted by DefianceIndustries. Goliath and UnnammedCharacter made some great headway a couple years ago on adding enhanced models into the original WC1 engine, and Defiance has taken that in a different direction. He's taken his animated series-style Tiger's Claw and converted it into a collection of sprites to be displayed in game. The result is that players are now able to fly around a Bengal straight out of the Academy television show. What a trip! Let Defiance know if you'd like to test this out or if there would be interest in a conversion pack with more ships.

So I was playing around with the WCt Toolbox and decided to try and make a WC1 mod. So I took my WCA Bengal and converted it into a sprite sheet. It was a larger process than I originally thought but it is kinda fun to do this sort of messing around. Admittedly I stand on the shoulders of giants here.

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Arne from

Android Arts

has been bitten by the Wing Commander bug lately and the result has been a wide ranging gallery of WC sketches. He put together some interesting

mockups

about a year ago that focused heavily on the WC1/2 timeframe, and now his new work spans virtually the entire series. This time he's got aliens in addition to ships, and this lineup includes Confed soldiers, Kilrathi, Firekkans, Steltek and even the Mopoks! His fighter sketches also have grown to include works from

both

Privateers, and there's a Tri-System Melissa Banks-inspired outfit! The Tarsus first person cockpit also makes an appearance. These are super fun, and I'm anxious to see what else he makes in the future. You can read more about his specific inspiration

here

and follow the creative process on

Twitter

.

I have some fond memories playing Wing Commander 1 on the Amiga. A sticker on my box says it works on the

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The Great Wing Commander Movie in Real Time Event has begun! The @WCCIC Twitter account is now tweeting the events of the film in real time as they happened across March 15, 16 and 17 in the year 2654. As we mentioned yesterday, this is much more than little snippets posted to social media. Many tweets are accompanied with a link that has script notes, video samples, storyboards and more that go along with that point in the film. A few examples are below. Follow the full event as it unfolds live here.

Day 1 - 0900 Zulu - BREAKING NEWS FROM THE VEGA SECTOR: a fleet of forty Kilrathi capital ships have launched a surprise attack on Pegasus Naval Station in the Dakota System! MORE

Kilrathi marines have boarded Pegasus and made their way to the bridge in an apparent attempt to capture the NAVCOM AI! Admiral Wilson and crew are presumed dead.

Day 1 - 2100 Zulu - TCS Concordia, flagship of the 14th Fleet

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As January is already coming to a close, we're happy to announce the winners to our annual fan project of the year event! To start things off, we've got two fantastic projects that we are co-awarding Fan Project of the Year this time around.

The first is Wing Loader, which had a tremendous release in 2023 that fully integrated speech from the Sega/Mega CD version of WC1 into the PC version of the game. With the knowledge gained from achieving this milestone, Destro began work on a larger effort to expand compatibility to other games in the series. This includes the future potential to integrate higher quality video into Wing Commander 3, which we hope comes to fruition!

The other fan project of the year winner is WC4 Remastered. They released a new iteration of the game's playable demo this past year that incorporates a variety of fixes, better joystick support and new in-flight comms.. The team

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We've been collecting votes for the last several weeks, and the winners of our annual Fan Project of the Year contest have become pretty clear!

It may come as little surprise, but we have a quite definitive first place choice for 2022. With a commanding lead in our polling, the WC4 Remastered project wins as our Fan Project of the Year! Congratulations to the team! If you haven't given it a spin year, you can still try out the playable demo. The project has generated quite a bit of excitement lately, and we can't wait to see what's in store for 2023!

As wonderful as our winner is, we had a whole slate of creative endeavors to choose from. Each one earned votes based on their own merits, and all are deserving of high praise thanks to their efforts to keep the WC community engaged and vibrant for another year. Two options bubbled up to the top and rank as our co-runners up this year.

The first is

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Votes have been coming in all month, and there's been a clear trend in the results. As January is coming to a close, we're ready to announce the winners! This year the numbers were pretty clear cut. With that being said, every project got a good handful of votes, which shows how there's something for everyone brewing in the community.

The top contender for 2021 was the Wing Commander 4 Fan Remake. While Wingnuts wait for a playable test, the team has provided a steady and informative pace of updates that tell people what they're working on. And these are formatted in short but slick articles with accompanying visuals to help provide a good sense of the state of things.

We have two established runners up this year. The first is ODVS' AI/Neural Net Enhanced Wing Commander Videos. We've seen more and more fans play around with the new WC3 language options lately, and it's been fun to see what may be

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Last year had plenty of low points, but Wing Commander fans persevered throughout the dark times and still managed to do some amazing things. We were able to pick out ten of them for special recognition, and Wingnuts have spent the last several weeks voting on which should take the top honors. It's always slightly painful to deem one or two the winners, since all of the nominees and more do such great things for the community, but it's usually clear that a few bubble up to the top.

This time around, our winner for Fan Project of the Year is AI/Neural Net Enhanced Wing Commander Videos! ODVS managed to successfully create what was one thought impossible, an extremely faithful upscaling of the original games' low res footage into HD quality. By mastering a handful of advanced AI/neural net tools, the process creates detail where none was present to boost the footage. He's completed full passes on