Some Armada Errata...

D

Dani_Moonstar

Spaceman
Well, I'm brand-new to this board, so forgive me if what I have to say isn't all that knowledgeable. I'm grasping at straws here, LOL.

At any rate, I was thinking about the theory that Angel's Covert Operations team might have been stationed aboard the Lexington in Armada, and I actually found this theory to be interesting. I also read that Angel's team arrived at Kilrah aboard a captured Kilrathi freighter... could this freighter have easily been captured by the Lexington fighters and crew? More to the point, don't you capture freighters in that game anyway?

I don't know if any of this is relevant, but I thought I'd put it out there for you all to see what you think. I personally think that the story of Angel and her team and the Lexington and her mission would make an excellent novel. I'd buy it.
 
Howdy! Welcome to the CZ! Glad to have anyone with this thoughtful a first post aboard. Don't take any of us too seriously in debates - we probably seem like horrible jerks to the casual observer, but we're a good community deep down.

This theory has been floated around, and my feeling has always been that it's a good one. The entry about Armada in Victory Streak's timeline is certainly written to imply this - mentioning that the Lexington carried a "62 person Special Operations team" (to play devil's advocate, though, Angel was part of the invented-for-WC3 "Covert Operations" rather than the "Special Operations" Blair flew for in the WC2:SO games).

The ability to capture transports is part of Armada - though if you actually fly a mission with your newly aquired transports, they've magically switched to the same class as those you build.
 
I have to say, getting a welcome from someone with over ten thousand posts on the board is quite flattering! When I was going through various Armada-related posts here, I read your posts fairly often and found myself in agreement more often than not.

I'd really love to see the story of the Lexington, her crew, and her pilots... sort of like "End Run" with a negative ending. I've been reading about this "Voices of War" publication, and I would love to get my hands on it, so I could get more insight into Armada. I'm giving serious consideration into taking the misadventures of the Lexington into a serial fanfic.

So if anyone reading this could contribute to what is known for sure about Armada, especially with the technical details (ship specs, known personalities, known systems, sector maps, etc.), they'd be greatly appreciated. Theories and hypotheses are also welcome. I am still a big fan of the Covert Ops team being Angel's team, since it makes a great deal of sense.
 
Here's some Armada resources to start with:

Jetlag did a PDF version of Voices of War a while back. You can find it online here: http://www.blacklance.org/jetlag/vow/01-02-10.pdf (As Wing Commander manuals go, Voices of War is great - the equal of Victory Streak or Claw Marks).

The other good source for some Armada flavor text is the 'Gauntlet Mode' mission briefings. They were just text introductions for each mission, but they followed a little story and mentioned some background information (including the closest thing Armada has to wingmen, Quarters and LiteSpeed). Wedge has them typed up online here: http://home.iprimus.com.au/nsswty/Wedge009/Armada/Mission.html

I did maps of the eleven 'set' Armada sectors, which are available at https://www.wcnews.com/maps/sectors/armada1.png (2 for sector two, up to 11). ('Armada Mode' generated a random map... 'Campaign Mode' had eleven pre-set maps, ending with a movie of the enemy homeworld being blown up.)
 
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Welcome aboard! Its always nice to see someone else from my 'corner' of the country :) . If you like the Armada Lexington, theres some fun info on the Fleet Tactics site along with an imaginative view on the origin of the carrier.

C-ya
 
Yay for us Midwesterners!

At any rate, you've all been very helpful indeed. Fleet Tactics is an amazing site, very useful for those of us who are overly obsessed with the content that the site provided.

My only question is this: if the Lexington-class carriers can carry so many fighters, why did the Lexington herself only carry 18? Also, why did they operate with a crew of less than a hundred? Is a carrier of that size able to function properly with such a skeleton crew? I guess the two didn't seem to equate very well to me... maybe the information in Armada was a gross underestimation of the actual numbers? I can't imagine that the mission that the Lexington was sent on would possibly be sent out with only 18 fighters... especially not if their goal was to 'destroy Kilrah', as it was stated.

I know all of this is guesswork, but I'd really like to know. I'd love to write stories about the Lexington, but I also want to do it right.
 
Hmm, I think the retcon implied by Victory Streak is that the "62 person" crew refers only to some sort of Special Ops team.

(And then that the eighteen ships refers to some kind of battlegroup... transports and destroyers and corvettes and such.)
 
So 'Victory Streak' was indeed a retcon as I suspected it to be... that's very interesting, and actually makes the entire mission make a lot more sense. So with that in mind, does anyone have any ideas as to the nitty-gritty of the retconned mission? What planes did this sucker carry, and in what numbers? What were the numbers/classes/names of the ships in the task force? Even educated guesses would be nice here.
 
Wow . . . smart, intelligent, thought provoking questions . . . from a newbie no less.

No one really knows about the make up of the task force, or any of the other ships. But we do know that the head guy in charge of the raider mission behind enemy lines was Admiral Hancock. But I got a feeling that the Lexington didn't act alone. Besides the modified Lexington, there were three other cases of Confed raider groups in that time period:

1) Voices of War in which half a dozen modified Salthi from a surviving Kat light/escort carrier torpedoed a Confed light/escort carrier, after it had taken down two light carriers and 74 Kilrathi warriors/pilots.

2) False Colors, in which they said the escort carrier Tarawa was crippled in a clash after Bondarevsky relinquished command of her to take command of Destroyer Squadron 67.

3) One of Ragark's top military leaders from False Colors, who was decorated for a single ship action against a Confed escort carrier after the Battle of Earth. I would assume the Confed CVE went ka-boom, cause if it wasn't, he wouldn't have gotten that medal.
 
High praise from Psych, indeed.

