How many Vesuvius class carriers were built?

DaveO

DaveO

Rear Admiral
I know at least two or three with Prophecy: Secret Ops showing one getting destroyed by the Nephilim.
 
We see four:

  • TCS Vesuvius, the class ship (CV-01 in the game, CV-70 in the novel);
  • TCS Mount St. Helens, CV-02 in game, CV-71 in novel, with an extra Mount added for good measure, apparently after some concern over naming a ship after a Christian saint;
  • TCS William Eisen, CV-74 from Star★Soldier and the ship that assists the Midway in Prophecy (the full name comes from S★S; in Prophecy she was always called TCS Eisen);
  • TCS McKinley, which is one of the ships in the Secret Ops episode intros. (The Saint Helens is the one that gets blown up).

Only Vesuvius, St. Helens and McKinley are posively identified as Vesuviuses - Eisen is *meant* to be one (and the liner notes for S★S indicate that the details were meant as a tribute to the CIC hat, which clearly depicts the carrier in silhouette); but there's nothing absolutely concrete. I believe the idea was to have her show up in Prophecy, but the model was one of the things that got axed during production.

John Guentzel ("Captain Johnny" here), an Origin staffer and the lead on Secret Ops, put together a list of seven Vesuviuses (he did the same with the Midways - TCS Port Broughton from Arena / S★S is lifted directly from it):

  • TCS Vesuvius
  • TCS Mt. St. Helens
  • TCS McKinley
  • TCS Fuji
  • TCS Kilauea
  • TCS Rainier
  • TCS Eisen
 
Bob McDob said:
John Guentzel ("Captain Johnny" here), an Origin staffer and the lead on Secret Ops, put together a list of seven Vesuviuses (he did the same with the Midways - TCS Port Broughton from Arena / S★S is lifted directly from it):

  • TCS Vesuvius
  • TCS Mt. St. Helens
  • TCS McKinley
  • TCS Fuji
  • TCS Kilauea
  • TCS Rainier
  • TCS Eisen
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There's more than that. The Krakatoa was on Johnny's list and made it into Star Soldier as such.

I was going to make the point that we needed to get these into the WCPedia, but they're all already there! https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Vesuvius-Class_Heavy_Carrier

DaveO said:
I know at least two or three with Prophecy: Secret Ops showing one getting destroyed by the Nephilim.
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Is "how many" really the question you're asking? It's the question that always comes up on the internet, and it's not really answerable. The answer is always going to be "here's what we know about the few named ships, and any future production will expand what we know." Occasionally they'll drop a throwaway line like "ten Midways" into an instruction manual, and then the next manual will tantalize people with comments like "the first ten Midways" or "Block II Midway production." So you're never going to get a final number - just strands of information on the specific ships we know about.
 
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ChrisReid said:
There's more than that. The Krakatoa was on Johnny's list and made it into Star Soldier as such.
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Yeah, I could have sworn that there were more, but I looked all over for the Vesuvius ship list (I even swallowed my dignity and looked at SpaceBattles, where LOAF posted it half a dozen times in 2001-2) and for the life of me, I can't find the Krakatoa anywhere. It's not on the old Wing Commander Ship List either (which I guess is unsurprising, given that other unpublished ships like the Port Broughton or Jutland aren't either.)
 
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Thanks at least for the known ship names. I should have worded my question better since the names of the carriers fits better with what I wanted to know.
 
I think it was to suggest that there were other Vesuvii (or things that sound like Vesuvii) rather than to tribute those, ah, weirdos.
 
Heh, this sort of thing makes me sad I haven't been part of the Wing Commander community longer.
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It still seems incredibly recent to me.

Ten years or so ago there were somehow two separate Black Lance fan/RPG clubs that fought with each other... for some reason. I can't really imagine how several dozen people came through Wing Commander IV thinking boy, the Black Lance is really great.

(Wing Commander IV's producer used to joke that they could make back some of their money by selling the forty-odd Black Lance uniforms they had made for the shoot to some kind of neo-Nazi club... and that's what a 'Black Lance club' always reminded me of.)

One of the groups, blance.org (now dead), was just a bunch of jerks who wanted to argue with people. The people who did blacklance.org (still alive, but not updated since 2003) were very nice and always kind to us.... but probably insane. They helped host some of our big files back in the early days and we paid them back by giving them free hosting later... but apparently the founder lost interest and decided to use the webspace to host a pirated copy of Sierra's "Red Baron 2" for some flight sim club. We told her to knock it off, deleted the file and she just went and put it back as if we couldn't see the traffic.
 
There's some clever shooting to make the player think there are more than 40 people in the scene where Blair lands at the Black Lance base. I hope it's not too much of a sidetrack to ask a best guess on how many of those uniforms are still around.
 
Few if any. EA stored the Wing Commander props for a while but ultimately auctioned them off and trashed what wasn't wanted.

