streakeagle

I may be all out of ARMs, but my wingman wants a piece of the action. It is the same story as before. And it has the same ending, too.

I have another Standard ARM... and I found another Shilka. History does tend to repeat itself... and the quarterback is toast!

Taking off to hit air defenses surrounding an enemy air force base. En route to the target, loaded for bear! Taking a shot with a Standard ARM. Say good bye to the ZSU-23-4! It's a hit!

Yes, they had a free trial of the F-15 and Su-27. It was posted in their weekly news update.

The original game didn't have carriers. WoV added carriers. WoE added clouds. WoI fixed a lot of the issues with AI and flight models introduced by WoV and WoE as well as adding better modeling of radar/ecm. If the base install of SF2 came with everything, there would have been no incentive to buy SF2V, SF2E, etc. As it was, the majority of SFP1/WoX purchasers never bought any of the SF2 releases and quite a few people exploited the lack of copy protection to pirate the series. I am not sure why TK even started messing with SF2 again given that he seems to be far more successful at generating revenue with his mobile games without investing nearly as much time, effort, and money.

SF2 was coded for Windows Vista, which inadvertently made it compatible with Windows 7. Windows 10 and the hardware drivers supporting it are a moving target. Don't expect any noticeable code changes if SF2 already runs well on your Win10 pc. What is coming will eliminate some problems under the hood and allow TK to market SF2 as a proper Win10 compatible game. Bringing the game up to Windows 10 coding standards also paves the way for future development, should TK believe it may be profitable again. I can't think of a single sim that stepped into the niche that SF2 filled: the Jane's Fighters Anthology lite survey sim. But his timing may be a little late as ED is going to release a dumbed down version of DCS World with all the main fighters in one package, which will inherently feature the things SF2 was always missing: multiplayer, recording missions, ejection sequences, and maybe air-to-air refueling. But the beauty of SF2 is that presumably most if not all of the previous SF2 mods will still be compatible, maintaining SF2's huge advantage: comprehensive libraries of aircraft, vehicles, ships, and maps from all eras of aviation from WWI to the recent past. If TK could afford to shoe-horn in a newer graphics engine and provide the plugins and tools needed to update existing models and create new, massively updated terrains, he would have a winner.

I will get the WW1 game eventually, too. Not sure about the tank game. I have DCS Combined Arms, but never use it. My preferred tank is the M60A1. Steel Beasts Pro PE has the M60A3, so it is my preferred tank game, especially since it is the DCS:World of tank games, being more of a study sim used for real-world training.

The Soviet Navy was huge and had an impressive submarine force. But it was never a "blue water" Navy. Coastal defense is a limited capability compared to controlling the sea lanes and power projection. China has a long way to go and numbers of vessels isn't the whole story. It is also the ability to operate them over extended time frames far away from home port. The Chinese may be able to improve it, but the Russian aircraft carriers have been less than impressive to date. When the Chinese are able to perform ASW well enough to prevent US Navy submarines from operating in their waters or within torpedo range of their ships, they might be useful. In the mean time, China doesn't have anything that can't be sunk overnight.

Back in 1997, I climbed up on the XB-70 landing gear so that I could touch it's skin. I saw the N9 fly around 1996-1997 as well.

The FA-18 has always been capable of pulling 90 degrees of AoA and recovering. Not quite as good as the Su-27's 120-130 degrees, but certainly outstanding by any measure. However, the flight control system isn't programmed to permit it. It is a risky flight regime that is pretty much worthless in combat. The pitch authority of the Hornet in a combat environment is still one of the best beyond the F-22 and F-35. You don't need a "cobra" to fire an AIM-9X.

I bought my last Warthog from Germany not too long ago for $375 when my throttle died and the PCB to fix it was out of stock. Deals can be found but they constantly come and go.

There is nothing better than meeting and conversing with people that lived through major historical events. We are losing so many so fast from WW2 to through Vietnam. The saddest part of watching the WW2 generation fade away is knowing that their history is slowly but surely being forgotten by the majority of people who simply don't care about history.

I bet you can find a complete Warthog HOTAS for the price of the base + Hornet grip. The HOTAS can periodically be found at $350 to $400 and has been sold for as low as $300. Of course, even as I post this I find prices are way up for the holiday season.

Relatively recent thread on this topic: https://combatace.com/forums/topic/91885-an-important-question/?tab=comments#comment-742990

If you delve back into the depths of SFP1, this capability has existed since the very first Walmart release. Kreelin's mission editor provided the option to enable this. But it was an unfinished, unsupported option that caused lots of problems, so at some point TK had patched it out of existence. I didn't realize it had been re-enabled. I don't think TK meant to make this option available again, but sometime he accidently re-introduced old code/bugs in later patches, so maybe that is why this is available again? I can't recall ever trying a ramp start since SF2 was introduced, so maybe it has been there all along?

