LanceCriminal86

Teamwork and WEST WIND '88 was exactly this, Forrestal and Roosevelt operating with NATO in the Fjords. It's the cruise I did my Tomcat skins for the Forrestal release, and a set of '88 VF-41/84 should go perfectly as we have both carriers and now Kola. It would be a logical exercise to model, if not as a basis to make a "hot" scenario.

Oh, this again. Cue that beautiful bean footage of a 54C from 1984 in an ACM shot definitely not being an un-agile bomber only missile at the 7:20 mark:

Unfortunately, a helmet existing in a separate 3rd party's module in no way makes it usable or accessible to HB as that mesh is part of the module's EDM. They'd have to get the mesh from the 3rd party and effectively go through the whole process of adding another helmet as they would any other, and they probably would start over anyways for it to be up to their standards. Until ED decouples pilots and their animations from the aircraft there's no easy way to support more pilot types, gear, helmets etc. short of the developer having to model them all in and hide/show them with animation arguments (which can start to be quite heavy on resources). It would be great if they ever do this, especially as many mods have not the greatest pilot bodies or they're way out of timeline for the aircraft. On the direct helmet topic, the 55G is the end of 80s - 90s+ onwards helmet and was already somewhat set upon as it can use the existing HGU-55 shell as a base. The extra bodies for Germany and Japan were a bonus/extra thing that came up because as I'm sure Cobra will admit, he saw photos and was like "cool, I want to do those". If anything else got added, personally the missing HGU-26 represents more of the USAF side as well as other export users, and the dual-visor setup is shared with the eventual Intruder and needs to be modeled for its HGU-43. After doing some digging of my own the Germans were definitely using the HGU-26 style by at least '83, it doesn't appear the Gueneau was the exclusive helmet necessarily. Definitely agree that it's fairly common especially the late 70s shots but even some of these early 80s ones I am seeing what look to be HGU-26 style, sometimes a mix of HGU and Gueneau. From '83, HGU-26 on the canopy: When the time comes for those other pilots to be done, it could be asked about I suppose but there's already resource crunches for all the art work needed not just for remaining Phantom items, but for the F-14, Viggen, AI Intruder, and other things that require the same set of resources to do.

German pilots with HGU-55G have been planned. Adding Guineau when we're missing other more USAF appropriate helmets seems not worth the effort.

As I recall the nozzle exit value came from ED while it was being sorted out.

Not necessarily, it's appearing to be more of a latency issue. When the latency comes in online that exacerbates the problems with extrapolated tracks etc. That too is something there's been back and forth about but there just doesn't seem to be an easy solution. The AWG-9 is set up to simulate the cycle/track times and unfortunately network latency has a negative impact on it. So low latency, generally no impact. High latency, or one player with high latency, that's when the issues crop in but can't just be solved by adding a wider buffer in there for tracks as that wouldn't match how the radar operated. And yes, HB testers are submitting tracks and trying to get these issues run down but there's only so much that can be done on one side of the equation.

They're already aware of all that as well.

HB has no control over the missile once it leaves the jet. Yes, they've been trying to get ED to fix things but it's out of their direct control.

No

The AGM-78 was only used on modified Israeli F-4Es which are not the focus of the module, and of which there is currently no public data. Without proper evidence and documentation as to how the STARM was integrated, what panels were added/removed/modified, and how it was operated they're unlikely to add it. AGM-45B is waiting on ED to complete the weapon.

Because you are changing how the graphics align between two different meshes. If you rotate the VStab forwards, then lines that would have gone straight across to the rudder will now be shifted upwards, and they will no longer line up. I again would rather have it fixed but I get why that's not a popular choice. With some of the other changes that need to happen on the jet and an actual earlier external model coming I'd bet the impact would be lessened by more folks coming back to migrate their skins to the earlier A or IRIAF externals.

Been building a list of the DMAS jets for when that time comes, that jet or another from 3TFW that were in Desert Storm are high on the list, and of course a number of the SJ jets, and the Spangdahelm jets. There were somewhere around 180 of the late jets upgraded with DMAS/ARN-101 but fewer wings and squadrons had those jets.

It was identified internally in testing, hence it's not in the bug forum.

The problem is, there are hundreds of F-14 skins out there if not more if you count private squadron/virtual wing etc. Personally I want the fix, but if you're someone that has 20+ skins from userfiles and those skinners aren't doing DCS anymore, they are all permanently broken. And that's not a popular option unless they can rotate the stab and also adjust the UVW to still align correctly.

It's been discussed internally for years, fixing this will break any livery that has art that goes from the vstab across to the rudder panel. That's why it hasn't been done, and may not end up being fixed until a method can be conceived that will also adjust the UV alignments and not require everyone out there to redo their left tail skins. And considering that many popular skins out there are probably no longer being kept up or artists have stopped skinning, that would mean permanently broken tails.

