One, Two, Three... Single Engine Fighters (September 27, 2023)

[Bandit LOAF]

A certain former president (not Jimmy Carter) recently said some goofy stuff about single-engine fighters recently which got me to thinking: do we fly any single engine space fighters in Wing Commander?

Most Confederation fighters have between two and six engines... but I can think of three exceptions! The Ferret in Wing Commander II and the Piranha in Prophecy are both single-engine patrol ships meant to seem like a cockpit glued to a rocket.





Prophecy's Devastator torpedo bomber also has a single engine but the visual intent is reversed: it's supposed to seem like a powerful ship with a powerplant that's similar to those of a capital ship.





I will also note that the Ferret seen in Wing Commander Academy actually had three engines; must've been the A or B model! Why does the Academy Ferret look so unlike the game one when the other Academy ships are pitch perfect? It's actually modeled on a toy prototype created for the series which had for some reason been commissioned in advance of any reference material.




'But the Ferret wasn't around in 2654!!!!!' - listen, the Confederation Handbook has Ferrets in 2638 as part of the Iason's boat complement. Paladin flies one!




--
Original update published on September 27, 2023

 

[Quarto]

Random thought... (also, hi everyone - I do still read the news regularly, and occasionally lurk-check the forums, even if I post so abysmally rarely...)

'But the Ferret wasn't around in 2654!!!!!' - listen, the Confederation Handbook has Ferrets in 2638 as part of the Iason's boat complement. Paladin flies one!

The other day, I found myself thinking of Wing Commander for some reason or another, and it occurred to me, that the world of today really casts some of those "eternal" fighters of the Wing Commander universe in a new light.

I mean, think about it: remember, when we were first arguing about these things back in the 1990s, it was a given that military fighters just weren't around for very long. Not only because we understood WC to be WWII-in-space, and therefore featuring a similarly rapid turnover in fighter designs, but also because it was very much the rule of our present day, as well. I mean, sure, there were some weird exceptions, like Central American states flying WWII Mustangs into the 1980s, but those were the obvious exceptions. But for mainstay fighters of the primary powers of our world, it was obvious that each new decade would bring a new MiG or a new F, and while we knew that in extreme cases, planes like the F-14 Tomcat could serve for three decades, this didn't feel at all typical. After all, it had mostly been replaced by F-18s, and besides, it was serving at a time when the USAF was literally decades ahead of any competition.

Well, fast-forward to 2023, and darn - look at that. Yes, the F-14 has retired. But the F-16 is still around everywhere (hiya, Strike Commander!), the F-18, designed in the same competition as the F-16, has just recently retired... only to still serve on in the now-twenty-years-old Super Hornet redesign. The F-15 is pushing 50 years of service, and its newest EX variant (like the F-18, a fairly significant redesign) is only just entering service. That's not even to mention the B-52, which is literally expected to be a century old by the time it retires (hiya, Scimitar!). And while the 1990s were very much an era of non-competition for the USAF, the 2010s and especially 2020s are a time of rising concern about Chinese air power - in theory, based on the precedent of the WWII-Vietnam era, you'd expect the US to be generating a whole bunch of new designs, but in practice, we're seeing mainly extensive re-designs of existing fighters - and new fighters like the F-35 are constructed specifically in such a way as to allow significant upgrades and re-designs in the future. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if the USAF, or at least National Guard units, were still using the F-35 around 2060, and some sort of F-35EX might be around at the start of the next century, flying around with its swarm of AI-operated drones or whatever. It also seems almost a given that the F-16 will be at least 70 years old by the time it retires (even service in Ukraine seems unlikely to significantly dent the available stock of this plane). That's not even to mention Russian and Chinese fighters, where the same thing can be observed.

In short: things that seemed crazy in the 1990s, today seem quite reasonable. Whether it's the Scimitar being a century old, the Ferret being a pre-war craft that re-appears halfway through the war with a different engine, the Rapier existing in significantly different forms (hiya, Movie Rapier!), it all now seems so... unremarkable. If anything, the abnormality was the changeover of fighters, though of course, I think we always understood that this was never "realistic" (whatever that means in pulp sci-fi recreating WWII in space), and merely a function of new games needing new toys for players.