Hmm... well, the question remains - do we know anything at all about what was meant to be in SO3?
I don't think there was ever a solid plot. My understanding is that the original idea (in 1992) was to develop Wing Commander III immediately along the same lines as WC1 and 2... to have it done on a ~twelve month development cycle (so, a Chritmas 1993 release).
Under that plan Special Operations 3 would have been a 'bridge' story written by the team that scripted Wing Commander III - essentially the same thing as Secret Missions 2 (which was written by Guon and Beeman to introduce WC2's storylines). WC3 quickly became a very different project with a long-term development plan and SO3 disappeared.
(Selling an addon to a 1991 release in mid-1994 probably wouldn't have been financially viable... and Wing Commander III ended up being written by outside contractors... and it obviously wanted to avoid being directly assosciated with the different art/storytelling style/etc. of WC2. Instead Wing Commander Armada was done as the 'bridge' game.)
(...or the second Priv addon, for that matter)
I've also seen quite a few Privateer 3D models that may have been part of this - a torpedo, an EMP missile, a Strakha, etc... or maybe they were just things left out of Privateer. I don't know how much (if any) development was done on the second Privateer addon ("Secret Operations", I think), but it's possible that the storyline was what appears in the 1995 series bible after Righteous Fire. It talks about marines quelling riots in Gemini or somesuch and has been reprinted in Star*Soldier.
Yes. The lore is that Blair is short for BLuehAIR which in turn was how people refered to the player character before he had a name (though there were apparently a few suggested names put forth by the team making the games quite early on).
Yes, the many names of Christopher Blair.
We've recently found (in a copy of Point of Origin) that 'Blair' was used as a last name as early as 1991, in the wake of Wing Commander II. An internal article refers to him as "Arturo Blair" (for 'Our Hero Bluehair'). The name first shows up in the canon in the 1992 novel Freedom Flight in a brief cameo.
He was named 'Carl Lafong' in "Wing Commander I & II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide", apparently the result of a memo sent to everyone at Origin asking for a name. The name is from a running joke in the WC (zorp!) Fields movie "It's a Gift", where characters are constantly looking for Carl Lafong (who never appears).
Several console ports give the character a name (or just callsign) to avoid having to rewrite all the in-game dialogue to remove the personalizations (like they did for Privateer). In the SegaCD version he's just called "Hotshot" and in Super Wing Commander he's "Maverick" Armstrong (certainly named after the first man on the moon).
Early character sketches for Wing Commander III have the character labeled "Roberts" instead of Blair.
The 'mouth script' for Wing Commander I is programmed to say 'dipstick' whenever the character's name is mentioned.
Blair's callsign in the WC2-era bible was said to be "Falcon" and then changed to "Phoenix" as he rises again in Wing Commander 2. This is referenced once in continuity, in End Run... which mentions Phoenix and his wingmate saving the Concordia. They eventually chose Chris Roberts' callsign, Maverick, for the character... and it first appears (other than in SWC) in the Wing Commander III novelization.
How very charming! Is that part of the lore or a fact?