The flight deck has crew now — eleven handlers in the proper Navy colors, and they work the whole cycle exactly as their real counterparts do:
Yellow shirts direct. A director marshals the air wing up the cat-2 lane with the come-ahead wave, wands crossing overhead when it’s time to hold. The recovery director waves trap survivors toward the parking row the same way — including you, after your own wire.
The shooter shoots. Kneel on one knee beside the shuttle, one arm pointed down the track — your cat-1 shooter drops into the pose the moment you come to military power, and the cat-2 shooter does it for every air-wing launch.
The right colors in the right places. Green shirts stand by their JBDs, blue handlers crouch on the tie-down chains along the port row, ordnance reds wait by the island, and the brown plane captain and purple fuel crew hold the bow spots.
Also in this build: SHIFT+J rides the spectate ring backwards — J steps forward through every contact in the area, SHIFT+J steps back to the previous one.
Two more pieces of the most dangerous 4.5 acres on Earth fell into place:
The boards work. Both bow cats now have their jet blast deflector — the panel lies flush with the deck while a jet taxies over it into position, rises to its full 57° as the holdback tensions, stands through the shot, and drops the moment the shuttle fires so the next aircraft can come forward. Your cat, and the air wing’s: watch Cat 2 cycle a Viking and you’ll see the whole ballet — deflector up, wings spread, shot, deflector down.
Deck marshal, one mover at a time. Aircraft on deck no longer drift through each other. A single-mover rule sequences every taxi; a jet whose path is blocked by a parked aircraft, a jet at the cat, or you holds position with the brakes on until the way is clear — exactly like the yellow shirts waving and crossing their arms. Row jets slip out through the widest gap in the pack instead of driving over their neighbours, and a recovering jet that traps while the deck is busy waits on the angle until its turn. Wings stay folded for the whole taxi and spread at the cat, where the cat officer still won’t start the countdown until they read full spread.
Respotted for clearance. The C-2’s park moved out of the port row to the starboard street — the row was spotted tighter than a folded wingtip could clear, and the real deck would never allow it either.
The flight deck finally works like the world’s most dangerous ballet should. Three rules now govern every airframe the deck crew touches:
Fold for parking. Trap aboard, taxi clear of the foul line, and the wings come up — Sto-Wing slew on the Hornet, fold-up on the Intruder, Viking and Greyhound — so the next jet can park wingtip-to-wingtip. You can watch the whole recovery cycle from the island.
Spread before the cat. Taxi toward the shuttle and the wings deploy on the way, locks in, ready for the shot. And if somehow a jet reaches the holdback still folded, the cat officer simply waits: the countdown holds until the wings read full spread. Nobody goes off the pointy end with folded wings. Ever.
Steam and spin. The catapult now vents steam down the track behind the shuttle — for your launch and every air-wing shot. And a sharp-eyed correction on the E-2: the rotodome turns, but the struts that carry it stand still, exactly like the real dish.
A reference diagram of USS Enterprise flight-deck markings arrived — the full numbered callout sheet, JBD warning stripes to stern nameplate — so the deck texture got repainted by the book. New on the deck: yellow/black jet-blast-deflector warning stripes behind all four catapults, elevator warning fences (the dashed offsets) and diagonal warning stripes around every elevator opening, the iconic red/white foul line segmenting the island side of the angle deck, runway boundary dashes, catapult shooters' pits, armament elevators and barrier covers, a scatter of electrical hook-up panels, and ENTERPRISE lettered across the stern. The bow "65" was re-centred between the catapult tracks where it belongs (it had drifted onto a track). Everything is placed in deck metres from the diagram, painted into the same 3px-per-metre canvas. The panels above are the raw texture — the box top face mirrors it in-world, which is why the "65" reads backwards here and correctly on the ship. Verified in the dive view on the harness: foul line, hatches and fences all read from the cockpit at retro scale.
Three carrier truths restored. The painted angle deck ran to starboard — the deck texture was mirrored, so the strip drifted toward the island instead of away from it; it now angles to port, agreeing with the sponson, the wires and the meatball. The island itself is rebuilt as CVN-65's signature flat-roofed box with billboard radar panels and just a small mast, and it's moved aft of midships where the Enterprise carries it — from the catapult shuttle the bridge now sits 80 metres behind you, out of sight, instead of looming ahead-right. And the journal has a real home: hornetbay.com/blog, with every entry living at its own permalink (this one is /blog/enterprise-island-blog). Old changelog.html links redirect; RSS and the search engines get a sitemap.xml and robots.txt for the asking.
The carrier finally looks like a carrier. The landing strip now runs onto a proper port-side sponson — every full-deck carrier angles its landing deck to the left — with edge stripes and lights to match, and the deck footprint for traps extends over it. Bolted to the port edge abeam the wires is a functional IFLOLS: an amber ball rides five cells against the green datum row to show where you sit on the 3.5° glideslope, and red wave-off lamps flash if you come aboard dirty (gear or hook up) or badly off slope. Two smaller tells: at 100% thrust with the burner lit, the cockpit thrust readout gets the original's bright yellow underline, and the aircraft position lights, strobes and beacons are shrunk to realistic size. (This journal itself is now titled NEW FEATURES & BUG FIXES.)
Carrier departures run off the C-13 catapult now: taxi to the shuttle, tension, holdback release, and the stroke flings you off the bow. The deck crew parks the other jets clear of the catapult track.
