It’s another attack on The Claw! This is the second time in the past two systems that the cats have sniffed out your home location. There’s nothing to drive home the feeling of being behind the 8-Ball like having your home under attack. Interesting too is the fact that essentially all three missions in this system are escorts of one sort or another.
Bar chat for this mission is all about how much the Scimitar sucks/doesn’t suck depending on who you ask. On the winning track, these conversations happen before the first McAuliffe mission. Here in Cheng-Du, you’re going to be forced into a Scim regardless of the overall system outcome, so it makes sense for these conversations to happen now. I’ve never been sure whether Shotglass and Knight are intentionally giving you incorrect information, or if their dialog mistakes are a result of game design changes that happened out of sync with the dialog writing.
We also get two more unseen pilot callsigns in the mission briefing. Redbird and Turtle are Killer Bees pilots that we never hear from again.
Over on Youtube, one of my regular viewers asked about wingman deaths. Angel happened to die while I was recording the successful run for this mission. Normally I consider that a good reason to restart a mission, but in this case I decided to go ahead and keep it to show the funeral cinematic. That said, because I did have to reload the mission and eject to get a failure and move to Port Hedland, Angel will still be alive in future videos.