Siberian Sky -- The VOLCANO MOD (for strategic air warfare)

<< "I spotted an afterburner plume at twenty miles." >>

This is the only quote I recall from a Vietnam War air combat book I read back in hi~school and I forgot the title and author. The author spotted the afterburner at night, against the stars if I recall, and said it was a MiG-21. They (F-4 crew) locked it up and downed it with a Sparrow.

The VOLCANO MOD attempts to address, or bring attention to, a long missing feature in all combat jetsims: long distance visibility of afterburners especially at night. To do this, we oversize the afterburners as the sim, along with every jetsim it seems, does not model the brightness intensity of afterburner plumes. The same philosophy was used in sizing the recent 3D Rocket Exhaust effects, making larger flame plumes optional for missiles on a sliding scale of selectable effects sizes.

With the smaller of two oversized afterburner systems here, I can just see a MiG-21's pixel sized R-13 afterburner flickering from a little over 20 miles using 30 degree field of view (FOV) and 1280x1024 screen resolution. I believe that higher resolution would allow longer visible distance for any given FOV. The full size screenshot shows very late twilight F-106 AI squadron takeoff to the South, using the smaller size afterburner system. The yellow arrows point to aircraft in full afterburner following the AI leader.

The VOLCANO MOD uses specific engine names in aircraft DATA files. Any engine afterburner can be done at any time with a simple calculation. A list of engines currently modelled here and simple formulae for calculating their afterburner data are in the instruction file. These are some of the engines that will be of use in a mythological strategic strike/intercept campaign (Siberian Sky), and include engines that were used, or could be used, by Strategic Air Command (SAC) and manned Soviet Air Defense (IA-PVO) from the 1940s to the 1960s.

ThirdWire thread discussing grafix for classical era strategic air warfare: Volcanos erupt on page 3 ~> http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=4964

"VOLCANO" was a name used by one or two of our Old Timer SF simmers some time ago who poked fun at an early experimental closeup cameo screenshot that I poasted (it looked pretty bad). The name stuck.

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*** ADDED TO INSTRUCTION FILE, but the replacement Zip file does not seem to upload here. So...

Grafix position of the afterburner may need to be changed to taste. This is done by changing the vector ExhaustPosition=[x,y,z], where...

-x is left, x is right.

-y is back, y is forward.

-z is down, z is up.

The numbers are in meters. I prefer the burner flame as close to the nozzle as possible, but without interacting to cause flickering of nozzle/flame.

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