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  1. Bandit LOAF

    Meet the Helmsperson (September 21, 2025)

    A recent BlueSky post mentioned Wing Commander IV's "chief corkscrew woman," the lady seen piloting the Intrepid throughout the latter half of the game. That got me thinking: what do we know about her, anyway? The character is credited as HELMSPERSON (not helmswoman) and she was played by...
  2. Bandit LOAF

    Read All About It (Air Combat Edition) (September 20, 2025)

    I was leafing through Strike Commander's wonderful manual, Sudden Death, the other afternoon and I noticed something I had never really thought about before: just after Chris Roberts' letter the booklet includes… an extensive bibliography? It was an era when serious flight simulators needed to...
  3. Bandit LOAF

    NMS Corvettes

    I would love to see more!
  4. Bandit LOAF

    A New Route to Towns (September 18, 2025)

    Truly, the era of new patches to help play the original Wing Commander is upon us! Now Derek Pascarella has created a patch specifically for the FM Towns port of the game. The patch removes the confusing disk selector which originally ran before the game (at the time, it was intended so that...
  5. Bandit LOAF

    Pilot endurance?

    That's a good question! I've never heard three hours before. The FAA says eight hours for a single pilot and ten for two pilots but I'm not sure how civil aviation would compare to the military. The WC3 manual says the Arrow has life support for up to seven hours, so that's probably a good...
  6. Bandit LOAF

    The Girls of Mac's Lore (September 14, 2025)

    Mac (of Mac's Lore) is back with some more... let's say unusual Wing Commander renderings. They mash up stunning models of Wing Commander spacecraft with characters from "Girls Frontline 2: Exilium". I don't know Girls Frontline 2: Exilium so I'm not in on the whole joke… but those starfighters...
  7. Bandit LOAF

    Reminder: #Wingnut Movie Night Tonight! (September 12, 2025)

    This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the...
  8. Bandit LOAF

    Sartha v. Drakhri (September 4, 2025)

    There's an exchange in End Run where Kevin Tolwyn excitedly claims he has shot down a Drakhri and Bondarevsky points out that it was actually a Sartha. This always felt a little relatable specifically because Wing Commander II's manual had World War II-style 'plane recognition' silhouettes for...
  9. Bandit LOAF

    Menace Remembers (September 11, 2025)

    Foxhound noticed a neat Wing Commander nod in a recent PC Gamer preview of an upcoming game called MENACE. The game is a turn based strategy from Overhype Studio in the vein of Jagged Alliance. But as this screenshot shows, its briefing room has a familiar inspiration! To learn more about...
  10. Bandit LOAF

    Classic Keith Confusion Continues (August 31, 2025)

    The seventh and final Baen Wing Commander novel has a pretty famous error: the cover incorrectly credits the novel to William Keith instead of his brother and fellow author Andrew Keith. Fans caught the error just as the book was going to press; it was too late to change the cover. Andrew Keith...
  11. Bandit LOAF

    Are Sound Cards Cool Again? (September 10, 2025)

    Creative Labs is… back? It looks like the legendary sound card company is preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign for… something. The description made available so far is incredibly vague: "Sound Blaster RE:Imagine is built for creators, gamers, audiophiles, and tinkerers. It's a bold...
  12. Bandit LOAF

    An Oxford Education (September 7, 2025)

    Here's a funny little 'unreadable text' Easter egg found in Privateer's source textures: the instructions for using the Oxford library computer, which appear as only background dots in the final game (shown). We can also get a closer look at the buttons on the side of the machine, although...
  13. Bandit LOAF

    1997 Prophecy Transcript Unearthed (September 6, 2025)

    We've extracted something interesting from the depths of the Wayback Machine. This is a November 1997 chat transcript for a conference with the Wing Commander Prophecy team held by gaming site PsychoNews. These were very special events at the time and the Prophecy team in particular conducted...
  14. Bandit LOAF

    Wing Commander Movie Night: True Lies (September 1, 2025)

    It's like the say, everyone loves the theatrical cut of Dune 1984! We had a great time discussing everything Dune last week and this time we're going back to Earth for a pretty fun one: the 1994 action comedy True Lies. It's a movie that's going to make us feel like it's 1994 again…...
  15. Bandit LOAF

    When did Iceman die?

    Yes… and your upper bound is only six weeks later since per the guide Lance has to be conceived at some point in 2655. So Iceman dies in a window that's about 1.5 to 3 months after the Tiger's Claw is lost. I think the key word there is combat. He still /flies/ occasionally in those years but...
  16. Bandit LOAF

    The Eldred Scrolls (or: Bruce Lewis Can Lose) (August 30, 2025)

    I was digging through Google's increasingly limited Usenet archive when I found an interesting series of posts concerning Wing Commander Academy that I thought were worth preserving here. On September 20, 1996, Wing Commander Academy storyboard artist Tim Eldred posted to rec.arts.anime.fandom...
  17. Bandit LOAF

    Fine Fralthi and Fantastic Fiction (August 24, 2025)

    Crack artist ulimann644 is back with two more extremely cool renderings of Wing Commander ships! The first is a scene which uses his previously shown Fralthi model and adds a brand new Drathi to the mix. The second imagines the cover to a Wing Commander story using his Hornet model. WING...
  18. Bandit LOAF

    After Action Report: Apollo 13 (August 29, 2025)

    Apollo 13 is essentially a flawless movie, so much so that it almost feels too slick to be real. But breaking it down into component parts–like the score, used in part to temp track Wing Commander–you begin to appreciate the sheer amount of artistry that went into every part of the thing...
  19. Bandit LOAF

    Lost Press Release: Wing Commander IV Mac (August 28, 2025)

    Here's one from the depths of Google Groups' Usenet archive: a Wing Commander press release we didn't have preserved! This was posted May 30 1996 to announce the release of Wing Commander IV Macintosh's demo. The Macintosh ports of Wing Commander III and IV are largely forgotten today... we aim...
  20. Bandit LOAF

    Wing Commander Movie Night: Dune (August 25, 2025)

    Last year's German re-release of the Ultimate Edition upgraded the version of the Spicediver cut to the 1080p version! I think it's a pain to find right now, though.
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