Follow-up to wands up, by popular request: the full vocabulary, frozen frame by frame with the signals arrowed. A carrier deck is too loud for radios and too busy for hesitation, so the Enterprise’s crew talks with wands — and every shirt color is a different trade. Here is the whole rainbow, caught in the act on the roof.
Yellow shirts — the aircraft directors
Yellow owns every moving jet. From the moment your engine lights to the moment the chocks go in, a director’s wands are the only traffic law that matters:
And when you come back aboard, the parking sequence is always the same three beats — stop, cut, chocks:
Two yellows work solo acts. The shooter — the catapult officer — sends every jet off the bow with the most famous gesture in naval aviation, and the wingwalker marches the starboard wingtip through the crowded taxi pattern where the pilot is blind:
The rest of the rainbow
Everybody else keeps the machine turning around the directors. Wands stowed, jobs very much not:
All of it is live on the flight deck right now: spawn on the roof and watch the directors pick you up with the identify gate, taxi to the cat and take the launch signal, or just spectate the air wing cycling — every jet that traps gets the same stop-cut-chocks send-off. Eleven months of flight school, and the deck still says it best with two orange sticks.
Two scopes got smarter and one room got a lot bigger this push:
Big hulls are now radar contacts. Freighters, tankers, container ships, the cruise liner and every warship in the group paint as steel-grey triangles on the radar scope — and on the tactical map (N) they draw with their names: MV BAY TRADER, MT PETRO PACIFIC, MS BAY MONARCH and the rest. Sailboats, crabbers and weekend cruisers stay below notice, exactly as they should.
The map keeps getting busier. Ships join the air picture that already carries callsigns for SCREWTOPS 601, the P-3, the airliners, your wingman and the helicopters — now including the Army’s Apache, K-MAN, orbiting the city.
The gallery is a showroom floor now. Open it and every model of the category is on display at once — fifteen aircraft, twelve vessels, all spinning under the lights with nameplates. Click any of them (or arrows + ENTER) to zoom in for the close-up with the old rotate-and-zoom controls; ESC takes you back to the floor. TAB switches categories: AIRCRAFT — planes and helicopters together — and SHIPPING.
Four new printables on the slipway. The P-3 Orion, SH-60 Seahawk, E-2C Hawkeye (Screwtops corkscrew and all) and AH-64 Apache join the store as printable STLs — bringing the Complete Fleet zip to twenty-seven models: fifteen aircraft and twelve vessels. The studio even captured the corkscrew on the Hawkeye’s dome for the box art.
Sharp eyes over the round-down spotted it: the Big E’s deck still wore a straight axial centreline down the middle, which read as the runway. No more — like every real carrier, her runway is now unmistakably the angled deck:
The straight centreline is gone. What remains is the one true runway: the angled landing strip, offset to port so pilots land left of the island — the whole point of the angled deck since 1952.
The strip got the full treatment — bolder edge stripes, bigger centreline dashes, and a threshold bar across the stern end where the pass begins.
Everything still agrees: the arrestor wires, the IFLOLS meatball and the landing aim-point all derive from the same strip geometry, so what you see is exactly what you trap on. Verified from the overhead: strip angles off the ship’s line and passes port of the island, wires square across it.
The printable carrier wears it too — the six-angle shots in the Print Bay were re-taken on the new deck plan.
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.
