Hellcat-V Designation?

capi3101

Admiral
Hey all.

Can anybody get me a high-res image of Rachel and Blair's first conversation in the Flight Control Room of TCS Victory prior to the first Orsini mission in WC3? I'm specifically looking for something high res on the Hellcat's picture while Rachel's talking about it being "prepped, prime, locked, loaded and ready to kick some ass". More specifically, I want to read what's in the lower left-hand side of the screen --- from the lower-res images available to me, it looks like it says "F-144D Hellcat V / Space Superiority Fighter", but I'd like to confirm that's what it says.
 
Unfortunately no high res version exists and it's just illegible. I've seen people swear it says ten different things...
 
The F-144 designation also seems unlikely given that the Excalibur, Lance, and all of the WCP fighters are in the low 100s. Having the number F-144 would require that it be a very old series number from before the last time that the series numbers were restarted from zero.
 
The F-144 designation also seems unlikely given that the Excalibur, Lance, and all of the WCP fighters are in the low 100s. Having the number F-144 would require that it be a very old series number from before the last time that the series numbers were restarted from zero.

Agreed. Unlike real militaries, the Wing Commander universe was always good about keeping the fighter numbers in order.
 
Unfortunately no high res version exists and it's just illegible. I've seen people swear it says ten different things...

Damn.

The F-144 designation also seems unlikely given that the Excalibur, Lance, and all of the WCP fighters are in the low 100s. Having the number F-144 would require that it be a very old series number from before the last time that the series numbers were restarted from zero.

See, I was thinking that too. I suppose it could be "F-44", but that designation is already taken up by the Rapier-II. That and I swear there's a little line there that looks like the number one.

Thanks, anyway y'all. Might have to fire up the game itself and see if it's any clearer then.
 
On the 1:18 mark of my YouTube video at
, it does seem to say space superiority fighter. The loadout screen shows heat-seekers and friend-or-foe for the missiles. I have no idea if the video can be enhanced or not with another program or a special screen shot recorder.
 
I think we can safely say we are flying a D variant...I think an O variant would be a little ridiculous.

It might actually be F-14D but the those numbers are so messy, it could be something else entirely. Hmm... I think there is a dash between the numbers and the D.

I have to admit, I am curious what other people have said it looked like. Might be something in common between them.
 
Oh no, please not that one again!
That discussion happens roughly once a year (and I bet some years ago it was more often, when WC3 was "new"), and that text is so badly readable that it could say "F - MlP" (for My little Pony) for all we know. If we didn't know that was an F in front of it, even that would not be decipherable, it might as well be a P

In former times I tended to agree with a D being the last letter, but since I learned what pixel combinations can be created by interpolation of letters and numbers during my studies I changed my opinion. That "D" structure may be a "3","B","0","O" even a "6" or an "8" although it doesn't look like that at first glance.
And the pixels before that? There are dozens of combinations that could fit to that pixel structure, especially the more dense characters can look really weird and very differently if you interpolate and stretch them.

I'd be really happy to to have the "real" designation one day. Until then I think I personally won't mind if anybody makes up something for a piece of fan art as long as it doesn't collide with anything canonical. Some people use "F-86" and I can live with that, the only problem I could see with that would be if the fighters in the animated series are Hellcats. I like to think they are Wildcats, though, so no problem here. After all the real-world Wildcat and Hellcat fighters did look a bit alike too.
And this does look a bit different than the WC3 Hellcat after all.
https://cdn.wcnews.com/newershots/full/wcatv-hellcat.jpg

If you want to do it the painful way, here are some threads about fighter designations (note how we discuss about almost the same things in 2007 :D ...and also note how easily a flame war is started. Read at your own risk ) :
https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/confederation-spacecraft-designations.21486/
https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/fighter-introduction-dates.20537/
https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/fighter-designations.20778/
https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/minor-inconsistency.14831/
 
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Hmmm...
I just couldn't resist and took another look at that. I captured a few screens from the video and used a 2D program to play with contrast, sharpness and such things.
I'm pretty sure the second line does not say "space superiority fighter" but "space superiority/interceptor", I'm not sure about the "space" part, it is barely readable, but it sounds plausible, it has the right number of characters and I'm pretty sure the second one is a "P" and it ends on "CE" .

The rest is barely readyble, but I see some single letters that make sense. Not enough for the words though, I fear.
 
Its interesting that the most ubiquitous Confed fighter of WC3 and WC4 doesn't have a numeral designation. Every other Confederation fighter we've ever seen in-game has a numeric designation.
 
