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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.

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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",

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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

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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!

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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

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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

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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 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!

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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The Wing Commander movie club has returned from the distant, hopeful tomorrow of 2010 and we've voted to watch another movie with a year for a title! This is going to be an interesting one because it's a movie I have not seen and know nothing about: Ridley Scott's 1992 historical drama 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Ridley Scott has made a lot of nearly perfect movies… but this is one we didn't know. It should be pretty exciting to find out what its deal is! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The Wing Commander connection is fascinating, too. 1492 is one of three major references used by Chris Roberts to develop the Wing Commander movie's spectacular opening sequence. The opening was not scripted with the rest of the movie, it was something Chris developed after the shoot to try and capture viewers' attention based on the same 'everything in the first act' philosophy used to develop

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Are you lucky enough to live in or near Sweden? Then you'll want to mark your calendars: the next edition of the gamed SCORE game music concert is coming to the De Geerhallen concert hall in Norrköping on November 8… and it will include music from Wing Commander! SCORE is an ongoing concert series which presents an ever-changing lineup of both classic and current video game music. In the past they've played a suite of music from the original game's score by George Sanger and it's a good bet that's what lucky Swedes will hear in November. You can learn more about the project and the Wing Commander suite here and you can book your tickets here.

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Leading voices in the exobiological community are demanding clarity on the fate of Terri Tora, the young researcher who recently went missing around HIP 87621.
Professor Frank Raddix, who originally appealed for help in locating his young partner, issued a new statement this week:
"Terri risked everything in pursuit of discovery. We deserve to know whether she is safe and what exactly she found. Continued silence from the authorities is unacceptable."
Independent journalist Alexei Keel of Vox Galactica has published evidence linking the permit lock to billionaire investor Lexi October. October Consortium, which predominantly deals in technology, gambling circles, and high-profile investments, refused to comment when approached. Lexi's silence has fuelled intense speculation over whether her organisation is involved with controlling access to the system.
Keel noted that the October Consortium's

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There's a pretty good joke hidden in the 'tips' section of the Wing Commander IV manual. Check out the very last one:

"You can fight the Seether" is maybe not a helpful tip for playing Wing Commander IV… but it does tie the game's genetically enhanced villain to the 1994 Veruca Salt song that provided his name! Here's the music video:

Another fun little popular music reference in a Wing Commander game is Arena's Broadsword Warpig, which was named after the Black Sabbath song War Pigs. RIP Ozzy!

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Cybot has a friend to introduce us to: Uncle Bilbop. Uncle Bilbop has a large selection of Privateer-styled ship upgrades that are available as OBJ files for you to use in your own work!

• Cargo Pods DAZ
• GOF Cabin Passager 01 DAZ
• PRIVATEER Armor Type 00 DAZ
• PRIVATEER Base Shield Generator 00 DAZ
• PRIVATEER Cargo BOT 00 DAZ
• PRIVATEER Device Protype 00 DAZ
• PRIVATEER ENFORCER DAZ
• PRIVATEER ENGINES 00 DAZ
• PRIVATEER Ecm Package 00 DAZ
• PRIVATEER Office computer 00 DAZ
• PRIVATEER Sensors 00 DAZ
• PRIVATEER Shield Generator 00 DAZ
• PRIVATEER Weapons 00 DAZ
• Privateer 00 Cargo
• Privateer_Droids Repair Mk2 -00
• Privateer_Droids Repair Mk2 -01
• Privateer_Droids Repair Mk2 -02
• Privateer_Droids Repair Mk2 -03
• TURRET Bottom A Daz LW
• TURRET TOP A

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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 are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) 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!

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We had a great time following a universal classic with its weird but incredibly special legacy sequel. 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a fascinating movie and I hope everyone enjoyed listening to me go on about it for two hours. I could probably spend that much time just opining on the unusual choice of tense for the title!

Here's the Leonov, designed by Wing Commander Prophecy's Syd Mead! Eagle-eyed sci fi fans will notice that Babylon 5 later... borrowed... the ship for the Omega-class destroyer. Which in turn fascinated Chris Douglas during the making of Wing Commander III!

All three of our simple 2001 references also reappear! Here's HAL, the AE-35 and TMA-1 as seen in all three places (2001, then 2010 and then Wing Commander). The Tycho monolith is only seen in the slideshow of clips from the original movie that opens the film. By the way, we also see "Moonbase Tycho" as a Confederation base on

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21st REGULANCER: Rise of Hiigara showcase, showing systems around and talking about future updates.

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Inside Mac Games was a unique sort of magazine from the mid-1990s. It was specific to the small, affluent community of Macintosh gamers and instead of being printed it came on a CD-ROM! The articles were presented through an interactive executable and they could link to slide shows, trailers, advertisements and even game demos! Dundradal, who remembers IMG from his youth, located five major previews and reviews of Wing Commander games which we've extracted to the best of our abilities here. Links to copies of the ISOs themselves are also included in case you want to get the genuine experience emulating them on an old Mac!

IMG 24 - January/February 1995 - Super Wing Commander preview

Sneak Peek: Super Wing Commander

by Tuncer Deniz

NOTE: Screen shots and information presented in this article are based on a pre-release version of Super Wing Commander and are subject to change before final release. This