ai for carriers

[tazzharm]

Hey everyone.
yes it's me again..
I have a quick question does anyone have or seen ai planes working with carriers in free flight?
In sandiego a couple planted on the static one but have never seen them move.
thanks.

[Firebird]

Hi Tazz,
Sorry, I am not sure what you mean. Are you talking about moving carriers or AI landing and taking off from static carriers?

Also can you confirm that you are talking about FS9.

[Calvin Gwin]

It appears that you cannot have any type of aircraft land on a moving carrier in FS9. It is just not allowed for in the 1's and 0's of the sim itself. As far as I can tell the only way to get any AI planes to land on moving carriers is to use scenery objects instead of AI. This was done in some add-ons like Flight Deck 4, the planes are an animated part of the scenery that take off, do circuits, and land. Its an interesting solution, but doing this means that it is all visual, no ATC or anything.

[Jumpshot724]

FD4 and 5 suck anyway, biggest waste of money I have ever spent on FS add-ons. The flyable aircraft crash the sim or the panels just don't work half the time as they black out, the F/A-18 flyable models have obvious control issues as far as turning etc, and you can't even fly away from the carrier or FS crashes itself, so forget about taking off from the carrier and flying to land 'cause once you get a few miles away the scenery crashes and then FS crashes itself.

I brought these issues up to Abacus but they never got back to me, bunch of grade-A programmers over there....

[Graham King]

Fixed wing AI operations are possible but very difficult.

It requires a seperate flight model and something called a super spoiler to stop the aircraft in 200 feet.

[Keith Jones]

Fixed wing AI operations are possible but very difficult.

It requires a seperate flight model and something called a super spoiler to stop the aircraft in 200 feet.

...or, get Rob Barendregt's carrier ops package. It will add a catapault launch system to the aircraft and also an arrester system. Both work very well. Available at the usual places.

[Graham King]

Keith I do not know Rob Barendregt's carrier ops package but does it work with AI aircraft?

[tazzharm]

hey..
sorry fsx.
I know most are using fs9 but Maiw and woai work perfectly in my fsx
either way static or moving I'd like to fing a program or add on that has ai planes land and take off as they do from an airport I guess static would be easier. but beggers cant be choosers.
thanks for the help.

[Keith Jones]

Keith I do not know Rob Barendregt's carrier ops package but does it work with AI aircraft?

Sorry, Graham. I misread the thread. Rob's package is for flyable aircraft, not, as far as I know, for AI. My apologies.

[Ford Friendly]

Try stenheli.zip on avsim by David "Opa" Marshall.
I have it running relatively successfully in my FSX installation if you are interested in helos and carriers.

USS Stennis Aircraft Carrier & Coast Guard Helicopters. This enhancement, created from several readily available components, features the USS Stennis Aircraft Carrier and AI Jayhawk Coast Guard Helicopters flying to and from it. The carrier is steaming up the Oregon coast off the Port of Newport and is escorted by a Coast Guard Cutter. The scenery is designed to compliment my Newport, Oregon airport (KNOP) scenery - newport1.zip - but will work with the FS2004 default scenery also. All necessary files are included. The documentation also lists the sources used - and several have instructions detailing how to add the component to your own scenery projects. Please unzip to a temporary folder and follow the simple installation instructions. Compiled for your flying enjoyment by David "Opa" Marshall.

On the other hand, the payware Flight Deck 4, FD5, and Alphasim USS Enterprise and Kutznetsov packages all work as advertised for me - in FSX and/or FS9. The limitations was the change and handling of textures and texture formats sometimes making the ship's deck appear to be floating above the water/making the hull or parts of it invisible.

I've even played around with swapping out the FDE's on specific aircraft just to change up the look and feel at times. For instance, I get a kick out of F-4's, A-6's and such heading off "together" as they did during the Vietnam War. I even played around with a "downed pilot" scenario for a while - sent out the mission package, assumed one didn't come back, sent out CAP to cover a USAF helo sent to rescue him. I even had some flyable-converted-to-ai involved from the USAF side providing additional CAP. Obviously, I had to accept a few limitations in the visuals and frame rates... didn't have perfect models or paints and the FDR's were not customized for the aircraft I used either.

EDITED TO ADD: The MAJOR limitaion for me, when switching from FS9 to FSX, was ship movements are different in FSX. Way different. While moving landable decks are possible in FSX, getting the ships to move where and how I wanted proved my undoing. So I mostly used static but landable CV's.
END OF EDIT

The key was finding what others had published, taking a bit from each, "duct taping" it together and then aking small adjustments until satisfied. The other thing, as people have already said, was recognizing the differences between FDE's which provide good looking carrier landings and those which are intended for shore-based landings only. (The FDE I used for A-6's going between Whidbey Island and the above mentioned carrier - off Oregon's coast - fold wings prematurely on their return to Whidbey but they DO land on the carrier correctly.).

Unfortunately, six major computer changes and HDD failures in the last two years lost me 90% of all of those files. Time, interest and a motorcycle accident head injury have interfered with recreating some/all of the flightplans/"packages".