I think we were all gearing up mentally for one final push versus everything the cats could throw at us, with every ship we could muster in-system. Instead, the Colonel decided to use the element of surprise and send an alpha strike from The Claw to do the job. I gotta say, it was definitely a risky move. If it hadn’t paid off, the Colonel wouldn’t have commanded anything bigger than a garbage tug ever again, and that would have been if he was lucky. If he was unlucky, then the cats would have picked off the mostly defenseless Claw once they’d shredded her fighter wings.
Fortunately for all of us, that wasn’t what happened. Hunter and I drew the flight profile equivalent of a quarterback sneak, running straight into the teeth of whatever Kilrathi defenses were between us and the station. That turned out to be fairly substantial, even if the cats were less prepared than they would have been in a few more days.
The Fralthi and her Krant escorts at Nav 1 we took down pretty easily. But at the station, I started to have serious doubts about whether we could outlast the Kilrathi reinforcements. First came the Gratha. Then a swarm of Salthi. Finally, a full quartet of Jalthi, and those cats were out for blood by the time they launched. Plus, Hunter and I were already pretty beaten up from the previous groups. Still, we managed it somehow.
Note: Next week I’ll start walking through the losing branch missions. I think I’ll skip the in-character bits for those, but will add some discussion, because the overall mission format is interesting and warrants some analysis.