Excalibur heavy fighter
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The (fictional) F-103 Excalibur space superiority fighter is a spaceplane in the Wing Commander computer game universe.
In 2669, the Terran Confederation, and thus the human race, was on the verge of extinction. The Kilrathi Empire was slowly overwhelming the fragile human fleets, destroying ship after ship and creeping closer to Earth's front door. The Terran warships were superior in maneuverability, defensive armor and personnel training, but the Kilrathi had superior numbers, faster manufacturing, and a quicker training regimen due to their feline hunting instincts. The brass at CNC formulated a number of end-run schemes to end the war on Terran terms, one of which involved the Excalibur.
The Excalibur space superiority fighter was, at the time, the cutting 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, was accused of "borrowing" a prototype Excalibur for an unauthorized (and unanticipated) combat mission. These allegations were never proven, but back-channel gossip suggested the Excalibur, even in prototype form, was just as deadly in practice as it looked on paper.
The end-run scheme, this one devised by Brigadier General James "Paladin" Taggart of the Special Forces, 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, killing its Emperor and Crown Prince, and obliterating a great deal of the Kilrathi fleet (which was in orbit, presumably to stop him). 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, quickly falling prey to a far more insidious enemy than the Kilrathi: post-war budget cuts. In 2670, the F-103B carried only eight missiles, its maintenance-intensive reaper cannon had been replaced with slower-firing cousin, the ion gun, and the finicky 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 RF-103D 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.
The Excalibur design bears a strong resemblance to the Transformers microcassette character Raindance and the Northrop-Grumman YF-23 Black Widow II.
