Timing Wing Commander
Timing events from Forstchen's novel False Colors is trivial: Every few pages there's a location, date and time heading. Not all the books in the Wing Commander series –not even all of Forstchen's books– are so cooperative. Some have no dates at all. The situation gets even more complicated when trying to time game events: Games like WC3 and WC4 have multiple branches. At each “node” in the campaign, winning or losing a mission puts you on different branches. Which of all the possible paths do we take as “THE path” for establishing a timeline?
One rule of thumb that occurs to me, even as I write this, is that whichever path was taken by a novel written in connection to a game, that should perhaps be the wisest choice to base a timeline on, as the timeline needs to embrace the book as well as the game. But then again, Heart of the Tiger –the novel–, takes a noble path, towards the end, that doesn't correspond to any branches in the game.
In the links below, I take a first crack at the issue of timing games. Ironically, I started off by timing a trip to Gemini by the TCS Winterrowd; the subject of a couple of emails at the good old Fleet Tactics website, which seems to have gone off-line, since. The trip was a speculation of the site's author, Psych; but I liked the stuff of Fleet Tactics so much I (Monk) adopted it as part of the WC heritage. Based on the length of that trip, and the number of days it took to complete, I arrived at a tentative formula…
Of course, I wasn't going to stop at one example. What I did next was to try and time WC3…
Caveat: I did the above analysis a long time ago. I had not read the WC novels yet, at that time. Taking Heart of the Tiger –the novel– into consideration might lead to different results from the ones I got. This is work I've been meaning to do for a while now, but haven't got around to it yet. Further timing samples need to be taken before settling on a general formula. I think good candidates are the the trips between McAuliffe and Landreich from Action Stations, though the problem there is that the maximum speed of Kruger's vessel is not reported. Taggart's trip to Hari and back, from Fleet Action… same problem, further complicate by the fact that he took a path of uncharted systems to get there, and we don't know exactly how many systems were crossed. End Run provides clear trips taken by fleets whose velocities are well known. The problem there is the notorious lack of dates. Probably the best samples will come from False Colors; but this remains to be done.
In any case, taking that as a tentative formula for now, it is the one I applied to timing Privateer and Righteous Fire…
As you can see, even giving Burrows 70 days for trading and upgrading at the start of Privateer (assuming a start in early january 2669), we still manage to finish RF a good two months before Blair drops the Temblor Bomb on Kilrah.
By combining the above results for Priv/RF with the more standard WC timeline for 2669, I arrived to the
- combined Privateer plus WC timeline (first half of 2669), and the
- combined Righteous Fire plus WC timeline (second half of 2669) timelines.
Please note that the above timelines contain many “facts” from Fleet Tactics, hypothetical events from the “story behind the story” from my Deep Analysis of Privateer work, and events preparatory to sequel project that is presently shelved.
