After Action Report: Battlestar Galactica

Greetings WingNuts,

The Wing Commander movie club has returned from the Twelve Colonies and we're here to report that Battlestar Galactica remains fairly impressive! It can't hold up to Star Wars in terms of narrative or world building but boy do those special effects come close. It's obvious that it's a TV pilot turned into a movie but everything is still pretty satisfying… although we probably spend a little bit too much time on the casino planet.

And Battlestar Galactica's reputation as a major source of inspiration for the early Wing Commander games is well deserved. From Ferrets and Dralthi to Hunter and the Tiger's Claw, it's all in there to some degree or another. We'll start with the takeoff scene that Denis Loubet has noted as an inspiration for the one in the original Wing Commander. We've got both the red-tinted 'closing the cockpit' scene and a launch tube that shoots the Viper out of the car…battlestar. The forward angle in the tube is also pretty close to the version seen in Super Wing Commander!

Landings are also very similar to those in the original Wing Commander and a couple of the later games. The fighters land in a bay to the rear of the ship rather than the same place they took off. In Wing Commander I that bay is front and center but it moves around in other designs in later games; Armada's Lexington (and the Super Wing Commander's Tiger's Claw) has recovery on the sides of the ship and Prophecy's Midway has the same traffic pattern as Galactica with two rear-facing recovery bays!

The pilot uniforms look pretty familiar, too–brown outer shirts with tan underneath is a close match for the original game.

And Hunter surely acquired his cigar habit from Starbuck, who is seen with one throughout the movie. Wing Commander even stole his name–the Japanese MegaCD port of Wing Commander I uses it as your default callsign to cover the necessary audio recording (the US version uses "Hotshot").

Even the silver-armored Kilrathi from Wing Commander I are a pretty close match for the Cylons.

... and the blue-tinted cockpit shots have a very similar vibe to Wing Commander's greenscale comm messages!

Now let's look at the ships! The dogfights are all straight out of Wing Commander and all of the interiors are very familiar. Here are some of the Viper interiors:

Wing Commander II's Ferret is another clear nod to Battlestar's Vipers:

And the fearsome Cylon Raiders are just Dralthi with a little chunk taken out of the front!

Galactica's warbook looks like a pretty close match for Joan's Fighting Spacecraft… with a pretty familiar style of VDU art!

We even get one sequence (repeated multiple times) that must have been the basis for WIng Commander I's opening 'chase shot' of Dralthi flying towards the camera as they break formation.

As noted above, the Tiger's Claw is functionally similar to the Battlestars.

One sequence that's repeated is a Cylon Raider 'strafing' a Battlestar. Super Wing Commander adapts this pretty closely for the first midgame which shows Kilrathi fighters attacking a carrier (the confusingly named TCS Exeter).

The Confederation starbase in Wing Commander II heavily references the Cylon basestars.

And you can even see the functionality of the Drayman/Diligent in the external cargo boxes on the famous Colonial movers ship!

Finally, Grandpa Mac's old Tarsus bears a striking resemblance to the colonial shuttle seen several times in the film,