A story flaw? Colonel Christopher Blair - the most inexperienced ace in the universe?

[Mekt-Hakkikt]

I am a bit late for the discussion:

(...)
I was wondering, does anybody else think that it was a flaw to the story that he spent a decade of his career aboard Caernarvon station, seeing no combat against the Kilrathi? (...)

I admit that I always thought that the 10 years were oddly long for the writers to choose. I mean 5 years are a long enough time too to get the point across without being so odd (at least to me). Especially considering how cramped the years 2665-2669 are.

(...)I mean in all wc parts, we always thought that maniac would be the one who get killed in the end for his flying style, but he is one of the few, who survived the whole war and retired

After I played SO2, I knew that Maniac wouldn't die, he was now firmly established as the comedy relief.

(...) We don't know when AM guns were invented, but they were NOT standard armaments on capships in WC1(...)

(...)
1. You mention that AM guns are standard equipment on WC2 capships, but not in WC1 - however, we also know that Waterloo cruisers already existed during the WC1 period - this is not merely mentioned in Freedom Flight, but even appears in the WC2 manual. We don't know anything about the other capital ships, but the only one that absolutely could not exist during WC1 was the Concordia.

Also, the Confederation Handbook (IIRC) lists AMG for almost all capital ships so they couldn't be that new.

And where does it say in the WC2 manual that the Waterloo was already around during WC1 - I only remember the WC2 manual as being not such a wealth of information.
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[Quarto]

well I actually meant the games not the manuals and other things that could have been printing error, or subject to other things like dead lines and not updated or w/e.

Ok, so we've narrowed down our sources even further. But that still leaves you to deal with the games themselves. As I pointed out earlier, there are serious continuity problems in WC1 itself: the Scimitar has a different shape in the takeoff/landing sequence than it does in flight. Similarly, the Tiger's Claw differs between flight and the final victory cutscene. If we go on to WC2, we then see a third version of the Tiger's Claw right there in the intro. There are dozens of issues like this all over the place... and if you tell me that you actually only meant the in-flight part of the games, and not the cutscenes, I'm really, really gonna laugh.

By the way, another thing occurs to me - if the games are canon and the manuals are not, does this mean that the Concordia and the Bonnie Heather are invulnerable in the *canon*? Neither ship can ever be destroyed in WC2... so why didn't the Confederation just build thousands of Bonnie Heathers and use them to win the war? And also, do asteroids *really* only exist when you're looking at them, and cease to exist the moment you turn away, like WC1 the *game* would have us believe? Where does the madness stop?

And where does it say in the WC2 manual that the Waterloo was already around during WC1 - I only remember the WC2 manual as being not such a wealth of information.

Indeed, the WC2 manual was pretty lousy compared to the wonderful Claw Marks... but it included an excerpt from Freedom Flight. In that excerpt, Ralgha nar Hhallas recalls a battle against the Waterloo-class cruiser Leningrad.

 

[Adventure4Life]

Ok, so we've narrowed down our sources even further. But that still leaves you to deal with the games themselves. As I pointed out earlier, there are serious continuity problems in WC1 itself: the Scimitar has a different shape in the takeoff/landing sequence than it does in flight. Similarly, the Tiger's Claw differs between flight and the final victory cutscene. If we go on to WC2, we then see a third version of the Tiger's Claw right there in the intro. There are dozens of issues like this all over the place... and if you tell me that you actually only meant the in-flight part of the games, and not the cutscenes, I'm really, really gonna laugh.

By the way, another thing occurs to me - if the games are canon and the manuals are not, does this mean that the Concordia and the Bonnie Heather are invulnerable in the *canon*? Neither ship can ever be destroyed in WC2... so why didn't the Confederation just build thousands of Bonnie Heathers and use them to win the war? And also, do asteroids *really* only exist when you're looking at them, and cease to exist the moment you turn away, like WC1 the *game* would have us believe? Where does the madness stop?

Yeh!! ... now your getting it!! There is so much conflicting stuff, there is no way to sort out anything from opinions, conjecture, what you "choose" to ignore or include, that the only thing that is 100% indisputable is what is in fact in the game on the screen, written in the game text.

 

[Mace]

As far as canon goes, even that can change; Star Trek is a good example, The animated series was originally for years considered non-canon, became canon, even the guy with three arms and legs, and their kilrathi comm-officer.

If a new wing commander game came out, and it would reference the events and characters from Standoff, then Standoff would pretty much become canon. You could go on forever for things that are or are not canon especially in the games; since the paths vary, not all things happen thesame way. That is the problem with playing a character that is the person who can change the outcome of the story. And then only fixed events would be canon, it would be better to go by the books as of how it happens anyway.

If you play it by the rules; Everything it's creator(Chris Roberts) created itself, or says is canon, is canon.

