A few Wing Commander questions

B

Brown and proud

Swabbie
Banned
Oh glorious masters, I
have some questions
about this great game
that only your superior
and supreme intellect can
answer.

In WC 1, if you play one
of the winning path
missions after a
succeeding a losing path,
does the difficulty or
story change at all?

There's an arguement
between Hunter and
Paladin in Secret Ops and
I was wondering if there
was going to be more to
it but was somehow cut.

Also in Secret Ops how
crucial is the Firekka raid
on Sivar?

Blair had several different
callsigns in the early
games and in Super Wing
Commander was named
Armstrong. But isn't Blair
considered a fallen hero
in the next game? If so
how does the Armstrong
character apply?

Why are Pilgrims hated in
the film again, as
opposed to revered for
their talents?

In WC2 how was Blair,
who is meant to be a
hero, blamed so readily
for the Tigers Claw? For
that matter, what's the
deal with the stealth
ships? The technology
had been around for
centuries and we, us, are
now talking about things
such as thermoptic
camouflage to make
things almost invisable to
the eye. Why then did no
one believe Blair?

Jazz hated the Kilrathi for
killing his brother. So he
joins them? How does
that work?

The Wing Commander 3
novel discussed the two
black projects and the
power struggle between
Paladin and Tolwyn, even
going so far as to say
Angel was killed,
sacrificed, to make some
point. How much truth is
there in this?

I might be the only one
who thinks this but with
the similar looks and
name is Tolwyn
influenced by Wilmof
Tarkin at all?

That's all I can think of
for now.
 
Brown and proud said:
Oh glorious masters, I
have some questions
about this great game
that only your superior
and supreme intellect can
answer.

In WC 1, if you play one
of the winning path
missions after a
succeeding a losing path,
does the difficulty or
story change at all?

There's an arguement
between Hunter and
Paladin in Secret Ops and
I was wondering if there
was going to be more to
it but was somehow cut.

Also in Secret Ops how
crucial is the Firekka raid
on Sivar?

Blair had several different
callsigns in the early
games and in Super Wing
Commander was named
Armstrong. But isn't Blair
considered a fallen hero
in the next game? If so
how does the Armstrong
character apply?

Why are Pilgrims hated in
the film again, as
opposed to revered for
their talents?

In WC2 how was Blair,
who is meant to be a
hero, blamed so readily
for the Tigers Claw? For
that matter, what's the
deal with the stealth
ships? The technology
had been around for
centuries and we, us, are
now talking about things
such as thermoptic
camouflage to make
things almost invisable to
the eye. Why then did no
one believe Blair?

Jazz hated the Kilrathi for
killing his brother. So he
joins them? How does
that work?

The Wing Commander 3
novel discussed the two
black projects and the
power struggle between
Paladin and Tolwyn, even
going so far as to say
Angel was killed,
sacrificed, to make some
point. How much truth is
there in this?

I might be the only one
who thinks this but with
the similar looks and
name is Tolwyn
influenced by Wilmof
Tarkin at all?

That's all I can think of
for now.
Click to expand...

A few years before the Kilrathi War the Pilgrims attacked the Confederation. During the war they enslaved or killed the population of the worlds they conquered so a lot of people who were affected by their actions have a grudge against them, and during the Kilrathi War some Pilgrims tried to sabotage the Confed war effort which led to more people having grudges against them.

Armstrong and Blair are seperate characters. WC is flown by Blair SWC's bonus missions are flown Armstrong IIRC.

The Tiger's Claw was on it's way to the colony Jazz's brother lived on when it changed course to attack a Kilrathi troop transport. Then the colony got destroyed before the Claw got to it so Jazz blames his brother's death on the crew of the Claw because he think that if the Claw hadn't changed course it could have saved the colony.

The fighters that destroyed the Claw were prototype fighters with cloaking devices. Blair was the only person who saw them de-cloak and re-cloak, but the recorder on his fighter was sabotaged so there was no proof of what he saw. Confed command assumed that he had either let the fighters through on purpose or failed to detect or intercept them, and that he had destroyed the recorder to cover up what he had done.
 
With the stealth ships,
wouldn't Blair's
reputation give him some
credentials? I fail to see
why stealth technology
seems so unbelievable.
Jazz might want to kill the
Tigers Claw crew but he
the motive is the death of
his brother how can he
age the Kilrathi?
 
