streakeagle

It has been on my hard drive since around 6:00 PM EST. Downloaded 1.2.9 pretty fast, too! Sheer pleasure flying this plane.

Purchased... and great fun to fly. It is going to take me a bit of practice to fly effectively enough to beat the MiG-15bis 1vs1.

I think you will find that in nearly every photo of a Sea Harrier during the Falklands, the loadout is two AIM-9s on outboard pylons and two fuel tanks on inboard pylons. Fleet air defense is best performed by an aircraft with a high endurance, which the Harrier is just the opposite, so firepower is sacrificed for more fuel, less drag, and lower weight.

This game ran great maxed out on my old Athlon 64 PC. The colors/lighting are a little odd, but the overall feel and detail were pretty good. It was my favorite rendition of the P-51D until I got the DCS version. I bought two separate licenses on Steam in case my son wanted to play, but he never did.

We aren't dinosaurs, just a very special minority that finds the challenges of flying and air combat to be fun and interesting. Most people find it too boring or too much like work. I have had no success with word of mouth. Despite advocating flight sims since I was in the 9th grade and had a Timex Sinclair 1000 PC, I have only attracted/converted one or two people into combat flight sim fanatics. At best, I can only discover other people who already share my interests... and none of them live anywhere near me. My son is 7. I have raised him with a strong aviation background. At 3 or 4 years old, he could fly and win air races in Redline:XAR2 and take off with a Spitfire and shoot down a dumb circling AI B-24 in offline Aces High. He can name a lot of my models. But he does not love airplanes the way I do and probably never will.

In the cockpit ini --- OpenCockpit=TRUE ExternalClipDistMin=0.05 InternalClipDistMin=0.05 If you are using OpenCockpit, then the above Clip parameters apply. This is a messy solution that can cause problems, but if you get the values correct, it can help in some situations.

What ED has repeatedly taught me: You can buy at release for $50, or wait 2-4 weeks and get 20-40% off. So, if you like donating money to ED or just can't wait 2-4 weeks, buy at release. Of course, if you can wait for the next seasonal sale (which might only be another 2-4 weeks away from the first sale), you get 50-80% off. I remember when the original IL-2 hit the shelves in Best Buy. It was $50 and it stayed at that price for YEARS. So, are DCS new release sales so bad that they have to tank the price within a month to get the volume up to a useful level? But it is kind of a chick/egg thing. Once the crowd knows how the pricing scheme is working, they just wait for the drop. By waiting, the release sales are low and ED drops the price quickly. Sounds like a vicious loop that ends with the company going out of business. Maybe they should price their finished and/or beta products like a kickstarter scheme. You can pay the low price and you get the product, but if you pay more, you get a cool forum title, a credit in the game and/or manual, a printed manual, t-shirts, etc. They just better make sure the reward costs less than the increase in payment. Clearly, RRG needed to be told that!

I had already bought everything available when ED gave the last bonuses... and they expired before anything new was released. I pre-paid for the MiG-21bis and DCS:WW2, so that leaves me with the F-86F, but I still have a coupon ED awarded to compensate those who bought the helos at release only to have the price drop dramatically 2 weeks later. I don't mind paying full price to help support ED, but giving me a bonus and then taking it away before I can use it isn't a very smart way to do business!

Phantom's Phorever! My dad was a saxophone player in the band on the USS America in the mid to late '60s. What a job as an enlisted? Play music and drink with the officers. He loved the RA-5 Vigilante the best. I believe he did a Med cruise and got out before the America went to Vietnam. I need to get more details from him.

I got my F2H-2 manual today. While it doesn't have the performance data that more modern aircraft have, it still has a lot of great stuff. The immediately useful information is loadout data: The two innermost hardpoints rated for 500 lb bombs, all other points rated for 250 lb bombs and smaller. If 500 lb bombs are carried, the other pair of hardpoints next to them cannot be used (as is visually obvious). Of course it is strongly suggested that loads be symmetrical. So any combination of rockets/bombs that doesn't violate the weight limit or the above rules is possible. If the above photo is 250 lb bombs, then 6 bombs is probably the loadout as that hits the 1,500+ lb weight limit.

Hope you are happy! It was a big jump for me to go from the AMD Athlon 64 single core Venice to the Intel Core I5. I built the AMD back in 2005. It still works pretty well with a HD7870 gpu for any games that don't benefit from multi-core or modern RAM speeds. The Intel Core I5 runs everything pretty well. What I really want is a 50" quad HD TV (3840x2160 pixels) that supports a 60 Hz or better refresh rate AND a PC that can run all my games at that resolution and refresh rate without using a multi-gpu setup. For now the 46" 1080p HD TV is doing the job pretty well and my current PC can hit 60 fps with most games even if it can't stay at that frame rate during "busy" situations.

