TOP GUN: 34years later. Some thoughts and questions.

Just watch Top Gun:



Some thoughts and questions.

QUESTION: What exactly does Charlie, the lady, do?

She has a degree in astrophysics, so she knows about G-Forces.

I doubt she ever piloted a jet fighter so how would she know anything about air dog fighting in this scene?



Also she is a TAGREP, what is that?

Here's the famous scene where she is referred to as a TAGREP:

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechtopguncharliebriefing.html

THOUGHT: The F-14 was a pretty plane.



QUESTION: At the end when there is a crisis in the Indian Ocean and Maverick and Iceman and the other pilots had to break up their Top Gun school graduation to go to the carrier. The carrier with all those F-14 on it. There were no other pilots on that carrier capable of flying a F-14 in air combat?

QUESTION: Iceman and Hollywood are in the air, Maverick is on the catapult on Alert Five standby. Just Maverick? There are 2 catapults. Why only one F-14 on one catapult on standby?

QUESTION: After Maverick launches off the carrier and he and Iceman are outnumbered 6-1. Both catapults break at once. What are the chances of both catapults on a multi-billion dollar carrier to break at the same time.

QUESTION: Is there still a Top Gun school now 34 years later?

QUESTION: Is this real? There was no CGI in 1986.



THOUGHT: I didn't think Charlie was pretty. She is build like a big brick horse and her mouth is kinda wide.

Tom is 5 7. Kelly is 5 10. In some the close up scenes with her and Tom, she had to stand in shoeless feet.

She's the "love interest". No idea what a TAGREP is. Could be real, could be Hollywoodese.

Yes, the F-14 is a good-looking aircraft. From that angle it looks more like an actual eagle than an F-15, with the wings folded or extended.

There were lots of other pilots on the carrier. But none of them were named Cruise or Kilmer. Wouldn't be Hollywood if some extra pulled the Top Gun Honor Grad's (and the star's biggest rival's) fat out of the fire.

See above.

See above. Also, the chances of both catapults on an aircraft carrier going Tango Uniform at the same time in a movie right after the star launches are 100%.

Don't know. There's still a need for pilots to hone air-to-air skills. Don't forget, Top Gun and Red Flag (I think that was the name of the Air Force equivalent) were created because air combat in Viet Nam showed that reliance on missiles had eroded those skills. I certainly hope the Navy and the Air Force haven't forgotten that. Besides, they made another movie about it so it MUST still be in operation. Hollywood wouldn't make up something like that, would they?

No CGI, but there were other tricks that have been available since the early days of movies, including splicing and superimposng one image on another. But that particular one looks more like a case of "forced perspective". The two aircraft have horizontal separation, with the Tomcat nearer the camera and probably lower than the Talon.

Kelly McGillis is attractive, IMO. "Pretty", "gorgeous", "sexy" get very subjective. I doubt any of us would be terribly annoyed if someone who looked like she did showed an interest. I know I wouldn't.

You might be surprised at some of the things Hollywood will do (and has done) to artificially adjust the stature of their leading men and women. They would build duplicate sets with smaller doorways to make the men look bigger and larger doorways the women more petite. Alan Ladd (Shane, among many other roles) was only 5' 6". They would routinely dig ditches for his leading ladies to walk in so they didn't tower over him. Again, forced perspective.

VonBaur is a Top Gun expert! Thank you!

haha my boy Crane

I don't know what that picture is taken from but I think they used models too. Maybe for only when they blew the migs up but they used models to some degree too. I think the inverted negative G dive shows real planes in flight but like mentioned above were spliced some how. I always thought Kelly McGillis was exceptional in Witness.

The US Navy Fighter Weapons School (a.k.a. Topgun) still exists, but moved from San Diego, CA to Fallon, NV in 1996. It also now includes air-to-ground training as well, and is more of a general combat training program than an air-to-air dogfighting school. The US Air Force has a Fighter Weapons School that is similar, and graduates are called "patch wearers" because they get a patch that indicates they passed, and they're considered elite.

Red Flag exercises are more simulations of war than teaching the deployment of weapons and specific tactics, and often include other countries. They help with overall combat operations and coordination more than just increasing a pilot's skill in certain areas.

I do not understand Crane's moving image.

Thank you Arthonon.

Berlin - Take My Breath Away (Official Video)...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx51eegLTY8

And while you're at it...

TOP GUN -DANGER ZONE (Music Video)...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUsFWO08CO0


TOP GUN ANTHEM...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCTJmXrgsFg

And don't forget about the other 80's F-14 masterpiece...

F-14 Tomcat Scenes from "The Final Countdown" HD Part1...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SwgU42XSpw


F-14 Tomcat Scenes from "The Final Countdown" HD Part2...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkOsXNF_ZoM


F-14 Tomcat Scenes from "The Final Countdown" HD Part3...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M74yB9duRc

And on that note:

Kelly was okay but she did not age well at all and she went south to the "carpet club," so...

Clearly Meg Ryan is the superior choice. She's almost too tall, though, even at 5'8. Pretty much anything past 5'5 is getting too big for a woman in my book. My wife is 5'2.



BTW, Flyboy, where have you been?

Most of us watched Top Gun multiple times in the theaters in the 80s, I bet.

I was a baby. Watch it on videotape many times when I was a kid.

Arthonon, that making of The Final Countdown was excellent!

++++++++++

This thread, along with getting back to an 80's Cold War playlist project, has sparked an enthusiasm in me that I haven't felt in years. Today I cleared out an area in our guest bedroom for a simple 'cockpit' project to use with my gaming PC (very old, not impressive), and then I pulled out my Saitek X52 from storage. I showed my father my plans (simple wood-frame construction to hold a seat, HOTAS and screen) and he thinks we might already have the material in the barn, maybe even a seat (old office chair). Meanwhile, I flew a couple of classic sims with the X52 (still have the profiles) and it felt good compared with my Logitech Wingman JS, much more control at my fingertips. I'm hoping that I've mellowed out enough to ignore some of the irritating quirks of my old flight sims and can just enjoy them for what they are.

So you're about 35 years old? I would have guessed you were like 20 based on your posts that I've read.

Age has not been any kinder to her than it has been to Kelly McGillis.

Q. for Scott if you're about...

When making Fleet Defender in the early-to-mid-90's, how popular were "The Final Countdown" and "Top Gun" in the hallowed halls of MicroProse?

Meg was the superior choice but i definitely would not have kicked Kelly out of the room back in the day. That day being long gone, unfortunately.

Top gun Aviation Gunnery Representative, probably

You only need one catapult with an F14 at the ready, as long as it's Mavericks.

So what will become of Cougar after he gave up his wings? Does it mean he won't be able to fly Navy jet fighters or that he won't be able to fly anything or that he will still be able to fly something like the refueling plane? Will he be dishonorably discharge or will he spent the remaining years doing other duties like mess or laundry or what they call it when they mop the deck?

I'd of course like to think that he had an illustrious career flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog sh*t out of Hong Kong.

However I postulate that Top Gun was actually a prequel offshoot of The Day After and Threads films, depicting one of the first major naval engagements between U.S. and Soviet forces, and so he, the rubber dogsh*t market and the city of Hong Kong may not have survived the war.

Except that the Soviets weren't directly involved in Top Gun (I don't think, it's been a while), but I don't remember which nation was depicted as flying the "MiGs". This is why, when I listen to the Top Gun soundtrack, I think more of a terrorist state opponent (a la Iron Eagle) than I do the mighty Russians.

I was asking in real world if a U.S. Navy aviator turned in his wings.

I would hope he gets treated decently. The reason being that if aviators hang onto their wings when they really should stop flying, they put the lives of those around them at risk.

That's because there was no real-world nation that served as the adversary in "Top Gun". It was a simply a generic authoritarian nation but because this movie came out in the summer of 1986, I bet you that either Libya, Iran or the USSR were the top countries imagined by people who saw the movie in the theater.

I swore I remembered a Middle Eastern accent, but I'm wrong, you never hear the MiG pilots speak...

Top Gun - Final Dogfight...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqfXXaOisKo

Who Exactly Was The Bad Guy In ‘Top Gun’?

I've always thought the MiG-28 theme had a definite Soviet synth vibe.

Make it sh/tty old battered rig that coughs and spews constant black smoke, leaks every fluid possible, throw in Mel Gibson, Nic Cage a cartel of some sort and we got a movie!

Will watch this today when the barbecue is slowly barbecueing on the barbecue.

[url=https://www.amazon.com/Final-Countdown-Kirk-Douglas/dp/B077V1QRD9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1JAEAL7PS9VXW&dchild=1&keywords=final+countdown&qid=1590382823&sprefix=final+countdown%2Cinstant-video%2C222&sr=8-1][/url]

Hi Mark,

I've got "Top Gun" on LD and I'd sometimes do movie nights at work but I don't think we ever got together as a group to watch either film. I think we all appreciated the movies but both had been out for quite a while and there is of course the "Hollywood Effect". I remember Mike pointing out to me that at times you could see the standby attitude indicator spinning like a top during some of the dogfights and we definitely weren't going to be using their radar stuff as a reference. Also given when most of "The Final Countdown" takes place and that the story wasn't as focused as much on flying I don't think that one sprang to mind much for inspiration. YouTube wasn't around and what internet there was was usually accessed through dial up so video sources were rather limited. We actually had to rent special video players so we could view some of the videos we were able to get access to.

Most of our inspiration and references were books. I definitely enjoyed reading a book about the making of "Top Gun" during that time. Another is a book called, 'The Cutting Edge", by C. J. Heatley III that has a ton of great pictures. One of our artists borrowed my copy and pretty much destroyed the spin smashing the book flat so he could scan it. I was not happy. It's a "coffee table" type book so wasn't cheap and it was my personal copy. I think I bought a hardbound edition after that and I believe I still have both. Another amusing book story was I lent another book to someone else and it was gone so long that I forgot who I lent it to. One day someone came up to me and said he found a book that he thought I might find of interest. He showed me the book, I looked at the cover, then the edge of the book opposite the spine, laughed and said, "Yes I would", as I showed him my last name written along that edge. At some point Marketing had gotten their hands on it from whomever I had initially lent it to and no one must have been worried about making sure it was returned. Since then I still lend out things but I keep a list on my whiteboard of what I've lent to whom.

I would guess that "Top Gun" would have been very popular with the guys at Spectrum that worked on the "Fire at Will" game a year or two after we came out since they would have been trying to capture a similar feel.

Speaking of "Fleet Defender" I just saw that "Fleet Defender" and some other MPS games just made it over to GOG. The Shadow Ops game isn't one of ours.

https://www.gog.com/news/7_classic_war_games_that_faithfully_simulate_a_reallife_battlefield

Elf

MarkG,

I couldn't remember if F-19 was new or not but had already bought the group so couldn't check. I went ahead and bought the block since I was in a good mood about FD and they were all pretty cheap. That reminds me I'll have to let Ed know about 1942:PAW.

Elf

<Apologies Scott, I wanted to consolidate my previous two posts which I deleted while you were responding to them>....

Thanks for the heads up on today's MicroProse releases at GOG ("Fleet Defender" and "1942: The Pacific Air War" being the most important to me).

++++++++++

I find GOG DOS game installs are often sloppy and bloated, including unneeded and duplicate files (with FD the entire game is duplicated). So I always strip down my GOG DOS games back to original content, using only the DOSBox config file in my own batch organization and sometimes keeping any post-installation tools that might be useful. To me, the joy of DOS software is the tiny footprint and not requiring a formal setup/install (self-contained), once it's stripped to essential files. I'm soon going start what I hope will be an all-encompassing Fleet Defender thread on the appropriate board where I'll explain this in detail.

I can't believe that I'm hearing sound and digital speech in 1942:PAW! Also confirmed, Fleet Defender is the Gold version with training videos and jukebox!

Along with what has become my all-time favorite game, MicroProse's SubWar 2050 (developed by Particle Systems), I can honestly say that I have never been as enthusiastic about simming and gaming as I am right now!

EDIT: I messed up with Gunship though (just $3.00 so...). I think what I really want is the DOS version of Jane's Longbow that damson posted on recently.

We watch the Final Countdown today. Fun movie, love seeing all those real airplanes and real working of the Nimitz carrier.

But the ending, don't want to spoil it, was impossible.

Also so many questions, so many questions!!

So what part did you find impossible besides the randomly appearing wormhole that allows time travel?

The fact that it made 56 mill at the box office is what blows my mind.

Audiences were much more easily entertained in 1980.

Watching the "Behind the Scenes" posted by Arthonon, those Jolly Rogers Tomcats were brand spanking new when they made that movie (although the F-14's maiden flight was 10 years earlier). BTW, I'm starting over with the Fleet Defender documentation which tells the history of the F-14.

I remember as a kid how freaking awesome these new futuristic-looking twin-tail fighters seemed back in the day (I had a snap-together model of the F-15 I'll never forget). I think that was a lot of it, being all so new, and how hi-tech military aircraft captured our imagination in the 1980's (The Final Countdown, Firefox, Blue Thunder, Iron Eagle, Top Gun, etc.).

No way those 2 people will be in the limo.

I just saw Fleet Defender on GOG yesterday as well. It's so cheap I considered adding it to my GOG library. My library is probably 80% games I haven't even downloaded let alone played so I didn't buy FD after all. I never played FD back in the day so I don't have a nostalgia connection to the game. The screen caps on GOG look so pixelated I didn't think I could get into the game now. I have the whole Strike Fighter's 2 series and my thought is to fly the SF2 F-14 some time in the future when time permits. I know lots of people loved FD as a great game. Any thoughts on this from you guys familiar with the game? Am I missing out on a great experience in FD or will SF2 fulfill my need for speed?

Wizard

Part of the problem with old games is in order to play them now, you have to emulate them on modern monitors and they look like crap because they weren't designed to look well on modern monitor technology. But if you emulate older CRT monitors properly within the Dos emulators, those old games still look great...

I guess you are amassing your inventory of games ahead of time to play once you retire?

Why not? It actually is one of the most realistically plausible aspects of the entire movie, given the movie's basic premise.

I actually recorded it over the weekend and watched it for the first time since its initial release, along with my 28 year old son, yesterday (obviously his first time ever). I've also shown him several John Wayne movies (Hellfighters, Rio Bravo, McClintock, Big Jake, Green Berets, The Shootist, and True Grit, so far), the original Mechanic, The Dirty Dozen, the original Death Wish, Death Hunt, and many more movies in which story and character development/interaction took precedent over fast-paced action and big explosions (and in which nothing was computer generated). I've gotten very good at NOT revealing the "Oh, sh*t" moments.

About Top Gun: The answer to any question about the movie can be answered by a simple statement - "Because I was inverted."



I helped pull the prop off of one of them a few weeks ago and will have to help put it back on in a week or so. The Pilatus is many things, but pretty ain't one of them.

Indeed, it's one of two left with a straight gas motivator.

If you change your mind later about FD and have to pay full price, you'll only be out of $3.00.

Later this week I'll be starting a Fleet Defender thread on the Air Combat - General / Modern Era board. My interest in FD isn't despite its age, it's *because* of it, having an interest in late-DOS game development. In fact, I'm scheduling it as one of my daily studies, so I'll be 'playing' it regularly whether I feel like it or not. I also want, for the first time ever, to conquer a relatively complex flight sim on full difficulty and with using all available features. I was about to do this with SubWar 2050 as I'm further along, but now that I have the full FD Gold version, I'll stick with flight. Plus I like everything else about the game.

It was easily one of the best flight sims of its era, although the graphics are so crude that I thought it looked outdated even by the first time I played it in the late '90s.

We already had 3D graphics acceleration and the early versions of Direct X by the late 90's so "Fleet Defender" most definitely would have looked outdated by even that time.

I agree somewhat as it always seemed to me that they tried pushing texture mapping a bit too far with VGA graphics (320x200x256 [game devs usually didn't use 640x480x16, Mode X being closer to the former]). Except lately I've changed my mind about FD with its beautiful (for its day) differing time-of-day and weather atmospherics. I'm guessing that EF2000 was the pinnacle of late-DOS flight sim visuals, with SVGA graphics (640x400x256), a *huge* jump in screen resolution, even before SVGA was assumed 800x600.

EDIT: Oh, and EF2000 even had DOS 3Dfx/Rendition graphic options, although I never minded the Software visuals.

2nd EDIT: But what looked better than Fleet Defender in 1994?

Make that 1993 (first pic) but what you want of course is the Gold version (second pic) which came out on CD in 1994.

I cannot believe this stuff is still out there (and many issues mentioned seemed to have been fixed according to later build release notes)...
A PLAYER'S GUIDE TO FLEET DEFENDER
...also on CombatSim...
Fleet Defender

Fleet Defender: The F-14 Tomcat simulation.

A fantastic review read...
Comparison with F15 SE 3?

I'll save the rest for my FD thread.

I can't guarantee that my memory is 100% reliable on this but I seem to recall that Pacific Air War: 1942 by Microprose and Dawn Patrol by Rowan had considerably better looking graphics than Fleet Defender.

1942:PAW is going to be my next sim (purchased on Monday along with FD) so I'll make some comparisons. Never heard of Dawn Patrol, maybe a "new" pleasant surprise for a retro simmer?

It was a WWI sim made by a UK based developer. The graphics at the time were quite stunning for a flight sim.

Confirmed that what you're comparing is 320x200 (1993) to 640x480 (1994), a *huge* increase in resolution at the time! FD Gold added new content but not upgraded graphics.

I believe, given those limitations, that MicroProse couldn't have done a better job graphically with FD. That next jump in resolution would have been incredible considering what their artists had already accomplished, with maybe one more installment of Stealth Fighter using such an upgraded next generation 3D engine. Had that happened, and assuming that we would have had the option of flying the F-117 and fictional F-19 (as was later patched for F-19, I think), I would have been happy with MP's Stealth Fighter for life.

Dawn Patrol.
1942 PAW

You are absolutely right! Problem is retirement is around a decade away give or take depending on how many years my kids are in university. I hope I have a gaming rig that will play this ancient stuff when the time comes.

Yeah, had it been released even a few years later it would have made a huge difference in visuals.

I honestly though that Fleet Defender's graphics looked like something from a Commodore 64 game's title screen the first time I played it!

Jane's US Navy Fighters came out in 1994. My brother was in to Fleet Defender, I was in to US Navy Fighters and we used to argue about which was better or better looking. Of course I was right.

Welcome to the Black Sea.

damson made a thread about it some time back. A trip down memory lane

https://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/4252177/

Yeah, my mistake. I should have said 1993.

EDIT: With the possible exception of 1942: PAW (I haven't decided yet), Fleet Defender is IMO the best-ever looking 320x200 rez flight sim (w/3D real-time graphics). Are there any others beside PAW? I thought Evasive Action looked nice for being so simplistic (from the dev that made SubWar 2050 for MicroProse).

If by ancient you mean earlier Windows, then good luck (especially with any DRM). But if you mean DOS, I think you'll always be in luck as long as the OS you're using supports a DOS emulator like DOSBox.

Cockroaches, Twinkies and DOS programs will always be around, even after...

Eh... I love Fighters Anthology (the Gold version of those Paul Grace Jane's sims mentioned), but come on.

Let's put it this way... I've never had FA manuals scattered over my kitchen table wondering what the hell I've gotten myself in to?! FD is definitely more of a deeper study sim than FA, although they're both fun.

Now I want those games too! Old games are more fun than today shoot them shoot them shoot them nothing but shoot them games.

"Charlie" was a Hollywood version of Christine Fox, a DoD tactical advisor for the Navy at the time. You can read more about her here:

Christine Fox

I believe "TAGREP" stands for Technical Assessment Group Representative.




I would assume the idea is that in such a high stakes scenario the Navy sent the best pilots they had, i.e. Maverick, Iceman, Slider, Hollywood, and Wolfman. In reality, they would have used pilots from the squadrons already embarked on the carrier on scene. It is worth noting, also, that most squadrons would have already had Topgun graduates on their rolls. It is common practice for a recent graduate to return to a fleet squadron as a training officer.



Hollywood. These two scenarios force the outcome of the movie's climax to depend on Maverick alone. Will he overcome his demons and save the day?



Yes. The US Navy Fighter Weapons School, Topgun, is located at NAS Fallon, NV.



Yes, it is real. While many of the shots were filmed using models, many others were filmed using real aircraft. The Navy allowed a couple live missile shoots for the filming and repainted several F-14As for the Tomcat flight scenes. The models were primarily for planes being destroyed and the flat spin. The black F5s, "MiG-28s" were flown by real Topgun instructors. I know that the rio in back of the F5 in question was Dave "Bio" Baranek. Though the footage was real, it was edited to make it appear closer than the aircraft actually were. The long "communication" closeup scene is clearly edited.

Thank you very much, VMIalpha454.

I quite enjoyed that myself.

Some final comments about MicroProse's Fleet Defender...

Looking over original reviews (released in '93), FD's graphics were overwhelmingly praised. As I sit in a darkened room, testing on a 19" CRT and a vintage 19" LCD with CRT aspect (native 1280x1024), I get it. This game is freaking gorgeous for its age w/VGA graphics (320x200x256), especially dusk and nighttime (my favorite times to fly).

I think that maybe FD's gameplay outlived its visuals with later Gold versions, but as a result it's one of the most completed flight sims I've ever played. I think the Gold version was more of a polishing than a milking, and I wish more sims would have done this back in the day (I'm looking at you, EF2000). It just feels like a finished game to me, once you get sound and joystick configured (and JS calibration is saved unlike some previous MicroProse sims).

What I'm wondering now is if the apparently semi-dynamic campaign engine actually lives up to the Manual hype, or is this another EF2000 (WarGen was good, but not as good as advertised in the Manual)? That's what I'm going to find out, but from what I've read I shouldn't be disappointed.

Tornado (and later HIND) had excellent mission editors/campaign planners. (World was generated, dynamic and fixed by the engine, but your mission and flightplan were yours to set, with a really solid planner).

I don't recall the FD one as being anything special.

EF2000 and TAW also had great mission planners, although normally I'd just accept a mission generated from the campaign engine as-is (always plenty of missions to choose from).

In EF2000 you could set an air refueling waypoint, or if you needed fuel mid-mission, just ask an AWACS (assuming you still had some) for the nearest refueling vector. And when you arrived and requested fuel, the tanker would always free up a basket for you, letting you skip the line of waiting aircraft.

In TAW, to avoid enemy ground radar, you might route your mission just inside the border of a neutral nation. They'd sometimes scramble and escort you with constant threats until you left. In the extracted game files there are developer's notes that too many trespasses over a neutral nation and they'll change allegiance to enemy, or if you fly over a sensitive area deeper in their territory then the fight was on (I always skirted the border). Lots of cool things were done with these old-school dynamic campaign engines.

I'm not looking for this level of campaign play in FD, but at least having auto-generated missions as with previous MicroProse sims, if in a more consistent world with finite resources (supposedly lost F-14s/pilots are not replaced throughout a campaign, but AI pilot skill increases with successful missions).

<Started new Fleet Defender thread on the "Air Combat - General > Modern Era" board.>

Scott Spanburg, who was handling the graphics for FD, and John Paquin, who did the same for PAW, worked closely together. I think John was the one that came up with the system for having the aircraft break apart. I believe we could have worked that into FD but I remember a good part of the decision not to was that we were coming out first and didn't want to steal their thunder. Also a lot of our combat takes place at far range so it has more impact in PAW. There also might have been more time spent on the aircraft skins for PAW for the same reason but that's so hazy I could be completely wrong about this.

MarkG,
I hope you have a great time with FD. I look forward to your posts. I did all of the missions that came with the Scenario Disk based off of ideas and I believe a campaign flow that George Wargo gave me. For these I could use the mission builder that I put together for the Scenario Disk/Gold version. The first missions were done with a text editor and I believe then run through a tool. With both I think we had some core missions that we'd use as a starting point so we wouldn't have to do things like lay out all the air defenses again and the carrier group so we wouldn't have to keep setting up the CAP, Ready 5 and other things like that. I checked the Strat Guide and we did move the carrier group around a bit but there definitely were missions where they started in the same location. I don't believe we tracked damage to enemy air defenses like we did in the Jane's stuff I worked on but since we were purely air to air and you'd know if the previous mission was a success or failure you could modify at least the next mission to reflect that. I can't remember if I did that. I do believe that I tried to take good advantage of the random abilities I put in to keep people guessing if they played the game again. I really liked that the skill of your squad members was based off of how experienced they were (I think I based it off their rank). I would have liked to have kept that for the Jane's games I did but it was decided to only have variable skill levels for the enemies with the variation dependent upon the difficulty level.

Elf

Love reading all the inside info, Scott. Fleet Defender just drips of 80's Cold War intensity, this is going to be a trip.

