Wing Commander Academy displays a little spinning ship on the selection screen. But take a look at the Crossbow bomber! Well, it's... er... it’s green.
The actual bomber sprites in Special Operations 1 are blue and white which is also how it looks if you fly it in Academy. The game uses different sprites for the spinning ship in the menu! But where did the change come from?
Turns out the mesh was originally built for Wing Commander II to be a human corvette also called the Crossbow. It was cut to save space and the Special Operations team retextured it to look smaller. Here are the specs from a work-in-progress Wing Commander II doc:
Turns out the SO1 artists didn’t back up the new textures though... so when the Academy team went to render the turnaround a year later they had the corvette instead! Here’s what the source model looks like, you can see it’s intended to be much larger than a bomber:
