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Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The Zachary Rackham-sponsored initiative to collect planetary scan data from across the galaxy has concluded.
Rackham Capital Investments confirmed an 'unprecedented volume of high-quality submissions' from independent explorers. Pilots were tasked to scan worlds matching the classification of certain planets within the permit-locked HIP 87621 system, after long-range scans revealed unusual exobiological signatures. The findings are now being analysed by researchers sponsored by RCI.
Zachary Rackham praised the pilot community for their efforts:
"I knew the galaxy's finest explorers wouldn't let me down. Thanks to the staggering amount of data you've gathered, our scientific teams are already narrowing down what makes HIP 87621 so special. Let me tell you, we're on the brink of cracking the mystery of that system. Won't that be marvellous?"
However, Federal Times journalist Bryanna Blanco, who

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

A recent BlueSky post mentioned Wing Commander IV's "chief corkscrew woman," the lady seen piloting the Intrepid throughout the latter half of the game. That got me thinking: what do we know about her, anyway?

The character is credited as HELMSPERSON (not helmswoman) and she was played by actress Beverly Castaldo. She actually appears in about a dozen cutscenes, generally in periphery any time we see characters interacting in the Intrepid's CIC (often right over Blair's shoulder). She has a few scripted lines which are mostly variations of "aye aye, sir" after she is ordered to set a course to a new location.

In spite of this, she gets several dedicated reaction shots which give us a good look at her face. And there are two 'moments' that fans will remember immediately: when Maniac attempts to flirt with her and instead sends the carrier careening off course and then when she can barely control her

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

I was leafing through Strike Commander's wonderful manual, Sudden Death, the other afternoon and I noticed something I had never really thought about before: just after Chris Roberts' letter the booklet includes… an extensive bibliography? It was an era when serious flight simulators needed to prove their authenticity and one small way to support that was to show how serious the research the team had done was. And researching a video game IS serious business; I just wish the Wing Commander games had included this sort of thing!

A little more research revealed that Strike Commander wasn't the only Origin game with a bibliography. All five of the company's dedicated flight simulator had them in some way or another. I decided to transcribe them all into a single spreadsheet which you can access here. Now you can recreate Origin's research library in your own home!

Wings of Glory didn't include a

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We had a great time watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a cold and unforgiving movie, for sure, but it also contains multitudes. It's inspired a million other things and it's hard to imagine what both film and science fiction would look like today without it. So let's take a look at some Wing Commander references both real and imagined!

Here's one that was pretty easy to catch: HAL 9000 as he appears in the film versus his cameo in the SNES port of Wing Commander. For those curious he does not appear in the port of The Secret Missions because the takeoff sequence is completely replaced with a cool mode 7 treat.

The AE-35 antenna, referenced in Wing Commander Secret Ops as a winning password, is the McGuffin that HAL uses to eliminate Frank Poole.

And the other 2001 password is TMA-1, which refers to the monolith discovered on the moon and seen in the 1999 sequence. TMA stands for Tycho Magnetic Anomaly.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) and you can find details on why we're watching it 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!

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

Venerable space sandbox No Man's Sky has recently turned its eye to starships with a brand new, free expansion called Voyagers. Voyagers allows players to create their own "corvettes", massive capital ships that can be customized to their liking in endless ways. Shaggy immediately took up the challenge… and he took it pleasantly literally, creating a Kilrathi Kamrani-class corvette and a human Venture-class in the game!

For those that don't know No Man's Sky just added the ability to build custom corvettes in the game. So what was the first thing I did? I built a Venture class and then a Kamrani. I took some artistic license with the Venture, because even the blueprint images out there are kind of simple, and the Kamrani runs right up to the complexity limit in the game, so I couldn't dress it up with antennae or other little greebles and the angular shape makes it hard to plug gaps with the parts

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Here's a scan to brighten your day: a newly aquired VidPro card for the SNES port of Wing Commander. These were the 'cards' that you would pick up to purchase a video game at stores like Toys R Us. They're a minor collectible today and we're hoping to complete the set of Wing Commander ones!

We previously shared this earlier type of SNES VidPro card. There may also be a 'horizontal' version... if we find more, we'll share them!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The Wing Commander movie club has charted the evolution of man all the way to the distant future of 2001… and it's obvious why this is such an important film both for cinema and science fiction. Next week we've voted to continue the story going with a VERY different sequel: 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984). It's a case of a different filmmaker picking up the toy box and doing something different in just about every way. I can't wait to share it! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

2010 is a little bit like Wing Commander Prophecy: the same world but adapted by a different director once the creator was wholly gone. And it makes a lot of the same choices! But the real connection to Wing Commander is the Soviet spaceship Leonov which appears in Wing Commander Secret Ops in the form of a Murphy-class destroyer. What's more, the Leonov was designed by Syd Mead… the mind behind

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Mac (of Mac's Lore) is back with some more... let's say unusual Wing Commander renderings. They mash up stunning models of Wing Commander spacecraft with characters from "Girls Frontline 2: Exilium". I don't know Girls Frontline 2: Exilium so I'm not in on the whole joke… but those starfighters are pretty sexy!

Wing Commander X Girls Frontline 2: Sharkry (ArtStation)

A imaginary crossover between the ships of Wing Commander and the T-Dolls from Girls Frontline 2: Exilium.

