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silent threat mission 8 wingmen missing!

I haven't found this problem in any of the walkthroughs or forums for freespace. I've played the Silent Threat mission 'Exodus' (save the Krios) about 20 times and concluded it's impossible.

Thing is, I have no wingmen when the mission starts! The walkthroughs all talk about alpha and beta wings, but I start the mission alone every time. With the loki the mission gives me, I can almost get one of the escape pods to the jumpgate but then the cruiser takes it out before I can draw its fire.

I've restarted the mission to go back to mission 7 (asteroids) a half dozen times, and loaded out with different ships and all. I even restarted the entire Silent Threat campaign once (the missions are easier second time through). But I still get no wingmen in mission 8.

Any workarounds/suggestions appreciated.

At least you get a Loki; for some odd reason, at one point I was stuck in that mission with 1 wingman (Beta 1) and a Medusa, even though I'd been flying a different ship to begin with! That made the mission truly impossible, since I couldn't catch anything that was attacking the pods.

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"Before Lethal Weapon 2, I NEVER thought there could be a bomb in my toilet. Now I check EVERY TIME.

Mission reviewer for [url="http://freespace.volitionwatch.com"]Freespace Watch[/url]

The problem with that mission is that it's a red-alert mission that doesn't have a lead-in mission.

Basically, every time you encounter a red-alert ("downloading new orders"), the game saves your current ship, weapons configuration, wingmen status, and a bunch of other stuff. When the next mission starts up, all this information is reloaded to make a seamless transition.

Unfortunately, in this particular case there was no information in the previous mission to be saved. So the game loads up the information left over from the last time it encountered a red-alert, which in most cases is garbage.

Whoever designed the mission simply made a mistake - he flagged it as a red-alert mission when he should have flagged it as a scramble mission. So to fix your problem, simply extract the mission to your missions folder and change the flags using FRED. Then it should work properly.

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Goober5000, previously known here as Sesquipedalian, now changing his handle to make room for the HLP persona known as Sesquipedalian to register as Sesquipedalian. :)

Still play FS1? Check out my upcoming campaign, [url=http://www.geocities.com/ipw47/campaign.html]Fortunes of War[/url].
Play FS2 instead? Check out my finished minicampaign, [url=http://www.geocities.com/ipw47/dem.html]Deus Ex Machina[/url]. :D

If you don't know how to extract a mission look at my FAQ. It's mostly about FS2 but the extraction and editing stuff is pretty much the same for FS1.

I'd have done it myself but I don't have silent threat installed at the moment.

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Questions about FS3? Questions about Fred? Questions about missions? Questions about adding new ships to your games?

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Supreme Overlord of The Mercury Affair Campaign.

FREDder, Modder, Story design and general busybody for [URL=http://www.3dap.com/hlp/hosted/mindgames/Background.html] Mind Games[/URL]

And most people say noone plays FS1 anymore...

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Im too young to be a hippie :hippy: , but the only good hippie is a hippo...

:hippy:

That was definately the most messed up in terms of coding but definately the most interesting and challenging mission I've played.

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- The Babylon Project Team

Thanks, folks. I switched the difficulty setting down to "easy" (ugh!) and passed the mission. 1 or 2 escape pods made it to the jumpgate. Next time thru I'll take Goober5k's advice and use the mission editor.

Now to get my hands on FS2. I happened to get lucky & found a Silent Threat disc in a Half Price Books, so what the hey. Pretty tough missions overall (when you're not playing on easy).