the time line and the cannon of wing commander

Jdawg

Commodore
im sure this has prob been discussed before and I tried to read thru much of the timeline posted here on wcnews, but im still confused.

as far as whats truly cannon is it everything from the games, to the books, to the movie, and animated tv show, bc a lot of it doesnt add up, now I know some of it is hard to bc for the longest time blair didnt even have a name, for instance in fleet action its said that hunter helped hobbes to defect, when really it was blair who did but he did not have a name yet.

plus tolwyn is all over the place, in wc1 I believe he is not mentioned until the secret missions, but in the tv show he is the captain of the tigers claw and there is no mention of halcyon. plus between the games, tv show, and movies, tolwyn is everything from a commodore to a vice admiral to a rear admiral it seems all within a short time period.

then there is the character of maniac who in the tv show went to the academy with blair but in wc1 acts like he never met him before, (I know this is a small thing but it bothers me just a little)

can anybody explain to me how this all line up as far as time frame, and does it really line up at all.

the funny thing each individual part is great as a stand alone form the first 4 games to the books to the tv show. ( I will admit I absoluetly hate the movie with a passion), and im LOVING FALSE COLORS so far and it seems to fit pretty perfectly into the universe that I already know about, but there are parts I just dont get.

any help would be great
 
The timeline presented in Star*Soldier (the Arena documentation) is generally considered to be the "official" canon of the universe - it does include the events of the movie, the series and the games in what's generally considered the "best" order. I say "best" because you are right in that there are several different versions of how (and in some cases when) specific events happened, which became loads of fun for me when I was building a timeline for WCRPG Chapter 12.1. Blair himself has at least three different origin stories, and they're largely incompatible with one another (in the movie his parents are dead, in Academy he regularly corresponds with his dad, etc.).

So yeah, use the Star*Soldier timeline. That's the best answer you're going to get on that question.

As far as False Colors is concerned, what parts do you not get? That's definitely a topic worthy of further discussion.
 
The timeline presented in Star*Soldier (the Arena documentation) is generally considered to be the "official" canon of the universe - it does include the events of the movie, the series and the games in what's generally considered the "best" order. I say "best" because you are right in that there are several different versions of how (and in some cases when) specific events happened, which became loads of fun for me when I was building a timeline for WCRPG Chapter 12.1. Blair himself has at least three different origin stories, and they're largely incompatible with one another (in the movie his parents are dead, in Academy he regularly corresponds with his dad, etc.).

So yeah, use the Star*Soldier timeline. That's the best answer you're going to get on that question.

As far as False Colors is concerned, what parts do you not get? That's definitely a topic worthy of further discussion.


sorry my last sentence is not worded the best, I meant there are certain parts of the universe that dont add up, not false colors specifically
 
Blair himself has at least three different origin stories, and they're largely incompatible with one another (in the movie his parents are dead, in Academy he regularly corresponds with his dad, etc.).

As you mention, Star*Soldier shows how to make the origin stories compatible: The Academy pilot is pre-movie. The movie occurs in March 2654, then the events of the rest of Academy follow. Finally the WC1 game occurs. Maniac might act like he doesn't know Blair in the WC1 game, but that's just internal game dialogue skewed toward the real life player. Even in the games, Maniac and Blair are supposed to have been at the Academy together.

Chris Blair's backstory is complicated, of course, but both the movie and TV show do sync with the games. At various points he was raised by he aunt/uncle and grandparents, and these are the people he's writing home to in Academy. Even though it might appear in a casual viewing that he's writing his father, in the Academy episode where Blair's running out of life support, it's the ghost (or hallucination) of his deceased father that appears. You can read more about Arnold Blair and Chris Blair's upbringing at https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/10906
 
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I just finished Wing Commander II Vengeance of the Kilrathi

I thought the story line was good. It's a limited story that doesn't really explain how it was implicated that you are the cause of the Tiger's Claw's destruction an not the 4 other people who survive but so be it. It's a lesser quality game than the original. The player course is a singular path but the story still hits a few climaxes right on the head. I missed the old Music and the bar to socialize and pay the simulator. It added a depth that made the Claw feel powerful and real. The new fighters are a hodge podge of ugly and bulky.

The Epee was missile-less but the most attractive of the new ships.
The Rapier was agile but with much more paper thin armor than I remember
The Broadsword was just a beast and perhaps the best looking and unconventional design of the game
The Ferret was supposed to be better armed but even with misses it seemed necessary and bit of an Ugly-Betty
The Sabre was touted as their best fighter and I can see why, it's a fighter bomber but I feel if you just add afterburners on the Broadsword it would be just as effect if not more so.

It's a strong sequel by with a few minuses.
I look forward to play both sets of secret missions and moving on to WC III

(I hadn't played the original Wing Commander in decades! What a powerful game with such great music! I was 12 when it came out and missed out on everyone but Wing commander Prophecy. It's like revisiting my past playing these games again. As I think about how much games have changed I wonder what's happened to gaming that simulators have fallen away as though off the proverbial cliff. With the current consoles this game could be turned into it's own high octane series again.)
 
It's a limited story that doesn't really explain how it was implicated that you are the cause of the Tiger's Claw's destruction an not the 4 other people who survive but so be it.
I don't remember the source exactly... anyway, the basics are that Blair was on patrol and basically left his post to investigate his Strakha fighter sightings. Since he flight recorder was toast he had no proof, and, even if it would have never made a difference, the assumption is that by abandoning his post he allowed the Claw to be attacked.
 
The story of Blair taking the blame for the Claw going down comes from the "The Story So Far..." section of the WC2 manual.

