streakeagle

As a one-trick pony (i.e. relying almost 100% on stealth for survival), the F-35 better remain very stealthy for the duration of its entire career. I have never been a big fan of stealth. All it takes is a technological breakthrough in sensor technology to waste both the money spent and performance trade-offs made to accommodate stealth. Just as there was a hi-lo mix of F-15s and F-16s, perhaps the strategy should have been to have a useful number of F-22 quality aircraft to support a much larger cost-effective force rather than trying to build an all-stealth force.

This change bothered me more than any other. The SF series already had some game oriented features to make gameplay more interesting for the player, but intentionally making separate laws of physics for players and AI for no other reason than to appease players that want to smoke the enemy without being smoked by the enemy is ludicrous. Couldn't such an effect been associated with the difficulty level or an optional checkbox? For most of the history of SFP1 and early SF2, the game got more and more detailed/realistic. When something didn't behave as expected, it was a bug and TK tried to make it right. Now, since around the release of expansion pack 1, every release seems to take a step backwards. However, I will say that I have not back-dated my installs. What little time I now spend on SF2 doesn't seem too bad despite all negative changes. I have seen enemies and wingmen use AA-2 and AA-8 missiles quite effectively. I also still have great difficulty using AIM-9Bs and AIM-4s effectively. So, despite any stated bias in the readme, I don't see any outlandish results caused by it. I hope DCS eventually matches the planeset and terrains of the SF series. DCS also needs much better air-to-air AI for both single player and co-op. AI needs to be scalable from novices to aces and able to reflect doctrine and training. While I enjoy DCS dogfights on 1 vs 1 situations, 1 vs 2 exposes some flaws and 4 vs 4 is just messy compared to SF2. Of course, SF2 is far from perfect. But, I think Battle of Britain 2 is the only sim I have played with equal or better air-to-air AI than SF2.

Aerodynamically, the only difference between an F-4B and an F-4C is the wing bulges for the fat tires required by the USAF. This only slightly decrease lift/increases drag of the wings. The F-4D was nearly identical to the F-4E. Per the flight manuals, all of the "hard wing" (unslatted) F-4 variants could easily get into a violent departure at high AoA. With enough altitude, recovery was possible and easy... unless it developed into a flat spin. When the famous ace, Robin Olds, hastily converted to the F-4C after flying F-101s, he wanted to experience this problem. He went to 30,000 feet, yanked the stick back, applied some aileron to generate the adverse yaw, and went tumbling. He went below 10,000 feet before figuring out how to recover.

While it may look 1999 visually, I can tell you that in 2001, the only sims with F-4s and F-105s worth playing was Jane's Fighters Anthology and Jane's USAF. USAF looked a lot better, but a modded FA install played much better and had much more accurate FM limitations. To this day, there is no more realistic modeling of the 50's to 70's aircraft and weapons technologies. Only in SFP1/SF2 would you have an AIM-7E that would not work every time or an AIM-9B that is almost useless except against a high flying non-maneuvering target. But in the past year or two, missile reliability and warhead effectiveness was slanted back towards the arcade kill probabilities of most other sims/games. If Jane's USAF had been patched to have decent FMs, AI, and had the object size/time/distance scale corrected, I would never have needed SFP1. But TK stepped up and made a sim that had a great FM foundation that was easily comprehended and improved if you know aerodynamics. That the textures and resolution of the terrain were dated never kept me from enjoying the flying and fighting. But trading modability and realism for new terrain, locked down files, and arcade style combat is a step backwards.

This has been the problem for a while: Someone complains about a valid gripe and TK waves a cursed monkey's paw over the problem so that his "fix" makes the situation as bad or even worse than the original problem.

SR-71s and U-2s were the heroes. These guys were getting shot at without the ability to defend themselves other than fly high and/or fast. The information they got could be critical to both tactical and strategic decisions that would effect the lives of many and even the course of history. As much as I wanted to be a fighter pilot -> test pilot -> astronaut as a kid, as an adult, I would have been all too happy to have been selected to fly the SR-71 or even a U-2. Of course, given that my vision went south in the 7th grade and I couldn't even be a WSO/RIO by the 10th grade, I would have been happy to fly anything at all for a living. <S> to all that flew into harms way to keep the country safe.

The game doesn't really leverage multicore as well as it could, so you are probably cpu limited.

I can revert to POV hat, but why? As long as the profile is smooth, responsive, and stable, TrackIR makes you feel like you are in the cockpit. The feeling is further enhanced by having a very large display filling your actual field of view. After years of using TrackIR, I can still get disoriented and lose visual track on a close-in violently maneuvering target that I would not have lost using a POV hat. But I will gladly live with that problem for the immersion it provides the other 99% of the time. Welcome to the club!

