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Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The Affiliated Counter-Terrorism unit has published an update on its investigation into the Neo-Marlinist Liberation Army.
Senior Agent Tanya Ramirez, one of ACT's joint leaders, gave a statement to the media:
"ACT is currently pursuing multiple lines of enquiry, which must remain classified for reasons of security. Our agents are gathering evidence from sites across the Alliance, Empire and Federation."
"As yet we cannot report any significant breakthroughs. NMLA activists appear to use a dark-comms network that defies detection. They also compartmentalise their operations, so individual cells have little knowledge of each other."
"In recent months, NMLA incidents have been restricted to minor strikes against Imperial authorities, which were dealt with by local police forces. There has been no activity by Theta Group, the hardcore extremists responsible for the 'Nine Martyrs' starport

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The creators of the NMLA's caustic enzyme bombs have been arrested, although the terrorist figurehead Theta Seven remains at large.
Theta Group is directly responsible for 17 starport bombings conducted by the NMLA across the core systems. These attacks resulted in a combined death toll of almost 800,000 people, with twice as many suffering serious injury.
Senior Agent Tanya Ramirez, one of the Affiliated Counter-Terrorism unit's co-leaders, told the media:
"We have finally tracked down the NMLA's bomb-making engineers, and a joint task force made the arrest with minimal casualties. Large quantities of Thargoid corrosives and explosive components were also seized."
"This achievement was only possible due to intercepting Theta Group's communications with Neo-Marlinist sympathisers. We are unsure why the NMLA's dark-comms network was not used in that instance."
"As our intel predicted, the

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

And here’s a fascinating Wing Commander I behind-the-screens story I had never heard from Denis Loubet! We alluded to this in our big post about how radar works, but never reported on the original anecdote:

LOAF: Is there anything more thrilling than the Wing Commander I box art? Despite the claim that “what you see is what you play” it’s not a screenshot but a digital piece carefully composed by the incomparable Denis Loubet!

Loubet: I invented the radar display as a super-quick way to know which direction to turn to bring a target into view! I think it worked really well.

LOAF: Wow, I had no idea! It felt so natural to me, I could never go back to the Elite-style radar.

Loubet: I had to do some fast-talking to get it in the cockpits! I’m glad I did! The idea sprang from an idea I had for a flat 360 degree display, where the image got more and more compressed and distorted toward the screen edges

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

A goodwill initiative from the Achilles Corporation has now concluded.

Chairman Gus Weaver of the Sol division of Achilles Corp announced:

"Thanks to the dedication of many independent traders, we have now acquired enough commodities to manufacture replacements for all robots destroyed in the wake of the spy robot scandal."

"I'd also like to remind our customers that the illegal surveillance program was safely deleted by our latest coreware update. Remember, you can always trust Achilles."

The deliveries were organised by the Adenets Pro-Alliance Bond, which also arranged to protect traders from attack. Pilots who contributed to the initiative can now collect their rewards from Henslow Market in the Adenets system.

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The Achilles Corporation has announced plans to replace all robots destroyed as a result of the recent spy robot scandal.

Chairman Gus Weaver of the Sol division of Achilles Corp said:

"We take customer support seriously. That's why we're offering to replace – free of charge – any robots destroyed or damaged by owners who suspected them of behaving inappropriately."

"To achieve this, we've asked the Adenets Pro-Alliance Bond to organise deliveries of robotics, computer components and microcontrollers to Henslow Market in the Adenets system. These will be used to produce brand new PA912 administration robots and other models."

"The Adenets Pro-Alliance Bond has also placed a kill order on all ships on its wanted list, to ensure that those delivering commodities can do so safely.

The initiative begins on the 29th of November 3304 and will run for one week. If the final target is met earlier

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Intense investment into research on Titan travel has been announced by the aerospace subdivision of the famed robotics company.
Their research has been centred on the method used by the Thargoid Titans to travel at speeds well beyond that of humanity's current technological capacity.
A spokesperson for Achilles Aerospace had this to say:
"For so long now, the means of space travel have been controlled by one company in a strict monopoly. Under that monopoly, progress seems to have stagnated entirely. But Achilles is a corporation built on the iteration and refinement of technology, and we intend to bring space travel into a new age."
"We have been limited to observational data alone so far, but that is no longer the case. The remnant of Taranis is now accessible, and within it lies the missing component to our work. We urge pilots to venture to the wreckage of the destroyed Titan and try to

