streakeagle

I stumbled on to an F-101 Voodoo throttle quadrant on eBay. It looked suspiciously like an F-4 throttle quadrant, so I bought it to see if I could use it with my F-4 throttle levers. They swapped in perfectly for the F-101 levers. The mechanics for engine off and afterburner engagement are a little different, but this will do fine if I can't ever fine an actual F-4 throttle.

DCS World has come a long way from Flanker / LOMAC. I thoroughly enjoy it. I have finally started to get into multiplayer using the awesome combination of VAICOM Pro for interacting with AI and SRS for interacting with real people using the proper radio controls and procedures. The F-14B and F/A-18C are great aircraft to fly. With Supercarrier, these two Naval fighters shine as the most fun and immersive to fly in DCS World. The Tomcat is a little harder to employ in combat because of the combination of older, complex systems and having to deal with the AI RIO, who can't figure out that if I tell him to track a target and the radar loses track while an AIM-7 or AIM-54 is in the air, that he needs to regain the lock as quickly as possible on the same contact. But the Tomcat is more fun to fly because it isn't fly-by-wire. The Tomcat is my go-to plane to fly until an F-4 Phantom is available. It is actually a half-decent F-4 simulator thanks to the RIO, steam gauge cockpit, and AIM-7/AIM-9 armament. If the F-14A ever becomes available as originally promised, it has very similar power-to-weight with resulting similar climb and sustained turn performance. If you don't use AIM-54s, it will only have the range and TWS benefits of the radar over the F-4 in weapons systems. Whereas the F-14B's big engines make it competitive if not superior to anything else flying if you can handle the lack of fly-by-wire with good pitch and yaw control. The Hornet is only crippled by two things: underpowered and low max g limit. But it is by far the easiest aircraft to use for air combat and one of the most fun to fly because of its high AoA performance. The Hornet really handles well if you can keep the speed low enough to not be limited by max G and fast enough to not be limited by drag and stall speed.

A taste of the OFP version, complete with passenger pickup and fighting a MiG-29:

That looks nice, but FSX is a waste for a combat helo with those capabilities. A long time ago, there was a pretty complete Airwolf mod for Operation Flashpoint. The models and textures look very dated at this point, but Operation Flashpoint was the perfect game engine for recreating Airwolf episodes as you could get in and out of the helo, drive vehicles, and fight bad guys in the air or on the ground. The only real drawback to helo operations in Operation Flashpoint was the flight model. But the FM was good enough to enjoy the variety of missions possible with scripting and open sandbox world.

My son loves this game. We used to play it at Disney Quest (Disney's version of a giant arcade/VR experience). So, I keep it installed and working with an emulator on our PCs. The emulation mostly works correctly... pretty much perfectly in the parts I like: X-Wing vs TIE fighters and snowspeeder vs AT-ATs.

I continue to experiment with SF2 VR and with the framerate locked at 80 fps, it is an amazing experience. SF2 is still the only semi-modern sim (as opposed to Jane's Fighters Anthology and Jane's USAF, which are much older and inferior to SF2 in most respects) where I can fly the F-4 in combat against excellent AI MiG opponents in historical environments like Vietnam and Israel. The FSX/P3d F-4s available from Milviz (F-4E/J/S) and Simworks Studios (F-4B/N) are a joy to fly, but VR runs like crap in P3d and the environment doesn't have AI opponents that you can dogfight. If you like clubbing baby seals, shooting down Cessnas and airliners works great in FSX/P3d with TacPack, but it isn't a true combat flight sim experience. SF2's terrains are obsolete compared to DCS World, even with the texture upgrades, but they are still the only way to fly decent combat missions over Vietnam and Israel in a historical context. The mix of SF2 and VR is a very good experience. I recommend it to anyone who owns both the SF2 series and has VR.

