Kilrah Run This Week

This is the last week of Crius.net's community replay of Wing Commander 3! Wingnuts are gearing up now to infiltrate the Kilrah System and strike Kirah with the temblor bomb. Players will then get next week off before everyone jumps into Wing Commander 4. Lorien had this to say about the final mission.

Kilrah 3: Paladin's briefing is again very simple. I have a Cloaking Device and a T-Bomb that I'm to take to Kilrah and use to send them all to Hell.

The Kilrathi presence close to their homeworld is getting a lot heavier. Instead of the corvette pairs on patrol in the outer system, Vagabond and I encounter nothing but Destroyers. The first one is escorted by Paktahns and Dralthi. The fighters are easily taken care of, but Vagabond wanders into the path of too much of the Destroyer's fire and I'm forced to send him home and take care of the Destroyer myself. The next Destroyer is guarded by Dralthi and a cloaked contingent of Strakha. The Dralthi are taken care of easily, but the Strakha swarm in such numbers that I'm forced to turn around and kick them in the chops as they fire upon me. I hang back a second to let my shields recharge before diving in on the Destroyer's rear, which is covered only by laser turrets and not the heavy AMGs. The weaker rear armour also helps it go down quickly. I'm unable to take full advantage of this weakness with the last Destroyer. The Darkets escorting it swarmed in much the same way as the Strakha did at the last nav point and fortunately the tactic used against them worked just as well. The Destroyer captain, however, is very aggressive and maneuvers his ship around to constantly face my Excalibur and bring the heavy guns to bear. I'm forced to fly carefully, but eventually it goes down.

Next stop, Kilrah. I engage my cloaking device so that I can slip through the gigantic Kilrathi fleet in orbit but I disengage the cloak when a very tempting target presents itself. Thrakhath and Hobbes. Thrakhath is flying his personal Bloodfang while Hobbes is in a Thunderbolt. No doubt they've taken a guess at the pilot destroying random Destroyers in their system and Hobbes' Thunderbolt is a carefully calculated insult. I'm not one to pass up a slap in the face like that, however, and decide to play the Strakha game against him. From the cloak, I lock two IR missiles onto him and match speeds to Hobbes' rear. Disengaging the cloak, I open fire with a full barrage of guns and missiles. I doubt the traitor even knew what hit him, but I'm sure he knew who. Thrakhath and his escort of two Paktahns move to engage me and I decide to take out the Paktahns first to make it properly personal. Once they can no longer interfere, it's time to dance with Thrakhath. It's a disappointingly short dance, however. Thrakhah makes one pass that barely scores any hits on me before I fall onto his tail. The Bloodfang's shields and armour do it little good from behind and I finally rid the universe of Prince Thrakhath. With his debris field behind me, I dive towards the Kilrathi homeworld.

• Community Replay - General Discussion
• WC1 Week 1 - Enyo, McAuliffe, Gimle, Gateway, Cheng-du
• WC1 Week 2 - Brimstone, Dakota, Kurasawa, Rostov, Port Hedland, Hubble's Star
• WC1 Week 3 - Venice, Hell's Kitchen, Alternate Paths
• Secret Missions Week 1 - Goddard, Border Zone, Midgard
• Secret Missions Week 2 - Jotunheim, Bifrost
• Secret Missions Week 3 - Valgard, Vigrid
• SM2: Crusade Week 1 - Firekka
• SM2: Crusade Week 2 - Corsair, Near Firekka
• SM2: Crusade Week 3 - Corsair, Charon
• WC2 Week 1 - Gwenydd, Niven
• WC2 Week 2 - Niven, Ghorah Khar
• WC2 Week 3 - Novaya Kiev, Heaven's Gate
• WC2 Week 4 - Heaven's Gate, Tesla
• WC2 Week 5 - Enigma
• WC2 Week 6 - K'tithrak Mang
• SO1 Week 1 - Pembroke
• SO1 Week 2 - Rigel
• SO1 Week 3 - Ghorah Khar 1
• SO1 Week 4 - Ghorah Khar 2
• SO2 Week 1 - Canewdon 1
• SO2 Week 2 - Canewdon 2
• SO2 Week 3 - Canewdon 3
• SO2 Week 4 - Ayer's Rock
• WC3 Week 1 - Orsini
• WC3 Week 2 - Tamayo, Locanda
• WC3 Week 3 - Blackmane, Ariel/Delius
• WC3 Week 4 - Caliban, Torgo
• WC3 Week 5 - Loki, Alcor
• WC3 Week 6 - Freya, Hyperion
• WC3 Week 7 - Kilrah

Star*Soldier Gloss: Page 24

This is the Star*Soldier gloss for the sixth systems page:

CONCEPT: See the previous post!

REFERENCES-

• "S'thran-Pak" - An anonymous Kilrathi system from the Wing Commander Universe map. This is Arena's "duel" mode, which is a very cool map. I'm proud of not taking the easy way out here - it would have been very simple to write a story about an asteroid crater rather than working out Wing Commander's equivalent of pistol duels.
• "Murragh's Empire" - Murragh was the Kilrathi dissident seen in False Colors; plans for the sequel to that book would have had him entering the civil war to try and reclaim the Empire for himself (we'll talk about that later).
• "L5" - Lagrange Points are specific areas in star systems where you can build a space station without worrying that it would gravitate in any particular direction.
• "Charon System" - Arena's multi-purpose boneyard map! The Charon System was first seen in The Secret Missions, which I reference here as the Boneyard's origin.
• "channels and tunnels" - These are obviously present in the game, but there were actually more earlier in the development process - you can kind of see some of their entrance points at the center of the map, which you would have had to use special maneuvers to access.
• "Gotherian Crystals" - The special ops team from Action Stations (Tolwyn, Turner, Richards and Kruger) carried a load of Gotherian Crystals as their cover while investigating a frontier trading post. It's a great connection, since the map is chock fupp of crystals.
• "largest Kilrathi pleasure world" - Look at that population! 19 billion kils is a lot... my intent here was to show that Kilrathi planets could have a *lot* of cat meat on them, to help explain why their wartime casualties were so very high (per the Wing Commander Prophecy guide). Since the Kilrathi were the ones wiping out entire planets, it's odd that their casualties were three times those of Earth (unless we're counting post-war suicides... and we are).
• "Kiranka Overlay" - I wanted to use these to imply what three of the five factions in the Kilrathi Civil War were: Murragh's Empire, the Qarg Governorship and the Kiranka Overlay. The other two are found elsewhere in the manual, more directly stated - the Ki'ra and the Sihkag.
• "k'g'harg ceremony" - Sorry, you'll have to use your imagination. Nonetheless, isn't the idea of a Kilrathi pleasure planet being a significantly different cultural experience cool? The story writes itself...