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The Wing Commander movie club has swung back around from the outer planets to finish Silent Running. This week we're going back to World War II for the 1958 submarine film Run Silent, Run Deep. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Run Silent, Run Deep is a 1958 action/war film about an American submarine captain desperately pursuing revenge against the Japanese destroyer captain that sunk his last boat. It stars Burt Lancaster as Clarke Gable as the captain and XO at odds over the battle and alongside the previous year's The Enemy Below helped establish the standard beats for a submarine movie. It was directed by Robert Wise who would go on to helm Star Trek: The Motion Picture and it was also heavily referenced in Star Trek's Balance of Terror.

As we discussed last week, Run Silent, Run Deep is almost certainly the movie Chris Roberts meant to reference when he described Wing

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A Reddit user named BackpackTwo recently posted something pretty interesting to the r/wingcommander subreddit: a photo of some costumes from Wing Commander Prophecy! They explained: "I worked at Origin in the late 90's around the launch of WC Prophecy so I had a few pieces of memorabilia that i had forgotten about when cleaning out the closets." Lucky person! These are Terran Confederation Navy uniforms worn by Seth Walter as comm officer 1st Lt. Anderson and Mindy Hester as science officer Lt. Commander Finley. A great, high resolution look, especially valuable for anyone interested in making their own costumes!

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But wait, there's more! For the first time, we also asked fans to vote this year for the greatest fan projects of all time. We reached back into nearly thirty years of community history to come up with five worthy contenders. This was a very interesting experiment in nostalgia and recognition, and while every nominee was evocative in its own way, the results speak for themselves:

Perhaps with little surprise, we are happy to announce our Hall of Fame winner is Klavs! It's been not quite a year since Adam Burch's passing, although we can say definitely that this untimely shock was not the reason for his boost in the polls. Rather, his decades of dedicated service to the community and legacy of assets left to the fans make him a clear winner. Once again, Klavs, we salute you.

We weren't aiming to give a runner up for this, but through the vote tallies and discussions with the community, it became

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We may have taken our time to get here this year, but Wingnuts have cast their votes and we now have the winners of our annual fan project contest! We once again had an excellent slate of nominees but a handful of undertakings rose above the rest. Sometimes we also have so many high achieving projects that it's not clear we have one winner, so we end up with multiple top selections. This year is one of those cases! So without further ado:

Our first winner for Fan Project of the Year 2024 is WC4 Remastered! Excitement remains high for the fan remake of The Price of Freedom, and the steady drumbeat of comprehensive updates gives Wingnuts high confidence that their patience will be rewarded (in about a year)!

Our second top spot is taken by the combination of AllTinker's two contenders: Originator and Confederation! The Originator tool is a phenomenal program used far and wide to hack into WC code to

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Greetings WingNuts,

We all love Alien! Is there anyone that doesn't love Alien? It holds up so well today, despite how 'slow' the first half is compared to movies today. But you aren't bored slowly creeping through the Nostromo's empty rooms for minutes and minutes at a time… if anything, the quality of the visual world building around you makes you wish you could stop and look around. And then once the movie gets going, you're in.

The biggest connection to Wing Commander is that both Wing Commander II and the Wing Commander movie referred to the Ripley character in adapting Angel. In both cases, it's clear what they were trying to do… but making your love interest a stronger female character doesn't approach Alien's treatment of Ripley as the lead. In the case of Alien, the character wasn't gendered until casting, leaving her the sum of her actions. Wing Commander couldn't really get there!

Here's John

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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Silent Running (1972) which inspired... maybe nothing in Wing Commander You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

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This is a fascinating little discovery that is about thirty years in the making: a previously unknown promotional album that includes music from Wing Commander III and several other Origin games! It's called Electronic Arts Music Sampler Volume Two and it was produced in 1995 to promote EA's ever-increasingly-professional music departments across four studios. In addition to Wing Commander III, it includes tracks from Bioforge, Wings of Glory, Pacific Strike, Ultima VIII: Pagan and the unreleased Prowler!

Here are the eight Origin-related tracks:

3. Credits/Theme (Wing Commander III) - George Oldziey & Randy Buck

Your browser cannot play this file. Click here to download the track.

4. Big Band-O-Rama (Pacific Strike) - Paul Baker

Your browser cannot play this file. Click here to download the track.

