[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Stealth_Eagle

Two requests that I have:

That's actually four.

Originally Posted by Stealth_Eagle

1. A flyable B-26B with the wing enhancements (extending of the wing by 3 feet so you wouldn't have to land extremely fast relative to other aircraft)

Add it to the pile of requests for official aircraft. There's a modded B-26B frankenplane, though. It works reasonably well.

Originally Posted by Stealth_Eagle

2. Workable catapults like the mod does (I don't know if the mod is good enough for it since I always run my IL-2 games clean) as well as improved ship functions such as below decks on carriers (that was initially planned to be part of pacific fighters but never came through)

Catapults are available as a mod and would be sort of useful as an official add-on. I don't see much point to below decks hangars on aircraft carriers, since that's mostly the domain of the mechanics and other ground crew. IL2 is a flight simulator, not a ship and aircraft maintenance simulator. Working elevators which make aircraft on deck "vanish" or magically appear would be sort of cool, but it's a real low priority.

Originally Posted by Stealth_Eagle

3. More surface ships

Again, available as a whole variety of mods. Also, according to rumors there will be more ships in official DT patches. While the list of U.S. ships is limited by the NG agreement, there are no restrictions on ships of other nationalities (i.e., British, Italian, Japanese, Soviet, German), and no restrictions on the sort of small craft which were the typical prey of strike fighters.

Ships fall between aircraft and land vehicles and ground objects in terms of modding difficulty. There are tutorials on how to get ships into the game on various modding websites, but nothing official.

Originally Posted by Stealth_Eagle

4. Skins for ships rather than having several examples of the same kind of ship like the Japanese carriers.

I agree that the ability to skin ships would be convenient. Not only could you update camo patterns by year, and make hack skins so that ships of one country could stand in for those of another, but you could apply skins to differentiate ships of the same class (e.g., the various U.S. CVL).

Who knows what the coding would be like to get this feature into the game, though? Again, IL2 is a flight simulator, not a ship simulator. The only reason that ships exist is as landing places, mobile flak batteries and/or targets. Most players probably don't give a rat's hindquarters that the U.S. Mahan class destroyer isn't in the game or that the Fletcher class destroyers all have the same camo scheme and that it never varies from 1941 to 1945. So, potentially a lot of work for little practical improvement to the game.