Part 50: Mission #46: 31 July 2654, Corsair system
Mission #46: 31 July 2654, Corsair systemPreviously on Wing Commander: Blown up a bunch of stuff. TCS Austin has retreated so our temporary guests, Doomsday and Jazz have departed. We'll meet up with them later.
Iceman and Knight. But where is Paladin, he's not been around for a while? Or, for that matter, Angel--she wasn't in the greatest shape last time we saw her!
Er, what?
Oh, in that case... Earl Grey--hot, please!
Not really. Most of the Bridge officers aren't talkin' much. I think everyone's waitin' to hear what's happened to the marines on Firekka.
Human traitors! Really. The plot thickens.
Right there with you, Ice.
...from all of those Kilrathi battle fleets. But those marines are right in the thick of it. And I keep thinking about that flight instructor job. It might be good, just for once, not to be right in the middle of a hot zone.
Mission Time!
Check the asteroid field at your Nav 2, then return home.
Don't know about you, but I always prefer to blow up capital ships rather than having to protect them! And this time it's just a couple of transports which are sitting ducks anyway!
And yes. The two transports are history and it literally took 4-5 full salvos from our Raptor for each one of them! Not that they were particularly well defended, I mean, really, Dralthis? Now that we've flown the Dralthi, we know full well how actually bad it is. Since the transports are prone to jumping, you can basically go straight for them as soon as the second one shows up; it takes so little time to destroy them both that Dralthis are unlikely to do anything serious to you meanwhile.
Those 5 Salthi at the start are mainly just for fun as they don't pose a real threat; try to kill all of them (i.e. don't let any escape) so that you would get 5 more to play with--if any from the fist wave escape, second wave won't show up, as usual (although you could try to go back to the nav point to see if they will re-spawn). It's also a good boost to your kill score.
And finally the two Hhriss in the asteroid field may seem like a disaster waiting to happen, but you should know by now that AI has an overly cautious scripting when fighting in the asteroids--this translates mainly to them moving a lot slower than they normally would. Hence, the main advantage of Hhriss, its speed, is mostly negated and they are only left with a thick armour.
Yes, this mission is considerably easier than previous. However, you do need to destroy all four big ships in these two missions to be able to progress down the winning path. Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid the 'heavy casualties' of the soldiers that disrupt the Kilrathi religious ceremony. It always happens that way.
As you saw in the video, next time we are again in a Dralthi, but just for one final mission in it. Also, we get a new wingperson, this time it's Angel.
The killboard now shows an exact average of 10 kills per mission.
Bonus
As usual, there are two sides of a cutscene; so here is what happens when you don't manage to win this set of missions. Basically the operation on the planet surface fails spectacularly:
Next time on Wing Commander
Face of an Angel, part three: A new direction.