I tried doing some flying with TrackIR, but the zoom level kept shifting back to default whenever I looked down, whereas I manually back it out to maximum to match the wide FOV of my 4k TV monitor. I switched back to VR and the zoom stayed where I put it, and it was a blast. I pretty much can't stand to fly SF2 without VR at this point, despite some very painful limitations of the VorpX means of implementing a basic VR capability. I was beta testing an F-4G and then flew some stock missions: Operation Bolo and F-4J vs MiG-21MF. It is like I am playing a completely new game. Also, after years of focusing on VR, it is nice to experience SF2 dogfighting AI, which has a lot more skill than DCS World AI. In DCS World, if you max out AI skill level, they don't fly smarter, they just abuse their basic flight models and fly more like UFOs. In SF2, the "top-gun" maneuver of chopping your throttle and hitting your brakes will get you killed. The MiG-21 pops his breaks and chops his throttles, too. If you have lost all of your energy, he won't overshoot you, but will shoot as if you are a fish in a barrel. Whereas even the best DCS AI tends to fall easy prey to basic horizontal rolling scissors and will pop helplessly out in front of you even when the AI is in a much superior aircraft.

Congrats to the few, the proud, the suckers for Third Wire products! It has been a long time since I regularly played and/or modded the SF series. But I still have plenty of love for this sim and have even recently been doing some beta testing of an upcoming F-4G overhaul. Nothing but respect for anyone who is still pouring their heart and soul into making this sim better and sharing their work with other for free.

The missiles were not always hyper effective. In fact, they were originally only a little better or in some cases worse than historical effectiveness. I don't know when you started playing SF, but the original SFP1 early AIM-9s and AIM-7s were very likely to be duds or miss. The AIM-7C and AIM-7D were at best 25% effective against easy targets and couldn't hit anything else. I could get the AIM-7E to work fairly well head on, but it otherwise didn't track/hit that often. The AIM-7E2 was good from a stern dogfight position, but didn't do so well with the head on shots. The AIM-9B needed a solid stern position on a non-maneuvering target. The AIM-9E wasn't much different. But if you flew Navy jets, you got the half-decent AIM-9D and once you graduated to the AIM-9G/H, you had an excellent weapon, just short of AIM-9L performance, i.e. lacking the head-on capability. So what changed? TK was desperate to make the game more appealing to casual gamers and they would be complaining about not being able to hit anything. So, TK made some changes that led to the missiles being a lot easier to employ, at least for the player.

Aces High has an exceptionally good VR implementation, but most of its cockpits are somewhat old models/textures. But it maintains fps in dogfights. Aerofly FS 2 is by far the best looking implementation. Their best aircraft models mixed with their best terrains look awesome and maintain high, smooth fps, but at the cost of a static world devoid any traffic on air, land, or sea other than what is pasted on in photo real textures that have zero animation. DCS World suffers performance issues and ghosting, but is otherwise my favorite VR experience because of the amazing cockpits and the updated terrains. If DCS ever gets its graphics engine updated in a way that boosts performance, it will be the king. But for now IL-2 is probably the best balance between performance and looks if you want to fly air combat in VR. Prepar3d and X-Plane aren't my favorite sims to begin with. P3d performance in VR is horrible. I haven't tried X-Plane in VR since they released graphic engine support for Vulkan. But I dislike X-Plane so many aspects of X-Plane that I will never fly it regularly no matter how well it looks and performs in VR.

Great job. SF modding can be a thankless job. But those loyal to this sim series greatly appreciate the efforts of the few and the proud :)

The MB 5 is one cool looking airplane with somewhat exceptional performance to match its looks. But the RAF was right to shift their focus to developing fighter jets.

I love the results, but without proper support for the HUD functionality being built into the game, the cockpit can never be correct. Because of this, I prefer using the MiG-21 cockpit that is close to correct for the export version with the radar display down in the cockpit.

I just played the default F-4J Carrier Takeoff mission. I took off, circled back, and landed. The inability to move my head up to see over the nose is a problem, but the workaround is to recenter your view looking a little low, then look up a few degrees. The more you look up, the more your view is move up, so I was able to see over the nose well enough to have almost a perfect landing. It was almost as easy as landing in DCS World. Next, I played the default F-4E vs MiG-21MF mission over the desert. The real advantage of VR over TrackIR is the 1:1 head tracking which allows you to maintain a sense of where your nose is while you visually follow the target through your rear quarter with a smooth motion that is damn near identical to using padlock. I thoroughly enjoyed this fight as much as a DCS World VR fight. This makes SF2 feel like a new game. If only the terrain and cockpits were up to DCS World standards, I wouldn't know the difference from the experience in VR.

