Every night on the Big E, a grey A-6E called KNIGHT 501 taxis to the starboard cat, launches, flies the pattern and traps back aboard. Here is the squadron behind the tail code, and how it lives in the sim.
KNIGHT 501 wears the colours of VA-52, the Knight Riders. The squadron began life as Navy Reserve Fighter Squadron VF-884 on 1 November 1949, was called to active duty in July 1950, and became VA-52 on 23 February 1959. It flew Corsairs, Panthers, Cougars and Skyraiders before taking delivery of its first A-6A Intruders in November 1967.
The record
VA-52’s combat tours include Yankee Team reconnaissance in 1964, Rolling Thunder in 1966, and Linebacker in 1972. On its last WestPac cruise, in 1994, its carrier was pulled off a Persian Gulf station and sent to the Korean Peninsula during the North Korean nuclear crisis. The squadron was disestablished on 31 March 1995.
Hornet Bay is an alternate-history tribute, not a record of who sailed where: in the sim the Knight Riders live aboard the Big E, because that is the deck we built. Nobody at the squadron, the Navy or the manufacturer has anything to do with it.
In the sim
Tail code NL, modex 501, callsign KNIGHT 501 — see the A-6E card for the specs.
She parks on the port row, waits a few seconds, then taxis to Cat 2, the starboard bow catapult. Cat 1 stays yours.
Two laps of the pattern, then a trap on the angle deck between the wires, then back to the spot. Her shipmates, the S-3B and the C-2, run the same cycle on longer timers.
Try this: press J to spectate, cycle until KNIGHT 501 comes up, and ride her off Cat 2. Then take off yourself, and remember: a mission only counts once you are back at the point of origin.
There is not a single 3D model file in Hornet Bay. Every aircraft is assembled at load time from boxes, cones and extruded wing shapes in one JavaScript file — and the same code is what exports the print-bay STLs.
Open the repository and look for the art: no .glb, no .obj, no .gltf, and no loader to read one. The libs folder holds exactly one file, three.js itself. The jets, helicopters and airliners come out of js/models.js — about 1,900 lines, roughly 110 KB — and the ships are built the same way in js/ships.js.
How a Hornet gets built
A handful of tiny helpers do the work: box, cone, cyl, and a wing helper that takes a planform outline, extrudes it a fraction of a metre thick and lays it flat. The F/A-18 starts as a 2.0 × 1.7 × 9.5 box for the fuselage, a cone for the radome, a squashed sphere for the canopy, a pair of extruded LEX strakes, and a trapezoid wing mirrored left and right. That is the recipe. Every part is a flat-shaded Lambert material, so the facets show — on purpose.
The livery work is code too. The airline schemes and the Jolly Rogers tail art are painted onto canvases at load time and wrapped on as textures. Nothing is fetched from an image file.
No build step
index.html carries an import map pointing three at ./libs/three.module.js, and the scripts load as plain ES modules. Edit a file, refresh the tab, fly. There is no bundler between you and the airframe.
Same code, on your desk
Because a model is just a function that returns a group of meshes, the print bay can call that function, hide the gear, hook and afterburner groups, and triangulate what is left into an STL — see how the bay opened. The Hornet file comes out at 29 KB, 150 mm long. It also means a bug in the builder is a bug in the print file, which is how the wheels-up fix happened: the exporter forgot that hidden groups hide their children.
In the sim
One builder function per type, dispatched from buildModel.
Flat shading everywhere, no image textures for the airframes.
Control surfaces are real hinge groups, so ailerons and flaps move when you do.
Try this: start a free flight, switch to the external camera and roll the Hornet slowly — watch the flat facets catch the light, and the ailerons answer the stick.
T-3 Carrier Pattern asks for two arrested landings in one sortie, and bolters do not count. Here is the gear, hook and meatball checklist that gets you aboard without the white knuckles.
Nobody is born calm on final. The trick in T-3 is that the sim never asks you to be — it asks you to do four small things in the right order, twice, and it counts only the passes that end in a wire. The Big E is the same boat you launched from in First Solo; the second trap is just the first one with your hands remembering it.
