streakeagle

Hint: Read the column on the right of the Osprey book cover.

My wife decided not to go last year, but we have confirmed tickets for this year. She is going to run the 1/2 Marathon. I get to spend 1 or more days at the museum plus whatever else we can find to do in the Dayton area. I think we will be at the airport by noon on Thursday and return home Sunday evening, so we should have plenty of time to browse the museum in spite of her running engagement. I have been there only once, but what a grand trip it was. The XB-70 and X-3 made it unique (superior?) compared to the Smithstonian. I just finished Olds' autobiography. He was an amazing individual and did so many things that I loved and respected. But he failed on the home front. He put his career almost completely ahead of his family and chose a Hollywood actress for a wife who refused to support him and had many of the problems that Hollywood people have. Having briefly attended and resigned from West Point myself, I enjoyed Olds' comments about it. He had it made, only had to endure 2 years of that before graduating and getting trained to fly P-38s. Unlike some of the aces (i.e. Steve Ritchie and Randy Cunningham), he seemed to be a down to earth person respectful of everyone around him rather than focused on his own image and legend. The contrast between the way the military worked back then and now is just way too funny. They lost planes to training or lack thereof at amazing rates from WW2 right up to the late 1950s. Olds hopped into planes and flew them with little or no ground training. He did informal formation air shows, sometimes with losses. He wanted to see what it was like to depart an F-4 with adverse yaw in his very brief conversion training. He fell from about 30,000 feet down to 10,000 before finding a way to recover. I still wish stock Thirdwire SF unslatted F-4s properly exhibited this behavior. I want DCS level F-4 Phantoms so badly! Olds seems to have preferred the P-51 to the P-38, but apparently loved the F-4 more than anything else he had flown. I don't know if performance and handling was much of a factor. I think he simply preferred whatever aircraft he happened to be flying when he was having good experiences and he appears to have enjoyed his time flying F-4s in Vietnam more than anything else in his life.

I envy you ;) I could use dimensions to the nearest mm for everything you have pictured on the left throttle console and the main/center panels. I have the wood waiting for me to make the gear/flaps position aux panel for the front of my throttle console, but I don't want to draw/cut anything until I am sure about the size. I have accurate drawings, but only approximate scale. Combined with real numbers, I can get a lot more things done much more accurately. But I should be able to get some if not most of the numbers I want myself in September, so don't waste your time helping me unless you have nothing better to do than dimension photos of old F-4 panels ;)

That is where I got the survival pack/lower cushion, lumbar/upper cushion, and parachute pack. But my original goal was to make a much cheaper wood "sport" scale seat rather than build a complete real seat. Not having a real seat handy to get some measurements I missed while in Pensacola, I cheated by buying nearly $600 worth of real parts, raising the total price quite a bit. Now that I have actual dimensions, I may build another one purely of wood with home-made cushions for my son. I used thick high-grade wood for most of the structure to make it durable enough, so the cost for just the seat as it is about $800 or $900, with the console about $1,000. Of course a complete real seat in good shape is $5,000 or more. If I build a 2nd one, I may try cheaper materials and try to keep the finished cost of just the seat to about $300-$400. The price of decent seat cushion foam is fairly high, but I can get my mom to sew up the seat covers to save some money there. Eliminating the survival pack and using just wood also allows the seat to become decent storage space with a fliptop lid. I could keep unused/extra peripherals and cables neatly stored under my butt ;) I bought two highly reputed 1/32 scale seats to make my initial plans, but discovered they were very inaccurate in some dimensions. I am supposed to go to Dayton, Ohio in September so my wife can run a 1/2 marathon and I can visit Dave's USAF Museum. I may get even more accurate numbers for even closer to scale wooden plans. I really want proper throttles. I would prefer real ones, but they are extremely rare on eBay and when they do appear, the bidding will easily go outside my budget. So, I want some good measurements that I can use to scale up some photos I have of the complete mechanicals hidden by the console. Proper rudder pedals adjusted by a handcrank like the real ones would be nice, too!

It is a great idea to create your own monster and write your own stories. In fact, if your Godzilla story is sizable and doesn't expressly depend on the Godzilla background history, you might consider adapting it to your own monster rather than giving it away as fan fiction.

Love all the Godzilla pics. Great to see you having some fun, too.

With AFM and 3d cockpit, the only thing I don't like about the A-10A is that the wheel brakes only have the simple button press for max braking power rather than toe pedal axis controls. With the AFM for the Su-27 and F-15C, FC3 becomes a really great bargain: 4 flyables at near DCS quality balanced with one attack and one fighter for opposing sides. If it just had a map location similar to WOE/SF2E (i.e. Germany!), it would almost be perfect. I hope all of the FC3 aircraft eventually become fully modeled DCS level aircraft, but for the time being this will do nicely.

