Whatever happened to Knight?

Aeronautico

Aeronautico

Rear Admiral
Okay, this is a question that's been bugging me for some time. I'm sure all of us remember Knight from WC1. Mighty fine pilot. Does anybody know what became of him? To my knowledge, they never confirmed if he died or retired in the war. It is totally probable that he died on the ''Claw'', but until a concrete answer is given, this cannot be said for sure. Does anybody have any indication of what happened to Knight?
 
On the losing track of Wing Commander II, Blair indicates that Knight died when the Tiger's Claw went down.

He also mentions that Hunter and Iceman died there, and of course later material gave them different fates, but no such luck in Knight's case. In the WC3 novelization, Blair thinks back on friends who died in the war, and Knight is among them.

The funny thing is that Knight mentioned in SM2 that he got an offer to teach at the Academy, but Blair tries to persuade him to stay onboard the Claw. :eek:
 
If I recall correctly, Knight rejected that Academy offer. That would put him in a good position to die on the Claw. By the sounds of it, Knight was not one of the lucky ones in that engagement.
 
I read the dialogue in which Blair mentioned Knight's death. He also mention Hunter and Iceman. Didn't those two die in later engagements, at least according to the novelizations?
 
Uh... yeah, that's what I was referring to in my previous post. Fleet Action reveals Hunter survived - he left on a furlough the day before the Claw was destroyed - only to kill him off a little later as Hunter sacrifices himself to protect Paladin.

I'm not sure whether Iceman was always intended to have survived or not. The series bible thing has him rounding up the surviving pilots in the aftermath of the Claw's destruction, but the same document lists him as having died on the Claw in his profile, and of course WC2 has Blair indicate that as well. *shrugs* Whatever the case, Prophecy made it that Iceman was taken alive by the Kilrathi and ripped to shreds, with Blair bringing back his remains after the cats tossed them out in a life pod. Incorporating the bit from the bible, that would have had to have happened while they were flying off the Austin.
 
It always pissed me off that Hunter wasn't in WC2 when I first played it. The Aussie was always my favorite character.
 
Knight bought it at my ships guns a few times, as I once referred to elsewhere. Anyone else consider his "official" cause of death to be friendly fire, in their heads?
 
On the losing track of Wing Commander II, Blair indicates that Knight died when the Tiger's Claw went down.
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Is Knight one of the pilots mentioned in the winning track too? Just after Jazz has ejected, Bluehair has him lined up in his sights and says something like:

"Justice for Hunter, Knight, Halcyon..." Then Angel comes and tractors him in, "Justice is decided in the courts, not with particle cannons"

Yeah I did that a few times... god I hated him.
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I find Knight much better in SM1, on the Sivar offensive mission he scored 7 kills before getting wasted. For me, Spirit is the worst Wingman of all, especially during the Gwenhyvar mission with all those Rapiers, she was just useless.
 
-danr- said:
Is Knight one of the pilots mentioned in the winning track too?
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No, they're not. On the winning path, the conversation is much shorter, with no names at all.

(which is fortunate, because it means we don't have to worry about explaining why it is that Blair thinks Hunter is dead, when clearly he's still alive :p )
 
Quarto said:
No, they're not. On the winning path, the conversation is much shorter, with no names at all.

(which is fortunate, because it means we don't have to worry about explaining why it is that Blair thinks Hunter is dead, when clearly he's still alive :p )
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Ah my bad then... shame he didn't pop up in WC2 really, or at least one of the Secret Ops. According to False Armistice, Hunter didn't die until 2668, so reasonably close to WC3.
 
There's a "Mr Knight" who gets blown up on the movie, but I'm not sure it's the same guy. Anyway, he could've ejected.
 
Quarto said:
No, they're not. On the winning path, the conversation is much shorter, with no names at all.

(which is fortunate, because it means we don't have to worry about explaining why it is that Blair thinks Hunter is dead, when clearly he's still alive :p )
Click to expand...

Though it doesn't explain why Doomsday says the only survivors from the Tiger's Claw who aren't on the Concordia are Paladin and Maniac, or why Jazz says the only survivors are Blair, Angel, Paladin, and Maniac.

