streakeagle

Here is a MiG-21bis Fishbed-L with stock textures:

There are improvements that screenshots won't show... such as radar ECM/ECCM. Radar doesn't work so well near the ground any more. Doppler radars like the F-15 don't work so well when targets put their beam to the line of sight. In short, radar missiles are a whole lot less effective than before if the target is low or turns 90 degrees to the direction the radar is moving. The terrain is especially impressive at medium to high altitudes over the mountains. WOI is what SFP1 should have been. There is always room for improvement, but WOI raises the bar in a lot of little areas besides the obvious terrain and planeset additions.

IMHO, blu-ray was the clear choice from the start... any features that HD had over it could be (and probably are) being added to it (i.e. interactive content). The whole point of HD is... HD, and blu-ray's higher potential capacity allows for uncompressed 1080p, HD-DVD did not. Now the question is: how long is blu-ray going to be around. VHS has been around forever and hasn't fully died yet. DVD is much younger and already on the way out. Should I even bother to get a blu-ray player? I have Netflix and I have a 1080p 46" LCD TV, so I guess I need one to finally realize the full benefit of my TV. But I wasn't buying until certain of which format to get... guess I need to start researching players.

Where SFP1 failed (besides the early release) was the fictional terrain/countries. The map and campaigns should have been historical: either Israel or Vietnam. TK could have limited the scope to USAF to avoid carriers for a Vietnam release or limited the time frame to 1973 to avoid F-15/F-16 aircraft for an Israel release. The F-104G should have been in a Europe release. If the community is going to build a sim, TK's experience should act as a guide: break the game into multiple releases that build up the game engine. Each release should add something significant, perhaps 1 aircraft per release including support for any unique avionics/weapon systems. The LOMAC people have figured this out, but I have zero interest in the first aircraft they are releasing, and only a passing interest in any of the aircraft planned over the immediate future. Targetware represents the best chance the community has ever had of creating their own combat flight sims. I haven't tried Targetware in a while, but I have never cared that much for the releases I have tried over the years. For me, it is a failure. I would rather pay $15 per month to fly Aces High than any other WW2 sim to date much less the free Target Tobruk. I also get much more enjoyment out of SFP1's Korean War mod or MiG Alley than I can from the Target Korea. Having a large number of us pool our money together to contract TK to enhance the SFP1 game engine to suit our needs is a great idea. But maybe, instead of gathering a huge lump sum and making a whole new sim, we should award smaller much more affordable contracts for specific enhancements. A specific enhancement would be made available for free to the original contractors and sold as an addon to everyone else. TK would need to set a price/schedule for each of the different additions desired, then the pledged money would have to hit the magic number before money was collected and work started. Whichever package hit the magic number first would be completed and released before the next package was charged/started. Packages would be divided up into categories similar to those listed here, i.e. detailed carrier ops, multiplayer expansion, more detailed campaigns, smarter/more realistic AI, individual high-fidelity aircraft cockpits (i.e having a Falcon 4.0 level clickable 3d pit for the F-4E would be one package, the F-4B would be a separate package), individual high-fidelity aircraft flgiht models (a good FM can take longer than building and entire 3d model with cockpit!), etc. Could such a model ever work? Would there ever be enough pledges to any one package to fund it? Would TK be able to sell the resulting work to anyone other than the original contractors and make a decent living?

It is the max altitude attainable in meters.

Historically (I have hosted SFP1 multiplayer for YEARS), if there is going to be any body online at all, the 8-10 PM eastern time frame mentioned above is the best time to hang out. Sometimes weekends were busy... such as Sunday nights. Usually Friday and Saturday nights are dead. Monday thru Thursday is pot luck: 0-12 (typically 2 or 3) people popping up between Hamachi (my streakserver1 network and some VFMA 531 networks), CombatAce Teamspeak, and Hyperlobby.

Thanks, but no thanks. I'm not having a birthday today or getting any older. I wear the same model shoes I have worn since 1980 (Nike Cortez). I drive the same car I have driven sinces 1991 (1980 Corvette). I listen to the 80's music I grew up with. So that makes me about 12 years old and not getting any older any time soon :) Where did all this gray hair come from? Why do I always have a pain in my right arm? Where did all these lines on my face come from? I am pretty sure most 12 year olds don't shave much less grow a full beard? Oh well, guess I should get back to playing with all my toys and listening to Pink Floyd and Blondie.

