streakeagle

While I already have MS FSX plus Accelerator, this is too good a buy to pass up to get the convenience of a Steam install. If A2A simulations ever jumps on board the Tac Pack train, and/or other 3rd parties attract me with equivalent releases, I will be ready ;)

When I first got DCS P-51D, the only viable AI opponent available was another P-51D. It took me awhile to figure out how to manage my energy as well or better as the AI and consistently win. The arrival of the Fw190D9 created a whole new challenge. DCS AI loves to fight in the vertical and can hang on a prop easier and possibly better than a human player. So, I had to improve my vertical game even more to beat the Fw190D9 while the P-51D owned the horizontal game if the AI could be pushed in that direction. Now enter the Bf109K4. Equals or betters the P-51D in the horizontal and stomps it beyond all recognition in the vertical. I don't know if any amount of practice will ever allow me to beat the Excellent AI at 1vs1. I know the AI's weakness: rolling scissors. But the 109 keeps booming and zooming even after I win a scissors angle fight. It is funny, I can beat an F-15 with a MiG-21, but I can't get a Bf109 with a P-51.

A cool crossing shot -- short burst = flaming dead Bf109K4 :)

It is supposed to be 100% FSX gold with some minor fixes to support Win 8.1 and the loss of gamespy for multiplayer. While intended to be 100% compatible with existing FSX addons, they can't guarantee it due to the install differences when using Steam, particularly directory paths vs the installers used by third parties. I have FSX and Acceleration (and almost never use it), so I have very little interest in the Steam release, but I might get it anyway just in case for the future.

My son loves any plane with a shark mouth, especially A-10s and P-40s. Can't say I disagree with him, though I prefer F-4Es :)

First, you could go the Prepar3d route. 2nd, maybe you didn't know FSX is about to be released on steam: http://www.dovetailgames.com/news/2014/dec/9/dovetail-games-clears-microsoft-flight-simulator-x-steam-edition-for-takeoff-on-december-18

Pre-order complete... but I keep building up bonus credit but never can use it since I buy the betas. Maybe use the bonus for upcoming WW2 fighters (Spit, Thud, etc.) or DCS 2 maps?

I basically stopped online flying when my son was born. I got to fly a few more times with my SFP1/WoX friends whenever I traveled out of town. But once I got a new job where I was home every night, online gaming was not an option. Years later, my son is much more independent and both he an my wife typically go to bed fairly early. I am in a new house (for nearly a year, so not so new) where I have my own isolated PC room (an upstairs "bonus" room in a single story house). So voice chat should be an option without any problems. Tonight, I dipped my toe in the DCS online. I saw a server labeled "F-86 test" and joined that one. The F-86 is the perfect DCS aircraft for me to mix it up with real people. Even on full realism settings, it is almost as easy to fly as an SF2 aircraft. There are a few more buttons/switches for selecting weapons, gunsights, etc., but aside from the difficulty of landing, I can already fly the DCS F-86F as well or better as I can the SF2 F-86F. I picked a base/aircraft, joined, performed a cold start (almost as easy as pushing a single button in SF2, just a few more clicks), requested permission to taxi, requested permission to take off, and launched into the air. I found the nearest player flying another F-86 and joined formation. I had fun just trying to fly formation and barrel rolling around him. Then he says to be aware MiG-15's are intercepting us. About that time, he crashed into the ground for some unknown reason. I pick up the MiG-15s on my tail visually and engage them. I takes me a moment to shift gears from playful formation flying to kill or be killed flying. I calm down, arm the guns, and settle on which one I am going to engage first. While lining up on the first one, the other one got a few hits on me. But I killed my first target and reversed into the second one. I stalled to get the shot, but took him down with relative ease. I would guess the AI MiG pilots were the lowest rank, "Average", but they could have been one rank higher. I saw my fuel was low, landed at the nearest base, refueled and rearmed with my canopy open and admiring the view. DCS multiplayer is everything SFP1/WoX multiplayer wasn't. People came and went in the middle of this open co-op mission. The AI kept going as well. I could start from the ground, parked and ready to perform a full cold start and also land for fuel and ammo. If SF2 had multiplayer this good, it could rule the market with its planeset and modability (if mainstream people actually knew about it and how easy and fun it could be). It won't be long before the MiG-21bis is released. I will fly offline for quite a while having fun learning the systems and air combat handling qualities. Then I will come back looking for F-15Cs to kill :) Shot of other player I had originally flown with in formation:

