Swordsman422

I think it should be the last thing Heatblur fixes before the F-14 leaves EA. I don't know what I've been doing wrong, but I have absolutely no trouble getting blown out of the sky by ARH and SARH missiles in the F-14 even with the jammer on and maneuvering. Nor have I had any trouble killing Tomcats with these same missiles. Hell, just before this post I was doing 1v1 F-14As against the AI. He was jamming, I was jamming, and our missiles both hit. How do I use the ECM to make myself invulnerable?

Unsurprising, since the actual pigment recipes changed in 1989/1990, and changed again just four years ago. I've just reached the point of "eh, looks close enough" when it comes to my skins, which is both a lazy attitude and why I haven't released anything in *checks calendar* quite a few months.

Darker colors show skin fatigue and dirt bleed less, and it cuts down on both maintenance and paint costs. This is why the USMC Harrier fleet started going all gunship grey in 2010.

Vallejo's 237 is notoriously too blue for the official chip. Mission Models makes it too purple. Model Master enamel was almost dead on, if a bit too matt, but Model Master got shuttered last year. I'm hoping Ammo by Mig is close enough. You wanna take a real deep dive, have a go... https://www.sae.org/standardsdev/colorchips/#:~:text=AMS-STD-595 defines a,available to conduct these activities. Bear in mind that the color procurement process changed as recently as 2017, leading to this being a thing... This is 375 before and after the procurement change. And for the curious, the pigment recipes for the 595B procurement period, which began in FY90:

The bottom color is light grey vice light ghost. Any other variation can be chalked up to production dye batches, which is another PITA we have to deal with. FS35237 has an official chip, but various dye batches won't always match exactly. Judging by the dates, CVW-7 had just returned from a deployment, so weathering, corrosion control layers, and sun fading are all playing a factor in how the paint looks. This cruise was an evaluation for TPS concepts, so we aren't seeing final patterns or paint colors here either. This is the crap that makes skinning for DCS so damned hard. The actual paint doesn't always match the chip, and can be several percentage points off in tone, then add in the other factors that affect paint, and then how those colors appear in the DCS environment, and you have a real challenge. One of the pictures I frequently look at to remind me of this fact is a VF-14 bird from the early 1980s that is "supposed" to be FS26440, but the corrosion control touch ups look almost sky blue and the story is that the CC paint cans in the shop were from a different batch than the depot, but it was labelled the same color.

First off, wow, that's only the second photo of that livery I have ever seen. Second, yeah, I can confirm for you that those aren't the same standard TPS colors. Not sure what the top or side colors are, but I know that the bottom is actually FS36373. The early 1980s were an interesting transitional time where they were pitching paint colors at the wall to see what worked. You can only trust the official Federal Standard paint chips when it comes to not just color but specular quality. Any copies put out by other entities are suspect at best, as I'm sure you've noticed. Edit: Checked with some of my more knowledgeable buddies in the hobby. That VF-143 livery is, top to bottom, FS35237, FS36375, and FS36373. The aircraft itself is an 85GR manufactured in 1975 and delivered directly to VF-143. You can still see she's lacking the L-bracket tail stiffeners and alpha probe on the nose, so at the time of this photo is unmodified. I wish I could find a photo of her port side. I'm betting she still has 7-hole GGVs. Edit#2: Here's AG107 from the same cruise. This jet is from the 80GR production block and still has the 7-hole vents.

Photos are great for detail references, but not so great for colors. Lighting conditions, exposure time, and many other factors can affect the true colors. The absolute best thing to do is actually get color swatches or paint codes for the colors required. According to Geoff at Furball AeroDesign, the VF-213 rudder is FS35183 Medium Blue.

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From GoNavy.jp's reference pages for the 1990 cruise:

Same here.

I currently own the F-14, F/A-18, A-10C, A-10C II, F-16, AV-8B, Mirage, and FC3 modules. The F-14 gets probably 70% of my flying time with the Hornet getting about 20% and the rest sharing the remaining 10%. The F-14 has made flying the others actually easier for me, and I sometimes appreciate that they are less work. When I spend time in another module, coming back to the F-14 I'll fly a few hours of refresher to kickstart my memory on the systems, flying qualities, and specific quirks of the plane before I get serious. Sometimes it comes back fast. Sometimes not. BTW, I saw the title of this post and thought it was going to be about game "balance." I'm left to wonder how soon it will be before the skyquakers and counterstrikers come in here expecting to be able to rail on that particular topic.

