streakeagle

Robin Olds flew the Voodoo. He actually used it to perform a formation air show (think Thunderbirds). It wasn't agile by any means, but it didn't just fly in straight lines either. He also had a very low opinion of the AIM-4 Falcon. However good the Falcon looked on paper or in staged tests, it took too long to fire, had even more limited launch parameters than the AIM-9B and early AIM-7s, and was rarely able to hit a fighter sized target. The Falcon might have been effective in its intended role of heavy bomber interception at altitude, but it was (thankfully) never employed in that role, so there is no real world data to confirm whether it would have worked as well as advertised.

I was flying the stock instant action mission, co-alt, head-on. Not sure what the altitude is because there is no time to check instruments... just dial in the wingspan of the Mustang and a range of about 300 meters to get the gunsight ready, then I try to keep my eyes on the P-51D 100% of the time and flying by "feel" in terms of climbing and turning as much as possible without stalling. Force feedback could be such a blessing.

I have flown P-51Ds for so long in so many different sims, but especially in Aces High. The Aces High P-51D FM gunnery models are both fairly detailed and accurate, so transitioning to the DCS P-51D was pretty much a no-brainer other than learning how to keep my engine from seizing up. The only feature I miss from Aces High is being able to set the range for the guns, as I like them focused a bit further out than most pilots. Initially, beating the AI P-51D (the only opponent originally available) proved very difficult because the AI uses aggressive vertical tactics and seems to retain energy more efficiently than player flown aircraft. But I soon figured out how to go easier on my stick, keep or restore energy every chance I got, then get a sustained burst on the AI as it peaked in its vertical maneuver. The AI Fw190D9 flew essentially the same way, perhaps having slightly inferior turn performance and slightly better climb performance? All I know, is that with no additional training or practice, I could smoke the AI Fw190D9 nearly every time if I didn't overheat my engine. With the release of the Fw190D9 module, I am in completely new territory. I rarely flew Fw190 variants in Aces High. I hated the ballistics of their guns and didn't have the patience to employ the boom and zoom tactics they were born to use. So, I have little idea how to employ an Fw190 efficiently. Most of my Aces High Fw190 time was in the Fw190A5 with some time in the Ta152, but almost no time in the Fw190D9. Now that I am the Fw190D9 flying against the AI P-51D, I have been painfully reminded how hard a time I have flying the Fw190. But years of flying F-104s, F-105s, F-4s, and F-8s against MiG-17s in SFP1/SF2 does help. I have no trouble getting the AI P-51D to get trapped below me as I make a steady climbing turn using my power advantage. Eventually, the angles come around in my favor. But every time I try to close in for a shot, the P-51D pulls up into some sort of vertical stall/lag roll that pretty much reverses our position. But, I finally figured out how to lag him and quickly gained practice on leading the target with such low velocity rounds. I finally got my first P-51D!

Hang out at Hyperlobby and look for "doghouse". If anyone is still flying, he will be.

What happens when edge is released and it looks a bit better, but performance is the same or worse? I am thinking of SF2, which greatly improved performance over SFP1, but then took a step backwards in an attempt to compete with modern graphic engines in SF2:NA. Iceland looks great in terms of height resolution... but I want full size maps like Vietnam and frame rates at Vsync 60 Hz on a respectable system. I also wasn't particularly impressed with the water in SF2:NA. LOMAC/FC series is almost as old as SFP1 and did a much better job with water.

Other than the obvious "facts" I would know from the media, school, and a few personal studies, I know next to nothing about WWI. Airplanes and pilots, tons due to personal interest. Naval tech and battles, barely even a basic history despite my love of ships. Land warfare? A little bit about the history of tanks, trench warfare, and chemical weapons. That is not a lot for a war that was easily as important and eventually led to WWII. Korea is considered the forgotten war by many veterans, but I know a lot more about Korea than World War I. I guess I should learn more, but I can't know everything and really enjoy studying more recent conflicts with a much greater focus on air power. Interestingly enough, I know a lot more about the War of 1812 than World War I... love the early US Navy history.

