WC4/WC5 Question?

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Drizzt Do Urden

Spaceman
I had a question that just popped into my mind. They said in WC5 that the black lance had been destroyed by the time you get to the Midway. But why didn't confed just keep the Dragon in their fighter fleet, it was the top of the line fighter carried torps had great guns, a clocking device and a nearly infinite supply of fuel. If Dragons had been on the Midway the could have launched them from two to three systems away to attack key Nephilum stations and Capships or to gather more info from different systems.
 
Who said that Confed didn't keep the Dragon? We saw the Excalibur fighter in SO (although it's non-flyable, and none of these seem to be on the Midway) perhaps there just weren't any dragons on the Midway, although they are still in use in some parts of the fleet?

Another possibility might be that the Dragon production facilities were destroyed in the time period that Confed was fighting the Black Lance.
 
It probably wasn't kept because the ship had a very bad reputation as a bad guy fighter. All the technology it had was assimilated and used in future confed designs.
 
By the time of WCP, there were ships that could do the Lance's job just as good or better, and for far cheaper than a wondertoy that doesn't exactly have the best of reputations, being a key part of a genocidal campaign involving biological warfare and all.
 
I believe that the Price Of Freedom novel also insinuates that the Black Lance / Conspiracy had been defeated - but since they were such an entrenched black operation, Confed may never find all of it.
 
Lt.Death100 said:
That seems that it would have made a cool expansion pack to WC4.
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They were supposed to be a faction in Privateer Online, If I'm remembering that right.
 
Except for the cloak and infinite afterburners, the Vampire is pretty much capable of everything that the Lance could do, is faster and more agile, is cheaper, and is a smaller target.
 
There was a thread about this not so long ago, on why the Dragon fighter never appeared after WC4.

Apart from the cost, the numbers and such (and being a model design of death), confed would'nt actually allow these uber-fighters being flown by their own pilots without knowing a few things about them first (like their strengths and weaknesses) and there are probably other reasons.
But there only use after the "Black Lance" incident was simply to study them, such as the technology used (i.e. matter-anti matter) and create new fighters that are equally better. See the Prophecy era ship for example; some of them can out-manoeuvre, out-run and out-gun the dragon and other WC4 ships.
 
Ijuin said:
Except for the cloak and infinite afterburners, the Vampire is pretty much capable of everything that the Lance could do.
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Didn't the Vampire have cloak capability in one of the WC:P missions that never got finished?
 
LeHah said:
Didn't the Vampire have cloak capability in one of the WC:P missions that never got finished?
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The Piranha did, in the first mission. We don't know if any other ships were supposed to have cloaks, particularly since the only reason the Piranha was supposed to have a cloak in the first mission was specifically to explain why you didn't use cloaking capabilities in the rest of the game.
 
It was a plot device that went unused in WC:P. I'm sure LOAF could expand upon it.
 
I am pretty sure the reason for that "explanation" bit in the first mission was because they intended to have a cloak "powerup" in MP mode, and they expected people would have inevitably said "why isn't there a cloak in the campaign too ?" So when the multiplayer part of the game was cut, it became unnecessary... especially since it seems that the graphic code necessary to implement the cloak has only been done in the Glide GL DLL; it saved the cost of coding GL stuff that would have been used only in one single mission and irrelevant to the rest of the game.
 
I seem to recall the cloak was on the list of things they didn't have time to implement. Instead, we got a similar explanation in the manual -- the Nephilim were shooting down cloaked Excaliburs without any difficulty.
 
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