streakeagle

One can only hope that all of the aircraft in the phone/tablet games were modeled to an SF2 level then stripped down to a lods used for these games... Then TK could go for the cheap AI DLC money. But, to be of immediate use to us, the flight models would need to be to a flyable level. I wonder how much of the SF2 flight engine is used for these games?

No one lives forever, but it is always sad to see someone you know and care about die. <salute> to Jug. He was one year older than my mom and four years younger than my dad. I need to spend more time with my parents. My grandfather, now dead for over a decade, once said that it is a time when your address book starts getting smaller as you are cross off friends and family as they grow old and die. I am old enough (47) that some of my friends/shipmates have already died of cancer, heart failure, and other illnesses/accidents. My address book is getting smaller :( Hug and kiss your children, you never know what day is your or their last! http://combatace.com/topic/46359-an-interview-with-jug/ http://combatace.com/user/7429-jug/

I was thinking the Ouragan was in SF2Israel/Expansion Pack 1... I guess not!

TK does sometimes work in mysterious ways. He blindsided the community when WOV originally came out with no previews or announcements. SF2 also popped up out of nowhere. But, the loss of the forums on the website tell me that SF for the PC is dead.

Ouragan makes sense, especially since it was already in SF2. Wishful thinking that maybe TK has been slowly but surely working on SF2Korea with some of the 3d work bleeding over into SF tablet.

Is that an F9F being targeted by the F-100? There was quite a bit of SF series code and models reused to create the tablet game. I would hope that the improvements in the tablet game could be leveraged back into the PC game.

It is a huge jump going from a "simple" single engine, single seat supersonic interceptor like the MiG-21 to the twin-engined, swing wing, avionics wonder of the F-14. I will be amazed if they can meet the goal of a beta release by the end of this year that works as well or better than the MiG-21bis beta release. I am expecting at least the same 2-year schedule slide the MiG-21 had, regardless of how many people are working on this. If Leatherneck can do this right and do it on time, they will become the leader in third party DCS aircraft despite Belsimtek's strong showing in quantity and quality.

Someone besides DCS has figured out how to access my wallet and get me to try Tac Pack: https://www.facebook.com/SimWorksStudios A Tac Pack supported F-4B Phantom has reached the beta testing level. I will wait for reviews, but these guys could succeed where A2A has failed: giving me a big enough reason to put some time and money into FSX in the form of a well modeled F-4 Phantom.

Monkeys paw strikes again: people made a valid gripe about AI unresponsiveness to attacks and TK fixed it by breaking something else that worked right. Really frustrating over the last year or two of SF2 development.

Good things come to those who wait... and those who bought the A-10C beta expecting to fly over Nevada shortly after the final release have been waiting a long time. Fortunately, that was not me. I just had to wait a few years for the MiG-21bis, and boy was it worth the wait!

I haven't tried flight gear in ages. It never ran well on my hardware and didn't have much to offer as a non-combat civil sim when I already have FSX and X-Plane. I saw previews of what the F-14B would be like for v3.4, so I have been waiting for its release ever since then. I just checked again last night, found v3.4 was available, and downloaded from here: http://www.flightgear.org/ Tonight, I installed it. I went straight to the F-14B and runway 10R at San Francisco International, summer afternoon. Out of the box, the graphics are still very dated, but the F-14B cockpit looks interesting. You can sit in the pilot or rio seat. Apparently, multiplayer with a pilot and rio in the same aircraft is possible, which makes this a unique sim as far as I know. At first, I couldn't figure out how to get my stick setup to work. I looked up the location of the joystick menu in the instruction file and also read that it should automatically recognize my stick setup and try to make basic assignments. So I restarted the game and sure enough, my complex stick setup was detected and automatically configured. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it came up with mostly valid assignments despite my unusual stick arrangement. I have a real B-8 grip and stick assembly from an F-4 Phantom that is integrated into Windows via a Bodnar Bu0836X USB stick interface board, a Thrustmaster Warthog Throttle, and Saitek rudder pedals. Everything was assigned 100% correct! The B-8 had the correct roll and pitch axes, the throttle had the throttle axis, and the rudder pedals had the toe-brakes and rudder. The only problem was dual assignment of the roll and pitch axes to the throttle's little cursor stick which were easily cleared to "none". The aircraft was on the runway with engines running. "Brake" light was red for wheel brakes (parking brake?), <shift><b> released the brakes per the "Common Aircraft Controls" summary. Throttle forward (single axis only, I didn't see any option for dual throttles on a twin engine aircraft). Rotated, lifted off, retracted gear <g>, and... got a master caution due to exceeding vne -> never exceed speed for the current altitude. Apparently, full throttle in an F-14B results in extremely quick acceleration, at least as modeled in this sim. Upon flying around just a minute or two, I figured out real fast that I needed to get TrackIR enabled to really enjoy this aircraft. This is where I hit the brakes! TrackIR is not inherently supported in any way after all of these years. Someone got creative and came up with a basic dll/config that allows use of TrackIR in Windows and someone else revised it to improve it to some extent, but I haven't had the guts to download and install this little hack. TrackIR is compatible with a library for Linux that also works in OSX: so you can easily use TrackIR in Linux or Apple OSX but not Windows! If the hack is actually still available for download (two years from the time the links were posted in a forum), it might work well enough for me to go further in exploring the F-14B in FlightGear v3.4. But as it stands now, this pretty much kills my interest in this sim.

