Lost Mech Discovered in Wing Commander III! (September 11, 2024)

[Bandit LOAF]

AD recently found something interesting while exploring Wing Commander III: a pair of unused, untextured models of mechs! They're labeled STMECH1 and STMECH2 and it's not at all clear what they were intended for. Could they have been additional targets for the ground battles? Or weapons loaders that could've appeared on human or Kilrathi capital ship interiors? We also checked Bioforge (1995) and Prowler (cancelled, 1996) and while the art style is understandably similar, they aren't the same mech designs from Origin's contemporary games.





The second Wing Commander novel, End Run, had already established that Confederation marines use 'walkers' during their planetary assaults, though this was almost certainly just a case of author William Forstchen referencing The Empire Strikes Back.

He pulled up to a hundred meters above the plateau and swept over it. Mongol and Chamberlain were lower down, weaving S-turns back and forth, waiting for targets to crop up. In the dust and confusion, he saw the grunts clambering out of their ships, racing through the wreckage, ground fighting vehicles pouring out the forward hatches, hovering up, and then skimming away. The heavy weapons landers touched down, disgorging their massive “walkers” which could traverse any terrain and earned as much armaments as a light corvette. There was a flurry of laser rifle fire, more secondary explosions, one of the landing craft, now serving as a medevac, already taking off and heading back out to space.

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Original update published on September 11, 2024

 

[AD]

I have to credit HCl here for this discovery actually. We looked at these back when we were working on the original WCNews ship viewer, but because these meshes were untextured I didn't really have a way to screenshot them or convert them to anything before.

Anyway, now with Alltinker's originator it's a lot easier to grab screenshots so he's the second hero in this story.