After Action Report: Back to the Future

Everyone loves Back to the Future! And the Wing Commander movie club is largely a subset of everyone. I was personally not sure how I would feel after it was so over-exposed in mid-2010s geek culture... but you can't help but smile when you're actually watching it. It's so beautifully structured and ceaselessly entertaining, the run time feels like nothing at all. I'd go so far as to say it's a better movie on its own than with the rest of the trilogy that was added later.

Now let's talk Wing Commander! Here's the very last shot of the movie where the Delorean switches to flight mode and shoots off into the future... and the Privateer animation that it inspired. Note that this was originally not a come on for Back to the Future but a final joke to end the movie. Crazy what it has since become!

We also have a full resolution clip available here for future car wheel historians.

And here's the great Biff comparison. Tom Wilson may be the best actor in the movie and he's the only one close to believable as both a high school student and a middle aged man. To say Wing Commander was lucky to get him for Maniac would be an understatement!

In fact, young Biff even looks a bit like Matthew Lillard's Maniac!

We should also note that Back to the Future shows up in tenth place on Chris Roberts' 1991 list of favored action/adventure films! By the time movie club is over we will likely have seen most of these.

As promised, we are going to do a brief survey of time travel in the Wing Commander universe! The most significant mention of time travel is from Privateer 2 and it relates to the game's spectacular Nuke 'em bomb.

Nuke'em

This is a smart bomb. If you use this beast, all small ships in a specific local vecinity will be destroyed, as well as causing a lot of damage to larger ships.

The Nuke 'em causes 14,000 points of damage to every ship within 500 kilometers of your ship, effectively destroying anything near you including both friends or foes.

Nuke 'em Bomb

Ah, the Nuke 'em bomb — the greatest toy in the Tri-System. Sure, they're expensive, but the amount of indiscriminate damage they do would make the sourest Original Humanist giggle (inwardly, of course).

These bombs have a blast radius extending out to about the first ring from the center of your radar in long-range Celestial TSM mode (about 500 klicks). When you drop a Nuke 'em, all ships within the ring will be affected — except your own — and most (if not all) will be wiped out. The closer a ship is to the center of the blast, the more likely it is to be completely destroyed.

Once released, the bomb takes 5 seconds to prime before it detonates.

Purchase Price: 4,000
Max. Damage (points): 14,000
Blast Radius (klicks): 500

Nuke 'em bombs blow up everything within their blast radius. This include friendlies, wingman and fair maidens in distress. This is not a good option for escort or rescue missions, unless you can get your pals out of range before you drop.

... and it turns out it keeps YOUR ship safe by shooting it several seconds forward in time! The information about the time travel aspect comes from the original UK version of the manual.

This horrible device emits a blastwave from the vicinity of your ship powerful enough to annihilate everything in close proximity but the most resilient dreadnoughts. The damage is worse near the epicentre, dissipating outward. The device carries a small synchronic temporal warp generator which at the point of detonation throws you marginally forward in time after the blast, giving you escape from the carnage. However, it does not extend this benefit to any cargo ships or wingmen you may have in tow, who will encounter a particularly terminal, and bad, day. The Campaign for Real Time considered this weapon to be a breach of most time laws and lobbied against its legality, until one day, quite by accident, a rogue Nuke 'em landed on their offices during an annual general meeting.

The manual was famously reworked by Origin's creative services department for the US release and they stripped the time travel mention right out!

Emits a blast wave from the vicinity of your ship powerful enough to annihilate all but the largest ships within close proximity. Damage is worst near the epicenter, dissipating outward. Includes a small Synchronic Temporal Warp generator which protects your ship from the blast.

... but it did make it into the players' guide (the little CD-sized booklet everyone forgets about). They drop the joke but actually add a little more lore about how the STWs work... while also clarifying that they aren't currently powerful enough to do more than this. Party poopers!

Nuke 'em

This horrible device emits a blast wave from the vicinity of your ship powerful enough to annihilate almost everything within close proximity. Damage is worst near the epicenter, dissipating outward.

A Nuke 'em device carries a small Synchronic Temporal Warp (STW) generator, which throws you marginally forward in time at the moment of detonation. You reappear in the same place after the blast, protected from the carnage of the explosion in the immediate past. STW generators are currently neither powerful nor sophisticated enough to protect any cargo ships or wingmen, however. Point your Nuke 'em away from your travelling companions, and make sure they are far enough away to survive.

Privateer 2 also has a second brief mention of time travel. The company database entry for Crius Net has a Douglas Adams-inspired story about how the company's 420 year old founder has recently purchased a "DEDFLASH space/time cruiser" which can look into the future and refuse to fly you somewhere you might be endangered or bored.

NAME: Crius Net
OWNER: Vrootle Pigfididrin
EMPLOYEES: 4712
LOCATION: Anticinedes Heights, Neo-Cabillus
BUSINESS: TeleCommunications
BACKGROUND: Starting out as a sandwich ordering service in the adolescent dawn of Crius' astonishing economic evolution, the Crius Net now connects all aspects of commerce, communication and entertainment across the planet. Its founder, Vrootle Pigfididrin recently made history after his fifth brain relocation transplant operation brought him up to the grand old age of 420 years. Speaking from his private penthouse complex at the Avalon Convalescence Dimension of Zib, Pigfididrin was quoted as saying "I feel like a new man, and a new woman too for that matter". Solicitors acting for his 212th wife Serefina Mucholusholise say that they intend to include Pigfididrin's new DEDFLASH space/time cruiser in their claim for alimony settlement. The revolutionary new craft has computational power so powerful that it sees into your planned journey's future and decides whether you are likely to enjoy it or not. If danger, trouble or boredom are detected, it simply refuses to take you. Pigfididrin is rumoured to have blown a small star system on acquiring the ship. <255>

Finally, we came close to having one more major appearance of time travel in the Wing Commander universe: the plot for Loose Cannon's Privateer 3: Retribution used a Steltek time machine as the story's McGuffin. General Drakas, a renegade Kilrathi, searches the galaxy for the machine so he can resurrect Kilrah… and of course it's up to your privateer to stop him. You can read the script for the sadly cancelled project here.