Awww shit. I have a bit of moral dilemma with Tie Fighter now. I've been stuck to Battle 13 Mission 5 several weeks now I think (or at least it feels so) on the hard level, so I am now thinking should I stop playing the game for good, so close to the end, or just lower the difficulty level and go on. The latter feels like cheating, I could just as well use some cheat code to skip the mission, couldn't I?
Maybe I'll keep trying, but currently I'm just fed up by that insanely hard mission. It just seems near impossible to kill all those transports in time, before they manage to destroy one of their targets. The mission forces you to make hard decisions, e.g. should you first try to kill the enemy TIE Defenders (but that means you'll lose valuable time killing the transports, and you probably can't select the jammer weapon which is very useful towards the transports), or feel lucky and go right away against the transports, hoping that your wingmen keep the Tie Defenders busy (usually they just lose, and a bit later all the Tie Defenders will be on your tail while you frantically try to destroy transports).
The best I've been able to do was that I went against the transports right away with heavy rockets, and magically my wingmen were able to destroy three of the enemy Tie Defenders by themselves (losing all wingmen except one), and I could concentrate on the transports. I was able to destroy the 8 first transports (one heavy rocket + some laser shots on each, also using the weapon jammer) and also identify and destroy the shuttle (=secondary and bonus objectives), but the next 8 transports could still destroy one of the bases. I had ran out of rockets at that point, so I had to decide whether to fight them with lasers only (slow), or waste time getting new rockets from the supply transports.
Damn that mission. Apparently someone is able to beat it, but the comments sections reveal some others have also stopped playing the game due to that mission (even when playing on Normal level):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AK84RnocoY