The DCS F-86F appears to be the "hard wing" -- no slats. Great on paper, but slats eventually came back for a number of reasons. While looking for "hard wing" vs "soft wing" for the F-86F, I found this very cool write-up: http://sabre-pilots.org/classics/v21gunnery.htm Lots of good info, but I liked this: I have the F-86F flight manual. It is very clear on the issue of slats vs unslatted: slats lower the stall speed vs weight/altitude graph curves by 15 knots across the board AND more importantly, unslatted aircraft are not as friendly at high AoA: turbulence, yaw, roll, depart with little warning. Hopefully, the DCS:F-86F models high AoA behavior accurately as I want the challenge of the hard wing if that's what they are providing. Of course, I would love to see more F-86 variants from the F-86A to the various blocks of F-86F. But I will take what I can get.

I am not sure which aircraft I am looking forward to flying more: the MiG-21bis or the F-86F. I am going to love both.

Love this. Best part is seeing the Enterprise in a configuration similar to Vietnam CVAN-65 with the square tower with billboard radar and cone on top at 3:14.

Check this China Lake test out: This is the 8xrocket loadout. I watched a video showing 4xrockets being loaded on the belly pylons and I have also seen 250/100 lb bombs on both inboard and outboard pylons. But I can't find any description of a "typical" loadout for specific mission types. Are these 250 lb or 100 lb? I am guessing 250 lb.

I flew the Meteor a bit... I had forgotten that it was now a stock flyable! By feel, I think I like the RAZBAM F2H-2 FM better as a starting point, but IF I start working on this, I may develop parallel solutions and see which one gets me closer to real world performance. Even IF I work on this, it will be a LONG time before I have anything to release for testing comments. No one should get their hopes up! I have to work on this during the wee hours of the night and lose sleep to make any useful progress once I actually start to plot/analyze/develop an FM. If it is any consolation... I bought the flight manual online... still waiting for a download link.

You have to figure ED was between a rock and a hard place: let the project fail and it could almost completely kill their business OR finish the project and honor the original awards and go bankrupt. Even with the compromised position they have taken, it is a huge risk if only the original backers buy into it. BUT despite all the banter about RRG being completely independent and at fault, it was ED's job to realize that supporting this project would lead to the rock and hard place and yet they proudly backed it... Apparently, caught by surprise in what was claimed to be possible versus what could actually be done? DCS aircraft are fantastic, but I have to wonder if ED is going to be able to stay afloat if they didn't fully understand what RRG was offering and backed them anyway. I was never involved with IL2:COD and didn't know much about Luthier, so when people started arguing with him on forums about the viability of his DCS WW2 proposal, I learned fast and realized this was an extremely risky Kickstarter deal. But the possibility of getting 4, 5, or even more aircraft for the price of one was too good a deal to pass up. Just like the money I ponied up for the MiG-21bis, I accepted the fact that I might as well be flushing it down the toilet. I would be doing pretty good if either crowd funded project panned out to any extent. So, I have always been prepared for the worst. What is frustrating is how everything was made to look okay other than the frequency of the reports. Despite my rational thoughts on the odds of success when placing my bet at the beginning, it is hard to get your hope up and have them dashed. As it stands, the final deal is pretty fair as long as ED survives to honor the "New Deal". Like it or not, WW2 is by far the most popular combat flight sim theme. If DCS succeeds in this genre, they will probably make as much money as possible for a hard core combat flight sim developer. As always, all I can do is wait... and hope that someone finally gives me a hard core F-4 vs MiG-21 sim (looks like the MiG-21 half is pretty damn close to being done!).

Now I see why you were concerned about the size of the case! It fits?

Wrench, I integrated your contributions into what I already had and it works great! Love the skins and all the other tweaks. About the only thing I differed on was the loadout and data ini for the hardpoints. I have seen photos which confirm the layout my model airplane has: the wing mounts are really the same as the intake mounts (exact same rails). All can mount bombs or rockets. The only limits are the wing strength, stability, and maximum safe payload. From photos, it appears bombs up to 250 lbs can be and were carried on the wing pylons. But 8 x 250 lb bombs is 500 lbs too heavy to take off.

Okay, I have done some preliminary research to see how to get started on making a decent FM. I like to start with a stock Third Wire FM. At a minimum, TK makes a flyable FM player friendly. After reviewing all the stock SF2 aircraft, it looks like only two aircraft are comparable in layout (Canberra and Meteor) and only one is close to the right size (Meteor). I need to evaluate the "feel" of the Meteor FM and see how the performance compares to the published Meteor F.8 data. The Meteor F.8 has very similar performance. F.8 has more thrust, more wing area, and lower weight, which leads to higher speeds, better, climb, and maybe even better turn performance. But don't underestimate the F2H-2. It has a slightly higher service ceiling with wing tanks, despite lower thrust and less wing area. Its longer wingspan/higher aspect ratio and blended engines/intakes are key factors -> Better lift to drag ratio, with more lift and less drag. At Korean War high altitudes, the F2H-2 would easily be the better aircraft with better turn, acceleration, and climb rate as fuel burns off (the empty weights are comparable, it is fuel which makes the F2H-2 heavier). If the F.8 FM is decent, it may be the perfect starting point to dial in total lift, total drag, and engine power. But I need a lift slope curve. At what AoA does the Banshee hit maximum lift? I have means to estimate the slope and max, but I would rather have the exact numbers. I have ordered a flight manual online, but at that time, it may not have the information I seek. Even as easy as this aircraft appears to be, building an accurate FM is work. I may chicken out before I get very far. I still have the ground work for an XB-70 flight model, but never had the motivation to finish importing the data into SF. I wish I could do this for a living. Or maybe not! Really, I just want to fly the actual aircraft or simulated aircraft with hyper-realistic FMs as opposed to doing the work myself. This is where DCS comes in. I don't even check the DCS FMs, I just enjoy all their complexity/detail despite any accuracy limitations. In other words, I am too old for the modding sh!t, I just want to fly!

