I just finally beat Operation 15 in Tour 5 of the 1998 version of X-Wing after countless hours of trying over and over again. After the B-Wings kept getting scattered no matter how many TIEs I shot down I became frustrated and read both the in-game hints (which say to focus on TIEs, which is NOT how I finally won) and watched a playthrough on Youtube.

The Youtube playthrough was the original version, though, and the TIEs both evade less and are destroyed after fewer hits, so the insane difficulty seems to be exclusive to the 1998 version... The way I finally won was by only killing the very first two TIEs and then flying directly to the frigate and doing nothing but strafing runs for like 15 minutes or so with some B-Wing assistance. The B-Wings seemed to do as much damage to the frigate whether I devoted myself completely to protecting them or completely ignored them.

Have other people had similar issues with this mission?