Flaming Cliffs 3 is an extension of LOMAC and requires the purchaser to have a valid LOMAC install. These separate aircraft modules are at the Flaming Cliffs level of systems fidelity, but do not require the purchaser to have LOMAC. So, if you are a long time LOMAC fan, you win by getting Flaming Cliffs 3. If on the other hand, you are a DCS World newbie, you can forget about buying LOMAC then FC3 and only buy the particular aircraft you want to fly. As I already have FC3, I gain the cockpits and flight models of the new modules for no additional cost which is a great reward for having bought LOMAC/FC/FC2 over the years. I can see the benefits to ED with this two-tier aircraft complexity model: 1) get an aircraft in the player's hands as fast as possible with Flaming Cliffs simplified systems modeling. 2) eventually provide full blown DCS level systems modeling as time/money permits. As long as I don't get knifed for buying the FC level module first, I am more than ok with this strategy since it means more flyables faster without giving up the DCS level systems simulation. With this approach, the F/A-18C could have already been available at the FC level.

I have all the RAZBAM SF planes and would really appreciate updated LODs without shadow problems. I was always sad that RAZBAM got out of the SF market, but happy to see them in the DCS market.

The USAF Museum displays Robin Olds' SCAT XXVII with AIM-9s and bombs. This isn't a mistake despite the lack of photos of USAF F-4s carrying both at the same time. When Olds requested to have the F-4Ds retrofitted with AIM-9s after he confirmed the dismal performance of the AIM-4s, he also asked for some sort of spacers to be shoehorned in to allow simultaneous carriage. I don't know if he was aware of the Navy's use of this configuration (were they even doing that in this time frame? don't recall). But it made sense to him and he personally tested firing the AIM-9s with bombs still attached before allowing the configuration to be used in combat. Olds also turned off his RWR gear. He felt all the beeps and flashing lights were just a distraction given the false alarm rate and the fact that they were almost continuously painted with radars the whole time they were in the combat/target area. Even after F-4Ds showed up with much better RWR equipment, he still left it turned off. He preferred visually searching/tracking/evading SAMs.

I love all of the human powered flying machines and adding a helicopter to the list of successes is fantastic! Thanks for the link! Leonardo Da Vinci is smiling. I wonder what he would have accomplished if he had access to our materials and CAD software. The closest modern equivalent in US aviation is Burt Rutan, but aerospace was just one facet of Da Vinci whereas that is all Burt Rutan ever focused on.

Finally made some progress. I have tried to get the upper ejection handles on ebay twice and failed to win the auction. I could spend a lot of money ordering from the same site that had the survival kit, parachute pack, and cushion. Or I could fabricate an imitation.

Found some more info on USAF F-4s and wing mounted AIM-7s at an old website I used to frequent: http://www.webring.org/l/rd?ring=vv;id=87;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwebspace%2Ewebring%2Ecom%2Fpeople%2Fhu%2Fum_688%2F It is a site created by an F-4 tech that maintained the WCS and here is his FAQ that provides some additional insight: Eight: Four AIM-7E/F and four AIM-9M. Early F-4Cs could carry two additional AIM-7Ds, one on each outboard station, in place of wing tanks. ( They had a TG-76 single-station tuning drive inside the special pylon. All series had a small RF window about half-way out on the leading edge of the wing to support outboard AIM-7s, even though the capability had been removed.) Prior to 1974 or so, the larger AIM-4D Falcon missiles were used in place of AIM-9s, ( except for PACAF aircraft ). So, it is originally all about the pylon. Can't use the AIM-7 without a TG-76 regardless of control panel switches. But note that he is talking about carrying 2 x AIM-7 on the outer pylons instead of fuel tanks.

I doubt a plane with more elegant lines will ever be designed. Looks great in that paint scheme, too.

Sorry... didn't notice it was in the "What If" section... picked it up from the front page.

Source?

Read that a long time ago. This book was in the library in the aviation section at USF. I would skip boring lectures and study aerodynamics, radar, and jet propulsion theory in the library. "The Man Who Rode Thunder" caught my eye. What an amazing story.

Cuts can be made more carefully and efficiently. But certain leaders are intentionally choosing to make the cuts as painful as possible.

I just installed the latest available SF2 Flagon TM today and was reminded that it has a few bugs to fix. My download is old, but I think I downloaded it 2 months after the date on the version posted here in the new and improved SF2 Downloads section. So, I think it needs to be updated. Missile texture files for AA-3's do not match the lod. Afterburner emitter doesn't work because it is missing one line. The cockpit is nowhere near the correct position relative to the external 3d model. I easily fixed all of those problems. The flight model could use some work, but I have neither the time nor the data to fix that.