While it will be hot outside, it is considerably more pleasant to be there at this time of year than at Christmas. I have been there during summers and winters, I will take summers every time!

The Skyhawk has been a work in progress that I was following in the DCS forums, but it is now publicly associated with VEAO. If the VEAO Hawk is any indication of the kind of product the A-4C Skyhawk will be, we are in for a treat. However, for me, the most important part is the flight model. The Hawk will be released with an SFM. I don't know how much time and effort it will take VEAO to develop its own EFM comparable to an ED PFM. I can only hope the Skyhawk will follow the same path: release it with an SFM to get it into players' hands then offer a PFM quality EFM as an addon when it becomes available. This business model may work better for 3rd parties, at least until they can get a handle on building detailed and accurate EFMs. For comparison, Belsimtek has gone straight for the PFM on its helos and provided the PFM for the F-15C. So, it is possible to produce/release PFM quality from the start with a bit of debugging after the beta release. So, overall, I am optimistic about the possibility of a DCS:A-4C Skyhawk from VEAO with the realization that there isn't even any kind of projected release date. I hope somewhere along the way a MiG-17F, even as an AI-only enemy, joins the party to provide a suitable opponent. Of course, the AI MiG-15 bis being supplied as an enemy of the F-86F will have to do in the mean time. Is it too much to ask for a Vietnam era aircraft carrier and terrain? I have visions of having the scope of Wings Over Vietnam combined with the detail/realism of DCS. DCS:Vietnam? Of course, I may be long dead and cremated by the time Edge and 3rd party terrains are released!

That is the document I had already stumbled into while searching for loadout details ;) It has quite a few numbers that are extremely useful if you know all the constraints used to qualify them. Unpowered stall speed gives a great estimate of CLmax at that speed, the only question is with or without flaps deployed. I wish it would include both so that I could figure out how effective the flaps are.

If you take the total MiG-15 claims by US pilots of 792 and divide it by the 78 Sabre losses admitted by the USAF, you get an overall kill ratio of 10:1. Of course, MiG pilots claimed to have killed about 600 Sabres. When you read detailed histories, the kill ratio bounced up and down throughout the war from quarter to quarter as tactics and hardware evolved. The ratio was actually going against the USAF towards the end when the MiG-15 pilots had perfected attacking patrols just as they were getting low on fuel and heading for home. If the Wiki entry is accurate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_F-86_Sabre Not having read either of those sources, consider the implications if both of those 2:1 estimates are correct. Assume the US is correct in assessing 78 losses in air-to-air, then F-86 pilots only shot down at most 156 MiGs. From my studies of Vietnam losses that have been supplemented by the other side's data, I would bet that the USAF always assumed a loss was anything but an air-to-air kill unless a first hand eye witness said otherwise. Pilots that are shot down don't always know how they got shot down or don't survive even if they knew. In Vietnam, air-to-air kills were relatively rare compared to AAA and SAMs, so if in doubt, it could be assumed that a missile hit was a SAM or a cannon hit was AAA. Not only was that a legitimate assumption, it also has the added benefit of making the air-to-air kill ratio look a bit better than it might otherwise be. I would be curious to know exactly how those two references arrived at a 2:1 ratio. I am buying the Osprey book [32] to find out ;) Suddenly all those years of having the "10:1" in Korea versus the "2:1" in Vietnam have been erased. While the kill ratio in Vietnam could have and should have been better, it is suddenly no worse than Korea historically. By the way, the RAND report is interesting and can be read here: http://www.mossekongen.no/downloads/2008_RAND_Pacific_View_Air_Combat_Briefing.pdf

I am thinking about looking at it. I have a climb rate curve that theoretically gives me specific excess power which gives me T-D/W at max thrust and I have a max speed curve that gives me T-D = 0 at max thrust and max speed. Just enough data to make useful estimates of thrust and drag versus altitude. I don't know if I have enough data to figure out CLmax (max lift), but given T, D, and W and the ceiling, I can estimate it. As this aircraft is marginally transonic in level flight, I don't have to worry about complex lift/drag/stability issues. It has been a long time since I worked on this, and it is a lot of work... but I am thinking about it.