Beautiful Homeworld Mod Upgrade Released

The new Flag Commander update with realistic starscape backgrounds is live! As we mentioned last month, L.I.F. got some neat skybox software and has been carefully adding cool scenes to the Homeworld Remastered mod. Grab the update with the pretty backgrounds here. Here's some gorgeous examples and creative flavor text!

The Concordia wasn't exactly the first ship I'd have thought about when it came to pull a gut punch like this one, but I was a pilot, not a brass, so there I was, flying escort in my trusty Sabre. Sure, we were going to be cut off from reinforcements or easy retreat, but the Cats wouldn't see us coming, if Intel didn't mess up too much on that one.

It was a long shot that ultimately paid off big, since I'm able to write about it now. A science officer briefed us about some strange astrogation phenomenon that involved a couple of jump points in interstellar space that somehow got tangled together. Don't ask me the physics behind it, I'm sure there is a few dozens papers about the entire thing.

The important thing is that it gave us a backdoor that we would use. Once. These jump points interacted together in a way that made this batch of empty space one of the deadliest traps around, frying anything or anyone stumbling in an insane radiation field... except for one place.

The physicist talked about Cherenkov radiation, interstellar dust and dark matter, but she didn't sell it as she should have: the second most breathtaking sight I ever witnessed in my career. The Iselhorn Corridor, they called it. Of course, you can find the holograms, but let me tell you that no recording will ever come close to that feeling of awe I experienced, in this small cockpit, as we moved forward.

A Wing and a Prayer: an Ace's View, by Colonel Winfield T. Hart (retired)
Enterprise Press, 2675

I don't know if that Salthi pilot was as distracted as Bucky was. Probably not.

We expected the Corridor to be clean of Kilrathi presence, that they wouldn't have found their way through the radiation from their end of the sector, and we were wrong. Thankfully, they never really understood there was another jump point on the other side, so when our scanners found the Cats, they were as surprised as we were, but we had a task force and they had a small research outpost with a couple of fighters.

I was flying CAP with Bucky while the two Exeter went in for the kill. These light fighters couldn't hope to do any serious damage to them, and they neither had the range nor the jump drive needed to send a message away, but they fought well. I hope I would have done the same thing in their place.

This encounter didn't scrub the mission, but we were a lot more cautious afterwards, which saved us on the return trip. I hear that afterwards, the Cats decided to make sure noone would ever go through this backdoor again. They set up large antimatter warheads in the inner dust and dug big enough holes with it that even a dreadnought of theirs would be sterilized by the radiation.

A Wing and a Prayer: an Ace's View, by Colonel Winfield T. Hart (retired)
Enterprise Press, 2675

The real targets were in range, a hidden shipyard providing ships and logistics support for the rear echelon of the Kilrathi. The cats had set up a clever installation around a large telluric planet: a few of the smallest moons - big asteroids, really - were turned into mining rigs feeding a shipyard that was orbiting in spitting range of the planet's surface.

There was barely any defences, the idea was apparently to avoid being noticed by one of our deep strike groups while reinforcing the defences and possibly reinforce any reaction force. They didn't see us coming until it was too late, when the Concordia launched several strike packages at all the mining stations at once.

I remember feeling a bit annoyed on our way back. It had been murder rather than war. I knew they did worse to the colonies in the Border Worlds, but it didn't make me feel better knowing our torpedoes destroyed life support, communications and power on these moons, letting the Cats there die slowly.

A Wing and a Prayer: an Ace's View, by Colonel Winfield T. Hart (retired)
Enterprise Press, 2675

While we left the Kilrathi miners suffocate, the capital ships deorbited, going deep inside the gravity well of the planet, jamming all communications as our Ferret squadrons made sure noone would carry a message of our presence.

In hindsight, we should have connected the dots when we were surprised by a quick reaction force on our way out of the system. The shipyard must have had some stealth fighters that sneaked out of range of our jammers, but by then, our tactics were not yet properly updated, so we had holes in our coverage that the Cats exploited.

It didn't save them, though, as I barely had the time to land before the admiral wanted me back outside to escort one of our destroyers on an attack run on the shipyard.

A Wing and a Prayer: an Ace's View, by Colonel Winfield T. Hart (retired)
Enterprise Press, 2675