The checklist that does the work
Gear down (G or L) and hook down (H or A). Skip the wheels and the deck is a crash: GEAR-UP DECK LANDING. Skip the hook and you get BOLTER! NO WIRE — FULL POWER, GO AROUND!
Fly the ball. The amber ball on the port-side meatball rides five cells against the green datum row. Keep it centred and you are on the 3.5° slope. Red wave-off lamps flash if you come in dirty or badly off it (see angle deck, meatball).
Hold the numbers. The first-solo briefing says 30–40% throttle and about 140 knots. Do not flare, do not chop the power; aim for the wires.
Be gentle at the end. The code takes a sink rate under 1.5 m/s and under 105 m/s relative to the deck, with the hook inside the wire zone.
By the numbers
T-3 is rated MEDIUM and unlocks after T-2.
Two arrested landings in one sortie to pass. A bolter is a go-around, not a trap.
Each trap pays +500; passing pays another +2,500.
Four wires are painted on the deck. The air wing’s own radio calls the one it aims for the 3-wire, so aim there too.
After every trap the deck crew refuel and rearm you, then it is taxi back, launch again and around.
The LSO line on loading is the whole lesson: TWO TRAPS TO PASS, VIPER. TAKE YOUR TIME IN THE GROOVE. After the first, you will hear GOOD PASS. CHOCKS AND CHAINS, THEN DO IT AGAIN. Then you really do. The carrier is also your point of origin, so a clean trap is a mission-style return to base in miniature; watch the deck cycle in a day on the Big E to see how the air wing does it.
Try this: bolter on purpose once — hook up, ball centred — just to hear the deck call it. Then put the hook down and do it properly. Three clean traps and you will stop being scared of the boat. Built for computers, not phones; arrow keys and a throttle hand are all it needs.
The Tomcat in Hornet Bay isn't wearing just any paint: black tails, a yellow tip, and the skull and crossbones of VF-84, the Jolly Rogers. Here's where that flag came from and how it ends up on the fins.
VF-84 was established at NAS Oceana on 1 July 1955. The skull and crossbones wasn’t originally theirs: it belonged to VF-61, and when VF-61 was deactivated in 1959, a former VF-61 skipper commanding VF-84 asked for the name and the insignia. The request was approved on 1 April 1960. The squadron flew it through the Phantom years and into the Tomcat, and when VF-84 itself was disestablished on 1 October 1995, VF-103 inherited the Jolly Rogers name and markings.
Why the sim’s Tomcat wears it
Hornet Bay is an alternate-history tribute, not a record of who flew what and when. Our F-14 is dressed in a 1978 Jolly Rogers scheme: gull grey over white, black twin fins with yellow tips, and the flag on both outer faces. It is a nod to the squadron’s reputation, nothing more official than that.
The fin art took a few passes. The skull once overhung the swept leading edge; the tail-trim fix cut the flag to the fin’s real outline so the skull stays round and nothing spills over.
In the sim
Skull and crossbones on both tails, with AJ and 200 at the root of each fin.
Yellow band at the tip of each fin.
Four AIM-54 Phoenix in the tunnel, two Sidewinders on the glove pylons.
Unlocked by earning it: the unlock message reads “Welcome to the Jolly Rogers.” See earn the Tomcat.
A printable Tomcat model carries the skull on both tails.
Try this: take the Tomcat off the Big E, sweep the wings back with S, and look back at the tails on the way out. Remember the rule: the mission only counts once you are back at the point of origin.
The Enterprise runs her air wing on a loop of her own: park, taxi, Cat 2, pattern at 260 m, 3-wire, park. Here is one full cycle for KNIGHT 501, SAWBUCK 700 and PROVIDER 30, with the deck crew who work it.
Park a jet on the Enterprise and walk away from the keyboard. Nothing stops. The air wing runs a loop on its own clock, and if you know the script you can read the whole deck like a timetable. Here is one lap, from the data.
The cast
KNIGHT 501 — the VA-52 A-6E. First off the deck: its wait timer starts at 6–14 seconds, and it flies two laps of the pattern.
