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Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Continuing a series of articles by historian Sima Kalhana that look at the most newsworthy events during the past year.
"April 3307 saw the creation of the Federation's Proactive Detection Bureau in reaction to the Nine Martyrs bombings. This organisation monitored all public and private communications for evidence of terrorists, to prevent similar attacks in future. But its highly controversial nature would soon present the Federation with new challenges."
"ACT's investigation led them to the Neo-Marlinist Order of Mudhrid, which had helped deliver the caustic enzyme bombs to their nine targets. The faction's defeat was an early victory against the NMLA, but much of the organisation remained a mystery."
"When the 'ghost ship' Adamastor began receiving an encoded signal, this began an entire saga of mysteries. Its long-lost sister ship, the Hesperus, was soon located by pilots who had been

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Sima Kalhana reviews the most newsworthy events of the past year in this series of articles.
"July began badly for the Federation, with more factions seceding in response to the Proactive Detection Bureau's establishment. The newly independent nations severed all links with these new surveillance efforts, inspiring many other systems to do likewise. This secession crisis would rumble on for the rest of the year."
"The Blue Viper Club, one of the rarely seen dredger clans, joined forces with the Kumo Crew to manufacture a medicinal drug that turned out to be a new strain of onionhead. The drug would ultimately end up being legally distributed by Neomedical Industries, causing Archon Delaine to seek revenge against the corporation."
"Tensions soared in the Marlinist Colonies during an election for the head of their diplomatic consulate. Aaron Whyte's candidate had the support of an Imperial

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The noted historian Sima Kalhana takes a look back at the turbulent events of the last year in a four-part series of articles.
"The start of 3307 was a time of crisis. The rise of the Neo-Marlinist Liberation Army (NMLA), the Marlinist refugee crisis and increased Empire-Federation tensions had brought a full-scale superpower war closer, with renewed attacks from the Thargoids increasing the pressure."
"All of this led to Pranav Antal's proposal of a diplomatic conference for all three superpower governments to work through their problems – the very first Galactic Summit. Within weeks, Sirius Corporation was selected as the neutral host for the conference. Li Yong-Rui scored another triumph by establishing the Marlinist Colonies for millions of political refugees who had fled from the Empire."
"In February came the trial of Fleet Admiral Vincent, accused of arranging Starship One's destruction

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The last in a series that reviews the events of the past year, by noted historian Sima Kalhana.
"October brought further controversy for the Federation, when a diplomatic conference in the Delta Pavonis system was revealed to be a honey trap designed to capture Yuri Grom. Only a rush of support for EG Union allowed their ruler to escape, causing political embarrassment for President Hudson."
"There was more corporate drama when Zemina Torval relinquished her long-held majority sharehold of Mastopolos Mining, fuelling rumours of a family rift with her cousins. Torval Mining Ltd became a fully independent corporation run by her daughter Constantia."
"The Colonia Bridge project officially started the first of two phases this year which would see the construction of 56 megaships between the Alcor and Colonia systems. Brewer Corporation enjoyed great public support for improving this travel

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The generation ship Golconda has departed from the Upaniklis system with much of its former population on board.
Three years ago, the Golcondans abandoned their ship and resettled at the Forester's Choice outpost in Upaniklis. Approximately 60% of these 70,000 people have now elected to resume their itinerant lifestyle aboard the vessel, which was recently upgraded with modern megaship technology by the Artificers Clan.
The Federation has made assurances that the Golconda is under its protection, and is equipped with comms systems to summon aid if needed. The Forester's Choice outpost remains operational and will continue to export Apa Vietti, a unique alcoholic spirit.
Shortly before the Golconda made its first jump into hyperspace, Vox Galactica published a statement from Commander Javi Alvarado:
"The last few weeks have been a bittersweet experience for me, watching these people prepare to

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

I don't really watch a lot of YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels or Tik Toks, but I doubt there's a lot of Wing Commander content out there in those formats. There is at least one clip, however, in the form of BigJim's take on Wing Commander Prophecy for the Game Boy Advance. It seems really hard to do any topic justice in 60 seconds, but given that time constraint, this isn't a bad rundown of the game's features. I do cringe at the horizontal content positioned in the middle of a vertical video, but it's still worth a watch!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Ground missions! Is there any more thrilling expression in the English language? We don't think so. Unfortunately, they're a rare commodity: across Wing Commander III and IV there are a total of only nine ground missions... and they were cut out entirely from multiple console ports! We thought it would be fun to post a quick visual guide that walks through the six planets seen in these special missions.