1. Detailed cockpit procedures (switchology) 2. Detailed carrier ops 3. Seat-switching in multi-seat aircraft 4. Detailed comms and ATC 5. High resolution graphics, terrain and effects 6. High moddability (like SF series) 7. Dynamic campaign (less story-driven) 8. Story-driven campaign (less dynamic) 9. Good performance on older systems If the game gives me most or all of what I want, I could care less about moddability... but it is never bad to have as much as possible exposed for modding other than anti-cheating for multiplayer. TK's current approach is more than open enough to allow the flexibility that most people want or need. But as a hardcore fan who needs to see several more features added to the sim to really satisfy my wants, there is never enough moddability. My top three choices are all equally important to me, very hard to rank them. It is important to maintain scalability. A great game will run on an old machine as be as fun/easy to play as SFP1 on EASY settings, yet given a modern PC and max settings look as good as LOMAC and be as detailed/realistic as Falcon 4.0.

F-4 MiG-21 Mirage Those 3 aircraft ARE the principal fighters from 1960 to 1980, and continue to serve to the present.

The bare minimum should be just about every other decent sim prior to SFP1: Jane's Fighters Anthology and Jane's USAF have far superior mission editing/multiplayer setups The IL-2 series is the benchmark for box sim multiplayer support/popularity: it is the only box/single player combat flight sim that has HUNDREDS playing every night on Hyperlobby, possibly THOUSANDS counting other server networks such as UBISoft, etc. for FREE. The Aces High approach with massive multiplayer requires servers/bandwidth that leads to monthly fees. I pay those fees, but would there be many besides me flying F-4s versus MiGs in an Aces High type game for a monthly fee? WW2 has the massive multiplayer sim market pretty much cornered. I don't know if the market is truly big enough to support separate eras such as WWI, Korea, and/or Vietnam. A truly successful game isn't going to target one small niche... but seek to get people playing together globally. But then, hard core jet combat flight sim jocks interested in 50's/60's70's era jets are about as small a niche as you can aim for. The only niches I know of that are smaller are hard core naval and armor combat sims (think Dangerous Waters and Steel Beasts, which definitely come to life with multiplayer!). That reminds me, I never got around to getting the latest Steel Beasts...

IMHO, the best place is Third Wire's online store found here: https://store.thirdwire.com/store.htm These come already patched to the current revision, which is nice. The only downside to buying SF Gold compared to the original SFP1 is the lack of the F-104G and C-130. Third Wire released an F-104G addon that allows SF Gold owners to have the F-104G, but the file is no longer hosted at Third Wire (at least the link is no longer posted). I can't remember, but maybe the latest version includes the F-104G? Of course other websites like CombatAce.com keep the original addon available for those who need it. But there is no other way to get the stock C-130 other than to get the original SFP1 CD-ROM (or the later $5 re-release version that is now out of print as well). It can be difficult to find a used copy of the original because there are a lot of copies of the infamous "Walmart" release still floating out there that cannot be patched and are woefully incomplete/buggy compared to the current version. So, I still say for both WOV and SF Gold, the online store downloads are the way to go.

I just got my Saitek X52 Pro stick/throttle and Pro Pedals. There is a huge difference between the X36/X45 and the X52 Pro. I haven't gotten to fly much since I have to manually program game profiles adapted from my X36/X45 profiles. But what little time I have gotten to fly has been amazing. The feel and precision easily exceeds the X36 (which is superior to the X45). The additional buttons and axis inputs are very useful, especially the toggle buttons at the base of the stick and the extra mouse wheel/button on the front of the throttle in place ot the X36/X45 rudder rocker. I hope I get a chance to fly this weekend.

