Star*Soldier Gloss: Inside Cover

This is the Star*Soldier gloss for the Arrow Eclipse advertisement:

CONCEPT: Here's the car advertisement! All of the 'features' listed at the top are the in-game systems for the Arrow Eclipse. I wish I could say it was original: it was stolen outright from my favorite magazine advertisement of all time, which was a pretend car advertisement for Wing Commander IV PSX's Dragon fighter. The placement comes from a youth spent reading Air & Space Magazine - which always had the especially glossy car or watch advertisements on the first page.

REFERENCES-

• I believe the background is public domain Hubble imagery. Is there anything it can't do? I later read that Chris Roberts and company went out of their way to avoid Hubble backgrounds in the Wing Commander movie - d'oh!
• "8GJ Meson Blaster" - the Meson Blaster was a gun which was introduced in Privateer and then went on to show up in several other games. 8 gigajoules was the power requirement from Privateer and also a slight dig at the fact that later games list the (presumably) outrageously incorrect 'nJ' (nanojoules) for their power usage statistics.
• "Vampire HS Missiles" - the Vampire Missile was a weapon which, prior to Arena, appeared exclusively in the 3DO port of Wing Commander III (where it replaced the Leech.) Vampires sucked holes in your target's shields rather than disabling him outright.
• "Arrow V Eclipse" - hoo, boy! For some reason the writers of the Kilrathi Saga manual decided to replace references to the Hellcat V with the Arrow when they put together an updated version of Victory Streak... but they forgot to replace the 'V.' Thus the Arrow's full name officially became the 'Arrow V' among especially anal fans. To his credit, Producer Sean Penney even asked if the ship should be called the Arrow V in the game itself. I thought about it for a moment and said no, it was too obscure a reference.
• "first of its kind" - note the careful wording here! The 2701 model is the first one to offer a *Kilrathi* cloaking device *and* Vampire missiles. This is because we see the first 'Arrow Eclipse' in Wing Commander IV, complete with some sort of cloaking device.
• "Douglas Aerospace" - the fact that Douglas Aerospace was the company responsible for the Arrow comes from the Wing Commander III Warbirds poster. It was then (and is now) a reference to former Origin artist Chris Douglas, who was responsible for much of the look and feel of several Wing Commander titles (it doesn't hurt that it sounds like McDonnell Douglas, either!)
• Douglas Aerospace Logo - the concept here was that the logo comes from an image of an airplane propeller, like various automotive companies have today. It's a unique take on that idea, I think!
• "leather optional" - this is a reference to the Wing Commander IV PSX advertisement mentioned above, which claims that the Lance features 'genuine Kilrathi leather interiors.' Does that mean...?
• Cockpit and Seat Screenshots - I needed to sneak a real Wing Commander cockpit into this material somewhere and this seemed like a reasonably inoffensive place. Like most things in this booklet it's just a kind nod to longtime fans who were angry about a lack of first-person perspective in Arena. These two are screenshots grabbed from Wing Commander Armada (there's no seat picture in WC3!)
• "2654" - the year the original Wing Commander takes place and also the first year we see an Arrow, in the "Red and Blue" episode of Wing Commander Academy (which caused no small amount of controversy, at the time.)
• "Mario Brito" - referenced as being 'Terra's greatest designer.' This is a tribute to one of the most impressive figures in the Wing Commander fan community today. Mr. Brito (aka "HCl") has dissected just about every Wing Commander game ever and built some long dreamt of applications around them (multiplayer in Wing Commander Prophecy, a movie player, etc.)
• "Parsecs Beyond" - this corporate slogan is a new addition, but it's also a slight reference to the Vega Sector map included in the original Claw Marks. It's one of the few instances where Wing Commander uses parsec instead of light year as a measure of distance.