Time, Again (November 12, 2010)

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
We've recovered another element of Origin's groundbreaking Wing Commander IV pre-release website: "The Story So Far..." is a timeline of previous Wing Commander games intended to quickly bring new players up to speed on the franchise. Half promotional, half in-universe, this interesting document actually adds a bit of continuity--like references to the 'Galactic War' or mention of the fact that Wing Commander III takes place "ten parsecs from home". You can access the recovered page here. We also have slightly larger versions of some of the screenshots included:

WINGLOGO.JPG






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Original update published on November 12, 2010
 
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Hmmm...They described Privateer as being set in 2670, but I thought this only applied to Righteous Fire - as per game intro "Jolson Pleasure Base - One year later".

But the same paragraph refers to the 'shadowier side to the Kilrathi war' - surely they shouldnt have replicated the same canonical mistake made years earlier with that careless sentence - implying the war hadn't ended by 2670.
 
I used to think that about Righteous Fire as well... but if you consider what happens, there's nothing really preventing the events of Righteous Fire from occurring after the end of the war. Or Privateer, really.
 
I basically agree, the only real contradiction might be that the Confeds (and all other humans for that matter) will fight with Kilrathi. However we know that there are Kilrathi privateers (I'm sure there are somewhere?) So there's no reason they're not just aggressive clan factions going about their cat business after the war.
 
It's not implausible to say that the Kilrathi we see in Gemini aren't necessarily part of the mainstream Kilrathi that abided by the Treaty of Torgo in 2669.
 
Interesting topic!

To get it out of the way: Privateer does take place in 2669. In fact, it's the first word in the game's introduction: "2669, Gemini Sector, Troy System..." Similarly, the assumption has always been that Righteous Fire must take place in 2670 because of its introduction: "Jolson Pleasure Base... One Year Later..." 2669 plus one year is 2670.

Now, to answer the next question: yes, this is problematic. In addition to importing Privateer's game state (that has hostile Kilrathi and bartender conversations with war news and so on) it also makes reference to the war, present tense, in the new dialogue--Terrell and Goodin talk about it, we fight a Kilrathi fleet commander, the plot revolves around a Kilrathi special operation and so on.

Now one argument was always that "one year later" isn't an exact figure--maybe Privateer takes place in early 2669 and Righteous Fire takes place 'almost' a year later. The problem with this is that the war ends in late September--which means that even if the events of Privateer all take place in early January (or if the 'one year later' is from the Privateer intro instead of the end) then 'one year later' could mean, with that understanding, no more than eight or nine months. Doesn't quite fit the letter or the intent of the law...

Star*Soldier, which is simply reusing an unpublished timeline update Origin created for a theoretical Wing Commander 4 manual in 1995, bludgeons the issue in an interesting way--it implies that *both* Privateer and Righteous Fire (dated 2669 and 2670) after the end of the war and that the war being fought may be against local Kilrathi raiders (note that it doesn't *state* this in the case of Privateer, it just places this entry after the surrender in the timeline). It also implies another possible-but-awkward assumption which has long been a fan theory: that Gemini Sector is so much of a frontier that news of the war wouldn't necessarily reach them in real time, like in 19th century worldwide conflicts on Earth ('reports filter in').

2669
The Terran Confederation assigns eighteen reserve marine units to civilian trade bases in Gemini Sector, where reports filter in concerning contraband activity. Gemini has long been a problem area for patrolling forces due to the large number of Kilrathi inhabitants and the localized Free Trade Agreement. The move sparks unrest among the Merchant’s Guild after over half the trading force relocates across enemy lines. Military officials step up patrols along the Kilrathi lines as attacks on civilian merchant ships reach an all time high. A team of sociologists and archeologists en route to Gemini Sector are captured and vid-transmissions of their torture beamed back to Sol. News leaks out to the general public, who become outraged and demand reprisals on Kilrathi P.O.W.s. The four men aboard had been undertaking the dangerous trek to investigate rumors of a Steltek alien “Rosetta” stone believed to contain valuable information about uncharted sectors.

