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Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The Titan known as Oya appears to have deployed a large fleet of Orthrus vessels into star systems farther from their own territory breaking expected behaviour.
Analysts noted that the locations in which Orthrus vessels have been tracked didn't appear to have any particular importance, instead suggesting that this may be a new tactic or possibly a simple panic response to the mounting pressure on its fleet.
Titan Oya has been steadily losing territory to large numbers of AX-equipped human forces. These forces, spearheaded by coalitions known as 'AXI' and 'XSF' have been reclaiming ground from the Titans successfully for some time and were pivotal in the recent successful campaigns against the now-destroyed Titans, Taranis and Leigong.
The Pilots' Federation have issued an alert to all independent pilots for each of the star systems where Orthrus vessels have been detected:
"If Oya can be

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Here's a quick Banshee 3D printed by Knight26-77. The time lapse video may only be 30 seconds, but the real work (before, during and after printing) was certainly more time consuming. I do appreciate the slick results though!

Here is lightly modified 3d printed banshee. I mostly just stretched out the back end to make it look more like the game and cutscene model.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The fantastic new CIC Head Museum is now even better! LOAF has just added the distinct look of the Super Nintendo characters to the database. These are, of course, very different than the portrayals from Super Wing Commander on the 3DO/Mac, which are also on display. Plus, you can find many other characters from Christopher Blair to Bruiser McDoozer, which are all neatly categorized according to the Wing Commander game they starred in. Check them out here.

I've added the Super Nintendo heads to the museum! A few interesting notes:

• The heads look very 'thin' because the SNES renders an 8:7 image which your TV would then stretch somewhat to 4:3.
• Hunter's cigar is removed, almost certainly a victim of Nintendo's then-very-strict content policy.
• Angel's earrings are removed, likely because of the more limited number of colors available (presumably not a strange content cut as Spirit still has her

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

It's Black Friday today, and if the deals out there didn't help you check off your list, maybe your friends and family need Wing Commander gifts! Here's a roundup of actively sold WC products. Most are digital, but that makes things easier in certain situations. As we reported last year, the WC Movie is harder to find these days, but we are lucky to still have the Academy television show readily available for a whopping $8 still. The Baen ebooks series is also complete, and GOG is in the midst of a holiday sale that's slashed its already low prices by 75%.

Games ($1.49 each)
Wing Commander 1&2 Wing Commander 3 Wing Commander 4 DVD Wing Commander Prophecy & Secret Ops	Wing Commander Privateer Wing Commander Privateer 2 Wing Commander Academy Wing Commander Armada

Movies & TV

Academy DVD $7.99

Novels ($6.99)
Freedom FlightBaen EbookAmazon KindleApple iBooksB&N NookKobo	End Run

Quote from Star Trek Online News-Bot

PC General: Updated Memorial plaque to include Robert Walker Jr. Updated Memorial plaque to include René Auberjonois. Ships: Updated the scale and orientation of the competitive engines in sector space and normal space on the Vulcan Experimental Scout Vessel. Systems: Added three new commands, which can be run through the chat window or keybound: /Cooldowns - opens or closes the "Reward Cooldowns" window otherwise accessible from the PvE Task Force Operations window. /Bridge - takes you to your Starship's Bridge. /ShuttleBridge - takes you to your Shuttle's Bridge. The "Hold Torch" Emote is now freely unlocked for all players, and as such as been removed as a prize option from the Anniversary Emote Box. Resolved an issue that prevented the Eject Red Matter universal console from being affected by the Unconventional Systems trait. Console General: Updated

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Often forgotten is the fact that the 1999 Wing Commander film features truly incredible set design. From the minutely detailed Rapier cockpits to the cramped, submarine-like environs of the Tiger Claw, the movie's sets succeed far beyond expectations. That's courtesy of Oscar-winning production designer Peter Lamont. Lamont, fresh off his work on James Cameron's Titanic, turned a warehouse in Luxembourg into a 27th Century Confederation space carrier full of don't-blink-and-you-still-miss-them details.

One of these wonderfully crafted details is the series of propaganda posters created to decorate the Tiger Claw's pilot's mess. At least eight different posters were designed by the art team to adorn the walls of the mess, which called for them directly in the shooting script:"MESS is an apt adjective for these cramped quarters. Defaced propaganda posters, and pin-ups, male and female, line the walls."

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

It's a new year and time for a new poll! Our annual new year's poll asks what kind of year you think it'll be for Wing Commander. As we saw in yesterday's recap, 2019 was a big year for Wing Commander, and there's no sign of letting up in 2020!