I never cared for the MiG-23 very much. The MiG-21 was generally better for WVR fighting and the MiG-23's BVR capability was limited to two missiles that were roughly AIM-7F equivalent (for reference, Israel was very disappointed with the AIM-7F). However, the radar was pretty cool, and if you are a Phantom Phanatic like myself, this is the Soviet equivalent to the F-4E, minus one engine, 2 SARH missiles, and one crew member. If a MiG-21 and an F-4 had a baby, this plane would be it. After flying the SF series for so many years and having extensively researched and flown all of the Soviet aircraft available for it, the MiG-21 remains my favorite, but the MiG-23 is a close 2nd place. I love flying the MLD, which strongly resembles a MiG-21bis with decent radar and even more power. I can't wait for RAZBAM's MiG-23 for DCS World. It won't be an MLD, but it is being modeled after a Cuban MLA. It should be the best the MiG-23 has ever been modeled in a combat flight sim. I can't wait!

AI flight models weren't always tweaked as well as they could have been, but a MiG-23 should more or less turn like an F-4, particularly at typical Mach 0.5 to Mach 0.9 dogfight speeds with the wings in the middle position. The final MLD variant was improved much like the slatted F-4E. The MLD was modestly superior to the slatted F-4E in maneuverability and way ahead in specific excess power (i.e. climb/acceleration). In that form, it wouldn't be too bad. Good enough to fight F-15s WVR.

If I had spent a lot of time developing a flight model for payware, I might be upset if someone else took that flight model and used it in other payware without my permission. But if I am experienced as creating/selling products for the SF series, I already know how open the game is and can expect the text based ini files to be borrowed/copied/edited at will by the modding community, as TK expects. What you are really selling are the 3d models, as everything else is readily copied/edited/redistributed. TK came to the same conclusion and started locking up the lods while leaving most of the game wide open to copying/editing/sharing.

I love FE, but have never modded it. I have been perfectly happy flying Camels, Dr.Is, D.VIIs, Spads, etc. But this post made me take a closer look at what is available. I remember a lot of the aircraft, but not the Gladiator. Well done!

The SF2 Korea produced by the modders combined with the Skyraiders and F2H-2 from Razbam makes for an awesome ride. I wouldn't hesitate to say that it came out better than what TK could have produced, which would have had a very small flyable plane set and still not as many aircraft and objects as modders have produced. But the problem of the FMs is always there. Ignore the FMs discrepancies and the quality of some of the older models and Korea looks great and plays great... Not available in any sim since MiG Alley and a marked improvement over MiG Alley. What other sim has a proper Korean War environment where you can fly missions with almost any aircraft historically available on either side? The F7F Tigercat and F3D Skyknight are rarely if ever in combat flight sim. Some of the Russian prop planes would have been late war monsters if WW2 had not ended, but in Korea they still faced P-51Ds but got a good taste of jets, too.

The prop engine flight model didn't exist in SFP1. First Eagles provided the WWI engines, but TK only made that sim because a certain person bankrolled it. Wings Over Israel was released with the first true support for WW2 aircraft flight models. I never delved into the WW2 aspect of the SF flight model, so I have no clue about what bugs were in it that might hinder attempts to develop decent flight models, but since they were rare birds in a sim focused on jets, I am sure TK didn't spend a lot of time on it, so it might not have everything you might want in terms of engine modeling and it might have bugs in the things it does provide. Having actually written an application to analyze and help edit SFP1/WoX flight models, I can say it takes a tremendous amount of research, time, and effort to get even one flight model as correct as the game engine permits. In many ways, the jets are much easier to model since more modern flight manuals contain countless tables of performance data that help figure out the actual lift, drag, and thrust curves. But even then, much of the information needed for stability and inertia parameters has to be done by trial and error and calibrated to personal preference. So, why would anyone try to develop the countless flight models needed for so many different aircraft to a decent level of detail when WW2 air combat sims are a dime a dozen and several already existed with diverse plane sets and/or great flight modeling? I only managed to create one decent flight model, the F-4B for SFP1 SP2a. As soon as TK release the next patch level, Wings Over Vietnam, my F-4B flight model was broken. While later patches allowed it to work ok again, it never was quite the same, especially because TK changed how the flight model engine handled stalling/departure, a critical aspect of hard winged Phantoms. I also developed a major bug in my flight model editor after adding new features to accommodate TK's patches. I didn't have the old source files nor the time/energy to track down what got broken, so I gave up developing flight models all together. There were/are several SFP1/SF2 veterans that produce new flight models and/or tweak old ones. But they mostly have moved on from this game or only pursue their own pet projects. It is possible to create a sort of template for a particular aircraft configuration and then massage it to fit particular aircraft. If you can find an existing aircraft in the stock game or available for download with a decent FM and similar to the aircraft you want to model, it is the best, least time consuming way to go. But you still have to perform flight test after flight test to tune the FM to any decent level of precision compared to published data for the real aircraft. To do a good job, you have to understand what the FM tables actually are and the consequences of tampering with them. Fixing one issue almost always causes another, unless you fully understand the interaction of all the aerodynamic coefficients, and even then it is still a lot of trial and error.

Thanks for the news. I now have BOK. I bought BOS and BOM a few years ago when there was a Christmas sale, but have been waiting for BOK to come down in price for a while. I don't play these sims enough to justify full price, but I still like to have them and try out new aircraft and features. These games work fairly well in VR. If I wasn't so focused on flying DCS World, I would probably spend a lot more time on this series. Now I am waiting for Bodenplatte to get finished and go through the sale cycle and hopefully the Pacific War isn't too far away.

I could see this being useful in VR. My preference would be for the version with the mousepad squeezed in between the keypad and keyboard where the cursor keys would normally be. But years of using laptops with mousepads has taught me that I would much rather have a real mouse than a mousepad unless the environment can't support a mouse.

Play the stock game for a bit. Find out what you don't like about the stock game and then try to find mods that fix those problems. The stock game is pretty impressive though, despite its bugs and limitations. The main complaint are the dated terrain graphics. You can find mods that provide major texture upgrades and mods that defeat the "newer" drawing distance limitations introduced in later patches. The best/most famous mods are complete additions, with some delivered as a "package" while others have to be searched for and downloaded as many, many individual components: NATO Fighters 5: Adds countless aircraft mods, some that you may not find available individually/only in this mod. I think the five (V) version was the last official release for SF2E, but there are probably some newer updates for it. Vietnam / Green Hell: I can't remember the name, but there is a comprehensive Vietnam upgrade that is comparable to the NATO addon, plus there are various terrain texture updates, most being a variation of the "Green Hell" addon. Operation Desert Storm: like NATO, this is a fairly comprehensive addon with some unique additions. For me, the one that is an absolute necessity is Korea for SF2. It isn't a single addon but an endless list of components that you must hunt down and download separately: terrain, aircraft, etc. All of these addons are getting very old and some modders have updated some of the components in them such as specific aircraft. I can't even give you the correct names of the above mods to aid your search for the best content, much less list all the updates that have occurred in recent years. Besides Korea, my favorite thing is the get the best looking, best-modeled variants of every single aircraft available for the game. For example, there are packages for the F-101 Voodoo. Some are newer, but aren't necessarily better. Sometimes you have to mix mods to get the best result: i.e. the newer mod has better textures, but the older mod has historically correct weapons, engines, etc. It is absolutely overwhelming how much content is available at CombatAce. If that wasn't enough, there is a private rogue site that splintered away from the main community, The A-Team Skunkworks. You have to request to join to access their content and they won't let you download too much at any one time or they will ban you, but they have content you can't get anywhere else: http://cplengineeringllc.com/SFP1/ But go back to my first statement: play the game stock for a while. There is already more to do there than you can possibly comprehend if you are a first time SF2 player. Then start out by downloading an airplane or two you really like, but isn't in the game. Then try adding skins or maybe a terrain or upgrading terrain textures. There is no shortage of things to learn/experiment with. The flight sim community at large wrongly bypassed this game. It is still one of the best available as long as you don't need multiplayer or advanced terrain modeling.

As cool as jester is, it is an immersion breaker for me. The graphical interface is quick and easy so you don't have to memorize all the commands, but what is the point of VR or 4K graphics if you have to break the immersion with a pop-up menu filling the screen? If I would take the time to use the vaicom voice module, I would probably like it, but voice recognition is still a pain in the butt to deal with... too many bugs/misinterpreted phrases, etc. It is like talking to someone who is partially deaf and doesn't know English as a first language. So far, I prefer having all controls from the backseat being available to me while I sit in the front seat: modes, range scales, cursor, etc. Modern HOTAS like the VKB MCG Pro have enough controls on the stick grip that I can operate the radar and fly/fight from the front seat. It may not be realistic, but it is better than dealing with AI or switching seats. The experience is similar to playing the SF series, where two-seaters were as implemented in a way that was easily as manageable as single seaters.