There are tradeoffs. If you use a big screen and stick to 1080p, you can see pixels and some gauges may be a little blurry if you make the game's field of view match the real world field of view. If you try to do 2160p (UHD / 4K) to dramatically improve the image, you may run into several problems: 1) Can your hardware run the game at a decent frame of rate (i.e. 60 Hz) with quality features like anti-aliasing enabled? 2) Does your interface between you PC and the monitor support 4K? At 60 Hz? A lot of 4K TV's can't do more than 30 Hz through their HDMI ports and don't have a display port interface that can do UHD at more than 30 Hz. 1080p will give you better frame rates for a much lower cost for all hardware involved, especially modern LED LCD TVs.

If you are going for realism, you need a MachTableDeltaX of 0.05 or less with the corresponding increase in TableNumData. CD0 should be flat from low to mid subsonic speeds with a sharp climb at the critical mach. A deltax of .1 is too large a jump to accurately show the critical mach and steep rise in drag just before it. This is what the CD0 graph looks like for an F-4, comparing NASA data versus SF2 stock data and my own proposed data:

I will say this: Column5 did everything within the limits of the game engine and his own mathematical abilities to match the behavior in the F-101 flight manual. I have always enjoyed the results and wouldn't change a thing unless I had reliable/accurate real world data that contradicted his work.

Did you see the icon... just "add" that little fee to your cart ;) If I was single, I would do it in a heartbeat!

Sabre's rule. As for the view changing: It is supposed to be elevating the seat when the wheels are down and lowering the seat when you retract the gear to make seeing over the nose easier. I don't see the "zoom" effect that you are seeing, possibly because I have "zoom" mapped to my HOTAS slider? When I first start the game with any aircraft, the zoom goes out uncontrollably to the max field of view. Then I bring it back to default with the "F1" function and/or use my slider to get the zoom I want. After that, the zoom only changes when I command it to change.

Nice tribute! Images and music aside... what I got out of the video was the stock F-4 engine sound and "One, two's airborne!". I heard those engines for countless hours and that call from my wingman countless times. There is still no better sim for flying an F-4 in combat than Third Wire's Strike Fighters series. There are only two other sims or more correctly sim engines I know of that even came close: Jane's Fighters Anthology (previously Naval Fighters) and Jane's USAF (previously IAF). But Chuck Yeager's Air Combat deserves an honorary mention as the first sim I ever played that let me shoot down a MiG with an F-4 :)

The Su-27 is pretty much the only one I bother to trim. All the others I can think of require minimal effort to move the stick just a tiny bit... if you don't count helos, which have that special trim function to relieve stick pressure.

I got some time in the with the new Su-27 PFM tonight. I see what you mean about having to trim a lot of pitch down. It seems when an aircraft gets a PFM, it also gets better damage modeling. In the run up to FC3's release, I had played a bunch of FC2 as the F-15C vs MiG-29 and Su-27 in guns only DACT. Once FC3 was released, I continued doing so and did a lot of the reverse: MiG-29 or Su-27 vs F-15C or F-16C in guns only DACT. It amazed me how many cannon rounds it took to down a fighter, even using the 30mm of the MiG-29/Su-27. Somewhere along the way, the effectiveness of cannons seemed to improve a bit, especially the 30mm. But now that the F-15C has PFM, the Su-27's 30mm was dropping the Eagle with a single minimal burst no matter where I hit... as it should be. Likewise, the F-15C no longer has to dump multiple bursts in the Su-27 to take it down. Whereas, the F-16C can still survive multiple 30mm hits. I can watch chunks fly off if I hit the fuselage without destroying the engine and I can punch a hole in the wing that makes a fuel leak. That's not very fair for the F-16 to be like a tank compared to the F-15 and Su-27. Of course, if it still goes down easier than I remember back when I was playing FC2, so it's not that bad. Just annoying. Also: I wish the wheel brakes on the Su-27 were modeled more realistically. I don't know if they work like the MiG-21 or have pedal brakes like US planes, but either way having an axis (or two) to apply brakes would be nice.

I was spoiled with Age of Sail 2 Privateer's Bounty... moddable with massive number of hulls to choose from and almost every historical and/or hypothetical battle I would want to recreate already programmed. If the graphics of this new game were simply merged with AoS2, I would really be impressed. As it stands, this looks like a great game, but I don't know about role playing stuff. I just want a decent sim where I can set up a particular scenario and play it out.

