Wing Commander

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It's hard to believe, but we're already well into June and the (northern) summer is practically here. That means that it's once again time for us to start getting ready for the CIC Birthday Party! Just like we have for the last few years, we'll be shifting the observed date slightly to accommodate various conflicts. We hope you can join us on Saturday, August 17, at 7:00 pm EDT (4:00 pm PDT and 11:00 pm GMT). This year we'll be celebrating the CIC's 21st, which is hard to believe!

The party will take place in #Wingnut on our Discord server. As always, you're welcome to drop by the chat room any time beforehand to join in the fun. We're still working out the specifics, but for the first time, there's a chance we might also have an accompanying simultaneous live stream to take the excitement to a whole new dimension! Stay tuned for more details as the event approaches.

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The first three German translations of the Wing Commander novels used the same Paul Alexander paintings commissioned by Baen as their covers. Starting with Heart of the Tiger, however, the publisher began using 'slush' artwork that they happened to own the rights to reuse. As a result, four books were published with covers initially used by (and created for) for other works. The first two unlikely sources were discovered in 2015 and now a third has been located!

The German cover to Heart of the Tiger (Book 4) is a painting by Romas Kukalis originally appeared in 1993 as the cover to Turning Point by Lisanne Norman, the first book in the Sholan Alliance series. The German publisher mirrored the image, making it more difficult to search for mechanically! With this discovery, the remaining unidentified cover is the translation of the Peter Telep film adaptation.

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Here's a neat article on the making of The Darkening from a 1996 DK book on multimedia!

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Kitbashes have a rough reputation, but they can be pretty awesome when done well. CorpusCounter has created several examples of how to turn these Frankenstein creations into clever novelties. He's dubbed the four fighters below Hellthi, Thundertoth, Ferket and Longtahn. These feature a Confed fighter paired up with its Kilrathi counterpart to build something new. Each ship takes on the tone of the tan Kilrathi durasteel, which happens to work. Not bad!

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The TCS Victory has so many amazing locations. The jump to SVGA 'photorealistic' backgrounds is still seared in my mind. It's so hard to pick a favorite, but the bridge might be it. I love the bar, I love gunnery control, and the briefing room is freakin cool, but all of the little consoles and expansive window with your escort out front really take the cake. Scribbler has created one more ASMR/ambiance video so you can enjoy it for a solid hour in the background.

Today we return to the TCS Victory. She can already look back on a long service. As long as some work shifts in space. No missions and no attacks? It can also be quiet in space but be careful, everything can change quickly. So stay alert and keep an eye on your monitors. The bridge is the heart of every ship

For ASMR, radio plays or to relax

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Klavs

has released his majestic

Waterloo

cruiser model, which has been in development for quite some time. It's not done up in a super fancy livery, but there are still many uses for such a high quality design. In fact, even though Klavs just released the model last night,

L.I.F.

has already imported it into Flag Commander, the

Homeworld Remastered

mod. It doesn't yet have stylistic consistency with the rest of the game, but the ship still looks cool! Grab the model

here

(63 meg zip).

Hi everyone, not sure when I'll ever get around to finishing the Waterloo Class Cruiser, so I thought I'd provide it as is. Symmetrical texure is baked and most of the topside details are there. Hope you like her, can't wait to see what the community does with her!

OK, so I had to split its hull parts into two, but there we go, a very nice heavy cruiser leaving its shipyard!

It doesn't have its turrets yet, but the

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Adm_Maverick

took a break from his

tabletop

game to complete his impressive Tallahassee cruiser

model

. He's designed it so each subcomponent fits together tightly and the overall structure balances well. As an extra bonus, you can see how his

miniature fighters

scale nicely, so he'll actually be able to use the 24" capship in his future gaming endeavors. Sounds like fun!

I've had another project I've been working on for a while: Scratchbuilding. I started with the Excalibur... realized I was in way over my head, took it back a step and worked on the Tallahassee Cruiser... lost the materials for that... and decided to go for broke and started over on the cruiser but built to be 24" long. I threw on the last parts of the Tallahassee Cruiser last night. I learned a lot from this build, mostly in the way of bracing and how to square parts of the model up.

