streakeagle

Not only a great F-4 video, but correctly presents the fact that it is the pilots that ultimately make the aircraft great

Aside from any bias in the weapons data, TK's way to make missions more "fun" is to have AI focus on engaging the player. It is one thing if the AIM-7 and AIM-9 perform better than they should relative to Soviet missiles, it is another thing if every aircraft with overpowered weapons aims them all at you. While TK did quite a bit to make a rivet counter like me happy over the years, he still made a lot of decisions that favored gameplay and fun over realism. Early on he decided to make the game only playable from the blue NATO/Western/US side and complaints about player missile reliability were addressed in patches, particularly after the release of SF2 North Atlantic. If you install SFP1 SP2a (the last major release before Wings Over Vietnam, which marked a major turn in AI dogfighting ability and flight modeling), you will find a given scenario such as 4 x F-4D vs 4 x MiG-21MF plays very differently. The AIM-7s and AIM-9s are far more likely to fail and if you don't have a gun, the MiG-21s have a decent chance. Having played online multiplayer with SFP1/WoX for years, I can say in a 1 vs 1 with player flown F-4s vs player flown MiGs, the F-4 has a hard time winning. The MiG-19 was the best PvP aircraft in the game, having the maneuverability of the MiG-17 and the power of the F-4. The MiG-17 wasn't easy to beat. The MiG-21 was for the most part a fair fight. The deviation between blue and red weapons parameters are but one small piece of the puzzle: it is the AI that really determines the difficulty of a given mission.

The A-X specification kept changing. At some point, the requirement for 30mm cannon was added. Aircraft designs progressed continuously as the specification changed from turboprop to turbofan and adding the gun. Was the A-10 design significantly complete before the gun requirement was added, then modified? Or was a completely new approach used to accommodate the gun? There is a clear history of the USAF request for proposal requirements. There are examples of proposals with turboprops long before the gun requirement was added. I suspect the designs we know as the A-9 and A-10 were not finalized until after the 1970 RFPs (including the gun). Since the gun was exceptionally large, the aircraft had to be designed around it, but they were also designed around the rest of the specifications for armor, payload, maneuverability, range, loiter time, and redundancy/survivability. The gun was just one of many requirements. But its size, shape, and weight definitely affected the overall design. It is not an exaggeration to say the A-10 was built around the gun, but it was also built around the titanium "bathtub" cockpit and the widely separated pod mounted engines. It is false to believe the gun design came first, then prototype aircraft were designed around it.

I have been wondering what happened to KillerBee. We interacted several times via emails/forums because we shared interest not only in Strike Fighters Project 1, but in some of the skins and missions for it. A lot of us old Strike Fighters fans are on the wrong side of the aging curve, so I had feared the worst. Now I know I was correct. I am sad to hear the news but relieved to know what happened. It seems you are as proud of your father as I you should be and I hope you carry on his legacy with pride. Everyone here shares the love of military aviation and Strike Fighters, too. I am glad you got to share that with your father. My son happens to have joined the Marines last summer. He has never taken to flight sims, but he grew up with my models, played some of my sims, went to airshows, and toured some of the best museums; so he knows a little bit more about airplane recognition than most and has sat in many cockpits. I hope you share your love and knowledge of military aviation with others, too. Semper Fi! and may your father rest in peace.

It has been quite a few years since I used it regularly. Hyperlobby was the only way to really meet people to play the Strike Fighters Project 1/Wings Over X series online. The removal of multiplayer from Strike Fighters 2 largely ended my time on Hyperlobby. I did try hosting SFP1/WoX a few more times, but the few people that used to fly SF online had moved on. Salute to Jiri for having hosted Hyperlobby so long!

Along with Falcon 4.0, this was a precursor to what DCS World is now. I periodically fired it up to enjoy the complexity/realism. But I never took to the Super Hornet. The Blue Angels were flying the F/A-18A and later F/A-18C "legacy" Hornets. Interestingly enough, just as the legacy Hornets were being retired, DCS World added the F/A-18C rather than the far more contemporary F/A-18E Super Hornet. The irony of the old sim modeling the future while the new sim models the past. I was running Windows 98SE on an intel Pentium 3 Tualatin 1.2 GHz with PC133 RAM (512/1024 MB?) and a Voodoo 5500 gpu, later an ATi Radeon 8500 128MB. Of course I downloaded and installed all of the mods that kept it going for years even though I rarely played it. "Team Super Hornet" kept Jane's F/A-18 going for many years with resolution/graphics fixes and extra features -- I seem to remember them adding a flyable F-14 at one point. The only thing holding Jane's F/A-18 back was the fact that the source code was never released, which was the key to Falcon 4.0's longevity. So, Jane's F/A-18 is relegated to being almost unplayable on modern hardware and even if working 100% correctly, it looks dated while Falcon 4.0 is still getting major updates from the BMS freeware team while the new Microprose prepares to release Falcon 5.0. DCS World provides the absolute best F/A-18C experience possible, especially if you have the Super Carrier module with realistic flight deck crew. But it isn't a Super Hornet. For now, the best option is the VRS Superbug for Prepar3d, which cannot match the combat experience of the old Jane's F/A-18 much less the DCS World experience. I still have my Jane's F/A-18 install CD and keyboard map, but it has been quite a few years since I last installed and played it.

