streakeagle

What clear evidence on the F-8? Give me a link or scan any reference that isn't an F-8 pilot saying F-8s always beat F-4s in ACM. No one ever did in the other thread devoted entirely to assessing F-8 maneuverability, I don't expect anyone can or will produce one now. The only data I could find on the F-8 clearly showed that the two aircraft were very close and that which one was better would depend on the specifc altitude and speed being compared. How does that equate to a clear advantage for the F-8? None of the F-4 performance (or any other aircraft) I have ever cited has ever been fantasy. I cited a specific point for the purposes of a simple, precise comparison to disprove the statement that an F-4 could never out turn an F-14 even with slats. The official data directly shows that a slatted F-4 actually could turn better than an F-14. The point I cited at Mach 0.9 at 10,000 feet isn't just some arbitrary point on the envelope where the slatted F-4 just happens to be better than the F-14. It is a major performance benchmark for contract flyoffs. The aircraft which is superior at Mach 0.9 and 10,000 feet is generally better over the entire subsonic envelope from sea level to 20 or 30 thousand feet. But my point never was to show that the F-4 is better than the F-14, but to back my original statements in many threads over many years that the F-14's performance was a marginal improvement over the F-4. The F-14's position on the wing loading chart should never have been modified to make it look better. Its high wing loading combined with its mediocre thrust ratio (both of which clearly apparent on your chart if you don't alter the numbers) is the reason why it was the worst performing aircraft of the teen series. It is your fantasy to selectively alter the wing loadings on your chart to favor specific aircraft. It should be noted that all the comparisons I have seen between F-14 and F-4 have been against the unslatted F-4J. I don't have the flight manual or charts for the F-4S, but the slatted F-4E should be close enough. Its max AoA is similar to the F-14 and its instantanous performance very close to the F-14A. The Aero book openly admits that the F-14A has a lower T/W ratio than an F-4J, but the F-14 is still going to accelerate better due to its lower CD0. For all the advantages slats offered to the F-4, there was one penalty: an even higher CD0. Wing loading by definition is W / S, where S is the reference area of the wing design. It is specified during the design process as an unchanging reference to make all other aerodynamic coefficients meaningful. You don't change S because some book mentions how other parts of the aircraft contribute to lift. Almost all aircraft generate lift with parts other than their wings, but the effective lift is by definition accounted for in CL not S. Wing loading comparisons are common for several reasons: the numbers needed to calculate wing loading are readily available, the calculation is simple, and if both aircraft have similar wing designs, it can be very accurate. But if the wings differ too much in aspect ratios, wing section profiles, lift devices, etc., it can't be used to judge relative performance at all. If your goal is to accurately show relative performance, why are you plotting wing loading? Not only does it not account for lifting bodies and LERXes, but misses slats, flaps, and wing section. Why not pick a Mach and an altitude and plot actual performance for all of the aircraft? Max instaneous lift load accounts for almost everything by including CL ( CLmax * S * q / W ). The only components missing are thrust and drag. If you want to account for everything in one shot, plot max sustained G... not because dogfights are won by flying in a constant circle, but because they are won by exploiting a combination of specific excess power and agility directly reflected by an aircrafts max sustained g. Your current chart plots purely W/S for most aircraft and some form of W/(CL*S) for those aircraft whose wing loadings you don't like. So it doesn't compare wing loadings or relative performance. Of course it is your chart and you are free to plot any points anywhere you want them. It is not my numbers that are "selective" or "fudged". I have always posted scans of entire performance charts and only select points to simplify comparisons and save time. I do not pick one number I don't like and change it to whatever I feel it should be. If you came up with an aerodynamically correct approach for figuring out the "effective wing area" for every plane on the chart instead of just the F-14, I would never have accused you of fudging the numbers. Instead, you take one discusssion limited to only the F-14 and twist it onto your chart. On the next page in the book is a comparison of CL curves for the F-14, F-4, and MiG-21, there is where your "effective area" is factored in to aero equations. Doing the math ( CL / (W/S) ) will quickly show you why the F-14's instantaneous performance chart looks so much better than the F-4 and only marginally better than the MiG-21. But beware, the F-4 curve stops at about 13 degrees, when the unslatted aircraft have a safe white mark for max g that is about 18 degrees, so the CLmax for the F-4 on the book chart is about 72% of what it should be. Find or estimate CLmax for all of the aircaft on your chart and divide the wing loading by that value and you will have a chart that (1) provides useful information and (2) realistically ranks the F-14 where it should be. Otherwise, my accusation of "fudging" isn't a taunt or an insult, it is by definition what you did to your wing loading table.

