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Quote from Star Trek Online News-Bot

This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the launch of Deep Space Nine, and the team for Star Trek Online couldn’t wait to mark the occasion with our fourth full expansion: Victory is Life. The only way we could see to top our previous expansions was to not only introduce a brand new player faction in the Jem’Hadar, but also throw in a level cap increase from 60 to 65! Starting today, Captains in Star Trek Online will have the opportunity to create a brand new captain in their own Jem’Hadar faction. All Jem’Hadar captains will be as formidable right out of space dock as their namesakes, as they will be leveled up to 60 with a fully equipped ship, a fully geared crew, and a variety of completed Reputations, Specialization trees, and R&D progress. As a fresh captain you will have all the tools you need at your disposal to dive in and play Star Trek Online right at end game, all 100% for

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Welcome to the CIC's 22nd Birthday celebration! We had to reschedule a couple times due to 2020-related awfulness, but we're extremely happy to have finally made it here today. Once again, super talented Wingnuts have shown up in force to put together a ton of fantastic updates below. There are substantial releases for well established projects and some truly exciting teasers for new items fans are working hard to bring you next. Even this kickoff image put together by FekLeyrTarg is itself a preview of something special in the works! We're glad you could be here with us - please enjoy the updates!

This year, inspired by the recent efforts to bring the later WC titles into 4K, I'd like to present a small teaser for things to come.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Welcome to the CIC's 23rd Birthday Party! When we opened our doors here at WCNews.com in August 1998, we never imagined we'd still be here now. The pandemic still looms and did directly affect a few items we had planned. This has not been the year of recovery that we'd envisioned, but I'm happy that we managed to still pull together a few fun things to share. Like you all, we're still making the best of it and having a blast hanging out (digitally, per social distancing guidelines) with friends. If you're not already there, stop by Wingnut and join the party!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Welcome to the CIC's 25th Birthday Party! It's unbelievable that a quarter century has passed, but time flies when you're having fun! We've got a nice slate full of items to share today, but the best part of the event is being able to connect with so many friends and fellow fans. Today wouldn't be possible without the contributions of so many of you. And on that note, to kick things off, we've got an exciting clip by Scribbler to help set the stage for what's to come!

Congratulations to the Wing Commander Community on their 25th anniversary!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Thank you for joining us for the Wing Commander CIC's 27th Birthday celebration! It was a hard year in many ways, but we appreciate the Wing Commander community's constant support; they've been the best of us even when times are rough. We hope you enjoy some of the material below and are having fun with us live on the stream. We also also looking forward to the future. In this year ahead we have a new project coming to collect disk images. More info will be forthcoming, but we'll need the entire community's help to make sure we get everything. Our weekly movie club has been a blast, and that will certainly continue with everything from Heaven's Gate to 2001: A Space Odyssey on the schedule. And we'll have a big focus on Super Wing Commander this year to make sure people get to appreciate a forgotten game. A sample of that is lower down below!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We've posted a number of fancy video packages this year that feature the enhanced cutscenes ODVS has managed to create. We're careful to not refer to it as just "upscaling" since actual bits of new data are being added to create detail where none existed before. How is this accomplished and what are the limits? What do we mean by saying it's run through an AI routine? ODVS explains all this and more in a new article. You can learn about modern computerized neural networks and all the work ODVS does to manually pre-process the footage before he can turn the crank here.

GIGO – QUALITY IS KING

In my case, I use a Neural Net-trained application called Topaz Labs Video Enhance AI. The application has been loaded with several AI models that can be applied to source materials of various quality with varying results.

Almost as a case-in-point of why “Artificial Intelligence” is a misleading term, the

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We are off and running well into the 2024 now, so it's time to conclude our annual new year's poll. We've swapped in a new one about stealth fighters in Wing Commander. The question this time asks which craft you think sowed the most chaos, did the most damage and wreaked the most havoc over the years. This is by no means an exhaustive list of cloaking fighters. In order to make the list of options more concise, we've narrowed the field to generally "enemy" presenting ships. So you won't see Blair's Excalibur that destroyed Kilrah, Earth's defensive screen of cloaking Arrows, the Recon Excaliburs that first scouted the Nephilim or the 28th Century Arrow Eclipse. But there's still some fun picks to choose from below!

