I wanted to post a few thoughts on the Top Gun DLC portion of the E3 Announcement video.
[For sake of disclosure, I’m a Naval Flight Officer but did not fly in the F/A-18 (I was in the S-3B Viking way back), though I have a decent amount of experience operating with them. (For those who aren’t familiar, in first movie “Maverick” was a pilot, who was flying the aircraft, while “Goose” was a naval flight officer, who was doing navigation and communications and operating various sensors and weapons systems.) I had two deployments flying off aircraft carriers before S-3s were phased out of service, and I went to various engineering and staff duties afterwards.]
First, the main suggestions:
Collimated/Parallax-Free HUD. I’m hoping this DLC will be a push for the development team to get proper head-up displays implemented natively in the sim. [Please support the Wishlist thread: Make HUD collimated please(the HUD in the aircraft, not the HUD of UI) - Self-Service / Wishlist - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums.] That other thread goes into a lot more detail with videos, but the basic idea is that the HUD symbology seen through the combiner glass should be focused at infinity and look like, say, a giant billboard projected on the “sky dome”, and not like text written on the HUD combiner glass or a small poster a few feet past the HUD glass (the way it is in the 787-10 currently). There are already two other Asobo aircraft from launch day that would benefit from this, the aforementioned 787-10 and the Citation Longitude (with the currently inop HUD), as well as a multitude of potential future addons of many airliners, smaller business jets, and military aircraft that use head-up displays.
External Fuel Tanks. I more or less get the whole no weapons thing that they are currently doing with the base simulation, but please let us have at least the centerline drop tank. In real life, Hornets and Super Hornets (“Rhinos”) basically never fly without external tanks except for air shows/demonstrations, and the plane looks sort of “naked” without tanks to anyone who has flown with/around them. [Even in the movie trailer every plane has drop tanks: Top Gun: Maverick (2021) – New Trailer - Paramount Pictures - YouTube] In any fast military jets, you’re very frequently checking your fuel state, and those planes can generally use all the fuel they can get (especially the A through D model Hornets). I might also suggest allowing non-live ordnance loads, like ACMI pods, NAVFLIR pod, and inert weapons like CATMs, laser guided training rounds, etc. to make the aircraft look more interesting/realistic.
Other video commentary/thoughts:
1:49 No ship wake, but based on the dev updates that should be added at some point. Also, some of those radar antennas on the island should be rotating but don’t appear to be animated currently.
1:52 Deck elevators aren’t actually moving in this shot (the way they are in the equivalent movie trailer shot). It would be nice if they had working elevators, though it would be a lower priority thing. (Most planes in the hangar are down there because they need maintenance or are having parts borrowed from them and aren’t going to be flying immediately; pretty much anything that’s going to fly is on the flight deck or being moved from the hangar up to the flight deck.)
1:53 Flight deck personnel look good; wonder if they have accurate hand signals when you’re taxiing around the flight deck. I’m pretty sure we don’t normally use that type of tow tractor or tow bar on the ship. It would be nice if they implemented wing folding.
1:55 Not sure why that helicopter is parked there. The other Rhinos look like they are sort of embedded in the deck for some reason. The wings and rotors of the aircraft should be folded to look realistic. (There’s not a lot of room when the whole air wing is aboard, so you unfold the wings right before going on the catapult and fold them as you taxi out of the landing area or after getting the Sidewinders safed and pinned depending on the aircraft.) Hopefully they try to accurize the 3-D model of the ship somewhat, as there are some details that seem off to me.
2:02 Probably a pre-alpha build thing, but it looks like the cockpit displays aren’t animated yet. (Notice how the attitude indicator in the left DDI and the backup attitude indicator near the pilot’s right knee don’t move.) This is also an example of the HUD collimation thing; the HUD symbology (which in this clip also doesn’t move) shouldn’t be rendered as drawn on the glass of the HUD but should be seen through the HUD far in the distance conformal to the sky at infinity (and should not actually be visible by the camera in this position).
2:05 The flag patch on the pilot’s left shoulder (right side of the screen) is backwards; the blue canton of the flag should be forward, so the “normal” flag would be worn on that side. (The default patch configuration from flight school is to have the flag patch on the left shoulder, service patch on the right shoulder, name tag on the left chest, and unit patch on the right chest, though people will often customize what they wear on the shoulder patch locations once they’re in the fleet.) The circular patch below the flag is somewhat unusual, though I’ve seen some people remove the flap on the pen pocket there and put a small patch on the Velcro that would normally secure the flap.
2:10 Looks good overall, though I’m going to keep my expectations realistic on avionics and flight model depth for now. I hope they also implement the two-seater F/A-18F as well as the single-seat E model; the difference in the 3D model is just the section of the fuselage just aft of the single-seat canopy, the canopy itself, and the aft cockpit, and the rest of the aircraft is otherwise identical. (If you look at the plastic scale model kits of Super Hornets that are out there, many have parts where you can build either a E or F version just by using about 3-4 different parts.) IIRC, the fleet is approximately half single-seaters and half two-seaters, maybe with a few more single-seater squadrons.
Thank you for your time.