Caesar

File Name: 1974 VF-14 Tophatters File Submitter: Caesar File Submitted: 23 Apr 2006 File Category: SF F-14 Skins This is the paint scheme for VF-14 Tophatters when they first equipped the F-14A Tomcat in 1974/their first cruise aboard the USS John F. Kennedy in 1976. For extra info, read the Read Me. Click here to download this file

File Name: 1978 VF-211 Checkmates File Submitter: Caesar File Submitted: 17 Apr 2006 File Category: SF F-14 Skins This is the paint scheme for VF-211 Checkmates circa 1978 (aboard the Connstellation.) Permission for release granted by BPAo. Please read the Read Me included in the archive for extra information. Click here to download this file

Bah, who needs to catch up to them when you can slap on a couple Buffalos; bag anything within 96NM of your aircraft with a Mach 5 missile. IIRC the Talon can carry the AIM-54. On topic: what altitude are you flying at? At low altitude the plane's not gonna get as fast, will overheat more quickly, and even if you don't care about the realism aspect, you'll have to deal with that issue; SF may be a light sim, but it is in no way Ace Combat; it's gonna be hard getting 1300kts out of the plane at 1000 feet. I'm not sure if leaving the overheat values blank will work (indicating no overheat, though I haven't the time to test this right now) I'd estimate some ungodly high exponential number might do the trick (a million degrees maybe?) If not, try flying higher, maybe. I got my Tomcat to 2.6M at 57,400feet (1489kts TAS or over 1700mph TAS) with an overheat warning but no fire. Even at 20,000 feet you'll probably get 1.8M out of the plane before getting a warning, and with how fast the Talon accelerates, you shouldn't have a problem catching those escaping bandits.

If you get too fast the engines overheat; keep 'em too hot for too long, and they catch fire. The thing is, the Talon's engines are very powerful, get to speed very quickly, and as a result are prone to overheat more quickly (due to how fast they can get going) if they aren't kept in check. Any aircraft can catch fire due to engine overheat, it's just not as easy to do with most other planes.

You shouldn't need to change any .ini's for pictures; just be sure the pic is 107x127 pixels, is a .bmp and is in the PilotData folder. That should be it.

Now that'd be a great clip to replace the negative with! "Wolfpack One, Red Crown, Run away! Run awaaaaaaaay!!!"

Hell yeah, another '70's scheme for the 'Cat! I'm a fan.

Did you use the weapon editor to add the weapons? Or, did you use the latest weapons pack; I seem to recall an issue where older versions don't work with the latest patches of SF/WoV/WoE?

You don't actually need LANTIRN on the plane to use LGB's; you can drop them from a plane without the pod and they'll still track. When you're dropping your bombs you can't be too close, too far or at too extreme an angle or they won't guide. If you're trying to dive in directly over the target and loose an LGB, in my own experience anyway, it probably won't hit the target, at least not by its own guidance. What I do is fly straight and level, and drop at about 7-10 miles or so from roughly 5-10000 feet and it almost always guides into the target.

Hot...real hot...with F-14's...I'm a fan.

I'll send you the process in which I did it; to the best of my knowledge, unless you want to release a modified model of an a/c, you can tweak it in any way you please. If you couldn't, then a lot of people, including myself, are breaking an ethics code by giving our 'Cats LANTIRN and TARPS capabilities, along with new HUD/radar/RWRs without first consulting the MF!

Check your PMs

IMHO the Mirage Factory's new F-15A HUD is one of the sexiest I've ever seen. I've made that one into my F-14A's HUD and also updated the Tomcat's radar based on the new one by MF (with new symbology, TWS/STT/ACM capabilities.) I'm a fan.

wpnssgt has one in the works, check out the mod mafia string.

First and foremost, let me just say there are a lot of guys out there with far more experience than me in this area and they can tell you a lot more than I, but here's my 2 cents from my own experience: In order for a decal to work, you need to make it a targa file (.tga). PSP, IMHO is not the ideal program for decals (though skinning is fine with PSP). A far easier tool for decals is Adobe Photoshop & ImageReady. From APS you make your decal (i think with no background); then when finished, hit edit in ImageReady, from IR, select export, then Original Document, and from there, you can save the decal as a 32-bit .tga file. From here it can be used on an a/c. I'm not sure what the restrictions are for PSP on exporting files or saving them as Targa images, but I'm almost certain all decal files have to be 32-bit Targa images, so if PSP can produce those, so much the better for you. I initially tried decals with PSP and ended up failing miserably, then switched to PS and actually got it working. Good luck with your work; I hope this was of at least some assistance.

