Display MoreFuel storage has always been a limiting factor for aircraft. The need to land and refuel determines an aircraft's range and capacity, which is especially important for military aircraft. Bombers, spy planes, command and control platforms and anything intended to serve reactively benefit from staying in the air as much as possible. This need is what led to the development of in-flight refueling in which one plane's range and capacity is extended because it can rendezvous with a tanker aircraft that provides it new fuel without needing to land. The first successful in-flight refueling took place in 1923 between two biplanes. While the aircraft have become much more advanced in the ensuing century, the process has remained the same: one plane deploys a sort of hose or boom which connects to the other and transfers the fuel.
Wing Commander has been concerned with fuel since the original game. In an element heavily inspired by the importance of fuel in the Traveller TTRPG, the original Wing Commander's lore was heavy with references to attacking and escorting tanker ships. There's no in-flight refueling mechanic in the original game; instead, the tankers we see (Dorkir, Draymen and then Lumbari) are simply for delivering the fuel to carriers and bases where it's needed to sustain fighter operations. But it's an early line in the sand that establishes that fuel is an important commodity in the Wing Commander universe… resulting in your Hornet or Rapier having exactly the same limitation as those biplanes in the roaring twenties: a duration defined by the amount of fuel they can carry. And anyone that has ever had to creep back to the Tiger's Claw without any afterburners knows that pain!
Wing Commander II memorably changes that! Early in the game, you are prompted to fly a mission where your Broadsword jumps to another star system. Since it uses up much of its fuel in the process, you are asked to dock with a Clydesdale-class tanker named the TCS Valdez (a reference to the stricken ship at the center of a then-recent oil spill) to refuel your bomber. This involves contacting the ship in flight which then starts an impressively animated cutscene. As a game mechanic, it's interestingly useless: the refueling tanker only appears in a single mission and there's never actually a situation where you NEED to refuel (your Broadsword can jump twice on a single tank). Really, it's pure world building and a wonderful thing that they decided to use precious disk space to keep the refueling cutscene… because even though it doesn't help you much in the game, it puts you into the Wing Commander universe so very well.
So in-flight refueling in the 27th century is a thing! We hear about it again in the Wing Commander III novel which suggests that one of Blair's particular abilities as a commander is his ability to develop new doctrine around the process. In the book we see him send a refueling shuttle to the front line to keep his ships flying at Tamayo and then he goes on to develop this into an ordered process to extend the ship's patrols. Instead of a massive freighter operating independently from the carrier like the Valdez we see a specialized shuttle used for the purpose.
"After our little scrap back at Tamayo, I started thinking about in-flight refueling," Blair told him. "A refueling shuttle with an escort of Thunderbolts could allow your whole squadron to operate over a normal patrol route." He shrugged. "We'd better see if the bombers can replace them before we talk about it further. At any rate, people, we've got to find out everything we can about the Empire's plans before they spring them. So make sure your pilots are sharp and ready for anything. When this thing goes down, whatever it is, we'll need to be ready. Dismissed."
Kilrathi doctrine was a little different. Instead of refueling freighters or shuttles, the Kilrathi have a dedicated variant of their Naktarg-class assault shuttle which is capable of docking with ships to not only refuel them but to rearm their missiles! In False Colors, these shuttle variants, called Kofars, are particularly valuable to the Landreich forces that salvage them.
Finally, there was the Kofar shuttle variant, a flying munitions and fuel dump that could dock with a Kilrathi fighter in space and transfer fuel and missiles. Tolwyn had long argued that the Confederation fleet could have used a similar platform. Carriers, after all, were at their most vulnerable when they were in the process of rearming and refueling fighters in the middle of combat operations. Terran carriers could launch small tankers, but there was no provision for restocking a fighter's missiles without having it return to the flight deck. The Kofar extended Kilrathi planes' flight times dramatically.
It would seem that Tolwyn's argument about rearming ships ultimately landed as the Confederation develops this process in the post-war era. In Wing Commander Prophecy we see the Midway supported by jump-capable SAR-23 Condor shuttles which carry fuel and munitions. In fact, one of the too-subtle-for-anyone-to-notice interactive elements of Prophecy is that later missions change depending on whether or not you rescue the TCS Redeemer refueling ship early in the game! (And to help jog your memory, the refuelers are the YELLOW Condors; the red are SAR and the gray are standard shuttles.)
