Wing Commander

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There's a piece of IMDb trivia that claims the poster in Blair's quarters is Freddie Prinze Jr.'s future wife, Sarah Michelle Gellar. I hate to ruin a non-Star Wars-related Wing Commander factoid but...

... it's not true. It's one of several propaganda posters made for the Tiger Claw sets (note the Confed flag behind her) and like the ones in other quarters and the lounge the lady is a stock photo model from a collection licensed by the production.

I don't know who she is but as you can see I've found the source photo for the first time! Plus another one from the same shoot. Today she shows up frequently as the graphic for scammy social media accounts in search of wealthy American husbands.

I also found her on a Czech translation of a romance novel by... Jude DEVERAUX! Which is pretty on-the-nose, IYKYK.

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I guess the comparison worked a little better for Bengals vs Chiefs...

I'm just watching for tHE lOVE aNIMALS' half time show anyway.

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Wow! Look at this awesome closeup of one of the large watches the Tiger Claw pilots wear in Wing Commander. Time for some more research!

@awesomead @banditloaf Only two years late but look what I stumbled upon! The watch from Wing Commander, I knew it was somewhere after I was given it on the film! pic.twitter.com/Gr333gk8xv

— Jordan Reeve (@R33VE) May 27, 2022

28 minutes later: I am now a member of a Storm Watch collecting group on Facebook.Here's what we've learned so far! The watches were from a British company called Storm Watches which still makes cool sci-fi looking watches. They show up in the credits:

Knowing that, I found a Storm Watch community on Facebook that has preserved 1990s catalogs! The watch R33VE kindly filmed is the "Camera". From there, AD and I started looking for frames in the movie where we could see the watches.

Maniac and Blair are both certainly wearing the "Navigator" which

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Pretty much

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Frequent readers of the Tri-System CCN booth news will find about ten stories written about Zakariah_Skintight and his hit band, The Buttock Men. But who is Zak Skintight and why is he featured so prominently? LOAF recently caught up with Privateer 2 developer Paul Hughes and finally got the answer!

I think that was Paul “Stitch” Chapman - the chap that did all the UI and box covers/ manual. He used to play bass in a band in his uni days.

Stitch was a brilliant UI designer - he was so shocked at how bad the box art and manual were shaping up, he took it upon himself to do it and knocked it out of the park. He proper pushed us to make a really cool UI (for 1995!).

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Ever wonder about the callsigns in the Wing Commander TrainSim? They're selected from a bank of options when you start a new game. They include all the wingmen plus SEGALLION, DIBBER, ZORO, GRYPHON, SUTEK and POTSHOT. These are all the callsigns of members of the dev team.

Segallion gets a star system in WC1, too. Sutek was Paul Isaac’s callsign but I’m not sure who the original Segallion was. Learn about the many variants of the TrainSim here!

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Here's a fun drawing that includes a little Wing Commander treat. A Brazilian magazine published this collage of characters from a wide range of famous '90s-'00s video game series. Admiral Tolwyn is poking through in the bottom right. It comes from the Brazilian comic Monica's Gang by cartoonist Mauricio de Sousa. LOAF did some digging and zeroed in on its exact origin dating to a July 2012 "Cinema Classics" spinoff issue. That's a pretty fantastic reference, because even at that point WC4 was a 16 year old game. Thanks to Romy for highlighting this!

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If you wanted to buy GOG's $5.99 Wing Commander I & II pack from Origin’s catalog in 1991 the total would’ve come to $309.65. That’s over $700 adjusted for inflation!

And the whole package is still on sale through the weekend for just $1.49!

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Here's Mike Winterbauer's wonderful Wing Commander SNES painting as a pin-up in a French magazine called Super Power!

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The new poll is about

All Wings Considered

, the CIC's weekly streaming program. The options below are a list of the the common features that fill out a typical episode. There's lots to like about each one, but which is your favorite? If you're not familiar with the show, you can find back episodes online

here

. You can also provide feedback or make requests at the CIC Forums

here

.

Our old poll asked

which Talon variant

peopled liked to shoot at the most. The Retro model was overwhelmingly popular with more than half the vote. Pirates got about a fifth of the vote, and the Privateer 2 easter egg actually got about a sixth.

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We've got a new poll up today that asks about your favorite briefing rooms in the main Wing Commander games. These spaces hold a special place in the heart of WC fans, and the each have their own special character to them. From the red light of the Tiger's Claw, bright blues on the Concordia or dim shadows of the Victory, what's your favorite? Don't forget that the latter three options all had awesome physical sets! Sorry Cerberus fans, we left you out this time.

The old poll asked about the worst places to ditch your fighter. Many pilots were averse to ejecting in the Kilrah System or Nephilim Fluid-space, but the winner is the lonely Delta Prime System well off the established space lanes in the Gemini Sector. Funny enough, four of the five lowest ranking choices were the ones where the indicated pilots actually died!

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This prompted me to dig up the original Tarsus model...

But what's that written on the rear!?! Zoom in and enhance... HIDDEN LORE!

