Wing Commander’s sequel throws the player into disgrace and he or she must fly to restore their reputation while keeping the Kilrathi under control at the same time. Wing Commander II featured improved graphics, expanded the depth of the storyline (considered by some to be the best of the entire series), and introduced digitised speech.
Wing Commander II is currently (since 25th August 2011) available from gog.com. Extensive background information for Wing Commander II, Special Operations 1 and Special Operations 2 is available at the CIC.
The Wing Commander II manual is available as a PDF from the CIC. The Special Operations reference is also available for download.
The Kilrathi Saga manual, presented as a scrapbook put together by Christopher Blair, the player character, includes background information from Wing Commander I, II and III.
When stuck on a mission, try the CIC’s very thorough game guide, written by TC.
For a little extra fun after finishing the game, try this savegame editor by David Raley. It also includes very detailed information on each mission, victory conditions, and more.
Wedge009’s interpretation of the dialogue from Wing Commander II. Also available is Shades’ PDF script which incorporates all possible scenes and conversations, many of which were omitted here for the sake of brevity and simplicity.
A collection of the MIDI from Wing Commander II, as well as MP3 renditions, are available from the CIC. This collection includes several of George Oldziey’s re-orchestrations from the Kilrathi Saga version of Wing Commander II, as well as music from more obscure releases such as the Origin Soundtrack CD. In addition, Scrap has made a medley of most of the piano pieces played by “Jazz”.
Extracting the music from Kilrathi Saga is a simple matter with any audio editor which can read raw sound data – such as Audacity (download). Music is located in the STREAMS folder as STR files and stored as stereo 16-bits @ 22050 Hz.
Speech used in Wing Commander II can be extracted from the files marked SPEECH.S?? and COMMUNIC.S?? using any raw audio editor. Some of the Special Operations speech from the DOS version are compressed and therefore cannot be read, however, the Kilrathi Saga version of these speech files are completely uncompressed.
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| COMMUNIC.S01 | Colonel Jeanette “Angel” Devereaux |
| COMMUNIC.S03 | Colonel Ralgha “Hobbes” nar Hhallas |
| COMMUNIC.S04 | Captain Dirk “Stingray” Wright |
| COMMUNIC.S06 | Major Zach “Jazz” Colson |
| COMMUNIC.S08 | Colonel James “Paladin” Taggart |
| COMMUNIC.S09 | Captain Etienne “Doomsday” Montclair |
| COMMUNIC.S11 | Captain Elizabeth “Shadow” Norwood |
| COMMUNIC.S12 | Prince Thrakhath |
| COMMUNIC.S14 | Lieutenant Colonel Mariko “Spirit” Tanaka |
| COMMUNIC.S15 | TCS Concordia |
| COMMUNIC.S16 | Generic Confederation Capital Ship (Male) |
| COMMUNIC.S17 | Generic Confederation Capital Ship (Female) |
| COMMUNIC.S18 | Generic Confederation Transport (Male) |
| COMMUNIC.S19 | Generic Confederation Transport (Female) |
| COMMUNIC.S20 | Generic Confederation Pilot (Male) |
| COMMUNIC.S21 | Generic Confederation Pilot (Female) |
| COMMUNIC.S22 | Khasra Redclaw |
| COMMUNIC.S23 | Rakti Blood-Drinker |
| COMMUNIC.S24 | Kur Human-Killer |
| COMMUNIC.S25 | Generic Kilrathi Pilot (Drakhai) |
| COMMUNIC.S26 | Generic Kilrathi Transport |
| COMMUNIC.S27 | Generic Kilrathi Capital Ship |
| COMMUNIC.S28 | Prince Thrakhath (Special Operations 1) |
| COMMUNIC.S29 | Generic Mutineer |
| COMMUNIC.S36 | Major Todd “Maniac” Marshall |
| COMMUNIC.S37 | Generic Mandarin Pilot |
| PALCOMM.S08 | Colonel James “Paladin” Taggart (Special Operations 1) |
| PALCOMM.S28 | Colonel James “Paladin” Taggart (Special Operations 2) |
| SPEECH.S00 | Introduction Part 1 |
| SPEECH.S01 | Introduction Part 2 |
| SPEECH.S02 | Introduction Part 3 |
| SPEECH.S03 | Khasra to War |
| SPEECH.S04 | Thrakhath to War |
| SPEECH.S05 | Thrakhath to Return |
| SPEECH.S10 | Special Operations 1 Introduction |
| SPEECH.S20 | Special Operations 2 Introduction Part 1 |
| SPEECH.S21 | Special Operations 2 Introduction Part 2 |
| SPEECH.S22 | Special Operations 2 Ending |
The following files are speech from the cutscenes in MP3 format. At the low bit-rate used, some hissing is evident in the audio output, however, the files contain speech only and such noise should be acceptable. If not, you can try converting the speech yourself. While not as time-consuming to find as the Privateer inflight speech, there is no timing information in the dialogue, and the voices play one after the other. The relatively long time it takes for Admiral Tolwyn to answer Blair’s claim of Kilrathi stealth fighters in the game (at least when played on an ancient 386 computer) is unbearably long, so probably the most noticeable adjustment to the speech is where Tolwyn’s rebuttal overlaps the first of Blair’s two spoken lines in the game.
| Title | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction Demo | 174 KiB |
From the Wing Commander II demo, an early version of the scene below. |
| Introduction Part 1 | 148 KiB |
Prince Thrakhath reports to his grandfather, the Kilrathi Emperor. |
| Introduction Part 2 | 99 KiB |
Captain Blair is assigned to In-System Security by Admiral Tolwyn. |
| Introduction Part 3 | 77 KiB |
Khasra Redclaw reports to Prince Thrakhath news of the Ghorah Khar rebellion. |
| Khasra to War | 101 KiB |
Prince Thrakhath assigns Khasra the single task of destroying the TCS Concordia. |
| Thrakhath to War | 171 KiB |
The Kilrathi Emperor allows Prince Thrakhath to personally go to war against the Terrans. |
| Title | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|
| I will Return! | 12 KiB |
Thrakhath swears to return after defeat. |
| Introduction | 106 KiB |
Prince Thrakhath orders Khasra Redclaw to lead the attack on Ghorah Khar. |
| Title | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction Part 1 | 63 KiB |
Major Zach “Jazz” Colson standing before a military tribunal headed by Admiral Tolwyn. |
| Introduction Part 2 | 32 KiB |
A Mandarin spy reports on the Morningstar project to the Kilrathi. |
If you find Special Operations 1 consistently involves excessively long waits (especially with unusually long periods of disk activity) before and after autopilot sequences, this patch may solve the inconvenience.
Also available is Mario “HCl” Brito’s ship editor, which is useful for examining the ships from Wing Commander II and Wing Commander Academy.