Downloaded the TrackIR hack. Very basic. You run an exe in place of the TrackIR software that communicates between TrackIR and FlightGear using a pair of UDP sockets. Better than nothing, but almost unconfigureable with limited field of view and only support for the hat reflectors. The out-of-box graphics are generally uglier than early SFP1/WoV, but the cockpit is quite clickable and overall systems modeling may be somewhat detailed. Absolutely impressive for a 100% free application. But no substitute for DCS or even SF2NA.

My son loves this, now :) Even played it in HD on my 60" TV for my wife because my son wanted her to see/hear it. She went to bed singing the chorus ;)

Watch the full song, even better! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anM1N5oN-OM

Edge needs to have good enough detail for land combat. So it should be capable of way more ground detail than any existing flight sim... more like OFP/ArmA type shooters. One could only hope that DCS would ultimately allow you to be a first person pilot that walks/rides out to the aircraft, climbs in, and can land/climb out or eject, then interact with the world like a shooter. This obviously isn't needed for jet flight/combat, but is the kind of functionality you need when flying UH-1H and Mi-8 transports to haul troops which could be AI or even other people. DCS will never be the best shooter, but ArmA will never be the best flight simulator. It would be cool if DCS, ArmA, and Steel Beasts could be integrated to have the best of all three sims making all of the fans happy and supporting a much larger community. Another aspect of this video is evidence of how well DCS could compete with FSX for airline mods. I hope they are building a globe that ties all of these terrains together instead of little square patches like SFP1/SF2.

Cool!

I have a pure stock install on a new pc and have no problem with the afterburner emitters. Patched to Jul 2013. We could discuss the issue on the Third Wire forums... oh wait, they have been shut down for quite some time. Or we could discuss it at the Third Wire facebook page... oh wait, there has been nothing but the sound of crickets from TK aside from basic holiday greetings. TK could still surprise us with the last promised expansion and re-open the forums with years of knowledge intact, but I am not holding my breath :( But it has been only just over a year and a half since the last patch. TK could still be squeezing SF2 progress in on the side, but no news last Christmas was a bad sign. No news this coming Christmas will most likely make SF2 a permanently "stable platform" for 3rd party developers. I hope TK is at least eating and sleeping well on the income from mobile gaming.

Excellent read. Tons of good info. I wish I could discuss the classified info with him.

Not something you see everyday. Pretty impressive.

Back to the F-104, based on the v-n diagram, 200 kts IAS is the 1g speed for both sea level and 20,000 ft, so the curves for the F-104 would start at about Mach 0.36 on the color graph. The instantaneous rate would peak at about the same spot as the F-4E.

An interesting point is at Mach 0.8. At 10,000 ft that is about 500 kts, a typical starting point for air-to-air combat, which is commonly evaluated at Mach 0.9. Around that point, the F-14A performs nearly identical to the F-4E in both sustained and instantaneous. Down to Mach 0.5, just over 300 kts, the F-14A's sustained performance is about 20% better than the F-4E, while its instantaneous is about 72% better. The power-to-weight advantage of the F-15C over the F-14A is very apparent from this graph. So only knowing the v-n diagram which establishes instantaneous performance limits doesn't quite tell the whole story. The weight/payload greatly affect performance: the F-16C does not sustain 9gs when the wings are cluttered with missiles and pylons -- too much weight, drag and lost lift. It is a shame the F-14D isn't shown, as it would reflect how simply changing the available thrust greatly affects the same airframe.

The unslatted F-4B can pull more g at a lower speed, which means its instantaneous performance is considerably better than the F-104A/C depicted above. At the same 7.33g load, the F-4 only needs to fly at 420 kts, about compared to the F-104G's 490+ kts. This results in 490/420 = 16% better turn rate. At corner speed, around 445 kts, the F-4 can pull about 8.5g, leading to 8.5/7.33*490/445 = 27% better turn rate. I don't know how accurate the information is, but this graph is way cool. Keep in mind that the slatted F-4E generally turns better than the F-4B by a good margin given how much better the F-4B turns compared to the F-104:

For perspective, consider a clean F-4B at 50% fuel. Since the altitude is at sea level, TAS = CAS = IAS is fairly true, so it is directly comparable to the sea level data above:

Be wary of the limits of the above graph: clean with flaps and gear up... and less than 1,000 lbs of fuel. If you take the total weight with 1,000 lbs of fuel, you can estimate performance with higher fuel loadings by using the weight ratio to reduce the load factor scale on the left. i.e. if the weight is increased by 25% (5/4), then the load factor g's should be 80% (4/5) lower. Note: this load factor reduction also applies to the 7.33g structural limit. In this example, it would now be 0.8 x 7.33g => 5.864g Flaps down should improve the lift curves a bit up to their rated speed, but at the cost of greatly increased drag. Keep in mind, this is not a sustained turn graph, this is the maximum load that can be pulled while the wing is at the max controllable angle of attack, which can be less than the theoretical Clmax angle since the F-104 had control issues at high AoA. The stick pusher system that tries to prevent unstable AoA is the source of the flat spots in the curves. Also keep in mind, the speed is IAS => indicated airspeed, not CAS/TAS, which is useful while flying but harder to read for performance evaluation/comparison. At sea level, IAS is theoretically equal to TAS, so that is a great altitude to derive Clmax information as a function of speed. According to this graph, at sea level, Vc is very close to 500 kts! This is the price of using thin stubby wings to maximize top speed.

This graph for the F-104A should give you an idea of F-104 corner speed (Vc):