SAWBUCK 700 — the VS-37 S-3B. Waits 70–110 seconds before it taxis, two laps.
PROVIDER 30 — the VRC-30 C-2 Greyhound. It never starts on deck at all: it joins already airborne on the downwind leg, 2,400 m off the port side, and flies one lap.
One cycle, in order
Park, then taxi. The jet leaves the port row through whichever gap is widest, with a 13 m clearance rule, and it holds the brakes if anything — the air wing, a wingman, you — sits inside its bubble. The yellow-shirt director works the cat-2 lane and a wingwalker marches the starboard wingtip. You can watch all of it in the colored shirts entry.
Hold. Cat 2 on the starboard bow; Cat 1 stays yours. The blast deflector goes up, the holdback is on, and the cat officer will not fire until the wings are fully spread. Then the radio: CAT 2 — YOU’RE AWAY.
Shot. The steam stroke accelerates at about 28 m/s² and tops out at 74 m/s, with the ship’s wind over the deck adding to it as the jet leaves the bow. Gear comes up at six seconds, and after fourteen it turns downwind.
Pattern. Break over the bow, then everything at 260 m (roughly 850 ft): upwind, a port downwind past the stern, base, the final gate. Only one jet works the groove at a time; the rest stack up, and if you are on short final they hold a lap and wait for you.
Trap. Down the 3.5° slope to the angle deck and the 3-wire. Miss it and you hear BOLTER, BOLTER and the jet goes around. Catch it and it is TRAPPED ABOARD, a rollout, a taxi clear, and parking. Then the wait timer restarts and the whole thing begins again.
The crew behind it
Thirteen handlers are on deck for the cycle: yellow shirts (two shooters, two directors, one wingwalker), green shirts at the jet blast deflectors, blue handlers on the tie-down chains, red ordnance crew by the island, and a brown plane captain and a purple fuel crew on the port row. The air wing entry covers how the squadrons got here, and The Big E covers the ship.
Try this: start any carrier sortie, taxi to Cat 1, and just sit there for five minutes with the external camera on. Count the traps before SAWBUCK 700 gets its shot.
Hornet Bay is a tribute to the 1988 Amiga classic F/A-18 Interceptor, flown over San Francisco Bay with a 1994 Pacific air wing on the deck. Here is why that place and that year.
Two choices shape everything in Hornet Bay: the place and the year. Neither is an accident.
The place: the Bay
The 1988 Amiga game F/A-18 Interceptor (Intellisoft, published by Electronic Arts) put you over the San Francisco Bay Area — the Golden Gate, the Bay Bridge, Alcatraz, with SFO, Oakland and Moffett Field to land at and a carrier anchored offshore. That compact, instantly readable map is the heart of the original, and the reason this site exists. It is a tribute rebuild, not a remake with a new setting: if the Bay is the stage, you always know where you are.
The year: 1994
Why 1994? Because it lets the deck be real. That summer the Pacific air wing was out on WestPac — Carrier Air Wing Fifteen, aboard USS Kitty Hawk, deployed in the Western Pacific from June to December. Its A-6E Intruders of VA-52 and S-3B Vikings of VS-37 are exactly the squadrons you will find working the Big E’s deck in the sim. They are parked on the wrong carrier entirely, as tradition allows. Hornet Bay is an alternate-history tribute: it is not affiliated with the Navy, any manufacturer, or the original game’s makers.
In the sim
The map. Golden Gate strait, the SF peninsula, Alcatraz, the East Bay, plus SFO, Oakland, Moffett Field and NAS Alameda.
The jets. Five flyable types, 8 flight-school sorties, a 19-mission campaign and free flight — the full roster is in the order of battle.
The rule. A mission only counts as complete when you return to the point it started from. Landing elsewhere to rearm is fine; going home is what scores.
Built for computers, not phones: keyboard or mouse, a big screen, and the Big E waiting. Want the models on your shelf? Visit the print bay.
