First things first: The positioning of ships

This is the thing that really helped me out. What your gonna wanna do is surrond the escort ship completley with ryders and the Sunrider.

This causes any missles to be shot down by large amounts of flak, provide shields (no pun intended) to the escort, lower enemy chances of hitting the escort, and overall distract enemy ships.

Next: movment of the ships

What I did was hug the top side of the the play field, your also gonna wanna make sure every unit moves every turn and stays surronding the escort.

This will pretty much incapacitat most enemy combat options, which should result in forced laser attacks or missles (which you can counter with shields and flak).

I'm pretty sure backup shows up around the corner, but with the large concentration of ships you could probably obliterate any back up that appears using kinetic attacks.

Combat is not at all an issue.

You only thing you have to worry about is units close to your Compact Unit Ball (patent pending), and any backup that might appear.

As long as you shoot anything too close you should be fine.

If all else fails you can ask me for any further advice, lower the difficulty, or even cheat a little (which isn't that hard)

Prior to the fight I would suggest upgrading anything with kinetic and upgrade everythings defense.

The Liberity may be one of the most valuable units during this mission, keep it to port of the escort (or top either explination is applicable), make sure its shields are upgraded, and focus repairs on the escort if it gets damaged. If the sunriders health gets too low repair it as well or use repair drones if you have them.

Thats the end of the guide. Hope these tips helped, if you need any further help you can pm me or something and I'll try my best to help (I said this 2 other times so you probably have it engraved in your mind by now)

Thanks for using my guide, I've been happy to been of service to you. I hope you can get past this burden of a mission and enjoy the rest of the game.