A standard reference point used for comparison is Mach 0.9 at 10,000 feet. Typically, you will find the peaks of sustained g curves at almost exactly that Mach and 10,000 feet is considered a good medium altitude for comparison, though sea level and 30,000 feet are also commonly used. The F-14A can sustain about 6.5g via visual interpolation, (I am too lazy to find a better chart to get a more precise number, but the value for 10,000 feet is nearly halfway between the 7g and 6g curve peaks at Mach 0.9. Exact data was observed and documented during slatted F-4E evaluation by the USAF and NASA for the standard 10,000 feet/ Mach 0.9 reference point: The unslatted F-4E can sustain 5.68g while the slatted F-4E is 6.78g. These F-4Es and F-14A are at 1/2 internal fuel and clean per standard table conditions. Now who is living in fantasy land and fudging numbers? No amount of taunting, insults, or Admiral anecdotes will alter hard numbers from objective sources. If you don't believe those numbers, I don't know what you will believe. And why do I always bring up F-4s when discussing aircraft performance? Because it is the stick by which all other aircraft are measured in almost every reference I have. F-16 vs F-4, MiG-21 vs F-4, MiG-17 vs F-4, MiG-23 vs F-4, F-15 vs F-4, F-14 vs F-4. Even combat aircraft design books use the F-4 as a primary example, because extensive data is readily available and it is comparable to anything else flying. Now, since you never reply to my posts with any facts, only vague contradictions to whatever I post and sometimes selected anecdotes that favor your position, I will throw in some facts that are less related to aircraft quality, but still prove my points about relative F-4 performance: VF-302 achieved the highest number of "kills" and placed 2nd out of 12 squadrons in the 1981 Fighter Airborne Early Warning Wing Pacific fighter derby. 8 of the competing squadrons were flying the F-14. VF-302 was flying the F-4 (either F-4N or F-4S, they were transitioning to the F-4S in 1981). VF-201 took first place honors with a 15:2 kill ratio in the 1982 Felix International Fighter Meet. They flew the F-4N against F-5E, F-14, F-15, and F-16 adversaries. There is no doubt that the pilots flying the F-4s were top notch, but were all of the other pilots so bad that the mighty teen fighters lost so badly to F-4s? You questioned my F-4 versus F-8 anecdotes because you said they contradicted each other, but they didn't. I am sure that the VF-96 pilot was 100% honest when he said he never saw an F-4 lose to an F-8 after Top Gun training. Likewise, why would the F-8 pilot lie about his experience against F-4s? They served in different units at different times, and had different expriences. But, even though almost all information on the F-8 versus the F-4 is anecdotal due to a lack of hard data on the F-8, when an F-4 pilot in a decent unit offers an experience that contradicts your opinion, you deem the anecdotes unacceptable? If an F-4 unit can get a 15:2 kill ratio over teen fighters and the F-5E, what do you think they did to F-8s when flown by equally good pilots? Is anyone ever going to respond with flight manual data? Maybe a NASA evaluation? Mathematical analysis of observed data? Any sort of aerodynamic data from some sort of factual soruce? Or just insult me and make line-by-line contradictory statements without any supporting data? Someone else in another thread said that no matter what data was posted they would never change their opinion. And I am the one that is biased

