streakeagle

I need to consolidate my sources. But the Osprey book on USAF F-4 kills in 72-73 is agreeing with my other book that chronicles all MiG killers of the entire war. The profiles in the Osprey book got some things right, but still have mistakes. Interesting text on the loadouts: the #2/#4 planes apparently carried fewer missiles based on a statement from the #2 pilot in this historical incident. Oyster 1: 3 x AIM-7, 2 x AIM-4 Oyster 2: 2 x AIM-7, 1 x AIM-4 Apparently all carried 3 drop tanks, which they dropped prior to engaging.

The early J models rushed into service had some reliability issues. The later post-Vietnam J models were much better, but were way behind what the AIM-G/H series had achieved. The jump from the AIM-9H to the AIM-9L was fairly small. Just a tweak to the seeker to give a chance at all-aspect. But if you look at the Israeli and Falklands data, AIM-9L series was still primarily fired from rear aspect, but achieved about 80% PK, not only well above the 15-25% experienced in Vietnam, but smoking the 35-40% achieved with AIM-7M in Desert Storm. As far as I can tell, AIM-9N/Ps were AIM-9Js altered to be roughly comparable to the AIM-9L/M without the all-aspect capability. On my submarine, we had the sonar equivalent to a RWR, the AN/WLR-9. Its job was to automatically warn us with a variety of beeps to any active sonar that met its detection criteria. It would give you a direction, a signal strength, frequency, and pulse length. But under some circumstances, the false alarm rate was very high and it would largely be disregarded -- though we had to verbally acknowledge all torpedo detections as false alarms to the officer of the deck in control. But when a real sonar or torpedo was really going active, it gave us great information automatically. We never faced the saturation of active sonars in all directions that Olds faced in Vietnam. The system would have been utterly useless in the middle of a surface action group banging away at full power on their active sonars. Nice profile. My books never had a current photo of the Oyster flight F-4Ds. This crew chief's photos are fantastic and belong in my books. I have identified three of the four tail codes in that flight. I would also like to know the tail codes of the sister, Balter, flight, especially the two that completed the mission and flew up high as bait. Once source confessed that 784 wasn't even assigned to them, but after scoring their kills, they used rank to have it the name blocks repainted/assigned to them. I never trust profiles. Photos have limited usefulness unless you can be certain about the date/location... but still much better than profiles. In the absence of information, I always take what I can get though. In the words of my WEPS on SSN-687 (weapons officer), "bad data is better than no data".

I have both. I don't have YAP3 or one last patch for YAP2 (though I still have the no longer valid email link to the patch).

He didn't / won't give me the latest versions, even cut off the last patch or two to YAP2. Important thing is that the one model I wanted from the original YAP did come with YAP 2: a really great rendition of CVAN-65. It cost me around $200, but no one else has released anything even close. My dad built the Revell 1/720 scale model of the Enterprise for me when I was 5 or 6. I bought and built the same model for my son :)

While I have flown a few campaigns, the vast majority of my experience is either in random single missions or hand edited historical single missions. I fought the AI to no end between the various patches/version changes to try to replicate historical reports on specific encounters. TK's AI just won't do what real pilots did. Always too smart or too dumb. But before SF2NA patches nerfed the missiles making even AA-2 Atolls effective, I could consistently get historical losses if not historical behavior from any well tweaked historical mission. The SF series may have been "lite" in certain regards (such as cockpit controls), but the flight and weapons modeling and even some of the AI behavior was very realistic and is still competitive against DCS World in terms of historical behavior/results. Of course, both before and after the SF2NA patches, I, as the player, could get unrealistically good results most of the time regardless of AI settings. I don't know if that is a result of game issues or because players get way more experience/training than any real pilot ever did.