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

A suite of new Supercruise Overcharge Frame Shift Drives entered the market earlier this week alongside several other upgrades to the new modules.
To celebrate the company's recent success, Dr. Namin Tirel, Achilles Aerospace's Head of Research and Development, offered a rare interview to Vox Galactica:
"It boggles the mind, truly. We were working in secret on what would eventually become our Supercruise Overcharge technology for over a year now. We had mountains of data and plenty of theories still to test, but we were struggling to make headway on anything that had real practical application. When we got hold of some of the actual parts of the Thargoids' drive-like technology, all that time, energy, and financial investment finally paid off. We were able to make huge strides in a short time frame, as you're now seeing."
"We purposefully made these drives difficult to modify as they're still

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The Alioth-based facility housing production of Achilles' new Supercruise Overcharge capable Frame Shift Drives came under attack today.
The crime was perpetrated by a small group of individuals piloting a ship loaded with high-impact explosive weaponry, seemingly with the intention of sabotaging SCO drive production.
The group piloting the ship had posed as Achilles' Aerospace engineers and had somehow gained high-level clearance to bring the vehicle deep into the facility. Achilles themselves are unsure how this could have been possible, stating to reporters that the malicious agents would have required "incredibly sophisticated technology" to forge the appropriate passes.
The group were able to bypass the facility's first checkpoint before the automated security robots identified them as a potential threat. The malicious agents apparently opened fire on the facility, preventing the robots

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Here's a little treat for anyone that likes looking at rare faces: we've done a set of much higher resolution scans of the Claw Marks wingman and Kilrathi ace heads that were redrawn in the Super Famicom port of Wing Commander I's manual. The original versions appeared in Claw Marks but they actually started life as the concept art upon which the Wing Commander I characters were based! For the Japanese SFC release, ASCII hired a local artist to redraw and colorize them!

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Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The subject came up on the CIC Discord and I was surprised some folks didn’t realize that the aces in Wing Commander III had custom, souped up versions of the standard fighters. Let’s go, there’ll be a spreadsheet at the end!

Victory Streak introduces us to five Kilrathi ace pilots, one per ship type in the tradition of Wing Commander I. Three of them appear in the PC version and two were cut but still have cool ships hidden in the game’s guts. All five appear in the 3DO port without special ships.

The aces themselves all look the same… in fact all the Kilrathi VDUs in the game use the same footage with updated dialogue. Each one does have its own set of taunts:

Aside: the 3DO and PSX versions use color versions of the Kilrathi pilot… and in the spirit of using every part of the animal, Wing Commander Prophecy reuses them with new audio instead of making/rendering new cats.

Time to meet the cats! For each

Quote from Star Trek Online News-Bot

For a limited time only starting today, players will be able to purchase the Key Ring Bundle! This special pack includes 20x Master Keys (used to open any Lock Box) for the price of 2250 Zen. As an additional special promotional offer when purchasing this bundle, every pack also includes a single Ultimate Tech Upgrade. Applying this item to any upgradeable piece of equipment will instantly set both its Mark and Quality to maximum (usually Mk XIV and Epic/Gold quality) with zero Dilithium Cost! This promotional bundle will be available in the C-Store beginning July 7th at at 10am PT to July 8th at 10am PT. .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

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

ODVS has something new and a little different on the video enhancement front. He's put together a quick test cut of the Academy intro transformed into 1080p. He stresses that this isn't a carefully curated version to maximize quality, but even the quick and dirty experiment is pretty slick. He won't be able to actually remaster the show due to copyright considerations, so it's not worth the effort to painstakingly clean this up much further. Nonetheless, it's very cool! Note the embedded view below is sharpened, but still low resolution. Grab the actual 1080p file here (16 meg mp4). You can right click to download, but many browsers will play it natively as well. You can buy the show on Amazon for $8 or watch it streaming on Peacock. Maybe someday one of the official NBC Universal-authorized sources will go HD!

I've actually got several Wing Commander projects on the go at the moment, but I

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Renowned comic and storyboard artist Tim Eldred has posted an awesome article about how he got involved with Wing Commander Academy and how it influenced the rest of his career. It's a combination of being in the right place at the right time as well as having the knack for visualizing the series' key concepts in engaging ways. He's got lots of fun concept art in the piece, including these two glorious shots. We've posted versions of them before without the color, but they really pop here fully illustrated like this.

When I sat down to watch Episode 3 (on a Saturday morning), it was a revelation to see my work on TV for the first time. In addition to what I mentioned earlier, this was also a case where some characters I designed were moving through scenes I created. It looked like I had somehow drawn every frame of this Saturday morning cartoon. I was also surprised to see that some of my shots were

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

LAZY SATURDAY SPACESHIP POST! I thought it might be fun to sort of roughly compare the Wing Commander Academy ships that originated in Wing Commander 2 with their original meshes. And you know what? It was fun! The Sartha:

The Kilrathi Jalkehi heavy fighter, which appears in a single episode! (Word of Honor)

The furball Grikath bomber, a series regular:

And the Kamekh corvette! The coloring is a little more like the all-tan Privateer version (which was the same mesh retextured).

