Astronomically Fine Designs Painted on WC Ships

Here's another beautiful batch of micro-airbrushed miniature models by Astro Commander. Like the rest, these are full of intricate detail! Just check out the jaws on the Vampire, Kilrathi writing on the Jalthi, spotlights on the Tallahassee and crackling plasma weapon the Midway. They all have a cool engine glow and squadron markings as well. Astro's not stopping here either. There are more painted Nephilim and Kilrathi designs on the way, and soon we'll get a glimpse of some Confed capships from earlier in the series.

Fighters are fighter scale 30-40mm while the Midway is about 90mm long if I remember correctly.

Look Back at Eleven Years of Forum Milestones

The modern incarnation of the CIC Forums turns eleven years old today! While the Y2K bug left most of the world unharmed, it did a number on our ancient 20th Century message boards, which had to be rebuilt from scratch. We lost thousands of great threads about Secret Ops, Prophecy Gold, False Colors and the Wing Commander Movie, but the good news is that our posters have bounced back with nearly 25,000 new threads and more than 360,000 posts since.

Here's a brief history of major milestones over the last decade:

• January 3, 2000 - New boards created to fix Y2K incompatibility
• Late 2000 - We switched from Ultimate BulletinBoard to vBulletin and gave the forums their own domain at Crius.net as a tribute to Privateer 2. This also allowed us to deal with hosting limitations of the day and spawned SolSector.net.
• August 11, 2001 - Customizable color layouts first became available.
• July 4, 2002 - The Off Topic Forum first opened, which was a controversial decision at the time! The idea that communities would form around a particular thing and then might want to discuss other subjects was a relatively new concept. In the message board equivalents on the Internet of the 1990s, posting off topic material was frowned upon.
• February 2003 - We held a logo contest, and Filler's winning entry still graces the top of the boards.
• July 2004 - The new [Discuss] link provided people a jumping off point to talk about front page news posts in the new News Discussion Forum.
• August 11, 2005 - Years before your friends filled your Facebook inbox with annoying Farmville and Mafia Wars invites, the CIC Forums Arcade added mini games and scoreboards (which were quietly deactivated a couple years later).
• February/March 2007 - The Forums were upgraded to accept XBox Live Gamertag inputs, and the board for the upcoming Wing Commander Arena displayed XBox Live info right next to your name.
• June 9, 2007 - A Squadron feature was activated to allow people to form groups around their Crius.net identity. This feature was set up for Arena, and was also intended for Prophecy multiplayer matchups.
• January 4, 2009 - A Feedback Forum was set up to allow people to more easily provide site feedback and comments.
• August 29, 2010 - Our first mobile plugin made it easier to post from cell phones. There'll certainly be more to come on this in the future.