Swordsman422

Oh, man. Ticos are my blue water crack. Next to a sim with the F-14 in it, my greatest desire was a new sim involving command of an Aegis cruiser. I have your originals already working and showing up in single missions. This update looks sweet!

BTW, USS Port Royal and a lot of the other Ticos are getting coral blue anti-fouling paint as they come in for refits. This can be seen in the added picture.

It's sad. The USN is going to retire the 6 ships that don't have BMDS and one other that requires extensive and expensive hull repairs next year because of fiscal budget cuts. Cross your fingers, this is tentative and if certain things improve, the retirements may be pushed back or not occur at all.

Do we know what file determines the general make-up and formation of a naval group in single missions and what year they start showing up?

Damn. Guess I gotta start doing Intruders too now. Thanks for doubling my workload! Lol!

Glad to have these.

Game over, man! Game over!

100% intelligence you say? Vely Intelestink. I've had a modded Dhimar/Paran campaign set in 2004 during the twilight of the F-14. Before NA the bad guys would attack the carrier station and the escorts I had as part of the scenery objects. After NA, they wouldn't come out at all. I'll have to try this. I can't right now and I'd say alas, I'm at work. But I work in paradise in corporate terms.

Waterworld eh? Y'know, now that we have NA, that map's usefulness is really going to take off (pun).

Aw right! I'm looking forward to this!

Just had an idea. Does an open ocean map exist? What about a campaign that is nothing more than a carrier group transitioning all the way across the map escorting a convoy? Since we can have carrier groups move during the campaign and can also have bombers from off screen. It'd be nothing but 10 missions of recon and bomber intercepts until we can get submarines good and figured out, then there'd be something for the S-3s to do.

Thought I'd be done by now. Alas, these two decal sets took a LOT longer than I expected.

Not much more left to go. Missing Fin decals for the stock squadron markings need doing and then the stock corrections will be finished. I'll release those as soon as that's done and I'll continue work on the alternate and early low-viz skins.

VF-142 had even more decal issues. Those are now fixed. Stock decals now look like this.

The more involved correction of VF-213's tail art. This is both their primary and alternate decals. The Low-viz will of course be different.

As to any Top Gun skins, yeah probably. I already have the decals made up to do it for the MF Tomcat. Unless TW gives us as a DLC the 100-GR, 105-GR, or 110-GR, I don't foresee providing them for the TW Tomcat. Plus in order to do the mid-80's TPS, I'd need some templates. I have them already for the MF cat so that makes my life easier and my decision less difficult.

Thanks Storm! Scratch that off the to-do list.

Sid, a new Forrestal? Awesome. That's the one US supercarrier class that needs an updated model badly. Can't wait to see that!

You have to go and add it into the data.ini for the aircraft. Which F-4 are you talking about? Some should already have it.

Aw. Now I feel like suck. My apologies.

TMF puts out some awesome stuff. And their F-14 is, as I stated, the best out there in any sim.

Bangarang! Can't wait to implement this. Thanks!

I've got early warning working, well at least an E-2 Hawkeye is buzzing around getting ignored I've been mostly flying for Cuba while testing, I really want to sink a carrier in a MiG-23BN. The lack of anti-ship missiles is a bit of a downer but hey ARMs work surprisingly well. I also got sidetracked to make some Caribbean migs skins for the Thirdwire MiGs, which was intially supposed to be a quick and dirty job. Now I have full 2048 templates in the works. I need to focus more

There is nothing wrong with ADOS when it's productive. That MiG looks pretty cool. I'd love some Caribbean skins. I fly on the Cuba and OTC maps all the time.

I like using both. The TW Tomcat models the look of the late 70's F-14 very well, and the cockpit is pretty nice. Aside the incorrect seats it's probably the best TW aircraft model to date. BUT, the MF Tomcat that Oli made is totally blow away. The B and D models especially are the best I have ever seen in any flight sim EVER, and that includes Dino Cattano's MSFS F-14 model. Plus the meshes for decals are just stupid easy to work with (except the lower half of the radome for some weird reason). And the cockpit panel is eye-wateringly detailed. When it was released, the MF product raised the bar on user made aircraft mods by an order of magnitude and there is yet to be another 3rd party jet that is even half as good. Not that there is anything wrong with the other planes. They're great. But this one is just so much better than anything out there.

As a Tomcat fanatic, I'm glad that my favorite aircraft received such quality efforts from both developer and 3rd party. I consider it a privilege to have the opportunity to produce work for both.

Working on adding and correcting fuselage sashes now. Here's a peek at VF-143's alternate decals from their last cruise on CV-66. Corrected stock markings can be seen in the background.

The bad news is that in order to correct the existing sashes, I had to double the size of the decal canvas, which means doubling the size of the decal in the layout. No worries. When I release the corrected stock decals, I'll include rewritten decal layouts for the stock skins as well.

A working LHA that I can fly a harrier off of? You, sir, can count me in!

Here are preview shots of several generic skins I'm working on made using corrected, alternate, or low-visibility decals. All squadrons will be represented, though not all of them will have different markings on each skin.

Like this?

Everybody will get represented.

Yeah, that's the TW F-14A_77. I'm doing several generic skins that will make use of alternate or lo-vis squadron markings. That was Gull Grey 2, which is defaulted to 1981. This is Gull Grey 1.

A little preview of one of the generic skins I'm working on. Did this squadron first because they deserve it above all others.

Stuntman, I'm currently working on fixing all the missing decals, including VF-103.

Dave, I haven't had a look at it, but I assume certain aspects such as MTT are triggered by selecting Fox 3. I assumed (because I haven't looked at the .ini yet) that there is some kinda entry that limits the maximum number of MTT targets, but I don't know. MAN, is it 5:00 YET?!

Beta testers.

+1x10^50

NA would probably not had so many issues without which TK went forward without beta testers.

Avionics changes, I dunno. If the F.1 had a functioning AG radar, MAYBE we'll see that. But this isn't a title, it's an expansion pack. Definately no new terrains, no new weapons that aren't specific to the F.1, no major avionics overhauls, and no new voice packs (though I'd LOVE it if he ever coded the game so that we could choose what countries use what voice packs just by editing the Nations.ini).

Bear, I forgot to ask you. When you were in the Kimberly in Australia and you had to drink your pee and you were complaining about how bad it tasted... um... why'd you drink the canteen dry?