Building on Strike Commander's terrain technology, Wing Commander III included four ground missions connected to the campaign to build the Temblor Bomb (and culminating in the game's firey finale at Kilrah). Unlike Strike Commander and Wing Commander IV, the WC3 planets were left untextured to improve performance... though they did have somewhat more detailed maps available in the game's nav screen (included below). The game has three distinct planet designs, although it's difficult to notice the

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Responding to public interest in Princess Aisling Duval's fiancé, Federal Ambassador Jordan Rochester, political journalist Cassia Carvalho has compiled a profile for The Imperial Herald:

"Jordan Rochester is now a household name throughout the Empire, though few were aware of him prior to his engagement to Princess Duval. But in the Federation, the Rochesters have been associated with success for over two hundred years."

"The Rochester name can be traced back to self-made tycoon Apollo Rochester, who was the biggest landowner on Biggs Colony in the Altair system. Each generation since has strived for fame and wealth, and the expression 'as rich as a Rochester' has become common parlance."

"The family matriarch is Isolde Rochester. She is a member of Congress, an influential figure in the Liberal Party and a staunch supporter of Shadow President Felicia Winters. Isolde raised five children,

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

I bought a joystick! Normally if it ain’t Thrustmaster I ain’t going, but I think they’ll forgive me for straying in this case... Look at the insane choice of screenshots! One is a clip of the box of a different game! Wild!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The Internet Archive is an incredible tool providing access to countless terabytes of archived websites, scanned media, imaged disks, preserved video... and a whole bunch of printed biographies of Freddie Prinze Jr.! While exploring the Archive's collection I happened to find they had digitally preserved six biographies of Wing Commander star Freddie Prinze Jr.! Mr. Prinze was something of a teen heartthrob in the late 1990s and so was the subject of a stack of quick 'teen pop' biographies. These 'trashy' unauthorized books were put together quickly, mostly from published interviews and press photographs, and sold at newsstands and book fairs. They were aimed at teenage fans and usually padded out their very simple chapters with press photos and film credits. Naturally, we've pulled out the chapter on Wing Commander from each book and collated them here for your reading pleasure:

Freddie Prinze Jr.:

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

LOAF has scanned a great article on the making of Wing Commander 3. It appeared in the August 1994 issue of Computer Game Review and followed the game's film shoot. The author talks about the experience with the CGI backdrops as well as the Kilrathi animatronics. There are also sidebar conversations with Chris Roberts and Mark Hamill. It sounds like filming all of the different angles and plot choice variations was as tricky as you might imagine, but they pulled it off well!

Oh, and here's Zephyr, which came out at the same time as WC3 yet somehow had worse graphics than WC1...

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Did you know that Wimg Commander’s future history includes a two-century pandemic that forces Earth to quarantine from the rest of the solar system?

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

One of my favorite pieces of Wing Commander art is the stylized box of The Secret Missions for the Super Nintendo. It doubles down on the SNES ports' conversion of the Jalthi into a "green Salthi" and puts the new ship front and center. Players got a poster of this depiction when they bought the game, but it's folded into nine squares to fit into the cartridge-size box. elend set out to fix this and has created this nifty version that does away with the crease lines as well as all of the logos and fine print that cluttered up the bottom. It looks pretty slick like this! The thumbnail below pops open a 1080p version, but you can also get it in 5K resolution here (5 meg jpg).

There, no logos, no creases. I might exchange the WC Logo and Title with the vector versions, once I got around to vectorizing this. Also it's AI upscaled.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

As part of Wing Commander's 30th birthday celebrations, people have had a lot of questions about the history of the franchise. A frequent topic is the famous box art used for the original game, which was highly unusual for featuring what purported to be a screenshot. Although it's not an actual reproducible image from the game, that's for good reason! LOAF goes into the details on why this is the way it is below. You can also find our previous coverage on this topic for a line-by-line rundown of what's different between the cover and what actually ends up in space!

