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The boring answer is that it's balance, the Retros (in the base game anyway) are supposed to be the easiest opponents. (Remember they're supposed to be a joke until their new leader unifies them in Righteous Fire.) In universe, I guess you could come up with any number of stories! Maybe they...

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 Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement...

That makes sense, you're hearing the differing gun types fire: mass drivers for the pirates and lasers for the retros (I guess you could watch for this, too!).

Also worth remembering that the Wing Commander community in 1996 blamed the change in engine for absolutely everything. Remember they were certain the Concorrdia wasn't in Wing Commander IV because the game couldn't display the model? There was absolutely no basis for any of this other than 'the...

Wing Commander author Dr. William Forstchen has found quite an audience with his most recent writing, the "One Second After" series. The books tell the story of the aftermath of a horrific EMP attack which renders modern technology useless and they've become very in vogue among "preppers" who...

The original Wing Commander I engine was special because it displayed ships as a collection of individual, pre-rendered sprites instead of as 3D meshes. That let the artists display ships that seemed impossible in 1990… because instead of having the game creating them on the fly, it was choosing...

That's a really interesting thought, I never noticed! I would use the video VDU (v) and determine based on their markings. It took a bit to learn the difference between pirates and militia!

Andrew lived to see the book published and to get to know that people really enjoyed it! That was a great time in the community, he used to visit #wingnut to talk about it. Just a really nice guy, and whip smart. You are probably remembering that Baen put the wrong name on the book cover when...

Like most people, I constantly find myself needing to refer to the ship sprites from the original Wing Commander games. Four (or five, depending on how you count Super Wing Commander) different Wing Commander games used an engine called 3Space which stored ships not as 3D objects but as...

Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn't quite live up to the highs of the franchise that followed but it was an interesting little movie… just one that fell short of the premise or its colorful cinematography. This week, we're returning to space with one more movie in 'part one' of our series: Star Trek...

Thirty years ago this month, Electronic Gaming Monthly pulished this short but interesting preview of the upcoming Wing Commander III 3DO. Wing Commander III 3DO had a playable build ready fairly early in development... but a lot of aspects changed before release, including a complete redo of...

Sort of! The games were typically made without any real thought to lore… it was the job of the creative services division, the folks that did the manuals and hint books, to come in at the end of the project and establish how it fit together.

It comes down to the fact that Wing Commander III has a completely different style of art for the ships. Chris Roberts asked his art director (a new role in the industry at the time) to develop a new, distinct style for both factions' ships. The Kilrathi got the whole 'asymmetrical knife edge'...

Origin did choose the Sabre to represent WC2 for the Kilrathi Saga intro! And Chris Roberts used it as the hero ship in the original movie script--got changed to Rapier in a later pass.

Yeah, that as such a shame. He used to be part of this community, that's how we know as much as we do about his plans! AD came across an obituary written by his brother recently which I found really interesting: https://archive.org/details/locus-465-1999-10/page/62/mode/2up

My first 'in game lore' nerd answer is the Rapier II and the Dralthi; they have always struck me as the 'Mustang and Messerschmitt' of the Wing Commander universe. I imagine there's a Rapier and a Dralthi hanging in the main gallery of the TCS Victory museum (and filling out the rest of that is...

The Wikipedia says: "About half of the world's PVC production capacity is in China, despite the closure of many Chinese PVC plants due to issues complying with environmental regulations and poor capacities of scale. The largest single producer of PVC as of 2018 is Shin-Etsu Chemical of Japan...

... and also he was Prince Thrakhath. The May 1994 issue of Electronic Games magazine brings us a pretty interesting profile of an Origin writer who doesn't get enough credit these days, Gilbert Austin. Credited as G.P. Austin for his work at Origin, he served as a writer on Wing Commander II...

Oooh, great catch -- and another one for movie night!

We've got a fascinating piece of Wing Commander archaeology today: the script for Wing Commander III's "wild lines". What's a wild line? Have you ever noticed distant talking in the background during cutscenes and gameflow aboard the Victory? These not-quite-audible-on-their-own PA announcements...