Got the AV-8A flying off the boat in LinebackerI

[SBIR 0]

I got tired of waiting for "Jet Thunder" to come out, and even more tired of trying to make the falklands add-on work, so I took it into my own hands to get the AV-8A flying off boats on campaign mode.

 

It took a bit of downloading, installing, extracting and editing, but I finally replaced a Navy squadron A-4's for AV-8A's in linebackerI. Totally ahistorical, I know, but the US' been flying AV-8's since '71, so why not? Anyway, I had to edit the aircraft's ini so the weapons were compatible with the weapon's pack, but that was about it to get it flying and shooting. The only problem that I have is that you can't take off from a CV with the harrier, although it lands fine. It starts you latched to the cat, so you can't take of verticaly, and the cat shot destroys the aircraft. I got arround that by starting "on air" and the campaign plays very well. Talk about hairy going downtown with no RWR or any chaff/flares, and listening to all the SAM calls, looking for trails, and seing if you can possibly get any lower on the deck... exciting stuff.

 

I attempted to take it to the next level and swap a Marine squadron A-4's for AV-8A's, switch the squadron to base at "Yankee Station," and last but not least, replace the CV-63 for an LHA-1. Well, I got the squadron flying the AV-8As from their land base OK. I downloaded and edited the LHA-1 so it would work in 1972, but that's as far as I got.

 

I could not find out how to replace the Constellation for the Tarawa. I've been looking at a variety of different threads on the matter, but the instructions vary depending on whether it is SFP1/SFG/WOV/WOE, and it's frustrating trying to apply instructions for one title to another which has a different file structure. I'm going mad trying to locate all these files that posters talk about, whirch are usually compressed in an unamed cat file, in an unamed folder

 

Can some kind soul please tell me which files you have to edit in order to change the CV-63 in Yankee Station for an LHA-1? I'm doing this on a combined install of WoV & WoE, which changed the file format of linebackerI to WoE standard (campaign_data.ini's must be extracted.)

 

Thanks for any help.

[SBIR 0]

Ok, I got further, but still no cigar.

 

After crawling through the campaign_data.ini I found that carrier based squadrons have a couple of extra lines, which ground squadrons do not:

 

Carrierbased=True

Carriernumber=#

 

Where # matches the selected carriernumber in the [carrierobject] section at the bottom of the campaign_data.ini. This is how you link a particular squadron with a particular boat.

 

I added the LHA-1 to the list of carrier objects, set the carriernumber entry to 1 which wasn't being used by any other [carrierobject,] and matched that number to the carriernumber entry in the [airunit] section for the particular squadron. I also extracted and edited the target nations.ini and added the LHA-1 as a target.

 

I start the campaign, and everything is fine, I'm on yankee station, I'm flying an AV-8A, but I'm siting in the water, no boat anywhere :cray:

 

I ended up switching the carriernumber to 19 on the [airunit], which is the constellation's number, to figure out if I was using the correct procedure to assign a squadron to a carrier. Sure enough, I'm sitting in the cat of the constellation. That leads me to conclude that something is wrong with the LHA-1 itself, or more likely with the way I added it to the [carrier objects] section of the campaign data.ini.

 

Oh well, I'll keep trying to get the LHA-1 to work, and I'll try some other baby flatops in the d/l section as well. Meanwhile, I'm flying the linebackerI campaign, with a Marine squadron flying the AV-8A, and landing in the constellation after every flight.