[Arcanum]

it's a no briefing mission, which I thought usually means you carry over what you flew in the previous mission.

But no matter how I complete Field of Destruction, I wind up in a Zeus bomber, with 8% hull.   This makes the mission virtually impossible to complete.

[Goober5000]

Yup. screwed up on that one.

Red-alert missions start you off on whatever craft you flew in the most recent red-alert mission.  Doesn't matter whether that was several missions ago or even in a different campaign altogether.

This is just one of the aspects of the original Silent Threat.  We kept it to preserve the feel of the original (and to provide a contrast for ST:R ).  Just use cheats to get through it.

[Mars]

Is that why I always ended up in an Ursa with 3 banks of Harbingers (made the cruiser kill easy but made it very hard to protect the pods.

[Goober5000]

Probably, if that's what you used for the "kill the Lucifer" mission.

[Arcanum]

Now the mission has started crashing on me. 
It's hard to describe, but it's happened 5-6 times in a row now.  The first time I went to put in the cheats as soon as the mission starts, and when I ~+w to get infinite missles (I had zero) the game hangs for 2-3 seconds then crashes.  Another time it crashed when a message tried to play, and another time when I tried to look behind.

Every time it's less than 15 seconds into the mission, and its a proper crash ("xxx encountered a problem and needs to close.  Please tell Microsoft about this problem* *we love invading your privacy and meddling with computer software that we aren't affiliated with or have any clue about whatsoever"), not an assertion fault.