9. Medley (Wings of Glory) - Lara Barratt

Your browser cannot play this file. Click here to download the track.

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The campaign to update Brewer Corporation's Trailblazer fleet has concluded in the Minerva system.
Thanks to the efforts of independent pilots ferrying shipments to Minerva, a total of 5 additional Trailblazer megaships will be placed in strategic locations on the fringes of the core systems, providing a hub of tradable materials and services for early colonies.
Brewer COO Mark Rennik remarked on the campaign's success:
"Once again, we have received widespread support and confirmation of our efforts, which is both humbling and inspiring. It is obvious that there is great appetite for breaching the latest frontier to establish new colonies, further expanding humanity's sphere of influence in our section of the galaxy."
The Trailblazer megaships are expected to be deployed in the coming weeks.
Participants can now collect their rewards from the initiative.

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Exciting news for one of our sister communities: Electronic Arts has released a mountain of Command and Conquer material for fans to explore including source code, modding access and never-before-seen footage of games while they were in development! You can read all of the details in their announcement.

Source code has been posted to Github for the original game, Red Alert, Renegade and Generals Zero Hour! They've also enabled mod support for several games via Steam Workshop and put out this fascinating video:

Once upon a time, Wing Commander and Command & Conquer, both beloved by fans, were effectively friendly rivals with Electronic Arts pitting Origin and Westwood against each other to develop a space MMO. That battle ended tragically for both studios! But it's nice to see a dedication to putting some of that history right… maybe we could see some archival Wing Commander material someday!

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There's a big new update on the progress of WC4 Remastered! The WCRespace team is now well into building out the Masa System with the new ships and gameplay mechanics that the game introduces there. They've got shuttle docking working and DefianceIndustries has introduced his very impressive Tallahassee cruiser. Plus there's additional discussion on targets to get a closed beta going by the end of the year and a tentative initial release next year.

While it’s still possible we’ll hit the February 12, 2026 target, we’re preparing for a slight delay to ensure we have enough time to polish the visuals. So we may be following in the original’s footsteps and delay the release to hit the 30th anniversary year, though possibly not the exact day.

We plan to have a closed beta by sometime close to the 30th anniversary of the original advertised release date (December 8th this year). The feedback from that

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The Wing Commander movie club has visited space and attempted to scream; results pending! This week, we're going to be taking another space voyage with the 1972 science fiction film Silent Running. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Silent Running is an environmental-themed science fiction film that tells the story of a convoy of spaceships carrying a destroyed Earth's last plant life. It was directed by the man responsible for 2001: A Space Odyssey's spectacular special effects, Douglas Trumbull, on a shoestring budget. Silent Running won critics' hearts but didn't perform at the box office; it has become a cult classic today.

Wing Commander's connection to Silent Running is… pretty much nothing. Here's an excerpt from Chris Roberts' original treatment of the Wing Commander movie where he is trying to explain how he intends for the film to feel:

Space combat in this universe follows

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Eggs are in the news right now and we thought we'd investigate one thing that's driving up the prices. That's right, it's the Dioscurian Ovizard! These adorable twelve-legged lizards show up in "Lords of the Sky" when the cadets first enter the atmosphere of Dioscuri-2. The ovizard eats the egg and is then startled by the Scimitars' thrusters, prompting it to change color and dart away. That's a lot of biology in a few frames!

Here's their home, from the mission briefing earlier in the episode. Note the Easter eggs in this screenshot, references to Forbidden Planet, Alien and Star Trek!

Their name was introduced in Star*Soldier in a classified ad intended to be from a scientist studying on Dioscuri-2:

Free to Good Home: litter of Dioscurian Ovizards. Stealthy, eggchomping space weirdos are allthe rage in Sol!
Contact creid@dioscuri.science

One question remains: what made the nest and the egg in the first

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Actor Christopher Walken recently made headlines when he revealed in an interview that he did not watch streaming video and didn't even own a cell phone. Well, this November 1995 Computer Game Review interview seems to suggest that's nothing new--here he says he's never even seen a CD-ROM (after shooting two of them)! This was published as a sidebar to an article about Ripper (which is now old enough that we should call it Bossman) but he talks about his work on Privateer 2: The Darkening, noting that he shot his role there for two days. And look how much fun he's having on the cover!

