Okay, the mission went a bit smoother with the Acheron. I didn't fail all my events right off the bat.
A few things:
Regarding Iota's message being sent by command. I've found that if you send a message too quickly after a ship arrives, FS2 thinks the ship isn't there and thus will send it by command again. You have two options here, either put the delay higher so it waits a moment for the transport to arrive. Or change the message origin to "#Iota 1". That way, it'll show up "Iota 1" whether FS2 thinks the transport is there or not, the only difference is the transport won't have a little "talking" box around it should the pilot have it in view at the time. But no big deal.
The way that many FS2 missions are set up for directives, they have an event that checks if the target has arrived. For instance:
-when
----has-arrived-delay
------0
------Scorpio
----do-nothing
Then they have a chained event after, with a delay of 0 like this:
-when
----is-destroyed-delay
------0
------Scorpio
----do-nothing
Directive Text: Destroy Scorpio
Now the way you have it set up, it might work just as well. But if it doesn't, the above method should do fine also. Also, I'm not a fan of the directive keypress thing. Some people seem to demand them from missions, personally I've never used them in a mission and have never fredded them into a mission either. I think having "F11" in the directives box kind of messes it up, on my resolution anyway. For instance, in my directives it might be something like:
Destroy Aquarius (8)
F11
Destroy Scorpio (5)
F12
Destroy Libra (6)
F13
I'd prefer to have:
Destroy Aquarius (8)
Destroy Scorpio (5)
Destroy Libra (6)
Looks much nicer in my opinion. It may look better at higher resolutions. I'm not sure.
Also I might change up the latter capital ship battle. You obviously want the Bedford to survive, but it seems silly that when the Sobek jumps in, it unleashes a deadly barrage of 3 AAAf beams (it doesn't fire its main batteries). It's also a bit silly that both forces sit there at speed zero until the Bedford jumps out. What I might do instead is change the Sobek to a Mentu, and give the Bedford some way points which will bring it past the station. That way, the Mentu is large enough to shield the station and robust enough to survive a few beam hits without needing to fire any anti-ship beams in return. When the Aeolus goes past the station, it can bring a lot of its flak guns to bear. What this means is that the station will start taking major damage, and the player has to inflict enough hits on the Bedford to force it to jump out.
Um, there are quite a few spelling mistakes so you're advised to run it through a spell checker. There are a few grammatical/phrasing errors which come to mind.
For message "Alpha3: maybe . . ." the expression is 'present company accepted' not 'present company excluded' unless there's some variation I'm not aware of.
Briefing stage 3: "Also once" is a little akward and is also a little disjointed. Rather than going with an additive approach, I'd change the briefing to something more like this
"During the recovery operation, allied flights will be required to provide cover to the station and the recovery craft. This means safeguarding Adur station and a nearby science vessel, the Aeschylus, from further NTR attacks."
Debriefing:
I think that the debriefing needs to be a little consolidated. Some FRED authors like to have little blurbs for each and every objective. I find that the debriefing is in consequence neither fun to read or look at on the screen. Try to incorporate more information into each stage. For example, instead of having a "perilous got away" and "station lost" "station won" stages. Have just "station lost" and "station won" and incorporate the information about the perilous into them. There's no way the player can stop the perilous, so why a debriefing stage checking for failure of the objective? You _know_ it's going to fail so why check for it?
For example:
"Unfortunately we were unable to deploy our forces in time to stop the Perilous and the escaping ships. Despite this failure, you responded well to the mission's new focus in your successful defense of the installation against an aggressive enemy assault. "
Similarly for the science vessel you can have just three stages: One where the science vessel survives, one where it is lost and the escape pod is saved, and one where both the ship and pod are lost.
Other little grammatical errors
deb stage 1: should be "sight" not "site"
deb stage 4: should be "despite superior enemy numbers" or "Against great odds"
+lots of spelling errors which can be caught in a program like Word.
Also, one particular word I noticed you having trouble with (I mix it up myself sometime:)
lose = to lose. As in, the GTVA is about to lose to the shivan armada.
loss = something lost. As in, the Colossus was a tremendous loss to GTVA forces.
loose = opposite of tight. As in, whoever is in Command of Alpha 1's sorties has a screw loose.
That's enough for now.
