Rising the Ante: Help

That`s challenging - but your piloting skills should be adequat, it's one of the last missions.
Take the Patcom and internal magazine for more disruptors, guess that will make your day.

Come on hero - give your best:)
You'll need this antimatter...

I remember this mission; it was bugged beyond belief and really p*ssed me off.

Docking the fighters to the freighter did nothing; the containment field slowly wasted away unless I personally was docked, in which case it would stop decaying but not regenerate. Undocking would cause it to slowly fade again. Docking anything else to the freighter had no effect.

I wound up completing the mission by staying docked to the freighter and ordering all wingmen to defend the freighter. Once the marauders appeared I undocked and killed off the marauders as quickly as possible with all gats, no t-fighters, and disruptors on the pylon launchers.

I used one missile each on the first wave of marauders to get their attention, but only the first wave seemed interested in the freighter; all the rest attacked me, which was the only reason I could finish the mission at all.

In several failed attempts at least some of the marauders went for the freighter, but because there was no way to stop the containment field dying I broke the "stay close" rule of escorting and went after the marauders hard and fast, and so discovered (or perhaps it was just coincidence) that if you engage maybe 22 klicks out from the freighter the marauders ignore the friegher completely and instead go after you exclusively, without your having to shoot each one to get their attention.

I should note that something was wrong with my I-War install. A partially-failed patch install caused me to run a "mixed version" of I think 10.0 with F14.6 (or whatever the latest is). I have since reinstalled, re-patched, and re-started a pure F14.6 game, but although I have accumulated a horde of at least several hundred cargo pods I have not yet made it back to this mission.