F-103 Excalibur Heavy Fighter
The (fictional) F-103 Excalibur Heavy Fighter is a heavy fighter in the Wing Commander computer game universe.
AbOUT
The F-103 Excalibur fighter was the [...] edge in fighter-craft and the single most capable ship on either side of the front lines. Its thin shields regenerated so quickly they were practically impenetrable, and its top speed and maneuverability were the equal of the Arrow light fighter. It could carry up to twelve missiles, and its gun rack--four tachyon cannon and two rapid-fire reaper cannon--was the most powerful ever seen on a fighter, augmented by an auto-tracking function that placed all shots perfectly on-target if the fighter/victim was within about a fifteen-degree cone of the Excalibur's nose. It carried a Jump drive; it also carried the Terran Confederation's first working, wide-scale cloaking device. In short, it was a pilot's dream come true. No less than Colonel Christopher Blair himself, then Wing Commander aboard the TCS Victory borrowed a prototype Excalibur for an unauthorized (and unanticipated) combat mission.
The end-run scheme, this one devised by Brigadier General James "Paladin" Taggart of the Covert Operations, involved taking a flight of F-103A Excaliburs straight through to Kilrah, the enemy homeworld. Kilrah was seismically unstable, and Paladin's people had developed an explosive, the Temblor Bomb, that, if Delivered precisely, would cause the planet to disintegrate. Col. Blair was picked for the mission; he and his pilots (Major Todd "Maniac" Marshall, Lt. Robin "Flint" Peters and Lt. Winston "Vagabond" Chang) successfully infiltrated the Kilrathi home solar system. Though his entire wing was shot down and Lt. Peters killed (Chang and Marshall successfully ejecting), Blair completed his mission, destroying the Kilrathi homeworld, [...] its Emperor and Crown Prince, and obliterating a great deal of the Kilrathi fleet (which was in ORBit). The Kilrathi sued for peace within the hour. Blair is now known as the Savior of the Confederation.
The Excalibur, which entered service less than three months before the Treaty of Torgo, soldiered on into peacetime. In 2670, the F-103 carried only eight missiles, its maintenance-intensive reaper cannon had been replaced with slower-firing cousin, the ion gun, and the cloaking device removed entirely. By the 2680s, the craft had been upgraded with stronger shields and the return of the cloaking device, at least for the recce version, but it proved of questionable utility against the Nephilim.
The few Excaliburs that saw wartime service were extremely successful against the Kilrathi for which they were designed to fight; no other production fighter could match it. By the time of the Nephilim invasion, however, the Excalibur was dated. While well-armed (in fact, somewhat more powerful than the newer F-108 Panther Medium fighter) it was, by the standards of the 2680s, also somewhat fragile. They performed adequately during the Kilrah and Proxima campaigns, but their glory days were over.
Trivia
- The Excalibur design bears a strong resemblance to the Transformers microcassette character Raindance and the Northrop-Grumman YF-23 Black Widow II.