That's one of the Hellcat tokens I built for

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Tonight's rabbit hole: I noticed that Privateer has two different internal sets of names for its commodities, one used in the exchange (and on your PPC) and one used on the in flight manifest. Some are the same but others are different. "Movies" becomes... "Moviechips"!

Games become Gamechips, Books become Bookchips. And PlayThing (tm) becomes...!

So I ended up extracting everything and making a Spreadsheet of different commodity names across six sources (three in-game, three from the Playtesters' Guide). It also shows what type of container displays for each:

Found some cut content, too: traces of the ability to eject passengers and a list of additional story-specific items that were cut when the plot was shortened: Alien Crystal, Alien Device, Ancient Gun, Alien Machinery and Alien Metal!

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People have been finding a lot of fascinating old magazine articles lately, and here's an interesting one from Computer Games Strategy Plus. FredDude found this Wing Commander 2 review in the December 1991 issue. It's interesting for a professional review - the author seemed to lack a powerful enough PC necessarily for decent performance, and he encountered a couple of bugs right off the bat that game developers today would have quickly worked to mitigate for a high profile print review. He calls the number of Tiger's Claw survivors "implausible" and the speed of the cutscenes "infuriating." He also never played far enough into WC2 to fly a Sabre nor even experience a bombing run in the Broadsword, which was a marquee feature. All in all, it doesn't quite seem like he was ready to review the game. If I was the editor, I likewise would not have considered this ready to go to print. Maybe this

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Here's an unusual oddity. AD found an emulation cabinet that purports to play the Sega CD version of Wing Commander. Upon further investigation, it's not really clear if Wing Commander is actually included. Due to the dubious legality of these types of setups, the mix of games is always a little questionable. Nevertheless, the visual of WC in an arcade type box is pretty cool. The variable title header that displays the Wing Commander name is also a wonderful touch!

You can find the product listing here. At $1400, it may be cheaper (and more legit) to build you own! AD looked up the base cabinet hardware here and digital display upgrade here.

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AD found a neat article in the December 2021 issue of Custom PC. It's a piece on the history and origins of VGA. It's a good story, but Wing Commander doesn't actually appear in the text of the article. Rather, a screenshot from WC1 (with its 320x200 256 color graphics) is used as the headliner - and most notably - on the cover of the magazine. It's not too often these days that you find professional print mags with Wing Commander on the front, so we thought it was worth pointing out. You can actually order a copy for £5.99 here. If you're not in it for the collectible, you can also find the whole article here and even download a PDF of the entire magazine.

VGA didn’t put the PC at the graphics cutting edge, but it did put it back in the race. The new hardware supported resolutions of up to 640 x 480 with 16 colours, or 320 x 200 with up to 256. What’s more, those 256 colours could be

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Sheppard

has expanded on his

patches

that neutralize asteroid damage with a brand new tool. Wing Hard is a nifty app that modifies WC1&2 ship damage values in order to allow players to customize the difficulty just to their liking. Rather than making yourself invulnerable or killing enemy ships with the push of a button, you can carefully tweak everyone's armor values to balance the right amount of challenge and fun. As an extra bonus, his asteroid knowledge has also been included so you can adjust the radius of impact and increase or decrease how deadly the rocks are. Grab the app

here

(3.3 meg zip) and run it in your game folder to get tweaking! You can learn more about exactly which files to modify at the CIC Forums

here

.

This program lets you fine tune WC1 and WC2 (GOG releases) difficulty to what you feel is correct.

Basically, I programmed in all the offsets for Terran Confederation

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Today we have a sketch from 213thBattalion on his take on the Dralthi VII. The "roll bar" feature might make some think that this was inspired by the Drakhri, but the VII has the same component and has its guns mounted on the inner wings rather than under the nose. He's got a first cut that's more of a 1:1 translation of the design, and then there's a bonus bomber variant as well. It's a beefed up version that makes room for more ordnance. If you're going to draw a Kilrathi ship, you can't go wrong with a Dralthi!

