Description
In this mission you must investagate a new system beyond Ross 128.

Storyline:
Uh, there's a storyline? The basic premise here is that you are exploring a newly-discovered (albeit nameless) system and are searching for any signs of hostility. As for the "Old Foe" stuff, I'm not entirely sure I understand to whom this is referring to. I'm inclined to believe it is the Shivans, but are they really "Old Foe?" The Debriefing, on the other hand, almost sounds like the Shivans are a newly discovered race.<p> The briefing is very minimal and does some wacky camera actions between stages. It is just utilitarian.

Balance:
The designer made some conscious effort to balance this mission. Your wingmen will get wiped out very early on, but supplementary fighter wings and even a Hecate destroyer will arrive to back you up. While this effort is thoughtful, a much easier way to conquer this problem would have been to set the wingmen to General intelligence instead of the default Captain.<p> The Shivans themselves are seemingly a bit more ferocious than they normally are, but that was probably just because I had more bogeys on me at once since my wingmen didn't cooperate. In fact, Alpha and Delta Wings are set to run on Waypoints for some reason and, upon completing them, fail to do anything unless you tell them to.<p> And, oddly enough, you'd almost want the Beacon to die since its death triggers the massive Hecate destroyer to appear 14 seconds later.

Design:
The design of this mission is quite lackluster. There are only a handful of in-flight messages and, much to my surprise, none of the Events are named (how did the author ever keep track of which was which?). What events exist primarily circle around the Directives and beam cannon coordination. It's odd how the Directives and the Escort ship lists work so well and yet everything else seems lacking. Of course, it is also odd that all of the ships are placed along the same axis, yet they are all pointing in the right directions instead of just northward.

Gameplay:
The gameplay disintegrates into a dogfight mission, since the capital ships take out the other capital ships. One thing I noticed is that Rama Wing has a very high respawn rate of seven. This means that before long, you'll see Rama 28 flying across the screen. The designer could have cut back on Rama's respawns, since the last two arrive after the Shivan cruisers are destroyed and are about as threatening as a moth to a bug zapper.<p> So much more could have been done here...

Other Thoughts:
While I'm not rating this mission too highly, it is a good start and with further refinements, it could become a fairly nice mission.