Who thought it was a good idea to have a railjack event with no railjack?

[Hallucinated]

Okay, I get that I'm weird because I actually enjoy railjack, it's what lured me back to Warframe after maybe three or four years of minimal activity, but seriously, what's the point of having the 'railjack' part of an event when all you use it for is to get to a glorified defence mission on a Sentient ship?

I finally got the chance to try the event last night, and was doing the Murex missions because I figured people with decently geared ships are thin on the ground, so I thought it'd be helpful to add one more. Instead, what do I discover? When the satellite is vulnerable, you can't fight and just drag it to the drop spot. When it's dropped, it's invulnerable, and you're supposed to jump on the damned Murex and play a defence mission against Sentients, my least favourite mission type against my least favourite enemy faction. Hooray. If I stay out in the railjack, what do I get? Two Sentient fighters at a time, nothing like the swarms of fighters you get to fight in Proxima Veil, and it doesn't even really matter because the satellite is invulnerable. Then Sargas Ruk turns up with more crappy crewships which are explicitly designed to require teamwork to kill efficiently, when my crew cares for nothing but farming Murex waves, and every time I jump into the main gun pit to kill one of those things, another one oneshots the satellite. Great. So, basically, I'm just supposed to tow around the satellite and play a few consecutive defence missions. Why do I need this ship again?

Sure, this event has to be accessible to people who don't have well-geared ships, I can understand that, and if it did there are probably a whole lot less than one out of eight players who do. But isn't that an excuse to take a break from the S#&$tiest railjack mechanics and let everyone have fun, rather than add token participation for it? No inane level 100 boarding parties, no invulnerable crewships you just have to hope your crew know how to handle, no invulnerable mission objectives spamming boarding pods at you, just lots of fighters to kill. Instead, we get new S#&$ty mechanics to add to the old ones, like disabling the pilot's guns when they most need to fight, or level 70 fighters that existing railjack equipment is in no way, shape or form designed to fight.

I get that actually defending a stationary object is antithetical to the entire concept of railjack, and I don't really want to do that either. When I played the missions, I first thought that maybe the satellite was invulnerable because I was in some reasonably generous protection radius. I wouldn't mind that concept, or perhaps let the satellite leech health from the railjack to encourage players to try to protect it. A spherical radius of about 2.5 km, so a diameter of 5 km, seems reasonable enough to be able to maneouvre in while discouraging ships from haring off after enemies.

Insofar as allowing players without good ships to play, how about you make the challenge of long Murex missions be, you know, the railjack part instead of the ground pounding part? I never got past three ships before I suddenly lost the satellite somehow, and now I realise it's because I was actually trying to play railjack instead of, you know, trying to avoid playing it and just running away to the next ship. That's crap. Start the fighters at low level and scale up as you go through ships, so Earth Proxima for ship 1, high Earth/low Saturn 2, high Saturn/low Veil 3, high Veil for 4 and you can go over the top for 5 for players who want the challenge. It should be easy enough for most players to get through 2 to 3 ships in one mission, while 4 or 5 would require well-geared ships with crews who know what they're doing, which seems reasonable to me. Scale down the boarding part if you have to; if players want to stretch themselves on foot they have, you know, the on foot missions they can do that in.

As an aside, I am somewhat uncertain of the concept of an event where, you know, not playing is supposedly an important and integral part of the event, with regards to the wave timers and all. Reducing completion rates for Murex missions would undoubtedly impact the number of flotillas successfully completing a wave, but why the wave structure is even a thing is something that I don't understand, though I haven't been paying much attention to how Warframe has been changing up its event philosophy over the last couple of years. All I know was that when I started, we could just farm an event as hard and fast as we wanted, none of this 'No Murex Detected' malarky.

I was really anticipating Scarlet Spear quite eagerly for the chance to bust out the ship that I've lavished time and effort on (realistically not very much, in Warframe terms), but if this is all I'm using it for I don't understand why I didn't leave it in the dry dock and do all of this in my Liset. I would have thought that the railjack event would involve playing railjack, but it looks like I have to go back to Proxima Veil and its, ugh, crewships, if I want to have my spaceflight jollies.