Or why the flashback at the beginning of Special Operations 2 shows the conversation from the losing track, though Blair successfully destroyed K'tithrak Mang. A man of contradictions, Blair is.
 
Another factor is the dialog at the beginning of WC2--Blair comes into the Concordia RecRoom to find Hobbes, Angel, Spirit, Doomsday, and Jazz, and comments that they are the survivors of the Tiger's Claw, and that he didn't realize there were so many of them left. Doomsday then chimes in that all they need is Paladin and Maniac, and they can all die together.

This implies that at the time Doomsday at least thinks that Knight (and, for that matter, Hunter, Iceman, AND Hawk) are all dead, although the novels indicate that Hunter, at least, is still alive at that point, and we know that Hawk is. That line of dialog and how it doesn't jive with later additions to the story by the novels and by Prophecy always bugged me.

Then again, it's possible that Doomsday only meant surviving PILOTS of the 'Claw, and, if I recall correctly, Hawk hadn't been a pilot at the time he served on the 'Claw, so maybe Doomsday wasn't counting him. Or maybe Doomsday was only counting survivors of the Claw that he had personally known...

Iceman is the most interesting case. We know he bought it when both Blair AND Hawk were flying...because he told Casey that Iceman agreed to be his wingman after he lost a buddy, and because he said that Blair flew out and recovered Iceman's body. That could have happened on the 'Claw, of course, but that would contradict Doomsday's statements above (had Hawk been flying with Blair and Iceman at the time, Doomsday probably would have included him as a "survivor of the Tiger's Claw"), and other sources that say Hawk never was a pilot on the Claw. But shortly after the 'Claw was destroyed, Blair was demoted, transferred to the ISS and Caernarvon, and didn't fly a combat mission in "ten years". So the only conclusion I can come to is that Hawk started flying immediately after the 'Claw went down, and that Iceman flew with him, bought it, and had his body recovered by Blair while they were all on the Austin escaping from K'Tithrak Mang before Blair's trial.

Of course, it's also possible that Doomsday just thought Hawk and Hunter were already dead...maybe they were on deep recon or special ops and had been missing from the mainstream picture for a while. But everything taken together, it's likely that Knight was indeed dead by the time WC2 starts.
 
You shouldn't take Doomsday too literally. We know there are others who survived the Tiger's Claw - a pilot is mentioned in Fleet Action, Shotglass the bartender is mentioned in the Armada manual, Sparks and Tolwyn (though of course, they are onboard the Concordia anyway) and so on. We can guess that pilots and crews are rotated on Confed ships in much the same way as they are in real life - meaning that there are probably hundreds of people who served on the Tiger's Claw at one point or another, and were no longer aboard when it was destroyed. So, Doomsday's words shouldn't be interpreted as an indication that the people on the Concordia at that particular point plus Maniac and Paladin are all there is to it.

Think of conversations of your own. Are you always 100% precise? The answer is no - human memory is hugely irregular (even your recall of the scene from WC2 shows this, because Hobbes wasn't actually there :p ). For some reason, Hunter simply didn't come into Doomsday's mind - and as for Hawk, well, we're not even sure he met with Doomsday, who, after all, was only onboard the Tiger's Claw for a very short period of time before going back to the Austin.
 
Yeah, in view of the greater universe, my current interpretation is that Doomsday was referring just to the pilots who he knew and interacted with during his brief posting to the Claw...which presumably are the pilots that shared that famous dormitory and had their names on the WC1 killboard. Which makes only his omission of Hunter curious (you're right...he probably never even did know Hawk). The best explanation I can come up with for that is that, wasn't Hunter off doing covert stuff by then? So maybe Doomsday thought he was already dead. (I haven't actually read the relevant novel yet...just am vaguely familiar with its general plot).

Of course, the 12-year-old me that first played WC2 (or however old I was...) took Doomsday's comment very literally, and I was quite certain that everyone except those mentioned were killed when the Claw went down. And then I was very confused when WC3 came out by the references to Hunter in the manual, and later when Prophecy came out to Hawk knowing Iceman and Blair.
 
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