Border Worlds Fighters

Dragon1

Dragon1

Rear Admiral
In Wing Commander 4, the flighter complement of the BWS Intrepid consisted of Banshee light fighters, Vindicator fighter-bombers, and Avenger heavy bombers.
In many cases it appeared that the Border Worlds craft were far superior to anything being flown by Confed forces (with the possible exception of the Excalibur and Bearcat fighters). Does anybody have any background info on these fighters? Were they older or newer than Confed contemporaries? Were they superior in design or just tweaked by 'Pliers' to be superior? Did they ever serve in the Confederation Space Force?

Also, does anybody have any backstory on the Bearcat? I thought this was a pretty cool fighter, but we never learn much about it. It then doesn't show up in Prophecy or the add-on.

-Thanks All
 
uhm...? Are we talking about the same fighters here? Give me a Hellcat or a Longbow over the bloody Vindicator and Avenger any day of the week!
 
Most fighters in WC4 reminded me of flying paper airplanes...missiles were most deadly in this period or at least it appeared, almost any fighter can be downed with one missile.

I'm not sure how much backstory there is to the UBW fighters and the Bearcat. The Bearcat often seems like a unneccesary fighter as the excalibur seems quite sufficient in the role of heavy fighter.
 
I always had a problem with the UBW having their own fighters. I know it was necessary from a game sense that there were new flyable craft, but it always seemed a little unrealistic to me. I always thought it would've made more sense for the UBW to use Hellcats, Arrows, Thunderbolts, Longbows, and possibly Bearcats. In other words, mimicking our practice of countries like the U.S. France, and Russia selling export versions of our weapons to other countries.

Yeah, this is entirely conjecture and rather pointless, but I always thought it would be cool to fly a Sabre or Broadsword in the WCIV engine.
 
Dundradal said:
The Bearcat often seems like a unneccesary fighter as the excalibur seems quite sufficient in the role of heavy fighter.
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The Excalibur was crammed with everything that could possibly be squeezed into a heavy fighter. As such, it was quite expensive. The Bearcat was designed to be the less complex heavy fighter that would be easier to build/maintain.
 
I had a talk with LOAF a long time ago about the Bearcat. He's most likely on his way to Texas now, so hopefully he'll arrive at Austin soon so he can chime in.

The Excalibur was from the Special Operations budget, thus it was packed with all of these cool bells and whistles, jump drive, cloak, etc etc. Thus it was great for covert ops or deep penetration runs (like the Temblor Bomb). And of course, they were used as test beds for the Dragons.

The Bearcat seems to be not in anyway affiliated with covert operations or any of that black project stuff. So it's more like a overt and official project by Confed, designed by BuShips as a conventional deck fighter (note how it lacks a jump drive) rather then a Special Ops one.
 
I guess one thing you'd want to consider is how much time had passed after the end of the Kilrathi war. I don't know how long that was, but I did get the impression that afterwards the Border Worlds lost a lot of contact with Confed and even Maniac said at one point that they didn't know what they had been up to since the big war ended.

I also picture in my mind the Border Worlds fighters not being built as reliable as Confed ones. They seemed really rickety to me. And I just imagined they had more raw power than the Confed fighters but just weren't as refined. And as for the ones you flew aboard the Intrepid, I did picture those were a little more powerful than other BW fighters just because Pliers was so brilliant and could tweak the hell out of em. But tweaking them so high also made them a little less reliable.

At any rate, as far as the WC4 era is concerned, I would take a BW fighter over any confed fighter anyday. Personally, I don't know what people like about the Hellcat so much. I love the Vindicator though. How it combines a high energy gun with a low energy gun and it even has a turret and a torpedo. And the design itself looks really cool.
 
Eh, I don't mind the BW fighters when I fly, so long as I have someone like Pliers as my chief technician.
 
Psych" said:
The Bearcat seems to be not in anyway affiliated with covert operations or any of that black project stuff. So it's more like a overt and official project by Confed, designed by BuShips as a conventional deck fighter (note how it lacks a jump drive) rather then a Special Ops one.
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I would also imagine that the Excalibur would be hellishly expensive to mass produce with all those refinements. Probably even more expensive to maintain. The Bearcat implimented technological refinements while at the same time staying cost conscious for a peacetime military (ex: Virginia-class SSNs as opposed to Seawolf-class SSNs).
 
I liked the design of the Bearcat. But there seemed little that was really special about it. In Prophecy, did they just start designing all those new fighters due to the new kind of capital ships they were building? Like, did building them just go hand in hand with the purpose of the new megacarriers?
 
Most likely the reason for the excalibur mk2 seen in WC4, the reaper cannons have been replaced and it's been changed in missile loadout and such.

I have small problem with the UBW having unique fighters. They are an entity which is very young in wc4, to have the abilty to construct its own fighters is a large effort. It would have been more realistic if they had flown rapier IIs, sabres, ferrets and raptors, which is mentioned in TPoF and seen to be possessed in numbers by the Landreich.

