Keep in mind though, WCM doesn't look like either design.
And there's the crux of the matter - that "arbitrary" I-don't-like-this-so-it-goes attitude. It's okey for the Tiger's Claw to look six different ways *before* the movie... but that seventh time, hoo-boy, now they're wrong and must be attacked. It's an absolutely unsupportable double (actually: septuple) standard.
The Rapier was never referred to as the Rapier II in WC-1. And generally when a fighter is brand new it is referred to by it's exact designation... no nickname's been added to it yet. For example the A-4D was the Skyhawk... however it was also nicknamed the Scooter. The F-105 Thunderchief was designated as such, but quickly it was designated the "Thud"... etc.
This isn't even true - it's something incredibly awkward and strange that you've made up in order to insist that there's a continuity error here. There's absolutely no gold standard for *how everyone in the world refers to something at a particular time*. It's easily the least quantifiable thing in the universe and you're acting like it's some kind of wonderful gold standard for argument.
(It's not only completely unquantifiable, it's abjectly false - the A-10 was the 'Warthog' before it was even in active service. And beyond even that, 'Rapier' isn't a nickname. It's just incredibly frustrating to imagine that someone thinks that argument could actually work this way.)
Considering she had the authority to push the wreckage of the damaged craft off the deck suggest significant authority. Like ship's CO authority, or Airwing Commander.
... except that she's neither of those things. She occupies the third tier on the carrier's chain of command, Squadron Commander (or maybe second, since Sansky had already been incapacitated at this point). She's also clearly the ranking officer on the flight deck at this point.
But I mean, seriously, what's the point of this? You can't possibly think back to this scene without realizing that it *immediately follows* a segment which makes clear Devereaux is commanding a single squadron (tasked with attacking the phoney ComCon) rather than the whole of the 'Claw's fighter complement (which is defending the ship). Why are you plugging your fingers in your ears and insisting otherwise? What's the benefit to pretending you don't understand even the movie's internal logic?
Uh, it does describe the McAuliffe engagement in 2634 which was later made into Action-Stations.
Actually, Wing Commander I doesn't ever mention the McAuliffe Ambush (despite visiting McAuliffe and engaging a Kilrathi battle group there) - it's only in Claw Marks. And we've already established why Claw Marks couldn't reference the movie...
WW-2 uniforms looked basically the same as now. 1939 to present basically. Just a small change to the hats (a metal rim in there) and a few pins (the Command at Sea badge worn on the right breast by ship commanders) different. Otherwise, they're the same uniforms.
The uniform may have been meant to look WW-2 like but it looked very cheesy to me.
The movie uniforms had a variety of influences - not all of them World War II. The more casual duty uniforms were taken right from the WW2-era silent service... but the formal naval jackets would have been more at home on the bridges of the Great White Fleet.
You know in all of WC-1, and the beginning of WC-2, they never seemed to have any problem naming the ship the Tiger's Claw, and calling it Tiger-Claw
I'm not following you here - this is exactly the point of the Star*Soldier explanation. You didn't respond to it in any fashion. Did you read it? If not, why not? Respond to the actual argument, not with some odd bit of vagary.
In WC-2 it was called the Rapier II... in WC-1 it was just called the Rapier. It would appear as if they were using the Navy idea of having a more advanced version of a fighter called miscellaneousfighter-II. For example prior to 1962, the F-8 was called the F-8U... the first of the series was called the F-8U-1, then the F-8U-2... they were still basically had the same airframe, the -2's nose was a little bit longer and better streamlined for supersonic flight, but otherwise, they're all Crusaders. (The exception would be the F-8U-3 Super Crusader, which was completely different in virtually every way, the structure was larger and composed largely out of titanium, the engines were different, the air intake, nose, and windscreen were shaped differently, the wings were modified etc...)
No... you're absolutely wrong here. A 'II' after the name in both USN and TCN nomenclature indicates an entirely new and unrelated airframe. The A-7 Corsair II is not a development of the F4U Corsair. The A-10 Thunderbolt II is not a development of the P-47 Thunderbolt. The F-35 Lightning II is not a development of the P-38 Lightning, etc., etc. In Wing Commander we see plenty of ships go through variants and retain the roman numeral just like the real system. Look all the different models of Thunderbolt VIIs, Hellcat Vs and Arrow Vs. Heck, there's an 'X' model Rapier II in Wing Commander Arena that's still the F-44X Rapier II.
(In fact, even your non-example is terrible: the specific practice of referring to the redesigns of the Crusader as 'Crusader II' and 'Crusader III' was actively discouraged by the Navy... because it didn't fit with their formal system for naming aircraft.)
