The Liberties

While building this page, I found a number of small but fairly significant gaps in the Wing Commander storyline and background, either because things were not fully explained, or even because no one had thought them up in the first place. Or I wanted to do something cool (like the Kilrathi Creed of Service written in Kilrah text), and didn't have the appropriate information to do it. As a result, I've had to take a few "liberties" here and there (all right, I made them up myself. Happy? :) ). These are as follows:

  • I've created symbols for the Firekkan Planetary Alliance, the Double Helix race, and the Mopoks.
  • There are a number of symbols that have been used to represent the Kilrathi Empire. I have chosen the one used in the Armada and WC3 manuals. The one found in the Prophecy guide book, I use as the symbol for the Kilrathi Assembly of Clans.
  • To fit the Pilgrim War in, so that it doesn't happen at the same time as the Battle of McAuliffe, I've pushed it back about six years, so that the Battle of Titan is in 2625 rather than 2631. Because Arnold Blair's death is directly pegged to the Pilgrim War, I've had to make Chris Blair (probably) a tad older than he should be.
    This of course is no longer the case with the "alternate universe" approach, but I've left the altered dates of the Pilgrim War in the timeline, just so that it can still be considered to "fit" with the rest of the history.
  • I have a "Confederation History" section, and the formation of the Terran Confederation is kind of an important part of the Terran Confederation's history, I would say. However since no one has actually bothered to say, "Here, this was when Confed was formed." I have tentatively placed the formation of the Terran Confederation in the year 2525. While this is most likely wrong, there is no direct evidence to contradict it either. This I got from the book "Action Stations", which talks about a hundred years or so of peace before the start of the Terran-Kilrathi War. It's not too fanciful to say that the Confederation was formed as part of this peace process, and was the organisation that ensured peace among all the human countries and colonies for so long. In addition, according to the Confederation Handbook, the Terran Confederation was already in place by the time the Akwende Drive was invented in 2588, and 2525 is also 100 years before the Battle of Titan, according to my timeline.
  • The exact date of the destruction of the TCS Iason is a bit of a mystery: one source gives it as March 15th, and another as March 16th. However, both give the standard date as 2629.105. I haven't been able to find any actual explanation as to what part of the year .105 is, but it is reasonable to assume that it represents the particular day in the year, .001 being January 1st. 2629 not being a leap year, this then makes .105 APRIL 15th, the 105th day of the year, and this is the date I use.
  • More on dates: Looking through the various documentations, you'll find that there are two timelines in the Wing Commander cannon relating to the dates for the Vega Campaign up to the Enigma Campaign -- the dates in the original Wing Commander and Secret Missions games, and the dates in the Wing Commander Armada and Wing Commander 3 manuals. Note also that the dates in the Kilrathi history text in the Armada manual were a direct base 10 to base 8 conversion of the Confed dates in the Wing Commander Armada manual. To calibrate the Kilrathi calendar, plus conversion between Human and Kilrathi time units, I used the Kilrathi dates in the Armada manual, correlating them with the original games' timeline (as opposed to the second timeline).
  • Again on Colonel Blair, there was very little concrete information on this man until the Prophecy Guide book and the Confederation Handbook; apparently since we were playing his character, Origin avoided filling in too many details during WC1 to WC4. In particular, I've given him a birth year of 2631 (see note above), so that he would have been around 23 when he joined the TCS Tiger's Claw (in the Pilgrim War version, I placed his birth in 2628). This is in opposition to his stated age of 32, in 2669, in the Kilrathi Saga and WC3 manuals -- which would then place his age at 17 when he graduated from the academy in 2654 (which is of course quite ridiculous) -- but makes him the same age as Maniac, a reasonable assumption given they graduated from the same Academy class.
  • I have taken the liberty of formulating my own version of Kilrathi alphabet and grammar, for lack of any other readily available source of written Kilrathi. When such a source does become available, I will definitely use it instead.
  • Addendum to above: Since I'm not a fontist, I have not used the examples of Kilrathi alphabet given in the Confederation Handbook; I will however make use of any other person's Kilrathi font if and when it is released on the Internet. Curiously enough, when I was writing the Kilrathi Oath, I based its grammatical structure on the Chinese language. According to the Confederation Handbook, this is in fact the case with the Kilrathi language.
  • While the Enigma Campaign is said to have lasted until 2667, the computer game itself gives the date as 2665. However, given the time references involved, 2667 seems to be the more likely year, and that is the one I have used. For example it seems more likely that two years would go by before the Tiger's Claw would be in a position to attack K'Tithrak Mang, even if the Kilrathi are reeling from recently falling out of favour with Sivar -- after all it took Confed another 8 years or so before it could strike at K'Tithrak Mang again. Note that this does somewhat contradict my standing rule that previous games should supercede future ones. However the evidence in this case seems to overwhelmingly indicate otherwise. Plus, 2667 is also the year used pretty much everywhere else.
    In other words, it was a convenient way to bridge the timeline discrepancies. :)