Chaser617

Playing around, doing some set ups for pictures for a Merc story I'm writing. SOmetimes flying helps me.

Someone will have a bad day Comrade....

Just prior to flare-out to land. The entire final portion of this flight was made 'dead stick' from rocket shut-off after initiating zoom-climb till touch-down. This wasn't the typical flight-profile of the NF-104A when it was used. Usually the aircraft had its turbine restarted by the time it crossed 35,000 do to the 'windmilling' effect. However I wanted to try a simulated 'X-15' profile landing. Both the X-15 and F-104 had extreamly similar glide-ratios, on the order of 4 feet forward for every foot decent travelled. You have to be very careful in this sort of landing that you don't either waste your energy too high and stall, or carry too much of it by your flare, and your speed break is very important since its the *ONLY* means of energy management during this portion of flight. As it was? I carried a bit too much energy and hit rather hard, I have a feeling in real life I would have blown a tire at best, worst? Collapsed my left main gear.

At around 114,111 feet altitude, the Starfighter has come full nose down and is starting to pick up airspeed again. It isn't until around 80,000 feet that I have any control input response, and not till 40,000 feet that thanks to the Mach 2.2 speed attained during the 'dive' portion of the flight that I fully regained control.

This shot is at around 119,000 feet as my nose is finally coming down from the ballistic portion of the flight (where I had no control over where I was going). I wish I could have gotten a picture at the peek altitude, still, this does show you TK even thought of people like me, there is NO control what so ever till around 80,000 feet due to the lack of atmospheric forces on the control surfaces, that up-elevator I have is doing absolutely nothing.

In to climb for my current 'maximum altitude' flight in my test profile. This series of test flights were done in a custom mission on the Desert SFP1 terrain with Starfighter2's NF-104. Maximum altitude achieved on this flight was 162,332 feet. Found out something interesting, the camera in exterior mode 'looses' the aircraft above 120k feet and the in cockpit camera you are looking down at your legs most the time above that flight level