Are you an ejection seat fellow or a space pod person? Per our recent conversation on the CIC Discord, here's a quick walk through Wing Commander ejection seats starting with Wing Commander I's guy in a leather jacket and jeans with a 2001 spacesuit backpack:
Wing Commander II keeps the outfit but has a modern ejection seat... and a cool silver version for the Kilrathi!
Privateer's take on the same idea; looks a bit like NASA's MMU. You can't actually eject in Privateer but certain enemies will... and when you tractor them in they become slaves that you can sell.
Wing Commander III has polygonal ejection pods for both humans and Kilrathi. And they're... pretty thicc!
And if you've ever shot a Kilrathi pod you've probably seen it fly off screen in a crazy direction. It actually explodes into three gorey pieces in the process but they flash by too quickly to readily notice:
There's a gross human destroyed seat model, too!
Wing Commander IV drops the exposed suit concept for a hard body ejection pod (despite using many of the same spacecraft models).
And Wing Commander Prophecy gives us something like the shuttle rescue balls from the 80s!
Super Wing Commander has a blink-and-you-miss it ejection mesh that seems to be a pod that comes out of your destroyed ship.
And Privateer 2 has... this! There's no way (or point to) ejecting yourself but you rescue these things all the time.
Wing Commander Academy has these Confederation ejection pods, which seem to be single person, two people (seen when a Broadsword has a pilot and co-pilot) and then a capital ship lifeboat.
The Kilrathi have a basic design with maybe some slight differences. That's the Dralthi, Grikath and then the one from the dreadnaught (which has two seats side by side instead of one).
The movie has Angel eject in what's basically the top part of her Rapier.
Last, but not least, there are a number of great ejection seats pictured in the Wing Commander card game. From both the Terran and Kilrathi perspective, we get the actual moment of ejection, capture of an enemy pilot and recovery of a friendly. Both sides geat a "seat" rather than a pod.
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