Most Iconic WC Fighter

Farbourne

Farbourne

Rear Admiral
Was thinking about various science fiction franchises involving starfighters (as I'm sure many of us here do), and about how most of them have an "iconic" fighter...a ship that kind of represents the franchise. If you were going to make a poster about the franchise, you'd probably put a picture of this fighter on the poster. Think the X-wing for Star Wars, the Colonial Viper for Battlestar Galactica, the Star Fury for Babylon 5.

So what would the "iconic" fighter for Wing Commander be? I'm struggling on this one. An "iconic" fighter should not only appear in but be featured in multiple installments of the franchise, be recognizable to hardcore and casual fans of the franchise alike, and ideally be a ship that the audience has a stake in (for a movie or TV show, this probably means the hero flies it at some point; for a game it probably means the player flies it).

The best I can come up with is... the Dralthi. (I'm lumping the Dralthi I, II, and IV together here). It is on the cover of the first game, is encountered in the very first mission of Wing Commander, appears in four of the five mainline games, has a distinctive shape, and you even get to fly one at one point.

But it's a little unsatisfying to have the "iconic" ship for the franchise be one of the bad guys. Still, I can't think of a Confed ship that fits the bill... the best Confed choice I can think of is the Rapier II. (And it's a little unfortunate if the "iconic" ship for the Wing Commander franchise is a blatant rip off from another IP).

What do you all think? If you had to name the "iconic" fighter of Wing Commander, would you pick?
 
TCSTigersClaw said:
Hornet
Click to expand...
Interesting. I can see the logic as (1) it's the first fighter the player ever flies, (2) it has a very recognizable shape, and (3) it is pictured (or at least its cockpit is) on the cover of the first game. However, it only appears in at most 13 missions, all in the first game and its expansions. And Enyo is so easy that most players probably only fly it twice in the base game and perhaps a couple more times if they play Secret Missions.
 
So I just dug through the Game Guides on this website. If frequency of use matters, the most flown fighter (in terms of number of missions it's available in) in all of the 5 mainline games and their expansion is the Panther, at 41. But I don't think of the Panther as the "iconic" Wing Commander fighter because it only show up in the very last game. Next is the Arrow at 31. But if you group the WC1 F-44A Rapier II along with the WC2 F-44G Rapier II, then the Rapier II comes in at second place with 32 missions.
 
Hornet is the first ship you enter , even at the simulator !
The shape is iconic and It is only in 13 missions (excluding expansions) , but it is the one ship you build "expirience" with.
I found frustrating trying to shoot down enemies with my puny dual lasers .
Once I completed a mission , and landed the Hornet ,it was a proud moment !
Also it is popular as shown in Squadron42 , they have the hornet there as an homage
 
I would say Rapier because of its sleek style. But if we talk about achievements, then probably the Centaurian mud pig as we shoot down the first capital ship in it 🎇🎇
 
...I mean, I would go with the Rapier, but they did go with the Scimitar for the cartoon. I suppose you could make the arguement that the Rapier wasn't in service at that point, but then you have to explain all the later ships you see in it.
 
My first 'in game lore' nerd answer is the Rapier II and the Dralthi; they have always struck me as the 'Mustang and Messerschmitt' of the Wing Commander universe. I imagine there's a Rapier and a Dralthi hanging in the main gallery of the TCS Victory museum (and filling out the rest of that is a good thought exercise!).

But that's in the universe… outside of that (and for the common man rather than the Wing Commander super nerd) I think there's a case to be made for the Hornet. It has frequently been both the intentional and the de facto face of the franchise. It's the cockpit on the cover of the box, it's on the cover of Claw Marks, it's the ship included as concept art in the original press kit, it's the first ship that was designed and the first one shown to the world in the original demo… it's the element from Wing Commander included in Origin's 1990 airbrush painting (used for the company catalog and in other places)! Origin chose the Hornet, the Sabre and the Excalibur as the representative ships in the Kilrathi Saga intro. And owing to the fact that it's the first ship you fly, there's also an ever-increasing number of videos and articles that pull the Hornet from the game as quickly as they can. (And as TCSTigersClaw noted, it's the ship Chris Roberts decided to bring back for Squadron 42, too!)

