Since everyone is now an expert on space patches I thought it might be fun to share a thread of the prop ones made for Wing Commander! This first one is used on all of the uniforms in Wing Commander III:
It’s called the ‘combined forces’ emblem because it was worn during the war by all branches of the Confederation military: marines, army, space navy and, yes, space force. It also had a blink-and-you-miss it cameo in the Wing Commander movie!
Wing Commander IV updates this to the post-war ‘Unified Space Command’ patch. They also designed new patches for the Union of Border Worlds and the Black Lance which appear as loyalties shift!
Wing Comnander Prophecy continues to use the USC patch and adds these unit emblems for the Midway’s fighter wings. These only appear on the leather bomber jackets that are occasionally worn between missions.
Three unit patches (Tiger Claw, Concordia and Pegasus) and a general Confed star show up in the movie. The physical props are printed on a thin martial that’s more like those worn by the Apollo astronauts on the moon than standard embroidered military patches.
There was also a tradition of awarding the game developers unit patches for the projects they worked on. The Privateer 2 patch was also sold to the public in deluxe editions of the game.
Not quite patches but also great, the movie had nose art designed for each character’s fighter. (Bossman’s Rapier used the wing logo.)
The Confederation Handbook also has a few fun emblems inspired by the movie patches:
The CCG has squadron logos for 80 different human and Kilrathi squadrons. Too many to share here but you can find every card scanned at ccg.jetlag.us
The ‘team shirt’ for the CCG has one and it adds a bit of cool lore, too (a marine unit?!) I own this one because it was left over after Mark Hamill didn’t want to wear it at Gencon in 1996!
The Wing Commander Academy (game) team got a cool emblem shirt too... designed by the late, great Paul Steed. Finding one of these is one of my big collecting grails!
The other Wing Commander Academy has shoulder patches too but there’s no visible detail. Easy cosplay option though!
That’s it for Wing Commander patches! Shout out to this book for making me OBSESSED with real space patches as a kid.
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