Keep Them Flying

For as long as I can remember I've been interested in the design of flags—or "vexillology", as the official term for it is—and being a Wingnut, I was naturally drawn to the Confederation flag. In particular the Confed star intrigued me; despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it originated as the Origin company logo, I believe it has a simple, bold grandeur that many real state emblems lack. After I looked into the matter, I discovered that no one had ever tried to produce accurate dimensions and guidelines for reproducing this gallant badge.

Now, I can be a real stickler for detail sometimes; this is one of those times. I became absolutely determined to reproduce the various Confed Stars as closely and as authentically as possible, since after all it is a prominent feature of both confirmed Confederation flags, and my eventual dream was to see them take their rightful place alongside those of other fictional universes at the website Flags of the World.

All things have to start somewhere, of course; I needed a starting reference, and I found mine in the Kilrathi Saga manual, as it covers the first three games and its version of the badge seems to be quite close if not identical to that used in WingIII and IV. The end result was this—a bare-bones vector drawn in Inkscape which is traced at the same size as the manual version but "loses" two of its outer bars when viewed in many programs due to them being white. Since I wanted to keep this file as a resource to people who wanted a star without hassle, I needed to present it in a way that made it more visible to people who just wanted a star.

I thought this over for a few days before I realized the answer was right in front of me—the big, blue flags seen in the background of the Price of Freedom epilogue. Unfortunately, since the physical version of these have yet to be found, I was unable to recreate them as accurately as I would have liked, and so the final proportions of the non-star elements are very much a matter of guesswork. The actual star is, however, as close to the original as I could make it, and because it's not transparent it's probably more useful for learning the proportions of the thing. Download Inkscape and look at it. You'll see what I mean.

As a final, triumphant aside, I pasted the flag into the canton of the Confederation Flag—the version seen in the opening of the movie and which has been interpreted multiple times by Klavs, Shaggy and myself. It is my third revision of the design, and stems from a recent viewing of the film when I realized that the top of the flag was incorrectly reproduced. It's not a definitive version, of course; the colors are conjectural compared to the original in the film, the top bars are still somewhat uncertain, the proportions are imprecise. Unless the original art used in the introduction is found, I doubt there ever will be a truly official version of this flag. It is, however, the best that I could make of it.

• Confederation Jack
• Confederation Star
• Confederation Flag