I have wondered why no one has done a modern update to Age of Sail 2. Of course the one ship I wanted was there... the Constitution. But I would love to see a lot more hulls available.

The graphics were never great... even a step backwards from SFP1's dated looking terrain engine. But XAR, its descendent Redline XAR 2, and Thunder Over Vegas were still fun and unique. So here is what the fire fighting simulation looked like:

The programmer that did Xtreme Air Racing and a Thunderbirds simulator also did a professional firefighting pilot training simulator. I always wondered why he didn't reuse the code to sell as a commercial game. And the answer is yes. If a decent simulator with a variety of aircraft that I like was made, I would enjoy trying to fight fires. I would prefer realism, but a theatrical release that played on sight and sound immersion with a slant towards the movie, "Always", would be ok, too.

Short but sweet... really liked it! I fell in love with sci-fi author Poul Anderson in the 10th grade after reading one of his short stories. Your story is much shorter, yet just as powerful. It would be cool if you could expand that ability into full length short stories or even novels and get paid decent bucks for doing something you love :) If you are going to write, you need to plan for the worst: total rejection, but hope for the best: Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings level franchise!

Looks like a really cool museum!

I am in the process of developing a MiG-21bis combat range similar to the online multiplayer mission I enjoyed so much for the F-86F. For several weeks, I have been trying to get the waypoints and commands correct for B-52s to take off, form up, and carpet bomb an air base. I now have 6 B-52s take off from the same base, climb to 30,000 feet and cruising at 450 knots with one 3-plane "vee" trailing another 3-plane "vee". When the AI doesn't act up, they drop all their bombs at almost the same time and blow the hell out of the runway, taxiway, and ramp from one end of the base to the other. So, now my MiG-21bis targets are ready... I go up as fast as I can from a cold ramp start. I intercept the lead formation just as they are hitting their peak altitude and formed into a "vee". I take the formation leader out with 2xSARH AA-2C Atoll. I take his right wingman with 2xIRM AA-2D Atoll. I run down his left wingman and take him down with the 23mm cannon. Despite having little ammo left, I catch the second "vee" before they have reached their target. I close to point blank and the AI has two B-52s crossing in front of me. I score hits on both and kill one of them. I am now out of ammo. With a little more patience/practice, I would not have spent as much ammo on the first gun kill and might have been able to kill the remaining two B-52s. Lessons learned: 1. Late model Atolls are quite effective in DCS World. 2. It usually takes at least two Atolls to down a B-52 between the small warhead and decoys. 2. B-52s are extremely vulnerable to gunfire, especially when the wings and belly are loaded with Mk82 bombs. 3. Without tail guns, the B-52s cannot repel gun attacks -- they are sitting ducks for cannon armed supersonic fighters. 4. The DCS MiG-21bis eats B-52s for breakfast as the original MiG-21 design was intended. I want to add a lot more things to this mission besides B-52s on a short range carpet bombing run. When I am done, there should be as many things to do as the F-86 Combat Range: 1. Fighter intercepts of escorted bombers. 2. Fighter sweeps leading to pure dogfights. 3. Ground attacks against armor. 4. Helo attack and rescue/transport missions. I intend to provide assets for players to play on both sides. Blue flyable fighters will include a pair of F-15Cs, but mostly F-86s. Red flyable fighters will include a pair of Su-27s, but mostly MiG-21bis. But given the time it took me to figure out how to get the AI to behave half decently with B-52 formations, it might be awhile before I try hosting anything publicly.

In the current revision of SF2NA, I use AA-2Ds and AA-8s with ease. They seem to work as well as the equivalent AIM-9D series. The version of the B-52H in DCS World has no tail guns, only electronics in the tail. Both the AA-2C SARH and AA-2D IRM appear to ignore the chaff/flares of the B-52H more than 50% of the time, but it is hard to say as sometimes the decoyed missiles explode close enough to do proximity damage. The wings on the B-52 (as with other DCS aircraft) appear to be easy to destroy. One direct hit plus one proximity hit seems to make the wing fold every time. Never having seen real numbers for decoy effectiveness, I can't say how realistic those numbers are, but for gameplay as a MiG-21bis pilot, works for me ;)

Unforgettable movies from my childhood that I have now shared with my son :)