I already know that at some point in training I'm going to come upon a flying dragon, a UFO, and creepy radio chatter from a lost WWII flight over the Bermuda Triangle. But I assume a tactical fleet-destroying nuke would be too much to ask for (a la Larry Bond's "Cauldron" and one or two others)? Just the possible threat would really raise the pucker factor of fleet defense, eh? Maybe with a future mod, if that's possible.

EDIT: Too bad I can't replace the FD menu music with the more haunting "Menu2" from Jane's F/A-18.

The dragon actually is outside of training but you won't run into it unless you go looking for it and luck is with you. I can give more details later but don't want to do spoilers at this point though of course it's easy enough to find online, even from stuff I've written before.

I haven't checked the strat guide but I'm fairly confident we didn't have nukes. Since the initial code was based off of the F-15/F-19 code I'm thinking the ground weapons should have had blast radii so someone might be able to hack the weapons data to replace one weapon with a "nuke" like someone did for JF-15 but I don't think you could get the graphics to work out to give anything even close to interesting besides just a bunch of things suddenly going boom so probably not worth the effort. That reminds me that this was the first of the modern aircraft MPS game where the AIs could do ground attacks. I had fun creating the AIs to coordinate strike packages going after targets.

Elf

Does anyone remember the Godzilla Easter egg from Falcon 4.0? You had to be playing in the Japan/Korea theater of operations though.

I keep looking through these posts and can't find the link to the Fleet Defender 2 GoFundMe effort anywhere.

Scott,
I'm sure I'll have a million questions in the near future (i.e. was FD coded in C or C++, any ASM, was it Turbo C, etc.?), but I'm going to pace myself. First a complete read of the Manuals while squaring away my game (stream-lining install, understanding the files), then off to training and then finally to the campaigns.

And I wouldn't want to scare you.

I remember some time ago being really interested in Digital Image Design sims, and trying to contact Steve Hunt to return to SimHQ and talk with us (the main TAW campaign coder, IIRC). He never came back (and I knew we'd never get Martin Kenwright to join us), but I would have probably scared him off anyway with too many questions!

Steve White (TAW's GUI coder) did visit us, even gave away some paraphernalia (I think Nephilim got one of the F-22 ADF/TAW posters I wanted). Steve passed away not long after, I remember finding out the day I received brand new EF2000 and TAW Strategy Guides from Dogsbody(?) in the UK.

BTW, I took those Strategy Guides, along with my F-117A Manual, over the Kinkos and had the spines cut out for loose pages. Then I purchased a scanner and made PDFs of all three. I was honored that the original GOG installment of F-117 has my name attached to the Manual, but I think they later switched it for an official one that I assume shipped in a bargain jewel case.

Sooo... I understand that you have a Fleet Defender Strategy Guide? Hmm...

I'm not being serious at all. I know how you feel about your books (as do I) and you mentioned before that you'd never let your Guide go. Just make sure that you don't lose it (and I'm sure you won't) because no doubt it'll be a good resource for some of my upcoming questions.

Thanks, dude.

I'm not sure about Falcon 4.0 but he showed up in F-15 III. There are at least a couple YouTube videos of it. Here's one of them:


Elf

MarkG,

I'll try to answer what I can, memory and time allowing. Regarding the guide I just checked Amazon and, OW!, the cheapest price is $85. After that my Google Fu was weak and I didn't have any better luck.

Scott

Still don't see it, someone's working on Fleet Defender 2, right?!

Yup, and that's a recent price drop (I've been following it for a long time), it used to be min. ~$300.00! I'm keeping my eye on it.

Enjoy your weekend, sir.

1:30AM...gets up, stumbles to kitchen (laptop on table) and orders a $90.00 450p. Strategy Guide from 1995!

This hobby...feels so good to be back. 'Night y'all.

See what you started?!

Man, I'd forgotten all about your write-up that you mentioned on your '30 Years...' thread (Fleet Defender on p. 2)...
http://www.SimHQ.com/_commentary/all_047a.html

So before I start firing off any questions (which should be fewer now that my own copy of the Strategy Guide is on the way), I'll first take a deep breath and see what I can find out for myself. There's surprisingly lots of good info still out there, my printer is getting a workout (just more stuff to add to my hernia-inducing 3-ring Fleet Defender binder). But whenever the mood hits you for more MicroProse or Jane's reminiscing, please do tell...