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I wonder if humans will use Banshees as Drathi when they film the future version :D

Here's a neat discovery courtesy of a brief memory someone mentioned on BlueSky. A documentary where Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven played Wing Commander? It sounded too specific not to be real and sure enough, a quick search revealed that the pair appeared in the second episode ("To The Brink...

Greetings WingNuts, Epic war movies haven't fared great with the Wing Commander movie club so far; a lot of classic air combat movies have come off as either extremely slow (The Dambusters, Battle of Britain) or kind of silly (Midway). Surprisingly, Tora! Tora! Tora! didn't share that fate...

Almost! The plan was that the Hhriss would appear in both SM2 and WC2 the same way the Rapier did, so it would be brand new in SM2 and then just a regular ship in WC2. But they ended up dropping it from WC2 pretty soon after.

The original idea was that The Secret Missions would be a direct sale bonus; if you skipped the middle man and ordered Wing Commander direct from Origin you would get a 'special edition' that included the extra missions (and a ball cap!). Because they decided this during Wing Commander I's...

Our touchstone for this was endless Toyota pickup trucks ending up in the hands of terrorists! Nobody blames Toyota... or do they?! This is tied to a big cut that I don't quite understand. But you can go back to at least one of the scripts we have and find there was a police 'section' to the...

No, Wing Commander I was developed with only the first Secret Missions in mind. They decided to do a second one after launch because it was so popular! (That's why it has a separate executable.)

You're right about it not being in the same spirit as the original Star Wars but insisting that it is "fanfic" is committing exactly the same sin in the other direction. It's a licensed tie-in which is inherently not the same as the original work but is also absolutely not the same thing as fan...

They solicited a second addon for Strike Commander but I think it was dead before Tactical Operation (1) was even finished (might even be the case that what we got is a mix of the plan for two stories... would explain the shift in plot midway through!). If you run through the Tactical Operations...

No designation for the Razor. I read the name as kind of parodic or as a joke; it fits the scheme but not the spirit of the Confed names... it feels like pirates (or some company that sells ships to pirates) named it the gritty street version versus Confed's noble swords. There are five of...

That is a good point, it's not something they find unexpected at all. The common denominator to all these stories (both pirates and groups like the Landreich or the Border Worlds) is that it's ships that are available legitimately being purchased by a private interest and in the case of the...

Against all odds, we enjoyed Tora! Tora! Tora! Which makes the score Wing Commander movie club one, war movies fifty. This week we've voted to travel back to the future with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). ST:tMP is a sometimes-misunderstood masterpiece that we've found has improved...

Yes, the idea was that Seether was operating off of the frigate (testing the flashpack)... and when it was destroyed he had to relocate to the Lexington.

Archive sites have recently preserved a new swath of gaming magazines. I found a pretty interesting general Origin preview in this issue of Computer Games Strategy Plus (February 1993)... but as I went to post about it, I got to thinking: just how much of this issue is covering games from...

I believe the CIS includes a military (perhaps the largest and most significant one) but it is not the sole military. While military and CIS are routinely used to mean the same thing there are a few pieces of lore were they aren't. Most famously the Hades description: "inhabited solely by...

You have to work pretty hard not to love Return of the Jedi… and frankly, we're not willing to do that much work; it was great! This week, we're back to World War II with Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). Tora! Tora! Tora! is a spectacular retelling of the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United...

Today we're taking a new look at some unusual 3DO magazine advertisements from Electronic Arts. These 'high concept' pieces ran in magazines in the UK in the first half of 1995 and they are... something. But underneath that something there are some interesting Wing Commander stories! This one...

Want to challenge one of Kilrah's finest? Here's a guide to where you can find the various Kilrathi aces in the first three Wing Commander games. Wing Commander I and the 3DO port of III both have a system where aces will reappear if you miss them... up to seven times in some cases! Wing...

This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Tora! Tora! Tora! which informed Chris Roberts' vision for the Wing Commander movie… and which was...

Yes, the actual game space is 3D and the in flight map is a 2D representation of it. I'm not sure if the coordinates work 1:1, though... the ones listed there are extracted from the game's system files, but it's possible there's some math that happens between the data and the implementation.