Try this: pick Free Flight from the menu, take off from Moffett or SFO, and fly the Golden Gate at dusk — then find the carrier by radar and trap aboard.
T-1 First Solo asks for three things: a catapult shot, a lap of the bay and an arrested landing back on the Big E. Here is the whole sortie, button by button, and what to fly when you are done.
Open the menu, pick FLIGHT SCHOOL, choose T-1. It is rated EASY, it is unarmed, and the only way to lose is to put the jet in the water. Your pass mark is one trap aboard the carrier you launched from — which, conveniently, is exactly where every mission wants you to finish anyway.
Launch
You start on Cat 1 with the holdback bar on. Push the throttle up (W) and the game tells you what it wants: 90% thrust for the shot. Cross that line and the steam does the rest. The briefing says rotate at 150 knots; ease the stick back and you are flying.
The lap
Tower says fly around and come back, so do. A waypoint rides above the carrier. Nobody is shooting at you; use the lap to learn how the jet banks, how the afterburner (hold Shift) eats fuel, and how the airspeed bleeds in a turn.
Coming aboard
Three things before the deck, and the sim checks all three:
Gear down — G or L. No wheels, no landing.
Hook down — H or A. The Hornet and Tomcat wear a HOOK lamp so you can see it. Skip it and the deck calls it a bolter: full power, go around.
Fly the ball — 30–40% throttle, about 140 knots, down the 3.5° slope the meatball shows you. The code wants a sink rate under 1.5 m/s and less than 105 m/s relative to the deck.
Catch a wire and the throttle chops, the brakes bite, and you stop in a couple of seconds. The deck crew rearms and refuels you, and the sortie ends with 2,000 points for the qualification on top of the 500 for the trap.
In the sim
Plane choice is yours; the F/A-18 is the natural fit, but the F-16, F-15 and A-10 carry no tailhook.
Press ESC to re-spot on the catapult if you botch the first shot.
A fresh pilot sees T-1 first on the board, ungated.
Try this: fly the pattern twice, and make the second trap the one where you never touch the stick after the ramp. Then take T-2 Bay Tour — three checkpoints, an under-seven-minute bonus, and a good look at the Big E’s neighbourhood.
The title screen now has a leaderboard: TOP PILOTS, ranked by MiG-29 kills. Set a callsign in your pilot log, splash a MiG, and your name goes on the board.
Until now the front door only showed fleet-wide totals. That tells you the Bay is busy; it doesn't tell you who is winning the fight. The new panel sits top right on the title screen and lists the five pilots with the most MiG-29 kills, with the leader in gold.
How it works
Opt in with a callsign. You only appear once you set a callsign in your pilot log (menu option 4). Stay ROOKIE and nothing about you is sent.
Only MiG-29s count. It uses the same counter as the fleet strip's Bogies splashed tile: bandits you shoot down yourself, not wingman kills, and never airliners.
What is shared. Callsign and kill count, plus a random id so two pilots named MAVERICK don't merge. The id is never shown. The board is client-reported, so treat it as bragging rights, not a tournament record.
Your own line. If you are in the top five, your callsign is underlined.
The screenshot above uses sample callsigns; the live board fills in as pilots earn their places. If the leaderboard service is unreachable the panel shows the last board your browser saw, or hides itself rather than showing an error.
Try this: set your callsign from the pilot log, fly a sortie and take down a Fulcrum. New to the sim? Start with flight school; the fleet totals strip is explained in By the numbers.
Hornet Bay has a lot of metal in it now. Before we start taking it apart one airframe, one squadron and one hull at a time, here is the whole roster: what flies, what sails, what shoots, and who you meet in the Bay. It also kicks off something new: an article every day for the next 90 days.
YOU FLY
Five flyable jets. The F/A-18 Hornet, F-14 Tomcat, F-16 Falcon, F-15 Eagle and A-10 Thunderbolt II. The Hornet and the Tomcat trap aboard the Big E; the F-16, F-15 and A-10 are land-based and fly without a tailhook.
28 sorties. Eight flight-school sorties, a 19-mission campaign that runs from a visual ID to a nuclear-tipped cruise missile sprint for the city, and free flight over the Bay by day, dusk or night.
