Swordsman422

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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.

Yeah, so does the A-10, F-15, Su-27, and MiG-29. The issue here is that the Hornet didn't have as many placements as the F-14 did across its career. Take the definitions seen in the Hornet's config file, multiply it by 10, and you might have enough to cover half of the Tomcat squadron variations. That's an enormous quantity of text, and text is data, and data is HD space. And while the Hornet does have dynamic numbers, the kerning still sucks, with numbers being spread too far apart. You give an F/A-18 the modex 111, for example, and the digits are spread across half a county. If Heatblur solves this, I'm sure they'll nail it.

Gameplay considerations and historical fidelity don't always go hand-in-hand. I'd rather have the right ships than worry about which ships keep the game interesting for me. The best real world engagements are the ones that your side isn't sweating razor-thin margins. And if it is a matter of other assets keeping a player from getting busy in the game, the mission designers always have the option of not using the ships that do. I don't really see why specific boats have to be recreated in exact individual detail down to a specific cruise either. The issue being that, outside of recreating that specific cruise it's wrong everywhere else. General sense of the thing should be good enough for a game, especially for a non-player asset. We fly on and off of it, or shoot at it as our hearts desire. Does it look within 90% of the ship it's supposed to represent? Fine enough. But none of us is the guy making the decisions here.

Yep, some people's immersion gets broken over different things. Modex numbers are a big deal, but I don't particularly care about mission-specified canopy names. People want the "realism" of specifying the jet's side number but also want to be able to put their own name below the canopy in a mission as if a particular pilot always flew the jet with his name on it as if this was the USAF. Frankly, I'd rather just have the dynamic modex numbers, not sweat the canopy names, and shrug off the BuNos. Unless the jet is a CAG/CO bird, the BuNo text is almost the same color as the rest of the plane. The trick with modex numbers on the F-14 is that "standard"... wasn't much. Each squadron had their own minor differences in typeface, size, and exact location across the 35 years the F-14 flew, to the point where even if Heatblur were to cover the most common placements, it still wouldn't account for half the options. Some people don't care about that and will be happy with just one placement so long as they get a dynamic modex, but others will get rather upset if, say, their 1970's high-viz VF-1 hotrods have their modex numbers out of place, and they'll whine about immersion. Then there is also the issue that the dynamic decal system already present in DCS has an atrocious kerning problem where spacing between numbers is off, and the italic digits commonly seen on Navy jets will only make it worse. It's a problem that, to even satisfy most of us, Heatblur needs to solve all the way or not at all.

Forrestal's very last cruise in 1991, CVW-6 had two Hornet squadrons, VFA-132 and -137. She did sail with contemporary surface assets, including Ticos, but I cannot find documentation to indicate whether she ever had surface nuke escorts. Appropriate Escorts would be Belknap or Tico-class CGs, Spruance, Charles F. Adams, or Forrest Sherman-class destroyers, and Knox or OHP frigates, of which we have only the OHP frigate and Bunker Hill-type Tico cruisers. DCS is SORELY lacking in US late Cold War surface combatants.

Kitty Hawk herself would go fantastic with those upcoming VF-154 skins from Isoko.

VF-32 and VF-33 are available for the F-14A. This specific VF-31 livery shouldn't be available for either, but you'll find it under the B.

http://www.anft.net/f-14/f14-history-f14d.htm