The data showing the turn performance differences between the F-4J and F-14A comes from the same book used for the wing area illustration in this post. Like the F-4, the F-14 was a heavy interceptor, not a MiG-21 or F-16 lightweight day fighter. The F-15 didn't even have the aerodynamic peformance (CLmax) to out turn the F-4E, just the excess power to sustain higher rates (I cite the F-15 vs the F-4 since the F-15A IS superior to the F-14A at the high subsonic speeds where comparisons are usually made). When the wing is swept back to an intermediate position at higher speeds, the F-14's wing behaves like any other aircraft with that wing sweep, but with 60,000 lbs hanging beneath it. When the wing is fully swept, it is practically a delta and suffers all of the problems of deltas. I am sure I posted the performance charts from the F-14 book a long time ago comparing the MiG-21, F-14A, F-14B (original version from 1970s), F-4J, and MiG-23. The MiG data is largely estimated, but the F-4 and F-14A pretty much match currently available charts. The F-14A is better than the F-4 across the board, but it is not that much better when you start comparing F-16 and F-18 data. Any claim that the F-14A was a nimble dogfighter is pathetic except in very specific circumstances about as useful in typical combat situations as the Flanker's Cobra maneuver. The F-14A+/F-14B/F-14D is another subject because the extra thrust did get the F-14 up to the F-15's class of performance when the wing is in an intermediate position and I can only speculate how much better that would make it when low and slow with wings fully exteneded. As I recalled, from the very same book, and used in previous discusssions about the same basic subject (F-14 vs everything else): http://img185.imageshack.us/i/realf4jsustghm6tx.jpg/ http://img185.imageshack.us/i/f14agsust8eu.jpg/ Keep in mind, that the F-4J is unslatted. The slatted F-4E sustained turn numbers get really close to the F-14A thanks to about a 10% to 20% increase in CLmax for no increase in induced drag.

You can fudge the numbers any way you want, but in reality the F-14 only turns modestly better than an F-4J until you get the wings extended. Aspect ratio greatly affects the lift properties of a wing with a fixed area and the F-14 has exceptionally high aspect ratio when the wings are fully extended. But keep in mind what speed the F-14 must stay below to get those wings out and how bad the drag will affect it because of its less than stellar thrust loading. The F/A-18 doesn't look so good according to your wing loading table, when in reality it will fly rings around an F-14 and is only marginally worse in sustained performance than an F-16 (actually marginally superior to the F-16 in instantaneous performance). The old rules of the thumb just don't work very well when you factor in LERX principles. As for fuselage area, the fuselage reduces lift of the reference wing. In the case of the F-14 (and similar aircraft), the fuselage does not interfere as much as conventional layouts, so the net lift is increased, but you don't change the reference area to account for that and the additional fuselage area cannot be added directly to the reference area to show the gain achieved by the F-14 layout. What really matters is the top surface of the wing. The cleaner the top surface is, the closer the lift curves will be to the theoretical limits of the reference wing. The F-15's clean high-mounted wing scores very well in this area, but almost all modern fighters relect this benefit to some extent. While F-102s and F-106s could pull some scary AoA's with their deltas, I would never call them dogfighters. Visibility out of the cockpit was horrendous and there was no close-in weapon system. I would rather have fought MiG-17s using F-104s with gun and AIM-9s than F-102s and F-106s with AIM-4s.

I think beta testing was taken out because despite all the beta testing, some major bugs were missed and still required more patching after release. So instead of a handful of fans getting an early release to critique, everyone gets to beta test. I actually like it better this way since it means a lot more eyes finding a lot more bugs so TK can spend a lot less time by releasing fewer, but more comprehensive patches.

Not so long ago, someone noticed inconsistent views between Israeli F-4 varians in SF2I, and the answer was that neither one was correct. March 2010 patch provided ini file and lod changes necessary to get a view like the one from the top, which is correct. If you want proof, pause the game and use the <Ctrl><F12> view to move the camera into the pit to see how it looks straight out of the 3d model.

I don't know if this works for Vista, but it is graphics corruption that it fixes. The intro videos and menu screens looked terrible and the game looked worse, but with this fix, it looks 100% like it did in Win95/Win98 as far as I can tell and recall. This game looked so cool to me in 1998 when I played on a work laptop.

Correct, must have deleted a <CR> when I posted this.

Go here to read more: http://www.mektek.net/projects/mw4/ I have this installed and running on two Win 7 64-bit PCs. Works great. Played multiplayer online and via LAN too. Comes with mission editor. Has updates beyond original Microsoft box game. Whatever complaints there may be about MechWarrior 4, it is free and runs great :)

Paraphrase of a comment from a modern armor miniatures game (an older game called Close and Destroy): The Redeye was never very good at hitting anything. The SA-7 was fairly accurate, but it rarely did enough damage to take an aircraft down. If the US and USSR engineers got together, they could probably make a missile that would rarely hit and do almost no damage if it did hit. The Stinger was a huge leap forward for shoulder launched weapons. Has it been surpassed by anything newer?

