As an aside, I tend to think the wing doesn't take heavy enough casulaties given how little experience it has - practically everyone ejects and gets picked up on the relatively frequent occasions they get blown up by the cats. You should on occasions be in danger of running out of pilots as well as fighters.
You are, of course, absolutely right. Up until Episode 5, all our pilots were actually immortal - they always ejected. And this is pretty unnatural, for a rag-tag wing like the one we see.
The truth is, it was purely a technical concern. For reasons I don't even remember any more, we had trouble using WCP's automatic-wingman-assignment option. Remember how in WCP, you'd have different generics every time you flew a mission? Well, this didn't work for us. I guess we probably just used it wrong, and then got so used to the idea of it not working that we never got around to checking what we actually did wrong
.
Anyway, so for every mission, I had to plan who'd be flying it. Had we made our pilots mortal, I would have no way of knowing who'd be alive at this point, and therefore, I'd have to use each pilot exactly once, and assume that he may be dead afterwards (this, incidentally, is the case for most pilots in Episode 5 - once a pilot is permitted to die, he never appears in another mission regardless of his survival). This would have required a lot more than 40 pilots, obviously...
Of course, had we used the WCP system, we'd soon have run into another major issue - the fact that the system in WCP was broken (incomplete, if you prefer). There was no way of tracking the number of still alive pilots and/or making them immortal if the number of living pilots got too low - so, if you take too many losses in WCP, sooner or later the game will crash at the start of another mission, telling you that "squadron <x> ran out of pilots". This was a consequence of the game being told to launch another ship and put a generic pilot in... only to find that there were no more living generic pilots. In WCP, most people never saw this - there was a huge oversupply of pilots. But in Standoff, this would have been a nightmare. Even had we found a solution that prevented the game from crashing by limiting the number of ships being launched... well, by about the end of Episode 3, the loss of pilots would be a far bigger concern for the player than the loss of ships. Imagine, having a dozen Rapiers sitting on the deck, and only seeing about three of them in the air, all populated by the immortal "lead character" pilots
. That would certainly be an interesting and fun experience - but it's not what Standoff was supposed to be about.