[Bandit LOAF]

Anyway I will try to wrap up my thoughts (my limited English vocabulary doesnt help) and post again

I would never know it from your writing! I very much enjoy finding your posts, you come up with many good things to think about.

Moreover, I recall reading somewhere (probably not in the CIC, so some sort of apocrypha I guess) some in-universe lore about a legal fight between the design bureaus of Crossbow and Longbow (the latter was McCall Industries IIRC) as the former claimed that the latter unfairly exploited the Crossbow fame using a similar-sounding name falsely implying that the Longbow was a continuation of the successful (mmmmm not really IMHO) Crossbow design. Thoughts @Bandit LOAF?

Heh, I think that must be a fan story. The Longbow is a good bit older than the Crossbow, so I would've written it the other way around!

So the militia is not part of the navy, WC2 and Privateer make that clear, but does it have a central command? And one which has the budget and the authority to commission studies and procure ships independently? I thought it was more localized in score and function.

It will vary from place to place! At their essence they're home defense squadrons organized by individual planets (the Privateer guide says they're often local mercenaries hired for the task)... but depending on the location they might have a unified command structure. One of those, the Outerworlds Militia, was what became the Union of Border Worlds' navy when they declared independence in WC4. It had been formed early in the war to unify local militias against the Kilrathi. There's likely an equivalent in the Gemini Sector!

um ...@Bandit LOAF: Did the war against the Kilrathi, and therefore WC3 not end in 2669? ... Or did I miss something?

You are not wrong! But behind the scenes, the development team intended it to be set in 2676 while they were making the game -- another similar time jump after WC2 to help explain why so much had changed (and to give time for Blair to have been wing commander on the Concordia). You can see a little vestige of this in WC3... when you're on the ship selection screen, hit alt-s and it'll display some text specifications with some of those original dates!

But that was never communicated to the packaging group that did the manual, though, which established it as being in 2669! And when they did WC4 they followed that. So it's one of those things that helps you figure out why things aer a certain way in WC3, but it didn't impact anything beyond that.