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Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Professor Katrien Rook has responded to Pranav Antal's claim that her company's nanomedicines are of Utopian origin:

"I confess that Vitadyne Labs did not invent the nanomeds, but neither did we steal them. We were approached by independent pilots who discovered a crashed Utopian transport ship. The recovered cargo canisters were clearly medical in nature, so the foragers sold them to us as legitimate salvage."

"I would be happy to return the original cargo to Utopia with our apologies. The new nanomeds that we have created are our property, however, and I insist that we be allowed to continue their manufacture."

Pranav Antal swiftly issued a reply:

"Any derivative nanomedicines must also be returned to us, and production must cease. Our technology cannot be used outside Utopia."

The Interstellar Health Organisation has said that it will review the case and make a decision.

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Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Have you ever wanted to study the gloriously 1993 3DS closeup background plates in Privateer but can't stand those damn characters getting in the way? Have I ever made the visual reference for you!

A couple of these are appearing for the first time; they're stored in the game's files but they're for places where a third angle is never used... like these fixer backgrounds for Oxford and the pleasure planets, respectively:

You'll also notice some are higher resolution and have more of 4:3 aspect ratio versus Privateer's usual 16:9 for the conversations. Some are designed to 'open' when you have to make a choice. Since many choices were cut, you're seeing some tops and bottoms for the first time!

Also: so, so much space booze.

You can also find all the Privateer 2 background plates here!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

SonataFantatica has started posting a series of "visual novels" that include just the story portions of the original Wing Commander games. So far he's completed Wing Commander 1, both Secret Missions 1&2 and Special Operations 1. This is an interesting concept and a surprising gap in fan-generated video content of this nature. There have been comparable story cuts of WC3, WC4 and Prophecy for many years, but WC1/2 are somewhat underserved. There certainly are plenty of playthrough streams, but these new videos condense down the gameplay into bite size <90 minute movies that just focus on the plot. Sounds like a great way to recap on the events of each game!

I didn't find any Wing Commander 1 story summary videos on YouTube, so I decided to cut and upload this video that has no combat in it. This way, you can read and experience the story of the first "Wing Commander" game (the entire Vega

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

SonataFanatica has finished his visual novel project for Wing Commanders 1 and 2. We previously reported on his videos for WC1, the SMs and SO1, and now he's added WC2 and SO2 to the mix. As a special bonus, he's also made an extra clip for the Sega CD edition of WC1, which adds full speech. That's a real treat for anyone who would like to relive the original Wing Commander story without going through all of the space combat! When you're ready to binge them all, check out SF's playlist here.

Here's the Sega CD version of the first Wing Commander game as a "Visual Novel" version. While this version has a different soundtrack and inferior graphics, it does have full voice acting. Enjoy!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Officer Uniforms

Duty Sweaters: Officers seen on the Tiger Claw, Concordia and at Pegasus wear a mix of two different types of knit sweaters, one without a collar and one with a turtleneck. The latter seems to be based on the Royal Navy's World War II-era submariner's sweater. There does not seem to be any particular division save that aviators are only ever seen wearing the collarless sweater. Both sweaters feature the officer's assignment patch on the right arm, rank indicators on the shoulder and nametag on the left breast.

Both types of sweaters may be worn with a brimless cap, seemingly the film's equivalent of a sailor's "Dixie cup" hat. The caps are personalized with an officer's name. The caps worn on Pegasus feature the Pegasus assignment patch while the caps worn on the Concordia and Tiger Claw have generic Confederation logos.

Both types of sweaters are worn with darker blue pants.

Peacoat: The

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Often forgotten is the fact that the 1999 Wing Commander film features truly incredible set design. From the minutely detailed Rapier cockpits to the cramped, submarine-like environs of the Tiger Claw, the movie's sets succeed far beyond expectations. That's courtesy of Oscar-winning production designer Peter Lamont. Lamont, fresh off his work on James Cameron's Titanic, turned a warehouse in Luxembourg into a 27th Century Confederation space carrier full of don't-blink-and-you-still-miss-them details.

One of these wonderfully crafted details is the series of propaganda posters created to decorate the Tiger Claw's pilot's mess. At least eight different posters were designed by the art team to adorn the walls of the mess, which called for them directly in the shooting script:"MESS is an apt adjective for these cramped quarters. Defaced propaganda posters, and pin-ups, male and female, line the walls."

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Last week, we released a visual guide to propaganda posters in the Wing Commander movie which included a great deal of information. But readers were quick to point out one thing it did not include: the various pin-ups that also decorate the pilot's mess' walls. For this addendum, we've identified as many as possible and have also provided some history behind why they were included in the first place!

