Sky Crawlers Mission 17 is another fighter sweep, this one prearranged, far from the Cougar base and over medieval Mont St Michele, the famous French island abbey with the high tides – here called Togakuten(which might have something to do with musical grammar). The mission turns out to be a three parter. It’s tough enough that I haven’t finished Part 3 yet, but I thought I’d put up my experiences so far.
Part 1 (furball)
In Part 1 you fight against a cloud of Lauterns. There’s so many that you have to rely pretty much entirely on TCM for your kills. Once you have shot down enough enemy, the others run away, and you are left facing their super-ace, Oroshina, in a Sanka 2
Part 2 (with spoilers)
A couple of passes against Oroshina and the fight drifts over the abbey, which turns out to house a flak trap — large and medium guns mounted mostly atop the high (800m, e.g. 175 stories, about the height of Burj Dubai) medieval towers. Your job in Part 2 is to shoot up as many of the guns as possible. Unfortunately, if you get very high up you become vulnerable to the guns. If you stay below 500m or so you are sortof safe because they can’t shoot down at you. Equally unfortunately, you can’t see them to kill them from below, and no, just blowing the top off the tower with a rocket pack doesn’t work. What you have to do is fly out at least two rings on your radar, Immelmann back and pop up to 900m or so, then bore in at high speed, kill the target, and immediately go nap of the earth on the other side. Since most of your weapons have a distinct reload time, you only get one shot, so the secret is to press really close before you fire. Kill enough guns and Oroshina suggests you move elsewhere and continue the fight at low altitude and why couldn’t she have thought of that earlier?
Part 3 (with whines)
This is a straightforward, 10 minute, air to air, one on one, mano a ….kildren dogfight. When you pop into this mode, Oroshina is in your gunsights, and you have to be ready to pour a lot of firepower into her from the beginning. If you were in ‘bombs’ mode from the last episode, too bad, she’s out of there before you can select ‘guns’. This is your only chance for a clean shot at her, so be ready.
The trouble with this phase of the combat is, the game cheats. Continuously. First is the problem of the invulnerable enemy. Previously, if you put enough of a burst into an enemy plane to make pieces fly off, you could switch to another target while the first one went into a spin and exploded. Not here. On my first try, I got lucky with an early lockon, and put so many rounds into Oroshina’s airplane that my wing guns overheated. Smoke, explosions, flashes, lots of big chunks, excitement. Didn’t faze her in the least (“Oh, you hit me”). That was early on, of course, and they might have had some sort of oratory planned for later. But it didn’t seem to matter how far into the scenario we were, or how many parts-fall-off bursts I hit her with, she never slowed down. This is using both wing guns and the rapid fire pods. Second problem was the radar, which had a tendency to go blank, even when I could see her airplane, or to go to its standard 5km ring display, even when she was within 1km of me, which kept me from seeing how she was maneuvering. Finally was the teleportation cheat, where the enemy fighter suddenly translates 100m to the side and rotates 180degrees. I encountered some kind of teleportation effect whenever she was anywhere near my gunline. This also impacted TCM play. I almost never got more than a quarter-second lock above TCM-1. If I didn’t hit (A) the instant the bar went to one, I lost the chance.
After all that, it’s hardly worth mentioning that her Sanka 2 was outmaneuvering me right and left, despite the fact that my Itsuha had a good 5 dgrees/sec turn rate on her. She’d fly past, blasting me well before I was in gun range, then spin, and curve around to make a side pass before I could get a MCM to work. I managed to capture an example of this on the replay. Her plane came from head-on, curved around behind me, and then outran mine. Talk about flying rings around me.
Comments (and countercheats)
I still haven’t cleared this level yet, but it looks like you need to hit Oroshina with some big ordnance in order to do any good – when I selected the gunpods, it told me they weren’t suitable for the antiaircraft mission. It didn’t mind the rapid fire gun, however. Oroshina gets better and better (i.e. cheats more) as the mission goes on, so you have to get your hits early.
Since it’s likely you will get shot down, or run out of time in Part 3, there’s some things you can do to improve your chances on the restart. One is to change your plane/weapons pack. I found that the strafing gun worked well on the flak towers (although the CBU might work as well). When the time came to restart, I switched to the rapid fire gun. Note that the restart (or maybe restart with plane change) will zero out all damage, and you start with a fresh plane.
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*OK, so the towers start halfway up the island, which means that from the base of the wall to the top of the tower is only 400meters – about the height of the former World Trade Center in NY. I note that the biggest Nazi flak tower in Berlin was only 54meters tall.
certainly the nicest looking level. you finding the locations was helpful for me
Certainly sunnier than Ubasama, and more urbane than the industrial parks around Kiriki. Of course, for pure Mediterranian hill town, you can’t beat the sun-drenched serenity of Rudakai. I like dive-bombing the fleet there, if only because of the photogenic replays you get.
As for the map locations, that’s part of the fun (besides, I’ve flown over half these places). I note that the anime appears to take place in the UK, but that the maps you see are all somewhere in Otherland.