Display MoreWell, everyone knows Babylon 5 was the last of the Babylon stations. What this update presupposes is... maybe it wasn't. The Confederation starbase seen here should be pretty familiar: it's Blackmane Base, which appears in Wing Commander III. Depending on your performance in the game, you will either fight to resupply or to evacuate the base relatively early in the game. Canonically, the latter missions are flown and the base is disassembled.
What may surprise you is that there's a nerdy reference hidden deep in the bowels of the game: internally, the station is stored as BAB6… for Babylon 6, a clear nod to the television series that surely inspired its design:
And while the mesh is named BAB6 in the PC version of Wing Commander III the 3DO release makes the reference even more clear by storing the station's textures as BABYLON6.TXM (accessible via the game's debug mode):
In fact, the 3DO release even adds some related text to the station itself; right below the entrance to the flight deck reads STATION 6:
The reference is all the more impressive because Babylon 5 wasn't a cult classic when Wing Commander III was being made… in fact, it had barely started! The game released shortly after the sixth episode aired and the filename for the station must've been chosen much earlier. In spite of this, we have a pretty likely suspect for the reference. Art director Chris Douglas specifically talks about Babylon 5 in Origin's Official Guide to Wing Commander III:
Chris has decked his door with "Dilbert” comic strips that he downloaded from the Internet, and his walls are hung with Maxfield Parrish posters. Compared to the other people on the Wing 3 team, however, the interior of his office is fairly uncluttered. Besides his PC and SGI there is only the black television that he uses to play tapes from his collection of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a comfortable chair, two strings of blue and purple origami cranes and thirty-four miniature Star Trek spaceships. "When I was a kid, I would have given anything for some of the toys they have out now,” he confides. "I’m pretty bitter about how empty my childhood was when today kids can get all sorts of neat stuff. . . now I just wish they’d come out with some Babylon 5 ships.”Chris would get his wish, by the way: Galoob would release six sets of Babylon 5 spaceships within the year! Hope he managed to pick them up.