Hmm. Now, keeping in mind that this is almost pure speculation (regarding the battle group and fighter complement):

I'd start with the standard "Recon In Force" group introduced in Victory Streak: the carrier, two escorts, a fast destroyer and a cruiser... then fill the rest of the eighteen ships out with standard transports (since the idea was to travel the 'long way around' to get to Kilrah).

For fighters... give it at least a WC3-sized (ten fighter) squadron of each of the first four Armada fighters (Arrow V, Phantom, Wraith, Gladius)... with a squadron of Banshees arriving later (which is part of the 'Gauntlet Mode' storyline). It's a heavy carrier (with no good specs about complement), so it might have two or three squadrons of each fighter.
 
The VoW manual should have the Lexington fighters listed in it, but heres this anyway. I'd also surmise that the capital ship types in escort were of WC3 vintage.

C-ya
 
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Nah, I'd go the other way - say that the ships escorting the Lexington would be top of the line... since it's clearly a fairly well regarded Confed project.
 
The one thing that really occurs to me while I'm brainstorming about this writing project is the nature of the Lexington mission itself. The basic tenet of Wing Commander seems to be this: victory over increasingly staggering odds. And this particular mission seems to run counter to that. I was talking to Loaf, and he brought up how similar 'End Run' is to what I'm thinking about. The difference between the two is that the Tarawa made it back. The Lexington didn't. While that may make the entire story seem a bit fatalistic, I wonder if this could be circumvented?

Also, thank you for the additional information... it's helping me piece together a very solid premise. All I have to say is, thank God for Voices of War. Very good stuff. What was the name of the captain of the Lexington? I think I did read it but I can't recall it... Also, we have the primary character and two wingmen mentioned: LiteSpeed and Quarters. Are these the only characters in the mission that are named?
 
Judging from the commander's log in Voices of War, the CO of the Lexington sounds like it was either meant to be "Blue Hair", or someone who served with him.(Given the wording, references to K'kai, Shotglass, and age, if not for his death in Fleet Action, Hunter might actually fit the best for the Commander as portrayed via logs.)

Just sort of out of curiosity, does the existance if Lexington as both a heavy carrier and being the class-name of a new class really fit with the existing Lexington of the Concordia class in FA? One thought I had on the fact they named the new CV after the Lady-Lex was given that we see this ship "rebuilt" for TPoF, perhaps they used the name as a cover?(Given the covert nature of the mission, it might make sense to use a name of an already burned out hulk of a carrier to confuse the Kilrathi.)
 
Looking at the big picture, Armada was released before WC3 and Colonel Christopher Blair got into the scene, so it does seem reasonable at that time to think that it was Phoenix(the WC Bible callsign for Blair)/Bluehair. Maybe there was another guy named Phoenix while Christopher Blair is officially Maverick? who knows . . .

It would be reasonable to call the heavy carrier the Lexington, cause it would be in Armada *after* the Concordia-class Lexington was destroyed in Fleet Action. And by that time the FA destroyed Lexington was rebuilt, the Armada Lexington would have been destroyed. The WC4 novel said the Lexington was the 11th ship to bear the name, so the Armada Lex would simply be the 10th.

As for the class, it can go many ways. One of them you just mentioned as a way to decieve the Kilrathi. Another would be obviously, the Lexington from Armada as the first ship of the class. Another could be that Confed dedicated its new class of carriers after the Lexington destroyed in FA.
 
Judging from the commander's log in Voices of War, the CO of the Lexington sounds like it was either meant to be "Blue Hair", or someone who served with him.(Given the wording, references to K'kai, Shotglass, and age, if not for his death in Fleet Action, Hunter might actually fit the best for the Commander as portrayed via logs.)
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I wouldn't put much faith in that - both of the "spinoffs" were written to "imply" that the character could be the same one as you flew as in Wing 1 and 2. Col. Lombard and Unnamed Armada Captain both share various similarities with Blair (flew on the Concordia, disliked by Tolwyn, etc.), but neither was ever really planned to be Blair. WC3 had already been shot when Armada was in development - so Chris McCubbin and the others who wrote Voices of War went in the writing process knowing the player wasn't Blair.

(To my recllection, they actually go through some effort to make the Armada Captain gender neutral, too...)

As for a possible name, the IRC-style conversation mentions that one of the pilots is meeting with "Jacorski", whom the other one refers to as something like 'the big man?'.

Just sort of out of curiosity, does the existance if Lexington as both a heavy carrier and being the class-name of a new class really fit with the existing Lexington of the Concordia class in FA? One thought I had on the fact they named the new CV after the Lady-Lex was given that we see this ship "rebuilt" for TPoF, perhaps they used the name as a cover?(Given the covert nature of the mission, it might make sense to use a name of an already burned out hulk of a carrier to confuse the Kilrathi.)
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Yup, the Armada Lexington would have entered service between the destruction and the rebuilding of the Concordia-class Lexington.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Yup, the Armada Lexington would have entered service between the destruction and the rebuilding of the Concordia-class Lexington.
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I don't think this is a particularly good explanation. Given that the Lexington was eventually rebuilt (and they would have probably started planning for this right away, hoping to get it back in action before the war ended), they would not have wanted to give another ship the same name.

The desire to deceive the Kilrathi is a far better explanation, I'd say. So, the Armada carrier would have been either codenamed Lexington, or temporarily renamed (while its name remained unchanged in the records). The purpose of this would have been to fool the Kilrathi into thinking that Confed was rebuilding its carriers faster than they really were - after all, the Kilrathi knew the Lexington went down in FA, but they would have had no way of going back to Sol later on to check what's happening with the wreck.
 
Oh, I don't have anything against that theory - I did say 'yup' to it. (G) I was just pointing out that Confed was, indeed, between Lexingtons when the ship entered service.
 
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