Brown and proud said:
With the stealth ships,
wouldn't Blair's
reputation give him some
credentials? I fail to see
why stealth technology
seems so unbelievable.
Click to expand...

The cloaked fighters that destroyed the Claw were prototypes. The factory that produced them was destroyed so they didn't enter mass production and weren't encountered by Confed again until WC2.
 
In WC 1, if you play one of the winning path missions after a succeeding a losing path, does the difficulty or story change at all?
Click to expand...

I don't think so - I don't think adaptive difficulty shows up until Wing Commander II. The story definately doesn't change.

There's an arguement between Hunter and Paladin in Secret Ops and I was wondering if there was going to be more to it but was somehow cut.
Click to expand...

Secret Missions - Secret Ops is the sequel to Wing Commander Prophecy. Is this the argument you're thinking of?

Hunter: ’ello, mate. Seen enough action yet? I was telling the Old Man here that Zeta Wing lost a couple pilots today. One of them just went bonkers, flew right at a Fralthi… and went up in an explosion that didn’t even dent the side of that catbox lorry. If we keep losing pilots, there won’t be enough of us to fly, and then it’ll be over.
Paladin: And I was just tellin’ this haggis-brained lad that there are a few pilots in our own squadron that need new pilots’ suits. Good white ones, with extra-long sleeves.

(Pasted from Wedge's site.)

I think it's not so much supposed to be a running argument between Paladin and Hunter as it is letting the player know that things on the carrier aren't going well (which is important, since you must *personally* be doing very well to get to this point... so you need dialogue to let you know that everyone else is falling apart.)

Also in Secret Ops how crucial is the Firekka raid on Sivar?
Click to expand...

It was crucial to the survival of the Firekkans but not cruclal to the overall war effort -- it gave Thrakhath a black eye rather than crippled the Kilrathi fleet in some meaningful manner.

Blair had several different callsigns in the early games and in Super Wing Commander was named Armstrong. But isn't Blair considered a fallen hero in the next game? If so how does the Armstrong character apply?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what this question means; if they'd done a Super Wing Commander 2 it would have (presumably) been about 'Armstrong' being blamed for the loss of the Tiger's Claw.

Why are Pilgrims hated in the film again, as opposed to revered for their talents?
Click to expand...

The Pilgrims considered themselves better than humans and separated themselves from Earth -- returning later to fight a war against the Confederation.

In WC2 how was Blair, who is meant to be a hero, blamed so readily for the Tigers Claw? For that matter, what's the deal with the stealth ships? The technology had been around for centuries and we, us, are now talking about things such as thermoptic camouflage to make things almost invisable tothe eye. Why then did noone believe Blair?
Click to expand...

Blair was officially convicted of *negligence* -- meaning that he was oredered to protect the Tiger's Claw and that it was destroyed, so he took the fall. Tolwyn, who had issues over the stealth fighter debate previously to even that event, had his own personal suspicions (the fact that Blair's flight recorder was removed from his fighter didn't help his case.)

Modern 'stealth fighters' exist in Wing Commander, too - the ones in Wing Commander II are a level beyond, physically making ships completely invisible. We're a ways off from that...

Still, the issue is again that *Tolwyn* refused to believe in the stealth fighters. Other people (including General Halcyon and members of the intelligence community) believed them to be in development.

Jazz hated the Kilrathi for killing his brother. So he joins them? How does that work?
Click to expand...

Jazz hated the *Tiger's Claw* for not saving his brother. I hate to simply say "he was crazy" because that's a bad analysis... but it's probably true. In all likelyhood, he considers death at the hands of the Kilrathi more of a disaster than a murder -- and he blames the Tiger's Claw crew in much the same way as you might blame a fireman for not saving your loved one when there's a fire. Not rational, but human.

The Wing Commander 3 novel discussed the two black projects and the power struggle between Paladin and Tolwyn, even going so far as to say Angel was killed, sacrificed, to make some point. How much truth is there in this?
Click to expand...

I don't think Angel really died to make a point - since her death was part of the project that actually ended the war.

I might be the only one who thinks this but with the similar looks and name is Tolwyn influenced by Wilmof Tarkin at all?
Click to expand...

I would say not at all -- Tolwyn wasn't an *evil* character to start out with... Wing Commander II makes a big point of letting us know that he was a *good* captain and admiral and that his crew loved him. It was only Blair who had a problem...
 
NinjaLA said:
he's probably posting here off something like a cell phone.
Click to expand...