 

[Quarto]

Yeh!! ... now your getting it!! There is so much conflicting stuff, there is no way to sort out anything from opinions, conjecture, what you "choose" to ignore or include, that the only thing that is 100% indisputable is what is in fact in the game on the screen, written in the game text.

But... my point was precisely that what you see on the screen is as far from indisputable as the rest of it. You have things looking different from one moment to the next in one game. You have spelling mistakes in the text. You have game bugs. There is absolutely nothing certain out there - going by your approach, we'd arrive at the conclusion that nothing is canon in the WC universe.

The only way to avoid this nonsensical conclusion is to use your head to resolve these issue. No matter what you do, you're going to wind up having to make choices about what you think, engage in conjecture, and yes - even choose to ignore some differences (for example, as huge as the differences between the three versions of the Scimitar in WC1 are, nobody has ever lost any sleep over it... except maybe Eder and other folks trying to make accurate 3d models of the ship ). Once you accept this, and combine it with the fact that we have no help from the creators in determining the levels of importance of the different sources, the ultimate logical conclusion is that we must treat all sources as equal, and simply resolve the differences as best we can, while accepting that some irresolvable differences will still remain. We'll probably never know, for example, why Paladin gained so much weight between WC2 and WC3 - just gotta accept it .

So, that's the two choices that Wing Commander presents you with - you can either take all of it, or you can cut all of it out, leaving nothing at all in the "canon" box. We understand that Star Trek and Star Wars handle this differently. God knows, we all at one point or another wished that someone from Origin would step in and tell us that this or that source is really not canon at all. But, while you never know what might happen in the future, this is simply not the case at the moment - we have no logical grounds to disregard any particular portion of the Wing Commander universe, unless we want to wind up disregarding all of it.

 

[AD]

Once you accept this, and combine it with the fact that we have no help from the creators in determining the levels of importance of the different sources, the ultimate logical conclusion is that we must treat all sources as equal, and simply resolve the differences as best we can, while accepting that some irresolvable differences will still remain. We'll probably never know, for example, why Paladin gained so much weight between WC2 and WC3 - just gotta accept it .

But we do know... in a round about way. Essentially the timelines provided with each game tell us what the devs, and EA/Origin felt was "Canon" and what they were taking into consideration for each game. We even got an updated one with Arena. Even in the WC3 and WC2 game timelines included in the box, there was reference to the Novels' events.

 

[Farbourne]

My feeling about canon has always been this. Anything produced by the official owners of the WC trademark is by definition "canon". Canon material doesn't always agree with other canon material, because games, books, movies, TV shows, etc, made in real life inevitably have continuity errors creep in or oversights made. You have to deal with it, or come up with "retcon" explanations of why different sources fit together (or wait for the trademark holder to publish new material that reconciles it). My personal way of dealing with continuity errors is to view all the different sources that tell parts of a fictional story the same way I would view different sources telling a real story--each has potential errors, but you can usually glean the whole picture by looking at as many of them as possible. You can read fifty different "factual" books about WWII and find that no two of them agree on every detail. Heck, even two different editions of the King James Bible, one of the most standardized books of all time, will have subtle differences. Why should we expect fifty different accounts of an epic war with the Kilrathi, written or filmed to focus on different topics by many different people with their own points of view, to agree in every possible point?

 

[Farbourne]

That doesn't work, though, once you take into account all the other complexities of the WC universe. There are things out there told in multiple stories, which we have to put together....

OK, I'll definitely grant that ships with heavy enough guns to penetrate the phase shields we see in WC2 may have been around, either on the front lines or in mothballs, during WC1 and in all the time in between. We don't know that for sure (the Waterloo may have been that old, but it's AM gun armament might not have been...ships are re-armed all the time as technology advances. Is there any references to AM guns prior to WC2?), but you're right: there is no evidence to the contrary. So I'll buy that it's possible that there never was a period when either side had capships impervious to attack by anything.

But, on the other hand, given the way technologies advance in counter and counter-counter versions, it's possible that there was.

But even if capships always could kill other capships, my main point remains. We know that the particular torpedoes needed to penetrate the particular phase shields we see in WC2 are described as a "recent invention", specifically one that the Terrans came up with that were leaked to the Kilrathi. So it's almost certain that there was a period of indeterminate length when FIGHTERS (or bombers) were incapable of damaging larger capships. But fighters could damage support vessels (corvettes and transports). Hence these support ships were extremely vulnerable.

If your vital support craft must be escorted at all times by phase-shield equipped capships (i.e. destroyers or bigger) to scare away other phase-shield equipped capships, AND by fighters to ward off other fighters, it's going to make it awfully difficult to wage an offensive war.

Besides, given the relatively small amount of change in the two sides respective positions between the two games, at least in Enigma sector, and the long period of time that elapsed, a stalemate over some portion of time there seems rather likely, especially when you consider how quickly some of the other time periods in the war saw dramatic and rapid changes in position.