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The old poll asked about the most underappreciated Wing Commander games. Armada, with its strategic mode and expansive multiplayer options, took the lead with Privateer 2 a close second. Super Wing Commander, Academy and even the Prophecy port for the Game Boy Advance also took in a good number of votes. It's great to see people who are fans of all these lesser-known WC products!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Surveys have been released for Through the Moongate, from Wing Commander and Ultima VII to Portalarium. This means that people who pledged for the book on Kickstarter can now go in and confirm their addresses for shipping. There are two big points associated with this, however. First, the team has made it super easy to add supplemental items. Fans can add €30 for a cool piece of cloth art that includes a Kilrathi warrior and Dralthi fighter. It's also just €3 to add one of Denis Loubet's Wing Commander bookmarks! You can even put in €6 for two more. These are only available via this campaign, so I would take all you can get of this awesome collector's item!

All artworks are done. The back cover by Manda is ready and beautiful with a lot of references to the history of Origin Systems Inc. It will be printed on every edition of Part II and it will also be printed on cloth. Also Denis Loubet's

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

This has been a really good year for space toilets. AD managed to screen cap some really good shots of the toilets in the Wing Commander Movie a couple months back, and now LOAF has discovered the Wing Commander Academy equivalent. Or rather, since this is Damon Karnes' holding cell from the episode The Last One Left, these are borderline space holes-in-the-ground. He recently got ahold of a concept art piece which shows a pair of basins at the foot of their cell beds. From this angle, their purpose seems fairly obvious. They're actually pictured in the episode itself, but with all the other action going on, nobody has ever called these out as far as we can tell. Now you know!

This is a Wing Commander Academy concept painting. These were done in the US as reference for animators in Japan and Korea painting the production backgrounds. It's from The Last One Left and reveals the pirate prison has

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Shot97 has snapped a fun preview from a 1990 edition of Dragon Magazine. At this point in time, the game was still sporting its Wingleader title after Squadron was nixed due to potential copyright concerns. Ultimately Wing Commander was selected over all. I love how the Kilrathi are called "vicious militarists" and the Friend or Foe missile is held up as a "deadly" weapon. And thirty years later, we're still trying to make ray tracing a thing!

Also coming from Origin is Wingleader. Mankind is locked in a deadly war with the Kilrathi in the 27th century. Battling these vicious militarists are the daring pilots of the Terran Confederation. With his faithful wingman flying at his side, the fearless Wingleader battles with Kilrathi aces in heated deep-space dogfights. The game features Panaview, 3-D technology that employs highly detailed, ray-traced, bit-mapped images modeled in 256 VGA colors.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

eddieb is back with an all new Flight Commander! The original was a very popular Wing Commander-themed modding engine that formed the core of multiple fan projects about a decade ago. It ran its course with the technology available at the time, but now Flight Commander 2 is here and ready to give budding modders a brand new platform to launch from! It features advanced support for shipboard sequences and a slick recreation of the Vision Engine. It even runs in a web browser! It's still in the basic stages, but you can walk around, jump in a fighter and take pot shots in space. Jump straight in via the weblink here. Currently, you must use Firefox for the web demo to work. You can also download a Windows standalone version from the CIC forums here.

Flight Commander 2 is in the works. It's still very early, but here is the first demo. You can walk around on foot on your carrier. Fire guns,

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

When ODVS first set out to remaster the video from Wing Commander games, the DVD source footage for WC4 and Prophecy was an obvious choice. It wasn't clear whether the very low quality WC3 material could be significantly upgraded. But not only was Owen able to pull together a complete cut back in July, but now he's taken it up another level and made version 2.0 available! Everything is here in 1080p at 30 frames per second, and the overall contrast has been fixed throughout. Check out the trailer and grab it below! Note that there is not yet a way to integrate the clips into the game, but this pack solves a big chicken-and-egg problem. If enhanced videos didn't exist, fans wouldn't have a reason to figure out how to include them. Now they do!

• Wing Commander 3: version 2.0 (3.7 gig zip)

To celebrate Wing Commander CIC's birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of the Wing Commander franchise, I'm

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Thanks in no small part to UnnamedCharacter's WC Toolbox, we've seen lots of fans undertake some pretty amazing WC1 hacks from inserting new ships to whole language conversions. YPersonified has another slick project, which is a straight clean-up of the original game's text and dialogue. WC1 has a handful of typos, misspellings, mixed up grammar and odd formatting. You might not have even ever noticed it, but there's room for improvement, and (after more than 30 years) YPersonified is doing the improving! Some examples are included below. You can try out what he's fixed so far by unzipping the contents of this file (211 k zip) into your gamedat folder. Help share feedback or point out additional items here.