I have seen some of the later YAP releases. About the time YAP 3 was coming along and being given freely to YAP 2 owners, I had a bad exchange with 05 on SimHQ because he was pissed at TK for making changes that broke his bug exploits (like refueling, because TK decided negative fuel flow in imaginary engines was a bug not a feature). So I was banned/terminated from being a YAP customer. Funny thing is that he said he didn't want or need my money, yet he kept every dime I ever spent on YAP1 and YAP2. I loved the models and idea of max detail historical missions -- did not like 05 and his hypocritical views where it was a federal crime to steal anything from him when a lot files he was selling were stolen from other people. So, short version: I can't buy YAP products, and I think that achievement ranks higher than being banned from the ATEAM, as anyone can get that by simply downloading more than one file in a year. I have been poking around the SF2 and SF1 files looking for options to expand/upgrade SF2 for Vietnam. But there isn't a whole lot of obvious support for the one or two things I was looking to do. I almost have my Coral Sea F-4B finished to compare/contrast with the FSX F-4B in the same skin. There are still some inaccuracies due to MyTai's decals and Sundowner's template not being quite right for the earlier 1965 F-4B. But I have merged the two in a way that will look good to most unless you have photos from exactly that time frame to compare. I would love to do a mission and some screenshots modeling Oyster flight on May 10, 1972. At this point, I know the tail numbers for three of the four that flew. But I would also need the tail codes for the two-ship Balter flight that was flying high as bait. I had gathered a lot of info to support doing this May 10 mission as accurately as possible. But I was trying to do missions in order starting with 1965 (see my F-100 and F-105 missions covering the first MiG kills and F-105 losses hosted on this site). I got frustrated when the very large mission I had worked on for so long got lost. I never rebuilt it and stopped trying to make historical missions from then on. I would love to model and fly every Red Baron report mission from the perspective of both sides. TK's all-knowing/all-seeing AI and super reliable missile patch for SF2NA kind of deflated my interest since a lot of missions require having one side approach the other undetected and/or for US aircraft to expend a lot of missiles for little or no results. So, I will settle for campaign missions with the latest terrain mods for semi-historical fun.

I am trying to build some nice screenshots to compare and contrast a max-modded SF2/Vietnam/F-4B/Coral Sea install versus FSX/TacPack/Vietnam/SimWorks Studios F-4B Beta release. What I have learned from doing this is: 1) Sundowner made some great templates available, which have to be modified to suit the particular unit/time frame I am trying to showcase. I am not very good at skinning and hate having to do anything more than download ready-made flawless skins by people with far greater skills than me. So, why doesn't SF2 have a complete library of skins that are hi-res/Sundowner quality for major stock aircraft the way SFP1/WoX did? MyTai did wonderful work for SFP1 and a mix between his work and the Sundowner templates is the way to go. But both the Sundowner template and the MyTai decals need to be modified to get nearly flawless results. I am spoiled from the past where everything I wanted just magically appeared (aside from Thunderbirds F-4E skins, and TK eventually improved that situation with a fairly decent DLC). 2) The stock provision for Coral Sea is still the stock Kittyhawk CV. 3) The freeware available at CombatAce for CV-43 supports SF2 NA carriers and is a huge improvement in many ways, but... 4) To this day, the only maxed out quality carriers for the SF series are YAP carriers, which don't inherently support SF2 and have the pretty, but impractical solution of having one version of the model for taking off and one version for landing. This looks great for hand written missions, but just doesn't work for generated missions, especially campaigns. On a related note: I was trying to replicate Oyster flight from May 10, 1972 for a nice screenshot. SF2 does not inherently support the "OY" tail code for the Triple Nickel in 1972 and CombatAce does not have an SF2 skin available, much less a Sundowner qulaity skin for the OY tail code. Sundowner did release a generic F-4D skin that would probably work ok if I had the right decals for 1972 Triple Nickel "OY" F-4Ds. But I can see the collapse of the SF community that took place in the transition from SFP1/WoX to SF2. In consolidating the core games, TK gave up some skins/decal variations that he had fully supported between SFP1, WoV, WoE, and WoI. The community never fully provided updated, hi-res replacements for the huge volume of material published to enhance/expand SFP1/WoX. So, what I really want, but am too unskilled/lazy to provide are: Complete skins at a Sundowner quality level for every aircraft in the SF2 library, especially the F-4. Freeware versions of all aircraft carriers that equal or surpass YAP carriers visual quality AND allow a single model to support both takeoffs and landings to be suitable for campaigns. Someone out there needs to get hot so I can ignore/criticize their work while I revert back to DCS World in the time it takes you to try to support an obsolete/unsupported sim that eventually won't work with the latest PCs/Windows. If you can't see the sarcasm/humor in my entire post, you can **** off! On the other hand, if someone could quickly polish up the 3d models/textures for an SF2 CV-43 Coral Sea in 1965 on very short notice, I would actually use it for a few screen shots.

