South Africa/SW Africa Terrain?
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Spudknocker, in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - General Discussion
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By tiopilotos
Atlas Giraffe fighter aircraft program
By 1984 SADF thought that Cheetah aircraft which was then under develpoment would not be ready to conduct operations on the ongoing border war. Atlas officials estimated that Cheetah will make its first flight sometime in 1985 with possible introduction to service date sometime in 1987 for the Cheetah E. The latter was regarded by many observers as an interim solution before Cheetah C become operational sometime in the early 90s. Cheetah E was actually a Mirage IIIEZ airframe conversion with some upgrades applied. It was fitted with a relatively simple avionics suite and radar but retained Atar 9C-3 engine. SADF decided that while avionics were good enough to counter FAPLA MiG-23s, lack of medium range air to air missile capability and engine performance were critical problems. With international embargo still active, South Africans decided to launch a parallel program code named "Giraffe".
Giraffe's goal was to acquire/produce a small number of relatively modern fighters with BVR capability and newer engines at low cost within minimum time so that the first airframes enter service the same time with Cheetah. There was no budget nor time for development of a completely new aircraft so the Giraffe team inside Atlas took into account that SAAF was already very familiar with French aviation technology so they decided to apply upgrades to existing aircrafts. Atlas officials came up with the idea that the RDM radar (with ground mode removed) and the M53-5 engine of the early Mirage 2000C could be acquired and fitted to older Mirage IIICZs. Also Giraffe team gained some access to early stage of Rafale program. On January 1985 development team presented to government and SADF the characteristics of the upgraded prototype which would be ready to make its first flight as soon as possible. The aircraft should be able to accelerate fast, carry at least 2 medium range AAMs and 2 short range AAMs, detect/track fighter size targets at 50/25 nautical miles, use defensive countermeasures and finally eqquiped with an internal jammer. RDM and M53-5 would be delivered through third countries while the medium range Super 530F missile would be acquired in secret cooperation with France. Short range AAM would be the domestic V3C Darter. The first flight was estimated to take place sometime in September 1985.
On May 1985 with the Cheetah on development stage and with the increase of military expenditures due to the ongoing conflict on Southern Angola, government prioritized Cheetah program as more important and terminated Giraffe. An artistic representation of how Giraffe could look like was published on Air International magazine (with little help from AI).
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By VonBeerhofen
An error I made working on the city districts drew my attention to the COSTCT tile which only shows a staggering 6 times in the entire EAW world. I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of coastal towns and seaside resorts in Europe, one of which is the one I live in. So I feel I have a choice to make, add more to the EAW coasts or free the tile to be turned into a new city tile to add more diversity to the limited set in use. Personally I think that a village or city tile one coastal tile away from shore will work just as well, after all the entire coast and beach are merely app. 1 or 2 KM deep. The question though is what is a better use in a 64 small tileset?
Furthermore with a universal tile border there is also a much better use for the river city tiles as they can now also function outside the cities and add more diversity, as was done with other nature's in EAWPRO. Besides that industries predominantly happen on river banks, so it adds to realism too. Vice versa there's also no reason not to use other bridges inside cities like London when borders are uniform, which had 5 at the time of the blitz. EAWPRO already uses dozens of instances of the unused stock rail bridge and a much higher number of any other bridge. They're even used as piers on coastal tiles too, making fun targets to destroy!
Here's Londen Thames with added bridges, of course the fake crossing can be removed now too.
VonBeerhofen
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By VonBeerhofen
or bringing order to the chaos. I've applied a previously described algorithm of grouping tiles on the Italian cities which forms them more into what one might call 'districts', i.e. more organized then what was shown in the previous thread. The fractal algorithm can create many different layouts using various parameters, one of which is determined by looking at an entire region and the neighboring tiles surrounding a particular tile. It then randomizes smaller groups it creates and adds an occasional seed between them so the group isn't just echoing a certain tile. In the below calculation groups are created from the outside inward, taking the city's shape into account, after all the surrounding tiles influence the outcome of the calculation. As part of the fun 1/2 of the tile map uses an inverted calculation as can be seen in the last 3 pictures which is Munich, hence it's border and center differs from the other pictures shown. The other 5 are London.
You heard it first in www.combatace.com
VonBeerhofen
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By VonBeerhofen
No more repetitive borders or center tiles and more different villages. With this randomization all village and city tiles can be used at will where ever in the game in any possible rotational state, and it's a lot less mapping work. I already showed the idea some time ago but not with the Harvest City Set. There is still some work to be done to narrow some borders and create the right impression I'm after but I think it's slowly getting there.
Here's a few screen shots, as an experiment a few village tiles were replaced with breaker field tiles and two different city/village layouts were tried, which means that the randomization for each layout is entirely different while the cities and village sizes and positions weren't changed.
You heard it first on combatace.com
VonBeerhofen
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By VonBeerhofen
Here's a compilation of the 12 latest tiles for the 'Harvest' set. I created a temporary map where all other tiles were removed from and randomly filled the EAW world with these 12 tiles only. 12 screen shots were taken of which 6 are displayed now. The remaining 6 will replace these pictures at a later date as I may not have captured all 12 tiles in these screenies and to safe on page loading times .
VonBeerhofen
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