Pilots of Koph Squadron, all of Wing VI, and FA Kramer:

I am sending this to everyone this week, because I stood up on my
soapbox this morning and felt inspired.

We currently have 237 FCHG points! I hear we're beating the Intrepid,
but VA Pel told me last night that he's planning to "start flying"
soon. I retorted, telling him that I would "start flying" as well. Joe
piped in at that point and said that he would also "start flying".
Personally, I think the Intrepid has little chance of winning.

Despite the fact that we can easily outfly a wing 1.5 times our size,
wing VI is in serious trouble right now, folks. We have 18 people in
the Wing. Joe and I put together the roster for our competition
against the cadets last night, and had trouble filling a single
squadron! If a squadron had 14 people instead of 12 people, I don't
think we could have pulled it off.

Now it's time to do or die. The FO isn't going to let us just hang
around at 18 people forever. She'll see that we have 2 inactive
squadrons and barely enough people to fill the other 4. Then do you
know what she'll do? She will consolidate Wing VI into 2 full
squadrons and put them into another wing.

I've been through that before. There I was, happily being the CMDR of
Beth Squadron in Wing III, when I got the news that Wing III was being
shut down. Beth Squadron got merged into Resh Squadron, and I replaced
the current CMDR of Resh because I outranked him. So began my career
in Wing VI.

That's all well and good, but the trick is that I wound up being where
I wanted to be. The former CMDR of Resh quickly transferred out, and is no
longer active in the EH. I have no idea if I would be so lucky as to
retain a command if Wing VI were merged today. There are a lot of
CMDR/MAJ's out there.

It turned out that merging was the best thing to happen to me as far
as my career in the EH was concerned. Wing VI was far more active than
III ever was, and has become my home.

Things are different this time around.

Look at the numbers. 41, 43, 39, 45, 37, and 18. A Wing can hold 73
people. It looks to me like we'd most likely go into Wing V. Wing V's
WC is MAJ Proton. I'm confident that our LC Joe would become WC of V.
Two of V's CMDRs are CMs, one is a CPT, one is an LC, and one is a
MAJ. That means that all three CMDRs from VI would probably take command
of squadrons in V, while they kept their LC and MAJ CMDRs. That should
tell you something right there. It is no coincidence that all of Wing
VI's commanding officers outrank their Wing V counterparts.

However, that's not what's important. What's important is that we
would no longer be in Koph Squadron. Or Resh. Or Shin, or Tav. Not to
mention Zeta or Ra.

Basically what I'm saying here is that nobody in VI wants to leave
their squadrons. We just might have the best organized and most active
wing in the entire TIE Corps. We have some of the most experienced
people in the whole EH sitting right here. We don't want to go to
another wing.

We want them to come to us.

* * * * *

...and now, the moment you've all been waiting for! The Koph Ace of
the Week is Iceman once again! Through difficult times and the harsh
adversity of a broken joystick, he has continued to try and fulfill
his promise of 90 BSFs by the end of the month even though he has to
fly his Missile Boat with a gamepad instead of a joystick.
Furthermore, he has -still- managed to earn high scores despite his
hardware difficulties. Congratulations!