About This File
This is a minor mod to give Wrench's excellent Sea Vixen FAW2 a 20mm SUU gun pod. It makes the aircraft (always one of my favorites) into quite a handy dogfighter and ground strafer. Just unzip the attached "Objects.zip" folder and drop it into your "VixenFAW2" folder.
This isn't just a pure fantasy. Well not quite. Some years ago I was on a sailing trip in the Caribbean, with an instructor who was an ex-FAA aircraft artificer (RN-speak for maintainer). He'd served on board HMS Eagle during her final commission, and told a tale of how 899 Sqn had somehow obtained a SUU-pod from their USN counterparts. The terms of the exchange weren't altogether clear, it seems to have involved a couple of cases of liquid morale restorative from the Eagle's wardroom (a fine RN tradition, history records that in 1945 the British Pacific Fleet used similar "currency" to maintain high serviceability rates for their mainly US-manufactured aircraft).
Seems that 899 managed to hang the SUU-pod on one of their Sea Vixens, but there the tale kind of peters out. My friend was very fuzzy on whether they actually managed to get it to fire.
What I have done here is assumed that Eagle's ever-creative air engineering department decided to hang the gun pod on the starboard outer pylon, the one that was already wired up for a buddy-buddy refueling pod. I've further assumed that they've somehow managed to adapt the refueling pod's power and control circuits from British to US voltage standards etc, to power and control the gun pod. Unfortunately they weren't able to go as far as altering the Sea Vixen's Pilot Attack Sight (PAS) to give it a lead-computing facility, so the pilot has to do the best he can with a fixed sight. This still works pretty well.
As for Controller Aircraft clearance? Shhh... !! (I learned first-hand how the FAA works on a TDY to HMS Ark Royal back in '78!)
So try it and have fun with a naughty Vixen!
Cheers
Mike