All I know is that it was a VERY short-lived nose art seen at NAS Oceana in the spring of of 2001 and was applied to a D-model jet. Photographers Pete Boschert and Dave Brown took the only photos I have ever seen of it.

It's planned, just not priority. BTW, those aren't HGU-55s. They're HGU-68s with the 600kt visor replaced with a bungee visor. You can tell because the holes for the track screws are visible on the left side of the brow of the pilot's helmet. The RIO's had his taped over.

Figuring out which were the old ones I needed to get rid of took me 10 whole seconds...

Sort of... the aircraft skins are done. I'm just waiting on the low profile helmets so that I don't have to update it.

Using the Jester LANTIRN has freed up brain cycles to realize how glaringly oblivious the wingman is to targets. This is more likely an ED thing than an HB thing, but for crying out loud, when Jester's found some armor and I tell the wingman to engage ground targets, I don't need an "unable" like he can't see something. They exist and we would have made that clear. He needs to start looking for some.

The waist cats on the Forrestal-class had... issues for the big, modern jets.

The other ships are actually probably too light, especially the flight decks of the SC carriers.

It's situational. Operational callsigns, per the name, were used when the aircraft was a component of a larger operation, such as an OSW CAP or a CAS element during OEF or OIF. Squadron callsigns were used around the boat, but "around the boat" meant really that as long as the aircraft was primarily within communication with the boat or on the boat's comms network. That's why the F-14s involved in the Gulf of Sidra incidents retained their squadron callsigns vice an operational one. Long CAPs, carrier-launched interceptions, etc. that we have in DCS would use squadron callsigns. Honestly, I think "both" would be ideal. Select the op callsign and squadron callsign in ME and have it be used in correct situations. Barring that, having more flight callsigns couldn't be a bad thing, but they'd either have to find that voice actor again (and it's been how many years since those lines were originally recorded) or completely replace the lines. This brings up another thing that I wish would happen; that we'd have multiple voice options and get to choose our PC voices on the logbook page.

I haven't dug into it too much, but so far it's pretty intuitive to use. Redkite's tutorial video is an excellent resource. Jester is a little slower finding targets than a human might be, but at least he's not better than human. And while it's pretty easy on the pilot, you do get a good sense of how hard the RIO had to work in the F-14 to find, ID, and lase targets. I also love it that once a target is destroyed, he'll search for another target without prompting. So far so good. I'll set out to break him and see what happens afterwards.

Yes. Go see some of the other threads where this issue is raised and HB has responded with "working on it, but low priority." Here's what IronMike had to say about it June of last year. And 2 years ago: There are more examples, but I am honestly too lazy to search for them.

I wasn't with TMF, but I did a lot of work skinning their Tomcat. If you go to the main SF2 mod site, a lot of the available liveries for the TMF F-14 are ones I've made. It took me months to nail down the coordinates for all the components, but once I had a map, a new skin was just a matter of making the decals and editing the text files. If there is one way that SF2 is unequivocally superior to DCS at all, it's in the way skins and decals function.

This all day. This is exactly how the Strike Fighters series handled it, requiring the decal to be for the whole modex, then selected in mission from a drop-down menu. Placement, size, and orientation were indicated with coordinates on a decal placement file. Have enough custom decals attached to a specific number on the list and everything, from modex number to BuNo to names on the rails, to even specific bits of weathering or variations in the markings could be replicated easily. The only drawback is the limited number of decal sets and not being able to just type in a number and expect it to appear. But any artist worth their salt would aim to represent the entire squadron this way anyway, so at least you have historical fidelity. In my old SF2 days, I mapped the entire Mirage Factory F-14 for decals and created several historical liveries. It was BY FAR the best way to handle it I have ever seen and I wish ED had adapted something similar for DCS instead of using the same tired old limited system left over from Flanker 2.0.

As all of the previous discussion on the topic shows (on the multiple threads that have been dedicated to it), thanks to the sheer number of possible sizes, typefaces, and placements seen on the F-14 during its career, the F-14 modex can't be handled satisfactorily the way it has been on other aircraft. It's an issue they're working on, but considering that they also want to release a carrier, a carrier-borne tanker, a pilot body with multiple helmet options, and one or two more variants of the F-14A, and fix and refine the bugs and systems already released, and just as many players are spitting out their pacifiers over each of those as they are dynamic modex numbers, it's understandably a low-priority issue as it doesn't affect playability or product delivery like all of the other items on this list. We'll see it once they develop the technology, as they have already repeatedly stated.

It's not a question of "should" but a question of how. if it were easy to do it at the level of quality that HB expects of themselves, it would have been done by now.