How do I skip the in-mission chatting among pilots?

How do I skip the in-mission chatting among pilots? It's getting really old, really fast. Of course, this being Wing Commander, you're going to do the same missions again and again until you pass them. I don't mind so much as long as we can hurry things up and get to the fighting. Listening to the other pilots make gay jokes again, and again, and again...it gets old. It's not so much the dialogue, it's the fact that I can't figure out how to make them shut up, plus the conversations take place IN REAL TIME. So far, it's been like this:

1) Dialogue, launch.
2) 60 seconds of dialogue before the game enables autopilot.
3) Reach first nav point, 60 seconds of dialogue.
4) Autopilot finally enabled.
5) Skip to next nav point.
6) 60 more seconds of apparently non-skippable dialogue.
7) Repeat until the pirates finally show up, get blown up.
Go to step 1) above. Listen to all the dialogue...again.

So, what can be done? Why do I have to listen to the other pilots when I already know what's happening, the game just won't enable autopilot to fly to the next waypoint?

Well...that kind of sucks. You mean I have to listen to it every time, when I will definitely be replaying every mission several times? This is gonna get old. I don't want to get bored and stop playing just because it takes 5-10 minutes to get back to where I got blown up last time.

Hmm.. Freespace, FS2, Starlancer, Freelancer, Dark Star One.... They all had scripted comms that you had to sit through to continue the plot. This isn't just a bad design idea from the hard working folks at Saga. It's simply the way it usually is.
Ones that don't have a lot of that? the X series, and Battlecruiser (if you can get the POS to be playable).

If you're getting frustrated by this, try lowering the difficulty. It will help you avoid having to re-play the same missions as many times

The simplest way to avoid having to listen to the pilots rehash the same lines as you run the same mission time and time again (other than accepting failure and moving on), is to learn from your mistakes. What are you doing that is getting you killed. Once you learn this lesson, remember it for future missions and you may not have to rerun the same mission time and time again....although there are a few missions that you will probably run several times due to mission difficulty.

arisian wrote: If you're getting frustrated by this, try lowering the difficulty. It will help you avoid having to re-play the same missions as many times

Unfortunately that's not a real solution. You're not getting frustrated because you're getting killed over and over again (that's actually expected ), you're getting frustrated because you have to listen to the same dialogues over and over again, with no way to avoid this, which effectively is nothing but lost time you could've spent actually playing the game.
Lowering the diffictulty is just a band aid and doesn't really fix the problem.

This is one of the major flaws I've noticed in this game so far. As far as I remember, the "original" Wing Commander games didn't have as much in-game story telling (dialogues) like Saga, there it happened more between the missions. And thus they didn't punish you as hard for having to repeat a mission because you failed (and by punish I mean having to sit idle and just do nothing while the game runs its script).

Generally, I do really like those dialogues and I'm happy they're in the game, it makes the setting more lively. It's just a real shame that you can't skip over those once you've already heard them (or twice, or thrice).

There already seems to be an internal counter on how many times you've tried a mission, as it seems to let you skip it once you failed 5 times. Maybe it would be possible to utilize this counter to skip such dialogue scenes as well.

Just let me fight already!

If we don't punish you for dying, what's the point?