I haven't played LOMAC in years as I much prefer Vietnam era jet combat, but the release of FC2 has got my attention. I got my joystick mapped (prior to FC2 I played using their default config, but FC2 doesn't seem to support that anymore). I started with 1v1 MiG-23 and smoked him easily as the F-15 just plane out turns him, especially with speed above 300 KIAS. I feared the MiG-29 would be dramatically harder, but I did a split-s to get my speed up, got a visual on him and pulled enough lead to kill him. The Su-27 was what I thought the MiG-29 would be. First try, the Su-27 got me as easily as I got the MiG-23. He just pulled around and shot me. However, I stomped the Su-27 second time around. After split-s, I could see the Su-27 on my tail and very close. I chopped my throttle, got him into my port forward quarter, pulled the necessary lead, and toasted him. While the operation of the radar is more detailed and realistic than SF2, in this guns only mode the flight modeling and gameplay feels about the same with similar results. The graphics are definitely a bit better in FC2. If this sim modeled the F-4 Phantom and MiG-21 as well as the F-15 and Su-27, I don't think I would be playing SF2 very much any more. But, I know from LOMAC/FC1 that once you start using AIM-120s and fighting Su-27s with equivalent missiles, the game becomes more about evading radar and/or missiles. I much prefer SF2's era that almost always turns into a close in dogfight. SF2's technical detail and realism may be a bit simplified, but the dogfights are quite fun. Having a lot less buttons to deal with makes it easier to maintain proficiency with the SF2 series.

I was working my way up to BVR. If I can't get past IRMs, how am I ever going to handle BVR? Helmet mounted sights give the MiGs an edge. They can fire when they otherwise couldn't because their nose can't pitch up enough. The patch didn't make a huge difference, but it is noticable. It took me longer to come around on the MiG-23 and MiG-29 if I let my speed bleed down, but I still win almost uncontested. The Su-27 is where I really felt the difference. Got smoked twice before I managed a 1 vs 1 gun kill. In reality, I wouldn't expect an F-15 to ever get his guns on an Su-27 unless during a head-on pass, or the Su-27 lost siutational awareness. But I can clearly force him to overshoot and hold him in front of me long enough to generate lead for solid kill shots if I don't lose sight of the Su-27 after the initial pass. I enjoy the guns only fighting enough that I would buy and play this sim soley for this purpose. The terrain looks awesome.

It would appear that I was smoking the AI in gun combat because the F-15 was turnning better than it should below Mach 0.4, as this was a fix in the new patch. Will try it again after patching and see if there is any difference in the results.

AIDE is mainly useful as a flight model viewing tool. Unforutnately, a bug creeped into it while I was trying to keep up with TK's patches. It used to work well with multiple documents open at the same time, later it got very unstable... presumably a memory leak. I intended to make a new version from the ground up to overcome some limitations of the original design and add a few more features. But I started traveling and working a lot of hours, then had a son enter the picture. I am just now starting to get the time and motivation to do any kind of modding/programming, but I am partially held back by the fact that I spend all day at work programming and/or trouble-shooting computer control and communication systems for water/waste water plants... in other words, my mind is pretty fried by the time I am picking my son up from day care. As for a tutorial, good luck! Either you understand the numbers in TK's data ini files or you don't. My tool helps see those numbers graphically and helps reduce the amount of time you have to spend flight testing to verify the effects of edits. A couple of college semesters on aerodynamics is what it takes to get moving in the right direction (or doing a lot of independent study of books covering the same material). Essentially, AIDE in its present form is for those who already know how to do this stuff by hand using spreadsheets. The math is mostly linear algebra with a bit of trigonometry thrown in for good measure. Of course, if you are good at vector math, it is even easier. I developed and tested the equations used in AIDE with Excel and screenshots of in-game flight test data. Whenever I didn't get the result I expected, I went to TK and asked for help. Over time, several people bothered TK about many aspects of the flight model data ini files. Most of those posts are still available at the Third Wire forums. From these posts, you can learn a lot about Third Wire flight models and real-world aerodynamics in general. I bumped up one early post by Wild Elmo in the SFP1 forum as an example, but I could not find the master post that had copies of all of the other posts integrated into it.