I was dissecting the various joysticks around the house looking for the best solution to making my F-4 stick functional. The rumble pad was the least suitable due to the way the sticks are made: little self-contained cubes with the joystick stubs sticking up. To use these, I would have to make a mechanism to convert the turning of the roll tube into left/right motion and mix it with the back/forth motion of the pitch tube to move the joystick stub. While I am sure someone knows how to do that very well, anything I could dream up would be too complicated, imprecise, etc. The Saitek sticks (X-36 and X-45) are a pain in the butt to take apart, so I decided to leave them alone unless I had no other choice. The Microsoft Sidewinder Precision 2 was easy to take apart and had the simplest possible mechanism: two separate pots for pitch and roll that were easily detached from the joystick gimble. To make the F-4 stick, I need a pitch axis, roll axis, trigger switch, top thumb button, left thumb button, pinky button, 4-way hat, and autopilot disengage lever (on the stick shaker box just below the stick grip). So that is 2 analog axis inputs, 1 pov hat and 5 discrete button inputs. The Sidewinder easily meets this criteria. After analyzing the wire leads coming from the B-8 stick grip and comparing them to the switches on the Sidewinder circuit boards, I realized that I am going to need some interposing relays to isolate the switches from the B-8 so that they can be wired into the Sidewinder correctly (i.e. the trim switch on the B-8 has 4 contact leads and 1 common, but the Sidewinder needs a dedicated pair of leads for each switch for them to work properly). The hardest part is making the axis inputs work. I have an idea from my long past days of building radio control airplanes. I am going to use bell crank principles to link the two types of motion from the F-4 stick to the separate potentiometers of the Sidewinder. For example, the roll tube will have a ball-joint stem coming out of the top that will be linked to a ball-joint tipped arm coming off the roll potentiometer. If the lengths from the rotation axis centers to the links is identical, the angular motion will be identical, which is exactly what I want. Alternatively, I can attach a wheel to the pot and place it adjacent to the roll tube so that the wheel turns with no slip whenever the roll tube turns. It might be hard to keep good contact with no slip, but the big advantage would be the ability to amplify the angular motion in a precise linear manner by simply using a wheel with a smaller diameter than the roll tube. This could be useful since the stick only swings 10 degrees to either side. The Sidewinder stick moved 20 degrees to either side. Attempting to do the same with the linked lever arms by using a shorter link arm on the pot will result in a non-linear response (i.e. the angular movement of the pot will not be directly proportional to the angular movement of the roll tube). The pitch axis will have to use the linked lever arm approach. Since the F-4 stick only moves forward 13 degrees and backwards 18 degrees, it may be necessary to use lever arms scaled to amplify the range of movement.

To the best of my knowledge, the AIM-7 is presently being phased out of service, but is not yet 100% gone. I am surprised that it is being phased out, that would require nearly 1 for 1 replacement of the entire stock with AIM-120s. Where did the budget come from to do that?

Offtopic Note: AIM-54C did not work for the better part of a decade after going into service. One the problems that plagued it during that period was a publicly identified flaw in it fuzing system that resulted in the missile detonating halfway to the target. The digital upgrade of the AIM-54C paralleled AMRAAM development, and both suffered from major teething troubles. Obviously, both of those missiles are absolutely amazing, but like the Sparrow and Sidewinder before them, they needed a decade or more to reach their full potential. Of course, the AIM-54C got retired, while the Sidewinder and Sparrow soldier on. Given AMRAAM's apparent success, 1 of 2 things will happen to the Sparrow: retired to save money on maintenance or upgraded to have similar guidance with longer flight range and bigger boom. As long as Eagles and Hornets built to carry the Sparrow continue flying in significant numbers, I see value in upgrading Sparrows. I wonder how the military feels about it? I know how Washington D.C. feels: do whatever is cheapest and will hurt us the most in a future conflict.

The Cougar could have marked the return of Thrustmaster (and for some it did). But IMHO, they missed the boat when they filled the fantastic outside stick shell with at best average crap. After paying all that money for your stick, you have to spend even more to mod it to the condition it should have been in when you first opened the box. Aside from that, the reason I never bothered with a Cougar even after they became really affordable is that I don't like F-16s and don't want in F-16 stick/throttle. If they had made a plug-in replacement for the stick that had the old B-8 stick up to milspec quality (like the real thrustmaster once made so well), I might have a fully modded Cougar on my desk right now. But if you look at all my other threads, you will see I have already spent more money trying to replicate the F-4's B-8 than I ever could have buying/modding a Cougar. I know what I want, no one else will provide it, so I am making my own :) Once I have my homebuilt stick working correctly, repairs/upgrades should be cheap: find any USB stick that can be used to replace whatever innards I settle on if and when they go bad or become obsolete due to operating system/interface changes. Until I get my homemade F-4 stick finished, my primary stick is the X-52 Pro, which I am very happy with. When I am flying newer aircraft that need more stick buttons, it will still be my primary stick. But if I am flying F-15A or older US aircraft, B-8 all the way on an actual F-4 stick assembly! How is that for realistic feel and travel limits? I am not sure yet if I am going to use any kind of pneumatic dampers/shocks to provide some force feedback. The forward/aft direction already has some resistance due to a rubber bellows attached down the center tube.