The ships in WCP are just new ones in the development cycle, confed seems to upgrade fighter designs fairly often. It seems to have a lot of different models in service at once (think of the excals and t-bolts we see in SO).
 
The BW fighters in WC4 were a lot cooler than the Confed fighters, no doubt. So there must be some kind of reason that the resource-poor Border Worlds would be flying ships that are so cool. Some possibilities:

1. The Banshee, Vindicator, and Avenger were all designed by Confed during the war as 'cheap-but-decent' models that could still be mass-manufactured if the core worlds were lost (or whatever). A series of 'doomsday' craft, if you will. Which would make them perfect for the Border Worlds.

2. They were actually produced in limited numbers by Confed, but weren't put into full production due to 'eccentricities' or design flaws that weren't super-serious, but common and severe enough to make the Hellcat, Arrow, Longbow the better craft. And the Border Worlds somehow got their hands on the limited run. (Confed surplus, perhaps?)

3. Since the Banshee, Vindicator, and Avenger are so cool, they were allocated to the coolest units in the Border Worlds forces, and everyone else got to fly broken Ferrets. (and every Border Worlds unit we saw in WCIV was one of those super-elite... yeah.)

Mix and match crazy theories! For most interesting, results... use all 3!
 
I agree Dundradal, but I thought the Union of Border Worlds was around during the war. I just thought they didn't form an organized military force until circa WC4. Maybe it's possible that the fighters we see in UBW were manufactured by companies for civilian use. After all, companies make combat craft for civilian use in the Gemini Sector.

And since you brought it up, I never understood why there was a whole new production line of fighters and bombers in 2681. They gave a decent canon explanation for the megacarrier program. However, replacing 12-year old fighters during peacetime seems like a major waste of resources. (Maybe that's why the civvie government is so critical of TCN in Wing Commander. ;))
 
Mad Cow said:
And since you brought it up, I never understood why there was a whole new production line of fighters and bombers in 2681.
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Pork-barrel government spending and politicians bowing to pressure coming from their constituents and the military-industrial complex for the sweet, sweet nectar of government defense contracts.

Like the senator dude from the beginning of Action Stations, blocking the new fighter refit/construction contract until it went to his planet.
 
Give me a Banshee over an Arrow, a Vindicator over a Hellcat, and an Avenger over a Longbow any day. I did like the Thunderbolt though.

Maybe the Border Worlds craft were also in Confederation service, we just never saw them in any of the Wing Commander Games before. I mean Confed probably has more than one of each fighter type. The Banshees Vindicators, and Avengers could have just been primarily assigned to a different area of the Confederation during the time of the Kilrathi war, maybe they were used in the Gemini or other sectors. Or they could have been in use throughout the Confederation but for some reason, either they were just entering production, they took longer to produce, or there were less plants producing them, so there were less of these fighters in service and as a result we didn't see them in Confederation service.
 
We do know there are a few private fighter manufacturers - we see their work all through the Gemini Sector - the Talons, Demons, and Centurions are generally in private hands for example; we also see militias get their hands on Gladius fighters as well. Granted, these craft generally don't have the shield and armor levels of state-of-the-art craft, but they do represent a range of products that some companies do seem to be producing, or at least that of some private workshops. There's precedent for new fighters that we don't see in the Confederation's front-line carriers, ones which may be built by non-Confed contractors (as I recall the Vindicator and Banshee are) who either retool an existing frame or scratch-build something that's not quite up to ConFleet standards but which is a sight better than the reconditioned flying-collections-of-surplus-parts that we read about in the novels. Given that Intrepid was their premiere carrier for that part of the conflict, it makes sense to expect that their 'best' ships be on them, even if they were half-junk. Or at least, the ships that we fly should be the best ones. For all we know, the other squadrons on the ship ARE flying Ferrets or Rapiers.

As noted before, we generaly flew off front-line carriers which had the newest and best equipment for that part of the conflict - and the Border Worlds were never apparently first in line for the newest-and-best gear, which is why the armaments raids in Speradon were an option (get state of the art equipment). The only advantage that we otherwise saw in the game was that some of their personnel were technological wizards - Pliers' homebuilt cloaking device was one such item, as it seemed to be the equivalent of at least a Shroud in capability, but that sort of genius was not evently spread around.
 
Fenris Ulven said:
If i dont remember wrong isent there a mission were you are supposed to steal fighters from a confed fabric?
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Speradon. It's the only way to get the Bearcats, which were a top-line Confed fighter undergoing final testing in the yards. The main reason you went after them, IIRC, was because it was the only way that the Border Worlds would get decent supplies and equipment.
 
You're all forgetting the biggest reason the Border Worlds have different fighters than Confed during WCIV. EA/Origin deemed it necessary to have all new fighters, because otherwise they didn't think people would buy the game.
 
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