Part 98: Mission #93: Olympus station, Ghorah Khar system

Mission #93: Olympus station, Ghorah Khar system

Previously on Wing Commander: A nice and fun mission, taking out a few rookie pilots on a practice run. They all did quite well and survived intact.

And now back to thwarting Kilrathi plans against the rebellious Ghorah Khar.











I guess this is the equivalent of a 'dead drop' in 27^th century...




A cunning plan!










Minutes later...























He's got a bit of a point there, I think.








Yeah, don't even bother, that fourth wall has been destroyed long ago...

So, anybody remember when was the last mission in which we had a 'normal' setup with just one named wingman? Yeah, it's been quite a while. But in this one it finally happens again, it's just us and Hobbes! As long as we don't get into his line of fire, we should be ok. What the briefing forgot to mention is that the data pod is actually on a far end of a minefield, so... groan. Before we take off, I'll just mention that this is another one of those videos that turned out a bit 'special' in the end.

• Mission Video (YouTube)
  

Heh, yes... generally I try to present relatively 'clean' runs here, but since we were nearly done here I thought I might as well show off what it looks like when your radar gets destroyed. It's kind of annoying as usually it makes it very difficult to finish the mission, although, I guess not impossible at least in theory. But, as I said, here we were almost done, so it didn't really matter.

Honestly, that minefield is the most annoying feature of this mission and you should basically try to avoid it as much as possible. The two Grikaths can be, to an extent, drawn out a little bit so you don't have to fight them right in the middle of it. Since there's only two, they shouldn't cause too much trouble; especially with Hobbes around. Also, if you don't feel up to it, you can safely skip this battle, nothing special to be gained from it.

As for the data pod, it's not actually IN the minefield, but just outside the far edge of it; If you don't want to go near the mines, just do what I did--fly to Nav 3 and then return back to it and you'll avoid them completely. But be warned that you MUST pick up that pod. If you fail, that means temporary switch to the losing branch--here you get an extra mission to fly; if you succeed you continue back normally, otherwise it's game over. In this extra mission, you get some additional dialogue from Paladin about how he had to send some other pilots for that data pod you failed to retrieve. Again, it's somewhat interesting and I wish they had room to work it into the main series; it goes like this:

Any news, James?
Well, we sent two of the Olympus pilots, Rodriguez and Hathaway, after that data pod. They retrieved the pod, but Rodriguez didn't make it back. Poor lass. An' I just received a report from Ghorah Khar. A Rigakh cruiser made it past the defensive forces on the Ghorah Khar-Rarkath border. They dropped some ground-burst bombs before one of our boys could take them out.
Civilian casualties?
No way to know yet, not until the smoke clears. Something irks me about this situation here, laddie… Here we are, manoeuvrin' the Kilrathi to attack us from a particular approach- But I'm getting the feeling that we're being manoeuvred, too. There's a pattern to what's going on here, but I can't see it yet.
I'm sure you will, James, in time.
Aye, but time's the one thing we dinna have right now, lad.


And that's it for this one, next time we start on the final set of missions for SO1.


Current kill total: 93 missions/768 kills



Next time on Wing Commander
Exactly what do you mean by 'small'?