Description
Your job is to patrol Hawthorne station, a top secret Instlation inside a nebula. The station has made incredible strides in negating the nebular effects. Protecting this station is your primary goal. This mission was 2nd place in the Ground Freespace joystick contest.

Storyline:
This mission places Alpha wing as part of the defence force of an installation in the nebula beyond Gamma Draconis. The installation has been heavily modified and the technicians have come up with a method to increase visibility in the nebula. All of this is explained in the Command briefing, which is good. The briefing is a little short and contains a misnamed icon, but nothing major. It's good to see that in mission there's a lot of chatter and messages, though there are quite a few spelling and grammar problems.

Balance:
This mission is well geared towards players of all skill levels, the earlier sections being fairly easy escort of the science cruiser and the subsequent ones becoming harder and harder. The best part of the mission, in my opinion is the final section, defending an Orion-class destroyer from frenzied Shivan bomber attack while it picks up escape pods. This is because you get to stay in one area for a while – in many of the other attacks you're flying from here to there, making it slightly disjointed, but not too much. Whoops, I gave away the mission there, didn't I?

Design:
In the design section the author has been able to get all of the directives to work properly, rearm the Arcadia installation with beam cannons (but why are they red Shivan cannons, not BFGreens?) and use send-message lists to cut down the number of events. Other events, like crippling the installation's subsystems could've been combined, the naming conventions for the wings of Shivan fighters are a little varied, and ideally I think I'd have like to have seen more nebula totally surrounding the player. As it was it felt like I was near a big nebula, not in it. However, it <i>is</i> a nice effect.

Gameplay:
So, I got all tooled up for a nebula mission, and it wasn't even one! This is a big surprise for whoever plays it the first time, and a good one. The mission is challenging but not difficult, and the use of open space instead of a nebula certainly allows for bigger battles and better balance. Despite the spelling errors and design oddities, or the destruction of the Hawthorne being quite predictable this mission is good fun throughout.

Other Thoughts:
Well done to Famtomeye for getting second in the GFS contest – this mission is a real step up from his first, Attack.