2670
Mordecai Jones, leader of the Church of Man temple, is exposed as having headed up an attack on a Terran super-weapon tested in a nearby sector. The church, which vehemently preaches antitechnology measures, denies responsibility for the attack, which was led by several squadrons of Kilrathi ships. All 25 technical assistance crew members that were working on the weapon’s components were killed when three squadrons of Kilrathi fighters ambushed the light fleet. Six months later, Jones is reported as missing by his Retro church followers, and his temple is bombarded. Following his death, TCN officials inspect the remnants of Base Gaea and find detailed accounts of over 35 attacks on orbital guns and scientific research outposts.

(By the by, I love how this was written (not by me!) as what the galaxy saw happening during Privateer rather than exactly what Brownhair did... which touches on his personal story to the degree that anyone else might have known it but mostly adds a big picture never saw.)

Now, that out of the way (?):

Although Privateer-as-published takes place in 2669, I would bet a fine quality hat that at some earlier point it was to take place in 2670. In addition to the reference in the timeline linked to above, 2670 was also used in some ad copy for the game (I have a one-page UK magazine ad at home that uses it in the action description) *and* it actually appears in the manual. On the 'Options Screen' page: "Weapons in 2670 do not fire hard ammo so much as..."

Which brings us to an even more interesting topic of discussion--the truly fascinating question isn't so much when games take place (we have comprehensive, canonical timelines today) but when we *knew* they took place then.

To the best of my knowledge the *only* games that include an internal date are Wing Commander I, Wing Commander II, Privateer (and Privateer 2, however hidden). For all the importance we fans put on the fictional year, the majority of the games were created without stopping to consider them. In many cases the year is added at the very end of the project in the manual (Armada, Wing Commander III, Wing Commander Prophecy) or up to several years later by some other tie-in product (Wing Commander IV, Wing Commander Academy).

Isn't that amazing to think about--Wing Commander III was made with no specific plan that 2669 was the year the Kilrathi war ended. The decision that the game would 'start' in the same year as Privateer wouldn't have been made until late 1994 when Victory Streak was put together and the fact that that was also when it ended wasn't official until the Kilrathi Saga calendar three years later!

Take a look at this precious oddity, extracted from Wing Commander III's inner guts: https://www.wcnews.com/articles/art52.shtml These ship specifications were likely going to be displayed on the selection screen at some point in the game... but look at the years! The Excalibur doesn't even enter service until 2676. (Aside: "Kelly Chance Todd" is an GREAT name for an aerospace designer; very Lockheed Skunk Works). All of which is to say that no one had any idea that the war wouldn't be going on in 2669 and 2670 when Privateer and Righteous Fire were created in 1992-1993.

Some other stray thoughts:

- Wing Commander II's dates are really ramrodded by later material. The oft-forgotten ingame text starts it at 2665.110, *exactly* eleven years after Wing Commander I, which more or less matches up with the time skips in the introduction. Kilrathi Saga decides the game ends in 2667, though, which means it takes place over the course of two years... which sure doesn't feel right.

- The only novel that was ever written with a date in mind was Action Stations (...okay, and the movie books) and that was only because it was expanding on an existing date. End Run and Fleet Action were all 'relational'--happening after certain games and before others. This became a huge problem in False Colors which wanted to be both five years after Fleet Action *and* before Wing Commander IV... and without an expanded WC3-forward bible decided that Fleet Action was in 2666 and that the war ended in 2671 (I managed to fix the references to the war's end, but I didn't have the actual manuscript to edit... and so we wound up with odd dialogue where characters say years have passed when it's only been a matter of months).

- Wing Commander IV has always been extremely shy in terms of dates. It used to be a vehement debate in the community when it happened, usually falling between 2672 and 2673 since all we would have were quotes like "a few years ago" in the novelization. I don't think it was ever even cleared up official (... until S*S!): the Wing Commander Prophecy Official Guide mentions 2672... but, more solidly, Origin's WCIV PSX website had a 'hidden' email from Captain Eisen dated 2673. I remember Chris Reid and I arguing quite seriously about this at the Worlds of Origin chat board back in 1996, the first time we'd ever met.

- I don't think there's an official date for Wing Commander Academy (the game) to this day.

