While working on a campaign, I got to wondering if there was a persistent background layout for missions that occur in the same system (the difference in position between one end of a system and the other would not be nearly enough to make a discernable difference in the locations of the nebulae). So I decided to go through each and every mission and duplicate it's background layout in a new mission. I decided to include Jump nodes, asteroid fields and positions of planets and stars as well, but this required a record of where in the system each background layout appeared. Anyway, in going through all the missions I also did both of the things below, so I guess I killed 3 Ravanas with one BFRed... All the missions are in a .ZIP file. The filenames are composed of the name of the system, the specific loaction within that system in parentheses, and the original filename.

There are many discrepancies in the main FS2 campaign between the mission that you play and the same mission in FRED2. What do I mean? For example, many missions started off with a ship having one name, and then in the course of the mission's development that name was changed to something else. Most events of the mission were updated to reflect that change, but there were events where you would not be able to simply change the reference, you'd have to rebuild the whole event. Those parts were left as-is, because they do not show in the mission itself, only in FRED2. They reveal some interesting information about a number of missions...

One by one, I went through all the FreeSpace 2 missions in the main campaign and made a record of every capital ship name, class, which mission(s) it appears in, etc. This includes all the ships in all parts of the missions - even from the failed debriefing text. There is one section of the missions, however, which I did not completely check - the messages. While I did not encounter any ships that were mentioned solely in an in-game message, that does not mean that there are none.