Swordsman422

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

Just copy one from another skin. Open the full-sized texture files you've edited. Copy them onto the 3in1 IN ORDER THAT THEY APPEAR on the 3in1, resize, and place. Be careful with resizing. Most of the main external textures need to be 12.5% the size of the original, other textures need only be scaled to 25% or 50% the original size. If you copy and resize them in the order that they appear on the 3in1, they should sort-of snap in to place when you move them. Once you have them all placed, double-check placement, then merge down until you have a single layer and save.

Not... really. Yes, by this point all the F-14 squadrons save VF-154 were home based at Oceana NAS, which was CinCAirLant's master jet base, but as indicated by the tail code starting with N, VF-2 deployed with PacFleet airwings and is still considered a PacFleet squadron. Here's a VF-1 jet from 1992, before the transfer of NAS Miramar to the USMC with the probe door gone... VF-21 during ODS. Hard to see, but here's another PacFleet jet with no probe door, tanking from the reason why the door got frequently removed. VF-211 in 1992, same deal... Demonstrably, it was common enough across all squadrons regardless of coast during the F-14's career.

And yet VF-2 was a West Coast squadron... Removing the door was common on long missions when anticipating the possibility of tanking from the KC-135, which had a much more unforgiving basket than any other tanker. The door was flimsy and could be knocked off and sucked down the right intake, which was bad news for the F-14. It was done regardless of fleet or model when the need arose. To be completely fair, I don't really see a need for it unless that type of damage is to be simulated. Otherwise it's just a nice feature.

There are four speed measurements in aircraft; indicated airspeed, true airspeed, calibrated airspeed, and groundspeed. In a real aircraft, it's not often that your indicated airspeed is going to match your groundspeed. IAS is the simplest to measure but the least accurate and there are several factors that affect it, including wind speed and direction, altitude, and air density. IAS into the wind is going to be faster than GS, where IAS with the wind will be slower. True airspeed is the aircraft's speed relative to the air it's flying through. Groundspeed true airspeed corrected for wind. I'd be more concerned of a bug if the IAS and GS matched all the time in DCS.

Meh. I think an Iowa might have been a component of a CVBG on a single occasion. I'd rather see escorts that matched the Forrestal-class. Early Ticos, Belknap, and Virginia-class CGs, Spruance and Farragut-class destroyers, ships that commonly operated with the carrier instead of the tired, old battlewagon that spent between 1958 and 1984 in mothballs and sailed with a carrier group once.

That's correct. To say it simply, when the nozzle closes, the interior chamber should still be a tube instead of transforming into a cone. The plates should remain parallel.

Yes, the F-14D was equipped with JTIDS/Link-16 near the end of its life. I don't think the B(U) ever had it.

I'd like to be able to define the parking spot for every aircraft or static placed on the ship just like you can with airfields.

This is the kind of thing usually said by people who have never done this sort of thing before. I used to work at a CRB, and the project managers had the same expectation that short sentences defining customer demands meant fulfilling the requirement was easy for the fulfillment team when it wasn't. Jester is a pretty complex system, and the core arguments of his code are probably different that Petro's. So no, you can't just "literally" copy-paste and expect it to work without some serious adjusting. And in this case, why waste time on borrowing someone esle's work when you're building your own system and are a lot closer to the end goal here. These are problems I either don't have or don't have with it, so I don't hate it, and I fall under the umbrella of "everyone." I can understand why lock gets lost, especially close in or when the target notches, which is a valid tactic and a challenge to overcome. I also understand that Jester is a work-in-progress, so he isn't perfect yet. Heatblur isn't interested in making a dumbed-down auto-RIO. Their intent is to make the F-14 experience as realistic as possible, which means modelling the complex avionics and systems, and the challenges the RIO would face in operating his half, and limiting the AI RIO to be not better than a human, which was a fear of the competitive community had anyway. "More fun" for MOST (not all, because you are obviously excluded from that group) of us is to face the challenges of an F-14 crew as closely as possible, not have some aimbot in our back seat helping us to win skyquake every day. "Triggered." That's funny considering that you're the one that got pissy when no one came in and said "what a great idea! Why didn't we think of this?" and patted you on the back because "it's literally so simple." What's outrageous about it is that you assume that it's simple, and it very obviously isn't or it wouldn't have taken this amount of time to get Jester where he is now, or even Petro. I'll tell you what I've told everyone else who comes in here and whines about "why haven't they done blank yet. It's so easy;" If you think you can do it better and quicker than the devs, then better hop to it, skippy, and show them what they're doing wrong. But you can't? No experience doing this sort of thing? I mean, there you go. You've already posted a fine enough reason to strike out on your own and prove us all wrong there, Galileo.

I doubt it's as easy as CRTL-C, CRTL-V. Just because the sentence is short doesn't mean the process is. HB is teaching Jester how to use LANTIRN in their own way and it'll work as realistically as possible. Just be patient.

Yeah, it's an optical illusion created by the shape of the canopy.

Are you sure the plane wasn't just committing seppuku after being touched by an Air Force guy? What was the ultimate cause of this mishap? Same corrosion as the VF-143 loss?

Fat Creason, that tailhook broke off due to age and corrosion in an area that was not typically inspected by maintenance. VF-211 lost that jet only about a month after VF-143 lost a plane on launch due to the nose gear shearing off for the same reason. Both incidents led to the grounding of F-14s fleet wide for a safety stand down and inspections. I recall in an interview one aviator commented that he'd been told in training that these two parts on the jet that would never fail and here they had both failed in the course of a month. It was a telling sign of how old the Tomcats had become.

I am a modeller too, so I shamelessly scan my decal sheets in photo mode to use. I still have to rebuild the artwork in photoshop to color match, but it's easier for me than building from scratch.

Did LSO grading get more lenient in 2.7? I've flown three OKs in the F/A-18 today, which has doubled my amount of OKs in that aircraft since Supercarrier was released. I'm NOT any better than I was, say, a month ago.

You would have to edit the training mission and change the aircraft skin in the editor.

Wow... never noticed that skin as the carrier name misspelled.

Tried every suggestion on this thread short of nuking from orbit and reinstalling fresh. No luck yet.