1. There are two shirtless men to the left and a woman in a swimsuit with boxing gloves to the right as Blair and Maniac first enter the mess.
2. On the pillar to Blair's left facing away from where he and Maniac enter. This one seems to be cutout of a woman in a red swimsuit.
3. A collage of too-small-to-be-identified photos next to the "BE PREPARED" photo.
4. A collection of rectangular photographs and a collage of photos that have been formed into a larger figure near the dart board. These are not seen clearly.
5. An

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

*Pilots' Federation ALERT*
The exobiology company Vista Genomics has increased payments for genetic data collected by independent pilots.
Dr Klaus-Peter Sonnek , one of the corporation's research directors, outlined the changes in a press release:
"Public and corporate interest in xenology-related fields remains high, but recent Thargoid aggression has increased the risk in collecting of such data. Vista Genomics is well-placed to incentivise the continued collection of samples. Therefore, we can officially confirm that substantially improved financial rewards will be offered for all genetic data submitted via our outlets."
"We are also aware of many civil and military projects focusing on the Thargoids, a species that makes extensive use of biomechanical technology. There is enormous value in gathering as much exobiology data as possible to provide comparative baselines for anti-xeno research

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

VISIONS was apparently "the Magazine of Fantasy TV, Home Video & New Media." You would be forgiven for not knowing that, though, as the periodical lasted only a single issue. But what an issue! Thanks to the Internet Archive a copy has been preserved including a very well done preview of Wing Commander III that interviews a number of people behind the cameras. Farewell, Visions, we barely knew you!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

DefianceIndustries

has shared some exciting news about another amazing graphical upgrade developed by the community.

Pedro

and

PopsiclePete

have helped implement emit maps that will allow for proper glow effects in Prophecy and Secret Ops. This is a huge win for a game that's highlighted by dark spaceships adorned with eerie lights. There's also some great benefits for regular spaceships too. Coming soon to a Secret Ops

Model Upgrade Pack

near you!

So...it isn't often we jaded MUP-pers get really excited over something, but this is one of those times. The dynamic graphical duo of Pedro and PopsiclePete have been hard at work performing dark magics and alchemy on the Open/GL patch and have given us a gift long sought after: Emit maps!

Up to this point we've had to be creative in how we do things like glowing windows and engines in the MUP. Kevin Caccamo 's awesome Wing Blender tools for Blender allow

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Wing Commander, at its core, is a game all about fancy space planes, so today we're recognizing a real life space plane that's achieved yet another milestone. SpaceX gets a lot of attention for its record breaking feats, but Boeing, Blue Origin and others are trying to accomplish a similar mission. Virgin Galactic is one with a fairly novel approach: their ship launches from an aerial carrier and then rockets up. The program has been seemingly stalled for a while, but today's successful flight is the first in more than two years. With today's exciting test under its belt, the company is a big step closer to offering commercial tour flights up into space. Check out the clips below. The first shows the detachment from the carrier and the third video shows the ship rotate up in the dark reaches of the atmosphere with the curvature of the Earth in the background. It's pretty cool to be living in

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson today achieved their long anticipated goal of launching a full crew aboard their rocket-propelled space plane. Way back in 2006, we reported that commercial launches were expected to be about two years away - and it's been more than 15! But as we've seen time and time again over the past decade, space is hard, but it's still possible to transform iconic ideas from science fiction into reality.

Much of the internet is quick to point out that today's flight is not without caveats: the ship barely crosses the 50 mile line for a few minutes, and it's slightly suspect that the flight was timed to occur just ahead of Jeff Bezos' launch next week. You could call it a fancy jet rather than a space ship. But I prefer to focus on the technological achievement. We see spacecraft launch from planets in Wing Commander like it's nothing, but that doesn't happen without baby

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Some fifty Wingnuts have now pledged towards the Deluxe vinyl pressing of the WING COMMANDER score, and that's brought the total up past $5300. There's still a few weeks left to get in on this special collectible, but if you're planning to jump in, there's no time like the present! The album takes advantage of George Oldziey's Wing Commander 3/4/Prophecy music that was rerecorded by a live orchestra several years ago. You can watch a short documentary on the making of this great WC music below. And contribute to the crowdfunding campaign to make this new album happen here!