I can answer that easily: people like myself who enjoy combat flight sims for the purposes of testing out the differences between various aircraft using real world tactics and maneuvers find that there is nothing learned from the process if you can't reasonably replicate known results for known conditions. So, if the F-15 is supposed to be better in some cateogies (in some cases by a large margin), then Blasto certainly has a problem with his discovery that either the F-15 is undermodeled or the F-14 is overmodeled to such an extent that it is glaringly obvious during gameplay. Of course, it is nicer if someone posts universally accepted performance charts of each aircraft and a graph of where one or both aircraft are deviating from such performance rather than just quoting thrust to weight ratios and wing loading to justify their claim... there is a lot more to aerodynamics than just those two parameters. Having been involved with FM development in this sim for some time, I can say that most FMs out there are lucky if they are even within 10% of where they should be, so if one aircraft's FM is more than 10% better than it should be, the other aircraft is more than 10% worse than it should be, and the real aircraft have less than a 10% difference in performance... then you are going to encounter plenty so situations similar to this one. The effort it takes to get an FM within +/-10% over the entire Mach-Height range is tremendous, so if you don't like the FMs you are flying with, feel free to calibrate them and document the resulting performance so that you can distribute them as the less than 1% error flawless FM everyone should be flying ;)

Faulting the F-15C for being optimized and having pilots trained explicitly for air-to-air while comparing it to the F-14 is ludicrous. The F-14 was built to do one thing: protect the fleet from Mach 3 high-altitude cruise missiles. The fact that it had better performance/maneuverability than the F-4 it replaced was an added bonus. It wasn't until the F-14 was modified that their pilots trained for anything other than Air-to-Air role. F-15s were modified too... they call them Strike Eagles, and like the F-14Ds, they are a little heavier but have the option for bigger engines. The F-14s advantages in endurance, cruising range, and low end turning/hi-aoa come at the cost of the weight of the variable geometry wings. Notice that not one fighter has been built VG since the 60s: cost/benefit ratio proved to be too low in practice: weight, complexity, monetary cost, maintenance, etc. As it is, despite the apparent advantages of having multi-role aircraft, the F-15C's dedication to air superiority guarantees that we get it quickly and keep it. Not being able to use them very effeciently as bomb trucks is a small price to pay. Of course, aside from training issues, F-15Cs can carry their fair share of dumb bombs, and I bet if they were really needed, that it wouldn't take too many modificiation to make them capable of delivering a much wider array of air-to-ground weapons seeing as how the F-15Cs were designed to work with FAST packs (Fuel and Sensor... i.e. air-to-ground night vision and laser designation packages). I don't know if F-15C's were fully wired to support it and probably don't have any software installed, but they were intended to be a dual-role airplane. The problem was that the USAF wanted a dedicated 2-seater to handle the work load, and hence went with the F-15E since the F-15D gave up some ECM to squeeze in the 2nd seat. Either aircraft can do the job, but unless you need carrier ops, the F-15 was the better deal overall. I am not sure why the Shah of Iran chose the Tomcat, but all of the other foreign countries with the cash to buy any aircraft they wanted chose the F-15 for air defense/air superiority. Those on a budget were forced to buy cheaper multi-role aircraft like the F-16 and F/A-18. In all honesty, I think German F-4F+ ICE aircraft are as good a platform as F-15s and F-14s for air superiority and almost as good as F-16/F/A-18s for ground attack. So what if it can't dogfight as well... when was the last time an F-15 got in a dogfight while using AMRAAM supported by AWACS?

These are not functional sticks. They are "display only" "buttons will break if pushed or pulled". But... I am thinking they could be modified to be functional. Of course the price is kind of high for a lump of resin that may not even be usuable. I may get the F-4 Throttles and find out. http://www.metalcraftbyblair.com/index.php...oducts_id=13223

Troops was awesome. I kept a permanent copy. I watched that sooo many times.

I don't have time to read all the links... but quite entertaining.