Robin Olds had already long ago established that the AIM-4 was worthless junk. He had F-4s in his unit immediately field modded by talented mechanics to go back to the AIM-9B. Units in the field wanted the Navy AIM-9s, but their F-4s did not have the pylons/plumbing to support their seeker cooling. Inter-service rivalry can be healthy and good, like competition in a free market. But in Vietnam (and later), it got in the way of doing their principal job -- providing effective military power for the USA. I don't understand why any AIM-4s were being deployed, much less to the dedicated air superiority units like the Triple Nickel. An interesting fact is that Robin Olds couldn't stand radar warning receivers. He felt that they were nothing more than an unnecessary distraction in a situation already suffering from information overload. He always turned his off. In an environment like Hanoi, threat radars were in every direction and causing continuous alarms. He didn't want or need a light, a buzzer or a green screen to tell him he was surrounded by radar directed SAMs and AAA. He felt that you couldn't effectively defend against a SAM unless someone had eyes on it anyway, so he stuck to visual scanning techniques for keeping up with SAM threats. Of course, he had an amazing, almost superhuman, ability to maintain situational awareness and equally important, he was flying in a daytime environment where his eyes could potentially do an equal or better job of sorting out threats as long as there wasn't too much cloud cover.

The USAF AIM-9's actually regressed. The AIM-9E performed the same or worse than the AIM-9B and the early AIM-9J performed even worse. Had the USAF accepted the USN AIM-9D/G/H development path instead of going over to the AIM-4 and then trying to develop its own AIM-9, there certainly would have been several more kills. If the Navy had committed to slats and a gun, they might have done a little better, too. The Navy was more stubborn on slats than the USAF was on training. They bit their tongue and finally partially installed slats on the F-4S, admitting the USAF was right about the the aircraft being part of the problem instead of just being a training issue.

I certainly didn't mean to challenge/refute/or insult your discovery... but rather to clarify how the game handles the AI difficulty setting and explain alternate means for manipulating the AI to get the desired result. In my experience, Normal is the way to go for general gameplay. But saved missions with AI set precisely as needed to get the desired behavior is absolutely the best way to make historical missions achieve historical results. Whereas making all the AI supersmart produce decidedly non-historical results whether you are talking a single mission or a full campaign. AI vs AI is much different than player vs AI. Optimizing the AI to provide you with the best challenge may not work out the best for the overall intent of the mission.

While poking around looking for certain F-4 info, I stumbled on to a crew chief's photos of Major Lodge's F-4 Phantom just before he was shot down on May 10, 1972. They can be found here: https://plus.google.com/photos/116952585503241705522/albums/5756583234734344785?sqi&sqsi Upon close inspection, I saw something odd: instead of 4 x AIM-9s, there were 2 x AIM-4s. As of May 10, 1972, F-4Ds were still carrying AIM-4 Falcons while acting as the primary CAP for the largest air activity of the entire war! No wonder the majority of USAF F-4 kills were with AIM-7s. On top of that, I noticed ECM pods in two locations: ALQ-101 in the front left Sparrow well and ALQ-71 on the left inner plyon under an AIM-4. I would have guessed that they would only being carrying two AIM-7s in the rear wells (as was common since a centerline tank prevents launching the forward Sparrows), but per Roger Locher, Major Lodge took three AIM-7 shots on May 10. So for those wanting to recreate this legendary fight where a dedicated CAP of 4xF-4Ds engaged 2-4xMiG-21s (the VPAF claims 2, the USAF claims 4) and 4xJ-6(MiG-19S)s, the loadouts is: 2xAIM-4 (one to the inside of each inner wing pylon), ALQ-71 pod on left inner wing pylon, ALQ-101 in forward left AIM-7 bay, and 3xAIM-7 in remaining AIM-7 bays. I have been unable to confirm the fuel tank loadout, but it was probably 2 x wing tanks + centerline. Google Plus went away, but fortunately, I saved Joey Hill's great photos of F-4D 65-0784.