There's a MiG-23 pit half way down the page in the link below. Below the actual pic is a drawing with the instruments labeled. http://www.richard-seaman.com/Aircraft/Mus...raft/index.html

Mater Dei... ...lookin' nice

Modifying .ini's is done in notepad.

Sky Captain, what emulator are you running? I've got DOS Box and it can run just about anything up to 1994, but the catch is you usually have to install the games through Windows command prompt first, then either set up a front-end to read their executables, or whip out the old DOS knowledge in the emulator (cd\ etc.) If you can install them in Windows, or an older machine, then cut the installed files and move them to your newer machine, they should be runnable.

My favorite oldies are Fleet Defender Gold, which I'm still playing thanks to a DOS emulator (nothing illegal here, I actually own the game, the emulator allows me to run it), Tomcat: The F-14 Simulator for my 29-year-old Atari VCS (aka Atari 2600), maybe Janes USNF 97, though it doesn't run very stable on WinXP.

Just a quick note on the number of group ID's you can have: there is a limit of 6. In other words, if you wanted to make each pylon individual on a fighter with more than 6 pylons, you would loose the ability to select the loadout on pylons 7 and beyond (they default to whatever is in the loadout.ini). On my Tomcat, I have 6 groups for weapons, and my last group ID for the fuel tanks is 7. This means I can no longer select whether or not my 'Cats have external fuel in-game, I have to do so in the loadout.ini; but because I always carry external fuel anyhow, and can jettison the tanks any time I'd like, this doesn't affect me in any way. On other fighters, such as the F-15 or -16, where external fuel creates a drag penalty (the Tomcat's don't, or might very nominally) it could have a more adverse affect if you didn't want to load external tanks, or wanted to have discression on whether or not the tanks are loaded. Just keep this in mind when you group the pylons: 6 usable ID's, and beyond that it's the loadout.ini default.

In order to get different loadouts, you have to modify the aircraft's data.ini file. In the weapon pylon section, you have to check the weapon station grouping. Let's say you want an F-14 to be able to carry a LANTIRN pod on one wing station and an AIM-7 or -54 on the other along with the usual 2 AIM-9's for self-escort on strike missions. The Tomcat's glove pylons are grouped together, making this impossible without modification (i.e. you carry 2 Sparrows or 2 LANTIRN pods, but not one of each.) Oh yeah, and you have to give it the ability to use LANTIRN in the first place by adding "LP" to the AllowedWeaponClass... Checking the stations in question (MissileStation1 and 2) [MissileStation1] SystemType=Weapon_Station StationID=11 StationGroupID=4 StationType=EXTERNAL etc... then [MissileStation2] SystemType=Weapon_Station StationID=12 StationGroupID=4 <-This is what will have to be modified etc... Switch the StationGroupID on MissileStation2 from 4 to 5. This will now allow you to fly with one Phoenix and one LANTIRN pod, but because a different pylon is used for Sparrows, you'll have to correct that one also. Go down to MissileStation2bis and change the StationGroupID from 4 to 5, and now you have the option of flying with one Sparrow and LANTIRN as well; you can also fly with one Sparrow and one Phoenix, or one Sparrow or Phoenix with any other weapon that your pylon supports on the other station, including the normal loadouts of 2 Sidewinder, 2 Sparrow or 2 Phoenix by selecting one of each. Hope this helped! EDIT: I think the fuel tanks are ID=5 on the Tomcat, so if you mod it, you may want to select ID=6 rather than 5 on the pylons in question.

Do you have the weapons pack installed, and what date is the mission being flown? You can't use weapons outside of their start date and end date as seen in the weapondata.ini (or thru the editor.) In other words, if you're flying a mission in 1980 with a plane from the 1940's, and all its weapons ended service by the end of the '40's, they won't appear. You can modify date ranges in .ini files with notepad, or weapons with the weapon editor (or also notepad, but its more difficult.)

The only stupid question is the question that remains unasked.

Right click on the exe (in this case WeaponEditor) Select "Properties" from the menu Click the Compatibility tab (furthest right) Check "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" then select Windows 98 / Me Click Apply or hit OK That should do it.