- Wing Commander Academy the show is another weird one--similar to Privateer it's another case of "obviously they meant..." but said something else in printed material. When the show started out development the plan was to retell Secret Missions 2 with the cast of Wing Commander III. A lot of that changed (Flint became Archer, Cobra became Payback, Ralgha became Gharal... other characters stayed the same but the relationship is never mentioned--Hyena is still Vagabond's brother) and the story was changed to a different year's Sivar ceremony. Never the less, the original blurb about it being set in 2655 appeared in various places... then it also went too far the other way, listing 2653 as the date in some places so that we would know it was a 'prequel' to Wing Commander I!

- The Wing Commander movie material has a frustrating typo (yes, along with Towlyn, Tiger Claw and so forth) that makes a lot of promo material give the date as 2564 instead of 2654. It appears in the weirdest places... including, very briefly, in "Paladin's letter" at the official website. In one of my very very very small victories in 1999 I remember managing to bluff the site's webmaster into thinking that I was someone working on the movie who needed the correction made immediately.
 
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I remember Kahl quoting himself as 'commander of the sixth fleet', which is why I didn't outright say the Kilrathi were just raiders outside of their mainstream military.

- Wing Commander II's dates are really ramrodded by later material. The oft-forgotten ingame text starts it at 2665.110, *exactly* eleven years after Wing Commander I, which more or less matches up with the time skips in the introduction. Kilrathi Saga decides the game ends in 2667, though, which means it takes place over the course of two years... which sure doesn't feel right.
I remember I used to record in my own personal files that WC2 took place at around 2665/2666 because of that, but I eventually conceded 2667 after becoming a regular here.

In one of my very very very small victories in 1999 I remember managing to bluff the site's webmaster into thinking that I was someone working on the movie who needed the correction made immediately.
Heh, that's awesome.
 
That's interesting and certainly in line with my impression that WC was always weird with its time periodes. On the one hand, there are incredibly long gaps - especially the 10 years between WC1 and 2 but also the 2 years WC2 is said to take, on the other hand a lot of events take place in a very small time window, especially the years 2667-2669.
 
It also implies another possible-but-awkward assumption which has long been a fan theory: that Gemini Sector is so much of a frontier that news of the war wouldn't necessarily reach them in real time, like in 19th century worldwide conflicts on Earth ('reports filter in').

Hmmm, I think as you say it's an 'awkward' evaluation of events. I'm sure for some it's "good enough" to help rationalise the conflicting dates, but it's not the kind of theory you can really give any credence to all things considered. If you think of the references to communications between the Tiger's Claw and high command during SM1 (while the famous Bengal was deep behind enemy lines in unknown space) -- then surely somebody at Sol HQ would think to inform Perry Naval Base the war is over :)

Isn't that amazing to think about--Wing Commander III was made with no specific plan that 2669

I didn't know that, but that is amazing! The timing choices could have changed everything, Blair would have been seven years older if the destruction of Kilrah was in 2676, I wonder how much life he'd have left for WC4 and Prophecy.
 
That's interesting and certainly in line with my impression that WC was always weird with its time periodes. On the one hand, there are incredibly long gaps - especially the 10 years between WC1 and 2 but also the 2 years WC2 is said to take, on the other hand a lot of events take place in a very small time window, especially the years 2667-2669.
Well, this does seem kinda realistic - in history, if you look at any lengthy conflict, you'll find that there were usually some fairly long periods when there was a lot less happening. Both WWI and WWIII had time periods where two sides essentially faced each other across the line - combat didn't stop, bombing even intensified, but there weren't any major operations that would show up in a chronicle as short as the one we see in WC game manuals.
 
Except that there was stuff happening - the Second (and possibly even, the First) Enigma Campaign take place between 2654-64, and the timeline since Voices of War has always been emphatic that Enigma was the primary theater of conflict during that period. The Privateer manual (and then Captain Johnny's map) even help throw this a bone, first by mentioning that Gemini hasn't seen really serious combat for several years, and then by placing it way on the Confederation's other flank.