The F-86/MiG-15 are missing if this is going to be a jets only list. Otherwise, all the "best" fighters from WWI to the 1960s are missing. "Best" would have to mean personal favorite given the arbitrary list of 60's to modern jets. Based on looks, I think the Flanker gets my vote. It looks like a wonderful blend of the US teen series yet retains some of the Soviet accents that clearly distinguishes it from any US/NATO aircraft. I very much dislike the F-22 and F-35, they look like overweight caricatures of high performance fighters thanks to the need to have large internal bays. If there is any airframe I like better than the Su-27, it is the F-23. I am very disappointed that the F-23 will never go into production. The F-22 looks like an inflated Eagle bent into a stealthier shape. The Eagle really looks good from some angles (espeically top views), but its main fuselage is essentially a square box. Blended body technology looks much more appealing. There are too many good looking 1950s and 1960s jets to mention, but none of them have the refinement of the Flanker and the F-23 looks like it is some kind of starfighter from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century... Which leads me to my honorable mention, a design that actually inspired a space ship in the Star Wars movies: the SR-71/YF-12. The SR-71 was prettier, but since the post said fighters, I think the YF-12 qualifies. If it were actually a fighter instead of a recon plane, I would make it my number 1 choice for "best fighter".

Another quote from the same page by the same guy countering the F-8 guy's claim that F-8s were still smoking F-4s in 72: One more that is really important: The margin between the planes had to be small, because it is very clear from this statement that this F-4 never lost to an F-8 over many fights. It is always more about the pilot quality than the plane. I would like to know if any of the F-8s they beat were flown by well-known quality F-8 pilots... Oh wait, I forgot, all F-8 pilots are aces because their plane was so good. Except that the only Navy aces were an F-4 crew? Forget the F-4/F-8 debate, just go read those forums. Real pilots telling their day to day life during Vietnam era. Sad, but fascinating.

As far as number of seats go, some would argue one seat is too many with modern technology. Pull more g's without a pilot. No more POWs. But any aircraft that has a high workload still gets two seats: F-14D, F-15E, F/A-18F. If it didn't cost so much weight with a corresponding increase in drag and decrease in range, most planes would still be two-seat. You can tell the USAF created the F-22 and strongly influenced the F-35: single seat.

I found a real gem in favor of F-4 was better once pilots were trained from here: http://dukecunningham.org/forum/read.php?f=1&i=1425&t=1425 For every F-8 pilot that believes the Crusader was best, there will be an F-4 pilot AND RIO that disagrees :) They also mentioned that having a backseater made paperwork chores when not flying much easier.

Can anyone who believes that the "F-8 was a much better fighter" post even one FACT (not opinion) learned from talking to people or studying books that supports or better yet proves this belief other than quoting someone else who said the same thing? In F-14 versus F-15 discussions, all of the facts are there and the only problem is agreeing on what makes a better fighter. But with the F-8, the only facts readily available to favor the F-8 as a better fighter than the F-4 are: 1. It has an internal gun. 2. It is smaller and doesn't smoke, therefore somewhat harder to visually detect. 3. Its smaller size and lower weight allowed it to operate from the older, smaller carriers. 4. It turns slightly better than the F-4 (and per the above posts I can show reasonable estimates that the margin might be so small as to be irrelavant). 5. Safer and more predictable at the high AoAs required for ACM. Compared to the F-4's advantages over the F-8: 1. Faster across the entire envelope. 2. Better rate of climb. 3. Better acceleration. 4. Heavier payload. 5. Much better radar. 6. Dedicated radar operator. 7. 2nd set of eyes when radar isn't needed. 8. All-aspect medium range missiles. 9. Safer during carrier landings. Combat radius is hard to compare as it is very much affected by the loadout and mission profile, but the available data favors the F-8 for profiles using subsonic cruise at high altitude to get to and from mission objectives while the F-4 is better for supersonic intercepts. "The F-8 IS and angles fighter vs the F-4, and it does outclass it in that arena"... back it up with a factual reference, not a quote or paraphrase of the same statement.

