Display MoreLAZY SATURDAY SPACESHIP POST! I thought it might be fun to sort of roughly compare the Wing Commander Academy ships that originated in Wing Commander 2 with their original meshes. And you know what? It was fun! The Sartha:
The Kilrathi Jalkehi heavy fighter, which appears in a single episode! (Word of Honor)
The furball Grikath bomber, a series regular:
And the Kamekh corvette! The coloring is a little more like the all-tan Privateer version (which was the same mesh retextured).
On the Confed side, we've got the Ferret. This appears in only one episode BUT somewhere there existed an unseen toy prototype of it, the only one made for the series. Wish I knew more!
The Epee medium fighter. This one shows up a few times on the show but it always seems like it didn't get a fully fleshed out model sheet...
... which is also the case with the Sabre, which actually looks like a different design in its two appearances on the show.
And of course the famed Broadsword bomber! I don't think Academy uses any of the WC2 capital ship designs.
A couple of WC3 designs have 'cameos' on the show too... they got full model sheets early in the process when the series was going to be 'WC3 Babies' and it would've been a shame not to use them. The Arrow:
One Hellcat V, primed, prepped, etc.
And we even get an incredibly brief appearance from the Longbow! Maybe it was still called the Imperator back then...
There's one WC4 cameo, too. This one was an intentional Easter egg, the Border Worlds Avenger bomber popping up as a pirate shuttle:
We don't have meshes for the Wing Commander I ships, but they're fun to compare to the original concept drawings. Here are the show's hero ships, the Scimitar and Dralthi:
Meanwhile, the Dorkir and Fralthi actually used the Claw Marks art as reference because the model sheets for the Kilrathi fleet weren't done:
Finally, you can see the Bengal is heavily inspired by the original line drawings but with a pretty significant revision pass working it into the style of the show:
