It's actually not that crazy. It was relatively common in WWII for badly damaged bombers to ditch in the channel rather than trying to land on land...better odds of survival for the crew. Likewise badly damaged carrier aircraft...they would ditch near their carrier and get picked up by a PBY...

It sounds like everyone is doing the right thing. It sounds like EA has no problem with releasing the addons, and maybe even wanted to, but wasn't super explicitly clear. GOG didn't want to chance anything legally, so they didn't release them. I'm pretty familiar with legal issues and...

OK, either spoiler tags are now broken in these new forums, or I'm an idiot and have forgotten how to use them...

But for Wing Commander fans, at least, there's a precedent. Kurusawa comes immediately to mind. And Heaven's Gate. And Proxima/Earth. I played all of Standoff before reading Fleet Action. So the end of Fleet Action was a little bit spoiled, but not too bad. I actually like the Stanodff...

I want to second this. I'm not one of the game developers, just a big fan. The game is awesome. It's as good as the official Wing Commander games (and, in my opinion, better than some of them). A word of warning, though...it is also harder than any of the official games. Success at Standoff...

Ah. Go go gadget selection bias! Still, nice video and impressive flying!

I'd love to help out, and am happy to share anything I've already created thus far that would be useful (namely, the mission tree and branching guide that I put together from Dundradal's notes, my own experience, and lot's of bugging of Quarto), and also the general tactical advice I wrote a...

I don't recall complaining about that. In fact, that's partly why I think it's the best in the series. Of course, it helps that what gameplay it had was really good. The WC4 gameplay is arguably the best GAMEPLAY in the series. Making missiles so deadly (so they actually live up to Hunter's...

Nice video. I didn't notice that you were using the map to target select and had edited it out till you pointed it out...I thought you were just really clever at selecting the next target. Question...what difficulty are you playing on? Those ships went down very easily. Do you hae the diff...

But if we do assume its length is correct and its mass is wrong, we're back to the problem I mentioned before. Even if it's density is stupidly low (i.e. it has almost no armor, and massive amounts of empty space on the inside), it still is at a minimum 130 times more massive than the Vesuvius...

I agree about "Flight of the Arrow"...it's probably my favorite mission in the game. Or at least, really close to it. I think my top 5 are: * Flight of the Arrow * Rescue Run * Armageddon (if only for the exchange between Freyrs and Trigger, but it's also an awesomely designed mission) * First...

Dundradal links to the thread where I was developing the branching guide. The CIC actually hosted the finished (well, nearly finished...I'm still open to fixing mistakes if anyone finds any and reports them) guides. The "quick reference" flowchart is here...

I'm still not buying 22 km. The whole mass issue scuttles things. Mass scales roughly with the cube of length, for ships with similar aspect ratios. If the Vesuvius is 1.6 km and 240,000 tonnes, then a 22 km ship with roughly the same density should be about 2,600 times more massive...or...

Many such things bother me about the movie. There are a ton of little references that are supposed to make it feel more like "iconic wing commander" but miss the boat because they don't *quite* fit in the continuity that had been established to date by the games. The fighters could have just as...

Heh. The first time I completed WC3, I was a freshman in college. My roommate watched me beat the game (he didn't play himself, but had read on GameFaqs or something how one beat the game and what happened so that he could have a bunch of snide comments saved up for me...like mocking the...

There's also a line in the WC1 manual (and a mechanic in the game) where, if you expend your fuel, you can still fly at 50 kps on "reserves" and your afterburners stop working (only happened to me once...luckily I had already taken down all the Kilrathi in that mission). This could be...

I'm not sure I agree with the basic premise in this thread. First, you kind of cherry pick in your sci-fi selection. How about Babylon 5? Humans do not "outsmart superior aliens" there...humans are shown as technologically inferior to several races, who continuously kick humans butts when...

If you think no-one has ever complained about the bad science of Star Wars/Star Trek, etc., you've clearly never looked around on these newfangled interwebs much. :-) There are entire websites dedicated to complaining about bad science in science fiction. And actually, Babylon 5 made a...

We don't know how "shields" work, but they almost certainly are *not* using atmospheric effects to create some kind of pressure field, or else they wouldn't work in space (where there is not atmospheres)...at least, not unless they work by the ship continuously spraying gas or plasma out, which...

Minor nitpick, but there are no shockwaves in space. A shockwave is a moving step change in density and pressure that propagates through a medium like the atmosphere. There is simply no medium (or at least, not a sufficiently dense medium) in space to transmit a shockwave. The only way a...