Hornet Bay’s four escorts hold station in the carrier’s own frame: Gettysburg 2,400 m ahead, Nicholson and Stout 1,500 m out on the beams, Klakring 2,800 m astern. Here is how the ring stays together through a turn.
The Enterprise never steams alone, and the escorts are not scenery on rails. Each one is a small piece of station-keeping code chasing a point that moves with the carrier. Here is the geometry, straight from ships.js.
In the sim: the ring
USS Gettysburg — on the carrier’s centreline, 2,400 m ahead of the reference point.
USS Nicholson and USS Stout — 1,500 m out on either beam, 300 m ahead of the reference point.
USS Klakring — on the centreline, 2,800 m astern.
Fore-and-aft span: 5,200 m from the van to the stern picket. Beam-to-beam: 3,000 m.
How they hold it
Every station is stored in the carrier’s own frame (distance abeam, distance ahead), then rotated by her current heading each frame. When the Big E turns, the whole ring swings with her instead of sliding off sideways. Each escort steers for its slot and aims to arrive on the carrier’s heading.
The speed rule is three steps. More than 500 m off station, an escort sprints at its 12 m/s maximum. Between 80 and 500 m it runs at carrier speed plus up to 3.5 m/s. Inside 80 m it matches the carrier exactly. The carrier steams at 7.7 m/s, about 15 knots, so a straggler closes the gap at a few metres per second and then settles without hunting.
Why Klakring sits where she does
The air wing’s pattern ends at a final gate 3,000 m astern and 350 m off the centreline (see a day on the Big E). The frigate sits 2,800 m back, on the centreline. The approach course passes beside her stern, not through her, and the lookout in the groove has her wake to the side instead of a hull in the windscreen. The escorts themselves are introduced in the escorts report their names.
Try this
Launch from the deck, climb out, and press N for the tactical map. Count the four hulls, then watch them keep the same shape through a carrier turn. Or press J and spectate one: the Gettysburg is the one with the wake streaming behind it.
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.
The Big E is where every Hornet Bay sortie begins and ends: a 342-metre angled-deck carrier with Cat 1 reserved for you, Cat 2 for the air wing, and a meatball guiding you to the 3-wire.
Every sortie in Hornet Bay starts and, if you follow the rules, ends in the same place: a 342-metre slab of grey steel doing a steady course through the bay. The Print Bay lists her at a real length of 342 m, and she is the one ship in the sim that matters more than any other, because she is your point of origin.
What you are standing on
USS Enterprise was the Navy’s first nuclear-powered carrier, commissioned in 1961. In the sim she is the home plate: a flat-top with a boxy, flat-roofed island and a landing strip angled off to port, as covered in the angle deck post and the island rebuild. The hull number, 65, is painted big on the deck.
In the sim
Cat 1 is yours. You taxi to the shuttle, ride the holdback, and the cockpit tells you “CAT 1 HOLDBACK — 90% THRUST FOR THE SHOT” before the stroke flings you off the bow.
Cat 2 belongs to the air wing. The starboard bow cat launches the squadron’s jets while you wait your turn, and the yellow shirts work both shooters.
The landing strip is the angled deck. Wires, meatball and aim point all derive from the same strip geometry, so what you see is what you trap on.
The meatball rides the port edge and shows you the 3.5° glideslope. Come aboard with gear or hook up and the red wave-off lamps flash.
The 3-wire is the one the air wing aims for: their jets flare to catch it, and the wire stops a 62 m/s arrival in about two seconds.
Escorts and a model for your desk
She never sails alone. Four station-keeping escorts hold a picket around her, and the cruiser ahead is also in the Print Bay, along with the Big E herself: scaled to 250 mm long, six angles of her on the shelf.
One standing rule applies, and it is the reason she matters: a mission only counts as complete when you return to the point of origin. Land at another airfield and you can rearm and refuel, but you still have to come home.
Try this: take off from the carrier, circle once, then fly the break and put the meatball in the centre of the row. Do it three times and you will never look at a runway the same way.