The issues come down to 1) how many manhours will it take to remodel/rework the nozzles and animations, and 2) will the fixes break anything. For the nozzles the likelihood of #2 is low, but there's also a whole bunch of other art stuff that either still needed to be added, needs to be done for the earlier jets, or also fixed like extraneous bits that don't belong on F-14A or B or things that were mirrored and shouldn't have been, needing to redo the engine nacelle panel lines and details. Then there's things like the tails fix, that will quite literally break liveries. Personally I'd rather get the fix in, and then fix some tails but others have apparently become violently table flipping angry over the consideration. The problem there was that the Vstab itself somehow was rotated longitudinally a degree or two on its axis, that's what causes the alignment problems and results in the rudder clipping. More than the nozzles that's where the cost vs negative impact has to be balanced, and we have yet to get a decision on how it can be done without breaking every single livery out there. Rotate the stab back to where it should be, and now everything aligned across from stab to rudder will be crooked.

There's a few Clark jets we've had our eyes on to add, I don't *think* this was one of them so that's good. One of our SMEs was with the 90th so I think we're looking at some of their photos for references and which scheme/jet to do. I think the one I settled on is SEA wraparound and the pattern is somewhat different from our existing ones, so it would need a new base camo layout.

No, it isn't dropped. Some issues appeared late before release of the module and require some reworks and re-exports of a potentially significant number of layers that make up the final Photoshop PSD template. Even internally it required either a lot of manual/individual changes by artists to account for them, or we had to hand across our raw PNG files to be processed through the model directly. It's not a minor thing, and is requiring effort to correct, re-export, and rebuild the template layers. This also while trying to handle all of the initial release fixes/corrections, taking in feedback and further bugs or errors identified, and folks trying to take a well-earned post release breather. It's coming, it will happen, and it's a solid template with a lot of features and tools geared for livery artists by livery artists. It will be worth the wait.

Sorry I missed your message, I was out of town on vacation. Typically, I troll through places like Flickr, Facebook F-4 groups, the US National Archives for photos and search them. I also use ForgottenJets serial number listing to search for squadrons or wings and note the serial numbers that were tracked to them, and then search by serial in the above resources and Google image search. Most of the time I'm not able to make out full crew names, especially when only one side of the jet is photographed as the far side usually has the crew chief and assistant crew chief. So it's similar to the challenges with the Tomcat like attempting to get full and accurate crew names and callsigns.

The jet isn't really a -45 in whole, it was meant to represent the earlier block jets that were upgraded through the 70s but below the delineation where slats and TISEO were integrated off the showroom floor, ie 71-0238 or so. Obviously no -45 would have had the APS-107 antenna like most of the 67- and 68- serial jets. Like the Tomcat it's not a single block, specific year jet. Rather representative of the body of jets that got upgrades post Vietnam into the 80s with OFP-005 or so. Some of the really early serial Es never even got DSCG apparently.

First people complained about country restrictions in the F-14, now we remove them and we have people complaining?

Folks can skin anything they like for userfiles of course, there have always been multiples of any one jet of course on there. Everyone takes a different approach and some folks prefer one or the other. As far as the official stuff the goal was to spread as much as possible for variances in the schemes themselves and represent a good amount of the squadrons that operated the E Phantom, which will potentially be expanded on more with whatever decal system can be implemented to help with less weight for multiple tail numbers.

As discussed a few times the 335th primarily used DMAS aircraft, and officially they'll be done when that time comes. There were older airframes used by the air wing however so we may try to add a few of those DSCG jets space permitting. Re: Olds' helmet, the one at the AF museum is suspected of being a replica, as photos show his helmet without the high-brow cut and the wear in the paint looks artificial. But colors wise it should be green and tan/brown, we actually did that helmet already but I'm not sure if it's in the common files or not, but it was done. It may have been something intended for the pilot customization.

Interesting, I was trying to comb through Forgotten Jets and also looked at Wiki's list of Vietnam kills. Basically all of the E kills were Linebacker II, ie '72 and were pretty spread around. I'll have to dig through photos and see if anyone's got some wide shots of the flight line from that period. I'm going to assume early-mid 80s since you mentioned 337th as well. There would have to be a good explanation for it, either the combined kills from the air wing or something. The other explanation could be someone got the kill count wrong or mixed serials up and it was eventually removed. I found one that wasn't on the list in Forgotten Jets showing 2 kills, 67-0270, but comments on the photo say it was a mistake. The 2nd star on there apparently said "4th TFW 1973" but of course the only kills in '73 were credited to an F-4D and F-4B respectively, the D kill is listed with 4th TFS. Jet was with the 21st TFTS at George at the time the erroneous star was seen first. So it seems there's a precedent of paint shops goofing kills sometimes, the one on 0270 seems to have followed it on display in NJ even.

I couldn't find any with 3 kills but a couple with 2. 68-0338 which I'm working on for the 110th TFS, 67-0392 that spent time at Moody in the 80s, then a bunch of singles. Could there have been a D still hanging around, or maybe the kills were the CO? 337th had a fair number of single Mig kills from my pass the other day and some others that were passed through 4th TFW squadrons. Looking at the wing commander jets, I guess 334th is the blue stripe, 335th the green, and 336th the yellow. Then later 337th I guess made for the red stripe on 1040?