Inspired by the Kilrathi fighter in "Privateer"

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Here's a cool video for your leap day enjoyment. The theboredcyborg has put together a mega review of all the major US-based video game movies of the '90s. The list includes Super Mario Brothers, Double Dragon, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. He saved the best for last and also covers Wing Commander as well. Although he owns the film and was somewhat familiar with the game series, he just watched the movie for the first time recently. Based on general internet sentiment, he went in with low expectations, but was very pleasantly surprised. The cast gets a big thumbs up and the CG space battles are a particularly high point. He's reasonably impressed with Chris Roberts' directing ability and came to care about the characters. Overall, his verdict is that it's a fun film with a lot of heart to push its simple story. We couldn't agree more! Jump to 25:42 in the video below if the auto-start

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Cybot is back with more wacky and creative Wing Commander designs. These were inspired by the Steltek craft that we see in Privateer. Cybot has taken those design elements and extrapolated them into a whole fleet of ships. If you're working on a project that needs a super powerful alien kick, check them out at the CIC Forums. His threads include download links for copies of your own!

STELTEK fleet ships: have fun with all models in Obj format.

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We've got great news for Wingnuts today! DaveO's extensive archive of Wing Commander videos has returned to the internet. Dave started this vast archive some fifteen years ago with playthroughs of most main story games and their expansions, but over time some segments became unavailable.

There's all kinds of reasons why fans might want to have this at their fingertips. It's very helpful to be able to quickly check how something looked in a mission, consult a video for strategy or grab a certain screenshot. You get game flow, cinematic and gameplay here for a complete experience. A few samples are below, but you can find all of his various game-specific playlists here on YouTube.

The CIC also has its own large scale WC video archive, but it's a little more focused on things like trailers, promotional vids, behind-the-scenes content, fan projects and similar material. The two archives complement

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Today we have something a little different. Dead Decks is a pair of hicks who review extinct collectible card games. The video shows them open up a Kilrathi starter and booster pack of the Wing Commander CCG. They know nothing about Wing Commander and just hate the cards - their favorite part is the back. It's kind of funny in a terrible way and not safe for work. If they can get ahold of a Terran starter, we may get to see them play. Just to be clear: the game is wonderful and these guys are just big dorks.

Harry and Richard bore themselves and you with another lackluster video er...game. Another try to 1995 and another fly-by-night CCG: Wing Commander

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randomthefox tipped us off about an absolutely stellar sketch of a Kilrathi and her Dralthi drawn by Heresy. The pilot's armor is exquisite with a wonderful mix of futuristic claws, ornamental plates and even a tail. The helmet is also reminiscent of Bhurak Starkiller's famous visage. A blur effect on the Dralthi and rest of the background complete the package nicely. You can find more of Heresey's work on DeviantArt or Patreon.

A female Kilrathi pilot from the Wing Commander computer game series.

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The new Star Trek Picard series premiered last week, and the show is chock full of rich continuity. The crew putting it together have spared no detail, and that includes a number of connections with the last TNG movie, Star Trek Nemesis. Among them is that Romulans use a nifty knife with two blades. Star Trek fans have confirmed that this is the legendary Double Shadow knife designed by Gil Hibben in 1991. Wing Commander fans will also recognize it as Seether's iconic and deadly knife from 1996's Wing Commander 4. It's what he uses to threaten Blair on Nephele and also later kill Captain Paulsen.

LOAF profiled the prop in greater depth a couple years ago. It's certainly the go-to sci-fi exotic blade and shows up in a wide variety of productions, but it's cool to see it here too. And if you're not watching Picard, we can't recommend it highly enough! The first episode is streaming now - it's one

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We've solved a small Wing Commander mystery! This

unidentified ship

appeared in a single act of an episode of Wing Commander Academy ("Invisible Enemy.") It wasn't an obvious match for a fighter from the games and it was only seen the once. Well we’ve tracked down the original script for the episode and discovered that it was meant to be... a FERRET!

For reference, this is the P-64C Ferret (and P-64D Super Ferret!) patrol fighter as introduced in Wing Commander II: