Back when Fleet Defender came out, I spent hours writing missions. Even now I occassionally write some and fly this sim in DOSBOX, and it still flies great. Most of the missions are historical, for example, I wrote several based upon the action against Libya in the 1980s, and in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. I also wrote 10 or so against Iraq in 1991 during ODS using the India-Pakistan flying from the Red Sea.

Some others are fictitious based upon books I've read.

My question is this: Does anyone still fly this sim regularly? If so, I would be glad to email some of these missions to you.

Email me at lee61156@aol.com

Dragon

Dragon--
While few play Fleet Defender that I know of, many play its sister and successor sim--European Air War (EAW)
I have a copy of Fleet Defender myself.

Anyone able to program Fleet Defender in DOSBOX will likely find a warm welcome at the EAW site.

Fleet Defender had features that a programming group for EAW is still trying to use and emulate.
Many features are "portable" into this sister sim. Many are not, and you may be able to tell us why.
Recently, for instance, aircraft carriers were introduced.

EAW's main "Tally-Ho" library containing thousands of aircraft will move to SimHQ soon (about a week). You may find Tally-Ho useful for your own work, since we share characteristics.

Please drop by and introduce yourself. Hopefully, you will find some kindred spirits quite interested and curious about Fleet Defender. You can count me as one.

----Wudpecker (member of the EAW Code Group)

IMHO, F-14 FD is the best flight sim ever of the best fighter ever. I played it as long as I could, until I experienced FreeFalcon in its 1280x960 (or whatever) glory and could not go back to FD's 320x200. I still may try to get it running again some day, tho. I miss having a good RIO. If someone could make a good F-18D/F sim (Yes, I meant D/F) with a talking back seater I'd donate my kids' blood to pay for it.

Only drawback? The mission builder, which I found an enormous pain.

Sorry about the mission builder, it was the first, and pretty much only one (excluding starting the JF-15 one) I ever did. Unfortunately, I think besides one artist, I was the only full time person on the scenario disk so I only had so much time and resources to spend on it. I think you would have disliked the text editing we had to do for the missions of the original game even more though.

Elf

Scott - I wrote over a hundred missions using the FD mission builder, a even used it recently. For its day it was GREAT! And it has stode up to the test of time. No apologies necessary.

I also recently downloaded the utility to load individual campaign missions in the MB. That's been very useful.

Maybe it is just a coincidence, but the North Cape campaign and India-Pakistan scenerios follow the CARRIER series books 3-6 pretty closely. Was that intentional?

Dragon

Well I think I did all of the Scenario Disk missions using the builder and it did what I needed but I can understand wanting a better system.

I'm glad you found something that will give you access to the individual missions. I remember someone doing it years ago but couldn't find the details.

I don't know about the North Cape but George Wargo gave me a bunch of short paragraphs of mission ideas for each of the scenario campaigns, and it may have also been laid out with a suggestion for flow but I'm not sure on that. I probably still have them in storage somewhere since I usually keep that sort of stuff but Lord knows where it is (and he's not telling me). Anyway, if he had used another source to get ideas from then I'm pretty sure he would have passed it along as a reference. Also he was an AF F-15 pilot and probably thought he could come up with as good a plan as any Navy guys. ;-) That's when I actually learned about the tensions between India and Pakistan. Which Carrier series are you talking about? The only things called Carrier that comes to mind is the Tom Clancy and I think a History Channel series. I searched Amazon but there were a number of different series on carriers.

Elf

There was a series called "CARRIER" by "KEITH DOUGLASS" but this was a pseudonym as many different authors wrote the books, and you can kind of tell when the author's changed based on the style. Especially the segues from more Combat oriented to more Love Story oriented :-)

I think, actually it was Major Dragon who clued me into this!

Walter Douglas wrote the first six books before Putnam gave the series to ghost writers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Keith,_Jr.

The first six are excellent books about plausible scenerios with accurate descriptions of carrier and F14 operations. The next 20+ books are a joke.

Recluse, you've clued me and countless others into alot more than this!

Thanks for the info guys. I'll have to check out the early ones when I get a chance.

Elf

Major Dragon,

'Great offer - at your convenience please send me any missions you have.

Regards,

J. P. Kelly