Most Dominant Fighter of it's time...

What was the most dominant fighter of it's time?


  • Total voters
    62
As much as I love the Raptor, the Vampire was absolutely untouchable. The first time I played the last mission of WCP, I only lost because I kept destroying waves of fighters and forgot about the towers until my time ran out. If my Vampire didn't spontaneously combust, I would have taken out the whole Nephilim fleet.
 
Got to agree with Mcgruff, even though I voted for the Raptor simply because I love it that much, the Vampire was truly untouchable...
 
The quick answer would of course be the Dragon...
Besides that one I think it hugely matters if you are talking about small 1 on 1 fights or fleet size actions. Some fighters are far better in teams.

Over all I'd probably go with LOAFs reply and also pick the Gothri...
 
FrostyNSO said:
I almost left out the Excal for that reason, but i knew the Excal fanboys would whine if I did.

...yes. Yes we would have. very mutch so. like a buntch of children. Thankyou for considering our feelings. ;)
 
AKAImBatman said:
I have to say, the Thunderbolt had to be *the* nicest bomber that Confed ever designed. It may have been slow, but God help anyone who got between its cross-hairs (or tried to attack from behind, MWHAHAHAH!).

The Thunderbolt is a Heavy Fighter
 
cff said:
The quick answer would of course be the Dragon...
Besides that one I think it hugely matters if you are talking about small 1 on 1 fights or fleet size actions. Some fighters are far better in teams.

Over all I'd probably go with LOAFs reply and also pick the Gothri...

Were there enough Dragons produced to make it the dominant fighter of its time?
 
TopGun said:
The Thunderbolt is a Heavy Fighter

That's not what it's torpedo loadout said. Hello, kitty... :D

I always think of it more as a light bomber than a heavy fighter. In a dogfight its half-a-ton of armor helps, but its slow turn rate makes it difficult to actually hit anything. It's not quite as slow as the Longbow, though (aka the deathtrap), so it is often better than the Longbow for a torpedo run. Besides, <privateer:hunter>I only need one shot...</privateer:hunter> ;)
 
McGruff said:
Were there enough Dragons produced to make it the dominant fighter of its time?

It seems to have only been produced in sufficient quantities for the Black Lance. While it's possible that it entered service for a short while, we see no sign of it after WC4. (Which is really too bad, because it outclasses almost everything the Midway is carrying.)
 
Paddybhoy said:
When I think about it the Excalibur always seemed to get my wingman wasted, remember the Freya missions where you have to take out a cruiser? If I wasn't careful I would usually lose a wingman on that mission.


How true... I chose Vagabond or Maniac for it... always sent them home about the time I got the cruiser. But I tried it in a Longbow... and it went MUCH worse.

*EDIT*

Actually... come to think of it... a lot of the later missions resulted in wingman ejections/fatalities/retreats. I'm pretty good about picking them off my wingmans back... but sometimes it seemed like they just couldn't fly for anything. Same goes for Wing Commander 4... Maniac definitely likes the ejection cord.
 
The Gothri is probably the worst fighter to fight in the whole of Wing Commander. Nothing was worse then going to a navpoint with your Crossbow and having to fight off three wings of Gothri.
Except maybe those moments in Wing Commander III where you were fending off Vakhtoths in your Hellcat, and were all out of afterburners, missiles, and much worse: decoys. I still wake up some nights about those moments.
 
Maj.Striker said:
Got to agree with Mcgruff, even though I voted for the Raptor simply because I love it that much, the Vampire was truly untouchable...
If the poll was titled "Best fighter of it's time" then I would agree it's the Vampire, closely followed by the black wasp but the most dominant, i.e. the one wich influenced the course of the war the most, then it's the Raptor hands down because there weren't a lot of Vampires around yet in Prophecy & Secret Ops to make a big difference
 
FrostyNSO said:
...Now when I ask this, I mean in large scale. In the hands of 100's of pilots throughout the course of the war, rather than in the hands of one pilot on a "suicide" mission :)
I'm not a huge fan of it, but I had to say the Vampire, though I would put the Raptor in close second.
I don't think there were 100 Vampires built yet in Prophecy, or even in Secret Ops. The only Vampires in action were those from the Midway & Cerberus (& maybe the Eisen?) , the rest were flying Thunderbolts & Excaliburs
 
The Excal was a prototype. It wasn't the dominating fighter, unless the T-Bomb was the dominating bomb.

The Vampire fits this role well, since it was much better than any of its counterparts.

