Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
For a few years I've been sharing random Wing Commander deep dives on Twitter. There's nothing I love more than taking some specific question or subject that maybe no one cares about and then looking at it as thoroughly as I can… and Twitter has always fit like a glove for that because it lets me kind of project out what I'm thinking about to the world and the inevitably forget about it when I lose steam. I'm a very long winded cross-every-dot writer and just doing stream of consciousness posts that forced me to think about what I was saying was a lot of fun.
So I thought that maybe in addition to that I should start doing longer form versions right here where people actually care about the tiniest bits of Wing Commander errata… and where I'd have some more space for explanatory notes. And I can answer questions and people who actually understand what they're talking about can contribute! Plus, the odds are that the CIC is going to long outlast Twitter as an archive. (And frankly, it was very nice to see folks asking after me after I did that movie post; like John Prine sang, everybody wants to be wanted.) So will I keep it up? Who knows! But let's get started…
… with a spreadsheet!
I was looking for something to think about last night and I decided it might be fun to 'update' the ranks chart originally published in Victory Streak for the 21st century. And I was right, it was fun! The overall reference needed some nips and tucks because of continuity introduced after Wing Commander III and I thought it would be fun to expand it a little beyond the original categories. Here's a snapshot:
For some background: the original Wing Commander gave the pilots officer ranks based exactly on the United States Air Force. You know them by heart–2nd Lieutenant, 1st Lieutenant, Captain, etc.--because they were a necessary part of the game! But as Origin built out the world it became a little bit confused because you're clearly on an analogue for an aircraft carrier, which in real life would be crewed by naval aviators who use navy ranks. And the warship analogy had, at least by 1991, necessarily generated commanders, (line) captains, admirals and the like.
The retcon for Wing Commander III forward in 1994 was that the Confederation is a /little/ different from the real world in that carriers are crewed by navy personnel but that they (can) have air wings that come from a different service, the Space Force. And the game included a rank chart that was originally put together for the costuming department showing the comparative ranks between the Navy, Space Force and the Kilrathi.
You can find the original in Victory Streak, on page 8: https://download.wcnews.com/files/manuals/victory_streak.pdf
Keeping sense of this hasn't gone /great/ since then, though, and we've had various additions that have to be considered - like later seeing actual naval (and even marine!) aviators… and I feel like each one takes you a LITTLE further away from the original direct analogue. AND THAT'S GREAT! Wing Commander shouldn't just be American in space. (In fact as I look through the wikipedia for reference I see real rank systems have changed time and time again just in recent history… but I digress!)
ADDITIONS
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OkWIETUS_uyucOOYypZWS1L1iYeuRL-1AhB-Zm_23FI/edit?usp=sharing
NEXT TIME: I'm thinking I should look at the rank insignias across all the games, especially comparing the original designs for WC3 to what WC4 and Prophecy eventually established as canon. Let's see if I remember!
So I thought that maybe in addition to that I should start doing longer form versions right here where people actually care about the tiniest bits of Wing Commander errata… and where I'd have some more space for explanatory notes. And I can answer questions and people who actually understand what they're talking about can contribute! Plus, the odds are that the CIC is going to long outlast Twitter as an archive. (And frankly, it was very nice to see folks asking after me after I did that movie post; like John Prine sang, everybody wants to be wanted.) So will I keep it up? Who knows! But let's get started…
… with a spreadsheet!
I was looking for something to think about last night and I decided it might be fun to 'update' the ranks chart originally published in Victory Streak for the 21st century. And I was right, it was fun! The overall reference needed some nips and tucks because of continuity introduced after Wing Commander III and I thought it would be fun to expand it a little beyond the original categories. Here's a snapshot:
For some background: the original Wing Commander gave the pilots officer ranks based exactly on the United States Air Force. You know them by heart–2nd Lieutenant, 1st Lieutenant, Captain, etc.--because they were a necessary part of the game! But as Origin built out the world it became a little bit confused because you're clearly on an analogue for an aircraft carrier, which in real life would be crewed by naval aviators who use navy ranks. And the warship analogy had, at least by 1991, necessarily generated commanders, (line) captains, admirals and the like.
The retcon for Wing Commander III forward in 1994 was that the Confederation is a /little/ different from the real world in that carriers are crewed by navy personnel but that they (can) have air wings that come from a different service, the Space Force. And the game included a rank chart that was originally put together for the costuming department showing the comparative ranks between the Navy, Space Force and the Kilrathi.