The mail was short: take the civilian airliners off the target list. Done — and then some. An airliner is still a contact on the scope, still traffic in the pattern, still a 747 full of people climbing out of SFO. What it is not, any longer, is anything your weapons will touch.
No lock. The target cycler steps past civil traffic now. T walks you through every bandit in the sky and never once stops on an airliner — no diamond, no tone, no SHOOT cue. Civilian contacts paint the scope; they don’t enter the firing solution.
No bullet, no warhead. Even a stray refuses: the Vulcan won’t track an airliner, an unguided round won’t detonate against one, and any damage that somehow arrives is waved off at the door. Guns, missiles, bombs — the whole inventory respects it.
No court martial, because no crime. The old check-fire shout and the wings-forfeit ending went out with the trigger — you can’t commit the offence, so the law came off the books. Enemy guns can still hurt the friendlies you escort, so the defector and NAVY 1 keep their stakes.
The pattern is full of people going about their day. Now they’re untouchable — the way it always should have been. — HB
A five-line punch list from the cockpit, worked line by line. First, the roads: by day they were rendering in a loud yellow — fine for a centreline at midnight, wrong for asphalt under the California sun. Road ribbons are now dark asphalt gray with muted gray edge lines and centre dashes, still dimming with the sun at dusk, and from altitude they read as proper highways again instead of glowing spaghetti. The menu footer grew too: the HornetBay YouTube channel and a contact address ([email protected]) now sit alongside the journal and X links.
The nastiest item was a trap waiting after mission success: bag the cruise missile bound for Moffett, read the MISSION SUCCESS debrief, close it — and the main menu slammed down over the world with no way back to your jet. The debrief simply never handed control back to the sim. Now it does: a RESUME FLIGHT button (or Enter, Space or Escape) folds the debrief away and drops you straight back into free flight over the world you just saved; MAIN MENU remains if you’re done for the day. Chasing this one exposed a sneakier accomplice — the service worker’s cache could pin an old build, so fixes weren’t always reaching installed copies. The worker now revalidates with the server on every load: what ships is what you fly.
And maritime law is now enforced: every ship, boat and pleasure craft stays in the blue water, never on the green. The traffic routes had been plotted against the wrong chart datum — the sea surface sits a touch below the terrain’s zero mark, so two legs that looked wet on paper actually clipped a drying shoreline and parked sailboats on the Sausalito shallows. Every route was re-plotted against the game’s own ground truth with the corrected waterline and a wide safety margin, then swept waypoint by waypoint. Twelve hulls, all wet, all day and night.
The Enterprise is the flagship of a carrier battle group, and now she sails like one. Four escorts hold a picket ring around her at all times: a guided-missile cruiser 2.4 km ahead, two destroyers 1.5 km out on each beam, and a frigate 2.8 km astern (far enough back to keep your final approach clean). Each escort is a proper station-keeper with its own helm — when the Big E reaches the end of her patrol leg and puts the rudder over, the ring swings with her, the outside ships sprinting to their new stations before settling back to formation speed. All five ships are procedural low-poly builds in the game's flat-shaded style, with wakes that trail astern and running lights that come on at night.
The bay is alive now too. Two container ships loop a shipping lane between the Pacific and the central bay, passing under the Golden Gate twice per circuit (inbound lane north, outbound lane south, like real traffic keeping right). Fishing boats work the grounds off the Marin coast, the waterfront and Richardson Bay, while sailboats and a little motor cruiser crisscross the bay between the city front, Alcatraz and Angel Island. Every route was validated against the game's own ground-truth terrain — the first draft beached two sailboats on Telegraph Hill, which is how the bay pilots learned their charts. Twelve ships total, all steaming day and night.
The Bay Area highways carry live traffic now — cars glued to the asphalt in their lanes (no more driving on the grass), over roads painted with center dividing lines and lane dashes, draped over the terrain including the bridge decks.
