Part 61: Grand Entrance, Sol System, Sol Sector (Gameplay only, no story)
1st Janurary 2669, Sol System, Sol SectorEpisode 5, Mission 5 - Grand Entrance
The Firekka arrives in Sol, to a warm welcome.
What, no jump video?
Well, they re-used the Talos one. You could watch it again and imagine the caption says "Jumping to Sol system" if you like.
Mission Briefing:
There is no briefing. This mission is a scramble.
Mission Video (Youtube)
Kills this mission: 15
It was 17 kills, but that video had a strange audio glitch in it, so it got junked. Then I had Standoff crash on me with another run 75% complete, and 80% of the way through my next attempt I found out the hard way I'd forgotten to turn Skype off. So this is take 4 or something, not counting failed missions or missions done just for the tacmap screenshots. This was somewhat annoying.
Frantic interception is always fun, but this mission pulls the "wrong tool for the job" method of fake difficulty - giving you a Rapier mission in a Sabre (yes, Reismann and Bradshaw would not have had any way of knowing it would be a Rapier mission, but that doesn't explain why Bradshaw, a Rapier II pilot by training and experience, would fly a Sabre when EVERY OTHER CONFED FIGHTER IN THE MISSION IS A RAPIER FUCK YOU STANDOFF) - and misses a trick by not doing something that they did on the very first losing path mission, where you need to torpedo an enemy destroyer before the Firekka, racing to the jump point, comes into its range. Here the Firekka would be racing away from the jump point so that the Tarawa didn't materialise in the same space as her, and you'd need to clear the path. Now, it's a bit of a stretch for the cats to have a frigate or destroyer covering this jump point, but not a huge one - the TCN is mostly holding the line in Martian orbit and believes the cats are all arriving from the same direction, so an out-of-the-way secondary jump point would be of little interest. That would give you a reason to be flying a Sabre and add to the general franticness. Instead we just have a fuckton of Gratha, which is entertaining and does lead to more torpedo interception, but it's still not quite the mission it could be.
Are things going this badly for Confed?
Sort of. The overall battle is actually going quite well but some Kilrathi ships have broken through the human lines. I'll quote the relevant parts of Fleet Action along with the next mission briefing.
Tactics Corner
At launch:
Friendly forces:
Confed:
1x Wake-class escort carrier TCS Firekka
2x Rapier medium fighter
1x Sabre heavy fighter
3x Rapier medium fighter (reinforcements, 1 launches every fifteen seconds)
Landreich:
2x Wake-class escort carrier FRLS Tarawa, FRLS Guadacanal (Tarawa arrives after 1 minute 45 seconds, Guadalcanal 5 seconds later)
6x Hornet (reinforcements, first launches at 2 minutes then 1 every 10 seconds)
15 friendlies, but arriving sufficiently strung out we can almost guarantee we'll always be outnumbered.
Enemy forces:
8x Drakhri medium fighter
4x Gothri heavy fighter
3x Kamekh corvette (reinforcments, arrive after 1 minute)
8x Sartha light fighter (reinforcments, arrive after 1 minute)
2x Krant medium fighter (reinforcments, arrive after 1 minute)
4x Krant medium fighter (reinforcements, arrive after 1 minute 55 seconds)
2x Gratha light bomber (reinforcements, arrive after 1 minute 55 seconds) and 2 minutes 50 seconds)
4x Krant medium fighter (reinforcements, arrive after 2 minutes 50 seconds)
4x Gratha light bomber (reinforcements, arrive after 2 minutes 50 seconds)
Deployment:
Right, so, you're launched into a half eight (Kilrathi count in base eight, which is which Standoff tries to throw fighters at us in fours and eights and sometimes even succeeds) of Drakhri which, by the time you've selected full guns and target nearest, are pretty much in weapons range. Screw them, we don't care. Instead hang a hard right and hit the burners, we have Gothri to play tag with. Save the missiles, though, we'll need them for later.
The rest of the mission is fundamentally similar. There's a ton of fighters flitting around, you mostly don't have time to deal with them because more bombers are always arriving and all of them seem to specifically want to nail your carrier. The brief period of time you do have to deal with fighters is in between the last Gothri going down (you can order your wingmen to help out, but usually they do anyway without needing to be told) and the first Gratha arriving. By the time the Gothri are dead the corvettes will have arrived and the map looks a bit like this:
However, you can ignore the corvettes because they're too slow to get into position to do any damage before the battle is over (how often have I written that in these sections?). Actually you pretty much have to ignore the corvettes because around this time they'll be at least 2 and probably 3-5 fighters gunning for you; use a couple of missiles (the FFs if any of your foes are Sarthas) and try and clear out your adversaries and generally thin out the local cat population before the Gratha arrive. You can try ignoring the first two if you like taking risks, but it doesn't always work (mostly this decision depends on whether you think you're more likely to get killed or lose the Firekka this time out). Anyway, by the time the Gratha show up our Landreich buddies will also have arrived, but won't have got any Hornets up yet - still, triple the amount of flak isn't a bad thing.