...I mean, I would go with the Rapier, but they did go with the Scimitar for the cartoon. I suppose you could make the arguement that the Rapier wasn't in service at that point, but then you have to explain all the later ships you see in it.
Click to expand...

You're very close there: what's the difference between the Rapier and the Sabre (or the Epee or the Arrow) in that regard? The Rapier is the only one that has an explicit story about how it enters service. Everything else is just 'when Blair saw it'.

(But also think about creating Academy from the perspective of someone charged with taking the continuity and telling a prequel story: the whole point of choosing the Scimitar is that it's the ship that's specifically known for being old. So when you're coming up with a story set earlier it's a neat point that the old ship is then new.

This is my question as well. We see Sabres and Longbows in WCATV, but why?
Click to expand...

Neither of those ships had an established backstory–Blair sees Sabres in WC2 and Longbows in WC3 but that doesn't mean it's when they were new.

(Behind the scenes, the Longbow is a leftover model sheet from when the show was entirely WC3 based… the Sabre is totally intentional because there was no lore saying the Sabre was new later on.)

Well, it could be because the Rapier had its origin with another IP, I suppose. I'm not the expert there, though…
Click to expand...

I don't think this is anything anyone ever really worried about; it's certainly inspired by Firefox but it's not 1:1 at all. Every ship in a game is based on /something/, we just know that one :D
 
Sabre from WC2. I know I know you guys want multiple installments but listen...

I immediately fell in love with this bird the first time I saw it. It looks absolutely gorgeous. Both the bird and the cockpit. On top of that is has everything, missiles, torpedos, a pew-pew rear turret, thick shields and the punch from particle cannons combined with mass drivers (including ITTS) is ripping everything a new butthole in an instant. You never have the feeling you sit in a heavy fighter, it has the same agility than the Hornet which is remarkable if you consider that the Sabre is the successor to the Raptor.

On top of that you fly pretty much most of the iconic missions with it: you blast lots of capital ships with torpedos, you fight Prince Thrakhath, you destroy K'tithrak Mang, you catch Jazz and you wreck an entire Kilrathi task force while defending the Olympus station in Ghorah Khar.

Wc2sabre[1].jpg


sddefault[1].jpg
 
Origin did choose the Sabre to represent WC2 for the Kilrathi Saga intro! And Chris Roberts used it as the hero ship in the original movie script--got changed to Rapier in a later pass.
 
kingmakeress said:
I like Sabre as well and actually I was wondering why it was not in WC3.
Click to expand...
One of my favourite moments in the fan-made WC Saga campaign for Freespace Open is after the Behemoth disaster, when the player is given the opportunity to fly an ISS Strike Sabre due to a lack of available Thunderbolts. The biggest problem I have is that while the shields are thin for a heavy fighter to match what we saw in WC2/Academy, they don't regenerate as quickly as they did in WC2. The lack of separate armour that differs from generic hull integrity also makes it a lot tougher to survive in that mission, as does the fact that the player's ship's turret will only fire on the currently targeted ship which makes it useless for scraping fighters off the rear while lining up a torpedo launch.
 
kingmakeress said:
I like Sabre as well and actually I was wondering why it was not in WC3.
Click to expand...
IRL because of hardware limitations I guess like most of the capital ships and fighters from wc2 .
In Universe answer is probably because most of the sabres didnt make it maybe after the earth invasion
 
I like Sabre as well and actually I was wondering why it was not in WC3.
Click to expand...

It comes down to the fact that Wing Commander III has a completely different style of art for the ships. Chris Roberts asked his art director (a new role in the industry at the time) to develop a new, distinct style for both factions' ships. The Kilrathi got the whole 'asymmetrical knife edge' thing and the human ships are now patterned after then-modern warbirds. The Sabre (and most of the earlier ships) don't fit with this aesthetic at all; they're all based on pulp science fiction. But even if Wing Commander III had the same look as Wing Commander II it wasn't likely to happen… because giving the player new toys is a selling point.

(There had been a very early plan to repeat the 'Rapier' bit from Wing Commander II in Wing Commander III with the Wraith built for Wing Commander Academy… with the idea that it was new there but just the ordinary medium fighter in Wing Commander III. But that died with the new design language for the ships.)

