The mail was blunt: the gear overspeed warning is distracting, it’s annoying, and nothing actually happens if you fly fast with the wheels out. All true. Hornet Bay has never modelled gear-door stress or a collapsed strut — the amber nag was scolding you for breaking a rule that didn’t exist. So it’s gone.
Off the HUD. The flashing amber GEAR OVERSPEED under the gunsight is deleted. Dirty up at 400 knots and the glass stays clean — the warnings that remain, STALL and MISSILE and LOW FUEL, are the ones that can actually end your day.
Off the net. The toast that popped when you dropped the gear above 300 knots went with it. Press G at any speed and the only answer is the clunk of the struts and the drag on the airframe — which was always the real consequence.
The drag stays. Wheels out still cost you speed and fuel, so pattern discipline is unchanged: gear up when you’re climbing, gear down when you mean it. The jet just trusts you to know.
Fly as dirty as you like. She’ll slow down — she won’t lecture. — HB
Sharp eyes again: after the vertical climb, helicopters used to porpoise their way along the route — easing up and down between waypoints that each carried a slightly different altitude, with a hover-wobble layered on top. Fixed from three directions:
One altitude, held. The cruise is flown at a single flight level — waypoint heights no longer tug the airframe up and down. Descent is saved for the final leg and the landing, exactly as it should be.
The wobble stays in the hover. The little sinusoidal bob now only plays during the landing settle — the climb and the cruise are rock steady. Measured in flight: less than half a metre of spread across an entire circuit.
K-MAN gets more sky. His police orbit over the city sat one metre above the tallest hill’s ground clearance, so the terrain floor kept kicking him upward. The orbit moves to 420 metres — comfortably over everything San Francisco can grow.
Bug fix: with rain selected, the briefing and plane-select maps were being swallowed by the weather — rain streaks and storm murk over the planning view. The satellite map now stays crisp and readable whatever the forecast; the weather only starts when you do.
Fuel burn was punishingly high — it's now halved for both jets, roughly doubling your time in the air. And the carrier plane-select no longer offers the F-16: with no tailhook it can't work the boat, so the option is gone (and the dormant hook mesh removed from the model) instead of biting you on launch.