You can find the original in Victory Streak, on page 8: https://download.wcnews.com/files/manuals/victory_streak.pdf
Keeping sense of this hasn't gone /great/ since then, though, and we've had various additions that have to be considered - like later seeing actual naval (and even marine!) aviators… and I feel like each one takes you a LITTLE further away from the original direct analogue. AND THAT'S GREAT! Wing Commander shouldn't just be American in space. (In fact as I look through the wikipedia for reference I see real rank systems have changed time and time again just in recent history… but I digress!)
ADDITIONS
- Marine ranks! Yellow ranks are ones that have not been identified in the WC canon. The names are taken from the real systems and can be contradicted in the future safely if needed. But it helps you see the structure of the thing, I think! Obviously we see far fewer enlisted ranks and ranks from services like the marines because of the usual perspective the stories are told from… so creating the marine column piecemeal from a bunch of sources was pretty fun!
- The movie establishes the rank of "Spaceman 2nd Class" among the Tiger Claw's crew. There was originally a more extended series of 'lower decks' cuts where we would follow missile loaders/engineers/etc. in the crew. You can see clips of these in the battles in the final film but there's a lot less than what was shot/imagined. The script introduces one of these characters thusly: "Spaceman RODRIGUEZ, 2nd class, a young Latino crosses himself." The novel makes that rank canon and unfortunately it isn't on the chart! The TCSN's O-1 rank was just "Spaceman" and per the logic used everywhere else Spaceman 2nd Class (as it is written in the novel) would be lower. So I've added that as an additional O-1 rank junior to the others. I'm not TOTALLY sold on this, though, since Rodriguez' emblem in the movie has three stripes which doesn't feel right for the lowest rank. Of course, perhaps there's an even lower Spaceman 4th class (one stripe) and 3rd class (two stripe) which would frankly explain everything perfectly. And it would help address the fact that the TCSN ranks are totally missing senior NCOs!
- The movie also refers to Blair and Maniac as "Lieutenant Junior Grade" (and confusingly 1st Lieutenant). There was no Lieutenant JG in the current setup and I opted to put it in the Navy schema to match the other movie ranks that are in the Navy (Lt. Commander Devereaux, etc.). And what do you know, that makes it the same as a TCSF First Lieutenant AND it reduces over to 2nd Lieutenant correctly (ie, the same as Angel, Hunter, etc.) when you convert the movie ranks to the game versions.
- WARRANT OFFICERS. The Wing Commander IV novel establishes that warrant officers exist in the TCSF so I've carried over the modern systems. We know very, very little beyond a single reference to Blair thinking that Seether might be a warrant officer. (Spoiler: he wasn't. Actually this is one of those writing-the-book-without-the-visuals things because if you actually play WC4 and look at Seether's uniform his rank is right there..)
- Officer Cadet ranks! This is super fun because we see cadet ranks at the TCSF flight school and we see an extensive explanation of naval academy's midshipmen in the Wing Commander I & II guide which matches right up with Annapolis (something Harrison researched specifically). The only confusing part is, of course, that Blair and Maniac explicitly went to the Space Naval Academy where they were midshipmen and not to some equivalent of the Air Force Academy… so again it seems like the service you end up in isn't as uniform as real life.
- Added "Hyilghar" as a Kilrathi O-1. From False Colors, describing Murragh who was on his first space assignment: "He was only a Hyilghar—the word translated very approximately as a lieutenant, but with a modifier that implied staff rather than combat duties and some sort of special aristocratic social status Graham didn't entirely understand—but despite his youth and modest rank he handled Kilrathi combat veterans three times his age with a natural aplomb that Graham still found himself envying after all these months."; I suspect the 'complete' Kilrathi rank chart would have many such variants for every rank.
- Other services exist! In some cases, they use the same rank systems as the Confederation (the UBW Navy, InSys, etc.) and in others we just don't have reference to more than one or two ranks (the CIS from Privateer 2, the Confederation army, various pirate organizations, etc.)
- The double O-4 in Victory Streak used to bug me until I referenced the actual DoD rank charts which have plenty of double or triple ranks per grade per service sometimes. So I've continued that here with abandon to explain new ranks! https://www.defense.gov/Resources/Insignia/
- Before anyone corrects it, Victory Streak does flip "Lieutenant General" and "Major General". This makes military historians cringe but WC has been pretty consistent with this since… it's still listed that way in Prophecy's design documents, for example!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OkWIETUS_uyucOOYypZWS1L1iYeuRL-1AhB-Zm_23FI/edit?usp=sharing
NEXT TIME: I'm thinking I should look at the rank insignias across all the games, especially comparing the original designs for WC3 to what WC4 and Prophecy eventually established as canon. Let's see if I remember!
