Part 64: A Long Way to Kilrah, Sol System, Sol Sector (Standoff Epilogue, Middle and Losing Endings)

1st January 2669, Sol System, Sol Sector
"Historical" Ending - It's a Long Way To Kilrah

(these cutscenes are a bit different, so since I was making a wrap-up post anyway...)

So, the Battle of Earth is over, with what's left of the Kilrathi fleet having withdrawn - but sufficient of it did survive to withdraw, and so much of the Confederation fleet was lost as well that Reismann doesn't think it qualifies as a victory:


Cutscene Video (Youtube)
FX: Fanfare
: You're all back! Guess I just...didn't expect to see you again.
: Yeah, I sure wasn't expecting to be coming back.
: I don't think any of us were.
: I was. I ain't going down for no cat.
: So, it's really over now? The cats have pulled out?
: Oh, the cats pulled out, but it ain't over by a long shot.
: People, today we managed to prevent the Confederation's total defeat, but that was the easy part.
: Now...now we have to actually win.
: Get some rest, everyone. The next few weeks will be busier than ever before.

Bradshaw's assessment is a bit more upbeat, possibly as a result of his realisation that dating Sparrow is kind of a bad idea.


Cutscene Video (Youtube)
: So what d'you think? I guess if you're less of a pessimist than Reismann, you could say we kinda won.
: Oh, sure. We only lost 90% of the fleet.
: See that there?
: See what where?
: There. The Earth.
: Yeah, I see it.
: See how it's not burning?
: But it is burning. (Sections of North America, Europe and North Africa are indeed on fire)
: Not like Sirius or Warsaw. Marie, they thought they'd wipe us out, but we turned them back.
: And our losses are huge, but look at theirs! Sparrow, we did the impossible today. Yeah, I'd call this a win.
: So what happens now?
: Dunno. They're running, but we're in no shape to counterattack either. You heard what Reismann...
: I meant with us, William.
: No, Marie. There is no "us".
: Huh. A clean break, huh?
: It's for the best.

Fade to Black, Roll Credits (again, I figure all of my ending videos should probably have the credits in)

But that's not the only way you can end this mission. Failing this mission in such a way as to get the losing ending is actually quite tricky - getting your fighter shot up or ejecting just kills you, so you have to survive the mission but either somehow lose the Firekka or let an Sr-90 missile through to Earth. In order to do that I had to turn away from every fight and retreat at afterburner in order to avoid getting involved, because if I just flew around enough of the cats would attack me that even self-defence tended to result in mission accomplished.


Cutscene Video (Youtube)

[monologuing, short of breath]:
So this is how it ends. All out of fuel, and running out of air. Won't switch on the beacon, cats would just love that. Guess I'm just going to have to wait and hope. [sarcastic, bitter] Yeah, hope. Computer, save journal entry, shut down.

Fade to Black, Roll Credits (yes, again)

So what's the situation now?

So, Wing Commander: Standoff, and the False Armistice Campaign it runs through, are finished. As far as Wing Commander III is concerned, we got the middle ending. Confed hasn't lost, but the balance of forces still favours the Kilrathi. In terms of fleet carriers, Confed has the Ark Royal and the Leyte Gulf* in decent fighting shape, the Concordia can be made approximately spaceworthy but would need a full drydock overhaul to be returned to full operational status, and nothing else. Given that, there's no time to overhaul the Concordia, so she's going to have to be sent out with the best repairs that can be made, and she takes the region where the Kilrathi forces are believed to be weakest.

To make matters worse, the Kilrathi cruiser squadron that broke through to Earth also hit the Moon's dockyard facilities where about a third of the fleet that had been mothballed during the armistice and hadn't been reactivated was stored. Most of the shipyards are still intact, and the TCS Bradshaw* (named after a system in Sol Sector, not, thankfully, the pilot) will probably come online in a couple of months, if the Confederation survives that long. The situation in terms of light carriers, cruisers and the like is slightly better but not much - basically, the TCN is now very low on carrier class vessels and anything in the mothballed yards that haven't been hit and that's capable of carrying fighters is being reactivated, even if they were pre-war relics like the Yorktown-class CVLs.

