The Darkest Dawn campaign mission 1 very long & boring

Hi all,

I used to play FS1 a couple of decades ago and recently discovered WCS, which seems like a great alternative.

I downloaded darkest-dawn-setup.zip (3,568,898,233 bytes), installed it by opening the darkest-dawn-setup.exe file (couldn't find the documented "setup.exe" file), applied the patch (darkest-dawn-1.1.0.7822-setup.exe) to take it up to v1.1.0.7822, and I start it by opening the wcsaga_sse2.exe program from the C:\Games\Wing Commander Saga folder. Does that sound all correct so far?

I didn't bother with the Prologue campaign, but went straight into The Darkest Dawn campaign. It's looking as if mission 1 is going to take at least 1.5 hours, as so far it's been taking 10-20 mins to go between each waypoint (Nav 1, Nav 2, etc), and so far I've only been to about 4 or 5 waypoints, and there seems to be 0 or 1 sets of enemies between each waypoint, which makes for a very boring game.

Questions:
Q1. Is this really how the first mission of The Darkest Dawn is supposed to be?
Q2. How many waypoints are there in the first mission?
Q3. How long should it take to complete the first mission?
Q4. Is there any (easy) way to get around this?
Q5. Is the 1st mission the only one this boring, or should I expect others?

Thanks.
Terry

Having not received any response to my questions above, I stumbled upon the solution while playing the game. I pressed Alt-A, which I think is something like "Toggle Auto Pilot" (bottom of the "Miscellaneous" controls), and that gave me a view of my squadron from the distance, and took me quickly to the next waypoint or enemy action. I can't see this control described in the manual.pdf or anywhere. Maybe it's described in the Prologue campaign training, which I skipped - is it?

Yes, autopilot controls are mentioned in Oberan 1 mission - 1st mission of Prologue campaign which acts as a tutorial.