Service entry dates for Confed fighters

but the only *report* we get of that entire decade of war is that blair spent it on a backwater space station.. definitely war still happened on a massive scale while blair was on the sidelines. its pretty silly to assume that someone would not have seen the bloodfang in an entire decade. remember.. during a massive war, every day hundreds, if not thousands of things are happening that you never get to see or hear about.

True however Excalibur is suppose to be the Confed counter for Bloodfang. If Bloodfangs where running around the front making a general nucence of themself for 10 years I personally would have expected to see the Excalibur several years sooner. There is also the fact that in WC2 your IDC tags Thrakath's fighter by his name, not the fighter class name. It's thin I'll admit but without more info from the missing 10 years its the best theroy I have. I just wish I could give a definative answer.

You can look for definitive answers in a piece of fiction, and never find them or assume something wich could be wrong and you would never know, that is why you could write letters to the creators of comicbooks and the author would come up with an awnser, and if it did or did not make sense to you, that is the awnser you get, straight from the source itself.

The bloodfang's backstory is listed in the WC3 manual(Only thrakhath himself and members of his elite personal guard are allowed to fly them), The Excalibur was created exactly to counter the Bloodfang after Blair's encounter with the fighter in the end of WC2's main campaign. You find a bloodfang wreckage in Ultima7, so yes, there is more than one fighter and other people then Thrakhath get to fly it.

LOAF when you refer to the Tornado as a Fighter/Bomber if you mean the Panavia Tornado its not strictly true as there is a fighter variant and a ground attack variant the F3 or the GR4 (F being fighter the 3 being its update same with GR Ground Recon) neither can do the others job if you look the F3 has a longer nose to house the radar in.

I dunno LOAF, you have to take out the SAM sites in both missions (well you don't have to in the recon mission but it makes life easier), so there is some ground attack in there.

Correct me if I'm wrong but arn't you fling for the UBW in WC4 by the time you start ground strikes? They don't have Longbows right?

As far as dicussing it well it has to be a theorecical exercise because we won't have a definite answer but You can anilise the shape and other listed charicteristics and compare these to both other WC craft and real world fighters used in this role and with reasonably gage a crafts sutibility espicially in relation to other WC craft.

Ok heres the list of dates. 2656 in the trailer for WC2 we see the first glips of the Bloodfang or at least a very Bloodfang like fighter flown by Thrakhath. Next Blair shoots Thrakhath down in the WC2 Bloodfang in 2667. Shortly there after Confed start the Excalibur development project.
2669 Excalibur enters prototype testing and is used for the strike on Kilra shooting down the WC3 Bloodfang.

Well yea if you are going to insist that both body stlyes exist in the same universe you do need to explane why they look so different from a reasonably technical standpoint because that not how it works in the real world. There was clearly a good sized production run of the WC2 type hull. If thats just the proto type what necisitated the massive hull changes for the production model.

Yea it would be nice to beable to translate the names. Might actual answer alot of questions.

I'm not questioning tha the B17 plays a major part in the look of Broadswords. I guess what I'm trying to say that I think its a real possibility the the B25 and the Doolittle raid might have served as the originating idea for Broadsword. When came down to actually designing the look of the fighter they decided to draw on the much better known and more iconic B17.

I like that idea alot. What do we know about the Vatari besides whats in Standoff?

We know almost nothing about the Vatari - the Standoff team's interpretation was entirely guesswork. Thrakhath says in Fleet Action that the Hakagas will be capable of "carrying and servicing our newest Vatari-class fighters to be launched next year." Whether that means the Vatari only entered service in 2669 (OK, Thrakhath was probably talking about Kilrathi years rather than Terran ones, but let's assume they're comparable), or whether it was just a new model of the Vatari that entered service then, is unclear. That is, I believe, literally the only time the word "Vatari" appears in a Wing Commander product (Standoff doesn't count).

What sort of conclusions have people drawn from these designations?

To me it would appear that the Arrow (both by virture of its F-27 and V designations) pre-dates the Rapier (which is new in 2654, no?)

Also, the Thunderbolt and Scimitar have HF and CF designations, respectively. Considering the WC3 model Thunderbolt is VII (so I'm assuming there were at least six previous variations of this craft), and that it's most similar to the pre-historic Scimitar in terms of having "XF-blah", it's likely that the Thunderbolt is at least pre-war old (this is supported by novel references that others have pointed out).

What else can we extrapolate - or at least attempt to extrapolate - here?

I think the SS manual cleared up the start date for the Thunderbolt 7 as 2669 (maybe 2668). One idea suggested was that the Thunderbolt 7 was also used for SAR duties since it has a tractor beam (HF designiation having been used for SAR planes). Admittedly, it would seem the designation means "heavy fighter", which is very inconsistent with the rest of the series. Though it could be argued it was the first of the fighters that is considered a true heavy fighter, but the HF designation was being "moth-balled" in favor of a more uniform designations and changes in role descriptions (eg heavy/medium/light fighters to space superiority/multi-role/scout fighters).

Do you think this means that previous versions of the Thunderbolt (in other words 1-6) were produced earlier? Or do you think that those just never made it off the cutting room floor?

*digs (clicks) up SS* Hmm... yeah, you're right Loaf (as usual). The only reference is to the '69 variant (no start date). It definitely isn't clear if there were versions before it given the commentary from the author.

We do know from SS, however, that the Arrow space frame dates back to the 2650s: The Scout is the standard Arrow V spaceframe, relatively unchanged over the last half century.

Thanks to Maniac, we also know that the Sabre was around in 2658, so the Epee was introduced sometime between 2654 and 2658.

Bingo. AFAIK, variants of the same airframe are labeled with an alphabet letter, such as the Sabre-D 3-man torpedo bomber variant.