When the Border Worlds started getting Rapiers for their Space Forces, many pilots nicknamed them XCRs due to the BW's fascination of an ancient Earth trend called "Weebery".

The meaning of XCR was "eXtremely Cute Rapier".

Wing Commander X Girls Frontline 2: Klukai (ArtStation)

A imaginary crossover between the ships of Wing Commander and the T-Dolls from Girls Frontline 2: Exilium.

Klukai x Hellcat V

The popular phrase "She is all I need",

Create your own colossal, fully furnished, completely bespoke Corvette-class starship in No Man's Sky VOYAGERS ...

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Sad news to report today: French actor Emmanuel Karsen passed away on Thursday. M. Karsen had a lengthy list of film credits but he is best known for his voice work, which included performing the French dubbing for actors Sean Penn and Norman Reedus. You can find an obituary here.

Wing Commander fans–French ones, at least–knew him for his work on Wing Commander III as the voice of "Radio" Rollins. Rollins is actually one of the biggest roles in the game since he appears in unique videos at the end of nearly every mission! Here's a sample of M. Karsen's work, the start of Rollins' first one-on-one with Colonel Blair outside the elevator:

Thank you to Sergorn for reporting this news.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Foxhound noticed a neat Wing Commander nod in a recent PC Gamer preview of an upcoming game called MENACE. The game is a turn based strategy from Overhype Studio in the vein of Jagged Alliance. But as this screenshot shows, its briefing room has a familiar inspiration!

To learn more about MENACE you can check out its Steam page.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The Wing Commander movie club enjoyed True Lies! It holds up very well, although a lot of what we remember as having been ridiculous action actually seems pretty mild compared to the average blockbuster today. We already talked about the music in the intro post but we did notice one interesting Wing Commander connection in the opening credits: the film's production designer was Peter Lamont. James Cameron would famously tap him again for Titanic… and then he would go on to work for Chris Roberts on the Wing Commander movie! You can read more about his work (and watch an interview) in our memorial post.

Sully didn't appreciate the little black dress; that's his look all the time!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and you can find details on why we're watching it 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!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Creative Labs is… back? It looks like the legendary sound card company is preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign for… something. The description made available so far is incredibly vague: "Sound Blaster RE:Imagine is built for creators, gamers, audiophiles, and tinkerers. It's a bold reimagining of a classic. Designed to adapt, expand, and evolve with you." It's hard to imagine what any of this could be as sound cards are no longer a key separate component of PCs like they were when Creative was powering Wing Commander II's speech accessory pack.

What is interesting, though, is that they are using the original Wing Commander in their ad campaign. A BlueSky post provided a screenshot from an email promoting the project that features a screenshot directly from the Enyo System:

Further search discovered a video version complete with Wing Commander-specific ad copy posted by the project's product

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

GOG's Back to School event is winding down, so now's your last chance (before the next sale) to complete your digital collection. The Wing Commander series is half off, so have at it!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The Wing Commander movie club had a great time revisiting the '90s with True Lies! For our next movie, we're going back to space... the space of a recent future past. That's right, it's finally time for Stanley Kubrick's legendary 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The first major reference to 2001 in Wing Commander is that the HAL 9000 actually appears in the SNES port of the original Wing Commander! Watch carefully as you take off, he's on the first 'rung' of the Tiger's Claw. It's so fun to imagine some artist at Mindscape deciding to sneak this into the game.

The passwords provided at the end of the second episode of Secret Ops ("Thickening") are both direct references to 2001. AE-35, the winning password, is the model of the Discovery's antenna which HAL sends the crew to repair. TMA-1, the losing password, is the monolith which is found on the moon in

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The mystery surrounding the permit-locked HIP 87621 system continues, with claims of unusual planetary signatures detected via long-range scan.
Many independent pilots have also reported that all colonisation has been blocked within a 37ly radius, fuelling speculation further.
While authorities remain tight-lipped, multiple independent analysts claim that at least one world within the system is exhibiting anomalous exobiological readings. These findings have prompted the galaxy's wealthiest citizen, Zachary Rackham, to offer a lucrative incentive for explorers willing to examine the puzzle via cross-reference.
Rackham, speaking from his villa on Lake Rackham on Homeland, said:
"Whatever's in HIP 87621 is strange enough to have the boffins scratching their heads. Therefore, I propose scouring every corner of the galaxy for similar planets. With enough data, maybe our top scientists will be able

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Here's a funny little 'unreadable text' Easter egg found in Privateer's source textures: the instructions for using the Oxford library computer, which appear as only background dots in the final game (shown).

K-MSi Instructions:
1. insert non-metallic objects in the vat.
2. put your finger up your butt.
3. wish real hard.
4. live peacefully and vote for the people's party.

We can also get a closer look at the buttons on the side of the machine, although there's not a clear meaning to them!

[ar] [vr] [vr]
[rr] [rr] [ar]
[vr] [rr] [vr]
[rr] [mi] [vr]
[vr] [rr] [ar]
[vr] [rr] [ar]
[mi] [vr] [rr]
[vr] [ar] [mi]
[ar] [ar] [mi]

There is some text that you're supposed to read! While the device is scanning your artifact, the screen displays:

structure unknown
trace failure
origin unknown

And then you cut to a closeup where you're intended to read all about Dr. Monkhouse. There's some pretty important lore hidden in this