[niffiwan]

I haven't checked the code to be 100% sure, but I thought there was an AWACs effect provided by your fighter - normally the Tiamat is outside the AWACs range of the Aquitane, when you get close enough you bring the Tiamat within your AWACs "bubble" and that lets the Aquitane target the Tiamat and fire its beams at it.

[Mongoose]

I'm pretty sure that the Recommendations text in the debriefing mentioned it helping, which I would assume is where the wiki got the info from.

[NGTM-1R]

I haven't checked the code to be 100% sure, but I thought there was an AWACs effect provided by your fighter - normally the Tiamat is outside the AWACs range of the Aquitane, when you get close enough you bring the Tiamat within your AWACs "bubble" and that lets the Aquitane target the Tiamat and fire its beams at it.

AWACs is a ship flag, though, unless there's some madness hardcoded to give the player an AWACs effect in that mission, or all the time, I don't think it's true...

[niffiwan]

You made me curious so I had a look through the code and I think you're right, the player doesn't have any hard-coded AWACs flag that I can see.  So unless it's set in the mission file (which I can't check right now) then getting close to the Tiamat won't have any effect 

[headdie]

What is the detection range set to in the mission, because I am wondering if the Tiamat is outside of the Aquitane's detection range.  IIRC if the player can't detect a ship and one of their allies can, eg stealth fighters, then while the AI has the ship in sight/can detect the object then it shows on the player's radar regardless of AWACS (thinking of "Out of the Darkness, into the night" as the main example), does this the other way when the player can detect a ship?

[Al-Rik]

Is it a AWACS thing ?

I have often noticed that Capital Ship Beams are fired at the ship that the players has targeted. Same with Bombs, sometimes capital ships seem to ignore a bomb them until you target it.
Seems to me that the AI is trying to steal kills from the player

[Spoon]

I think that destroying comms stops their messages from appearing, but I'll check that one.

Only if the message has a priority of normal or low. High priority messages get send regardless, even if the ship sending it has already been destroyed. Fred defaults every message to high.

[Qent]

I tried all priorities. Destroying comms does nothing to messages. Although if your comm is destroyed you can't receive messages or give orders except to call for a support ship.