Part 51

Tynam has awakened from his coma, but is continuing to hallucinate. He attributes his destruction at the hands of his own fusion missile as a "training simulation." Once he was awake he didn't waste any time getting back to what he does best - incorrectly imagining the Frontier War.

No more holographic training missions, this is the real thing! This alien base is going down!

The trick is to get as close as you safely can...

...then hit reverse thrust and fire the fusion missiles.

And that's how you do that.

With the alien base destroyed, UFO activity in the area will decrease to nearly zero.

Two more bases have gone online recently, so we'll be getting a lot more research downloaded.

SUCH AS GRAVITAS DRIVE.

The gravitas drive is powerful enough to mount on our super avengers. The avengers still lack the range of Lightning craft, so I'll be keeping More Gravitas around. I can have shields and weapons recharge at 75%, tractor beam on and still travel at top speed. This new engine kicks ass.

Equipped with my new engine I departed my base to begin eliminating nearby alien outposts when I detected another alien base.

It was dealt with the same way. I returned to base to rearm, when we got more technology downloaded.

Much like how the Muton was the best alien soldier, the Aereon proves to be the best possible alien pilot. The Shade is already a formidable fighter, and with Aereons exclusively piloting them, they become even deadlier. I got really lucky when I was previously able to disable one.

This is a good one shield. Better than our current shields. The entire fleet gets an upgrade.

Awesome armor. Again, the entire fleet will be upgraded.

Trans-dermal armor and graviton pulse drive continue to be the best available hull and engine for our ships, even twenty years later.

YEEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!

Hey look, it's a funny "sixty-nine, dudes!" joke! Aren't we clever now. Groan.

Our alien autopsy video is much cooler than the ones the Mutant Alliance claims to have.

Video

OH SHIT a freighter is wreaking havoc on nearby systems? However are we going to deal with the offensive powerhouse know as a freighter?

They say this development will lead to better missiles, but I hardly ever use the ones they give me.

The invention of synthetic elerium wasn't the great advancement we were hoping it might be. It's less power intensive to mine in the Frontier than it is to manufacture from scratch, so mining of elerium will continue to be of great importance.

The tracking tracer cannon is of much greater importance to me. The regular tracer cannon fires straight. The tracking tracer cannon aims for you, so all you have to do is point your ship in the general direction of an alien and it will automatically aim and hit it for you. The drawback is low damage and high energy requirements. Still, the entire fleet is getting some of these!

We found that SUPER freighter, so it's time to destroy it!

Four regular lightning versus our now super craft, ON NOES!

So yeah, tachyon pulsars...

...plus gravitas means no more pirate freighter.

What's our reward for going on this dangerous mission?

Two-fifty grand. Our current balance is fifty million. Whoop-dee-doo.

So here's the tracking tracer cannon in action. It rules. That muton never knew what hit it.

Speaking of mutons, they suck as pilots.

Better than the missiles we have, but not worth the trouble of equipping on all our craft. Fusion and X-winder missiles do just fine.

See? We've started taking out a lot of outposts in the Frontier.

And look! We find another alien base in the process.

The vector control thrusters look cool at first glance. It gives you the ability to move laterally. The problem is that our fighters can't detect our advanced joystick's HAT switch so we have to use a keyboard to use them, which really, really sucks.

I went to destroy that new alien base.

I noticed it was defended by a phantasm class ship.

The pilot was some creature called a "Psilord". Good thing I'm the lord of gravitas, and we captured the ship. Our new engine gave us the capability to win a tractor tug-of-war with a phantasm.

Research of this new ship will be a high priority. We've got a lot of new tech researched, but unfortunately, not much of it is of direct use to us.

The phase cannon is a decent weapon. It's more damaging and power efficient than the tracer cannon, but you have to aim it.

THIS gun is totally useless. It totally drains your weapon energy when you fire it, so if you miss, you're boned. And if you hit? You maybe, maybe confuse the pilot to fight on your side - for like 10 seconds.

Very true. Psionic attacks were a very important part of the first two alien wars, but they played almost no part in dogfights in the Frontier.

9/11/67 Never forget Portals '69.

With our AATS devices, our ships can scan a heck of a lot better than probes, even probes that move in little circles. Still, probes are useful for exploring far away nooks of the Frontier.

The accumulator shields are pretty cool. Too bad we can't use them on our ships for some reason.

Autopsy on the Psilord tells us that whenever we're in a fight, we need to kill the Psilords first. It's a good thing we've never seen these things used as soldiers as they would be highly effective. Luckily they can't support their own mass in a gravity field, as they can't move around very well outside of a ship.

With this, we can now order Firestar class vessels.

It's a ship in between the Lightning and the Super Avenger. It has most of the good qualities of both ships, but excels in nothing.

Just once I'd like a cloaking device that allows you to fire with it on. Is that too much to wish for?

Now that we've completed download of the phantasm class, we've now unlocked can now begin downloading the...


...wait for it...


...it's coming soon, I swear...


...almost...

There is it! Message four, coming to us very soon.

Still not worth equipping.

While the parallax missile is itself pretty useless, it triggered a line of research options that eventually led to one of the few useful missile X-COM uses.

Hey look, more fantasically huge alien components to capture!

On the way to capture that, we finished downloading a piece of technology blatantly ripped off of the skipper missile from Wing Commader.

And then I capture this thing for good measure. I'll update my journal with cool videos soon, I swear.

Bah! Another torpedo I'll never use. Get to the cool stuff already!

Here we go. The large alien component is part of a huge drive system. We'll research that soon.

But not before we research another missile we'll never use.

Finally! Something cool! The flashing X-COM symbol at the beginning of this message indicates it was directed at us. We see an Ethereal speaking.

Video

"**************ighly unacceptable ************* attacks does not ************** project is falling behind! Excuses about disrupted shipments and harassed base commanders are irrelevant! I do not wish to travel to ************* myself, BUT I WILL if your work continues at its current, substandard level. AND I PROMISE YOU, I will have your ************* if I am forced to make such a visit!"

This alien message apparently was intended for an alien in the Frontier in charge of shipments on the Doomsday project. The video shows an ethereal chewing him out. The curious thing is the way this message was transmitted. The aliens clearly WANTED X-COM to intercept the message, perhaps to instill fear in us. The Frontier is neither the territory of X-COM or the aliens, so there's the threat that the ethereals may come here in full force. Instead this message increased our resolve to figure out the details of the Doomsday project, and find a way to stop it.