SkyChart Patchnotes v0.2 -> v0.4

SkyChart v0.3 + v0.4 — The Big Catch-Up

Casey's been at his clipboard for the better part of a year. The pile of patch notes finally needs a summary. Here's what's actually different in the cockpit.

The Aerobiz Depth Pass (v0.3)

• Multi-stop routes. Open A → B → C chains where direct flight is out of range. Each leg has its own demand math, transit rings on the map, and a wizard panel that pre-fills from the Strategic Advisor. AI rivals open chains too, legacy and premium carriers prefer hub-feeder shapes, and budget rivals stay strictly point-to-point.

• Aircraft scheduling. Every plane has a seven-day weekly calendar and can split between routes. Lease and maintenance bills are divided by frequency share. The Fleet panel reads real utilization numbers.

• A/B/C/D maintenance checks. Real-life inspection cycles fire on flight hours and time. A check every 500 hours, B every seven months, C every 21 months, D every eight years. Costs scale with airframe size. C and D checks pull the aircraft from service for a month. The Fleet Maintenance panel shows next-due and projected cost per plane.

• Realism mode. Opt-in at campaign start. Country licensing fees on first flight to a new country, 7th-freedom relations gates on foreign-to-foreign routes, 5th-freedom uplift on chains with codeshare partners, and stricter cabotage. The new Freedoms Codex panel walks all nine ICAO freedoms with live region-relations readouts.

• Runways and slots. Every airport has a real runway length with era scaling — a 1930 Heathrow is 40% of its modern length. Every aircraft has a runway requirement on its spec sheet. Try to send a 747 to a 1,200-metre regional strip, and Casey hands the form back. Hub Investment has a new Runway Extension and Slot Throughput dials so you can buy past the natural era curve.

• Tutorial. Five new chapters bring the manual to 26: multi-stop, scheduling, maintenance, realism mode, and the Freedoms Codex.

The Operating Costs Audit Suite

You used to see "Operating Costs: $108K/mo" on a route card and take Casey's word for it. Not anymore.

• Every route card itemizes Maintenance, Fuel + Ops, Lease, and Carbon Tax with dollars and percentages. Below that, every active modifier that nudged the bill is named in plain English — Carbon offset, COO trait, R&D Lean Operations, trade war surcharge, the lot.

• A new Operating Costs panel under Routes shows the full breakdown across your whole network: eight categories in a stacked bar, the top 10 most expensive routes with per-route stacks, and a 12-month trend chart.

• The Cash Flow Forecast and the Quarterly Report Operating Costs line both pick up the same itemization. Wherever you audit your books, the categories agree.

• Hub Investment shows quarterly, annual, and lifetime totals at the top, and a subtotal per hub.

Distance Math Now Reads the Globe

Casey took a string and a globe up to the chart drawer. The old math was a flat-earth approximation that overstated transcontinental routes by 30 to 50 percent. JFK to London was reading 8,200 km; the real number is 5,540. Every leg now uses proper great-circle math. Transatlantic setup fees drop about a third, fuel and operating costs follow, and per-route profit lands roughly where it was. Your books just got honest. A few aircraft that were borderline for the Atlantic on the old math suddenly fit it.

Espionage Is Open for Business

Three plays per rival under Rivals → Competition → Espionage. Plant negative press in their hometown for $300K. Poach an executive for $1M. Disrupt their next route launch for $500K. Each has its own cooldown and odds of getting caught — costs and percentages are spelled out on every button. Get caught, and your reputation takes a hit, and the target region stops returning your calls for a while. Pull it off cleanly, and the rival pays the price: a prestige drop, a frozen route board, or a press windfall that lifts your own standing.

Paint Your Own Cockpit

• Rename anything. Settings → Aircraft & Manufacturer Names lets you rename any manufacturer or any aircraft model. Edits save automatically and stick across campaigns. Underlying game data is unchanged, so saves and rivals don't care. Hit Reset All to wipe back to the original Bering / Pacifica / Tupi / Yangtze lineup.

• Tail numbers. A new Tail Numbers tab gives every airframe its own row. Paint N12345 or G-BNLY on the side, and it rides with that specific plane forever. Tail numbers show up in Fleet Maintenance next to the model name, so when Casey reports the 737 needs a D-check, you know which one. Search box at the top of the tab.

• Country flags. Flags show next to city names in the City Panel header, route info, every row of the Route Manager, City Details popup, and the Country Licenses panel. Hover any flag for the country name in your language.

Quality of Life

• Hangar stepper. Sell any number of parked aircraft in one click. Hold Shift on +/- to jump in tens. The button shows the proceeds before you commit. No more rapid-clicking Sell 1 until the screen goes black.

