Cute Little Mini Ship EXPOSED (September 16, 2017)

[Bandit LOAF]

Do you remember Wing Commander III's smallest, cutest spaceship? You have to look carefully! The Confederation and Kilrathi transports in Wing Commander III are designed to have cargo pods attached to their latticework. These components change the look of the ship and can be shot off during combat. For some reason, the Kilrathi transports don't ever actually have pods attached in-game... but the Confederation transports you escort do (pictured.) And when you examine the individual cargo tanks and pods you will find included: a tiny, smaller ship! So here's your exhaustive look at the model. Is it a shuttle or lander? A 27th century 'family car'? Some kind of environment pod? Who knows!? (Interestingly, the Wing Commander IV transports don't have pods... making for several missions where you seem to be escorting shipments of nothing.)









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Original update published on September 16, 2017

 

[StarvingPilot]

It's a shuttle/transport. I actually just reconstructed this very model on Blender the other night based off some text files I found in the WC/Origin Models Archive. If you open conttran.asc (Confed Tiny Transport?) with notepad, you get a long list of coordinates for vertices. The vertices were huge, so I scaled each number back (decimal 4 places to the left) and connected the dots when I was finished. I came up with this:

 

[Whistler]

Conttrans sounds like Container Transport.

Xwing Alliance had a little ship like that that was the command module of the container train. WC3's mini ship seems to fit the profile as it appears to lack a sizeable engine housing that would likely have been a separate module. The one's aboard her seem too tiny for that role and likely are intended for individual propulsion. The WC3 team, for whatever reason, seemed it unnecessary.

Here is an idea of what they likely had in mind: