I did have to redo the combat portion of the mission a couple times figuring out how much time and dv to use for the first encounter such that the second encounter of that ship wouldn't end up on a collision course with mars after the combat. If you ever feel like spending a lot of time on this, my suggestion would be to make that collision course a forced outcome, and split the cleanup and consolidation portion into a second mission, where you have to refuel the ship before it hits the ground.

In addition to that, there are a lot of orbital maneuvers that players have to plan in this mission, and each of them requires a lot of time to set up right. I can't ask players to plan several maneuvers again from scratch because the combat is hard enough that they got unlucky and lost the last combat engagement.

Regarding combat... Nippon Prime ships are a joke. One way to make combat hard against Nippon Prime ships would be to give the player tutorial-grade ships, or worse than that: the Patrol Ship is better than the Corsair, for example. But Solar Ties is the 4th to last mission in the campaign, and people would expect to command better ships than that. The way I set up this mission is also an obstacle against hard combat: intercept speeds are relatively high, so the time from combat start to hitting the merge is low. And you are forced to kill all enemy ships within this short window, because you don't have the dV nor the time to successfully plan a re-intercept maneuver (maybe you could, but then you'd lose the mission for other reasons).

Thank you for the feedback! I unwillingly reintroduced that bug regarding gold in version 3, and I fixed it in this new version that I published a few hours ago. It showing silver at mission completion and gold in the mission list afterward is odd indeed, but there's nothing I can do about that.

Oddly, despite the silver rating at mission completion, it shows up as gold in the mission list afterwards.

I like that you've tried to make a more difficult mission, but it felt more like a memorization puzzle than a combat scenario.

the change to allow gold doesn't seem to have worked: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3403728539