 

[ChrisReid]

But we do know... in a round about way. Essentially the timelines provided with each game tell us what the devs, and EA/Origin felt was "Canon" and what they were taking into consideration for each game. We even got an updated one with Arena. Even in the WC3 and WC2 game timelines included in the box, there was reference to the Novels' events.

I think A4L mistook the note about how "the creators of Wing Commander have never said that one source is more "canon" than the others" to mean that the books and other things were just ignored. That's not the case. The point is that the developers treat all sources equally. The people who made the games embraced all the supporting materials and worked them into the games whenever possible - both at Origin in the 90s and at EA today (Paul Semel/Sean Penney interview in 2007).

But even if capships always could kill other capships, my main point remains. We know that the particular torpedoes needed to penetrate the particular phase shields we see in WC2 are described as a "recent invention", specifically one that the Terrans came up with that were leaked to the Kilrathi. So it's almost certain that there was a period of indeterminate length when FIGHTERS (or bombers) were incapable of damaging larger capships. But fighters could damage support vessels (corvettes and transports). Hence these support ships were extremely vulnerable.

What's new is the latest version of the torpedo that tunes to whatever it needs to tune to and slices right through the latest shield technology. Without these, simply battering at the capships with enough guns/missiles/etc fast enough also works, just far less efficiently (though not presented as an option to the player in the main WC2 game). This isn't even a retcon - we see it in action in Special Operations with the dumbfire Mace Missile.

 

[Quarto]

OK, I'll definitely grant that ships with heavy enough guns to penetrate the phase shields we see in WC2 may have been around, either on the front lines or in mothballs, during WC1 and in all the time in between. We don't know that for sure (the Waterloo may have been that old, but it's AM gun armament might not have been...ships are re-armed all the time as technology advances. Is there any references to AM guns prior to WC2?), but you're right: there is no evidence to the contrary. So I'll buy that it's possible that there never was a period when either side had capships impervious to attack by anything.

Well, Mekt mentioned that AMGs are listed in the Confed Handbook, dated 2654 - so it's more than possible (although he wasn't sure, and I don't have my Confed Handbook here to check either). More than that, we also know that both sides had access to capship missiles (the Kilrathi even had primitive skipper missiles back in 2654!).

But, the real question you have to ask yourself is this - even if we assume the worst-case scenario where both sides have capships literally impervious to anything other than other capships... how does this occur exactly? Does Confed one day secretly shuttle in new shield generators to all of its frontline capships, and then, with the flick of a switch, all ships bigger than a corvette become impervious to the stunned Kilrathi? Do the Kilrathi do the same? These are rhetorical questions - you realise, I'm sure, that this would be just plain impossible. Replacing the shield generators is no doubt not a field job, it probably requires a lengthy visit to a dockyard. And neither side has the option of doing this simultaneously on all their ships - they can only do it on a one-by-one basis, otherwise their frontlines would collapse. Heck, this may well be entirely beyond the economic means of either side - I'm willing to bet that backwater sectors like Gemini and Landreich still had both sides using tons of outdated equipment, in much the same way that WWII in Somalia was for the most part a war of biplanes (even though clearly, both Italy and the British Empire had far superior monoplanes at their disposal!). Even Malta, which was so utterly crucial to the Allied war effort, was at one point defended from the air by... three old Gloster Gladiators. So, what's the story for Confed? When we see Paradigm destroyers in Gemini in 2669, their shields can be penetrated by fighter guns. But, can their shields already be penetrated by (freshly-upgraded) fighter guns... or can their (unupgraded) shields still be penetrated by fighter guns?

All in all, the possibility of a technology-induced stalemate is slim, because by the time both sides would have replaced all their shield generators, new torpedoes would already be in use.

One interesting example is worth bringing up here: chaff. During WWII, both sides invented radar-jamming chaff (little strips of aluminium dropped from the air) independently of each other... and both absolutely forbade its use. Why? Because both sides were so scared of the enemy getting a hold of this technology and using it against their own radar systems. They were willing to let the enemy radar systems work uninterrrupted, just as long as this ensured that the enemy did not gain the knowledge to knock their own radar systems out of action. The implications of this example are as follows - it may be that one or both sides in the Kilrathi war had figured out the new type of shields, and then held back on using them until it also had the weapons required to knock out those shields. There is obviously no evidence to support this idea, and I'm certainly not claiming this is what actually happened - but it's just one of the many possibilities that lower the probability of a technology-induced stalemate. Such a stalemate would not be in the interest of either side - so both would do whatever they could to avoid it.

 

[Mekt-Hakkikt]

Indeed, the WC2 manual was pretty lousy compared to the wonderful Claw Marks... but it included an excerpt from Freedom Flight. In that excerpt, Ralgha nar Hhallas recalls a battle against the Waterloo-class cruiser Leningrad.

Ah, mine didn't. But I remember now the part about the Leningrad: 500 gifts to Sivar! Thanks for clearing that up.