Part 73: Orsini System, Epsilon Sector, Mission 4 (Gameplay)
Yeah, being very productive and putting up Christmas decorations don't really go together as it turns out. Anyway, have an update.12th August 2669, Orsini System, Epsilon Sector
TCS Victory
The Kilrathi deploy their prototype Skipper missile against a passenger transport travelling through the Orsini system.
Cutscene videos/thread vote:
Flint was the thread's choice of wingman, with 8 votes to Cobra's two. You people are all about the high morale responses, not that I expect this one will make you like Flint much more (she's rather insecure, for...well, a lot of reasons, and doesn't always come off well as a result, but more on that in her character bio). I probably shouldn't be all that suprised given that you also kept picking the right ships in Standoff, but I kind of am. After "mahalo, fuckers" I was somewhat expecting the thread's Blair to be a complete jerk.
Here's the video for the pre-mission conversation:
Pre-Mission Conversations (Youtube)
Mission Briefing & Loadout:
Briefing Video (Youtube)
(This is I think a bit cruel - the Skipper is shown targeting an Arrow in the briefing video, whereas in the mission we're going to discover that skippers are anti-capship weapons. Still, I suppose intelligence being wrong is hardly a first.)
I'm flying an Arrow armed with image recognition missiles. This is the lazy choice for the mission, in that the Arrow is almost as fast as the Skipper without using burners, so I can miss it at my first attempt, get another shot, and still have plenty of AB left to fight the Dralthi. Since I've already pretty much proved that while I'm a solid pilot and tactician I'm hardly a crackshot in this game, it's clearly the correct approach. Also, the Arrow is just better at dealing with Dralthi (missile avoidance and turning circles being the big things here), and since Darkets are rarely dangerous, only annoying, it's the better option for that reason too. There'll be a corvette to kill, but as I showed last time, that's hardly a problem either.
Mission Video (Youtube)
(Skipper missile in the process of cloaking, and also way the fuck closer to my Arrow than I intended for it to get)
Kills this mission: 7, counting the Skipper missile (since the killboard does).
Ship of the day:
Darket
Class: Light Fighter
Length: 24 m
Mass: 12 tonnes
Max Velocity: 520 kps
Afterburner Velocity: 1350 kps
Maximum Yaw/Pitch/Roll: 90/80/90 degrees\second
Weapons: 2x Meson Guns 2x Missile Hardpoints (default loadout is Heat-Seeking missiles)
Shields: 8 cm durasteel equivalent all sides
Armour: Front: 6 cm durasteel Left: 4 cm Right: 4 cm Rear: 6 cm
Missile Decoys: 6
Official Strategy Guide: The tiny, diabolically quick Darket is much, much less powerful than any of the Confederation ships, but that doesn't mean it's not a threat. Darket are explicitly designed with a single tactic in mind. They exist to gang up on Confederation fighters. While one Darket engages the enemy from the front, evading his shots and missiles with its formidable speed and maneuverability, the other Darket line up behind him and nibble him to death with guns or blast him with heat seekers. (Darket get much better at actually implementing this tactic at higher skill levels.) The moral to the story is: keep the Darket in front of you. Once you've whittled down the enemy Darket to the point where they're one to one, they're no longer any sort of effective threat, but they can still be devilishly hard to run down and smash. If you're not fanatical about missile conservation, you may want to tag a slightly-wounded Darket with an IR missile, just to save time. Even a single missile shot is usually enough to take a Darket out of action.
I say: I've already said a lot about the Darket and practically none of it is complimentary. As the guide implies, they're slightly more of a threat in larger numbers, though only slightly so to an Arrow (just as it struggles to follow them, they can't follow it either) and in a Thunderbolt all it means is that you have to switch rapidly between your targets so you're facing whoever's about to shoot at you - and as I've also shown, a Darket doesn't need to be wounded to nail it with an IR missile.
Lieutenant Robin Peters
Callsign: Flint
Played by: Jennifer MacDonald
Current role: Pilot, 36th Fighter Wing, TCS Victory
Previous assignments: Unknown, this may be her first tour.
If Rachel is an expanded-upon version of Sparks, you could argue that Flint bears a similar relationship to Angel (Blair even remarks on it, actually), or at least to how you imagine Angel might be if she was younger and less experienced than the protagonist rather than the other way around. Flint is a cautious, by-the-book officer who comes from a military family - she was taught to fly by her father and is very proud of him, but feels at the same time a lot of pressure to prove herself as a pilot, something which having a living legend as her CO does absolutely nothing to alleviate. Flint is probably the most detailed character in the game; she gets a lot of scenes and Jennifer MacDonald does a pretty good job with her, too. We'll learn a lot about her as the game goes on.
Flint's too young to have been really affected by the war badly yet - which is a relative term, of course, in a war this long and this intense, but it's not something that she's really been forced to face through an adult's eyes rather than a child's. A lot of her plot is coming-of-age in various ways, and they're some of my favourite scenes in the game. In case you've not guessed yet, I really like Flint as a character.
She's also, for that matter, one of the best wingmen too. Cautious and competent, she can be relied upon to obey orders and not to get her fighter shot to pieces and thereby continue dividing the incoming fire for a lot longer than almost any of your other comrades. For that reason, she's generally a good choice on the toughest missions and is also a fine strike pilot. While she might be compared to Angel on the ground, behind a stick she's got more in common with Doomsday - assuming you treat her right, anyway, she's badly affected by low morale. The strategy guide says:
pre:
Aggressiveness......1 (0) Carefulness ........1 Courage ............1 (0) Flying .............2 Gunnery.............2 Loyalty ............2 (1) Verbosity ..........1
Total kills (Wing Commander III): 4 missions / 21 kills
Total kills (this thread): 31 missions / 388 kills
Total kills (including previous thread): 142 missions / 1314 kills
Next time on Let's Play Wing Commander:
We only have 24 hours to save Tamayo II!