Toast
Space Marshal
We've had so many fighter "gripes" threads here that we even covered the fighters almost everyone likes. So let's turn things around. Tell everyone why you love the Scimitar! Favorite stories, favorite missions, closest calls, best moments in WC Academy or the novels, anything you've seen in the WC continuity or experienced yourself that exemplifies why this old bird holds a place of honor in your pilot's heart.
That ancient standby, the CF-105(?) Scimitar. Over a hundred years old, a gun-heavy slug that handles like a Centaurian mud pig. But hey, by and large we love the Scim anyway. Tough, good guns, and about as handsome as a Mack truck. Its handling characteristics made flying missions in WC1 a completely different experience from flying the Rapier or the Raptor:
- you had to worry about missiles, since your shields couldn't absorb them entirely
- you had to guesstimate and reguesstimate how much front/rear armor you had during combat, since the indicator wouldn't tell you (although the music sometimes would)
- no green inside the cockpit, with VDU's over the pilot's head. A totally different feel.
WC1, Brimstone series
It was with the Scimitar in Brimstone that I learned the obvious: asteroids and minefields must be treated differently. Pick your way through the rocks, but afterburner through the mines.
- I can't remember just how many mines I hit during that patrol with Maniac! 9? 10? I kept thinking the next mine was going to total the ship. But it never did - I still landed. And I even still had both of my mass drivers.
Things like these made missions in Scimitars intense, to be sure, but that didn't mean they weren't fun. You had powerful guns and shields too thin to keep you totally safe. A mission in a Scimitar could be handled like a good-old-fashioned slugfest, with the tension mounting as your armor gets burned off one centimeter at a time, or executed as a tour de force of piloting expertise as you use slides, kickstops and 'burners to dodge fire you normally wouldn't care about in a Rapier or Raptor. And every maneuver had to pulled off with more urgency and better situational awareness, since she didn't have the Rapier's agility or the Raptor's speed.
She was a inferior fighter very long in the tooth, but the missions were more exciting. It was this that made the difference between a welcome challenge and a frustrating bore.
That ancient standby, the CF-105(?) Scimitar. Over a hundred years old, a gun-heavy slug that handles like a Centaurian mud pig. But hey, by and large we love the Scim anyway. Tough, good guns, and about as handsome as a Mack truck. Its handling characteristics made flying missions in WC1 a completely different experience from flying the Rapier or the Raptor:
- you had to worry about missiles, since your shields couldn't absorb them entirely
- you had to guesstimate and reguesstimate how much front/rear armor you had during combat, since the indicator wouldn't tell you (although the music sometimes would)
- no green inside the cockpit, with VDU's over the pilot's head. A totally different feel.
WC1, Brimstone series
It was with the Scimitar in Brimstone that I learned the obvious: asteroids and minefields must be treated differently. Pick your way through the rocks, but afterburner through the mines.
- I can't remember just how many mines I hit during that patrol with Maniac! 9? 10? I kept thinking the next mine was going to total the ship. But it never did - I still landed. And I even still had both of my mass drivers.
Things like these made missions in Scimitars intense, to be sure, but that didn't mean they weren't fun. You had powerful guns and shields too thin to keep you totally safe. A mission in a Scimitar could be handled like a good-old-fashioned slugfest, with the tension mounting as your armor gets burned off one centimeter at a time, or executed as a tour de force of piloting expertise as you use slides, kickstops and 'burners to dodge fire you normally wouldn't care about in a Rapier or Raptor. And every maneuver had to pulled off with more urgency and better situational awareness, since she didn't have the Rapier's agility or the Raptor's speed.
She was a inferior fighter very long in the tooth, but the missions were more exciting. It was this that made the difference between a welcome challenge and a frustrating bore.