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This is the ninety-eighth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

I’ve complained about it before and this time is no different. By the time I got myself around to flying another mission in BAT, I had been overtaking by some substantial updates. Bottom line: before I could even think about getting started, I had 3-4 hours of downloading to get through.

That done, and all the installations run, I was ready to open up my desired scenario, that being one called Iron Hand. It is part of the Nam War package, specifically the 1.13 scenario from the F-8 Crusader set. Iron Hand is a classification, used throughout the war, for suppression of enemy air defenses (more generally called “Wild Weasel” and more technically Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses, or SEAD). The player does not, however, fly the A-4 Skyhawk, armed and ready to take out the SAMs. The F-8s are escorts to deal with the, historically, numerically-superior intercepting force of 4 MiG-17s. On December 14th, 1967, each side lost an aircraft in aerial combat… not exactly a win for the player’s side.

But before I play, though, I have to go back through all the usual troubles. All of my stick mapping is now different (even if it looked right at first glance). What is button “5” on my throttle is actually button “1” in the game and is, counterintuitively, mapped to the primary weapon. Was it like this before? It’s been so long I don’t remember.

Next, I’m need to get my F-8 on to the catapult to launch. There was a time, well practiced, I could do this manually, even though it is far easier to use the autopilot to set up for launch. These days, I can no longer manage to get myself aligned manually and the autopilot seems to just skip the catapult and, left to proceed further, drive the bird straight into the ocean. If I do interrupt and take off manually, considering I have forgotten everything I knew a year ago about getting a plane off of a carrier deck, I also end up in the ocean but even faster.

Now, the learning curve is so substantial that, once I take a little bit of a break, I dread getting back into it. Once I take a little more break, I have to do a major install that then breaks everything that I’ve figured out so far. Takeoffs and landings need a lot of practice to get right and then some steady use to keep the skill-set fresh. If I even manage to eventually get myself off the ground, I’m almost certain I forgot everything I knew about using air-to-air missiles, so there is that to relearn as well.

On that note, it looks to me like the manual for The Jet Age has been updated as well. It’s hard for me to tell, but I think I see more “stuff” than I remember reading before. That is a plus, especially since I need to review everything anyway.

Beyond all the key-mappings and remembering all the pre-take-off checklist items, though, I am guessing I’ve messed up something a little more severely than usual. No matter how I try, I can’t seem to get the use of the catapult. Nor can either I or the autopilot manage anything but tossing the aircraft directly into the ocean (the autopilot doing it just a tad bit more gracefully than I can manage on my own).

This didn’t happen the last time I flew the F-8. With a solid catapult launch and lots of afterburner I could make a sloppy take-off from the carrier. Recall, though, that with the A-1, I never was able to get that thing off the deck. In that case I fell back on using the “difficulty” option that allows the mission to start with the aircraft already in the air. Immersion factor aside, that proved to be a good option for me.

With Iron Hand, when I tried to start the scenario with my F-8 in the air, it was even worse than when I took off. The mission starts me only a few meters off of the ocean’s surface – possibly with no forward velocity. It is an instantaneous death as the plane drops from the sky and then my engines explode.

It is this totality of my failure suggests that I’ve done something horrible with the installation, messing up the flight models, the scenarios, or… well, who knows what. I even tried a couple of other Nam War scenarios that (I think) I was successful with in the past. I saw similar failures with respect to the “no take off/no landing” setting.

– Rushing off to find the enemy!

As a final test, I decided to dig up a land-based, USAF scenario. I went all the way back to 1965, figuring it meant it was probably one I’d played in one of the earlier BAT versions. If it was a familiar scenario that might give me some good information about installation problems. What I stumbled into, however, was the Air War Over North Vietnam mission package by user HercJG54. Is this newly-added in my recent install? I don’t know, but I do know that I haven’t played it before now.

The scenario in question is called Dragon’s Jaw and simulates a 1965 mission flown out of Da Nang airbase against the Thanh Hóa Bridge. It is actually Day 2 of that very same mission I flew with the F-8 Crusader, an April 3rd Rolling Thunder assault on the target. Dragon’s Jaw takes place on April 4th.

Bombs away

In Dragon’s Jaw, the player flies Combat Air Patrol for the F-105s which actually carry the bombs. (The lead aircraft in the top screenshot is the player. Second screen shows who we are supposed to be protecting). If not obvious, getting off the runway at Da Nang was not an issue. Neither did I have problems with flight controls or other “install” -type functions. What was an issue was actually finding the baddies.

Apparently, though, this was a key factor in the fighting that day. The North Vietnamese had their local, ground-based radar and had a very good handle on both their own positions and the enemy*. Their fighters could be directed in to kill the bombers and the scoot away before the CAP responded. The U.S. fighters, venerable North American Super Sabres, relied upon on-board targeting radar, which wasn’t nearly so accurate.

– Not very good protection

In my first run-through, I was unable to even make visual contact with the enemy MiGs. My bombers suffered losses (see final screenshot, above) without any of my fighters even loosing a missile. I ended up not even bothering to make a post-mission landing… it was getting late and, chances are, I would have crashed. Poor performance aside, this scenario didn’t indicate any installation problems whatsoever. It points me to a next step in troubleshooting Nam War.

If I do ever get my carrier-launched Crusader up into the air, I may be able to return to you to relate that experience. If its worth relating, that is. We shall see.

Return to the master post or move forward to my next post where I take advantage of a nice round number to look backwards and forwards. If you’d prefer to jump ahead to when I finally got the scenario running, click here.

*Funny that I’m reading about that just now. I’ll explain later.