We've had a great run of impressive fan projects this past year, and we expect that to continue well into the future! The results show that most fans are eagerly anticipating what's

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

I *NEVER* do these, but what the hey! 1 like = 1 answer

The ESK rating for the Dart DF missile is... 11,000 ESK! What is ESK? The blueprints list it as the 'strength' rating for the missile and the numbers roughly correspond to the game's explosive force stat. In Secret Missions 2, Maniac proposes (suicidally) arming missiles with "a double load of ESK-5 explosives". So maybe its like TNT?

The max range of the Mass Driver Cannon is 3,000 mrrs... later listed as simply 3,000 kilometers! *plonk* *plonk* *plonk*

The ESK rating for the Pilum FF is... 9,500! Note also the Duck Dodgers reference on all the blueprint missile breakouts!

The velocity of the Dart DF is... 900 kilometers per second! That means you'll need afterburners to outrun one... or you can just move out of the way.

Oh, here's the rest of the answers!

1. What is the ESK rating for the Dart DF missile? 11000
2. What is the max range of the mass driver

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Did you know Dekker’s assault shuttle has a name? It’s called Hermes in the game files but it’s never mentioned in on screen.

Here's an update created for WC4 Remastered:

This also happens with Prince Thrakhath’s fighter in Wing Commander II. It’s named Bloodfang but since you only ever encounter it flown by the Prince (an ace profile that supersedes the normal ship ID) you never see the name!

Another good one: the surplus Kilrathi ships in Righteous Fire display as unknowns but they are stored as SALTHI.IFF. And what do you know, that’s the Super Wing Commander Salthi model!

Huh, and two out of three of these had Ultima universe cameos too. Everyone knows the Bloodfang in the corn field but the Salthi also showed up attacking Trinsic in in an Ultima Online April Fools gag.

Ultima Forever had a Dralthi/Drakhri type ship crashed on an island but it was never accessible. They were kind enough to send us a

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

This prompted me to dig up the original Tarsus model...

But what's that written on the rear!?! Zoom in and enhance... HIDDEN LORE!

Is this visible in the game itself? Not even a little.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We've got a new poll up today that asks about your favorite briefing rooms in the main Wing Commander games. These spaces hold a special place in the heart of WC fans, and the each have their own special character to them. From the red light of the Tiger's Claw, bright blues on the Concordia or dim shadows of the Victory, what's your favorite? Don't forget that the latter three options all had awesome physical sets! Sorry Cerberus fans, we left you out this time.

The old poll asked about the worst places to ditch your fighter. Many pilots were averse to ejecting in the Kilrah System or Nephilim Fluid-space, but the winner is the lonely Delta Prime System well off the established space lanes in the Gemini Sector. Funny enough, four of the five lowest ranking choices were the ones where the indicated pilots actually died!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The new poll is about

All Wings Considered

, the CIC's weekly streaming program. The options below are a list of the the common features that fill out a typical episode. There's lots to like about each one, but which is your favorite? If you're not familiar with the show, you can find back episodes online

here

. You can also provide feedback or make requests at the CIC Forums

here

.

Our old poll asked

which Talon variant

peopled liked to shoot at the most. The Retro model was overwhelmingly popular with more than half the vote. Pirates got about a fifth of the vote, and the Privateer 2 easter egg actually got about a sixth.

