LanceCriminal86

It looks like there is a normal map, the files in the default textures zipper in the mod with the _B are all bump/normal maps. Generate a livery file and then go edit/update the livery file to overwrite those and remove the baked in letters.

Here's a couple more shots, starting at the 3:30 or so mark from VF-24 and VF-211, both AIM-7 and AIM-54C shots at 4:05:

Oh you can absolutely go to jail for divulging classified information. If the government still knows it's classified that's all it takes. It doesn't require "hard proof". Even though some portions of the Tomcat manuals apparently were cleared to declassify and release, ITAR still stood in the way of a FOIA in another thread which means that verbally or electronically divulging that information falls under the same rules. And there were portions not cleared for declassification as well that would have been redacted from the requested manuals. Until that day where ITAR or the State Dept get told to pound sand, I doubt a lot of the former RIOs or techs are going to want to divulge anything even remotely risky. I know some have even expressed that they'd love to go into it but again, not worth risking. ITAR sucks.

There would be no Phantom without the naval Phantom. To have an E but no Navy Phantom I could reverse the sentiment that it would be just as wrong to have. There's a ton of E variants and spinoffs for export, it's impossible to do an E that's one-size-fits-all. They'd have to pick one and then some specific country fans would be bummered, though I'd figure most would just slap their roundel on there and enjoy it anyways. I'm unsure I could care less about the "capabilities" or "roles" a Phantom brings to DCS. The Tomcat isn't a groundbreaker in multirole do-everything that seems to get most DCS folks all jazzed up. It's good at being a Tomcat, which is why I like it. I don't want it to be a Hornet, nor am I super sad it isn't the super late D model that's more "capable". I want a Phantom that goes on boats, has no gun, handles like ass compared to a Tomcat, and leaves borderline Soviet amounts of smoke behind it. Ideally an S as it slots in with the Tomcat, A-7E, and Tomcats Intruders. It would also fit in if anyone ever does the Midway class. You could close one eye and pretend it's a J if you restrict yourself of some loadouts maybe, and squint a bit more you could pretend it were an N or even a B for the folks that really need their VN Phantom vs Fishbed matchup. But what it also needs are more contemporary adversaries, and even if not flyable then the more reason to get that AI flight model overhaul we were promised however many years ago so we can dogfight and also have our AI be more useful wingmen, which a Phantom in the 80s would need to counter the many more nimble COMBLOC opponents it would be stacked up against. Not saying the E shouldn't be in here, I just think a Naval jet completes the flow of what they've been building out. As pointed out perhaps TrueGrit could someday bring a German F-4F that would fit in that slot?

No. B, J, N, and S were all gunless, and not seeing any indicators pods were really used at all either.

The Forrestal is not being made by ED, it's being made by Heatblur to accompany the F-14 module and will be made available to everyone in DCS.

The photo I recalled seemed to have wing fences, a feature the F-4 doesn't have, and where I'd expect to see the elevators they were not apparent.

We I'll be damned, photo from 1959 over on Seaforces.org: And the Oriskany in 1969:

Ah, almost forgot about the Savage. I know it and the Tracker were bigger but I guess I'm not thinking of them on the same scale as the A-3 or the A-5. Now I'm curious to look back and see what all operated off the Essex and Midway decks.

If you think about when they were implemented though, we didn't have many of the monster aircraft in inventory at the time. Think F9F Cougars, A-4s, A-1s. I don't believe the A-3 or A-5 had shown up, though the Phantom was used off the later Midway change. And even when the Phantom, Intruder, and other bigger stuff were adopted the Forrestal class were online and the Kitty Hawk class was on the way. But the old converted Essex carriers like Lexington and Hornet, and the Midway class were still used as attack carriers chock full of A-4s and the lighter aircraft.

Officially un-officially, yes there are more "planned" liveries. There's been a goal that each squadron that operated the A and B should have a skin or two included at a minimum. But there is no guarantee that everyone's favorite liveries can make it as "default", even as popular as the movie is. The nice thing is while fat creason, Naquaii, and the other FM/system folks work on these anticipated FM upgrades to help the Tomcat fly more accurately, it doesn't impact resources to make the Tomcat look more accurate. So while everyone is happily thrashing the Forrestal's decks more liveries are always being worked on.

... posts while having the F/A-18 as his avatar.

Why not build a bridge out of it?

Still playing with the Film Workshop reshade plugin, trying to see if I can get good replication of the Kodachrome look.