I guess it's a matter of perspective - the manual is trying to address the war from a grand strategic viewpoint, but also include events that players are familiar with, without introducing too much new stuff (with Repleetah as the big exception - maybe the 1994 authors felt the same way about the 'lost decade'). It is a stalemate war - using the First World War as a baseline, the battles of the middle period, say, 1916, that stick in people's minds are Verdun, the Somme; but then there were also lots of other things going on during the same time, which might not have the same dubious "glamour" and name recognition, but were probably just as critical in being (and if you take either Verdun or the Somme, you're really talking about campaigns rather than "battles"; parts of them can be cut down into smaller parts and so forth until you deal with units that have recognizable human beings). This is just looking at one year, 1916. In Europe, and not even all or even half of it, but several very narrow slivers of a border.

And of course, Wing Commander involves hundreds, if not thousands, of worlds, and battles raging over sectors consisting of dozens of entire solar systems.

I think that, given all that, "there was fierce fighting in Enigma" more than suffices for the period. And we actually do get more than that; both K'ththrak Mang and Olympus Station are mentioned as key points in the fighting. Maybe, because of all the attention lavished on the Tiger's Claw in the previous page, and the plot of Wing Commander II (and because, well, she was our ship) we see the former entry as mainly about her going down, but there must have been a lot more to it than that. The battles for K'ththrak Mang and Olympus Station sound like stories worth telling.
 
I remember I used to record in my own personal files that WC2 took place at around 2665/2666 because of that, but I eventually conceded 2667 after becoming a regular here.

I can tell you exactly what happened, too. The 1994 version of the series bible gave dates to each Wing Commander II mission but started the game in 2666 instead of 2665. They either forgot the in-game "2665.110" text or intentionally ignored it in favor of jiving the better known "ten years later" with the (retroactive) decision to have the Tiger's Claw destroyed in 2656.

... then the Kilrathi Saga calendar referred to the bible to add a few Wing Commander II dates. They (luckily?) didn't pick the early missions, but did select Spirit's death in 2666 and the end of the game in 2667... which gave us a completely unintended additional year between Gwynedd and Heaven's Gate.

Heh, that's awesome.

The Wing Commander movie website is an interesting story, all told!

Digital Anvil initially brought Dan Finkelstein, who was running a Wing Commander movie news site, in to create the film's official site. They flew him down to Austin, had him record some ADR (you can hear him in the movie) provided some materials and so forth. He went back home and created a truly awesome site--a pretend Tiger Claw computer system where you access different files to learn about the movie's universe (I wrote some copy for it--lots of material about the Kilrathi.)

For whatever reason--either because it was too high concept or because they knew the Handbook was in the pipeline--Digital Anvil nixed that proposal and Dan instead created a "fancy" Wing Commander movie site (1998 fancy--mouseovers, splash graphics, etc.) For reasons that I do not understand they hated it and opted to go with an incredibly simple affair from their internal webmaster instead for wcmovie.com. Dan reused the splashy site in an unfortunate remodel of his own movie site after the film came out...

Anyway, the one saving grace of wcmovie.com was the goofy in-continuity letter from Paladin, which is what I referred to earlier (here it is, archived with us: https://www.wcnews.com/articles/sofiction/paladinletter.htm). As I said, the date was originally transverse... I e-mailed and asked them to change it and then I tried to get Dan to do it. Dan, disappointed by what had happened to his site, gave me the password for Digital Anvil's FTP and I went in and changed it myself... only to see it changed back over and over as they would reupload the whole site from their server when a tiny change was made.

So I ended up calling the guy who replaced Dan at Digital Anvil and heavily implying that I was someone from FOX who needed this change made permanent immediately. I think my bluff included telling him to check some particular made up time stamp in their workprint of the film to see the correct date used... which luckily he didn't or couldn't do, so he just changed the date.

So ends another lost tale of Wing Commander continuity black ops adventure.

