WC1, Cheng-Du 1. Where's the Ralari?!

Have you tried just waiting at the navpoint for a few minutes, not flying away trying to find the Ralari, just sitting. You don't have to fly anywhere special, it will just appear after a certain amount of time. After you've taken out the fighters, just kill your speed and sit sit floating in space, she should just show up after a few minutes. No more than 3-4 mins though.

If that doesn't work, try to stretch out your dogfight with the Krants, it could be she won't appear unless they're still alive but honestly I don't remember that being the case.

It's not really necessary to kill the Ralari to advance here, your main objective is to protect Valkyrie - but I guess you want that Gold Star.
 
Kurasawa 2 is probably the most infamously difficult Wing Commander mission in the entire series, we all know it's a total bitch - but I've (sadly) reached a stage where I can almost always nail it down first time. Only pointers I can give you are to ignore the Salthis in the asteroid field, slip past them, use Afterburners sparingly through the rocks, but don't autopilot - fly manually to the nav point with the Ralari waiting. I'm not sure why but if you autopilot, the cats are always a lot closer to the Ralari when you arrive.

Go for the nearest Gratha with a volley of full guns and a dumbfire missile, hit the second one in a similar way but fight as dirty as you can - I normally ram it if I haven't killed it with a few volleys of gunfire. Once the first two fighters are out the way, half the battle is won.

That mission is a notorious bitch, but after 24 years of playing the game, I've finally gotten used to beating it. Enjoy!
 
Sorry, that'll teach me to skim read using my phone. Ok, which version of WC1 are you playing, is it original WC1 via DOSBOX? (The GOG release?) If so you might be able to seek out an optimised DOSBOX config file for WC1 to improve frame rate.

Otherwise, I'd reccomend using the Kilrathi Saga version of WC1, which is available exclusively free from wcnews.com - you may be able to transfer your existing savegame across to it, for me it provides the most stable frame rate for running original Wing Commander on modern systems.

All else fails, make an MS DOS boot CD or floppy, and load WC1 in the original DOS environment for which it was designed.

As for those Salthi, have you tried crawling up to them, then throttling back your speed to zero, letting them approach you head on and just pick them off with full guns? Might be easier to fight standing still if you're getting choppy performance.
 
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I'm glad it worked out :) Regarding that copy of Kilrathi Saga you have: There's at least one online outlet selling Kilrathi Saga for download, but they're distributing pirated copies. Ebay is really the only place to legitimately get KS, anything you find for download online is ripped-off, which might be why the music is missing. This could well be an honest mistake on your part as like I said there's a sketchy online vendor.

The WC1 KS version from this wcnews includes working music ;)

You'll get the Silver star with persistance, I tried for like 10 minutes last night and came pretty close. Practise makes perfect.
 
Nathanael Ligon said:
In order to get the credit for the first four kills, I have to be extremely aggressive! I only have about a minute; then whoever is left just blows up on their own. So bizarre. I'm still new to WC, but together with all the other anomalies, I'm beginning to get the impression that it's really fun, but also one of the buggiest, glitchiest games I have ever played.
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The spontaneous explosions are by design... mostly.

Probably as a memory management issue, WC1 defines 2 fighter graphics and 2 capital ship graphics to be loaded for each encounter. If you reach a new encounter while ships from the previous encounter are in your field of view, the old ships will explode. If you're not worried about medals, you can complete almost any mission by afterburning back to the Tiger's Claw while using rear view (F4) or floating view (F9) to keep an eye on the enemy.

Venice 4 appears to exploit this by design. If you don't destroy the Fralthi at Nav 1 and fly back there after reaching Nav 2, the Tiger's Claw and its escorts will jump in, and all the Kilrathi will obediently explode.

In Chengdu 2, the action tends to drift back towards the Tiger's Claw. Get too close, and it will load in, destroying the Kilerathi before you can. However, in that particular mission, it seems that sometimes you can get too far from the Kilrathi encounter even if the Claw isn't in view yet, and they will explode in deep space. You are also correct that, once this happens, you will never find your way back to the Ralari.

Nathanael Ligon said:
The issue for now seems to be that I save the ralari most (half?) of the time because I come out at the same spot and have memorized the perfect strategy for decimating my opponents in seconds. When I fly around in the astroid fields taking out those salthis... well, who knows where I'll wind up when I get to the ralari. Still haven't managed it, but will persist.
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You could always destroy the Salthi, then fly back to the Tiger's Claw, then autopilot towards the Ralari from there for consistent placement. The Ralari and Gratha will happily snooze until you turn up.

Good luck in your effort to win all the medals. Just don't wear them in the cockpit, or their combined mass will send you tumbling to the left...
WC1VegaMedals.png
 
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