Years ago (I have had VR that long?) I tried flying SF2 in VR using VorpX and the original Oculus Rift. I couldn't write custom profiles, but I tried borrowing profiles from all of the supported games. I couldn't get it to run in DX10, but if I forced DX9, it did work. But it was buggy, ugly, difficult to use, and tended to crash when exiting missions. CAStary eventually got VR and fiddled with SF2/VorpX and somehow got it running ok in DX10. He sent me the profile, but I had never gotten around to trying it out. Well, today I installed the latest version of VorpX and tried out Stary's SF2 profile on my Oculus Rift S. It isn't perfect, but it has improved tremendously. There is a way to toggle between zoomed in for flying and zoomed out for navigating the menus, which solves one of the most annoying bugs I experienced the last time I tried it. At this point, I only see two major problems with flying VR using VorpX: 1) It uses a "mouse look" emulation that only allows you to pivot your viewpoint around, i.e. you can't lean in closer to look at something in detail or move your head around for a better view around a canopy frame. 2) After removing the yaw and pitch limits, you can see how ugly the combined stock cockpit/external model looks because they weren't designed for 360 degrees of pitch and yaw. You can often see through you own aircraft because the cockpit model wasn't designed for you to see anything beyond what was visible with the default view limits. Once I am in the game with my jet, I like using the F1 key to center the view, followed by adjusting the zoom out to the maximum. On my Rift S, the graphics look very nice with smooth, high frame rates. If you have VorpX and want to try SF2, log in to the cloud profiles and find and save the "Strike Fighters 2 DX10" profile, and import it into the local Vorpx library.

My review is up at amazon and there are two other reviews plus one rating with no visible review. Out of four ratings, this book has scored five stars every single time. So, I am not alone in thinking this is a really good book. While four reviews isn't many, having all four be five stars is a pretty nice start.

I got it much faster, and in fact it beat the other book here. I haven't had much time to read it, but I have already read several pages, enough to know what I have on my hands. First, let me say the English translation's publisher did an outstanding job. This book has the quality of a really good school textbook. It has a hard cover with high quality color printing with an unusual combination of a matte finish for the photographic elements and a gloss finish for the title block and author block. The pages are heavy weight and somewhere between a matte/gloss finish with excellent color photos and clear text that isn't too small, but small enough to cram a useful amount of information in between the countless gorgeous photos. Without even finishing the text, this is one of my best books. So, far I haven't seen any of the editing errors I have come to expect from translations, which makes it much easier to read. What it provides: 1. A comprehensive history of both development and operation of the Hind and its systems, including weapons employment and formation tactics. 2. Basic specifications of major variants. 3. A brief history of the opposition's attack helicopters. 4. Extensive number of high quality photos and some diagrams supporting the text. What is doesn't provide: 1. Blueprints, schematics, profiles, 3-view drawings. 2. Detailed flight performance. 3. Pilot manual. So, you won't be able to build a precise 3d model or learn how to fly the Hind from this book. But the photos are great for both traditional and 3d modelers to verify details, color schemes, etc. This is a great book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone that is a fan of Hinds, attack helicopters, or military aviation history.

One that I am beta testing. The entire F-4G series with refined 3d models inside and out is being finished as we speak. But I have no idea when it will be polished enough for release.

The problem is that India already has too many types of fighters in service. So, as I understand it, they are heavily in favor of buying more Dasault Rafale jets so they can get a better return on long term maintenance and supply.

At least one guy is already building a home sim pit for this monster. I can't wait to fly it.

