Part 53: Mission #49: 12 August 2654, Charon system

Mission #49: 12 August 2654, Charon system

Previously on Wing Commander: A bit of search and destroy. Also, a decision has been made to withdraw from Firekka while trying to cause as much damage as possible on the way.


Maniac is exactly what I need now... not!






Let's just hope that we can cause enough damage so that the Kilrathi have to withdraw too...


Uh...


Nonononononononononono!






Oh, boy... here it comes.








Ok, enough. Let's talk to Knight, he's at least not crazy.





I suppose there's nothing else we can do here. I just hope those Firekka can fight against the Kilrathi on their own. But I don't think there's much of a chance of that, really.

Oh, come on, don't be such a pessimist, we'll make sure they have a chance!



Mission Time!

Well... no avoiding having Maniac on our wing this time I suppose.















With the huge Kilrathi fleet behind us, we can't take the time to detour around the border ships. Your assignment is to clear those ships out of our path. You'll have to work fast, pilots. Because every minute that we delay here means that those Kilrathi battle fleets are closer on our tail. These are your assignments…













So, first of all: yes, this is still the winning path and yes you HAVE to fly with Maniac regardless (there is actually one little quirk here with how the SM2 mission tree works, but I'll cover that next time with the final mission). All conversations almost seem to sound like we are retreating in defeat, but that's not actually the case; again, I'll explain this next time when we have a look at the failure side of equation. In the meantime let's see if flying with Maniac is really that awful.

• Mission Video (Youtube)
  

So he quite literally does not shut up, does he? But he does have the most entertaining/strangest comments of all wingmen, such as threatening to kill you if you accidentally shoot him and accusing you of stealing his kills and so on. But as a wingman he's kind of like a slightly more terrible Hunter. He is quite reckless, will rarely obey orders and it's up to you to make sure that you're not in his line of fire.

As for the mission itself, it's not really super-hard. As expected, the main problem will be keeping Maniac alive; since he won't obey orders to form up or anything like that, you will just have to hope for the best. If he doesn't get damaged by the Jalthi, then chances are fairly good--he's not a terrible pilot in fact.

The Gratha/Ralari encounter is fairly easy due to the enemies again being divided into two separate groups so you can engage one at a time. The main battle of course is with 5 Krants and a Snakeir and this may give you a bit of trouble as the Krants are very aggressive in this one. This will also prevent you from going after Snakeir until most/all of them are dead, which when put together with the fact that it requires quite a few hits to kill, pretty much guarantees that it will escape by jumping away. Luckily, the success of this mission doesn't depend on Snakeir. In fact it carries no points at all--the only thing you need to do to hear the victory music is to touch nav point 1, that's it! This is because we have a repeat of situation like in WC1 and unlike SM1: once you have reached this mission, you can't really lose the game any more--but it's not quite the same as in WC1, I'll explain next time the whole story.

In case anybody is wondering why I didn't use the rest of my missiles on Krants (or Snakeir for that matter), it's because my target lock computer got damaged in that collision so missiles couldn't lock on any more. And of course they won't fire unless locked on.

Incredibly we got another Medal of Valour in this one! Unfortunately, they didn't seem to foresee anybody having two so you don't even get an extra bar affixed or anything; hence no screenshot as there is nothing different to see.

Even though there was no reassignment talk, next mission is actually in a Rapier again. Which means, this is it for the Raptor; we won't get to fly it again--however there is something similar, but better in WC2.

The killboard:




Bonus

Somehow I managed to omit showing what happens when you eject. So here it is. Basically there are two different scenarios; one when you eject the first time--this nets you a nice talk with the commander and a Golden Sun medal for surviving. All subsequent times when you eject, you get a reprimand for not being more careful with the ships and not doing enough to bring it back!

Here are two videos; the first shows what happens when you eject the first time--this video also shows how the game handles when there is more than one thing to talk about in the commander's office (I don't think we've had a chance to see this before so I've included it this time). The second video shows what happens when you eject subsequent times (the actual text that colonel says may vary in WC1/SM1/SM2, this is the SM2 version).

• Ejecting for the first time (Youtube)
  
• Ejecting more than once (Youtube)
  

Next time on Wing Commander
The final stand at Firekka.