Looks more like he's hitting enter at the end of each line to match the size of the text box in his browser. You don't need to do this. The forum will automatically resize lines to fit everyone's screen. This shouldn't be much different on a cell phone or full computer.
 
See, here's one of those arguing points -- you need to tell us where it *doesnt'* say that when you bring up these subjects. The Confederation Handbook gives a length (and as far as I know, completely unique) history of the Pilgrims... and it doesn't say the thing you're claiming.
 
RogueBanshee said:
I thought that the original Pilgrims were banished from Earth.
Click to expand...

Banished? It's more like they were the ONLY ones to leave Earth. Supposedly before advanced navigational computers like the Navcom AI shown in the Wing Commander movie, having a Pilgrim navigator was the ONLY way to jump from unstable locations such as Charybdis. Thus, everybody ELSE pretty much only traveled through them if the Pilgrims allowed it. It's really more like the Pilgrims "owned" the jump lines and everybody else had to (resentfully) depend on them to travel the stars at all. If anything, it was the non-Pilgrims being "imprisoned", not the reverse.
 
Ijuin said:
Banished? It's more like they were the ONLY ones to leave Earth. Supposedly before advanced navigational computers like the Navcom AI shown in the Wing Commander movie, having a Pilgrim navigator was the ONLY way to jump from unstable locations such as Charybdis. Thus, everybody ELSE pretty much only traveled through them if the Pilgrims allowed it. It's really more like the Pilgrims "owned" the jump lines and everybody else had to (resentfully) depend on them to travel the stars at all. If anything, it was the non-Pilgrims being "imprisoned", not the reverse.
Click to expand...

But they had FTL-travel pre-jump drive, jump drives are just much faster. In fact according to the Jump FAQ the Pilgrim Alliance was formed before they developed the first Jump Drive. What gave the Pilgrim Alliance it's power over space was the treaty with Confed which gave them control of all systems with 50-years Hopper Drive travel from Sol. Then Confed developed it's own Jump Drives and was able to bypass Pilgrim space, the Pilgrim leadership got angry and attacked Confed and the war broke out.

The point being that the Jump Drive didn't give the Pilgrims control of space travel at all, on the contary the Jump Drive ended Pilgrim control of space travel by allowing Confed to bypass the treaty zone. Which brings up a question, has anyone ever tried to calculate where Pilgrim Space, based on the original treaty, ended?
 
You're right, it was the Hopper Drive that the Pilgrims controlled, not the Akwende (Jump) Drive. Still, my point was that the Pilgrims were in the dominant position for a while, having exclusive control of any travel in space that the people in Sol could reasonably reach, which effectively left the non-Pilgrims dependent on the Pilgrims' mercy for any interstellar resources.
 
Yeah, I was out for a couple of weeks and was doing up my messages on my phone. It is quite advanced, had Wing Commander on it and everything, so I would think it would have been able to word wrap okay.

Now for the questions. I think the way the first game and add ons work is WC = Blair and SM = Armstrong.

I might have an answer for the issue with stealth ships. At the time the games were made the technology was very new. The F117 stealth bomber, if it was known about at the time, was a revolution simply based on it's radar defeating capeabilities and things that we are looking at today, thermoptic camoflage similar to Kilrathi cloaking technology, was unheard of. Taking the technology of the day into account, not to mention the buttheadedness typical of the military who might not want to accept the Kilrathi had grown that advanced, then one can see why Blair's story might not have been creditble.

With Jazz, I am not so sure I would label him as crazy. A crazy person would toss grenades into the berths or something. The way he acted was cold, calulating, planned out years in advance. What was done to Spirit was intended to be as cruel, as tormenting as possible. I think such an act is beyond the measure of someone who is simply crazy.
 
One wee little problem with the F-117 analogy: While that aircraft was new, the concept of "invisibility shield" was not.
 
Certainly the notion of invisibility was known, AS FICTION. However, I would think that the supposed Confederation "authorities" on the science behind cloaking theory would have declared it to be decades beyond the technology of both Kilrathi and Confederation--much like how many "authorities" on aerodynamics and engineering in the 1890s declared that self-powered heavier-than-air machines could not fly through the air.

In other words, while Tolwyn may have known that invisibility was theoretically possible, he found it implausible that the Kilrathi could have developed the technology to completely cloak a fighter against detection by both Confederation sensors and human vision--he considered it to be too much of a leap beyond what he knew they could do for it to seem credible to him.
 
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