Additionally, the CF-117 Rapier was never mentioned in Action Stations among the various fighters depicted of that earlier era.
The novel that you just insisted shouldn't be part of the canon?
I don't understand where you're getting this stuff - it's not a legitimate way of thinking about anything, ever. Repeat to yourself: not seeing a thing is not the same as a thing ceasing to exist. Close your eyes... you can't see your computer anymore! Do not panic... it still exists.
Not only is this a simple thought process that's necessary for dealing with everyday life, but it's *absolutely* necessary to understanding spacecraft history in Wing Commander. Each new game doesn't invent a new set of five to ten spaeccraft that were magically built in the course of sometimes only a few months... they bring out ships that we haven't seen before. (Made clear by the fact that each game frequently features one 'cutting edge' new design as a story element).
(In fact, Action Stations has three 'ship piles'... points in the book where several present-day ships are listed off in quick fashion and *never* described or mentioned again. Surprise, surprise - there's no overlap even within the confines of the novel. There's no overlap even when those piles are describing ships at the *Same base*!)
Have you ever seen footage of an aircaft-carrier's flight-deck? You see all sorts of planes all over the place, AWACS (E-2C), until recently the F-14, the F-18, etc... there are loads of different planes there which are quite visible.
I have seen the deck of the Tiger's Claw, which is what's being discussed here... and has never, ever seen more than one type of fighter on the flight deck at a time in Wing Commander I. What is your point here? It's okay to show only one class of fighter at a time in Wing Commander, The Secret Missions, Secret Missions 2, Super Wing Commander and Wing Commander Academy... but not in the movie? How can you believe that? Is your point that you want the film to be less like the game?
Plus, the novel is not the same as the movie. The novel was written after the movie and would have probably added details after the fact that were not in the movie. Also, anything cut out of the movie, would have been probably mentioned even though it was cut from the movie.
ARGH! Listen very carefully: if you do not know something, do not say it. You've just written this as though it were true... and it isn't. At all. I worked on (and am credited in) the novel. Like every movie novelization ever it was written before the movie was finished. Peter Telep was given a copy of the shooting script and (much later on) some still photographs from the shoot. This is one of the reasons the book is so interesting... because it's written using Wing Commander I, Claw Marks, the USG, etc. as reference points rather than the movie itself (which hadn't been made yet). This is all because it takes months to edit and publish a novel... so it has to be 'ready to go' *well* before a finished cut of a movie is done. The same is true of the game novelizations - they're written based on the games scripts and nothing else.
I would have to see a transcript of the dialogue from the SWC intro... However, since it was was part of a briefing in WC-1 after the beginning, it kind of is part of the game's plot after the beginning
What you just said doesn't make sense. It ignored three of the four points (well, technically all four - butit referenced one of them) I listed and came to a conclusion that is bizarre and unrelated to the topic at hand. So, I will repeat: the movie's inclusion of a Fralthi before the 'McLaren' dialogue in Wing Commander I is in no way unique to that story. Fralthi appear before that point at several times:
* They are listed in the April, 2654 Joan's Fighting Ships update (ie, in Claw Marks). This was printed months before the events of
* Paladin says "Approaching Fralthi target" in the Super Wing Commander intro flick. The scene takes place in the Enyo System (at the beginning of Wing Commander I). I don't know how the specific dialogue helps you, but there you go.
* Ralgha talks about having commanded the Ras Nik'hra for several years of the Vega Campaign in Freedom Flight. This is less than a year after the 'discovery' of the Fralthi.
* A pair of Fralthi are guarding a jump point in 'Expendable', an episode of Wing Commander Academy set earlier in 2654.
These are all points in the timeline where the Fralthi appears before the supposed discovery scene you referred to earlier. Where are we going with this? Exactly where the dialogue you didn't quote says - that the McLaren sighting refers to the new carrier conversion of the Fralthi and not the cruiser which has been in service for years... including in the movie.
Colonel Halcyon was the Ship's CO *AND* the WC? I was always under the impression that he was just the WC, and there was some other guy commanding the ship.
Halcyon commanded the Tiger's Claw during Operation Thor's Hammer, Tolwyn having left the ship shorty before. He mentions commanding the ship in The Secret Mission's dialogue (the character of Captain Thorn was created by Freedom Flight some years later).
As I said, the book is not the same as the movie.
It is, however, part of the same continuity - which is the point of all this. We're not debating whether or not it's a good movie (we would probably agree on that point). We're debating the value and the meaning of its impact on the overall continuity... and a huge amount of that value comes not from the movie itself but from the spinoff novels and the Confederation Handbook. The movie is just a small, small story that doesn't really introduce anything interesting or new.
