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A new planetary survey initiative has been announced by Brewer Corporation, calling for pilots to scan locations around the core systems.
Following the recent deployment of the megaship Trailblazer Echo, CEO Madelyn Teague made the following announcement from the megaship's bridge:
"Recent events have accelerated plans to explore a new age of system colonisation efforts. Brewer Corporation has proudly supported ambitious projects such as the Colonia Bridge, and worked with other corporations to improve and increase starports across the galaxy. Now we take another step forward in the continued march across the stars."
"Universal Cartographics has partnered with us to collect, analyse and process the very latest exploration data, to help calibrate our metrics for optimal colonisation targets."
Brewer Corporation, which constructs Coriolis and Orbis starports, has supported localised expansion

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rap1983 took a break from 3D printing to share the latest progress on his current Tarsus model. Although he doesn't necessarily consider it complete, I really like how it's posed with trees in the background and a service/tow truck working underneath. That's a really nice touch!

My current mockup of my Tarsus.At the moment I'm having technical problems with my 3D printer, so I'm taking an involuntary break.

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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is An American Werewolf in Paris (1997) which was shot in the same factory as Wing Commander, used the same production company and took advantage of the same tax dodge! You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

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After Action Report: Star Wars

Greetings WingNuts,

It shouldn't be a surprise that we had a blast with Star Wars! The movie holds up exactly as well as we hoped it would… the worst anyone could say was that the first act was a little slower than we remembered, and that's nothing now that we've seen The Dam Busters! Our overall review was that the original Star Wars deserves its reputation for both inspiring later movies and… video games.

It would be impossible to catalog every single thing in the Wing Commander canon that was influenced by Star Wars; the series itself is at its heart an attempt to create an interactive Star Wars experience! But we have collected some fun connections from the screening to list out here… be sure to share your favorites on the forums to add to the legend!

To start, here are some of the items we mentioned in the initial article. In the Dam Busters analysis we compared Wing

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We reported last year that Narrarrol was building out a Wing Commander RPG in the M-Space ruleset. He had a Salthi ready to go at the time, and now its opposing Hornet is ready. He's published a whole article at his blog about the creation process. It's in Spanish, but you can easily translate the process into your language of choice. It sounds pretty involved!

I share a step-by-step guide on the construction of the #WingCommander Hornet light fighter following the spacecraft design rules of the M-Space role playing game by @77mundos.bsky.social. Source information, reflections, hypotheses, decisions, rules and references.

After building several stable #WingCommander space fighter sheets using the M-Space RPG ruleset, first steps in creating player characters. The origin templates and life events tables provide many nuances and are of great help.

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Release date and info about v0.5, everything is going as expected, happy with the results.

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Last year, we reported about the discovery of the original stock photo behind Blair's pinup in the Wing Commander movie. Today, we've discovered another one: meet... "The Champion!". He's the figure who appears on one of the pinup posters in the Tiger's Claw's lounge in the Wing Commander movie, most visible behind Maniac just after the pulsar jump.

To create the prop they placed him in front of a Confederation logo along with text that reads CHAMPION with an additional text bock at the bottom. It's obscured but it looks like his name ends in 'PACHO' and then there's text that partially reads MARTIAL ARTS and 2653 below him. Most interesting of all, the graphics department seems to have added a Kilrathi text tattoo to the stock photo model's bicep!

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This is a reminder that the GOG's Lunar New Year sale is winding down. You have just a couple days left to save 59% on Wing Commander games across the board. I've also noticed that the company has been emphasizing its Dreamlist feature a ton lately. This allows people to vote for titles that are not currently available but that they'd like to have added. Back in the day, Wing Commander garnered thousands of votes from fans before the series was eventually added. Now Chris Roberts' Freelancer game is featured very prominently in new marketing materials. EA's Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection is also at the top of the list. There are also still a few outstanding WC entries you can vote for: Kilrathi Saga, Arena and Super Wing Commander. Significant practical/technical hurdles exist which are the reason they're not currently available, but it doesn't hurt to toss them a vote!

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The Wing Commander movie club had a surprisingly fun time watching An American Werewolf in Paris. It wasn't a good movie but it was a good time... and that's really what we need these days! You'll also be surprised at how obvious the Wing Commander connection is when the after action report comes out. But this week we're heading back to World War II with what is probably going to be our final movie about the RAF: 1969's Battle of Britain. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Battle of Britain is a war movie covering the 1940 Battle of Britain (well, duh). The battle pitted the outnumbered but courageous RAF against the might of the German Luftwaffe as heroic fighter pilots desperately fought to defend their homes from Nazi bombers. The movie was lauded for its spectacular flying sequences; the story itself is less a character piece and more a Longest Day-style anthology that covers

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This is the first in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums!

The Video Game History Foundation has launched an impressive new initiative that aims to help out anyone interested in video game history… and you'd better believe that means us! The VGHF's new Digital Archive offers an impressive collection of preserved media that anyone can access without jumping through any hoops! They've got hundreds of issues of gaming magazines like PC Gamer alongside an impressive amount of inside baseball content like promotional CDs and GDC-related publications… and it sounds like that collection is just going to grow. You can read more about the effort in their launch

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This is the second in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums!

