Part 16: Mission 16 – Operation Sandstorm, August 15th, 2005

Whiskey Corridor

Mission 16: Operation Sandstorm – August 15th, 2005


Overview: The Eruseans have fallen back to their last organized line of defense at the mouth of a strategic desert bottleneck, the Whiskey Corridor. ISAF’s ground forces plan to smash through the Erusean lines at the abandoned Anchor Point City ruins and have requested close air support from Mobius 1 specifically.

With ISAF pushing into Erusean territory for the first time, the alliance’s goals now shift from liberating lost territory from Erusean occupation, to reaching Farbanti and forcing the Erusean military government to capitulate to a surrender treaty before Megalith can be brought back online.



Guest Commentator: Making his third straight appearance in an Ace Combat LP as well in this video is my dear friend, The Mad Welshman, JamieTheD. His Wipeout megathread may have sadly been claimed by return of the Archive Lock because “lol radium,” but he has recently started up a new megathread examining Screwfly Studios’ back catalog of games, notably Zafehouse: Diaries, Deadnaut, and Fear Equation.





WHISKEY CORRIDOR

A vast dry desert valley nestled in a narrow stretch of land between the Amber and Lambert mountains well inside the Federal Republic of Erusea, close to its national border with the rest of Usea.

Whiskey Corridor (so named because it was once an infamous rum-running route between Erusea and San Salvacion during the days of Prohibition in the 1920s) is one of the most arid and inhospitable stretches of land on Usea thanks to its location in the Amber Mountains’ rain shadow. A river once flowed westward down from the Lambert Mountains across the valley, but has since dried up due to climate change.

Whiskey Corridor was also once the home of a thriving border town, Anchor Point City, which now lies in ruins, largely reclaimed by the desert after Ulysses Day. A particularly large fragment of Ulysses 1994XF04 struck the desert roughly 50 miles outside of Anchor Point, producing significant debris and ejecta from its impact crater (now known as Goldberg Crater). The survivors of the asteroid strike were forcibly evacuated from Anchor Point by the Erusean military and relocated elsewhere in the country after Erusean Supreme Command deemed the city unsafe.

The abandonment of Anchor Point, now known as Old Anchor Point City, was later seen as emblematic of Erusea’s further severing of ties from the rest of Usea. One of the few major highways into Erusea from San Salvacion and the FCU ran through Anchor Point and was largely destroyed by the asteroid fragment impact and ultimately buried under tons of sand as the expanding desert reclaimed it. It can now only be found on old maps or using highly attuned geological survey satellites.



THE LEGEND OF MOBIUS 1

As of Whiskey Corridor Mobius 1 has basically attained legendary status among both sides of the Shattered Skies war. The stories of his accomplishments have spread so far in the Usean military (and cultural) zeitgeist that practically every soldier knows of him. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before in the late game of the previous Ace Combats we’ve looked at. The Belkan and A World With No Boundaries soldiers fretted over the “Demon Lord” as Cipher approached a battlefield in Zero, while the URF rebels constantly lost their shit over the “Firebird” whenever Phoenix sortied in Assault Horizon Legacy. Again, I said Shattered Skies was the game where Ace Combat functionally became Ace Combat, and we get to see where another key facet of the franchise’s vaunted implied storytelling comes from.

The Erusean soldiers’ resolve begins to break at the mere idea that the “Ribbon” ace is up there above them in the skies, literally calling Mobius 1 the Grim Reaper, seeing as how he’s kicked Erusea’s shit in from one side of Usea to the next, not to mention how he single-handed destroyed Stonehenge and has so far scored the only confirmed shoot down kill of a member of Yellow Squadron since the start of the war.

On the ISAF side, Mobius 1’s presence on the battlefield serves to inspire the troops’ morale and help them fight better. The ISAF grunts see Mobius 1 as the great protector and equalizer in the skies. A lot of the friendly radio chatter in Whiskey Corridor and the next mission coming up centers around the ground forces’ reaction to Mobius 1 flying above them, or even just the idea that Mobius 1 might be up there. There’s one line in the next mission which is randomly triggered and I don’t think it actually played during the footage I eventually settled on as being “acceptable” given the utter nightmare of a time I had trying to record unfucked up video of Farbanti, but basically one of the ISAF ground commanders says word-for-word, “I don’t care if it’s a lie, just tell them Mobius 1’s already here!” Which I find basically emblematic of how much of a vital propaganda weapon Mobius 1 himself has become over the course of this war.

Even the Storyteller Boy, after the Eruseans are driven from San Salvacion looks up ponderously to the sky and wonders if that’s Mobius 1 flying above the liberated city come daylight the next morning after Operation Firefly ends. Of course, the Storyteller Boy is something of an unreliable narrator, as we’ve seen a few times already, and is paraphrasing his experience from memory for the sake of his narrative, but it’s basically all but a fact that he knows who Mobius 1 is by both role and name given how close he was to Yellow Squadron and Yellow 13 specifically, who had developed something of an obsession with Mobius 1 both before and after Yellow 4’s death.

Unlike Cipher and Phoenix, whose existences were hushed up due to political reasons (or Nemo because lol electrosphere), Mobius 1 won’t exactly be fading quietly into the background of Usean history any time soon.




Aircraft featured in Mission 16: Operation Sandstorm


Su-35 Flanker-E
Manufacturer: Sukhoi
Role: Multi-role air superiority fighter
Manufactured: 1988–present
Status: In service
Primary Operators: Russia
Quick Facts:

• Appears in Ace Combats 2, 04,5, Assault Horizon, and Infinity.
  
• The general production model off which the Su-37 Terminator was designed.
  
• Was the successor to both the Su-37 and Su-30 fighter platforms.
  
• The model that appears in the Ace Combat games is actually the Su-27M prototype.
  
• The actual Su-35 lacks the forward maneuvering canards seen in game.
  
• One of the few planes capable of preforming a Pugachev’s Cobra maneuver.
  
• Originally, the Project Aces wanted the player to be able to pull off a Cobra themselves using the Su-35 (the canon plane of the game), but couldn’t get it working properly and stripped the faulty code for it out of the game right before launch.
  
• Is the 3rd to last plane unlocked in Ace Combat 04, unlocking after the player clears Emancipation. The Su-37 and F-22 unlock simultaneously upon completion of Whiskey Corridor, while the final plane requires a special set of circumstances to unlock.
  

Kwee

• Plane: F-117A Nighthawk
  
• Mission 16
  
• Spawn conditions: Appears in the upper western portion of the map past the west-most line of Erusean artillery.

Tracks featured in Mission 16:

DISC 2

• 8. Whiskey Corridor
  

Production sketches of the Whiskey Corridor and Goldberg Crater: