streakeagle

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?

Wrench, I integrated your contributions into what I already had and it works great! Love the skins and all the other tweaks. About the only thing I differed on was the loadout and data ini for the hardpoints. I have seen photos which confirm the layout my model airplane has: the wing mounts are really the same as the intake mounts (exact same rails). All can mount bombs or rockets. The only limits are the wing strength, stability, and maximum safe payload. From photos, it appears bombs up to 250 lbs can be and were carried on the wing pylons. But 8 x 250 lb bombs is 500 lbs too heavy to take off.

Okay, I have done some preliminary research to see how to get started on making a decent FM. I like to start with a stock Third Wire FM. At a minimum, TK makes a flyable FM player friendly. After reviewing all the stock SF2 aircraft, it looks like only two aircraft are comparable in layout (Canberra and Meteor) and only one is close to the right size (Meteor). I need to evaluate the "feel" of the Meteor FM and see how the performance compares to the published Meteor F.8 data. The Meteor F.8 has very similar performance. F.8 has more thrust, more wing area, and lower weight, which leads to higher speeds, better, climb, and maybe even better turn performance. But don't underestimate the F2H-2. It has a slightly higher service ceiling with wing tanks, despite lower thrust and less wing area. Its longer wingspan/higher aspect ratio and blended engines/intakes are key factors -> Better lift to drag ratio, with more lift and less drag. At Korean War high altitudes, the F2H-2 would easily be the better aircraft with better turn, acceleration, and climb rate as fuel burns off (the empty weights are comparable, it is fuel which makes the F2H-2 heavier). If the F.8 FM is decent, it may be the perfect starting point to dial in total lift, total drag, and engine power. But I need a lift slope curve. At what AoA does the Banshee hit maximum lift? I have means to estimate the slope and max, but I would rather have the exact numbers. I have ordered a flight manual online, but at that time, it may not have the information I seek. Even as easy as this aircraft appears to be, building an accurate FM is work. I may chicken out before I get very far. I still have the ground work for an XB-70 flight model, but never had the motivation to finish importing the data into SF. I wish I could do this for a living. Or maybe not! Really, I just want to fly the actual aircraft or simulated aircraft with hyper-realistic FMs as opposed to doing the work myself. This is where DCS comes in. I don't even check the DCS FMs, I just enjoy all their complexity/detail despite any accuracy limitations. In other words, I am too old for the modding sh!t, I just want to fly!

While it will be hot outside, it is considerably more pleasant to be there at this time of year than at Christmas. I have been there during summers and winters, I will take summers every time!

That is the document I had already stumbled into while searching for loadout details ;) It has quite a few numbers that are extremely useful if you know all the constraints used to qualify them. Unpowered stall speed gives a great estimate of CLmax at that speed, the only question is with or without flaps deployed. I wish it would include both so that I could figure out how effective the flaps are.

I am thinking about looking at it. I have a climb rate curve that theoretically gives me specific excess power which gives me T-D/W at max thrust and I have a max speed curve that gives me T-D = 0 at max thrust and max speed. Just enough data to make useful estimates of thrust and drag versus altitude. I don't know if I have enough data to figure out CLmax (max lift), but given T, D, and W and the ceiling, I can estimate it. As this aircraft is marginally transonic in level flight, I don't have to worry about complex lift/drag/stability issues. It has been a long time since I worked on this, and it is a lot of work... but I am thinking about it.

Yes, that is much more fair. However, maybe they did this on purpose: release the not-so-good-plan, if people really hate it, then release the not-as-bad-as-the-not-so-good-plan. There was going to be shock at the loss of the generous original kickstarter rewards, but by making it look like you were going to get screwed royally, then the alternative that otherwise might have been rejected suddenly looks like a great idea :) Gas prices went from $2 to $5 then down to $3-$4. While $3-$4 is a huge jump, it is great after having a taste of $5.

A bit better. Didn't want or need another P-51D key. I will take the Fw 190D-9 and the next one to be released. So, I get 2 of the 5 available aircraft and a map for $40, less than 1/3 the new release retail value. If this had been the original kickstarter plan, I would have put in the $80 or $100 depending on whether the Me262 goal had been met, but the $40 deal is what it should be: better than just getting one new plane for 80% of retail.