• Bulk Replace upgrade. Filter by source aircraft type, sort by source/profit, /distance/fleet, size/route name, and a new "Lowest net cost" policy that prefers planes already in your hangar over slightly-cheaper new orders.

• Bulk close negative routes. Closes 2,000 losing routes in about two seconds, with a proper spinner so it doesn't look like a freeze.

• Stock slider. Issue and buyback in 5% increments from 5% up to the per-action max, instead of one all-or-nothing button.

• R&D panel reorders. Branch tabs show how many techs are fundable right now in each branch. Click a branch, and the stepper auto-selects the first fundable tech. No more empty side panels with cryptic capstone-only options.

• Strategic Advisor hub filter. THE NEW ROUTES tab has a From: filter at the top. Click it, type a hub name, and pick. The picks list narrows to routes touching that airport.

• Steam Deck. The three tabs in Settings → Aircraft & Manufacturer Names hold their height when the window is short.

Balance & Rebalance

• Maintenance bills. D-checks down by half. Widebody multiplier capped at 4× the regional baseline instead of 8×. A widebody D-check is now around $14M instead of $37M. Per-aircraft monthly amortized maintenance drops about 20%.

• Maintenance timing. Aircraft pick up a small stagger on first check, so two planes delivered the same month don't hit their D-check the same month eight years later. Hard ceiling: no more than one D-check and two C-checks in any single month. Idle hangar planes don't pay calendar checks.

• Slots do real work. Each airport slot you own at a city adds 28 ops per week of throughput at that airport — two daily round-trip routes per slot. Six slots at a 1970 hub gives you 588 ops/week instead of 420. AI rivals get the same treatment.

• CFO promotion. The CFO ($2M) now halves the underwriting fee on stock issuance and the premium on buybacks (3% → 1.5% on both sides), and adds 5 points to your credit rating. Loan interest -30% stays.

• Wages and customer service scale with operations. Both used to be flat per-tier fees regardless of fleet size. Now, a small base plus a per-aircraft (crew) or per-thousand-passengers (customer service) amount. Smaller airlines pay less, bigger airlines pay more.

• Rivals catch up. Late-era loan caps now scale by era — a 2010 rival in trouble can actually borrow enough to recover. Procgen replacement rivals enter with cash scaled to the era AND your company value, so they're real competition instead of tomato cans that go broke before they buy a second route.

Performance & Reliability

• Strategic Advisor speed. Scans that took minutes on globe-spanning networks now take seconds. Chain scanner caps anchors at 25 (population-sorted) so the cubic math stays bounded. Above 500 routes, chains skip entirely — at that scale, every direct route worth flying is already built.

• Quarterly tick speed. On large networks, achievement checks that used to walk the entire route list now run on the next idle frame instead of blocking the tick. Head-section work cut from ~290 ms to ~40 ms at 1,200 routes.

• Phantom airline cleanup. On load, any route belonging to an airline no longer on the rivals' roster gets cleaned up, slots released, and hubs downgraded. Three ghost carriers that had been haunting one player's Threat board for a decade are now properly retired.

• Phantom recession fix. Active economic events now save with the game so they expire properly on reload. Self-heal on load: if there are no active events but the global economy multiplier isn't 1.0, it gets reset to 1.0. Repairs every existing save that had been silently bleeding 25% demand per stacked recession. If your books have been mysteriously red across the board, load on this build.

• Steam leaderboard retry queue. Failed uploads get saved to disk and retried — next launch, after every successful upload, and on a sane backoff. Six tries before giving up. If a score per era is already pending, only the higher one survives the queue.

• Clean shutdown. Quitting the game mid-tick no longer fires a cascade of console errors as background threads try to read autoloads that have been freed.

Casey Tidied the Back Office

You won't see any of this from the cockpit, but the year-long paperwork reorganisation behind the scenes is officially done. Casey gave the route-restore crew its own bay, filed the career ledger in a dedicated cabinet, moved the diplomatic paperwork to an embassy desk, sorted each rival's runtime numbers into the same drawer instead of pinning them to the corkboard, and pulled the historical logbooks (quarterly P&L snapshots, monthly costs, trend charts) into one cabinet with a clerk on staff. The demand math is now on three labelled worksheets instead of a 200-line column on Casey's desk. Pinned profit numbers across nine real scenarios — short-haul, long-haul, every pricing tier, suspended routes — confirm not a single dollar moved through the renovation. Saves load the same way they always did. The lobby looks the same. But the next time something goes wrong in route loading or save restoration, Casey knows exactly where to look. The pelican two desks over tried to claim half a drawer for sandwich storage. Casey said no.

Localization

Every patch note from the last few months is in front of translators in all 29 languages. The audit Casey ran on the rest of the UI text came back clean — no leftover English hiding in a button somewhere. The cockpit is bilingual right down to the rivets.