Hmmm, I think as you say it's an 'awkward' evaluation of events. I'm sure for some it's "good enough" to help rationalise the conflicting dates, but it's not the kind of theory you can really give any credence to all things considered. If you think of the references to communications between the Tiger's Claw and high command during SM1 (while the famous Bengal was deep behind enemy lines in unknown space) -- then surely somebody at Sol HQ would think to inform Perry Naval Base the war is over

Oddly, long range communication in the Wing Commander universe something Chris Roberts in particular seems to have thought a lot about. There was a big concern that Wing Commander IV start building some of the less interesting 'backbone' of the Wing Commander world in order to flesh it out and this was one of the first things chosen. There was a whole concept built around how information would go through jump buoys and particular types of stations and all this would make it travel at a particular speed... and they started adding those things to the game itself (there's that mission early on in WC4 where you stop to visit a relay station under construction--now that the war is over, Confed is building a communications infrastructure). The WCIV novel also mentions how Nephele is off the beaten path and so that news comes on tape via courier instead of via burst signal.

I like the idea of a distant frontier that's weeks or months from the heart of the Confederation and I think there was a lot of that in Gemini's DNA... but in an amalgamated Wing Commander universe where the great frontier ends up directly adjacent to Sol it's a tough story to maintain.

FTL communication does exist in the Wing Commander universe and we see it a bunch in the novels... but it is not some universal device. It requires sophisticated hardware that seems to limit its existence to warships and facilities on planets that are so rare as to be one per important world (McAuliffe, home to a major Confederation shipyard, had *one* burst facility). It also seems to send very short... bursts... of information--a set of words rather than an encoded hologram (and, it's not a person-to-person call--anyone anywhere seems to be able to pick them up).

... but that all comes after Privateer, darn it. :)

I didn't know that, but that is amazing! The timing choices could have changed everything, Blair would have been seven years older if the destruction of Kilrah was in 2676, I wonder how much life he'd have left for WC4 and Prophecy.

Of course, the Wing Commander III manual already pushed his age down somewhat (he's 32 there, somehow).

Here's another timeline oddity: have any of you ever read through the earlier Wing Commander movie scripts? The first draft includes the concept from 'The Forever War' where the pilots who travel to the front are doing so at FTL speeds and so are leaving their time period on Earth behind... so when they return a year later their time then decades will have passed. That was (wisely?) cut out of later drafts... except it *somehow* managed to survive in one conversation all the way to the finished movie. In the 'sex' scene Maniac and Rosie talk about how they know from the 'briefing' that everyone they ever knew will be "dead and buried" by the time they return home. It turns into really strange dialogue without the context!

Except that there was stuff happening - the Second (and possibly even, the First) Enigma Campaign take place between 2654-64, and the timeline since Voices of War has always been emphatic that Enigma was the primary theater of conflict during that period.

We had a big discussion about what the two Enigma campaigns are the other day. My best guess is that they must refer to the two attempts to take K'Tithrak Mang rather than anything we haven't heard of. (The THird Enigma Campaign has to happen after End Run).
 
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We had a big discussion about what the two Enigma campaigns are the other day. My best guess is that they must refer to the two attempts to take K'Tithrak Mang rather than anything we haven't heard of. (The THird Enigma Campaign has to happen after End Run).

Linking into the WCPedia pages for reference....here's what we were able to compile so far about the events. Most of this is gained from Fleet Action which provides names for the campaigns.

First Enigma Campaign

Second Enigma

Third Enigma
 
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Well, this does seem kinda realistic - in history, if you look at any lengthy conflict, you'll find that there were usually some fairly long periods when there was a lot less happening. Both WWI and WWIII had time periods where two sides essentially faced each other across the line - combat didn't stop, bombing even intensified, but there weren't any major operations that would show up in a chronicle as short as the one we see in WC game manuals.

Thay may be true but I was more thinking of the perspective of the player / fan. I ask myself: would it have hurt the story to have Blair be just five years with the ISS? Then WC2 could have ended in 2660 and WC3 would take 9 years later, with lots of room to have Armada, Privateer and the novels take place and thus being more easy to accept the accompanying changes in every product. But of course, as we now know, they didn't thought the timeline to be that important. :)
 
Just a thought on that: the length of Blair's assignment on Gwynedd was supposed to highlight how awful it is for the player's character, I think. Five years is maybe, possibly, somewhat not-too-bad, but ten years?! That's a long time, especially if you're playing this as a teenager - it's more than half your lifetime.
 
Of course, I can imagine that. It just always truck me as odd that the took the freedom to let such a long time period pass between WC 1 and 2 and then most of the other games (and novel stories) took place in a very short time period.
 
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