Again... the book is not the same as the movie. Although obviously he is a combat pilot. Where he actually served other than a Cruiser and the Tiger's Claw is beyond me. Him being a Commodore doesn't mesh with the WC-1 game. He was just a Major/LCDR (Still a senior rank, but no commodore). Additionally if he *was* a Commodore, he would be equal to Tolwyn in the mid 2650 era.
I wouldn't say he was necessarily a Commodore in the sense that he rose through the ranks... but he was someone to whom Naval Intelligence specifically granted the broad power to order around line captains for this particular operation (which would be the classic definition of Commodore, wouldn't it?).
Expanding a story is one thing... completely re-writing it is another. That's the issue I have with the WC Movie.
The Wing Commander movie is not rewriting a story - it's telling a story which hadn't been told before (Blair and Maniac's arrival on the Tiger's Claw). It's quite clever... and clear... in this regard. They specifically chose a point to tell the story that hadn't been expanded upon. We've seen them given their orders
That would be a serious part of Terran history during the Kilrathi war -- the Kilrathi manage to destroy a base, and find a jumpline right to Earth (near Venus), forcing Confed to scramble at record speed destroying several vessels just from reactor malfunctions, and jump-mistakes, and just narrowly stopped them because a fighter jumped through and broadcased the jump-coordinates to the approaching battlefleet. That's not a little item a history...
I imagine that's why it's in Gunther's timeline, as of Star*Soldier (you're simplifying the story, though - they didn't *find* a jumpline in the sense that they could ever use it again... they went through Charybdis using the stolen Navcom and the lack of the Pegasus station - it's not something that could be repeated).
As I said... small additions of detail is one thing. Completely adding a MAJOR sneak-attack, ambush retroactively into the plot is another.
No, it isn't - you're just completely wrong on your face here. The tiny amount of background given by Claw Marks was created and presented in a manner *designed* for exactly this sort of addition. By limiting your history to a few even-numbered events you let future story writers add *exactly* this sort of story. It's *why* the first timeline was done in a piecemeal fashion. (And they began doing so immediately, with references to battles like Epsilon Prime in Wing Commander I.)
Yeah, it mentions a Kilrathi invasion... the WCM description would be a MAJOR story event -- not a little trivial piece of data!
Please don't ignore things in this fashion again. This was *somehow* in my response to pointing out that the Claw Marks timeline was a) not a timeline and b) written before the events of the movie. Your response takes neither of those things into account.
Well you're sort of right. But even afterwords, nobody seemed to mention something this major! This came an inch short of a full blown invasion-- it was a MAJOR story detail!
No one in Wing Commander I mentions the McAuliffe Ambush or the Enyo Engagement, despite fighting further battles in both of those specific systems.
Wing Commander Fleet Action which was a novel taking place in 2668, 14 years after WCM, and it didn't seem to mention anything about a serious ambush/sneak-attack battle like this. In fact FA seems to be one of the first time Kilrathi managed to make it all the way to Earth to my knowledge...
Except that's not a fact - it's something you made up in order to disagree with the movie. Don't do this!
Well, in Wing Commander the characters were VERY diverse. You had a black-guy from Africa (Khumalo), a guy from China (Chen), a Japanese (Spirit/Mariko Tanaka or vice versa), and a Belgian woman (Deveraux), a Scottish guy (Taggart), one guy from a Colony *OUTSIDE* the solar-system (Marshall), and two Americans (Blair, Halcyon)
Bossman wasn't Chinese, Paladin wasn't Scottish, Blair wasn't American and no background was ever established for Halcyon (Bossman was Taiwanese, Paladin was from Ares and Blair was from Nephele.)
Well technically I'm right and wrong. Technically Captain Picard was originally to be named Julian Picard (British) -- later on they re-named him Jean-Luc for more dramatic effect. However the actor still was and is British!
That's completely irrelevant to the point - you can't classify casting Stewart in TNG as a *mistake* because he's of a nationality other than his character (he is also not really a space captain).
The double-breasted uniforms did look navy-like, but the way the uniform was designed, partially the fabric made them look incredibly cheesy.
You're reaching for something that isn't there. There's no 'haha, it's a cheap b-movie' aspect to the Wing Commander movie's production - the production designer and the cinematographer were both extremely well respected (with at least one Oscar between them). You may not like the designs (but then if we've learned anything here it's that you protest too much), but it's certainly not cheap fabric.
I wasn't fond of the red-suits either.
Interestingly, it wasn't the first WC to have red flightsuits - they show up on the box art of the FM Towns port of Wing Commander I way back in 1992.
-- pretty much everybody on the forum disliked it. For a number of reasons! The acting was bad the SFX was bad, some aspects of the plot made little sense, and there were a number of technical points that were in conflict. 
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