It's very rare to see Wing Commander props available because there just wasn't an interest in preserving most of it, especially the stuff that was specific to WC. You'll find guns and such occasionally because they were bought by people doing other scifi shows for set dressing... but the only uniforms kept were the ones taken by Origin guys.
 
Dyret said:
Heh, this sort of thing makes me sad I haven't been part of the Wing Commander community longer.
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It has certainly been an interesting ride. WC4 did produce quite a few "weirdo" clubs and some very strange storylines within the WC Aces club but also brought in a lot of fans to the CIC and the other WC sites.
 
It has certainly been an interesting ride. WC4 did produce quite a few "weirdo" clubs and some very strange storylines within the WC Aces club but also brought in a lot of fans to the CIC and the other WC sites.
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Wing Commander 4 didn't make the Ace's Club weird, it just illuminated the fact that it was already bizarre. :) (I said, ramming the TCS Victory into a "Sivarnaught".)
 
Bandit LOAF said:
It still seems incredibly recent to me.

Ten years or so ago there were somehow two separate Black Lance fan/RPG clubs that fought with each other... for some reason. I can't really imagine how several dozen people came through Wing Commander IV thinking boy, the Black Lance is really great.

(Wing Commander IV's producer used to joke that they could make back some of their money by selling the forty-odd Black Lance uniforms they had made for the shoot to some kind of neo-Nazi club... and that's what a 'Black Lance club' always reminded me of.)

One of the groups, blance.org (now dead), was just a bunch of jerks who wanted to argue with people. The people who did blacklance.org (still alive, but not updated since 2003) were very nice and always kind to us.... but probably insane. They helped host some of our big files back in the early days and we paid them back by giving them free hosting later... but apparently the founder lost interest and decided to use the webspace to host a pirated copy of Sierra's "Red Baron 2" for some flight sim club. We told her to knock it off, deleted the file and she just went and put it back as if we couldn't see the traffic.
Click to expand...

Dundradal said:
It has certainly been an interesting ride. WC4 did produce quite a few "weirdo" clubs and some very strange storylines within the WC Aces club but also brought in a lot of fans to the CIC and the other WC sites.
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Hey, thanks for the story. :)

The idea of the Wing Commander community being some big dynamic entity with weirdo special clubs for people with... special interests and assorted craziness seems incredibly cool to me. Maybe we'll see something like that happen again with the release of a new game.
 
There is also something about the way the show works. It ultimately a tight, self contained four season story about the crew and occupants of Babylon 5 and after that... not even the show knew what to do with itself... and there really isn't a lot left of what made B5 awesome in the first place. G'Kar and Franklin are gone, Sheridan has a boring job now, Babylon 5 itself lost all it's interesting characters and exploded, and so on. I'm sure there are still awesome stories to be told in the universe, but until then, there really isn't a lot more to be said. Babylon 5 has told it's story.
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I know we're told now that season 5 was so slow because big parts of the story had been crushed into Season 4 because the show wasn't expected to survive... but there's stuff that's *missing*. We spent years building up (and Babylon 5 was never subtle about... anything) the fact that there was going to be a war with the telepaths and that we were going to reach this crisis point with Londo somewhere down the line with the neck-sucking brain monsters... and those stories just never happened.

Honestly, it has to be a behind-the-scenes thing. There's this unilateral change between the syndicated episodes and the TNT stuff that feels just like the jump between the first two Matrix movies or the early episodes of TNG where Gene Roddenberry was actually running the show. They must have dropped whichever producer was keeping the show together in favor of the guy who had his name on it and now believed the hype.

I don't think any cult science fiction show has ever been given as sweet a deal as Babylon 5 was by TNT--here's the money and the press upfront and you can make 22 episodes of your show AND five movies AND a spinoff. Then they spent half the season treading water (not just treading water--actively pissing people off fetishizing new characters) and then spent the movie money (which they KEPT GETTING?!) on backdoor pilots that went nowhere because they were the same unimpressive engine over and over.

Seriously--Thirdspace, A Call to Arms, Crusade, Legend of the Rangers: a mysterious new threat emerges and only a cast of new characters plus one or two familiar ones can stop it! JMS clearly likes that idea and that idea alone. It's unpleasant to existing fans because it's some entirely new concept they don't care about (what about the mysterious *OLD* threats?!) and it's unnecessary to new viewers because... well, better shows with production values exist.

Why not keep making Babylon 5? You could easily sell people on the idea that this was a *second* five year arc we were going into... but you'd keep the valuable IP going instead of doing something weird and unrecognizable (you could even rename it in some recognizable way, like Bioshock Infinite). Failing that, though, do a much smaller spinoff. The original show built this massive universe everyone *wanted* to see... and no one did anything with it. Lets see Garibaldi go be a space wild west sheriff or something.
 
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