I fully realize that mission is a series of possible insta-fails. Not my favorite mission.. but hey, it was my 2nd mission I ever FREDed!
Though I am surprised you had issues dropping the charges in the right places. That system in place for detecting that is pretty gracious. (I think. It's been a few years since I worked on that.) And Aries moves pretty slow.. though the cruiser killing one of them is a bug. I'll have to fix that. The conversation chunk was definitely shoehorned in late in development of that mission and probably should have been left out. In fact, the entire intro section was thought up by Snail, iirc, after the mission was mostly complete. Oh well!
Get past that one and hopefully you find other missions to like!
And yeah, I'm aware of the hotkey bug.. but I don't know what else I can do about it. I've set the wing as F10 hotkey. I guess I could be a good modder and make a reproducible test case for the SCP guys.