KAPSET II

KAPSET 3

sensory deprivation

Welcome to KAPSET 3 the third FA custom lib from Kaptor .

The goals of this patch were to improve both realism AND gameplay by modifying the base elements of the sim and to add new objects. It focuses primarily on the years 2000-2020. I’ve added or included ships, artillery,armor,and planes for USA, Russia,China,England, and France.You’ll find that all aircraft have been modified from stock to improve their flight characteristics,RADAR cross section, IR signature and to adjust their relative survivability and weapon carrying ability.

In addition, all RADARs and sensors in KAPSET3 Have been modified to represent a more realistic detection capability. If you fly with an enemy off your 9 or 3 o’clock position (directly left or right) the enemy will not detect you with his RADAR until you are within visual range, thus this LIBs title “Sensory Deprivation” naturally if an enemy is flying with YOU on his 9 or 3 o’clock YOU wont see him on your display either. Helicoptors are just plain hard to detect at all due to their slow speeds.

Infrared and FLIR sensors will also fail to display an aircraft unless that planes tail is somewhat pointed in your direction.

I’ve tied 4 of the campaigns together in sort of a global war that I have called “Valiant Ranger”. I didn’t really do anything to the campaigns themselves, just tweaked the storylines and time events around a little to let the campaigns make sense with each other.

In KAPSET3 you will notice that just about everything is armed even the soldier and troops have greatly increased firepower as is the tendancy on the modern battlefield. You’ll also find that most weapons are MUCH more lethal than you’re used to (some of the Air to Air weapons have parts of their range that are basically a no escape zone), that’s why the extra ECM has been made available ( if you’re used to just out maneuvering missles, you may have to get used to something else: EJECTING !!). There is no more conflict with the AWACS and JSTARS in the same mission, use them freely when building missions. I have added many new planes, many many new vehicles, and many many many new ships(with accurate skins, and greatly enhanced destroyed skins for the ships), these are there to increase the variety in the building of custom missions for you and me. Except for the helicopters, all the planes have the 1^st harpoint slot occupied by a visual sensor which is usually not needed, so you can use the Mission file hardpoint editing trick to add any weapon you want in a particular mission even if I didn’t put it on the aircraft in the first place, just use “hard 0”.I’ve also removed the National markings from most of the skins, so (for example) now an F-8 Crusader can serve with the US navy or French forces. As in my previous Lib. there are many driveable vehicles and ALL the helicopters are flyable, and more controlable than you’re likely to find in any other Lib . My helos can hover ( if you’re careful ! ) to pick off targets while hiding behind buildings or other cover (pay no attention to the stall horn in the helos, real helos don’t really stall and neither do mine). The helos also feature several new engine/rotor sounds particular to the size and performance of the helo. My driveable vehicles can actually climb OVER large hills and mountains unlike some other Lib.s ( aint that annoying !) if you look carefully you’ll also notice my driveable vehicles don’t have aircraft shadows either. I’ve added many new weapons (all I could fit in ) and modified the rest because blowing things up is more fun than just about anything !! When building your own missions you’ll find something unusuall in the “choose object “ lists, there are 2 versions of many land vehicles. This is because of how the AI (Artificial Inteligence) of the game treats these objects. Drivable vehicles for instance are treated by the game as aircraft that can’t fly, so they wont follow waypoints (since they haven’t taken off yet ) and can only be set at airports to start the game.The driveable vehicles are marked with an asterick * to tell them apart from the AI objects. Use the vehicles marked with * in a mission as the ones you want “player” to operate,and the ones without the * for the computer to operate, this doesn’t affect aircraft so you can use any of them,any way you want. The weapon ICONs have their ranges and target types in the ICON picture. I haven’t overwritten very many of the original aircraft/vehicle names in FA so most or all of the regular (or custom) missions will be playable although they may be much easier or harder depending on the weapons that the aircraft in that mission happen to be carrying. If you need a good laugh place the “**means flyable/driveable” entry into a mission, and try to destroy it ,or drive it yourself!J. There is more object specific info in the mission builder docs. There should be enough room left over for at least 20-30 custom missions, if you get the error message “FA has caused a fault in FA.EXE”, it’s because there are too many custom missions in the FA folder. I made a folder called “mission vault”, and I can just transfer the extra missions out of there.

WORKING THE STUFF:

My vehicles weapon ranges are usually stated with the title of the vehicle. Some of them can hit targets MANY miles away but if it’s more than about 5 miles you’ll have to give the vehicle a waypoint and then designate a target for it to hit on it’s way to that waypoint (the waypoints can be very short and don’t have to be anywhere near the target) . You designate a target by clicking on the waypoint then in the gray panel at the right of the screen click where it says “no target selected” then click on the targets ICON on the map (a dashed yellow line will appear between the vehicle waypoint and it’s target) you can have many waypoints for the vehicle and a different target for each waypoint. If the targets are close (5 miles or so) you can just give it 1 waypoint and click those SAM, SHIP, AAA etc boxes in the gray panel and let it go, it’ll chase down and attack anything it can find according to those boxes you click. The same technique applies to ships but they can find their own targets within about 20 miles instead of 5! I have included a list of the ships and what ranges their weapons have because they all have multiple weapons with different ranges, OH yeah-please don’t get within gun range of the Russian Kirov class ships, you wont make it back J. My drivable land vehicles can be set anywhere on the map to start a mission from but you HAVE to use the “Drivables Launch Pad”, or an airport,to start them from, just drop it wherever you want to start the drivable vehicle from, then set the vehicle on it. You can set other regular vehicles in the area and drive with them as an attack force ! One odd note,sometimes when you start a mission in a driveable vehicle it wont reach it’s top speed, it’ll top out around 28 kts or so. If that happens quit the mission and then start the mission again (you don’t have to leave the game, just the mission) and then the vehicle will go properly ! Weird !

Known Issues: So far it’s been quite fritzy(a lot of CTD crashes)in the Baltic campaign when flying with the cheats on(all planes all weapons etc.). But it’s been very solid with the recommended planes/weps( but some CDTs when you try to re-enter a mission). The other campaigns have been very stable with or without the cheats. It’s been rock solid in Single Missions , Quick Missions and custom/Pro missions (no CDTs at all there).

CREDITS:

All major testing (and many good ideas): “Pappy”

J.K.Peterson (Zephyr) for endless help, there would be no working ships or vehicles if it weren’t for him. He also allowed me to use a few of his weapon ICONs (I added the JKP to those ICONs)which I felt I could not equal.

Centurian for various help.

CAG Hotshot for the Gray SU-35 pic and sh with white nose, and

other help and info.

Scorpion/AIM-120s for the light gray/silver MiG-15 shape (I did the skin for it).

CW3 Paul M. Steele for help developing the AH-64 Apache flight models.

Pictures: The Internet.

Sounds:

Nicola McLean: Recon Pod Voice

I got the GAU-8 sound from JKP. I think the Vulcan sound

came from VarkLib, all other sounds by Kaptor.

Steven Chen for missle launch sound.

Sources:

I’ve tried to base all of the objects and modifications on at leaste 5 different sources of information, among them being:Bill Gunstons The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Aircraft Armaments.

Bill Gunstons The Encyclopedia of Modern Warplanes.

The Aviation Week and Space Technology Source Book, and many articles from the weekly magazine.

Kalbach Books U.S.Aircraft & Armament of Operation Desert Storm.

Doug Richardsons Stealth:Deception,Evasion and Concealment In The Air.

Online resourses were primarily FAS, Russian Aircraft Museum, the voluminous writings of Joe Baugher, and the Aircraft database at Danshistory.com, but I got stuff from all over the web.