When SFP1 originally came out, it had a smattering of nifty 60s jets over a fictional middle eastern country. That didn't stop me from enjoying it. I could set up Vietnam era dogfights to my heart's content with the only problems being the color of the terrain below and the total lack of clouds. User mods and later releases were just icing on the cake, as I already had a game where I could fly F-4s and F-104s against MiG-17/19/21s right out of the box. LOMAC's flight modeling never appealed to me, I found SFP1's flight engine far more satisfying. So, despite buying all of the LO/FC/FC2 packages, I never played them more than once in a while. As someone who prefers air combat and the 50's/60's/70's eras, I had little interest in flying the Ka-50 or the A-10C, so I had never even bothered to purchase those DCS titles. Jump ahead to now: DCS has some classic matches: P-51D vs Fw190D9 (with many more on the way), the F-86F vs the MiG-15bis, and the F-15C vs the MiG-21bis/MiG-23MLD/MiG-29S/Su-27. Just around the corner (another year or two?) there will be a lot more flyables. Presumably, the eminent release of Edge and associated developer tools will lead to some appropriate maps (Nevada and some sort of WW2 Normandy map should be out this year?). I am having a blast flying ACM, the fact that it is over Georgia doesn't bother me a bit. But give me Korea, Vietnam, and a few more aircraft from those wars (especially the F-4 and earlier MiG variants), and the SF series just might go unused.

It has been on my hard drive since around 6:00 PM EST. Downloaded 1.2.9 pretty fast, too! Sheer pleasure flying this plane.

Purchased... and great fun to fly. It is going to take me a bit of practice to fly effectively enough to beat the MiG-15bis 1vs1.

I think you will find that in nearly every photo of a Sea Harrier during the Falklands, the loadout is two AIM-9s on outboard pylons and two fuel tanks on inboard pylons. Fleet air defense is best performed by an aircraft with a high endurance, which the Harrier is just the opposite, so firepower is sacrificed for more fuel, less drag, and lower weight.

This game ran great maxed out on my old Athlon 64 PC. The colors/lighting are a little odd, but the overall feel and detail were pretty good. It was my favorite rendition of the P-51D until I got the DCS version. I bought two separate licenses on Steam in case my son wanted to play, but he never did.

We aren't dinosaurs, just a very special minority that finds the challenges of flying and air combat to be fun and interesting. Most people find it too boring or too much like work. I have had no success with word of mouth. Despite advocating flight sims since I was in the 9th grade and had a Timex Sinclair 1000 PC, I have only attracted/converted one or two people into combat flight sim fanatics. At best, I can only discover other people who already share my interests... and none of them live anywhere near me. My son is 7. I have raised him with a strong aviation background. At 3 or 4 years old, he could fly and win air races in Redline:XAR2 and take off with a Spitfire and shoot down a dumb circling AI B-24 in offline Aces High. He can name a lot of my models. But he does not love airplanes the way I do and probably never will.

In the cockpit ini --- OpenCockpit=TRUE ExternalClipDistMin=0.05 InternalClipDistMin=0.05 If you are using OpenCockpit, then the above Clip parameters apply. This is a messy solution that can cause problems, but if you get the values correct, it can help in some situations.

What ED has repeatedly taught me: You can buy at release for $50, or wait 2-4 weeks and get 20-40% off. So, if you like donating money to ED or just can't wait 2-4 weeks, buy at release. Of course, if you can wait for the next seasonal sale (which might only be another 2-4 weeks away from the first sale), you get 50-80% off. I remember when the original IL-2 hit the shelves in Best Buy. It was $50 and it stayed at that price for YEARS. So, are DCS new release sales so bad that they have to tank the price within a month to get the volume up to a useful level? But it is kind of a chick/egg thing. Once the crowd knows how the pricing scheme is working, they just wait for the drop. By waiting, the release sales are low and ED drops the price quickly. Sounds like a vicious loop that ends with the company going out of business. Maybe they should price their finished and/or beta products like a kickstarter scheme. You can pay the low price and you get the product, but if you pay more, you get a cool forum title, a credit in the game and/or manual, a printed manual, t-shirts, etc. They just better make sure the reward costs less than the increase in payment. Clearly, RRG needed to be told that!

I had already bought everything available when ED gave the last bonuses... and they expired before anything new was released. I pre-paid for the MiG-21bis and DCS:WW2, so that leaves me with the F-86F, but I still have a coupon ED awarded to compensate those who bought the helos at release only to have the price drop dramatically 2 weeks later. I don't mind paying full price to help support ED, but giving me a bonus and then taking it away before I can use it isn't a very smart way to do business!

Phantom's Phorever! My dad was a saxophone player in the band on the USS America in the mid to late '60s. What a job as an enlisted? Play music and drink with the officers. He loved the RA-5 Vigilante the best. I believe he did a Med cruise and got out before the America went to Vietnam. I need to get more details from him.