Soon after, however, disaster struck. While the Tiger’s Claw was attacking the K’tithrak Mang, you encountered several fighters that faded mysteriously from sight. Even your radar couldn’t track them! Not wanting to panic the Claw over what you thought to be a radar malfunction, you went looking for the ghostly fighters.

The search delayed your return to the Claw just long enough for the fighters to destroy the hap-less carrier.

Landing on the TCS Austin, you learned that you were the only pilot to encounter these “stealth” fighters. Furthermore, your flight recorder disk mysteriously disappeared right after you landed. Brought before a general court martial, you were charged with treason, and your claims about stealth fighters were ignored.

Considering at this point, Confed knew traitors were becoming an issue (Mandarins had been found on another ship a year prior), an unverifiable claim about miracle fighters never before encountered somehow being responsible for the loss of the Claw could easily lead to some questions being raised about Blair.
 
So...after the latest news about WC3`s easter egg , we are re-writting the timeline ?
 
The story of Blair taking the blame for the Claw going down comes from the "The Story So Far..." section of the WC2 manual.



Considering at this point, Confed knew traitors were becoming an issue (Mandarins had been found on another ship a year prior), an unverifiable claim about miracle fighters never before encountered somehow being responsible for the loss of the Claw could easily lead to some questions being raised about Blair.

The problem with tying the movie into the game timeline is that doing so means disbelieving Blair, or at least believing he was a traitor because of what happened to the Claw makes no sense if the events of the movie took place..

1: They had cloaked missiles in the movie so cloaked fighters shouldn't be hard to believe at all.

2: If Blair was a traitor all he had to do was screw up his mission at the end of the movie or just let te battleship continue to Earth and he would have done far more damage then taking out one carrier.
 
1: They had cloaked missiles in the movie so cloaked fighters shouldn't be hard to believe at all.

This is debatable. We don't know anything about the functioning of cloaking. It could be that it needs an extreme ammount of enery that exponentially grows with mass. So terrans could believe the crystals to power an entire ship do not exist. Or a ships power plant could never sustain the energy needed.
Or cloaking could be considered highly toxic to a point that it would kill organic matter in seconds


As for the traitor thing. A traitor would not necessarily want humanity to be detroyed. The Pilgrims were more of a third party type traitors, so it could still be in his interest to save humanity for now. Or at this point. Blair might have been turned afterwards, or so Tolwyn believes
 
Another thing is that Skipper missiles pass in and out of cloak every few seconds. The purpose of the Skipper missile's cloak is to evade weapons lock, not to completely evade detection. By comparison, a fighter entering from outside of sensor range and closing to torpedo-firing range would have to remain cloaked for a sizable fraction of an hour.

The "power plant can't sustain the energy" argument sounds plausible as well given that in the WC games a cloaked ship (whether player or enemy) can not fire its guns.
 
This is debatable. We don't know anything about the functioning of cloaking. It could be that it needs an extreme ammount of enery that exponentially grows with mass. So terrans could believe the crystals to power an entire ship do not exist. Or a ships power plant could never sustain the energy needed.

Or cloaking could be considered highly toxic to a point that it would kill organic matter in seconds



The Confederation Handbook clears up a lot of this!



The cloak found on the movie’s Skipper is the simplest theoretical type, a ‘double blind’ effect. It renders the rocket invisible to the outside world, but in so doing also blinds itself FROM the world. Which is why it de-cloaks regularly to reacquire the target. (I’d argue that it’s actually hard to see it the other way around… else why would they ever decloak?) It also notes that energy generated within the cloak would be trapped, so the missile needs to periodically vent.



I think it adds a nice subtext that the cloaked ship debate was missing before; there’s just a bit more subtlety to Admiral Tolwyn insisting a cloaked ship can’t exist because he has a working knowledge of how cloaking technology circa 2650 works than to his simply deciding that this particular new space weapon can’t exist because he doesn’t want it to.



In that light, I’d see the race to discover a single-blind cloak as sort of Wing Commander’s equivalent of the race to design an effective gun synchronizer circa World War I. You have a base tech that immediately defines the possibility, with an engineering/scientific challenge in the way of reaching that obviously desired point.



As for how cloaking works: “ the photon cloak uses a linked array of at least three antigraviton emitters to route photons and other electromagnetic emissions around the object with no reflection or diffusion.”
 
The other thing to remember is, it really is *not that long* from the WC movie to the point where the Kilrathi actually do have single blind cloaking fighters. WC2 mostly takes place 10 years after WC1, but the intro to WC2, where cloaking fighters take out the claw is more or less immediately after WC1 SM2. The movie events with a cloaking torpedo happen sometime in the first half of 2654 and the Claw is destroyed by cloaking fighters sometime in 2656. We go from double-blind cloak to fully cloaking fighters in less than two years.
 
The Confederation Handbook clears up a lot of this!
I think it adds a nice subtext that the cloaked ship debate was missing before; there’s just a bit more subtlety to Admiral Tolwyn insisting a cloaked ship can’t exist because he has a working knowledge of how cloaking technology circa 2650 works than to his simply deciding that this particular new space weapon can’t exist because he doesn’t want it to.
IMO it seems very much a case of Tolwyn believing "there's no way that the Kilrathi can make something like that practical for the next several years" as opposed to "such a thing is theoretically impossible". Tolwyn knows enough about cloaking research (and possibly whatever has been reverse-engineered from captured Skipper missiles) to figure that combat-ready torpedo-carrying craft are years away at the time that the Claw is destroyed. As for his behavior in WCII, I always read it as him saying "show me evidence" rather than "you are making up lies again" when Blair tells him about the stealth fighters, so by that point he may be considering that the Kilrathi have reached that stage of technology after the additional decade.
 
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