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The latest episode of ALL WINGS CONSIDERED is live now! All Wings Considered is the CIC's first ever streaming variety show which features news, conversation and gameplay relating to our favorite series. This week's Nav Points include:

• Earning our color scanner in PRIVATEER!
• Never-before-seen Syd Mead Nephilim art
• Privateer 2 ship of the week: the Aurora
• Fleet Action Book Club, Chapters 6 & 7

Missed the stream? The replay will be available below once it has been processed by YouTube. You can subscribe to the AWC channel for future notifications here.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The latest episode of ALL WINGS CONSIDERED is live now! All Wings Considered is the CIC's first ever streaming variety show which features news, conversation and gameplay relating to our favorite series. This week's Nav Points include:

• The start of our epic play through of PRIVATEER!
• Concept art from big name artists
• Privateer 2 ship of the week: the Kalrechi
• Never before seen Privateer and WCM material

Missed the stream? The replay will be available below once it has been processed by YouTube. You can subscribe to the AWC channel for future notifications here.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The latest episode of ALL WINGS CONSIDERED is live now! All Wings Considered is the CIC's first ever streaming variety show which features news, conversation and gameplay relating to our favorite series. This week's Nav Points include:

• Everything you ever wanted to know about the Steltek!
• Special Operations 1, Series 4: the big finish!
• Privateer 2 ship of the week: the Skecis Mk II
• Book Club: Chapters 4 and 5 of Fleet Action

Missed the stream? The replay will be available below once it has been processed by YouTube. You can subscribe to the AWC channel for future notifications here.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The latest episode of ALL WINGS CONSIDERED is live now! All Wings Considered is the CIC's first ever streaming variety show which features news, conversation and gameplay relating to our favorite series. This week's Nav Points include:

• Visiting Bex to check out Brian Blessed's unusual mission
• Special Operations 1, Series 3: Flying the Morningstar
• Privateer 2 ship of the week: the Skecsis
• Food Club: Testing the MREs from End Run!

Missed the stream? The replay will be available below once it has been processed by YouTube. You can subscribe to the AWC channel for future notifications here.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The first episode of ALL WINGS CONSIDERED is live now! All Wings Considered is the CIC's first ever streaming variety show which will feature news, conversation and gameplay relating to our favorite series. This week we're taking on ground missions in Wing Commander IV and talking about the first four chapters of the novel End Run with members of the community. If you're watching live, you can join the End Run book discussion through the voice chat channel of our Discord server here. Missed the stream? The replay will be available below once it has been processed by YouTube. You can subscribe to the AWC channel for future notifications here.

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Wing Commander II has some excellent tuckerizations! This is from Special Operations 1. Denis Loubet is the famous Origin artist, and the Miller is Craig Miller, who designed the Wing Commander II box.

General Snell of Niven Colony was Wing Commander II's executive producer Dallas Snell (who is likely well known to many Origin Systems fans)!

Lady Blue, CO of the Concordia's Ferret wing, is writer/assistant diretor Ellen Guon (who you probably know first as the co-author of Freedom Flight).

Ghorah Khar Sabre pilot "Ladyman" is the man behind the manuals, David Ladyman.

Blair's gunner Lieutenant Haley is programmer Richard Haley.

Ghorah Khar rookie pilot "Cafrelli" is programmer Charles Cafrelli (who also voiced a Kilrathi admiral!).

Do you know any others?

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We've got some delightful new artifacts to share today! LOAF found these WC CCG scans in a pair of vintage copies of InQuest. First up is a December 1995 advertisement featuring a Vaktoth unleashing a deadly salvo against a Hellcat. The art was made by Barclay Shaw and is featured on the Going Ape Kilrathi Maneuver card. The tagline is especially cool: "FLY A VAKTOTH IN THE KILRATHI IMPERIAL FLEET!" The January 1996 issue also includes a nifty review of the game and a price sheet.. Despite how ahead of their time Mag Force 7 was with getting information online in 1995, this was before many gamers had internet access or knew how to find the Wing Commander communities, so magazines like these were an invaluable way to get the inside scoop!

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This weekend was the big Dune premiere on HBO and in North American theaters, and it's been a hot topic on the Wing Commander Discord. Naturally, LOAF took a moment to run down all of the Dune reference and connections sprinkled throughout Wing Commander. Once you get sand in your Wing Commander, can you ever get it all out?

Someone had to do it and let’s face it, it was always going to be me. Here are some (very minor) nods to Dune in Wing Commander!

Privateer let’s you send ‘joke’ one-liner comms to bases. You can tell New Constantinople that “my name is a killing word”, a quote from the David Lynch Dune film.

Wing Commander IV has a scene where Maniac compares the sensor blackout at Peleus to “groping around like some pathetic sandworm on Isis VII!”

Wing Commander Arena’s Star*Soldier manual has a casual mention that the Rigel system has “massive sandworms and powerful dust storms.”

One of the three

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Last week, we talked about Privateer 2's palette feature which allows any ship to appear in the livery of any of twelve factions. We didn't mention that this was being noted in the service of helping AllTinker add the correct default style for every ship in a future release of the incredible Originator. There were actually two additional options we didn't show in the last post: the Heretic's actual color yellow and blue scheme and this final seemingly unused one (note how this one also changes the color of the cockpit glass from green to blue).

In this process of studying this, we did manage to find somewhere in Privateer 2 that the system is actually used: for generating the 'booth database' images of ships! If you look closely at the different registration entries (and a few other places) you'll see different ships appear in all sorts of different colors! The system isn't actually used internally but

Quote from Star Trek Online News-Bot

Something is terribly wrong. Forces from all across the universe are being drawn to our galaxy. Where once they may have attacked one at a time, now the Borg, the Elachi, the Tzenkethi, and more are coming at once. We need the forces of the Alliance now, more than ever. This weekend, from August 29th at 8am PT, to September 2nd at 10am PT, all Red Alerts will be live at once! Play your favorites with no cooldowns, and earn mark rewards for each one! Enjoy this special weekend event, Captains, and protect the galaxy as best you can! .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 {

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Here's the nav map from the original Wing Commander. That "Sector: Vega XR-231.3" is my favorite kind of texture... you know what the Vega Sector is and you assume the designation makes sense to the character; the world is implied to have history and rules beyond what you see.

Unfortunately, the mission disks let us down by not changing it (they're set in the Deneb and Antares sectors, respectively). The name is stored in WC.EXE so it couldn't easily be changed for Thor's Hammer... while Secret Missions 2 is probably a case of just forgetting about it.

HOWEVER! We have to again praise the Mindscape team that did the SNES ports... they thought to swap it to XR-41.8 for The Secret Missions. Which is not only right, it continues the implication that there's some sector classification system we don't understand.

The folks adapting Super Wing Commander, on the other hand, solved the problem the opposite way:

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Wing Commander IV dropped the traditional attaboy landing cutscenes but it did have visible damage states in its gameflow screens after a mission. Here's a little post with all of the ships!

The Banshee:

The Vindicator, which was always one of my favorites to fly. Jack of all trades, master of none!

The Avenger bomber, the great flying brick:

Here’s a Bearcat in various states of disrepair!

The fearsome Lance (aka Dragon). I don't think I've ever suffered enough damage flying one to get either of the non-pristine versions after a mission!

And here's one of those great Chris Roberts touches: there are damage states for the Hellcat even though you can only see it landed on the Intrepid once (after you defect).

The Lexington fighters have damage states, too! Here's the Hellcat:

... and the Longbow!

And a couple of special cases: Bluepoint Station, both carriers without a fighter present and a shuttle on the

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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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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

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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!

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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.