wing commander fleet action

[Jdawg]

just finished the book, a couple of questions when is the concordia destroyed bc it wasnt at the end of the book, and where was blair during the fight for earth

 

[LeHah]

just finished the book, a couple of questions when is the concordia destroyed bc it wasnt at the end of the book, and where was blair during the fight for earth

The Concordia was destroyed during a rear-guard movement over Vespus. She'd been "downgraded" to a patrol ship due to damages. We've never "seen" the attack that killed her, simply the result (the opening of WC3, showing it dead in the water). Its history can be read here: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/TCS_Concordia_(CVS-65)

If I remember correctly, Blair was wounded prior to the Battle For Earth and was kept off the line - but I'm going by memory on that.

 

[Jdawg]

love those pages and I was doing some more reading and it said jason returned to duty as a rear admiral in the landreich system, and faced off one time against tolwyn in the later yrs, and it ended in a draw, wouldnt the planets of this system have been part of the border world conflict, its is not mentioned on the page at all


https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Jason_Bondarevsky

 

[Dundradal]

love those pages and I was doing some more reading and it said jason returned to duty as a rear admiral in the landreich system, and faced off one time against tolwyn in the later yrs, and it ended in a draw, wouldnt the planets of this system have been part of the border world conflict, its is not mentioned on the page at all


https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Jason_Bondarevsky

A lot of the pages are still works in progress. The WC4 novel actually talks about how the Landreich is separate from the UBW. At one point in the novel, the Landreich provides aid to the UBW.

Here's the galactic map (it has some things added from the expanded universe). You can see the respective locations of the UBW and Landreic: https://www.wcnews.com/maps/

 

[Jdawg]

thanks for the map it does seem odd they didnt join the union as a full member

 

[Whistler]

If I remember correctly, Blair was wounded prior to the Battle For Earth and was kept off the line - but I'm going by memory on that.

Your memory serves you well. In the novel Heart of the Tiger page seven Blair states this:

He'd been Wing Commander aboard the Concordia for three years, until the Battle of Earth. If he hadn't taken that Kilrathi missile which left him grounded for six long months, Blair would have been on board when Concordia fought the rearguard action over Vespus: fought and died.

Since Blair isn't featured in the novel it is likely he was WIA before or during the armistice. Six months is an eternity in the war effort. However, this could be conjecture because it states that he was wing commander, "until the Battle of Earth." He may have even been wounded in the Battle of Sirius.

EDIT:
For a kick, capi3101's WCRPG has a campaign (non-canonical) set during the Vespus events. You may even have a chance to save the ol' girl. Yours truly even plays a role.
https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/wcrpg-vespus.26654/

 

[Dundradal]

thanks for the map it does seem odd they didnt join the union as a full member

The Landreich is the older of the two, if I'm remembering correctly and has always gone its own way.

Your memory serves you well. In the novel Heart of the Tiger page seven Blair states this:

He'd been Wing Commander aboard the Concordia for three years, until the Battle of Earth. If he hadn't taken that Kilrathi missile which left him grounded for six long months, Blair would have been on board when Concordia fought the rearguard action over Vespus: fought and died.

Since Blair isn't featured in the novel it is likely he was WIA before or during the armistice. Six months is an eternity in the war effort. However, this could be conjecture because it states that he was wing commander, "until the Battle of Earth." He may have even been wounded in the Battle of Sirius.

I think it's referring to fleet personnel being discharged. That's the end of this three years as WC on the Concordia. When the False Armistice is broken and all hell breaks lose, he's probably flying from her again during the battle. He's not mentioned in the novel because it's a Bear book. Besides the game novelizations, Blair only shows up in one scene in Freedom Flight.

He takes the missile during the battle and is sidelined after. During that time, he recovers then helps find the wreckage of the Concordia on Vespus.

EDIT: Also, these are the events that Standoff covers. From the False Armistice falling to the climax at Earth.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

The Landreich is the older of the two, if I'm remembering correctly and has always gone its own way.

The Landreich is the older of the two, by a wide margin; they declared independence in the early 2650s, during the dog days of the war. The Confederation didn’t have the resources or the interest in keeping the Landreich in the family, and simply let them go. The “Union of Border Worlds” as a political entity doesn’t exist until 2673, when they declared their independence and form the makeshift union we see in Wing Commander IV. (In fact, it wasn’t until the Wing Commander Universe Map came out that we even knew the Border Worlds continued to exist AFTER the crisis was resolved in Wing Commander IV... I remember more than a few debates about that one!)

I think it's referring to fleet personnel being discharged. That's the end of this three years as WC on the Concordia. When the False Armistice is broken and all hell breaks lose, he's probably flying from her again during the battle. He's not mentioned in the novel because it's a Bear book. Besides the game novelizations, Blair only shows up in one scene in Freedom Flight.

Blair also has a brief so-unexplained-you-miss-it reference in End Run, where Bear references "Phoenix" and his wingmate saving the Concordia after the flight decks were disabled. We always suspected that Dr. Forstchen was referencing the Gwynedd series in Wing Commander II... but couldn't understand why he'd decided to call Blair "PHOENIX." The mystery was solved some years later, when we recovered the original "writer's bible" sent to the prospective licensed authors in 1993... which includes a pargraph explaining how Blair changed his callsign to Phoenix after the destruction of the Tiger's Claw (which was never made canon or referenced in any way beyond the slight End Run callout.)

More confusing are the novelizations, which turn these references around and try to make Blair a background player in End Run. Heart of the Tiger has Blair mention that he knew Kevin Tolwyn from serving on the Tarawa at some point... and then the Wing Commander IV novel entirely conflates Blair and Bear, with Sosa talking about how she first heard of Blair when his pilots on the Tarawa attacked the Kilrathi shipyards. (I like to just imagine Blair deciding not to correct her in that scene...)

The big problem with the timeline here (and at several points in Fleet Action and False Colors) is that there simply aren't three years between the end of Wing Commander II and the Battle of Earth in 2668. There are three years since the /beginning/ of Wing Commander II in 2665, but Origin ended up establishing that the K'Tithrak Mang series was in early 2667 (and then followed by the Special Operations stories.) So we run into trouble with things like Blair's three years as Wing Commander on the Concordia and Bear's year off working on the Academy's new trainsim (the world's only attempt to make Wing Commander Academy relevant to the ongoing storyline.)