Display MoreHave you ever noticed that Colonel Halcyon typically specifies in briefings whether you're encountering a "sport" (transport) or a tanker? That's because Wing Commander I originally had both. The idea was cut for disk space but the original design, heavily inspired by Traveller, was that there were both tanker and freighter versions of the Drayman and the Dorkir. So each briefing is written to tell you which one to expect! The variant graphics were reused in The Secret Missions as the Terran Diligent (originally the Drayman tanker) and the Kilrathi Lumbari (originally the Dorkir freighter).
We were curious what the original game might have looked like, so we poured through the original game (plus the addons and Super Wing Commander's extra campaign) and tried to identify the variant of all 41 transports that appear! You can access the inevitable spreadsheet here. As you can see, there's a lot of lore about what the different transports you're attacking and/or escorting!
… and thanks to the disk space issue, BOTH versions of each ship can be configured as a freighter or a transport. Super Wing Commander ultimately dropped any visual connection between the designs, making them seem more like totally unrelated designs!
