Two dials turned this push, one for your patience and one for your ears:
The warp ladder grows two rungs.Z now climbs 2x · 4x · 8x · 16x · 32x before dropping back to normal. Sixteen and thirty-two are for the long hauls — the inbound leg from the far waypoint, the air wing’s full pattern cycle, waiting on a trap queue. The whole world steps with you: traffic, helicopters, the carrier’s steam, all of it.
The S-3 sings turbofan now. Sharp ears caught it: the Viking is no prop — she runs a pair of TF34 turbofans under those wings. SAWBUCK 700 now gets the airliner voice in spectate (J), the high synthesized whine instead of the prop whirr. The C-2 keeps the whirr (hers are honest turboprops), the A-6 keeps the jet loop, and every other ride is unchanged.
Spectate mode (J) used to be a silent film. Now every aircraft you ride sounds like itself, three voices crossfaded by type:
Jets — the Hornet, Tomcat, Viper, Eagle, Warthog, MiG, Flanker and the air wing’s jets — reuse the recorded Amiga engine loops, pitch following speed.
Airliners get a turbofan whine, synthesized fresh: two detuned high sines over a band of compressor hiss that rises with speed. Ride a Liberty 737 up the approach and it sings exactly like the cheap seats.
Props get a whirr — the E-2, the C-2 and the P-3, plus all four helicopters: twin blade-pass saws beating against each other the way two turboprops do, over low rumble.
Ships, the carrier and missiles stay quiet — some rides have no engine note to give.
Notifications come with you. Important messages — radio calls, trap calls, warnings — now print on-screen under the spectate title instead of staying home in the cockpit bar. They ride on-screen in the cockpit view too, no longer confined to the little strip in the panel.
The R toggle just grew a full weather ladder. Where it once flipped CLEAR/RAIN it now steps through five states — MISSION DEFAULT → CLEAR → CLOUDS → RAIN → STORM — on the main menu, on the plane-select map, and saved between visits:
CLOUDS breaks the original’s cloudless sky — the scattered sprite deck that ships with the sim finally gets to fly, fading in over a couple of seconds with a light dimming of the day. Everything eases; nothing pops.
RAIN implies overcast now — the streak rain you know, under the cloud deck, with the usual gloom dragging the murk in close.
STORM brings the lightning. Every few seconds a jagged channel bolt walks down out of the deck somewhere within a few miles, the whole sky answers with a cold blue-white flash, and the thunder arrives late — delayed by true distance at 343 m/s, a crack decaying into a long low rumble through the audio graph.
Clouds got their own weather channel — separate from the rain blend, so overcast days can exist without a drop of rain, and every state fades smoothly through the same sky/fog/sun gloom the rain always used.
Manners kept: satellite planning maps stay free of rain, murk and bolts; pausing still silences the sky; and missions you authored stay exactly as clear as you left them — MISSION DEFAULT never surprises you.
The gatling sample is rebuilt to match the real M61: a 100-rounds-per-second burst synthesized from scratch — powder-crack impulse train, mechanical roar, and the fire-rate ripple that gives the Vulcan its buzzsaw shriek. YouTube was unreachable from the build sandbox, so the sound is synthesized to the reference rather than lifted from the video.
Hold the trigger on the gun and she sings: a proper A-10-style BBBBRRRRR gatling roar loops for as long as the burst lasts, then cuts when you let off. And cycling weapons with ENTER now gets you a spoken callout — GUNS, SIDEWINDER, AMRAAM — so you always know what's live without looking down.