A long, long time ago, I had always set AI difficulty to "Hard". The idea is that it affects the probability distribution of pilot quality. There are baseline settings for each nation (or branch of service as the case may be) that are modified by the difficulty setting. The problem is that when you choose "Hard", not only do enemy planes tend to have higher quality pilots than normally specified by their nationality, but friendly pilots have lower quality. I wanted enemy pilots to be better, but I didn't want the friendly pilots to become stupid! I simply learned to live with "Normal". This should result in a good historical match for AI vs AI fights even if it leaves you effectively being an ace. No matter what the setting is, both the AI and the player tend to unrealistically maintain situational awareness, ignore fuel constraints, and fight to the death. Combine that with over-effective weapons and the result is extremely unrealistically high air-to-air losses. If you save missions, then manually edit the pilot quality for each flight, you can better control the flow of the missions. I tended to find myself giving both sides the highest quality possible to make the AI for both side do something more than wait to get shot down. Even then, the AI was never really as smart as I would have liked. But try out missions with every possible AI combination to see the full effects on gameplay. It can be a challenge to find the right combination for re-creating historical missions.

I am looking forward to the DCS F-5E... perfect compliment to the MiG-21bis.

This video is pure gold. I hope the SimWorks Studios are able to use the information in it to improve their F-4B addon for FSX.

While poking around for info on CV 43 Coral Sea, I stumbled onto this fairly old post that I somehow missed. Great stuff! Thanks for all the pics.

It is interesting. As I understand it, it is currently just the standard FSX flight model engine tweaked to the max. It is intended to make it better. But it already exhibits many of the textbook characteristics of an unslatted F-4 with things like "nose slice" and "Mach tuck". You can depart controlled flight, particularly at low speeds/high AoA. They developers claim they are going to make it better over time. I have enjoyed flying it, but sorely miss air-to-air vs aggressive AI. Shooting down drones or simple intercept-only AI is no fun after just a few times.

Did someone say "badgers" ? I see the badges in the other post. Strange.

The ongoing beta development of the F-4B continues with the addition of the promised aircraft carrier. After troubleshooting all day and finally realizing the problem was the loss of my default key mappings for carrier operations, I finally completed a cat launch. It took several tries, but I finally trapped, too. The "meatball" is functional. Landing without crashing is far more difficult than SF2. Overall, I am very happy with the beta even though some of the systems aren't fully implemented. The only limitations I have run into aren't the fault of the addon, but due to FSX not truly being a combat simulator and the limited number and quality of FSX addons for simulating the Vietnam War. If I could fight MiG-17s and MiG-21s in the air with decent AI, I would be a lot happier. I have yet to attempt strike missions or face SA-2s. Perhaps if that works as well as advertised I will be happier with the FSX/TacPack combination. As it stands, SF2 is the better combat simulation for flying F-4 Phantoms, but FSX/TacPack/SWS F-4B addon is better from an operations point of view.

