Hi Ripcord!
Having the first release as the RAF Harrier Gr.3, their missions will follow closely the events on Jerry Pook's book. As you may know, it starts half way through the campaign timeline, at May 20, 1982, with the brits on the eve of getting the beach head at San Carlos. It will have a set of missions based on the descriptions (and maps) found in the book. Actually, our programmer scary_pigeon, through the book's editor got Jerry's contact (lets cross our fingers
For the second release with the argentinean side and the mainland bases, it will be similar, except it will start on May 1, 1982 with the "baptism of fire" of the argentinean airforce. Regarding the mission data, the argentinean air force has a lot of info, with correct schedules, loadouts, description of events and even waypoint coords for each of their missions.
For the third release, the full boxed release, we'll take a shot at a dynamic campaign like what scary_pigeon mentioned in his interview, and this is huge, costly and complicated, as you may know by the lack of such feature in any other sim outside of Falcon 4, and you're right too, the first two installments are meant to be getting a product out there and getting some cash flow so we can at least have a shot at the dynamic campaign.
Regarding the artistic license regarding a wider range of missions flown, we're pondering about the lack of air-to-air in RAF Harrier missions. Actually, they brought the Gr.3s into the theater to support the Sea Harriers in air combat, because of the numeric advantage of the argentinean air force, the war planners had foresee a huge attrition in the Sea Harrier's force. Those RAF pilots were trained in air-to-air and have fought mock battles against French Mirages and Super Etendard before being dropped in the South Atlantic. They had the AIM-9L too. Perhaps is not too much of an artistic license if some missions calls for supporting the SHARs in CAP duties, even if this didn't happened historically. Or, less of an artistic license, it could had happened, is a flight of RAF Harriers on a mud moving mission got into visual range with a flight of argentinean aircraft - by all accounts, even if both flights were in air-to-ground missions, they would jettison their stores and prepare to self-defense! So, I must mention Jane's F-15 historical campaign of Desert Storm/Iraq 1991: we were intercepted by Iraq MiG-29s half way through the campaign, even knowing that in the real events the Iraq Air Force was blasted out of the skies in the first nights of the conflict. Artistic license! Please give us your opinions on this interesting subject.
P.S.: they actually launched in an intercept mission on May 19 but were unsuccessful and returned to carrier. The first mission were they dropped ordnance with effects on targets was on May 20.
