Star*Soldier Gloss: Page 6

This is the Star*Soldier gloss for the second Joan's page:

CONCEPT: I didn't have much (if any) control over the specifications - most of them come directly from the game. I had some leeway with the length and mass, but since they're classic Wing Commander fighters... not much. Note the increasing mass as the ships become 'fatter' (more armored) - that's something the game's Producer remembered to include. I will admit that even though this was a 'virtual' manual, it suffers from the same problem as the Origin booklets did: since I couldn't play the game regularly during its final balancing and since the development team was so busy with more important things the specifications aren't always exactly right. The ship images are all from Arena screenshots -- with all sorts of bits of text and background photoshopped out!

Coming up with material here was actually something of a challenge. I wrote 'flavor' blurbs for these ships about four times - once for the game, once for the manual, once for a gaming site article and once for the EA Arcade site (most weren't used). I insisted on trying to include a different 'fact' each time, which is harder than it sounds. (I will also refer everyone who insists that Joan's doesn't have text descriptions to the Terran Confederation Handbook.)

REFERENCES-

"F-27" - This is probably the first piece of Wing Commander history I ever created. I helped develop some of the in-game flavor text and was asked for a designation for the Arrow to make it look like the other two Confederation ships (which already had F-44 and A-17). I came up with F-27 on the spot, leaving it early enough to predate most of the '2660s' Confederationf ighters. I will note that I also vetoed using movie-based 'KF-XXX' designations for the Kilrathi ships. The especially anal details should be reserved for manuals, not the part of the game everyone has to play.

Joan's Logo (Upper Left) - Looks like we didn't make them all orange. It does seem pretty close to the 'real thing'.

"Arrow V," "Douglas Aerospace" - See my notes on the inside cover for this history.

"last half century" - Refers to the Arrow's appearance in the pilot episode of Wing Commander Academy.

"Orbital Racing Competitions" - This was an 'expand the game' reference. My distant hope was that someone would pick it up and start racing fighters in Arena maps. As far as I know, no one has done this.

"CAG" - A slight reference to CAG Drake from Prophecy. Generally an acknowledgement of the term, which is less popular than 'Wing Commander'.

"Captured Kilrathi Technology," "Black Ops ship" - I happened to hear someone at Gaia explain how they wanted to suggest that the Arrow Eclipse was built with stolen Kilrathi technology by giving it a cloaking device and Kilrathi missiles (which is absolutely an awesome level of thought to put into the game on their part). I personally wanted to tie it to the cloaking Arrows in Wing Commander IV, but I had to make sure I respected that backstory as well.

"deployment of early model guardians" - This is another explanation for an 'annoying movie complaint'; obviously, the appearance of a "skipper missile" at the film's climax. For the record, I do realize that this makes absolutely no sense. "Arrow Guardian did it" can be Wing Commander's equivalent of "Wizard did it".