If I could only have one of them, I would have a tough time choosing between SF2V and SF2I as both are historical and have great planesets. I would lean toward SF2V for the carriers and Naval aircraft. But historically, the SF2I environment had a lot more air-to-air combat over a much wider time frame presenting a lot of interesting matchups. Fortunately, I don't have to choose only one and have all of them in a merged install.

So everyone agreed with me from the start that the F-8 is not an angles fighter at all and does not clearly outclass the F-4 in horizontal performance? With a 10% advantage and a sustained turn rate of say 8 deg/sec (perhaps generous for the 30,000 feet altituded needed to get the 10% advantage), that means the F-8 could do 8.8 deg/sec. So, if the F-4 started on the F-8's tail, the F-8 would have to turn for 450 seconds to get all the way around back on the F-4's tail, or 11 full circles. To put it in perspective, under very similar conditions, the F-16 gains 90 degrees on a slatted F-4E in 1 circle and would only take 3 more circles to get the job done. The upengined late MiG-21bis was within 10% of F-16A turn performance. So, in an F-4 vs F-8 match, the pilots' skills outweigh the the performance differences and if the pilots are perfectly matched, the odds of victory are about 50/50 in a close in dogfight. If either the F-4 or F-8 had to face a MiG-21bis, they had better hope they MiG pilot sucks or doesn't ever see them. Funny, I never programmed my F-4B flight model based on how it felt. Having never flown an F-4, how could I ever know what it really felt like anyway? FMs are lists of aerodynamic coefficients. To be accurate, the numbers must either be calculated or tweaked until the in-game performance matches some known standard. The F-8 manual doesn't quantify very much of the performance in ways that help out with calculating the FM or even provide very many perfomrance curves that you can try to tweak the FM to match. The lift curves I found last night were part of the section on how to pull out of a dive without hitting the ground. There is a 1g level flight envelope for max speed that can be matched, but should drag be increased or thrust decreased to avoid crossing the Mach limit for a given altitude? Or is the limit a self imposed one to protect the engine? It takes tons of data to get the performance curves to match, not just min and max speeds at 1g and the sea level static thrust of the engine. The F-8 manual mainly has a lot of data used for planning missions: fuel-burn rates, time-to-altitude, etc. In the above posts, I made the best estimates I could with what little info was available. Actual flight data will probably be +/-10% of what I guessed if I interpreted the table correctly, but could be off by +/-50% because of other variables not reflected in a simple CL versus Mach table. I even have some problems with the F-4 tables as they have some conflicts with the NASA data. One of the two sources is using less accurate data, both are using measured data mixed with wind tunnel results and faired in data points, so how do I decided which one is based more on measured data and which one was cheating by using basic equations to fair in points? So, even with charts in hand, there is room for errors even if you do all the math without any mistakes. I prefer detailed flight manual charts--these had to be as correct as possible because pilots lived and died by them. NASA data is usually gathered by some engineer type doing a study. Some of these studies are very focused and detailed perhaps even better than the flight manuals, but many are done using the same methods I used above: simple linear equations with extrapolated data to fill in the blanks. I may criticize TK's stock flight models in many posts, but TK made all of his flight models from scratch. I merely used his FM as a foundation and tweaked it to fit the curves I have derived from the flight manuals and NASA data. So, I have the utmost respect for TK's aerospace engineering expertise. But he has to divide his time between programming tasks and an entire catalog of aicraft. Whereas I can afford to pick one aircraft and build a massive library of data on it. Duke's problem vs. the MiG-17 was that when he pulled into the vertical, the F-4 pulled out in front of the MiG-17, who would then start to pepper him with gunfire, forcing him to evade and disengage. Energy tactics are not to zoom up in front of guns. They are to get above your opponent while not in his gunsight and force him to stall trying to reach your altitude. An angles fighter's only defense against a high energy fighter is to pull a tight circle every time the energy fighter tries to make a pass, which could result in a stalemate. But the energy fighter can leave at will. Whereas, if the angles fighter has to leave first, he gets an IRM up the tailpipe. First, Duke assumed the MiG-17 pilot was typical and would either go into a flat turn or disengage when he zoomed. Then, he entered into a vertical rolling scissors at point blank range. The object of a scissors is to force the target to overshoot, not zoom past him. I think Duke was lucky that the pilot was not a better shot. After the first time the MiG-17 flew so agressively in the vertical, Duke should have extended, climbed, then come back rather than keep repeating co-altitude head-on passes followed by more vertical scissoring. Fortunately for Duke, he avoided the gunfire and forced the MiG-17 to disengage first. If you fly an F-105 vs the MiG-17 in SF2, you get an idea about how difficult it is for an energy fighter to beat and angles fighter, but if the energy fighter is flown correctly it will never lose, only win or draw. When you fly an energy fighter and try to use only tail-aspect heat-seeking missiles (such as the F-8 or F-4), the job gets even harder since you not only need to be on the target's tail, but the target needs to ease off his rate of turn a bit to helpt he missile track and hit. It sounds really hard to do and in SF2 where the AI can see you even in its blindspot it is even harder, but with a little patience and luck, the enemy will make a mistake. This is the "Iceman" school of dogfighting. It is tedious and boring but reduces your risk to near zero. Attempting to scissor with the angles fighter and relying on the enemy to be surprised and overshoot when you chop your throttlles is the "Maverick" school of dogfighting. It worked out for Duke, but most people who chop their throttles while in front of a gun armed opponent find out that the gun solution is much easier to solve when the target stops and fills your windscreen.