For our second VGHF update we're looking at another artifact from behind the scenes of game development: the Computer Game Developers' Conference 1997 Conference Proceedings. This is an academic-style publication that prints articles based on the presentations given at GDC, an industry convention that focuses on the hows and whys of game development. This one is material presented at the April 25–29, 1997 GDC and it includes an article by Wing Commander III and IV script writer Terry Borst about his experience with interactive writing and those games specifically!

There's a lot here to enjoy but one

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This is the third in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums!

Another welcome addition with the VGHF Digital Library is access to the full run of vintage US PC Gamer magazines which have been surprisingly difficult to preserve online in the past. And to show that off, what better than the September 1995 issue (Vol. 2, No. 9) which features a full page preview for "The Darkening". This article was one of a collection that came about after Electronic Arts junketed the Privateer 2 film shoot well before the game was part of the Wing Commander universe or even named Privateer (as the article's title hilariously incorrectly predicts). It also features a couple of

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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Battle of Britain (1969) which was an inspiration for the Wing Commander movie and a historical event closely tied to Wing Commander's lore and themes! You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

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Greetings WingNuts,

An American Werewolf in Paris was kind of a surprise: it really was a 'so bad it's good' style movie, which are actually a rarity! We all had a great time watching it swerve in crazy directions with awful CG werewolves and crazy jags of slapstick comedy followed by untenable gore and weird sex. A terrible movie that contained multitudes, there's no doubt! Kind of like another film we love…

We will skip some of the funny coincidences–like a character who clearly would've been played by Freddie Prinze Jr. were he available, a climatic 'here me baby, hold together' and the fact that it also concludes with the French female lead being attended to on a stretcher in favor of a couple of fascinating real connections, but there was a lot to watch for for imaginative Wng Commander fans! (I will mention one memory was that the movie came out on Christmas in 1997… a day many of us remember

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This is the fourth in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums!

Here's another cool, likely otherwise forgotten collection from the VGHF Digital Library: the original black and white "3DO Club News" newsletters that were mailed to early adopters of the unpopular (but well-Wing Commandered) game console. The fourth issue is from February 1995 and includes multiple items of interest for Wing Commander historians. The first is a neat two page preview of Wing Commander III 3DO, coming in a couple of months:

WING COMMANDER III: HEART OF THE TIGER

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger is more than just the sequel to the best- selling flight simulation game of all time.

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Here's a little treat from the universe: YouTube has the 1999 Wing Commander movie available to watch for free (in the United States, at least)! YouTube's rules prevent commercial movies from being embedded but you can follow this link to watch the movie. As a bonus, making the movie available on YouTube means that lots of people are seeing it for the first time... and if their social media comments are any indication, they aren't hating it! Weird what a couple decades an do to a film.

This is a legitimate licensed stream rather than somebody pitching up the sound and playing it under a filter... it's the real Wing Commander experience! We don't know how long Wing Commander will be available but past availability suggests that you should have at least all of February to catch it. A big thank you to Sebastian for letting us know!

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The Wing Commander movie club has succesfully ended the beginning with a pretty uneventful watch of Battle of Britain; maybe have some characters next time, movie! And that next time will be 1995's Judge Dredd, a fun action sci-fi movie with a slight technical connection to Wing Commander. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Judge Dredd is a British comic book antihero whose stories have appeared in 2000 A.D. since the late 1970s. He's an ultra-powered police officer in a dystopian world where the police are judge, jury and executioner. The 1995 film adaptation is a big, brassy action movie that trades some of the satire of the source material for Jean-Claude Van Damme and a big '90s action movie production. No one thinks Judge Dredd is the best movie in the world (or even the best Judge Dredd movie) but it's certainly a mood!

The big Wing Commander connection to Judge Dredd is

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This is the fifth in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums!

It's our final VGHF update (for now!) we've saved the best for last… this one is absolutely fascinating! It's a June 1992 issue of The Journal of Computer Game Design (Vol. 5, No. 5), an early academic-style publication covering game design… and it features a four page interview with Ellen Guon that goes into a great amount of detail about her writing for Wing Commander! This is the kind of article narrative designers today should be reading, it's absolute gold that's still relevant today. And as she talks about developing Angel's story for Wing Commander II, you'll think she probably should've had a

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Last year, we reported on some wonderful 3D renderings of the TCS Victory created by AEdwardBaker. Today we're following up and sharing a number of other Wing Commander pieces he's created! These three pieces are, respectively, Angry Hornets, Homecoming and Sisters. Very cool to see the Victory and the Tiger's Claw together!

They also have two new renders of the Victory, seen both fore and aft.

... and those renders are actually from a pretty cool fan film that they've created featuring the Victory!

Lastly, there's even a phone wallpaper!

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It's a long standing claim that Chris Roberts' Strike Commander was originally intended to have quite a few more playable aircraft. In the end, the game focuses heavily on simulating the flight model of an F-16 Falcon and only allows the player a second aircraft, the prototype F-22 Raptor, very briefly at the end of the game. But early descriptions of the game mention everything from World War I biplanes to Harrier jump jets. What can we find out?

The earliest surviving marketing material for Strike Commander is this press release announcing the game and providing details on the plans and the extremely qualified development team. It was published in May 1991 alongside a sales sheet with additional details. The sales sheet tells us that the game will allow you to "pilot six different aircraft" and it specifically mentions that there will be NPC's flying World War I biplanes. This is the only mention of