Is this visible in the game itself? Not even a little.

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Did you know Dekker’s assault shuttle has a name? It’s called Hermes in the game files but it’s never mentioned in on screen.

Here's an update created for WC4 Remastered:

This also happens with Prince Thrakhath’s fighter in Wing Commander II. It’s named Bloodfang but since you only ever encounter it flown by the Prince (an ace profile that supersedes the normal ship ID) you never see the name!

Another good one: the surplus Kilrathi ships in Righteous Fire display as unknowns but they are stored as SALTHI.IFF. And what do you know, that’s the Super Wing Commander Salthi model!

Huh, and two out of three of these had Ultima universe cameos too. Everyone knows the Bloodfang in the corn field but the Salthi also showed up attacking Trinsic in in an Ultima Online April Fools gag.

Ultima Forever had a Dralthi/Drakhri type ship crashed on an island but it was never accessible. They were kind enough to send us a

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I *NEVER* do these, but what the hey! 1 like = 1 answer

The ESK rating for the Dart DF missile is... 11,000 ESK! What is ESK? The blueprints list it as the 'strength' rating for the missile and the numbers roughly correspond to the game's explosive force stat. In Secret Missions 2, Maniac proposes (suicidally) arming missiles with "a double load of ESK-5 explosives". So maybe its like TNT?

The max range of the Mass Driver Cannon is 3,000 mrrs... later listed as simply 3,000 kilometers! *plonk* *plonk* *plonk*

The ESK rating for the Pilum FF is... 9,500! Note also the Duck Dodgers reference on all the blueprint missile breakouts!

The velocity of the Dart DF is... 900 kilometers per second! That means you'll need afterburners to outrun one... or you can just move out of the way.

Oh, here's the rest of the answers!

1. What is the ESK rating for the Dart DF missile? 11000
2. What is the max range of the mass driver

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We are off and running well into the 2024 now, so it's time to conclude our annual new year's poll. We've swapped in a new one about stealth fighters in Wing Commander. The question this time asks which craft you think sowed the most chaos, did the most damage and wreaked the most havoc over the years. This is by no means an exhaustive list of cloaking fighters. In order to make the list of options more concise, we've narrowed the field to generally "enemy" presenting ships. So you won't see Blair's Excalibur that destroyed Kilrah, Earth's defensive screen of cloaking Arrows, the Recon Excaliburs that first scouted the Nephilim or the 28th Century Arrow Eclipse. But there's still some fun picks to choose from below!

We've had a great run of impressive fan projects this past year, and we expect that to continue well into the future! The results show that most fans are eagerly anticipating what's

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We've posted a number of fancy video packages this year that feature the enhanced cutscenes ODVS has managed to create. We're careful to not refer to it as just "upscaling" since actual bits of new data are being added to create detail where none existed before. How is this accomplished and what are the limits? What do we mean by saying it's run through an AI routine? ODVS explains all this and more in a new article. You can learn about modern computerized neural networks and all the work ODVS does to manually pre-process the footage before he can turn the crank here.

GIGO – QUALITY IS KING

In my case, I use a Neural Net-trained application called Topaz Labs Video Enhance AI. The application has been loaded with several AI models that can be applied to source materials of various quality with varying results.

Almost as a case-in-point of why “Artificial Intelligence” is a misleading term, the

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Welcome to the CIC's 25th Birthday Party! It's unbelievable that a quarter century has passed, but time flies when you're having fun! We've got a nice slate full of items to share today, but the best part of the event is being able to connect with so many friends and fellow fans. Today wouldn't be possible without the contributions of so many of you. And on that note, to kick things off, we've got an exciting clip by Scribbler to help set the stage for what's to come!

Congratulations to the Wing Commander Community on their 25th anniversary!

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Welcome to the CIC's 23rd Birthday Party! When we opened our doors here at WCNews.com in August 1998, we never imagined we'd still be here now. The pandemic still looms and did directly affect a few items we had planned. This has not been the year of recovery that we'd envisioned, but I'm happy that we managed to still pull together a few fun things to share. Like you all, we're still making the best of it and having a blast hanging out (digitally, per social distancing guidelines) with friends. If you're not already there, stop by Wingnut and join the party!

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Welcome to the CIC's 22nd Birthday celebration! We had to reschedule a couple times due to 2020-related awfulness, but we're extremely happy to have finally made it here today. Once again, super talented Wingnuts have shown up in force to put together a ton of fantastic updates below. There are substantial releases for well established projects and some truly exciting teasers for new items fans are working hard to bring you next. Even this kickoff image put together by FekLeyrTarg is itself a preview of something special in the works! We're glad you could be here with us - please enjoy the updates!

This year, inspired by the recent efforts to bring the later WC titles into 4K, I'd like to present a small teaser for things to come.

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Welcome to the big event! Here's a wonderful welcome video put together by

Fek'Leyr Targ

.

This year I've once again produced a little birthday video, returning to the Gemini Sector.Do you recognise the scene?