Two of the campaign’s most-requested shapes are in the gallery and the print bay:
The balloon. Sixty-one metres of gore-seamed envelope with the camera payload slung underneath — the most photographed aerostat of the century, hanging at Angels 34 in M8 waiting for your cannon. The seams are proper meridian rings now, so she reads round from every angle.
The go-fast. Nine metres of smuggler’s speedboat from the M11 siege — low hull, console, twin outboards. She looks fast standing still, which is the entire point of a go-fast.
Both print. The balloon is the tallest piece in the bay at 180 mm ($4), the go-fast a desk-friendly 120 mm ($3) — thirty-six STLs in the fleet bundle now, and yes, the balloon is in it.
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.
The flight line just grew a third mount, and she’s a big one. The Grumman F-14 Tomcat — fleet defender, swing-wing icon, and the only fighter ever to operationally sling the AIM-54 Phoenix — is ready for catapult shots off the Big E, wearing the 1978 VF-84 Jolly Rogers scheme: gull grey over white, black tails with yellow tips, skull and crossbones on both rudders, AJ on the modex:
She’s fully carrier-qualified. Cat 1 holdback and stroke off the bow, tailhook and wires back aboard — the same boat ops as the Hornet, with the Tomcat’s heavier, thirstier twin-engine personality (and a higher ceiling: those TF30s breathe up to 50,000 ft).
The wings sweep on command.S works the swing-wing: 20° spread for the pattern, 68° swept for the dash, easing over about two seconds just like the real box. The flight model morphs with the geometry — drag drops, stall speed climbs, roll sharpens, the G limit rises — and the HUD calls out the sweep angle as it travels. She even oversweeps to park, wings hugging the fuselage on the deck.
Four AIM-54 Phoenix in the tunnel, two Sidewinders on the glove pylons. The Phoenix is a different class of weapon from anything else in the bay: fatter, faster, and fired from far beyond the horizon — radar-guided all the way, FOX 3. It rides the rails from 1.2 out to 90 kilometres.
The AWG-9 reaches out. The Tomcat’s radar adds a 100 MI tier on top of the usual 40/10/2 — R cycles the lot, and the scope, the lock logic and the Phoenix’s envelope all honour the big radar’s legs.
She’s a squadron purchase. Plane-select 3 asks for the unlock code once; the Tomcat DLC in the Hornet Bay Store delivers it instantly for $8, and the jet stays in your logbook for good. Squadron founders fly her free, of course.
The printable joins the fleet. Her STL — wings spread, four Phoenix kept in the tunnel, skull and crossbones on the tails — is in the 3D Print Bay for $5, and THE COMPLETE FLEET bundle now packs all 23 models.
The slipway is clear and the fleet is launched: all 23 printable STL products are live on the squadron’s Fourthwall store, and every button in the 3D Print Bay now says ADD TO CART:
All 22 models plus THE COMPLETE FLEET are on the shelves — each product carries its studio portrait, its spec sheet, and the zip (STL + PRINTING.txt) attached for instant delivery the moment checkout clears.
Checkout is real Fourthwall end-to-end — add to cart on hornetbay.com, pay on the squadron store, and the download link arrives by email. Merchant of record, taxes, delivery: all handled, same as the merch.
The wiring happened by API, not by hand — all 23 products were created, priced, imaged, file-attached and published through Fourthwall’s Platform API in one scripted run. Restocks and new models are now a one-command affair.
One plumbing fix along the way: the storefront catalog returns ten products per page by default, and with 23 new arrivals the older shelves went dark. The shelf and every stub page now fetch the full catalog in one page — all buttons lit, verified live.
The fishing boat stays free — the sample row downloads straight from the site, no checkout, while its $2 twin sits on the store for anyone who’d rather toss a coin in the jar.
A sharp-eyed inspection of the print files found stowaways: the Hornet and Falcon STLs were shipping with their landing gear still down. Fixed:
The bug. The exporter hides the gear, hook and afterburner groups before triangulating — but the triangle walk only checked each mesh’s own visibility flag, and children of a hidden group kept their own flags set. The renderers hid the subtree; the file didn’t.
The fix. The walk now checks visibility all the way up the ancestor chain. The F/A-18 STL dropped from 58 KB to 29 KB and the F-16 from 50 KB to 21 KB — half the file was wheels.
Every file regenerated. All 22 models re-exported, every zip repacked (PRINTING.txt unchanged — scales and sizes never moved), and the free fishing-boat sample refreshed too. Only the two fighters were affected, but the whole fleet got a fresh, verified build.
Verified on the plate. Side-view wireframes of the new files show the fuselage belly sitting flush at z=0 with nothing hanging below — ready to print wheels-up, as the box always promised.
All 154 photographs in the 3D Print Bay have been re-shot in a proper studio:
Backgrounds are gone. Every model now renders on transparency — no sky, no sea, no horizon. What’s left is the model and nothing else.
The models are much bigger in frame. The camera now solves its distance from the actual vertices of each mesh, so every aircraft and hull fills the frame edge-to-edge at every one of the six angles — roughly double the on-screen size of the old captures.
A studio sweep replaces the scenery. Cards on the shelf, the six-angle viewer, the bundle banner and the free-sample crabber all sit on a soft bay-blue radial backdrop behind the transparent render — consistent from thumbnail to full size.
Same squadron rule, new technique: the renders are still built by the game’s own model code in the gallery showroom, now lit by a three-point rig (key, fill and hemisphere) and captured straight off the GPU with the alpha channel intact.
A large six-angle gallery on every page — the model captured all the way around in 1600×1200, with a thumbnail strip to step through the views. Walk around it before you print it.
Full spec sheet beside the viewer: printed size, exact scale, real length, file size, format — plus the blurb, the price, and the buy button (which lights up the moment the Fourthwall products go live, same as the shelf).
Prev/next navigation runs through the whole fleet, and every page carries Product structured data and its own canonical link — the sitemap now lists all 22.
Standing rule held: all 132 new captures were shot in the in-game gallery, the squadron’s official photo studio.
The models in the sim were too good to keep on the far side of the screen. The 3D Print Bay is open:
All 22 models as printable STL files — ten aircraft (Hornet, Falcon, MiG-29, the five SFO heavies, Air Force One, the cruise missile) and twelve vessels (the Enterprise, her three escorts, the supertanker, the cruise liner, the freighter, the sub, and the small traffic). Every one exported straight from the same code that flies and sails it in the sim — low-poly by design, gloriously so.
Print-ready out of the zip. Wheels up, weapons off, scaled in millimetres with the longest dimension sized for a standard print bed, and a PRINTING.txt in every zip with the scale, printed size and slicer settings. Ships print hull-down, no supports needed on most beds.
Priced per model — $2 for the little rescue raft, $4 for the fighters, up to $8 for the Enterprise — or take THE COMPLETE FLEET: all 22 files in one zip for $59, less than half the individual prices.
A free sample so you can test your bed first — the fishing boat zip downloads right from the page, no checkout, no email.
Checkout and delivery run through Fourthwall (the squadron’s merchant of record, same as the store): the download link arrives by email the moment payment clears. The paid files themselves are never exposed on the site — only the freebie.
Gallery coverage grew to make this possible: the Boeing 707, cruise missile, Shadow Sub and rescue raft all joined the showroom, and every card portrait on the page was captured in the gallery — squadron policy now.
The shelves are being stocked as this goes to press — if a buy button still says ON THE SLIPWAY, the crabber is free while you wait.