THE HOME TEAM
The air wing. USS Enterprise (CVN-65) works a 1994 Pacific air wing around the clock: an A-6E Intruder of VA-52 Knight Riders, an S-3B Viking of VS-37 Sawbucks and a C-2 Greyhound of VRC-30 Providers, with an E-2C Hawkeye of VAW-123 Screwtops watching the Bay from above. See Around the clock.
The escorts. USS Gettysburg (CG-64), USS Nicholson (DD-982), USS Stout (DDG-55) and USS Klakring (FFG-42) hold the picket ring. See The escorts report their names.
The Bay itself. Freighters and tankers on the shipping lanes, a cruise ship, fishing boats and yachts, airliners on approach to SFO, and a P-3 and Seahawks hunting a shadow submarine.
THE OTHER SIDE
The opposition. MiG-29s and Su-27s that actually dogfight, Tu-95 Bear bombers, cruise missiles, a Kilo-class submarine, go-fast boats and gunboats, and shoulder-fired Igla missiles waiting on the freighter decks.
THE ARMOURY
Yours. Sidewinder, Sparrow, Phoenix and AMRAAM, a gatling gun and Mk 83 bombs.
Theirs and the fleet’s. The R-27 and R-73 on the Russian jets, and the SM-1 and Harpoon that Klakring fires back with.
EVERY DAY FOR 90 DAYS
From tomorrow the Flight Log runs a weekly rhythm, and every post lands at a different hour of the day:
Mondays: the squadrons. The units behind the airframes.
Tuesdays: the aircraft. One airframe at a time, in numbers.
Wednesdays: the ships. Starting tomorrow with the Big E herself.
Thursdays: the weapons. Every round in the armoury.
Fridays: the sorties. Walkthroughs from flight school to the campaign.
Saturdays: the workshop. How Hornet Bay is built, sounds and prints.
Sundays: the long read. One story, properly told.
Every model in this roster also lives in the 3D Print Bay: 37 of them. Keep the RSS feed handy so the daily posts find you. — HB
Three site chores landed in one sweep — one visible alignment fix, one clickable banner, and a full dress uniform for every journal link you share:
The search box is back in formation. Search Flight Log rides the same row as BACK TO THE COCKPIT and RETURN TO BASE — 59 pixels to 59 pixels, tops aligned — while the squadron-store links keep the row below to themselves. Phones stack the lot, search full-width.
Every post now ships its cards. All 134 journal entries carry an optimised meta description (cut at a sentence where one fits, 155 characters budget), a complete Open Graph card — image with its true pixel dimensions read off the file, secure URL, type, alt text, locale, published time and one article:tag per squadron — and a complete Twitter card: summary_large_image, site and creator @hornetbay, a title trimmed to 70 characters, and alt text on the image. Drop a link anywhere and it arrives in dress uniform.
The banner flies home. The laurel header on every one of the 212 pages is now a link back to the homepage, with a soft amber glow when you hover it. One template, one shared stylesheet, one sweep — every page born from here on carries it.
Found and fixed in the sweep: four old headlines carried spliced markup from an ancient hash-stamp — one title duplicated mid-word, four wearing two hash badges. All repaired, and the rebuild now audits every page: descriptions under 160, Twitter titles under 70, no exceptions.
Thirty-five tags was a roster, not a filing system. The flight log’s sidebar now squadrons up — five parent categories with the child tags tucked into sub-menus — and a little menu housekeeping flew the same sortie:
Five squadrons, every tag assigned. THE GAME (19 tags: FEATURE, CONTROLS, BUG FIX, SIM, the whole flying machine), MISSIONS & THE FLEET (7), THE SITE (5), SQUADRON STORES (2) and THE SQUADRON (2). Parents show their child count and open an accordion of chips — one squadron on the board at a time, each child carrying its post count.
The rail still flies the same. Clicking a child filters exactly like before, the parent lights amber when one of its own is on the board, and a #tag= link auto-opens the right squadron — search and paging are untouched.