I’ve seen a lot of folks talking about the “bullshot” used as the cover of the original Wing Commander and thought I’d try and provide a little background.

First of all: yes, it’s “fake” and not as is sometimes rumored an early build with different graphics. The image itself was created in DeluxePaint by pasting together

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Truly, the era of new patches to help play the original Wing Commander is upon us! Now Derek Pascarella has created a patch specifically for the FM Towns port of the game. The patch removes the confusing disk selector which originally ran before the game (at the time, it was intended so that users without hard drive or players with an FM Towns Marty could save games to a diskette if desired). This makes it much easier for modern players to experience a genuinely exotic version of the game. What a cool thing to do! You can download a copy from Derek's GItHub. Here's the official description:

This patch removes the TownsOS-based save disk selector that normally appears when running "Wing Commander" on the FM Towns. Instead of prompting the player, the game will automatically default to using the first floppy disk drive (i.e., A:) for all save and load operations.

The patch is particularly useful for

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Since we've kicked off a new console generation this month, it's time for a new poll asking about your preferred platform for a new Wing Commander game. A lot has changed in just the couple years since we asked about mid generation options (Xbox One X/PS4 Pro). For starters, cross-platform play has become much more standard, so it's easy enough to buy the system you want and still play with your friends if they're on a different machine. It's also not uncommon for practically identical versions of a game to be made available for everything from PC to Switch to mobile OSes. We've also added cloud gaming services for the first time. We've grouped them all together since no single service is a major player, but they certainly kind of exist. This stands in stark contrast to promises for the last 15 years or so that such a thing could be viable. There's also been minimal change on the Nintendo side

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We've come across a small treasure today: extracts from a 1994 textbook about game development called The Magic of Interactive Entertainment by Mike Morrison. The book includes a lot of introductory information about building games (some of which is still very accurate!) and an entire chapter focused on the development of Privateer! There's a lot of interesting information here, from sales figures for some of the different games to some never-before-noted details about how Privateer came together. First up is an overview of the Wing Commander series and the work that went into it:

Next is the Privateer chapter, which is truly fascinating:

And we end on a short section covering Wing Commander Academy:

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Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Professor Ishmael Palin has established a permanent base of operations in the Arque system.

Aegis Research confirmed the news with a statement from Professor Alba Tesreau:

"Having fled the Maia system, Professor Palin and his staff have installed their equipment at the planetary port Abel Laboratory on Arque 4 E."

"All of the engineering services previously offered by Professor Palin are now available at his new location. His study of meta-alloys and other Thargoid-related materials has also resumed."

"The megaship Carson's Spring, which facilitated an emergency evacuation of the Palin Research Centre, has left the Arque system to resume other duties."

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

With the Thargoid invasion force seemingly on the edge of defeat, political analysts have presented several arguments for what follows.
The potential balance of power across the core systems will be heavily influenced by the ambitions of its primary players – perhaps crucially in the Federation, claims Jean-Daniel Moulin:
"President Winters has finally taken up residence in the White House, ready to face a multitude of challenges. A depressed war economy, mass citizen displacement and a series of late-term policies implemented by the outgoing Zachary Hudson will keep her schedule full for months. Jeremy Archer stands opposite her in Congress, ready to pounce on any signs of weakness and eager to fully emerge from the long shadow of Hudson as the true leader of the Republican party."
On the Imperial front, Cassia Carvalho of the Imperial Herald has provided a summary of those most likely to

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Azimuth Biotech has outlined plans for the corporation's future following the confirmation of Salvation's death.
Director Torben Rademaker, head of strategic operations, submitted a statement to public newsfeeds:
"The loss of Salvation, formerly known as Caleb Wycherley, is a sad day for our organisation. We will remember his sacrifice on humanity's behalf, but recognise this as a chance to forge a fresh path towards the future."
"Azimuth Biotech is now under new management, with myself as its acting CEO. We have lost a great deal of expertise and personnel, but our decades of xenological research will serve a vital purpose in the war against the Thargoids."
"Unfortunately, due to a misguided campaign by radicalised saboteurs, many of our official facilities have been illegally snatched from our control. Yet plans are already underway to rebuild our corporate infrastructure. Of our surviving