The number crunching is actually the most important part. If the right nubmers show up, they can be used to "calibrate" the stock flight models. I don't even need an FM editor, just an Excel spreadsheet to dial in the lift, drag, and thrust curves. This technique will never get exactly the right numbers on the indiviudal components, but the sum total will behave almost identically to the performance charts. If the numbers don't matter, TK should just use one flight model for all of the aircraft. Screenshots would look just as good and it would make TK's job much easier. Graphics are nice to have, but having unique detailed realistic flight models is what makes a FLIGHT sim fun for me. Of course, it used to be more important to me when I played online multiplayer all the time.

I am a Crusader fan as well, have one hanging right next to my F-4J and MiG-21PF on my ceiling. TK's sims are a blessing as they focus on the the aircraft and time frame I love the most. Third party addons cover the gaps really well too... complete set of Century fighters and MiG-21 cockpits, plus 1950s aircraft. I just wish the flight models could be tuned to be as close to dead on as possible within this engine so that I could better enjoy the subtle differences between types. If you look at the F-8, it was a total dog when WoV first came out, then it replaced the MiG-19 (back around SP1/SP2a) as the unbeatable UFO in online multiplayer. The F-4 flight model has always been too generous, especially in the drag department. Just tuning the Cd0 and CDL tables will give you a very credible F-4 experience minus the nasty departure behavior. I have tons of data on the F-4 on XB-70 that I have yet to translate into FM tables. NASA data could help me do detailed F-104, A-7, A-4, F-106, T-38, F-5, F-105, and B-58 exceeding the quality of my original F-4B FM. It just takes more time and focus than I have to convert all those charts into Excel graphs and then derive co-efficient tables from the graphs, then extrapolate the missing points and fill any remaining gaps with DATCOM estimates or faired in values from similar aircraft. Now if someone were paying me good money to do that for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, that would be great. But why am I going to spend 8 to 10 hours a day at work on computers and control systems and then come home to do what is the equivalent to boring college theoretical engineering homework. I am at the point now where I would rather just play the game as it is.

The missing component for sustained turn performance is drag. The best I can do on short notice is take the two readily available CD0 numbers: F-4: 0.0175 for the F-4B/C, 0.0224 for the slatted F-4E (slats came with a heavy price) F-8: 0.0133 I have no precise way of comparing induced drag. Tons of info on the F-4, almost nothing on the F-8. But the F-4 has a terrible zero-lift drag. 0.175 / 0.0133 = 1.316 or 31.6% worse drag with no induced drag. Aspect ratio is the best relative indicator: A = b^2/S, where b = wing span and S = wing area For F-4: 38.3^2 / 530 = 2.77 For F-8: 35.2^2 / 385 = 3.22 3.22 / 2.77 = 1.162, or possibly 16% more drag for the F-4. Of course, both of these aspect ratios are reasonably close to the typical 3.0 for supersonic jet fighters. If there really is a 16% diffence in induced drag, the the F-4 should be able to compete at sea level with its 24% thrust advantage more than compensating for the drag penalty. But up high, the F-4 will lose in both instaneous and sustained turn performance by about a 10% margin.