Revvin' up your engine
Listen to her howlin' roar
Metal under tension
Beggin' you to touch and go...

The day my phone died a few weeks ago, I got a tablet and one of the first things I did was install SimplePlanes once more to start from scratch. Part of this effort was churning out even more "not-replicas", including this one. This bad boy is by far the most complex plane I've built (excluding those two or three poor VR planes I did once) and it clearly shows. While it may not qualify as a real Tomcat (wrong control surface configuration, design still looks funky, etc), it's still a relatively great build compared to everything I've made so far. I had to painstakingly sculpt the fuselage and canopy but I started cutting corners for everything else so it is at best an approximation of an F-14. I based the design mainly on the F-14A variant as I didn't have the brainpower to do the electronic greebles of the F-14B and F-14D variants, though I never bothered on adding the glove vanes because it would've been a waste of time and effort to add for little improvement (just like the real life glove vanes!). The livery is based off of the VF-1 "Wolfpack" squadron, though renamed to just CVF-01 here. Side note, VF-1 was based at USS Enterprise so I made CVF-01 based at "USS Defiance", a nod to the USS Defiant in Star Trek. Of course, I wouldn't do an F-14 build without a single Top Gun reference. In keeping with the bootleg style of this build series, I named the pilot Pedro "Rookie" Mitchell (Peter "Maverick" Mitchell) and the RIO/WSO Anton "Mallard" Bradshaw (Nick "Goose" Bradshaw and his actor Anthony Edwards). Now onto the weaponry, I did make an XML edited version of the Interceptor as a stand-in for the R-40 missiles for my unreleased not MiG-25 build but I didn't bother to make stand-ins for the AIM-54 so I just used standard Interceptors as Sparrow missiles, and the Guardian missiles are obviously Sidewinders.

Features
•Variable-geometry wing (free-moving but can be angled for STOL, cruise and high-speed flight)
•Weaponry meant to emulate real F-14 loadouts
•Countermeasures
•Arrestor hook for carrier ops
•Somehow worse agility than an actual Tomcat (at least the engines don't cause any problems here)
•Okay-ish paint job with pilot name tags

Gallery

Buzzing the tower!

Going in for landing... until I nearly missed the carrier and slammed on the deck.

Not-Tomcat at dawn.

On the catapult and ready for launch.

Fox Two out! Also a reference to a shot in Top Gun.

Launching flares and chaff.

Teaser

In the skies over NAS Miramar- sorry, just off Wright Island, a not-Tomcat engages with an aggressor...