Supercade Press is offering three new editions of the soundtrack:

• Deluxe Edition Gatefold with 180g Starfield Splatter Vinyl
• Special Edition with 180g Marbled Bi-color Vinyl (new colors may be issued)
• Standard Edition with 180g Classic Black Vinyl

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The crowdfunding campaign for the Deluxe vinyl pressing of the WING COMMANDER score is in full swing, and the project has now passed 25% of its goal with more than $3800 pledged so far. To get even more fans to join in on the excitement, if a few more people add to the total this weekend and get us over $5000, LOAF will do a live Wing Commander Movie commentary.

The Wing Commander vinyl record campaign is at 25%! To sweeten the pot in absolutely no way, I’ll do a Twitter Space watch-along of the movie if we get to $5k this weekend.

The $75 Deluxe Edition seems to be the most popular so far, but a standard LP is just $35! Learn more about the project here.

Supercade's exclusive new LP editions of the Wing Commander Orchestral Recording Project will mark the first time George Oldziey's orchestral score is available on vinyl. Working with a celebrated independent record press, we'll be sure these records

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

LazyGameReviews posted this image of a teaser for Wolfenstein 3D. It's from the February 1992 digital Apogee catalog advertising the pending launch of the iconic first person shooter. It's a cool little artifact unto itself, but wow, check out that smack talk (plus spelling mistakes) in the footnote!

This is very first ever "texture-mapped" three dimensional (3D) game with REAL-TIME scrolling and panning! Most 3D games use the polygon fill method, such as the flight simulators available commercially. Wolfenstein 3D uses a 3D technology that has NEVER been seen commercially. (The Wing Commander games tried to fake tuxture-mapped 3D graphics, but the results didn't work very well.)

LOAF observes, "Odd, the only Wing Commander games at the time used the exact same solution as Wolfenstein: a 3D environment with 2D sprites for enemies that scale and rotate!" Whatever the underlying tech was, Wolf 3D

Quote from Wing Commander News

This is the last in a series of interesting video features published in the mid '90s by the CD-ROM "magazine" Interactive Entertainment. Their Wing Commander 4 review appeared in issue 23. The CD-ROM interface displayed screenshots from the game and overlaid them with low resolution videos. That experience has been recreated here rather than displaying the videos full screen. Again, while it looks pretty dated today, the setup was really cool for the time. The vast majority of internet access out there was still dialup, so this was the only practical way to experience something like this!

Text article that accompanied the video review on the CD:

The Commander Returns to Battle

A rogue band of pilots from the border worlds descends upon an innocent civilian transport and its escorts and destroy them by unleashing a mysterious device. Cut to our hero, Christopher Blair, once again played by the

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Looking Glass Museum has posted a brief but nifty thirty year old video. Before E3 was a thing, the Consumer Electronics Shows was one of the primary venues to showcase your big video game. This was recorded by someone at the Summer 1992 CES. It features some of the upcoming games for the Sega CD system on a cool nine-television video wall. We get lots of flickering WING COMMANDERS on screen interspersed with some nice Hornet on Dralthi action. What a show that must have been!

LOAF: Interesting video clip from CES in 1992 showing Sega’s Sega CD display look at! Obviously I want a nine TV bank that flashes WING COMMANDER but the unreleased Ultima Underworld port is probably more interesting!

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Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Today we've got a tiny 1992 video review from the British television show GamesMaster. Non-print reviews are quite rare from this era since we were still a couple years before magazines starting including multimedia cover discs. Wing Commander 2 is one of my favorite games, so I was anxious to see what they had to say. And boy, they did not like it! Both reviewers say the game just has graphics going for it and award it a failing 59% score. I'm honestly pretty shocked at that assessment. The graphics were only minimally refined over WC1, but there were some wonderful advances in terms of storytelling, sound/speech and gameplay mechanics (torpedo bombing, turrets, tractor beams, jump points, etc). Ah well, check out this thirty year old clip below! Thanks to Oli for archiving this.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We've had a number of non-English language vids in the news lately... and here's another one! But in the various translation methods aren't quite your style, this one has been helpfully translated in real time by native Russian speaker enilenis. Seeing WC on vintage television programs was always a rarity, and catching an international show was even harder, so we're really lucky that opportunities like this exist! This one comes from the Russian program "Hard Off." It covers Wing Commanders 1-3, but the focus is on the flashy FMV of the latter title. WC3 was a big mainstream crossover!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

It's a new year, but we're turning back the clock today with a new batch of retro reviews found by Maxi de Sokar. The first is a wonderful five page spread in PC Review for Wing Commander 3. It starts off with a couple pages of "behind the scenes" info before launching into the actual review. Then we have a quick take on Super Wing Commander for the 3DO by Micromania. Finally, there's a six page spread in OKPC about Wing Commander 4. I love how much space was dedicated to these new releases at the time!