Wing Commander - Improved GAMEDAT Files

The project of fan-edited GAMEDAT files from Wing Commander for better gameplay experience. The work is mostly focused on slightly demanding but basic

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Today marks a whopping thirty years since Wing Commander 2 first shipped to stores! WC2 was the first game I played on a brand new shiny 486 back in the day. I learned how to install a sound card just so I could hear the glorious full speech intro, and that opening theme music still gives me chills. This remastered WC2 soundtrack by Jason Walton is still as one of my favorite fan creations of all time:

For many years, I could just fire up any random mission at any time and just lose myself for hours. I'd invite everyone to do the same to celebrate, but if you're not in a position to jump in the cockpit, re-watching out 25th anniversary livestream is the next best thing! Here it is broken up into several parts. That was a long night, but it was super fun!

Happy birthday to Wing Commander II, one of the greatest games ever made! Thirty years ago today we learned that our friends were all dead and

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

LOAF followed the Bricks with Wings instructions that we posted about last year, and I'm in love with the results. I don't actually see the plans available on the BWW site anymore, but fortunately LOAF was able to source all of the necessary pieces and make a tiny squadron of Confed fighters from the WC1 Vega Sector fleet.

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The spacefaring tribe that lives aboard an ancient dredger has refused to allow Orion University to take possession of the vessel.
Vox Galactica published an eye-witness account by freelance reporter Casey Kilpatrick from the Oochost PC-C c29-0 system:
"Once the Scriveners Clan was found, it wasn't long before Orion University arrived. Their megaship, Scientia Aeterna, remotely disabled the dredger's hyperdrive using a series of override codes. These had been unearthed from the university's archives, along with evidence that the ship – commissioned in 3088 as Dredger J-403 – legally belongs to them."
"Despite being unable to escape, the Scriveners have made a stand. All requests to communicate were roundly ignored. I've watched several craft try to dock with the dredger, only to be met with sealed airlocks and an electrified hull."
"It's clear that these people are unwilling to give up their

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The Scriveners Clan's legal ownership of their dredger has been supported by the civil rights organisation Advocacy.
The ancient Dredger-class bulk cruiser, currently located in the Oochost PC-C c29-0 system, is inhabited by a nomadic tribe descended from the vessel's original crew. Orion University claims that the cruiser is its commercial property, but has failed to make contact with its occupants.
Rhiannon Grady, director of Advocacy, explained:
"For centuries, there has been widespread legislation to protect remote communities from cultural contamination. These laws apply to micro-societies, such as those found aboard generation ships, that evolved in isolation."
"Therefore, Orion University should not presume to deprive over ten thousand people of the only home they have ever known. Unlike cases such as the Golconda, which requested emergency assistance, in this case we are legally and

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The Reorte Mining Coalition wants to cut ties with the Alliance in protest against the military defence pact with Sirius Corporation.
Vox Galactica featured an announcement from the faction's CEO, Fergus Cassidy:
"The pact's three-month probationary period is clearly a ruse. It is designed to allow time for Sirius agents to bribe, convince or threaten Allied decision-makers into accepting Li Yong-Rui's presence. We'd rather become an independent faction than allow this greedy and untrustworthy company into Reorte space."
Councillor Ainsley Niven, who represents Reorte, told the Assembly:
"Obviously I have argued against this extreme move, but I cannot ignore the strength of feeling from the system's governing faction. For Reorte Mining Coalition leaders, leaving the Alliance is less risky than allowing Sirius Corporation to become embedded in the system's infrastructure."
Vanya Driscoll,

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We are very excited to finally unveil the finished version of elend's physical Dralthi model! As you can see, it's absolutely exquisite - just a sight to behold! The detail is completely next level. All of the angels, curves, panel lines, intake serrations, tubes and more have been carefully sculpted and assembled by hand. The paint has been layered for rich dimensionality and there's even a Kilrathi pilot in the cockpit! All told, it likely took some five hundred hours to complete, and it's an amazing counterpart to the Banshee that he built a number of years back. Enjoy the pictures!

This is a scratch built Dralthi from the Wing Commander games series. More specifically, this is a reimagination by "Hangar B Productions", which I used as inspiration. I started this last year in June and basically worked daily on it, probably 2 hours on average. In hindsight I should have planned some things

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

One of John Nelson's original Wing Commander designs a while back was the sturdy Border Worlds Avenger. Although it's super impressive what people can do with Lego bricks, there's always room for improvement, and he's taken a second run at tightening things up a bit. The results look really solid. Most of the hull plating is a bit darker and the major structural elements are bit thicker with more mass. Hit the comment link to let him know what you think!

The last of my Lego updates, the Avenger. I went ground up to give it a more game accurate boxy and thicker look and the front cockpit cover had to change and I found the parts to do it. Enjoy.