The whole point of flying F-4s and MiGs in Vietnam Israel is to have intense dogfights in the struggle to get a kill with crappy missiles. If I wanted pushbutton kills, I could play any modern F-14/F-15/F-16/F-18 game or even the F-15/F-16 in SF2E/SF2I. But, even with unrealistic lethality, the dogfights are pretty good. In 1 vs 1 against a max skilled AI pilot, an unslatted F-4 with no guns has to work pretty hard to hit a MiG-21MF once you get in close. Good enough for me to have some fun without resorting to multiplayer to have a good dogfight.

It is an outstanding release. I love the F2H-2 to begin with and RAZBAM made it very well. I just wish the shadows could be fixed. Folding wings would be icing on the cake. I found some flight manual performance chart information on the F2H. It is a subsonic aircraft, so... if I put a bit of time into it, I could probably get the lift, drag, and thrust curves in the ballpark fairly easily. I simply never gained the ability to develop and tune the stability/inertia aspect that affects the "feel" so much. Not having done any measurements, I have enjoyed the FM provided by RAZBAM (column5?). It is predictable and stable as a simple subsonic straight wing aircraft should be, but can be stalled/departed. It also captures the underpowered feeling of early jets, especially on a catapult takeoff with a full external weapons load. I always enjoyed the original SFP1 KAW even long after WoV and WoE came out: the SP2a AI made for great dogfight's and the A-Team's F2H-2 was adequate at the time. Now that I finally took the time to get SF2 KAW fully as implemented as possible, I am even happier. Great stuff! Thanks for the all the hard work from Wrench and the whole MiG Alley team! Thanks for the feedback and the files :) I guess I wasn't alone in having MASH be the first thing that came to mind when trying to find a Korean War theme.

I had withdrawn my original higher level donation after carefully reading what was being said on forums by those seeking the money. But I weighed the possible outcomes and $40 was a small amount to risk for 5 DCS level aircraft I didn't have and would eventually buy if they were created: Fw190, Spit, P-47, Bf109, and Me262 was a steal... less than $10 per plane. Even if I only got just the Fw190, $40 was a fair price if it is as good at the P-51D. I am not surprised by the failure of RRG Studios to complete this project and deliver the promised goods at the promised prices. I am surprised that DCS has tried to pick up the tab and keep the ball rolling. So instead of losing $40, I end up getting the Fw190 and the new map... $20 each. Probably the price they will be selling for by Christmas, but I will get the Fw190 now. The P-51D key is worthless to me, I don't think ED will let me trade it, I already have one, and I would be lucky if I could sell it for $5. Perhaps I can give it to a friend/relative? I am not sure how to interpret the $20 per plane. It seems they provided the bonuses at that rate, adding 1 key per full $20 donated. Can I buy the later releases at that price? If so, that's still a great deal compared to $40 or $50 per plane on initial release. While I am disappointed in the loss of the other four "freebies", I am not angry. I am actually relieved that I will get an Fw190 without paying a penny more. But I will say that I still don't have a MiG-21bis (presumably fix that this month or next). I don't think I have to swear off DCS kickstarter campaigns, because I doubt there will ever be any more! The real question is, after everything is all said and done, is ED going to still be running at a profit and continuing to expand and refine DCS World? I am happy to hear that DCS WW2 won't be a separate install. That just didn't make sense. DCS World should end up like SF2 with everything integrated together to allow mission designers complete flexibility. All I can do is wait another month and see what comes next. If ED and the 3rd parties have their dates squared away, there is going to be a flood of releases all at once. I have already paid for the Fw190 and the MiG-21bis. In theory, I have a coupon from the UH-1H pricing gaff that will pay for most of the F-86F. That leaves me paying full price for the Hawk should it come out as well. That's a lot of DCS goodness for minimal expense if everything goes as planned. But with ED, that is a huge IF! Originally, I backed $75. A bad price point for the new scheme: $35 more and only 1 more item (Bf109). Any even multiple of $20 was the sweetspot. If they let me buy later releases at $20 each, then that allows me to match donors of $60, $80, $100, or $120. I don't know how they feel about that, but it is okay with me.

What theme music does everyone use for KAW installs? Top Gun and Iron Eagle that I typically use don't cut it in this case! For now, the only theme I can associate with the Korean War is the theme from M*A*S*H, so that's what I will use until I figure out something more appropriate.