[martok2112]

When you get to about mission 11 or 12, you acquire the Strike Viper. This baby rocks. She has the heaviest missile payload, and is the fastest Viper in the game.

However, the mission where you go up against Erebus' basestar is a real witch!

For the first part of the mission, after scoring about 12 kills on Advanced Cylon Raiders (an easy enough task with the missiles), you have to defend Galactica against incoming troop ships. This part of the mission is also fairly easy. If you find a group of troopships in close proximity, one missile hit on one of the troop ships is enough usually to wipe out the entire group. Otherwise, the troop ships are easily taken down individually with one missile.

After you have eliminated that threat, you are then ordered to take on Erebus' basestar itself.

Here is where the mission becomes really hairy. You have to keep a sharp eye on Paulus, and make sure he doesn't get blasted into space dust. The sucky part about this is, you might end up concentrating so hard on the mission of taking out the basestar's laser cannons, that by the time you receive a "Help, I'm coming apart" warning from Paulus, within about two seconds, he's dead, and you have to restart the mission.

What sucks is that sometimes you will get LITTLE to NO WARNING whatsoever before he gets blasted into random energy. If he dies, you have to restart the mission.

Your best bet is when you get the order to attack the basestar...go in quickly, and try to take out the laser cannons as quickly as possible. There are 10 laser cannons in the central hub (five upper and five lower lasers). If you fly the circumference of the hub, you should be able to pass over each pair of laser cannons, and take them out with your missiles. You do not have to hold down the missile lock button to get a lock. The Strike Viper's missiles are literally fire and forget. After you eliminate the central hub's lasers, there are five on the topside section of the basestar, and five on the bottom. Use the same technique. Target a laser cannon, and quick fire a missile. After that cannon is destroyed, the next available cannon should be targetted automatically. Try and wipe out those cannons before Paulus cries out for help. Once he's done that, you are only two to five seconds from losing the game.

Then, the Basestar will fire a neutron cannon at the Galactica, and destroy her portside landing pontoon. You will then have 60 seconds to wipe out the five targetting sensors (they look like bright blue domes). Two are on the belly, and three are topside.

Then, you fight Magus after he kills Paulus. Magus is in the Imperium class Raider, which has cloaking abilities. Keep him as the Primary Target, and fire away missiles at him. This will be a long and tedious process, but if you do it right, you will kill Magus.