The instructor’s red pen: a full schoolhouse playtest, and the rescue of VIPER TWO 6e748a4

We flew the whole syllabus the way a rookie finds it — all eight school sorties, then the campaign board, instruments rolling. The red pen came out early and often. The headline casualty was not on any board: VIPER TWO was drowning on every catapult shot. The wingman launch gate fired the moment your gear cleared thirty feet, and his spawn point sat a flat three hundred meters below you — which, off the boat, is the bottom of the bay. He now steps down only when there’s sky to step into, with a hard floor two hundred meters above the terrain. The silence after “AIRBORNE — JOINING YOUR WING” is over.

• T-2 BAY TOUR: honest bonus math. The under-five-minutes bonus asked for a hundred-kilometer out-and-back plus a carrier pattern in three hundred seconds — not even the burner does that. It’s seven minutes now, and the brief owns the RTB leg out loud.
• T-4 JOIN UP: the rendezvous moved to the boat. The instructor’s lazy circle orbited forty-seven kilometers east — five minutes of dead air before the lesson began. He now holds his pattern just west of the ship; you can see him from the deck.
• T-5 AEROBATICS: the grader forgives a student. The roll gate demanded a perfectly level entry and mistook loops for slow rolls. It now reads the roll rate like an instructor’s eyes, and a nose-high entry still counts — the figure is graded, not the approach.
• M5 CRUISE MISSILE INBOUND: the brief stops lying. The text promised nine minutes; the geometry gave two and a half. The missile now flies 505 knots from thirty-three miles out — a four-minute problem, and the brief says so.
• M13 AVENGE VIPER TWO: the sweep steer holds. A waypoint bug wiped your vector to the northern approach for the first forty-two seconds — the quiet part of the sweep now has a steer like it should.
• The menu learned the logbook. A fresh card reads NEW PILOTS START HERE on the schoolhouse door; mid-syllabus it counts your sorties; graduate and the MISSIONS row starts counting the campaign. The career is visible from the front step.

One confession from the workshop: the headless autopilot we fly for test passes had its stick backwards — a sign flip that turned every scripted approach into a slow roll into the sea. Players were never touched; your stick was always honest. The machine just had to relearn right from left, and the trap scripts now grease onto the wires like they were meant to. — HB