Description
In this mission the setting is of the stranded ships stuck in the nebula after Capella's destruction. They are standed and must get back to the GTVA. If it gets good ratings I will make it into a Campaign.

Storyline:
This is an interesting premise that I had wondered about after the main campaign. When the GTVA pulled out of the nebula they left behind anyone who couldn’t get back quickly enough. This mission is played from the perspective of those stragglers, who are grouping together to break out of the nebula. The Command briefing is quite long, actually, and though the layout isn’t the best (it’s a bit squashed-up) and there are no animations, it’s well written. The briefing, though a little short tells you all you need to know, and all of the icons match up. The debriefing may be a bit short, but it’s what’s in the mission is what most impresses me – chatter! Okay, so it’s only a bit about missing ships and wanting to live in Gamma Draconis, but it adds to the storyline, and adds something interesting. There are a couple of minor grammatical errors, mostly concerned with spaces at the start of messages.

Balance:
The first part of this mission is comfortably easy, involving some simple intercept, and it gets you into the swing of the nebula fighting, which, as I'm sure everyone knows is very different to fighting in space. This continues for a good while until a friendly corvette is spotted, and then the action switches to tenser bomber and fighter intercept. The bombers come in at point-blank range and itÂ’s very hard to stop all of their bombs, which is both good and also frustrating. The size of the attacking force is just about perfect for the environment. The author also included a tailored loadout, which is good, though perhaps a bit harsh with the exclusion of even the Prometheus S.

Design:
The author was intelligent enough to keep the sensor range in this mission fairly long. There’ll be no dogfighting interrupted by your sensors losing their lock in this mission, though you may have to fly at the dots before you can target the bombers sometimes. They’re cued to arrive a set distance from the corvette, which is good, as it keeps you on your toes. One annoyance is the fact that all of the fighters face in the same direction – it’s easy to spin them around a bit, so why not? There are some good waypoint paths, the directives in this mission all work, as do beam cannons, but the message layout could’ve been improved by using the infamous send-message-list. As usual, this is no big problem to you, the player.

Gameplay:
The first section of the mission, while easy is quite fun, though it gets a bit repetitive after four or five waves of fighters, which all seem to do nothing in particular. Defending the corvette is a lot of fun, shooting down bombs and blowing bombers to pieces. The final part of the mission, when the corvette has to battle with a Moloch feels tacked-on, as there are no other supporting units for it. It can be very annoying to see the Moloch annihilate you corvette just a few seconds from the end, and while you can do nothing to help really. One thing I will say in the missionÂ’s favour, is that the author seems to have got down the fact that engagements in nebula battles should be much smaller than normal ones, and this mission is all the better for itÂ’s smallness.

Other Thoughts:
I wonder if the Fruit Soup article by <b>Ouroboros</b> helped this author out? Also, is it me or is it really hard to hit enemy fighters with primaries in nebulas?