A small bonus from this issue: a previously unarchived version of the Wing Commander CTCG release advertisement with the tagline "Available Everywhere!"; sadly, this was not true!

One on One Exclusive Interview with Walken

“This guy can convey a character in a situation so well, it’s just unmatched.”
-Mark Semeret,

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Release of the mod, what is to come next in the future.

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Greetings WingNuts,

We loved Titanic! The film hods up extremely well. It was very easy to write it off as a fad in 1997 but rewatching it today there's no question that its success was well deserved. It's an amazing combination of rewarding character drama set against so much hard work to create a world that even Richard Garriott could learn something. And it certainly didn't seem like it was three hours long! James Cameron's position as king of the Hollywood universe is deservedly still secure today. (A note relevant only to this group is that Titanic opened one week before one of our previous films, An American Werewolf in Paris. And it was much, much more successful!)

The big Wing Commander connection was production designer Peter Lamont who deservedly won an Oscar for recreating the Titanic for the film. One of the reasons the movie works so well is that Cameron goes so very deep with his Titanic

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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Alien (1979) which influenced everything from the seats in the Rapiers in Wing Commander II to the character of Angel in the movie. You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

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Earlier this month, the science fiction art community was saddened by the passing of artist Chris Moore. Mr. Moore was a famed UK illustrator who painted countless science fiction book and album over his long career. You can find his obituary here. While looking through his artwork, I noticed something familiar:

That's right: his painting "Millennium" was used by Taiwanese publisher Soft-World for the disk labels of the original Wing Commander! It's not clear how the piece made it around the world but it was originally painted in 1988 as a wraparound cover for a reissue of Ben Bova's novel Millennium. It was also used as the cover for the July 1991 issue of Omni, which seems better remembered.

The original painting sold at auction some time ago, which provided an image of both the original painting and Moore's initial layout sketch. The sketch is listed as 12 1/4" x 9 3/8" pencil on tracing paper and

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Sharpshooter is back with another smart analysis of a Wing Commander IV mechanic!

This time, they have tackled the Hawk vs. Panther morale mechanic which decides which winning cutscene you receive at the end of the game. Sharpshooter discovered that the morale for Panther is stored at 0x600 and the morale for Hawk is at 0xfe in your WSG (save) file. The character with the higher morale at the end of the game decides the final clip: if it's Panther, you are a flight instructor and if it's Hawk you're an Admiral. If the two values are tied then the game plays the flight instructor ending.

There are a grand total of nine FMV choices that impact Hawk or Panther's morale. Their morale level starts at 5 and goes up or down based only on these choices (and not how you treat them in flight.) Not all of the choices will be played in any one play through of the game and some of them can be ignored if so desired.

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Brewer Corporation's much-anticipated system colonisation module and claim management process is now available.
While colonisation technology has existed for over a millennium, a formal claim and colony establishment process for individuals, communities and minor factions has not previously been available. Analysts consider this a moment of historical significance, as viable colony targets will not be dictated by large corporations or superpower governments.
CEO Madelyn Teague shared her enthusiasm at a gala event in Minerva, covered by Vox Galactica:
"The sheer potential of this process is staggering. I'm delighted that the move towards widespread, community-led expansion was so eagerly endorsed by all three superpowers. System colonisation contacts will be available on starports to facilitate the initial work on a claimed system."
"This is an exciting time, and I can't wait to see how the

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Early in Secret Missions 2, Shotglass informs Blair that he has seen a suspicious story about the Kilrathi withdrawing from the Deneb Sector on "Jerry Rivers on the Galaxy Network News". Who, exactly, is Jerry Rivers?

From Blair's reaction ("that show will rot your brain") and the name alone, players at the time would infer that Jerry Rivers is Wing Commander's pastiche of a '90s tabloid television presenter inspired by Jerry Springer and Geraldo Rivera.

But there's more to the story! Like many elements of Secret Missions 2, the mention of Jerry Rivers is intended to preface an appearance in Wing Commander II. Jerry Rivers was ultimately cut from the game but his intended story was pretty interesting! The idea was that Jerry Rivers would replace the 'Meanwhile…' clips from Wing Commander I which informed the player what was going on in the war beyond the Tiger's Claw. In Wing Commander II, players would