The most useful parts of YAP are the aircraft carriers. They are very well done and many are not available any other way, or if there is a free one available, the free one is just plain ugly in comparison. Unfortunately, the carriers were designed to YAP / WOV specs, so they are not especially well suited to the updates provided by SF2:NA and they are generally divided into two models for each ship: one model for launching and one model for landing. This two model approach allows well placed objects on the carrier deck, which in pre-SF2NA days was the only way to populate the deck with aircraft. So launching, the cats are clear with aircraft blocking the landing, and the bow cats are usually blocked for the landing model. There are some mods floating around here at CombatAce for the YAP carriers to make them as SF2NA compliant as possible. So, if you love high poly, high resolution aircraft carriers from the Vietnam era, YAP is the way to go. They also have some more great carrier stuff in the separate 3d model shop for Korea and more modern carriers. But I don't have anything after YAP2 came out, i.e. YAP3, Rising Sun, 3d model shop, etc. because I pissed off Zero Cinco (05), the owner of the YAP products when I strongly disagreed with his rant against TK/Third Wire for the changes made in the 2008 patch for the SF/WoX series and SF2, which broke some of the "features" of YAP (such as inflight refueling) that were exploiting bugs in the core code. I never got the final YAP2 patches nor the promised free upgrade to YAP3. So, I personally don't care for the company and wouldn't support them. But if you like what they have, there is nowhere else to go to get it.

Where did you buy your serial numbers from? Some sellers were reselling licenses a few years back. ED banned the practice and all of the known "bad" serial numbers were deactivated by ED. Of course ED and their licensing system are far from infallible. They have switched to newer system that doesn't rely on typing in activation codes. So, if your licenses don't show as active/ok when you log into ED's website, you have to contact ED for support. They are the only ones that can tell you what is wrong and/or fix the problem. Good luck!

I would love to have had an Mi-24 ride like that! The only helo ride I have ever had was hanging out the side door of a UH-1 while flying low over the Hudson River near West Point, NY. If I could only have one helo ride, I would want it to be a UH-1, so that was a victory for me. But I would love a treetop ride at maximum speed in an AH-1, Mi-24, or AH-64. The combination of VR and DCS World helicopters has been amazing. I can't wait for the DCS Mi-24, OH-58, and AH-1. Helicopter flight models are hard to develop, so every helo in DCS feels very different as much from the skills/approaches of the different developers as from actual difference due to real world design and performance. Realistic or not, the variety in feel, stability, etc. is challenging and fun. Unlike fixed wing fighters, I don't know a whole lot about the real world numbers/equations, so I enjoy whatever is delivered with less critical complaints. I don't even have any data points to challenge their results. I have tons of flight manuals for US fighters and some Soviet, but not one manual for helos. In this case, ignorance has been bliss. I have a lot more fun not knowing the top speed and/or climb rate is off by 15% or more or that the engine should be harder or easier to overheat than it is. Whereas, I know that the AoA indication should change decrease by about 1 unit when the gear is retracted on an F-4E/F/G while it should increase by about 3 units on all other F-4's with the larger nose as I own and have extensively studied the flight manuals for the F-4B/C/D/E/F/G/N/S. I am only missing the manuals for the RN/RAF F-4K/M variants. But your book could be my start down the slippery slope of collecting helicopter references.

I also hope this book helps get me ready for the DCS Mi-24P ;) The Take On Helicopters Mi-24 was a disappointment... not really any better than what you could already fly in the OFP / ArmA series in terms of flight model and systems modeling. But until DCS released the UH-1 and Mi-8, OFP/ ArmA series was my go-to helo sim because of the immersive experience of flying actual helicopter recon, attack, transport, and rescue missions as a small part of a huge environment. FSX and X-Plane have much better flight and systems modeling, but in OFP/ArmA, there is a huge world of AI and even other players that you can pick up, drop off, or kill. With DCS World, I can now fly a UH-1 on the same variety of missions with a similar immersive experience with much better graphics, flight modeling, and insane systems modeling. Then I can switch to the Mi-8 which performs similar roles but provides a radically different flight/operation experience. With the Mi-24 being derived from the Mi-8, I would expect the DCS Mi-24 to feel like a heavier Mi-8. It will be interesting to see what your book says, then compare what it is like flying the Mi-24 in DCS.