The loop re-scored every contact every tick, so the nose chased whichever
fighter scored best that instant and aim error wandered 10-40 deg through a
pass. A missile lock is time-on-target, so constant switching is the one thing
guaranteed to prevent a kill. Commit to a contact until it dies, passes 6000,
sits >90 deg off the nose for 2.5 s, or 14 s elapse.
Same guns, same ballistics, same escort weighting, same missile cadence:
kills 0000 (five gun-only runs) -> 0002 (missiles) -> 0009 (commitment), with
101 missiles vs 98, and the largest hostile-population fall of any run
(134->97). Own hull untouched. The ACROPOLIS still ended at 76.6%, so this is
lethality, not the mission outcome.
Also records a negative result so it is not re-attempted: the selected target is
NOT a raw entity pointer. Three searches came up empty — a +-0x1400 window of
the player object, a full-RAM sweep of every entity-pointer word tapped through
each button (only thread-stack slots churn, which is frame noise), and a delta
tally over all 150 entities of the kind that found the definition pointer at
+0x130. The selection must be a handle, an index, or in a subsystem outside the
entity object.