I got my F2H-2 manual today. While it doesn't have the performance data that more modern aircraft have, it still has a lot of great stuff. The immediately useful information is loadout data: The two innermost hardpoints rated for 500 lb bombs, all other points rated for 250 lb bombs and smaller. If 500 lb bombs are carried, the other pair of hardpoints next to them cannot be used (as is visually obvious). Of course it is strongly suggested that loads be symmetrical. So any combination of rockets/bombs that doesn't violate the weight limit or the above rules is possible. If the above photo is 250 lb bombs, then 6 bombs is probably the loadout as that hits the 1,500+ lb weight limit.

Hope you are happy! It was a big jump for me to go from the AMD Athlon 64 single core Venice to the Intel Core I5. I built the AMD back in 2005. It still works pretty well with a HD7870 gpu for any games that don't benefit from multi-core or modern RAM speeds. The Intel Core I5 runs everything pretty well. What I really want is a 50" quad HD TV (3840x2160 pixels) that supports a 60 Hz or better refresh rate AND a PC that can run all my games at that resolution and refresh rate without using a multi-gpu setup. For now the 46" 1080p HD TV is doing the job pretty well and my current PC can hit 60 fps with most games even if it can't stay at that frame rate during "busy" situations.

The DCS F-86F appears to be the "hard wing" -- no slats. Great on paper, but slats eventually came back for a number of reasons. While looking for "hard wing" vs "soft wing" for the F-86F, I found this very cool write-up: http://sabre-pilots.org/classics/v21gunnery.htm Lots of good info, but I liked this: I have the F-86F flight manual. It is very clear on the issue of slats vs unslatted: slats lower the stall speed vs weight/altitude graph curves by 15 knots across the board AND more importantly, unslatted aircraft are not as friendly at high AoA: turbulence, yaw, roll, depart with little warning. Hopefully, the DCS:F-86F models high AoA behavior accurately as I want the challenge of the hard wing if that's what they are providing. Of course, I would love to see more F-86 variants from the F-86A to the various blocks of F-86F. But I will take what I can get.

I am not sure which aircraft I am looking forward to flying more: the MiG-21bis or the F-86F. I am going to love both.

Love this. Best part is seeing the Enterprise in a configuration similar to Vietnam CVAN-65 with the square tower with billboard radar and cone on top at 3:14.

Check this China Lake test out: This is the 8xrocket loadout. I watched a video showing 4xrockets being loaded on the belly pylons and I have also seen 250/100 lb bombs on both inboard and outboard pylons. But I can't find any description of a "typical" loadout for specific mission types. Are these 250 lb or 100 lb? I am guessing 250 lb.

I flew the Meteor a bit... I had forgotten that it was now a stock flyable! By feel, I think I like the RAZBAM F2H-2 FM better as a starting point, but IF I start working on this, I may develop parallel solutions and see which one gets me closer to real world performance. Even IF I work on this, it will be a LONG time before I have anything to release for testing comments. No one should get their hopes up! I have to work on this during the wee hours of the night and lose sleep to make any useful progress once I actually start to plot/analyze/develop an FM. If it is any consolation... I bought the flight manual online... still waiting for a download link.

You have to figure ED was between a rock and a hard place: let the project fail and it could almost completely kill their business OR finish the project and honor the original awards and go bankrupt. Even with the compromised position they have taken, it is a huge risk if only the original backers buy into it. BUT despite all the banter about RRG being completely independent and at fault, it was ED's job to realize that supporting this project would lead to the rock and hard place and yet they proudly backed it... Apparently, caught by surprise in what was claimed to be possible versus what could actually be done? DCS aircraft are fantastic, but I have to wonder if ED is going to be able to stay afloat if they didn't fully understand what RRG was offering and backed them anyway. I was never involved with IL2:COD and didn't know much about Luthier, so when people started arguing with him on forums about the viability of his DCS WW2 proposal, I learned fast and realized this was an extremely risky Kickstarter deal. But the possibility of getting 4, 5, or even more aircraft for the price of one was too good a deal to pass up. Just like the money I ponied up for the MiG-21bis, I accepted the fact that I might as well be flushing it down the toilet. I would be doing pretty good if either crowd funded project panned out to any extent. So, I have always been prepared for the worst. What is frustrating is how everything was made to look okay other than the frequency of the reports. Despite my rational thoughts on the odds of success when placing my bet at the beginning, it is hard to get your hope up and have them dashed. As it stands, the final deal is pretty fair as long as ED survives to honor the "New Deal". Like it or not, WW2 is by far the most popular combat flight sim theme. If DCS succeeds in this genre, they will probably make as much money as possible for a hard core combat flight sim developer. As always, all I can do is wait... and hope that someone finally gives me a hard core F-4 vs MiG-21 sim (looks like the MiG-21 half is pretty damn close to being done!).

Now I see why you were concerned about the size of the case! It fits?