LAST EDITED ON Feb-16-07 AT 12:47 PM (EST)
 
>You know, with all the demands on these guys, essentially being
>qualified in 3 full-on weapons systems at the same time, (air, land,
>space, infantry, CAS, BFM, counter-maritime strike)...
>
>Most. Multi-tasked pilots. Ever. Training has to be a
>nightmare...

It helps extraordinarily that WDF pilots have virtually unlimited stick time. They have maximums in terms of hours flown per day, and minimum rest times before scheduled duty shifts, but beyond that - as long as there isn't a general combat alert on and the carrier's not preparing to transit FTL - if a WDF pilot wants to strap on and take a training flight, try out some new tactics, work on gunnery or maneuvers, mess with sensor techniques, or just fart around and pile up hours, that's perfectly OK. Not for nothing were experienced Golden Age WDF pilots some of the highest-time throttle jockeys around.

During his career as an active fighter pilot, Gryphon averaged around 30 flight hours a week, and that doesn't include simulator time. Not all of that was Valkyrie time, since he insisted (for various masochistic reasons) on keeping his VF-6 qual current as well, but the VF-1 was by far his ride of choice and he logged probably 90% of his time in one.

Of course, he was also SDF-17's executive officer, which cut into his free time. Golden Age pilots without other responsibilities routinely bettered that 30-hour figure. Miria Sterling practically lived in her Valkyrie back in the day. Gryphon once joked that her first daughter, Komilia, was conceived in the cockpit of either Miria's VF-1 or Max's, and neither of them would deny it.

The thing is, they could do that kind of thing (er, racking up a lot of flight time, not necessarily conceiving offspring at the controls) back in those days for two reasons:

1) Cost was no object whatsoever. The Golden Age WDF defined deep-pocket backing, so things pilots in normal forces weren't permitted to do because of the expense - like fly the jets around for several hours every day if they wanted - were not only allowed but not even thought of. Hell, missiles and GU-11 ammo were cheap just because of the volume they were produced in, and Veritech fighters don't burn expensive fuel anyway.

2) These were not your normal military pilots. A lot of people liked to disparage the old-timey WDF as amateurs, and to be fair, they were - in the old-fashioned sense of the world, people who did what they did just out of love for the doing of it. Sure, they were getting paid, but to a lot of WDF pilots, that was just a bonus. As Gryphon famously said in a 2092 documentary on the WDF's 100th anniversary, "This [pointing into the cockpit of Eight-Ball One] is my office. You tell me who lives better than me." They lived aboard ship, not just during deployments, but practically all the time. They approached being starfighter pilots with the same mindset they had once applied to being computer geeks or anime fans. They were space combat nerds.

Another thing to consider is that the WDF's pilots were not routinely called upon to do weird things like fly the Sea Valkyrie. It was literally something they fielded, inventing the tactics on the fly, for a particular engagement that required its strange capabilities. More than 90% of a Valkyrie pilot's operational time in the Golden Age was spent prosecuting the VF-1's primary design role, aerospace superiority. Most of the rest of that time went into various more conventional secondary uses, like the strike role (and only a small percentage of active VF-1 pilots kept current in Strike Valkyrie operations - most of that work went to the dedicated VA-1 and VB-9 squadrons) and CAS (again, something more often done by Judicators and Legios teams).

Yeah, a Veritech fighter is a complex multi-role weapons system that requires a lot of intensive training, and a certain kind of pilot, to succeed. But the WDF was a small force with the luxury of extreme selectivity. Only the very best-suited pilots - which is not to say, necessarily, the best pilots, by the standards of a more conventional force like the real-life USAF - ever got to fly a VF-1 or VF-6 for the Golden Age Wedge Defense Force. Those people got to the point where they knew that weapon inside, out, and backward, and could make it, as Princess Koriand'r put it, both cry and sing.

End result? You ask someone like that - a hard-core, fully-trained, high-time Golden Age Valkyrie jock like Miria, or Terror Currier - to take her bird into an unfamiliar environment or prosecute an unfamiliar goal, and she is going to bitch and complain and probably do, by her usual standards, a half-assed job of it... but by that point, she's so good at her job, her half-assed job is better than a lot of forces' elites.

>I'm trying to think, just for a second how the hell you'd actually
>train somebody to fight in this thing AND keep them good at regular
>flying ops...that's a lot on their plate.

Well, that's just it - it's not like anybody in the WDF was ever current on the VF-1U. It was the kind of thing that got hauled out of the broom closet once in a full moon, usually to a round of groans and "oh, here we go"s in the briefing room, and a lot of last-minute simulator time to try and achieve something vaguely like competence before the torpedoes started flying for real. Not all of them managed it. As Erik Swimm ruefully noted in a documentary about the operation in which the Sea Valkyrie saw its most prominent use, "Like most seafood, it's kind of an acquired taste." :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/