I got out of the Navy in May of 1997. I went back to college in January of 2000 to finish my electrical engineering degree that I had halfway finished before joining the Navy. I bought my first Windows PC, a Win 98 SE Pentium III around August of 2000 to help with school work... and play flight sims. By January 2001, I had a Voodoo 5500 gpu, and an X-36 USB HOTAS. As fast as I could afford them I had bought all the Jane's sims: USAF/IAF/F-15E, Jane's WW2 Fighters, and Jane's F/A-18/Fleet Command/688i. Jane's USAF had become my favorite because of the F-4E Phantom and its amazing graphics (compared to my previous experience with Fighters Anthology that I had already played on a work laptop for years). A really cool feature of USAF was that many alternate skins were available for all of the aircraft in the came and a tool made it easy to install them/swap them before flying. I loved flying the F-4E in USAF Thunderbirds colors... I had discovered flight sim forums which led to new games that could be downloaded like Warbirds and Aces High. I ended up hanging out primarily on one forum: the SimHQ Jane's USAF section. It was there that I first learned of a new upcoming jet air combat sim starring the F-4E: Strike Fighters Project 1. In those days, the developer, TK, would post screenshots and answer questions in the SimHQ SFP1 forum. After what seemed like an eternity, I stumbled onto the legendary (infamous) Walmart release of SFP1 while shopping for some stuff to fix up my friend's PC. Suddenly, every flight sim I had became obsolete. SFP1 had the best aircraft/weapons graphics of any flight sim I had. The flight model, even in a rough beta stage, was a huge leap beyond Jane's USAF. I had found my primary flight sim that I would fly to this very day. SFP1 was designed to be easily moddable and Third Wire provided tools and templates to ease the task. Tutorials started popping up on how to do everything up to and including building a 3d model and importing it into the game. Out of this whirlwind of enthusiasm and talent came an artist that went by the online name of marcfighters. He was cranking out beautiful new aircraft skins for SFP1. He never made my favorite F-4E skin, the Thunderbirds, but he made Blue Angels skins that were the best I had ever seen in a game. It seemed like every week he released all kinds of new skins. I collected them and stored them on CD's. marcfighters had established his website and addons as an important anchor for the early SFP1 modding crowd. Many more people would join the online modding community, but marcfighters would remain at the hub of development; eventually branching out into 3d modeling projects such as aircraft, ships/subs, and ground objects. Unfortunately for the SFP1 community, Marcelo established such a reputation that it pulled him into professional flight sim development. But CombatAce.com preserved his legacy: http://marcfighters.combatace.com/ If you were around for the early years, click around and enjoy the memories. If don't know much if anything about marcfighters, click around and see one of the last vestiges of the early SFP1 modding community that made the Strike Fighters series and its still highly skilled and highly active community what it is today. I remember the day-by-day adventures at SimHQ, the early fansite/modders of the long defunct Skunk Works forums, and all the trolls that did nothing but complain about the games' limitations and the free addons produced by the online modding community. Nothing lasts forever. There will be a day when the SF series will only run on a handful of legacy PCs. But CombatAce might still be here, and until all of the old geezers that originally bought and played SFP1 fade away, a little corner of CombatAce.com will continue to showcase the early work of Marcelo aka marcfighters. <S> to all the all the great people that helped make flying with the Strike Fighters series an even greater experience. The list of early modding greats is fairly long for such a little niche game, but sitting near the top of any such list is Marcelo. P.S. No modder ever produced an F-4E Thunderbird skin for me! So, I struggled to make my own. I lacked the skills/experience to make anything close to the quality of a marcfighters skin, but when I was done, I could fly like I did in Jane's USAF... but with better graphics, better flight model... better everything (except maybe the terrain). It wasn't until TK started releasing DLC for SF2 that I finally got a professional grade F-4E Thunderbirds skin. Of course it looks way better than mine. But it only showed up as my days of flying SF every night were coming to an end.

For my PCs with AMD 7970 and 7870, I have reverted back to Catalyst 15.7.1. The problem with SF2 was some random/intermittent flickering texture problems off to the left or right along the horizon line. It was livable, but I discovered Star Wars Battlefront 2 was utterly ruined with bizarre ground textures, so I looked for the last good driver I was using before "Crimson". Image quality for both games was restored by reverting to this driver.

Shimmering cannot be fully eliminated. One source that cannot truly be addressed is the "z-fighting". The software can't decide which item clips the other, so it paints over one than the other pops back to the front. Objects on top of the runway viewed at longer distances always shimmer for instance. I see cities shimmer because of shadows. But, there are sources shimmering that can be addressed. Anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing helps with shimmering textures. When I can get away with using "supersampling" instead of "multisampling" for the FSAA method, it makes every game I have look far superior, but it drops the frame rate too much for most of my games, even at a basic x4 FSAA. Fortunately, SF2 is one application where the frame rates tend to stay above 30, even with heavy mods and long range visibility, so if I don't mind dropping from 50-60 fps down to 30-40 fps, I can enjoy minimal shimmering and aliasing while still seeing smooth graphics. For intense dogfighting down in the mud, I still want 60 fps more than pretty screenshots, so I go back to multisampling or adaptative as required to fly and gun more precisely.

Z-fighting is exactly what I am seeing. It is only objects on the tarmac that do this. Now: what is the solution to have the terrain not show through the runway and the objects sit securely on top of the runway?

No I do not, trying it out now... That doesn't fix PIT8 or PIT16, which are what I am seeing on almost every base. As my Vietnam terrain is already extracted... I edited every object to 60,000 for both the last lod and the max visual distance. Didn't take that long for Vietnam.

OK, I modified every single <target>.ini I could find in the VietnamSEA terrain folder. Everything looks great... except the pits (where aircraft park--open revetments) and hangars which give me some issues with flickering at any useful distance.