Insert another mission in before Bearbaiting. It's mentioned in one of the two briefing that the Sathanas smashed a blockade on its way to Capella, but obviously that's not true, because Alpha One wasn't there, and Alpha One is
at all major engagements, always. This is where you get your BoE on. GTVA Command makes a big deal of making the Sathanas sound unstoppable, so demonstrate its power! Twenty capital ships! Forty capital ships! However many you like, so long as the Sathanas effortlessly punches a hole through the middle and continues on without so much as slowing down for breath. Oh, and grossly misprioritize the player by giving him the task of intercepting the Sathanas' bombers, so that he doesn't get the wise idea of trying to knock out the forward beams prematurely.
Bearbaiting does pretty well at the start. Given how close the Sathanas is to the Capella node, there's serious time-pressure for you to get your job done, so it builds tension very well, while providing a healthy challenge. It all falls apart, once the Sathanas jumps out, and despite the importance of disarming it, prior to it engaging the Colossus, you have to faff around with a Demon (a comparatively minor threat) and kill
every single fighter in the area. I'd make Bearbaiting shorter, by having ordering the bomber wing to
immediately pursue the Sathanas and exacting punishment for noncompliance.
High Noon is a little trickier. First instinct is to insert more warships, because who wouldn't erect a mother-f'n blockade with a juggernaut coming to town? Trouble is, by the time the Sathanas gets to Capella, it's bashed its way through at least one of those already, so the Colossus is being deployed in lieu of losing another dozen capital ships. However, with two ships with fighterbays the size of small moons, one would think that between them, they'd deploy a little more than a wing of bombers and a few waves of assault fighters. More fighters! More bombers! Reset the Colossus' AAA beams to normal (instead of those ridiculous Ultra-AAA beams), and make the player work to survive, nevermind sneaking a Sathanas kill credit onto his record. If FS2 was going WWII air combat in space, then make this feel like an epic engagement between carrier groups (as the Sathanas and Colossus both are each supposed to be a carrier group built into one ship). The
Battle of Midway involved an estimated 624 aircraft. Surely the Colossus and Sathanas combined, even after your slaughter of the latter's bombers in the first mission of the series, can muster at least that many fighters.
Anyway, the option that seems closest to what I've written is the big, domesticated mammoth.
Poll