On WC1-4, every fighter had a strong point and a weak point. The Rapier II was great, but had weak armor. The Arrow was weak, but made up with good missiles and high maneuverability. The Thunderbolt was stronger, but also easier to hit.

Now, the Vampire is faster, maneuverable, well armored, shielded, has great weapons and a massive missile loadout. What's the downside?
 
Delance said:
The Excal was a prototype. It wasn't the dominating fighter, unless the T-Bomb was the dominating bomb.

Didn't we already go over this? The Excalabur was a dominating fighter in the Border Worlds and Nephilim wars. It was not "just a prototype". Even at the end of the Kilrathi War, we saw them begin to enter service, and they were invaluable for making that run on Kilrah.

There's actually a "deleted scene" out of WC3 where the news service plays up the Excalabur's entry into the war. I'm glad they deleted that scene though. There's no way we'd let the press give out the sort of tactical information the reporter was giving in the clip.
 
It seemed throughout prophecy and SO, that the bulk of the fighting was being done by the midway and the cerberus. If other carriers were racking up 3000 kill counts, the Nephilim would've been a joke. In SO in particular, when you'd go and bail out the excals and t-bolts, they would be the ones getting hosed, not your wingmen (at least not first :) ). While the Excal seemed to be in heavy usage during the WCP-SO era (and I believe these were slightly downgraded too, not the killing machine from WC3), It seemd to be the equal of most Nephilim craft, but only the better of a few.

Also, lets remember that this isn't a favorite fighter poll. We're talking broad-strokes wartime usage. 100's of pilots, not one.
 
teh thing is that i guess it's Excalibur and Thunderbolt VII, simply because they are still in service by the end of WCP: SO.

Also do not forget that Blair gets the mission in wc4, where he has the opportunity to destroy the factory, which massivly produces Bearcats. So we may speak of massive production here.

My favorite ship always was Thunderbolt. But i may put Bearcat here as well.
 
I don't think the Bearcat was produced and implemented in the numbers it would take to be considered a dominating force.

The indication in the game itself is that this just isn't true -- there's a factory churning them out very quickly, and that's basically our only experience with Bearcats in Wing Commander IV.

There's a lot of confusion about them, because the old Aces Club created an internal no-Bearcats policy (for whatever reason) -- so there's a series of elaborate fan explanations for why Bearcats don't *really* exist (they weren't mass produced, they had trouble with their ion engines, etc.)

They're sort of bizarre stories, though, because... well, they're exactly contrary to how we see Bearcats in the game -- as fighters being mass produced (which we can then fly with no trouble).

I don't think there were 100 Vampires built yet in Prophecy, or even in Secret Ops. The only Vampires in action were those from the Midway & Cerberus (& maybe the Eisen?) , the rest were flying Thunderbolts & Excaliburs

We really don't know enough about the Vampire to say this. The Vampire isn't necessarily *new* fighter - by Secret Ops, the B variant is already in service. We also see Vampires stationed at the Kreiger starbase in WCSO.

I'll argue against the Raptor, too. The Raptor served famously at the Enyo/McAuliffe Engagement... but I can't think of another single example of Raptors being the deciding factor. It'd be like saying the Dauntless was the standout fighter of World War II because they were responsible for sinking the Japanese carriers at Midway. Rather, they simply happened to be the standard dive bombers at the time of the battle. I'm sure the minefields could have been deployed just as easily with Broadswords.
 
My favorite is still the Excalibur. Too bad Confed didn't have them 6 months earlier in WC3, then the fur would've flown faster. Regarding my reasons, the Excalibur still has decent speed, armor, shields and firepower to compete with more recent fighters and in WCSO it was used en masse.
 
AKAImBatman said:
That's not what [the Thunderbolt's] torpedo loadout said. Hello, kitty... :D

There are torp-carrying variants of the Panther and Vampire, too. Does that make them bombers as well? :p
 
Confed said:
I don't think there were 100 Vampires built yet in Prophecy, or even in Secret Ops. The only Vampires in action were those from the Midway & Cerberus (& maybe the Eisen?) , the rest were flying Thunderbolts & Excaliburs

Not quite. The Wolfpack squadron left behind by the Eisen were flying Vampires, meaning that at least one fleet carrier was carrying them. Also, seeing mostly Thunderbolts and Excaliburs doesnt mean that that's what Confed was using the most. Those T-bolts and Excals obviously came from stations or from planetside, which dont always have top of the line military fighters. The Midway and the Cerberus had them because both ships were brand new.
 
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