I just thought of something... if the stick shaker still works, I need to figure out if there is a way to get a force-feedback signal to it. Since the Saitek doesn't support force feedback, maybe I should get a stick that does? Cheap solution: get a new rumble pad and use it to build my joystick rather than cutting up my x-45. I just tried my wife's Saitek P2500... should do the trick :)

I got lucky, a guy on eBay is parting out his F-4 cockpit collection. I can't afford to get the instrument panel, but look what I got: It comes with everything but the stick grip, including the $100 metal connector lug that my stick grip doesn't have. It is costing me $545 including shipping, which means I have now spent over $1,000 on a stupid stick. I feel bad about spending so much money on something of such limited value. But I have never wasted any money on cigarettes. Very little money on alcohol (compared to most people I have known). The only other things I have wasted money on besides flight related hobbies is 1980 Corvettes/gas, guns/bullets. and music/video. Oh wait... that's actually quite a bit of money wasted and quite a bit more than the total money I have spent on PCs and flight sims. The difference is CDs were $10 or $15 here and there, where PC/fllight simming tends to be $500 or $1,000 here and there. Enough about the guilt I am feeling over blowing so much money on a hunk of metal... Once I get this assembly, I need to mount it to a sheet of wood (or maybe a frame). My X-45 is standing by to be mutilated to become the interface to the PC. Since the X-45 has more buttons than the B-8 stick, I figure I can used the spare buttons to make an aux panel with armament and/or radar controls which use real knobs and switches. Third Wire's weapon selection system of Next/Previous air-weapon doesn't match well with the F-4's missile station selector knob, but I could make a 2 position knob that would look like the F-4 panel, but really only activate Next Weapon and use the shift key to get previous weapon (rather than using 2 switches, so that I can have more functions). So, I guess my project is going to consist of: mounting the F-4 stick interfacing the F-4 stick as much as possible with the X-45 adding a simulated instrument panel interfacing left over switches from the x-45 stick and placing the throttle in the correct position on the left arm building a semi-scale replica of the F-4 ejection seat out of plywood I don't have a whole lot of free time right now, but that is going to get better within a year or two. I am changing jobs so that I don't have to travel so much, and once I move closer, won't have to waste as much time commuting. Until I move, I will be losing 2 hours a day to commuting... yuck! When I have been in town for my current job, home is only 25 or 30 minutes away, not 1 hour. Once I get settled into my new job and get moved into a new home... I can see a future filled with delusions of being an F-4 pilot complete with a helmet, O2 mask, g-suit, and flight suit :) Is there something wrong with me?

AIM-9Bs just aren't useful against human players that see the missile coming, chop their throttles, and turn into the shot. I only gets kills with an AIM-9B against people that are inexperienced and try to blindly extend in full afterburner. But I had one shot with an AIM-9B during online multiplayer dogfight that really stands out. We were probably 7 or 8 thousand feet up and my opponent dove for the deck. I chopped my throttle and pushed through with negative g's into a 70 or 80 degree dive. I pointed at his exhaust, unloaded the g, and fired the AIM-9 without regard for tone, his lack of afterburner, or the fact that the ground filled my entire field of view. The guy I was flying against was an online veteran. He knew that I always fired AIM-9Bs just to scare people into turning toward me (I am good at high deflection snapshots with guns). He knew that AIM-9Bs rarely hit with the afterburner off or when pointed at the ground. He was so sure that he wouldn't get hit that he completetly ignored my shot. His airplane disintegrated when the AIM-9B went up his tailpipe. I don't know if the missile tracked or not, maybe it was just a lucky collision, either way I hit and killed him. It was a miracle shot that I have never duplicated. Now AIM-9Ds are a lot more useful. And AIM-9Gs and AIM-9Hs are a lot more likely to get decent hits under adverse conditions, almost comparable to the AIM-9L. Unfortunately, my favorite ride, the F-4E, only carries USAF AIM-9B/E/J missiles. None of those are nearly as good as the Navy variants, though the J seems to be noticably better than the B and E.

You have to get the "loud" tone, which isn't so loud in the stock sound files. You can't be pulling hardly any g. More importantly, the target has to either be flying straight or in a very gentle turn. Targets with after burner on are much easier to hit, but with patience, a non-afterburning target dies just as easy as long as he isn't maneuvering and you have a solid tone on hm before firing. 50% is about right, though if you catch a strike flight of 4 flying straight and level you might get lucky and get 3 or 4 out of the 4. All of my info is based on full hard settings... I don't know how things work at any other level.