[StratComm]

Just be careful Woolie that Alpha 1 does not die before said orders were given.  Fighters have a notoriously short lifespan unless a human is flying.

[Solatar]

custom hitpoints, up them up to something like a Leviathan.

[Woolie Wool]

A couple of sexps will take care of that. Just make Alpha 1 invincible when his hull integrity reaches a certain point or just use the protect flag so his ship hangs on by a hair no matter what firepower is arrayed against him.

Using a special "Ace" AI class with every category pushed to the max helps too, unless you're playing on Insane, where Colonel and General pilots also have max AI stats.

[Solatar]

Well, if you give him high hitpoints, he can still be destroyed, and you could have no messages being ordered, or have Alpha 2 do them. You could be yelled at later.

That's if it isn't a persistant character...

[Trivial Psychic]

Or you could just use the "ship-guardian" flag, which will revent a ship from being destroyed, remaining at 1%... it won't prevent subsystems from being destroyed however, so you run the risk of a ship getting disabled and unable to engage... it can still call for a repair ship though.  Just to clarify, the protect-ship flag/sexp will prevent any ship from attacking that target.

Later!

[karajorma]

I actually prefer Solotars suggestion. One big problem with ship-guardian is that when you have a wing of fighters with 1% hulls it becomes very obvious what is going on. Boosting the hitpoints would mean that the ship would take damage but would be hard to destroy. A ship guardian just to make sure is a nice idea though