I understand your comparison to adding cut scenes to an already-completed movie, but at the risk of derailing this thread further, I feel like there's still a fundamental difference here. It's my opinion, though maybe not anyone else's, that Their Finest Hour as it stands contains severe inconsistencies that are mechanical more than anything else. The Wiki
walkthrough page does a good job of outlining them. Most notably, you have Command ordering the Colossus to avoid destruction and jump out, and the Colossus's commander nobly refusing to abandon its post, which is all well and good...except for the fact that the Colossus's engines are randomly disabled, which makes both Command and the ship's comm officer look like flaming idiots. Said disabling isn't referenced in any of the briefing or in-mission dialog, either. And then there the other friendly capital ships in the mission, whose sole purpose is to enforce the Capella blockade...except they don't use their main beams once, completely ignoring the fact that Shivan cruisers and corvettes are flying right past them into Epsilon Pegasi. From an in-mission viewpoint, nothing that goes on during it makes one iota of sense.
Out-of-universe, though, you can see exactly what was going on under the hood. The Colossus has the infamous waypoint path defined in the mission file that's never used due to its disabling. I've heard karajorma and a few other FREDders state their belief that
wanted the Colossus to pull off some fancy maneuvers, but because they couldn't get it to move just right to be in the right position to meet its demise (if you do enable the Colossus's images, I think it winds up not getting offed by the Sathanas), they were forced to disable it. The whole thing smacks of running up against a deadline and employing a crude, stopgap solution, as game developers so often have to do. As for the friendly capital ships not using their beams, that seems more like a flat-out error than anything else. There is a beam-free-all event for them, but it's timed literally a second or two
before they jump in. There's no in-mission reason for them to be disarmed, and I can't see why
would bother putting capital ships in a mission as part of a blockade yet not letting them actually fight. The simplest explanation is that someone just got the timing wrong.
Look, I'm not advocating going through the entire campaign with a fine-toothed comb and tweaking the hell out of every single mission with the end purpose of putting some sort of "enhanced" version in the MediaVPs, because I don't think anyone wants that. But in this one extremely limited case, with this one mission, I'd not only be fine with such an endeavor, I'd
want it. Based on the dialog we hear, both in-mission and during the briefing/debriefing, the mission as it stands doesn't make sense, but that can be changed very easily using what
has already given us. Fix the beam-free-all event, so that the blockading ships are actually blockading. If the Colossus's current unused waypoints are unusable, create a new path that does let it take out the Ravana and get destroyed by the Sathanas, but either way, get it moving. Make the mission match the spirit of the dialog, because you can do so without changing anything significant about its progression and outcome. I believe the FSU team has already made tiny tweaks to a few missions, things like correcting briefing icons that show the wrong type of ship; in my mind, this is just one and the same.
(And just to comment on something mostly unrelated to all that, while the Sathanas may still use earlier names in certain mission file events, there's never a point in-game where any dialog refers to it as anything other than its final name.)
