Steam Edition and P3D also include this feature but if you really want to enjoy flying from carriers – you need to install several add-ons.
I was flying Wildcats and Corsairs again – with much better graphics and realism than in 1942 Pacific Air War.įlight Simulator X introduced carrier operations in Acceleration expansion pack. Later came Pacific Fighters from the Il-2 series.
I spent countless hours flying F-14 in the Top Gun Fire at Will and learned how to land it on the carrier. Today you may laugh watching this minecraft-like terrain but back then – it was a breakthrough in terms of mesh design. Additionally – Top Gun Fire at Will boasted the best graphics of all aviation related games I had by this time. Short movies at the beginning of each flight featured real actors – including James Tolkan who played the CAG in Top Gun the movie.
Like many other PC simulation games in the 90s – it was a story based game/sim. It was the Top Gun Fire at Will that made me really love naval sims. But after some time I managed to master carrier landings in Zeros and Wildcats. And I found the option to end my missions before landing very helpful. To be honest – I preferred to fly from land bases than from carriers. My next encounter with naval aviation started when I discovered 1942 Pacific Air War. Later I tried to go back to FD but the graphics scared me off.
For the first time I had to read the whole manual to be able to fly it properly and being eleven – I gave up. But the Fleet Defender was a different animal. I was a capable F-16 pilot in Strike Commander. I clocked hundreds of hours in Air Combat and received nearly all medals in F-15 Strike Eagle III.
I was not a complete newbie at this time. Back in 1990s it was advertised as the most realistic naval flight sim with unprecedented carrier operation simulation.
My first serious carrier flight was in the Fleet Defendera. Freeware guide.Ī bit of history – carrier aviation on PC Otherwise I'd recommend to look at other German airports.Carrier operations in FSX – which carriers and aircraft should you install and how to find a carrier in the middle of the ocean. For this being a P3D convert the price is rather high, but if you must have a Stuttgart airport in your collection, this one is still the one to get. It is still a good step up in quality from the Asobo EDDS though. Were it not for that off-colour grass texture, my rating would have been higher. And I just don't see a reason for this at all. But as it is currently it simply looks artificial and out of place and is thus kind of destroying the immersion during daytime. All they had to do really was to at least use a grass texture that features the same blueish-green colour and it would have looked fairly OK. What really bothers me, and I can't think of a reason as to why Justsim did this Surrounding all taxiways and the runway one can see this generic repetitive band of grass texture that does not match to the surrounding aerial image at all, meaning it's a completely different shade of green. It's not that bad since the night textures for the windows and glass front are OK regarding perspective. That doesn't matter during daytime, but obviously you can see that clearly during night hours. The main terminal interior is all blurry 2D textures too. Then again, the hand-crafted EDDS delivered by Asobo did miss out the tower completely, so let's call it a draw shall we? Luckily it is located quite far away off the runway, so you won't see that much.
The textures put on the ATC tower are rather gross, featuring 2D-out-of-persp-Įctive blurry textures that are not at all what you would expect from a MSFS add-on. The airport is actually fairly detailed and nicely modelled, not much to complain in that area.