The limitations were tremendous. But Co-op could still have been pretty good if all 16 slots could be filled by real people. Despite my best attempts to gather a crowd, I don't think I ever saw more than 6 to 8 on a Co-op mission. No one else could join after a mission was started and once you died you were out, combine that with the connectivity/stability issues and you were lucky to keep 4 people together for an entire co-op mission. The dogfight mode was far better due to its flexibility. If someone had a problem, they could disconnnect, fix the problem, and rejoin the same session. If you died, you respawned. I think the record number of people online at one time on a single dogfight server was 12 as far as I know. I took a screenshot showing all the names in the briefing chat room and posted it back then. If you could get 16 people to show up for a dogfight server, but have them split into teams and form up before a dogfight, that would have been the way to play co-op. Of course, that wouldn't allow for any air-to-ground, but it would be the best way to have great fights with no AI. Unlike co-op, you could do something like pit 4xF-4Bs or F8Es vs 12 x MiG-17s or other odd ratios of interest. Oh well, it was not meant to be. Maybe DCS will eventually fill that niche of an any era online co-op or team air combat simulator.

Whenever there is a topic about which sims are the best, the IL-2 series always gets touted as the best WW2 combat flight sim. For multiplayer, I personally much prefer Aces High, though you have to pay a monthly fee and either play in a wild-n-crazy arena or have to wait for special historical scenarios. For offline play, I think Battle of Britain 2 is the best. Aside from not having multiplayer, it has great graphics, is very detailed/realistic, and is amazingly immersive. The AI is among the best I have ever played against and there is everything from single missions to full-blown strategic campaigns. Unlike IL-2, I feel like I am in the middle of WW2: there are planes everywhere, the tracers don't look like cartoons or lasers, the radio chatter sounds fairly good, and the carnage resulting from a massive, escorted German bomber raid mixing it up with British interceptors is impressive. When I take hits, I feel them. There is smoke and fire everywhere on the ground from bomb attacks and downed aircraft. Only one other game has given me the awesome sight of a sky full of hundreds of planes (Aces High 2). It is practically a study sim complete with clickable 3d cockpits and engine management, but is at its best in simulating the complete Battle of Britain. Originally, to play a campaign, you had to act as the overall strategic commander as well as fly any missions that interested you. The latest patch gives you the ability to simply fly the missions assigned to you. Of course, the results of your missions still impact the overall campaign dynamics. Despite awesome graphics, the IL-2 series has never really caught my interest. I every game in the series except the latest 1946, but I hesitate to buy that since I have never spent more than a few hours playing the other versions. Whatever it is that seems to be missing from IL-2 appears to have been captured by BoB2. My one hope is that some day they finally get around to giving MiG Alley the same treatment. I love MiG Alley even more than the original BoB, so naturally I expect that I would enjoy MiG Alley 2 more than BoB2. That's saying alot given that after years of playing combat flight sims, playing BoB2 leaves me feeling shock and awe with every massive air battle. Perhaps some day the Flying Tigers sim based on this engine will be released. If that day every comes, they have my money. I don't know if anyone could pry my fingers from my joystick if I could fly P-40Bs over Burma with the same level of detail/immersion/realism as BoB2. If multiplayer support is ever added and well implemented, this could end up being one of the greatest flight sims of all time.

I was flying BoB2 every night for a while, alternating between Spitfire and Bf109. The 109 is challenging to get started and off the ground quickly with a good verbal rating from the instructor. The 109 is hard pressed to beat the Spitfire in this sim, it takes a lot more patience and skill against a max Ace/Hero AI Spit. Whereas, I can beat an Ace/Hero 109 consistently even if I fly a little sloppy or make a mistake. Developments in DCS : World redirected my focus, but find the AI in BoB2 much more challenging and interesting than DCS : World. If I loved flying Spitfires and/or 109s as much as I love F-4s/MiG-21s, I would probably spend all my time flying BoB2. For me, the age of the game is a non-issue. The graphics are adequate and the flight model and AI are top notch. The clickable cockpits are icing on the cake, and I love having icing on my cake!

I am guessing you can't mix DX10 graphics with DX9 DirectPlay code, so to use the code, you would have to give up graphics quality and performance. Prior to the birth of my son, I played SFP1/WoX multiplayer as often as I could find others, which was quite a bit of the time with the small but dedicated hyperlobby/hamachi SFP1 group. I played a bit of WoI and FE online from hotel rooms until my job situation changed and I was home every night with my family. I had plenty of good times with dogfighting, co-op missions, and even some formation flying.