Duplicate spellings merged. FIX and BUGFIX both become BUG FIX — 37 tags down to 35 and one spelling from here on. The old flat tag strip stays in the markup for the crawlers but no longer takes up the page.
Same sortie, lighter menu. GALLERY has left the main menu — spectate view does its job now — and the ANALYTICS dashboard page is retired (the counters still tick quietly in the background). The social chips on the menu footer and every blog footer are bigger, bolder, and a lot easier to hit.
A big batch of small doors and corridors this time — plus one very big grey hull:
The gallery now covers every aircraft and every ship in the game. Eight airframes and ten hulls: the Big E, her cruiser, destroyer and frigate escorts, MT PETRO PACIFIC, MS BAY MONARCH, MV BAY TRADER, and the fishing boat, sailboat and motor cruiser that clutter the weekend lanes.
It is split into two categories — AIRCRAFT and SHIPS. TAB jumps between them; [ ] or 1–9 still step through the exhibits, and every model remembers its own sensible viewing distance.
SELECTABLE MISSIONS is now simply MISSIONS, and NEXT ACTIVE ADVANCED MISSION has left the menu — the missions speak for themselves.
BLOG is a main-menu item (key B, opens in a new tab), and the homepage link is retitled to match.
HORNET BAY STORE is a main-menu item (key S, new tab) — the old Exchange link is retitled too.
Every blog tag is now a page. Each tag chip links to its own stub — /blog/tag/ships and friends — and the blog carries a tag sub-menu up top, so you can read by topic: FEATURE, CONTENT, SHIPS, SITE and the rest.
One housekeeping note: from now on, every model screenshot you see here comes straight from the gallery — and any new model that joins the game joins the gallery at the same time.
The shipping lanes between the Bay and the Pacific have gone heavy. Four new hulls now work the lane in both directions — three deep-laden supertankers and a cruise liner — each one named and typed in the traffic system, each trailing a wake scaled to its length. Meet the new traffic, largest first:
MT PETRO PACIFIC — 360 m overall, 54 m beam, 3.5 kt on the lane. The biggest hull in the bay; she barely answers her helm.
MT GOLDEN CRUDE — 340 m, 50 m beam, 3.8 kt. Black hull, rust-brown deck, pump manifold amidships, accommodation castle right aft.
MT ATLANTIC BULK — 320 m, 48 m beam, 4.0 kt. The sprinter of the tanker trio — which, granted, is not saying much.
MS BAY MONARCH — 230 m, 30 m beam, 6.8 kt. The cruise liner and the fast mover of the lane: stacked white decks, window bands, and the line’s amber band on the funnel.
Seamanship notes: after dark all four show proper lights — white masthead, red to port, green to starboard — and every hull leaves a wake you can pick out from altitude. They share the water with the existing freighters, fishing boats and yachts, so the Golden Gate is properly busy now.
One word to the wise, pilots: file these names away. The mission desk has been asking an unusual number of questions about lane schedules of late — best to know a supertanker from a cruise liner before the tasking orders start mentioning hulls by name.
View system overhaul: V now cycles cockpit → cockpit-off → chase → orbit → tower. Cockpit-off is the pilot’s-eye view with full symbology and no glass or panel in the way. Spectate (J) no longer shows your own jet or the cockpit furniture while you ride along — just a clean SPECTATE banner, and X drops you straight back into the cockpit. The F1–F10 throttle row has been retired from the flight manual (the bindings themselves are untouched), and the title screen now reads Carrier Ops Flight Simulator.
The shipping lanes are getting heavy: three supertankers — MT PETRO PACIFIC (360 m), MT GOLDEN CRUDE (340 m) and MT ATLANTIC BULK (320 m) — plus the cruise liner MS BAY MONARCH now ply the lane between the Bay and the Pacific. All four are named and typed in the traffic system, ready to be tasked in future missions.
Brand desk: the Squadron Laurel roundel has been re-shot — the complete Hornet now appears from the original emblem’s camera angle, whole airframe inside the ring. Files on the assets page.