On the Confed side, we've got the Ferret. This appears in only one episode BUT somewhere there existed an unseen toy prototype of it, the only one made for the series. Wish I knew more!

The Epee medium fighter. This one shows up a few times on the show but it always seems like it didn't get a fully fleshed out model sheet...

... which is also the case with the Sabre, which actually looks like a different design in its two

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

As promised, a second Wing Commander Academy episode is now available! Today's script covers episode nine, "Walking Wounded." The episode starts with a cut scene that was intended to better establish Maniac's character for the episode, a scene taken from Wing Commander IV where he uncomfortably hits on a new Tiger's Claw bridge officer. You'll find everything from confirmation that the long-suspected captured Confederation ship design is intended to be a Sabre to the names of the doctors and nurses aboard the hospital ship! You can download the script in PDF form here.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We have an exciting new addition to the archives today: a script for the third episode of Wing Commander Academy, "The Most Delicate Instrument." Over the years we've preserved shooting scripts (and a number of drafts) for all of the Wing Commander games and the 1999 film... but tracking down Wing Commander Academy teleplays has proven much more difficult. Until today, only two of the thirteen episodes were represented in the archive. These documents are especially fascinating for hardcore Wing Commander fans as they include not only scenes cut for time but also names of characters, places and ships in stage directions which were never spoken in the aired episode. You can download the The Most Delicate Instrument script in PDF form here. Stay tuned, two more episode scripts and several treatments will be added in the coming days.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Peacock is live and that means the highly anticipated streaming debut of Wing Commander Academy is here! The good news is that the sound appears to be much better than in other iterations of the show, so it seems like this is probably the definitive edition to watch. On the other hand, the brief segment missing from "On Both Your Houses" is absent on Peacock. For the DVD release, VEI was able to replace the missing ten seconds from that episode with footage from LOAF's archive.

I also neglected to mention yesterday that there is also a fully free tier available to everyone. It's heavily supported by ads (compared with minimal ads on the Peacock "Premium" and zero ads present on "Premium Plus"), but that means anyone and everyone can watch Wing Commander now. Comcast customers' free package is equivalent to Premium. The platform is currently available on Apple devices (iPhone/iPad/Apple TV),

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

FekLeyrTarg has a beautiful remaster to share with fellow Wingnuts today. He's gone through the Wing Commander Academy game soundtrack and overhauled it with an SC-55 sound font. This is described as giving the game the "Kilrathi Saga treatment" based on the digital audio enhancements that those games received. He's matched up the new tracks with the appropriate in-game clips in a wonderful YouTube vid below. You can also separately download the new album in MP3 (18 meg zip) or WAV (131 meg zip).

Happy 25th Birthday Wing Commander CIC!

What if the PC game "Wing Commander Academy" (not to be confused with the animated TV-series) received a Windows port like the "Kilrathi Saga" version of "Wing Commander I" and "Wing Commander II - Vengeance of the Kilrathi" and George Oldziey re-orchestrated the music again? Find out in this video.

To render each music track with Patch93's Roland SC-55 soundfont in

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The NBC streaming platform Peacock launches tomorrow, July 15, and with it comes Wing Commander Academy streaming for the first time. All thirteen episodes of our favorite television show will be available sandwiched between Will & Grace and World of Dance. It's normally $5 a month, but if you preorder it tonight it comes to just $30 for the first year, which is quite a markdown. An ad-free version is $80 for the year. Additionally, Comcast Xfinity customers get free access to Peacock via Flex or X1, so it's worth getting the right setup. We have no kind of advertising or affiliate sponsorship with anyone - we're just trying to find fellow Wingnuts the cheapest ways to experience Wing Commander! The series is still available on DVD for $8, but I'm excited to rewatch the show in a new way. Just seeing the thumbnail on a modern interface like that is cool! And there are likely to be slight

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

PC Gamer is now rerunning celebrated articles from a decade ago, so I guess that means we can rereport on them! Up on deck today is Richard Cobbett's big retrospective on the Wing Commander Academy animated series. It was part of his original Crapshoot column and delves into the history of the franchise with a focus on the show. He walks through the pilot and gives a number of examples that illustrate what made the cartoon stand out in the crowd. I don't recall his scorn for certain products like WC Prophecy, but that's beside the point. The one inaccuracy that does need to be pointed out is that the show is available on DVD now. This piece was written in April 2011, and in September 2011 we found out the series was to be released on disc. Amazingly, it's still in print, and Amazon carries it for just $8. I guess they'll keep making it if we keep buying it. If you don't have a copy in your