"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...