I'd bet those baffles in there would change how it sounds too compared to an F-15 or F-16, or even a Hornet....

C-130 first flight was in 1954, and KC-135 was adopted in 1956.

You have not provided any video of an F-14 shooting the gun, inside or outside. Clips of F-15E, F-15C, F-16C, and F/A-18C shooting the gun in strafing passes all sounded substantially different from each other. And even none of those passes were having the listener from the same angle, same duration of burst, nor are the guns in those jets mounted in even remotely the same way as the F-14. I know of one camcorder clip of a Tomcat doing a gun pass, with typical 80s/90s camcorder quality. And as has been pointed out before, sound is a complicated subject depending on the angle it's being heard from, the speed of the object, and the Doppler effect.

The problem with photos is that there are a LOT of factors that will impact how a color looks. Lighting, ISO, shutter speed, white balance. Add in film vs digital, and now you have the colors of the film itself, how it was processed. When people scan old Kodachrome slides they often don't take into the account how blue they were because they were intended to be shown with a tungsten bulb. And even when done right the color balance of Kodachrome is different than other brands and lines of Kodak film, meaning blue hues might be stronger than in reality. Another problem is there are a few different resources listing and showing very different shades and hex/RGB values for the US standard colors. Some of them appear pretty close, other times you lay them side-by-side and they look nothing like what the paint on the jets do. I believe the colors of our current jets were taken from scans and photogrammetry, and also may have been adjusted based on the DCS engine from 2.5.x to "look" right. Another curve ball, fresh paint versus at sea can impact the brightness and saturation of the colors. Further than that, any changes in production of the paint itself, as well as the mixture of the paint at the time it was painted are going to impact it as well. Even MORE fun than that are squadrons that used a variation of the TPS, like VF-84's in the 80s/90s, or VF-41 around 1999 when they used overall Dark Ghost Gray. I've spent some time trying to figure it out myself and share it with some of the other folks working on F-14 skins, there have been some decent photos and RGB values that I was able to tweak to get where I'm mostly happy with the look in the sim, but again it depends on the lighting in the SIM which can be tough to check because the model viewer no longer reflects how skins look in-game. --- All that said, I've made sure this was added to the skin/livery tracker to be redone whenever the model updates are completed, and tied to that the fixes to the base textures for the A and B models. When that stuff and the new pilot bodies are added, hopefully with HGU-55s, all of the skins will have to be reworked anyways and a wave of skin fixes should roll out afterwards. There's not much sense fixing and releasing something that will have to be completely re-done or at least re-saved within an updated template when there's already a limited pool of resources working them.

There's some fixes/additions in the model pipeline that should happen first, but the skin fixes are definitely in the pipe/being tracked so to speak. Stuff like removing the D model bits that were added, fixes to some of the NACA ducts and panel lines, and adding the missing ALQ-126 jammers. Those are going to mean reworking each default skin in the sim because the changes impact both the A and the B. I think as Cobra and IronMike have already mentioned elsewhere the Forrestal is the current big push in terms of art resources, and I think the external models and new pilot were somewhere after that in priority. It's one of those things where the time spent making the fixes would have to be re-done because the base textures may change, meaning they'd have to yet again be addressed when the aforementioned stuff drops. Most if not all of the B skins will need the HGU-55 helmets with new accurate tape jobs as well. A few skins need the BuNOs fixed, and some minor tweaks to stencils and stuff made. In the cases of the tails, the base textures of the leading edge reinforcements are on the list to be corrected too, so again that would be something that would be done twice. -- My *personal* opinion is that the Last Ride skins are somewhat outside the era/config presented in the B model's module, and that JR skins closer to 96-98 would make more sense (even though those jets had the PTIDs for the LANTIRN, but they didn't have the later HUD and GPS upgrades). Many of the existing B model skins were from the Gulf War through later 90s. BUT hey, I'm not in charge and the skins are probably way too popular to straight up remove at this point, so the corrections will come, probably with some of the aforementioned enhancements to the visual model.