In terms of fighters, the TCSF is a wreck. There's still a reasonable number of experienced pilots - those who were on colonial worlds and couldn't be mobilised in time, those who survived the battle, and those who ejected and were picked up. Fighters for them to fly, less so. A lot of the front-line fighter models were manufactured on Earth and Sirius, and combined losses of Rapiers, Sabres and Broadswords at Sirius and Earth were in excess of 50%, up to almost 90% for the Broadswords. Fighter squadrons are being rebuilt with whatever's to hand, which is rarely the newest fighters Confed has.

In other words, the Confederation needed to put a fleet together on the double-quick, and the fleet they ended up with is a patchwork job as a result.

*These things are conjecture on my part or the Standoff team's part (Ark Royal is theirs; what's known is that two from Ark Royal, Leyte Gulf and Saratoga survived and one was lost; the TCS Bradshaw is a ship that exists but precisely what it is is unclear other than that Blair wants to serve on it, which is why there's something of an assumption it's a new carrier).

For the Kilrathi, the situation is both better and worse. Carriers and other capital ships are not a problem. The cats had over ten older carrier-class vessels in reserve, and the Hari sector yards that turned out the Hakagas are getting to work on new designs. Where they're hurting, though, is trained pilots and modern fighters for them to fly, both of which took greivous losses at Earth and were problematic before that. The reason ten carriers were held in reserve is they lacked pilots to man them; the situation is not getting better, especially after a Terran destroyer rammed the Craxtha's launch deck while it was trying to recover, re-arm and re-launch fighters in the closing phases of the battle of Earth. Compounding this problem is politics. The short peace before the resumption of hostilities almost fractured the Empire (Kilrathi society essentially has to be at war with someone, and if nobody else presents, then "themsevles" is the default), and the religion of Sivar is not exactly happy with the less-than-honourable nature of the whole false armistice ploy.

The calculation that Thrakhath and the Emperor had worked upon is that all of these problems would be forgotten in the aftermath of a victory, but now they don't have a victory. With Baron Jukaga dead there's no figure for other houses to coalesce around, but the situation is still unstable and requires the Kiranka clan (the one which holds the throne) to keep its most loyal/experienced troops close to Kilrah to deter other families from getting ambitious.

So if Confed has a patchwork fleet, the cats have ships manned by raw conscripts and are fighting with one hand tied behind their back. The next solid blow either side manages to land might be the last. Speaking of which...

Next time on Let's Play Wing Commander:
Ahhhh, the Heart of the Tiger. I've got a Cutscene (Youtube) test video here, and I'd have an in-mission one as well, but Youtube has decided to mess it up, ah hell, have it anyway (Youtube), but that one clearly needs fixing because the text is hardly readable (it's fine in the .mp4 on my computer - I'll have a go at fixing it tomorrow).

In addition to any commentary on the quality (some of the problems are internal to the game, like for example at the end of the mission video when Blair's walking off the flight deck - and I'm not aware of any high-res or better compressed videos for WC3 like there are for WC4 - you'd need to extract them from the 3DO version, and as far as I'm aware nobody has), I'm interested in opinions on whether I should leave subtitles on or turn them off, to what extent I should leave transitions in or just do the scenes - I'm guessing we don't want most of them, but maybe include the launch each time - and whether I should do between mission cutscenes all in one video or split them by conversations. Should I use more DOSBox cycles? Fewer?

Then there's the question of reader interaction. I like it when people post in my thread, so I'm strongly tempted to go full attention whore and have people vote on every conversation choice, but if enough of you remind me that this is a terrible idea the part of me which already knows that might actually get listened to. I could accomplish the same thing by keeping you down to choosing the fighter, or (more likely) the fighter and wingman. (We can handle loadouts by saying eg. "Strike Arrow" or "Dogfight Arrow"; ie, load up on Dumbfires or load up on Imrecs/FFs). If I did that I'd still open up conversation choices that actually had consequences (other than changing morale values, they all do that), but they're fairly rare.