IRL because of hardware limitations I guess like most of the capital ships and fighters from wc2 .
In Universe answer is probably because most of the sabres didnt make it maybe after the earth invasion
Click to expand...

These are both things that fans came up with years ago but neither of them is really true.

Wing Commander III's RealSpace engine is fully capable of rendering a Sabre or any other 'rounded' ship. Remember that it was the engine first created for Strike Commander, a game that's full of modern jets with sleek, curved lines! And the 'they were all lost in Fleet Action' idea–which isn't ever mentioned anywhere–is satisfying until you really think about it. If you're desperate to replace fighters lost in a battle, designing and building totally new types is the least efficient and fast way to do it. (And there's plenty of lore now that says the Hellcat, Arrow and Longbow at least are older designs!)

The reason we don't see the WC2 ships is what I discussed above, the reason we don't see them in the universe is because they just aren't in front of our character. The Victory has the four squadrons we see… there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of others operating around the galaxy that operate differently. If you plunk me down in England in 1940 and I see Hurricanes and Spitfires does that mean no other warplanes exist? No, I'm just looking in one place! These all kind of spring from this idea that lore is the big thing that matters to the people making the game and that's just not the case. No one making Wing Commander III had any idea what future year the game was to be set in… much less worried about what happened in Fleet Action.
 
Sort of! The games were typically made without any real thought to lore… it was the job of the creative services division, the folks that did the manuals and hint books, to come in at the end of the project and establish how it fit together.
 
Maybe it's because Wing Commander was the game that I played last, but I have a hard time treating the Hornet as the "most iconic" fighter of the series. I don't even think it's the most iconic fighter in the game it's in. When it comes to Confed fighters I would probably go with either the Hellcat, for its major role in two games and cameo in Academy as well as inspiring the design of the Scimitars in that, or more likely the Excalibur which I think is tied with the Thunderbolt for most appearances in a mainline game. Neither of them are my favorite fighter, I would probably give that to the Rapier, but I always feel like the Rapier has a weirdly low profile despite how important it's treated in the first game and appearing in three others as well as I think every novel but End Run and the last two Pilgrim books? It gets upstaged by the Sabre in the second game and exists in the others.

Bandit LOAF said:
It comes down to the fact that Wing Commander III has a completely different style of art for the ships. Chris Roberts asked his art director (a new role in the industry at the time) to develop a new, distinct style for both factions' ships. The Kilrathi got the whole 'asymmetrical knife edge' thing and the human ships are now patterned after then-modern warbirds. The Sabre (and most of the earlier ships) don't fit with this aesthetic at all; they're all based on pulp science fiction. But even if Wing Commander III had the same look as Wing Commander II it wasn't likely to happen… because giving the player new toys is a selling point.

(There had been a very early plan to repeat the 'Rapier' bit from Wing Commander II in Wing Commander III with the Wraith built for Wing Commander Academy… with the idea that it was new there but just the ordinary medium fighter in Wing Commander III. But that died with the new design language for the ships.)
Click to expand...

I think the earlier ships could have worked fairly easily if they had really wanted to: the Arrow sits comfortably with the Rapier and Broadsword in Arena and the Scimitar and Hellcat-like coexist in Academy. But if you're putting in the effort to make your old ships look like the new ships the question is why not just make new ships to begin with?
 
Bob McDob said:
but I have a hard time treating the Hornet as the "most iconic" fighter of the series.
Click to expand...
Same here. I mean I bet we all remember our first mission, but after playing the games the most iconic fighter is the one we associate the franchise with. So it doesn't have to be the first fighter we flew.

TCSTigersClaw said:
IRL because of hardware limitations I guess like most of the capital ships and fighters from wc2 .
Click to expand...
The Sabre was probably stretching the hardware of WC2 era, but WC3 was running on more powerful computers --or not running at all. Also, the Thunderbolt and the Kilrathi asteroid ship probably put the same strain on the engine. Granted, the other Confed and Kilrathi ships are made of straight lines.

TCSTigersClaw said:
In Universe answer is probably because most of the sabres didnt make it maybe after the earth invasion
Click to expand...
Most probably they didn't as they would be in the front lines, but the production lines and the shipyards in other systems survived if I had to guess.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top