Not every fighter - for example, none of the WC1 ships had designations originally, and neither did all of the WC2 ships, or any of the Armada ships. Most of those designations were only added retrospectively in Arena's Star*Soldier. That having been said, it is a little peculiar that we know all the other WC3 designations straight from that game, but the Hellcat's was somehow omitted.
 
@Quarto: Yeah that is indeed strange.

@all
I wanted to post a screenshot of my enhanced versions but actually no single file shows clearly what I wanted to show. I can only see it while moving the contrast / brightness slider around. Don't ask me why, I guess it has something to do with how human eyes work...
But you can see it yourself if you just make some screenshots in youtube, open them in a 2D program like Gimp, Photoshop or Paint.NET and move the sliders around.

Unfortunately as I said before there isn't much to see.
This is what I think I read:

F - ??? HELLCAT V
SPACE SUPERIORITY/INTERCEPTOR
AVG ??? - YA ???
A???(?)? ???????

(I know that doen't make too much sense :D )

I'm not sure about the G and the Y in the third line and in the fourth I can almost read nothing. Some of them may actually be numbers.
I give up and return to my previous statement: I can't read it. Also I guess someone more skilled than I has done this before. If there were something to read we would know it already.
 
huh, well looks like we would have had a designation in Arena if this https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/25/arena-s-lost-lore had gone through.

One of the flavor texts has the following:


Dralthi (Rhino)

The Dralthi Rhino is a 'jack of all trades' medium fighter following in the grand tradition of the F-42 Hellcat and the F2M Vindicator. Unlike these 'master of none' examples, however, the Rhino is an efficient killing machine capable of expertly performing a wide variety of mission roles. Its deadly combination of Tachyon and Plasma guns give it a hard-hitting edge over the heavy shields of enemy capital ships and the light armor of maneuverable opponents.

Of course it isn't canon, but I guess if you have to have a number, this is better than most.
 
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huh, well looks like we would have had a designation in Arena if this https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/25/arena-s-lost-lore had gone through.
Funny, I never noticed that before. But you know what? These contain something far cooler than just the F-42 designation for the Hellcat. Look at those WWII-style US Navy designations for all the Border Worlds fighters!

There isn't really much logic to having the Border Worlds use that system of designations - but it would have been an awesome way of differentiating them from Confed. When we finally make that patch for UE (and I am working on it... honest!), you can bet we'll adjust all our made-up BW designations to match this!

And yeah, I would definitely go with the F-42 designation for the Hellcat (of course, with the caveat that it's still unofficial and subject to change). This stuff was written by the same people who wrote the Star*Soldier manual, and they put a lot of thought into this stuff.
 
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Possibly yes, but at the time of the WC4, these designations would probably have been valid considering they had a very spit and clue navy at the time with mostly militia units and defector Confed pilots and crews providing the craft. Certainly creating a new set of designations would have been at the bottom of the list of priorities during the early years. In 2681, the numbers already so low, they probably would have kept the designations.
 
Possibly yes, but at the time of the WC4, these designations would probably have been valid considering they had a very spit and clue navy at the time with mostly militia units and defector Confed pilots and crews providing the craft. Certainly creating a new set of designations would have been at the bottom of the list of priorities during the early years. In 2681, the numbers already so low, they probably would have kept the designations.
Well, then again - if you think about it, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some, if not all of these ships would have been evaluated by Confed. Probably, even if they are post-war designs (and presumably, not all of them are: Vagabond implies the Border Worlds militias existed already during the war), they would have had Confed designations, in much the same way that Northrop's F-5 Tiger and F-20 Tigershark had US designations in spite of not being used by the US Air Force or Navy.

What this means is that if nobody had time to think of new designations, then most likely they continued using Confed designations, and they chose to adapt this new system at some point later, when they actually had time to think about things like this.

It's not an altogether crazy system. the US Navy used it for decades, and would most likely still be using it today if the DoD didn't decide to unify the Navy and Air Force systems. The Russians still use a similar system where all planes labelled only by the manufacturer name and number (not even a type designation), and I think that's also the case for more recent European combat aircraft (all three of them!). Ultimately, I guess any system is ok, as long as it is applied, ahem, systematically.

Either way, it's a cool thing to do, and it's really a pity none of this ended up in the material actually published.
 
It makes sense that, post-war the fact that these fighters would have had Confed designations doesn't mean that the Border Worlds would have used them; especially if Confed only tried the fighter out and didn't commission it for a production run. Separatist sentiment in the Border Worlds militia would probably have preferred F3V Banshee to YF-26 Banshee, as a way of asserting their independence.
 
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