Aircraft type cards: your collection now has three floors
Until today your aircraft collection was a flat wall: one card per airframe, sorted by date. That works at ten cards and stops working at fifty — three dozen A320 tails bury the one An-124 you are actually proud of, and the wall answers "how many planes did I catch" but not the question collectors really ask: how many kinds?
So the type itself is now a card. Catch your first airframe of any type — first 737-800, first ATR 72, first Beluga — and a type card is minted in your collection alongside the airframe card. It carries the type's name, its class (narrowbody, widebody, helicopter…), the manufacturer, and a rarity tier that comes straight from the reference catalogue. That rarity is static by design: an A380 is rare because it is an A380, not because of anything about the specific tail you caught. Every further tail of the same type you claim ticks a counter on the type card — it shows how many distinct airframes of that kind you own.
The collection page now opens in a "By type" view: one card per unlocked type, rarest first. Tap a type and it unfolds right there — every tail you caught under it, each linking to its own airframe page. The old flat wall is still one tap away under "All airframes"; nothing was taken from you, the wall just learned to fold.
The graph links run both ways from every card. A type card links up to its manufacturer and out to the global type page, where you can see who else caught airframes of that kind and who was first. An airframe card links up to its type, its builder and its airline. Airlines and manufacturers keep their shelves above the wall. Wherever you land in the aircraft graph, you can walk to any neighbour in one click.
One honest note on scoring: minting a type card pays zero extra XP. The first airframe of a new type already pays full rarity XP, and the type-rating achievement already rewards type milestones — the card is the trophy, not a second payout. Collections built before today get their type cards backfilled, so nobody has to re-catch anything.
Every card also carries its history now: the 📸 date it was first caught (ships too), the type card shows when you unlocked the kind, and the airframe page lists every other spotter who caught the same tail, with dates — spot history is part of the card, not a separate ledger.
So the collection now stacks three floors: the type (you unlocked the kind), the airframe (you caught this exact tail), and the shot history on each airframe. Ships keep their own structure — flags, shipyards and hulls — and the two halves of the dex live side by side in their tabs.
And catching finally feels like catching
Same-day polish from live testing: the map got louder. Aircraft silhouettes are bigger and brighter, radar candidates wear a name tag next to the blip, and the ambient live-sky layer no longer vanishes when you start a scan — it dims politely so the catchable targets stand out, but the sky stays alive.
And the moment you actually catch one, the game celebrates: a big rarity-coloured banner pops over the map — who you caught, the type and airline, the rarity tier, the XP it paid, and a special header when the card is brand new or a world first. Achievement unlocks queue right behind it. Before this, a successful catch was a one-line status message that faded in three seconds; the endorphins were being left on the table.