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Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Here's Mike Winterbauer's wonderful Wing Commander SNES painting as a pin-up in a French magazine called Super Power!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

... and also he was Prince Thrakhath. The May 1994 issue of Electronic Games magazine brings us a pretty interesting profile of an Origin writer who doesn't get enough credit these days, Gilbert Austin. Credited as G.P. Austin for his work at Origin, he served as a writer on Wing Commander II, Strike Commander and Privateer (and provided voice work for Wing Commander II and Ultima Underworld 2!). At the time of the interview he had just moved on to write and design his own game, Harvester, for a newly formed studio. The most interesting note is that his last project for Origin was an outline for Wing Commander III, which it notes was finished before Strike Commander released. He's not credited on Wing Commander III so I'd be very curious to know what his plan for the game had been so early on!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Here's a first: a bit of Wing Commander-adjacent history reported by my wife! She came across a cover story about Freddie Prinze Jr. from the February 2000 issue of Seventeen on an Instagram account called imstuckin.1999 which provides a bit of a look at how he was marketed to teenage girls around the time of the Wing Commander movie! It even quotes Matthew Lillard and notes that they became friends on set in Luxembourg. And great news for collectors: the magazine had two different Freddie Prinze Jr. covers!

During the release of Wing Commander I remember working closely with the "fan girls" running news sites like ours but for Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard… and frankly, it was a lot more interesting way to interact with people than bickering with other gamers! And while we're at it, here's something else to preserve for posterity that doesn't really fit anywhere: a Freddie Prinze Jr. gag

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Archive sites have recently preserved a new swath of gaming magazines. I found a pretty interesting general Origin preview in this issue of Computer Games Strategy Plus (February 1993)... but as I went to post about it, I got to thinking: just how much of this issue is covering games from Origin? The answer surprised me!

The issue's cover story is a preview of Origin's Pacific Strike, a game that ended up not having the simplest birth. It's all sunlight here, though, as the game promises to be a followup to Strike Commander that actually lets you drool over the textured aircraft in longer gunnery-based dogfights.

This is the preview itself which covers Origin's entire lineup at the time. Some of these projects, like Bioforge and Wings of Glory, would end up being over a year away! The fact that they intended to have a disk-based SKU for Bioforge is itself fascinating but Wing Commander fans will be most

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

If you wanted to buy GOG's $5.99 Wing Commander I & II pack from Origin’s catalog in 1991 the total would’ve come to $309.65. That’s over $700 adjusted for inflation!

And the whole package is still on sale through the weekend for just $1.49!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

When it comes to science fiction, sandworms are everywhere. We largely owe that to the enduring popularity of Dune. Its desert planet is defined by impossibly huge worms which play a major role in the story.. and that has led to decades of sandworms in fiction, from Beetlejuice to a Star Citizen demo. And Wing Commander is technically no exception! We don't ever get a visual of sandworms in the Wing Commander universe but we do know of at least THREE planets that are home to such creatures! Let's take a quick tour of the universe…

Brimstone II: In the Wing Commander I & II Ultimate Strategy Guide, veteran Carl LaFong recounts his first days at the Terran Confederation Space Naval Academy. He includes a note given to him on arrival from the senior class as part of the hazing of new students. It mentions, among other things, that they are "lower than a sand worm in the Brimstone System." Here's the whole

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Here's a fun drawing that includes a little Wing Commander treat. A Brazilian magazine published this collage of characters from a wide range of famous '90s-'00s video game series. Admiral Tolwyn is poking through in the bottom right. It comes from the Brazilian comic Monica's Gang by cartoonist Mauricio de Sousa. LOAF did some digging and zeroed in on its exact origin dating to a July 2012 "Cinema Classics" spinoff issue. That's a pretty fantastic reference, because even at that point WC4 was a 16 year old game. Thanks to Romy for highlighting this!

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

A potential connection between the NMLA's dark-comms network and Imperial Intelligence has been made public by one of ACT's co-leaders.
Captain Saskia Landau sent a personal statement to all major media outlets:
"The majority of my career has been with the Imperial Internal Security Service, but I was seconded for a year to a classified project run by Imperial Intelligence. To coordinate their operations, they use a sophisticated communications system known as the Omega Grid. This is designed to avoid detection or interception by enemies of the Empire."
"I have reviewed ACT's research into the NMLA's dark-comms network and can verify its similarity to Omega Grid technology. Since this is exclusively under Imperial Intelligence's control, it suggests that an individual or group within the organisation was making it available to the NMLA."
"I'm aware that revealing this information publicly may