As soon as you've killed everyone trying to get rid of you it's time to hightail it for the general vicinity of the Firekka's engines, hopefully in time to intercept the torpedoes that will by now either be about to be fired or already have been fired at them. If you notice running torpeodes while people are still trying to kill you, well, probably you're done for but try and go to intercept them anyway. Here's where you use the remainder of your missiles, on these two Gratha and the other four who are about to show up, all of whom go straight after the Firekka:
Fortunately those Gratha have a habit of flying in formation which at least makes hitting them with dumbfire missiles easier, so that's where I'd use those. Then use your remaining couple of IRs to get them to break off torpedo runs and in general spare no amount of firepower or burner fuel in taking them down - once they're dead, the mission is pretty much won, you can fly defensively, conserve fuel, use the Sabre's strong front shields to win head-to-heads against the surviving cat fighters since there's nothing heavy here, and if any of the corvettes are still alive try to focus fire on them and take one out at a time (in the video, I was lucky enough for the surviving fighters to actually be my wingmen, so I could even control what we shot at in the final secions).
Then you can breathe out, and also celebrate because the best mission in the game is coming up.
Ship of the day:
Hornet
Class: Light Fighter
Length: 18.80 m
Mass: 12.5 tonnes
Max Velocity: 440 kps
Afterburner Velocity: 1280 kps
Maximum Yaw/Pitch/Roll: 80/90/80 degrees/second
Weapons: 2x laser cannon, 2x dumbfire missile, 2x heat-seeking missile
Shields: Front: 45 Rear: 45
Armour: Front: 45 Left: 30 Right: 30 Rear: 40
Game says: Once the most widely used light fighter in the Confederation's fleet, the Hornet is due to be retired in 2669. Even after numerous upgrades, the ship's performance is only average when compared to Kilrathi light fighters.
I say: The only Hornets you encounter in Standoff are those launched by the Landreich carriers in these losing path missions. They are...not very good, certainly not by comparison with the Firekka's Rapiers which are much better at getting rid of enemy fighters - the AI seems less dumbfire-happy than the Sartha or Rapier AIs are. What the Hornets mostly do is give the Kilrathi something to shoot at other than you and the Sabres that the Firekka, Tarawa and Guadacanal put up. By the stats, the Hornet is about on the same level as the Sartha, except it carries lasers rather than neutron guns and has another missile.
Insert name here posted:
Are they trying to make it look all beat up and old or something because if they are they didn't do a very good job.
That is, I imagine, what they are doing (no, I don't think they got it quite right either), since Hornets are representing a mishmash of Landreich fighters which are described in Fleet Action as follows:
Fleet Action posted:
Tucked into the hangars lining the field was a bizarre assortment of ships. The heaviest was a medium corvette and it took Ian a moment to recognize it as an old Granicus-class, a line discontinued more than twenty years ago. The ship, however, was refitted with a couple of E-8 engines attached to anchor points on the side of the hull, with half a dozen mass driver turrets patched on as well. It was a hell of a smugglers craft with the firepower of a light frigate thrown in. A number of fighters were on the field as well and it was easy to see which ones had ferried in the staff attending today's meeting, their Confed insignia simply painted over with standard fleet gray.
It was the other ships, however, that caught his eye. It looked like the Landreich was planning to set up a museum, with some of the fighters actual prewar ships of more than thirty years vintage. All of them, however, were no longer spec in any way whatsoever. An early Ferret A had a new engine housing with of all things a Mark 10 engine off an old Falcon light corvette. It looked absolutely absurd, like nothing but an engine with a cockpit up front, with a gatling mass driver gun strapped on underneath. It'd be a hell of a ride, he realized.
Most of the ships were painted Stealth black without identification numbers or even the blue circle and red Saint Andrew's cross of the Landreich. He slowly walked past the hangars, noticing the less than friendly stares of most of the crews. He wanted to take the time to go up and chat, to ask about the specs on the strange array of ships, maybe even try a climb into the cockpits but thought better of it Ever since the armistice the uneasy cooperation of the Confederation with the colonials was now strained even further. He couldn't blame them, for when the stuff finally hit the fen, it would be the outpost worlds that would get covered by it first.
Total kills (Standoff): 27 missions / 367 kills
Total kills (including previous thread): 138 missions / 1293 kills
(since these missions didn't happen - the Firekka was "actually" on the winning path - I don't get to count the kills in them in the kill tally.)
Next time on Standoff:
Faster than a speeding antimatter missle, it's the F-27J Arrow V! (that's the Armada version, not the WC3 version)