The SCOUT is OUT!

Caliban System, 2669; second mission. Captain Eisen has ordered you to clear every single nav point to prevent the Kilrathi from reporting the Victory's jump point. You battle through two nav points of fierce fighters and then find… four capital ships, unescorted? There's a light destroyed, two corvettes and a…

… it's a transport? No, it's a… "scout"? The existence of the scout has long been recognized but to the best of my knowledge no one had really looked into /why/ it was there. So I did… and learned some interesting things in the process, including a pretty significant change to something we had previously thought about the making of the game!

Wing Commander III famously shipped on time… but to make this happen the developers had to cut some broken features rather than spend time to get them working. A number of these changes were related to an item attachment bug which caused issues in some cases when models were supposed to be connected to a ship. This resulted in a number of otherwise completed ships and vehicles being dropped from the game at the eleventh hour. The team removed the intended Kilrathi transport, the Confederation frigate, the Kilrathi missile tank and others because they couldn't be made to work correctly with the time allowed.

Some small item attachments DID work, however, and I started my investigation by looking at one. Kilrathi carriers have lines of blank fighters on their deck, the Victory has little trucks and barrels and the Clarkson-class transports in Wing Commander III carry a variety of cargo pods along their triangular superstructure. This allows for a total of up to ten cargo pods on any given transport: three along each side of the triangle plus a fourth pod in the extra space at the front on top. First, I studied the internal filenames and models to identify each type of container:

Next, I decided to chart out the possible transport configurations. I learned that there are three different configurations seen in Wing Commander III: fully laden with a variety of containers in every slot, partially loaded with only four containers in the forward slots and then completely empty. Here are all three configurations:

Further organizing, I found eighteen different transports in Wing Commander III missions. Almost half of them are from the losing Blackmane series and two appear in the simulator. Interestingly, the only time we see the fully laden variant is in Orsini A4 (the Skipper mission) and in the sim. The others are all the partial configuration except for the booby-trapped ones, which are empty (a sign of danger!). Additional fact: the first transport you escort in Orsini A3 is labeled 'cargo' instead of 'transport'.

Aside: Wait what? Booby-trapped? It's easy to miss: in either version of the Blackmane series you come across a pair of transports to escort home only to find that they explode and damage your ship when you approach them to link up (followed by an attack from decloaking Strakha). These transports were captured by the Kilrathi and then set to explode to ambush you. How was the audience supposed to know this? It isn't mentioned anywhere in the final PC game; instead, the warning about these transports came in a TNC news segment that was cut late for space.

This is Barbara Miles with another TNC InfoBurst. Reports have surfaced that captured Confederation transports and freighters have been used by the enemy as decoys, luring in unsuspecting fighter pilots who are then ambushed by the enemy.

This demonstrates an issue with Wing Commander III's design that speaks to all of this: as it was not possible to rework the briefing and debriefing scenes ones they were shot, planners had to be as generic as possible to allow mission designers to adapt to the ordinary challenges that come up between an initial implementation and release. It becomes increasingly difficult to have missions where, say, Captain Eisen tells you you're going to encounter a particular fighter or Rollins congratulates you for sinking a carrier because the film shoot happened before any of that could've been built, much less playtested. Occasionally, this works the other way around, where a briefing or debriefing seems to indicate the game intended you to have done something that never happened. And that's where this sort of Wing Commander archaeology begins!

The attach bug actually carries over to Wing Commander IV where they decided to simply not include any cargo containers on the Clarkson… which neuters the feel of the early escort missions just a little bit!

Wing Commander IV does do some additional development of the transport, though. In the introduction we see a high res cinematic model of the Clarkson configured as the Amadeus, a medical transport. The 'rungs' each have two inhabitable modules filled with civilians (briefly).

There's no in-game Amadeus model other than the damaged hulk you discover early in the game. But you can see here that instead of attaching a separate set of boxes they've simply created a single model of the transport and the cargo together. The same thing occurs with the Peleus jammer which uses a Clarkson base and attaches weird evil antennae to it.

Wing Commander IV does have an abandoned Clarkson cargo pod in its files, though! This set of military pods was intended to be applied to the transport in order to serve as a marine troopship. It would've been present around the Lexington in the Tyr series as the home of the troops used to seize the ground installations (or, for Playstation fans, the three identical space labs).

And here's an interesting bit of Amadeus-related archaeology. A prototype of the 'attached habitation pods' are actually visible in a rendering included in the 1995 Wing Commander card game. This art was done by Origin and likely represents the state of the cinematic quality model between Wing Commander III and IV. So you're essentially looking at the Amadeus for the introduction as she took shape! If you zoom in to the scan you can even read the ship's registration number, TCV 147-52, something not present in the WC3 art.

This all brings us to the Kilrathi "triangle transport" which was famously cut from the game because of the attachment bugs. For many years, the accepted story has been that there were two freighters designed for Wing Commander III: one triangular transport and one boxy one connected with a series of latticeworks. The triangular transport was later named Dukara in Star Soldier and the multipart ship was named the Sha'kar, both in honor of transports specced out for Privateer Online. Both transports are present in the games' files but only the Sha'kar ever appears in the original PC version of the game.

The story went that the Dukara was intended to be the game's transport and the Sha'kar was designed specifically as a tanker for the Torgo series Behemoth refueling mission. Because of the attachment error, the Dukara was replaced in both roles by the Sha'kar (mirroring, interestingly, Wing Commander 1 and 2 which both began with two Kilrathi freighters each and cut one for disk space).

One of the biggest pieces of evidence for this has been that that's how the 3DO port, which had more time to fix bugs and add features, presents the transports. The Dukara is resurrected and the Sha'kar is limited to a single appearance in the refueling mission.

But it turns out, that isn't what was intended for the Sha'kar at all! The attachment bug did, indeed, create this situation but the Sha'kar was never meant to be a transport. To learn more, I organized the game's unused Kilrathi container options. There are a total of seven. Four of them mirror their Confederation counterparts and the others are a pair of more unique shapes and one special fuel pod. As intended, these would have appeared down the side of the Dukaras with variation depending on the mission… including the tanker mission, which would've used the longer fuel tanks on the chart.

So if the Kilrathi transport and tanker were intended to be the same Dukara triangle transport then what was the Sha'kar designed for? The answer will shock you unless you read the title of this article and/or the introduction: it was originally meant to be a SCOUT! The idea was that the Scout Frigate was an especially unusual Kilrathi ship that is so incredibly rare that it seems to the player to be an incredibly special encounter. It's a fascinating piece of worldbuilding and game design that was unfortunately totally lost to the maelstrom in the final release… despite the fact that the scout appears correctly and works exactly as intended! But because it's "just" a transport the player doesn't notice it and because there's no reference to it in the briefing or debriefing there's no real reason to ever even consider why it has a different name (or why its survival immediately prompts you to lose the series).

There's actually a second potential Scout encounter in the game and its presence explains a weird mechanic that WC3 somehow uses only once. If you choose to rescue Flint in the Locanda series you must visit four different nav points. Each nav point has a fixed percent chance of an encounter from a set of four possible. An average play through tends to give you one of these random encounters and then one with Flint fighting a Fralthi II cruiser. But you can have up to four different sets of enemies present chosen at random… with the rarest encounter being a Scout and a pair of Vaktoth. Again, the high level idea is that the Scout is something so incredibly special that players will argue whether or not it even existed. It's so clever, it's a perfect moment of Chris Roberts immersion and it's clearly something that a fair amount of thought and actual development time went into realizing! But it's totally negated by the model being turned into the standard transport!

But do we know anything else about the Scout? It turns out, we do! There have been some Scout facts in our faces for thirty years and we just haven't been able to see them. Origin's Official Guide to Wing Commander III actually has a full description and a set of specifications for the scout printed in its unusual Kilrathi ships section!

SCOUT FRIGATE
The scout frigate is a glorified frigate, equipped with high-resolution radar and enhanced tracking software that supports electronic jamming techniques. Their purpose is to scout out enemy actions and report fleet coordinates to their base of operation.

Class: Frigate
Length: 620 meters
Mass: 26,000 metric tonnes
Max. YPR: 5 dps
Max. Velocity: 160 kps
Acceleration: 10 k/s^2
Shields
Fore: 1000 cm equiv.
Aft: 1000 cm equiv.
Armor
Fore/Aft: 600 cm
Right/Left: 600 cm
Weapons
Laser Turrets (3)
FF missile turrets (2)

See how the role described matches the Caliban 2 mission setup exactly? The Scout is the thing scanning for the Victory and reporting its location to Thrakhath. And the Authorized Combat Guide to Wing Commander III even has a notation about how special the scout is! We knew this existed but assumed it was incorrectly referring to the (cut) Confederation frigate. In retrospect, the reason the stats are so close is because that's how all the similarly-classed ships in Wing Commander III work.. the Confederation's frigate, operated by Paladin's elite Covert Operations, is their equivalent of the special Kilrathi scout frigate.

Long range sensors show that there's a Kilrathi Scout Ship at nav 3 as well. This is a rare bird, probably the only one in this entire region. The Scout is a hybrid between a Corvette and a Destroyer. While this is a new class of ship and not one we have a lot of tactical data on, our analysis team recommends that you strafe its turrets and take them out first, then switch to your heavy guns and riddle the aft engine sections.

Aside: wait, how do I know what the Dukara is? I'm not some filthy 3DO owner! Even though it didn't appear in the game itself, the Dukara was pretty prolific from 1994 to 1996! It appears in the first ever released screenshot of Wing Commander III, in an Intel print ad, in the Wing Commander CCG and was then used for a pretty spectacular (and heavily promoted) cinematic sequence in Wing Commander IV! As you can see, they never return to the Sha'kar as a Kilrathi transport even though it would've been easy and made sense to the audience.

Well, that's the end!? No, there's another ship that was cut from Wing Commander III because of the attach bug and replaced by a generic reuse: the Confederation frigate. That's right, both sides had frigates and they were both mercilessly cut down by the God of software development. The Confederation frigate, later slightly confusingly named Caernarven-class, appears in the Alcor system where it is supposed to indicate Paladin's arrival (it's Paladin's frigate!). But in the final game it was replaced with a destroyer NAMED frigate:

Unlike the scout, the Confederation frigate's specifications actually appear in Victory Streak:

You will again recognize the cut frigate immediately: it was rehabilitated for Wing Commander IV where it was decked out as a pirate base ship and in Confederation and Border Worlds liveries.

And then there's one more ever-so-slight ship reuse. To eliminate a bug where you could fly the Torgo minelaying mission without enough mines, the 3DO port of Wing Commander III instead asks you to escort a pair of Confederation minelayers… and like the frigate, they are simply relabeled Southampton-class destroyers!