Part 69: Orsini System, Epsilon Sector, Mission 2 (Gameplay)

6th August 2669, Orsini System, Epsilon Sector
TCS Victory

A Confed listening post in Orsini picks up evidence of the transit of a Kilrathi capital ship; the TCS Victory sends fighters to intercept.

Cutscene videos/thread vote:
The thread voted unanimously that Blair though Vaquero's dream sounded good to him, showing a surprising dedication to not being complete jerks for a bunch of goons. This was unsurprisingly the morale up response, so everyone on the Victory is still being made happy by Blair. In terms of wingmen, Vagabond had 3 votes to Cobra's 2 and Maniac's 1.

I've cut the transitions out of the conversation videos, since there was (as expected) absolutely no outcry to keep them.
Pre-Mission Conversations (Youtube)

Mission Briefing & Loadout:

Briefing Video (Youtube)

For this mission I took a Thunderbolt armed with heat-seeking missiles, primarily so I could show you how useless they (the missiles - the Thunderbolt's not useless, certainly not against opposition as weak as this) are against light fighters on the higher difficulties. It does make a certain amount of sense to take the Thunderbolt when you've been told you'll run into a capship, though it's hardly necessary.


Mission Video (Youtube)
(Pictured: A Confederation Lance torpedo about to make it an extremely bad day for anyone aboard that Kilrathi transport)

Kills this mission: 5, including the transport.

Other than the Kilrathi transport, pretty much identical to the first mission. No, I don't know what the transport is doing here in Confederation space either. Maybe it got lost?

Here we see part of the problem in using the Thunderbolt against light fighters - it can't really keep up with them unless they're willing to fly straight at it, which fortunately they usually are eventually. It doesn't really matter here, because with numbers even I can concentrate on one fighter and nail it when it turns to attack. However, as light and medium fighter numbers increase, keeping on top of the enemy requires a lot of target switching just to make sure you're facing whoever's attacking right now, and taking damage starts becoming unavoidable when more than one fighter decides to hit you at once.

Speaking of which,
Ship of the day:
Thunderbolt VII

Class: Heavy Fighter
Length: 34 m
Mass: 20 tonnes
Max Velocity: 380 kps
Afterburner Velocity: 1000 kps
Maximum Yaw/Pitch/Roll: 50 degrees\second
Weapons: 2x Photon Cannon, 2x Plasma Guns, 2x Meson Guns, 6x Missile Hardpoints (default loadout is Heat-Seeking missiles), 1x Torpedo hardpoint
Shields: 25 cm durasteel equivalent all sides
Armour: Front: 12 cm durasteel Left: 10 cm Right: 10 cm Rear: 12 cm
Missile Decoys: 24

Official Strategy Guide: Amazing as the SPOILER is, there's one thing it absolutely cannot do, and that's deliver a torpedo against a cap ship. For that, you need something like the good old Thunderbolt. Although not as sleek or sexy as the Hellcat or SPOILER, the Thunderbolt is very good at what it was designed to do go - head-to-head with heavy targets. A traditional heavy fighter, the Thunderbolt has massive armor and shields and a potent gun attack. Its speed and maneuverability (while not in the SPOILER class) are respectable for a ship its size. In the hands of a good pilot, the Thunderbolt is quite capable of bulling its way through multiple smaller opponents (the rear-mounted mass drivers are handy for shaking particularly speedy gnats off its tail). The Thunderbolt's weak spots include a hefty silhouette and a curiously sparse missile loadout. Also, while its three sets of forward guns pack a formidable offensive punch, they have a very high energy drain and must be fired in three or four round bursts, with pauses of one or two seconds between. Most pilots prefer to fly something a little more sleek than the Thunderbolt, unless they absolutely know that they're going to need to use a torpedo. But if that's what it's going to take to get the job done, they know that the Thunderbolt will deliver the goods.

I say: I have no idea why the person who wrote the official strategy guide thought it was sensible to compare the Thunderbolt to this game's experimental Confed supership (it's not a spoiler to tell you there is one, there's always one in a WC game), which outclasses it in essentially every category (and torpedoes are unnecessary in WC3; you can kill capships without them, it just takes longer). The Thunderbolt is, to quote a character from a previous game, a gun-heavy slug. Trying to turn fast enough to keep up with Darkets is faintly comical and the Kilrathi medium fighters can also fly rings around a T-Bolt most of the time. It makes up for this with its front gun armament, which punches holes even in the heaviest enemy fighters, and pretty decent shield strength. On the lower difficulty levels, where the AI rarely uses its afterburners or missiles and doesn't evade or shoot as well as it can, there's no doubt the Thunderbolt is the best of the normally available fighters, though as the AI gets progressively more deadly at higher difficulty levels the speed and manuverability of the Arrow become more and more important both in setting up shots and staying alive.

Total kills (Wing Commander III): 2 missions / 8 kills
Total kills (this thread): 29 missions / 375 kills
Total kills (including previous thread): 140 missions / 1301 kills

Next time on Let's Play Wing Commander:
Everybody loves an escort mission!