Star*Soldier Gloss: Page 34

This is the Star*Soldier gloss for the Paktahn page:

CONCEPT: Yet another late-in-the-game filler page! The basic idea here was to better explain how the rollout and private ownership of space fighters in Wing Commander Arena worked. Are they newly built or actual war surplus? Who is flying them? And so forth.

REFERENCES-

• "Fighter and Pilot" - Obviously a parody of Car and Driver. We switched the colored bars around, for good measure.
• "2701 Paktahn Mauler" - The idea of giving fighters model numbers similar to modern cars comes from Privateer, which (in 2669) gives you the 2670 Galaxy transport.
• "P. Deshaies" - PopsiclePete, from the Standoff mod project.
• "Hornet" - Light fighter from the original Wing Commander.
• "unskilled kids who want to blast their way..." - An accurate prediction of the type of person who actually DID end up picking bombers in Arena!
• "torpedo planes" - Love that!
• "drove Geoff Tolwyn mad" - Refers to the destruction of the Behemoth in Wing Commander III.
• "holographic viewscope" - An attempt to quantify the 'virtual cockpit' mode.
• "Merlin computer" - The talking computer from the Wing Commander movie.
• "tail holster" - First appears in Freedom Flight!
• "noxious green nutrient gas system" - The Wing Commander movie material explains that the green gas that obscures how crummy the movie Kilrathi look is a 'nutrient gas' that helps them stay battle ready. Personally, I think someone just took the green-and-black VDUs in the earlier games too seriously.
• "fur loss" - Hah hah hah. This is part of my original charge for movie references - explain what's going on and make fun of the whole debate.
• "Her forward armament" - Not (necessarily) a mistake. My basic idea was that the author (before I'd named him after a fan!) was kind of an insensitive idiot - and so he was either intentionally or unconsciously using the wrong gender for Kilrathi ships.
• "efficient tachyon cannons" - Refers to the fact that the Tachyons in Privateer were far-and-away the most effective weapons in terms of damagee-per-energy.
• "Paw DF pods... five rockets" - Why do the ships in Arena have so many missiles? Well, gameplay... so here I'm trying to suggest that they're more akin to the rocket pods in Prophecy than they are the large missiles in earlier games.
• "Eight Lances" - The torpedo class from Wing Commander III.
• "Epee" - Light fighter from Wing Commander II (to parallell the Hornet reference at the start of the article).
• "DataZig" - PDA mentioned in the Kilrathi Saga manual.
• "Quine" - The PDA from Privateer.