Congratulations on your curiousity, you have downloaded the Hammerhawk -a nimble, wicked fast starfighter packing a wallop of firepower. She's a little beat up but perfectly functional. The on-board computers will take care of engine cooling and weapons charge & cool-down, all you have to do is fly 'er.
You'll begin on the runway with your wings and wing guns automatically in the 'standby' position.

This aircraft is equipped with 3 Gravgo* anti-grav lifters for effective VTOL capability. Begin with flaps in full extension. Throttle up just short of afterburner kick-in and she'll lift off like a champ. Angle her up a little, trim up a little (she'll have a natural downward pitch tendency once she gets going), and either cycle through the eight flaps positions to zero or just do the F5 thang and off you go. Make SURE to have adequate ground clearance and nail the throttle all the way when you lose flaps. Reverse the order to land. She'll speed-wobble a little as you reach ludicrous speed, just back off the throttle or take her into a turn.


INSTALL:

Unzip this package to a temp folder, then copy and paste the folder labelled 'Hammerhawk' to your FS9's main aircraft folder.
Be sure to take the 10 seconds it takes to copy and paste the few custom effect files (.fx) within the included effects folder to your main FS9 'effects' folder, to enjoy the afterburners and subtle engine glow effects, and copy and paste the ENTIRE FOLDER 'ab-gauges' into your main FS9 'gauges' folder to enable the afterburners, they make the package complete.


QUICK NOTES:

Yeah, I know, no custom panel or VC. It would be perfect if you used your favourite two-engine fighter panel, or even better, a VTOL panel.

If there are any issues with the afterburners showing when they shouldn't or vice versa, cycle through your 'Views' once and they'll behave.

The Hammerhawk was built and tested for FS9, but should work fine in FSX - I do know the nice bright blue nacelle spinners will turn black in FSX. I'll be working on fixing it up to display properly in FSX & get that version out there shortly.


LEGALESE:

This add-on folder and all contained therein is for non-commercial purposes only. Released to .com and Simviation as Freeware. It is not to be re-uploaded anywhere, period. Grab it and enjoy it. If you have some fun with it, toss me an email & I'll reply.
If it blows up your computer, good luck finding me, just buy another one & get over it. Kidding, it's a clean file and will cause you no trouble. If it does, email me and I'll sympathise while offering no concrete help whatsoever, 'cause I'm lost too.


CREDITS:

RD/Ardie, infamous over at Forums; thank you for the custom afterburner treatment. Once again your creation has perfectly complimented and enhanced my creation, hats off bud.

I'm pretty sure the front grille texture and the crinkled foil texture used on one of the greeble panels was from CG Textures, so THANK YOU to them for stuff that I couldn't come up with from scratch, they always seem to have what ya need for free. All other textures on this thing were worked up from scratch in Paint, Pixia and Photoshop.

(The snake and tribal markings were from a tattoo I found online. There was no way to confirm the artist's name or contact anyone, so thank you for the awesome image. I turned the tribal marks from the snake's tongue into a lightning strike, and added the nuke symbol, and the skull on the wing art version.)

Thank you (again) to Rob Barendregt for the gauge & gauge folder that enables RD's hot A/B's!

Always have to thank the developers over at Freeflight Design Shop for being willing to share their years of expertise & experience when you're stuck.


REPAINTS:

Any logos or markings would look silly slapped over the weathering, but I did include the few, layer-happy .PSD files I saved, so you can put your own stuff UNDER all the weathering layers. Seems I only saved the outer wing textures in uncollapsed .PSD's, so that's all you get to play with. Please release any repaint stuff as 'Textures Only' and refrain from re-uploading the whole aircraft package. Have fun.

hark

A.K.A. as Glenn Crowell
hark2131@yahoo.ca

Hey, zip by .com for awesome downloads and our friendly, helpful forum.

(It does kinda look like an X-Wing and a T.I.E. Fighter got together and had a baby, eh? Greetings from northern Ontario, Canada.)