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"Carry-boo"! ;-)

;-)

"Bandwagon 106"

Heh ;-) Really not bad as for 1st settings for fall line simulation ;-)

VMA-311. 1991. and...Squat Eye.

Hellcats box art (from GiantBomb) Have you ever had the bug to play an old sim? Say, European Air War or Jane's Longbow. What about Hellcats Over the Pacific, or A-10! Attack? Wait… you may be saying, I've never even heard of these sims! I understand if you haven't, as these sims were released only for MacOS, an operating system most hardcore sim pilots have never even considered. In the 1990's, however, there was a very large, and rather unique simulation community built around the Macintosh. While many PC sims such as A-10 Tank Killer and Armored Fist were only starting to scratch the surface of "True 3D", with voxel graphics rendering low resolution textures, Mac developers knew they would have to take some risks to achieve the greatness that was already on full display on the DOS/Windows shelves of CompUSA and ElekTek. Their solution? A typical Mac developer response. They would sacrifice the then high resolution, "photo-realistic" textures for flat shaded polygons to create fully realized 3D worlds and models, including real-time shadows and highly accurate physics. From Wikipedia: "Hellcats was a major release for the Mac platform, one of the first 3D games to be able to drive a 640 x 480 x 8-bit display at reasonable frame rates in an era when the PC clone's VGA at 320 x 240 x 4-bit was the standard." Having only had my parent's Mac to play on, and being crazy about flying (thanks to them no less!) I dove into this world full bore. My first experience in this new world of flight was Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0, a fantastic sim I taught myself how to play at the young age of five, mostly by trial and error. Soaring above the Chicago skyline in my Cessna 182RG was truly amazing for my young self, but something was lacking. That something was obviously guns. By 1991, I was six years old. With the combination of ever increasing hours of time spent in FS4 and the excitement of reading about the air to air victories from the just ended Gulf War, I was ready. During a trip to the store I saw the game I wanted, and I begged my parents to get it for me. Amazingly enough, they actually relented. Soon, I knew, I would be soaring over tropical locales and splashing Zeroes! Hellcats Over The Pacific was released in 1991 by Graphsim Entertainment, who would go on to release the excellent Hornet series a few years later, which will be the subject of a future write-up. Developed by Parsoft Interactive and coded by Eric Parker, it would become maybe the most popular sim ever released on the Macintosh. Sporting bright graphics, excellent physics and flight models, and rudimentary carrier ops it was, much like its namesake the F6F Hellcat, truly a beast to be reckoned with that outclassed and outdated all opponents. Bagging a Zero at the merge. You can see the rudimentary "radar" here (Photo courtesy of mobygames.com) Taking place on a large map of the Solomon Islands, it focused on the Battle of Guadalcanal and related engagements in "The Slot". The missions themselves were rather basic, with accordingly basic mission names. "Bomb Base" for instance had you bombing a Japanese held airfield, which would eventually become Henderson. "Scramble!" is pretty self-explanatory, take off, shoot down the G4M Betty while mixing it up with a pair of escorting Zeroes. Rarely were there more than just a few aircraft in any given scenario. Typically no more than four or five, including your aircraft, most likely to keep memory usage down. Only two missions ever had you flying with allied aircraft, the first an escort mission with a B-17 called, you guessed it, "Flying Fortress". And the final mission of the game, "The Duel", paired you up with ultimate Hellcat ace Cpt. David McCampbell (34 victories, including 9 in one sortie, and the Medal of Honor). Number two behind McCampbell (Photo courtesy of mobygames.com) A particularly grueling trial came in the form of the mission "Flat Top" where you needed to bomb and sink an opposing Japanese carrier. One bomb usually wouldn't do it, and it was hard to get both on target with the massive AAA fire from the surrounding task force. Sometimes this meant multiple sorties in a single mission, returning to trap on the carrier over and over till you finished. Since many flight sims don't include an in-mission re-arming mechanic, this made this fairly unique, especially considering the fact that in many missions you would be returning to the carrier, and not a nice long stretch of concrete. Trapping once is tough enough, but doing it multiple times per mission seriously heightened the challenge! Another tricky mission was "Divine Wind" where you needed to defend your carrier against kamikaze attacks. As the enemy aircraft spawned at a regular interval there was usually no time to return to base and rearm, necessitating careful ammunition and fuel management. With the carrier sinking, the mission is effectively over. (Photo courtesy of mobygames.com) But like all things, it was not without its problems. Chief among them was the seriously lacking draw distance, a common issue amongst many games in the nineties. It is not typically an issue in say, an RTS or corridor FPS shooter, but in flight sims, the farther you can push the draw distance, the better off you are, and the more immersive it becomes. Unfortunately, the distance in Hellcats was short even for the time, making strafing runs on enemy airfields with parked aircraft and long distance intercept missions harder than they probably needed to be. The work around was a sort of radar, in the center of the instrument panel. This radar gave a 360 view around the aircraft out to a few miles, with other aircraft represented as white dots. The enemy AI was also quite lacking. Most engagements typically quickly devolved into a tight turning fight that the Hellcat could easily win by use of the aircraft's flaps to gain a significant turning advantage over the opposing Zero. This was a feature the Hellcat did not have, but that ironically, many Japanese fighters did. The hit detection was spotty at close ranges, causing many bullets to simply pass through the opposing aircraft and simply drain away your ammo. At longer ranges accuracy was better, but many times the enemy would simply smoke then ditch, requiring close in strafing runs near the ocean's surface to get credit for the kill. I can still remember my first kill in any combat sim ever, a snapshot with a deflection angle of nearly 90 degrees. I turned sharply to the right to chase and was rewarded with a swiftly descending, and heavily smoking Zero. It's an image forever burned into my mind, and I was hooked. For better or for worse, I had begun a lifetime obsessed with the skill curve of the Combat Sim. It was a fun jaunt into the past writing this article. I even remembered most of the key bindings! If you're ever looking into the retro-sim scene yourself, don't count out the Macintosh platform. There are several other great sims from this era for the mac, a few of which will be the subjects of future articles. If anyone would like to know how to get into the world of emulating Mac or DOS games for a similar trip down memory lane, PM me. I'll get back to you as soon as I can! Thanks for reading, good luck, and good hunting.

Ryan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Firebee CL

I looked at JSBSim when I was evaluating Flight Gear flight models. I think you will find that the numbers will not directly translate between the two flight engines. TK uses extensive tables so that you can plot correct, empirical data. So, if you have a NASA wind tunnel study or better yet a collection of curves/data points from live flight testing, you can usually tweak TK's flight models to match those results. If I recall correctly, JSBSim was much simpler. You start with a core set of numbers and the flight engine estimates all of the other values at various machs/altitudes. I don't recall how JSBSim handles transonic/supersonic mach numbers, but I don't recall being impressed. TK's flight models suffer first and foremost a problem with resolution. The original SFP1 flight models were tabulated in increments of 0.4 Mach. In general, this was adequate from Mach 0.4 to 0.8 and Mach 1.2+ where the curves are fairly linear and flat. If you fed the tables the correct numbers, you could get magical "1%" accurate flight models that seem to be the "gold" standard for flight sims. But a lot of things change quickly at very specific Mach numbers over the Mach 0.8 to 1.2 range. To model transonic fighters like the MiG-15, MiG-17, and F-86 accurately, the interval needs to be Mach 0.05. Even Mach 2 fighters like the F-4, MiG-21, and F-105 benefit from high resolution intervals over the transonic range. If TK's flight models could have been so much more accurate if they had supported varying the resolution as needed instead of a fixed interval between all data points. It is a pain in the butt to develop flight models with the original Mach 0.4 interval, and insufferable to use an interval like Mach 0.1 or smaller. The other problem with TK's flight models is that they can't show interference, such as between the wing and tail. The effectiveness of the tail can be greatly effected at higher AoA by the wing's airflow. The table for the horizontal tail (elevator, stabilator, etc.) is pretty straight forward based on the Mach and/or angle of attack. But the wing can cause the tail to see different speeds and/or angles than the air which originally hit the wing. So you have to choose between tailoring the tail control tables to normal flight conditions such as level flight or to reflect high AoA conditions. The F-100, F-101, F-104, and F-4 are all subject to problems based on this. In my F-4B flight model, I simply ignored the interference effects which combined with the Mach 0.4 table intervals left it quite inaccurate over the transonic range, but still did great at Mach <= 0.8 and ok at Mach >= 1.2.

CL pylon is removable. USN/USMC Aggressors usually didnt use them. The flat shark nose and extended LERX are late-production F-5E features, I used to have details/dates on that when I researched F-5's some years ago. Nice website where you can look around for the modifications... http://www.the-northrop-f-5-enthusiast-page.info/index.html

Red Flag

Flowers

1950s Air Defence

In a special meeting in the Hebrew cabinet in August 1987, the goverment presided by Yitzhak Shamir decided to stop the development of the IAI Lavi after defense budget had sikyrocketed. But in a twist of fate, almost at the end of the meeting a urgent message arrived trough diplomatic channels. Japan and Argentina will help to fund the IAI Lavi in exchange for techincal help and the permissions to build the plane in country. At this genereous offer, Shamir soon made a press conference presenting the country with the new situation and letting IAI enginners and pilots to continue the flight tests then underway. 5 years after that the plane was considered a huge succes with export orders to several countries as well as being a plane that meets all the old and new requirements being made by the IAF. Here we see the plane in a punitive strike in 1994 against Gaza strip. Model by AngelP, it need some work on skins, basicly weathering and stencils, if anyone wanto to help with that...

Since we seem to be so far behind in replacements for our CF188s...the Gripen was tossed around as a possible replacement.

thanks for link....might be usefully one day... when bored with current projects.... will see what I can do about target drone....remove here and there....

OK. Thanks I'll replace it. I have an info sheet on an older Ryan drone and has a profile and upper view if this modeller is interested. https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=7&ved=0ahUKEwjHjqjYz7LZAhUFZKwKHbktByoQFghJMAY&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocuments.techno-science.ca%2Fdocuments%2FCASM-Aircrafthistories-RyanKDA-4Firebeetargetdrone.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0tObe1TePlV1TtLtojWMCP

Il-102 Brawny - Soviet Air Force, Afghanistan, 1984

Have now tested with the static/slow/fast/etc propnodenames commented out and the pump prop still spins well. I don't have the rotationaxis value in place so it should be fine to comment that out too....theoretically, I would say that dynamic streamers are possible, as Wrench outlined, although I am no streamer specialist - hopefully someone will figure out how that works. Von S

Mue, I greatly appreciate this tool. Swambast / KJakker - Very raw preliminary work on an mortarpit. The pit I made (like I said, very raw) while the mortar was pulled from a 3D online site.

Usually down to money and customer need / requirements...for example an F-15C with Thrust vectoring PW-232s could have been but in reality there was no unlimited budget for such things. So the F-20 cockpit was 44% larger...could a retrofit have been done cheaply?........the fact nobody did it is more likely down to nobody needing it or was willing to pay for those changes..they may have had to pay for flight testing etc. You can put some nice avionics in an F-5E...........look at Chiles upgraded F-5E Tiger III. The avionics in the F-20 were cutting edge for their time (Mid 1980s)....but the fact that it didn't become a standard was probably again down to lack of requirement from customers or e.g. those that had the money procured more advanced fighters instead.

This bird took forever to get airborne with this little lot on board.....

Streamer with shadow, now Bruno Stachel is finally squadron leader

Hawker Hunter FGA9 - No. 112 Sqd, RAF Middle East Command, 1973

Thank you, Steve! You are absolutely right, they look pretty good in the air. It seems to me that in order to animate the streamer, this tape, at a least, must be composed of several parts in order to try to impose on it the effect of the flag. )

Funny how much time is gone when you fix something on a skin you don't like :) Traced all of the panel lines. Adjusting of camo lines can happen later.

Started a camo process on it. Has anyone repainted this yet and done the panel lines over?

Fooling around with some of Gambit's FE screens, adapted to the new concept.

What Libyan gunboats?

Should be complete by the Saturday....

It's coming along now....super great tool

All I can say is AWESOME!!!!! Thanks guys.

Great start on camo Pete! Well Mue´s lod_viewer is the most helpful tool we skinners have for SF2. Saves a lot of time. Btw what about a Ferris Camo skin? ;-)

Kestrel FGA.2... in 1968! NATO needed new aerodynamical test flights with 6 initial modified Kestrels before the first RAF Harrier GR.1 deliveries!

I erased my whole Effects folder and then extracted the original one and reinstalled, my effects, tracers, muzzle flashes, are back. Thanks guys! Castillac approves!

Happy New Year. ...and coming in 2018..

Heading up the hill.

...somewhere....20 05 1941....( Maleme- crete- Greece) 805/806 FLEET AIR ARM GLADIATOR and FULMAR .We do have the Gladiator.. https://combatace.com/files/file/13587-sf2-ww2-gloster-gladiator-mk2-and-sea-gladiator-by-cocas/?tab=reviews

Blenheim MK IVF

Bundesmarine F-2GN Super Fury ready for take off from Carrier "Walther Scheel" On course to soviet carrier group around TAKR Odessa Carrier hit, but plane damaged. Strike seen from wingman.

"The world will change" ~ Joshua Bristow

MiG-19SK

Screenshots come from a personal mod Soviets East Germany and fictional Libyan republic vs NATO in North Africa the F-103 (Dhimar ? addon) is modified to make it a fictional what if had it served for the French as recon aircraft I know should change Finflash with something else :P

Cocas

Supermarine Attacker then known as the 'Jet Spitfull' F.1 in RAF WWII service