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The problem is photography, changes in paint mix, weathering, and lighting all combine to influence how our eyes see the TPS colors in photographs. What film was used, how was it processed, were they scanned Kodachrome slides and someone forgot to adjust for the blue tinting, what ISO did they use, was it overcast or full sun, was the jet freshly painted. There's no 100% way to get it perfect, except for everyone to use the same hex values for the colors and then make small brightness adjustments from there. It used to be you needed to take whatever published hex value for a color and drop it by 10% brightness so it wouldn't look washed out. But, a while back I stopped using the adjustment layers in the template and personally preferred the overall color balance. Add to all that they keep changing the lighting in the sim, and the shaders as well. You need to compare a bright, direct summer sunlight photo to similar conditions in-sim to see if it correctly washes out the contrast of the TPS. Another thing, It seems to me most often the corrosion control spot paint used is close to the light ghost gray used on the underside of the jet, so that's usually what I use for my corrosion control layers. If you want to get fancy, you can even add some color variation in the brush by a few %, but that means no two passes will have the exact same color. But it adds that visual variation from panel to panel if that's what you seek.

D model also had a different ECM suite as well. The vents on the jet above the NAVY stencils that have been pointed out are only on the D model and only on the right side, coincide with the electronics housed in that panel. D also had OBOGS, which I do not believe the B models or A were ever upgraded with. I could be wrong though in the last few years of operation. The D also had different ejection seats.

At some point here they'll get fixed. The jet in question should have been 163221. The VF-24 skin also should have been 162911. With the new pilot models and some of the fixes/additions like ALQ-126, all of the skins should be getting reworked anyways. And yeah, BuNos were unique, but in the case of the F-14 there was at least one "oops" where a jet was painted with the wrong BuNo and then entered into USN records. 158630 and 159630 got mixed up. 159630 got painted as 158630 for something like 2 years from 78-80. 158630 was a Block 65 jet used in tests, later rebuilt as a Block 135 and sent to VF-201. This is 163221: Apparently before being with VF-11 through the GWOT 162911 was an aggressor at Topgun, by some commentary the only B model to do so.

Imgur. Create an account, create a new "post" and make sure it's set to private. When your pics upload just right click and say copy image URL. Paste it in here and hit *enter* and the forum will auto-format.

I think it would be interesting to take a look at ED's helmet filter itself, and see if there is any room for change/editing. The filter makes sense if you throw an actual flight helmet on sometime, it's close to having a set of shooting ear protection on. I think I've still seen a lot of pilots still wearing foam plugs underneath their helmets, which probably should be an indication of how loud it is in the cockpit. That said the filter would make the most sense if it only dampens the volume and tone of the actual cockpit environment but leaves ICS/radio untouched. I haven't used it in a while but that's how I'd figure it should be. I think the challenge with mods for sound is that while you can change/edit the various sdef files, I'm unsure if you can necessarily ADD more sounds and features. Examples being creating more ECS sound layers and moving certain mixes to it (like the water glass chimes in the TF-30 sound, if accurate). Or, adding more fidelity to the internal or external engine sounds, such as tying in more samples at different RPM ranges and angles from the jet. One example would be adding some samples for the exterior of full mil right before the afterburners kick in and that sound overtakes the intake howl, or some more flyby sounds from different power settings. Or taking a page from racing sims, having separate samples that are used from the engine spooling up versus down on the RPM range. I honestly don't know if DCS even has the logic to cover those types of sound operations, or if that can even be done with mods as they would need to be tied to some specific conditions of the engine, ie a specific RPM range and something to say if the engine is increasing or decreasing RPM. The other big problem here is sound samples themselves. I don't know if y'all noticed but there's not exactly a plethora of pure sound samples of Tomcat engines running that don't have 1) wind noise, 2) voices, or 3) were filmed on an 80s or 90s camcorder. At this point to get some honest to goodness Tomcat engine sounds you either have to go to Iran and get sound samples from their flightlines and hush house, or, find a working TF-30 somewhere and build a replica Tomcat intake to try and reproduce the right sound. I know there was more than one usage of the TF30 out there between the A-7 and F-111 but I suspect running TF-30s of any Tomcat type have been destroyed or in some way deactivated, even those on display. So any work trying to synthesize sounds for the Tomcat means a skilled sound engineer and probably some really good equipment and software, where you maybe only have a second or two sample that you need to work with and NOT have hard looping or harsh transitions from one effect to another. I will say the Hornet seems to have more varied sounds in its external sound model where it seems like they tried to get all of those elements together and allow the engine to handle/mix them. But the Tomcat just doesn't enjoy the same breadth of availability of high quality sound sources. Here's a thought for some of you guys that don't like the big loud clicks: replace the sound with the thump when dropping ordnance, or when the gear locks. It gives you a little feedback that you flipped the switch but maybe is more, *immersive* as you probably aren't going to hear loud clicks and snaps even cold starting (because helmet is basically hearing protection).