AMDs Adrenaline software also supports recording and streaming. I have used both nVidia and AMD to record/stream. There are parameters you can adjust to trade off between image quality/frame rate and file size/performance hit.

SF2 is codes for TrackIR, so any head/eye tracking system that can hook into TrackIR games will work. At only point, the payware app, VorpX, allowed VR to work with SF2. CAStarry had made a profile that worked for several years. But VorpX is constantly updated and around 2020 a patch broke the profile CA Starry had developed. I haven't ever got it working again.

M1's sent to Ukraine had their advanced armor plates removed to prevent capture by the Russians, not unlike export T-72's sent to the middle east that didn't have their advanced laminate armor plates installed, which allowed M60A1 tanks to 1-hole them with 105mm at maximum range.

Did you find and apply the BDG MiG Alley 0.85 patch that improves the stability and supports TrackIR? I was disappointed when they never upgraded/re-released MiG Alley the way they did Battle of Britain. I don't have many mods, just the patches and a couple of basic skins: F-86_Generic_BWStripes, F-86_Generic_YellowStripes, and "The Huff".

That looks great! You are always pushing the limits.

It is a shame that the Strike Fighters 2 series cannot easily be adapted to VR. Due to its older game engine designed for much slower PCs, it runs smooth as glass in VR, which can't be said of MSFS or DCS World. If the interior cockpits were fully modeled for 360 degree views and SF2 natively supported OpenXR, it would be a great VR sim.

Ironic that the master thief didn't want anyone stealing property that he had stolen. He didn't want anyone posting screenshots that he didn't approve of. He accused Third Wire/TK of trying to intentionally sabotage his project with the changes TK made to SF2. The goal of accurately recreating the history of Vietnam was great. His execution of that goal is not a legacy I would want to honor in any way. I respect his service to the country as a fighter pilot who risked his life in combat. But that doesn't pardon his behavior in this community.

Great information. This entire thread was quite the learning experience.

"Sonic boom buster" is an aerospike. Still curious why it is only seen on this one variant. Maybe they were trying out a new idea. Or compared to earlier designs, the AIM-4F needed a drag reduction to reach performance goals?

I would agree that looks plausible. In the other examples, the shape of the cone is very flat or blunt requiring a fairly long spike. Maybe the AIM-4 was sufficiently aerodynamic that it only needed a relatively short one to get the desired drag reduction? My question would be why only this version of the AIM-4? It seems the aerospike concept was first utilized in the 1970s, a bit before the AIM-4F's time. I would bet that even though it may not have been intended to be an aerospike, that it certainly acted like one.

AIM-4F has two claimed improvements: better SARH guidance and better ECCM. The nose probe is probably an antenna involved with one of those two improvements. But I can't find any documents online that go into any real detail on the AIM-4 series of missiles.

What year does the base (fictional map) SF2 install stop? Did a quick install. Base SF2 stops at F-4D_75 and F-4E_75, both of which are the latest year variants included.

Great work!

This is a list of all the F-4 manual pdfs I have. I had bought several early on, but most of what is listed here came from Avialogs and possibly from some other free sources on the internet.

There are two places to look for good F-4 manuals. The first doesn't require any kind of registration: Downloads The seconds used to be a payware site, but went to free if you register for access: Avialogs: Aviation Library - Avialogs: Welcome to the aviation library, online since 2010. Avialogs has tons of manuals on everything, quite a few on F-4s. About once a month, I pick an aircraft type and download all the pdfs for it. This site has dramatically increased my flight manual library... for free!

They no longer force Facebook accounts. The VR market is still relatively small. The dominant market share is the Meta Quest app store. So, if you want to make money selling VR games, time spent on supporting anything other than Quest is time and money lost.

I thought SF2 (perhaps only in early patch levels?) was backwards compatible with old mods that had shadow models. My memory extends mostly to old mods being used in SF2. The Razbam F2H-2 sticks out in my memory. The SF2 shadow technique mixed poorly with the old mod, so disabling the shadow fixed the problem. The F-111 pack I have on file was an updated SF2 version with the following lines: [Shadow] CastShadow=TRUE ShadowCastDist=10000 MaxVisibleDistance=400 As such, CastShadow can be set to false if the F-111's shadow is causing the performance hit. Interestingly enough, the ini is only using a single LOD reported as 1,713 kB: [LOD001] Filename=F-111Ad.lod Distance=8000 But has a 2nd smaller lod file included in the folder reported as 799 kB: F-111A.LOD I wonder why there are two LODs, but only one is utilized in-game?

There are two ways to generate shadows: The original method incorporated a separate shadow 3d model. The new method generates shadows from the regular lod. If this is an old mod, it may still be using the separate shadow lod. If so, there is a chance editing the F-111 ini file to use the new shadow method may solve the problem. If not, perhaps completely disabling the shadow for the F-111 in the F-111 ini file will solve the problem at the cost of no shadow at all.