Display MoreUp for a little late night Wing Commander lore? Claw Marks includes the earliest published timeline. The late, great Aaron Allston imagined the major battles of the first two decades of the Kilrathi war. Including the 2639 “Enyo Engagement”:
Claw Marks also establishes that Knight is a veteran of the Enyo Engagement and that it was where he earned his callsign. (I know what you’re thinking; Knight was a combat pilot for 15 years?!?!)
Next, the Wing Commander I & II Ultimate Strategy Guide, which heavily references Claw Marks, says that one of Blair’s Academy instructors was Lt. Col. Blakely, the man who planned the Confederation’s counterattack.
Uh, don’t you mean Prankster and not Blair? Regardless of how you choose to deal with that, Blair being in Blakely’s class is mentioned in one of his yearbook signatures in the Kilrathi Saga manual:
The second iteration of the Wing Commander timeline is published in 1994 in Armada’s Voices of War… which as you can see makes a pretty big mistake: it confuses the 2634 McAuliffe Ambush with the 2639 Enyo Engagenent! Enyo is never mentioned. The horror!
Voices of War also gives us the only Kilrathi perspective on the battle. “Sun Year 5117” is base eight for 2639!
Unfortunately this version was also the one that went into the licensing bible… so Enyo does not appear in the Baen novels.
Wing Commander III’s Victory Streak continues to use McAuliffe… and it updates the story to establish that then-Captain Geoffrey Tolwyn was in command. Maybe this is the action he was knighted for!
The final (so far!) version of the published timeline appears in Arena’s Star Soldier… and it splits the difference by having the Kilrathi attack both systems! Whoever did this must have been very handsome and interesting to be friends with.
Enyo and McAuliffe are just a jump apart, so the story seems like a reasonable fix for an old typo!
The day by day timeline in Star Soldier includes some details exclusive to the Super Famicom manual’s expanded version of Claw Marks. It’s likely no one at Origin had any idea this existed in 1994!
A followup to Action Stations that follows Captain Tolwyn through the engagement pretty much writes itself; one of several WC novels I would commission in an instant if EA would lend me the license!