Over the time frame from Expansion Pack 1 to SF2:NA's final patch were a lot of "little" changes per those listed above. The trend trend for the past few years has been to resolve complaints by making a change that causes worse problems than the original complaint. TK's forums have been a "Monkey's Paw". You wish for something, but get unintended consequences. For years people had complaints about the terrain engine: 1) The way ground objects popped into view. 2) Sorting issues with clouds and terrain. 3) The 1998 dated look of the terrain mesh height resolution and textures. TKs solution to these problems: 1) Make objects fade into view rather than pop-up. The new effect looked great, except that you couldn't even see the runways until just before landing. Of course the fade-in distance had been locked down. So, TK provided an ini key to disable the new system. But disabling it might cripple future changes and still didn't give you control over the view ranges. For me, the biggest problem associated with this change was the limits on view distance to aircraft. The "fix" that allows people to turn off the new system does not solve my problem: aircraft used to be visible as soon as they rendered as a single pixel AND met the ini file specified visibility range. Now, they appear at a hard-coded range per the horizon distance settings with no regard for the ini setting or 1-pixel rendering range. Even at the farthest horizon settings, B-52 size aircraft go from invisible to quite large, which makes fighting using visual spotting look as bad as the old system's terrain popping into view. 2) Since low level clouds and objects have sorting issues and many people using mods complained very heavily about these problems, TK hard-coded the clould altitude limits to a much higher level. This didn't fix the problem, it just hid the problem. Now you won't see as many sorting issues because the clouds can't be at historical low altitudes. I like to create and fly historical missions. A key component to getting historical results are the visibility conditions imposed by the historical weather. In Vietnam, the clouds were low, usually about 3,000 feet, but you can't make clouds any lower than about 10,000 feet. 3) Aside from much improved support for naval actions, SF2NA brought the new terrain. This new terrain cost TK a lot of time and money to develop. But, it comes at a high performance cost, doesn't look that good in its stock release, is partially locked down, and modders get no support in the form of tools or even answers to basic questions about how to make new terrains using the new system. There was also another little itty, bitty problem: the increased resolution came at the expense of the overall map size. If you want maps that look as good as first person shooters, then the maps have to be the size of first person shooters. Of course, the original terrain system was already limited in map size. It was a flat square rather than based on the real shape of the globe. But now it is a much smaller square. Now, you can still use the old terrain engine... but the way the game handles getting close to the edge of the terrain was changed which broke many modders' terrains. The Monkey's paw never fails to aggravate those wishing for improvements to the SF game engine. Call me selfish, but I never cared that much about the terrain. All I care about is the air-to-air fight. So, aside from the dramatic change to visibility ranges for aircraft and cloud ceilings, none of the above got under my skin too much. But, when people started complaining about missile reliability and how hard it was to win, the Monkey's Paw clubbed me over the head. Rather than suggesting that these players use less than hard settings, TK just changed the weapons to be dramatically more reliable for the player. As "lite" as the SF series was supposed to be, it was actually a pretty good simulation for the effectiveness of early air-to-air missiles. Now, later missiles are almost a sure thing and even some of the earlier missiles will hit very consistently. From the very beginning of SFP1, each major patch brought new things at the expense of new bugs. When WoV was released, the flight models and AI got hosed. The flight models were mostly fixed by WoE, but the AI didn't really improve until WoI was released many years later. SF2 brought DX10, which greatly enhanced the look and performance of the game, but that came at the cost of multiplayer. So, maybe the post on the Third Wire forums wasn't stated correctly in terms of describing the time frame, but I more than understand the frustration of the poster. As is mentioned above, you can't go back to earlier versions if you want to use later content. SF2 remains the best survey sim available that leverage current hardware capabilities. The stock flyable and AI aircraft library is simply amazing in scope and quality. Throw in the free user mods, and you still have an incredible range of options to fly anything in any time frame. But if TK could have addressed problems without limiting the modders or creating new problems, it could have been so much more. Now, his focus is mobile games. I look forward to any new SF2 content that may pop up, but I dread what problems are going to be caused by installing them. Of course, it is entirely possible that there will not be any more significant releases for SF2. I am not holding my breath waiting for Expansion Pack 3.

Not that original or shocking... reminds me of all the different things Madonna did over the years trying to top herself.

Iris really dropped the ball losing M2M. RAZBAM was already going to be a key player in the DCS lineup, but having MSM take his F-15E and bring it to RAZBAM was a hell of a coup. I hope the 3rd parties get DCS figured out in a way that lets them match DCS:A-10C quality but crank out more than 1 plane every 3-5 years. Tac Pack has yet to show good enough results to get my dollars to go into FSX/P3D. I am staying solely committed to DCS where the only limits are the planeset and mapset from a combat perspective.

That is an interesting way of doing business... defecting to the competition and then marketing a product that upgrades the former business associate's product. Presumably, the target market is people who already have the Iris F-15E, otherwise you can't make money unless the customer buys the competition's product first. I know Metal2Mesh migrated for sound business reasons, but this is still quite amazing when you look on the surface without the background context In the time in which no one else has released any DCS addons, one company has already released an awesome UH-1, has an Mi-8 just around the corner, and I am willing to bet an AH-1 derived from the experience with the UH-1 waiting in the wings. I have the UH-1 and will buy just about any other helo released by Belsimtek. But I am still anxiously awaiting the MiG-21bis. I hope Metal2Mesh's work is fully utilized by RAZBAM to release DCS products this decade.

Has little to do with the pressure and everything to do with the chemical he used to repair it: You have to inform a shop if you use instant tire repair foam, or it might explode

To actually get the product go to: http://www.flight-replicas.com/P-40N_basepage.htm I don't buy FSX modules, but if I did, it would be the Accu-Sim/Wings of Power P-40B, P-40C, AVG model, RAF Tomahawk, and Russian Tomahawk found here: http://www.a2asimulations.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=9&products_id=47&zenid=d4e036910530fc5d79d8a40b0fac14ec

Absolutely awesome! I can edit these into photo real printouts to use as placards until I get around to ordering engraved plates. Much better than the low res slightly out of scale manual drawings I used to lay out the wood console.

Great stuff!

I never had a problem with the whole quantity versus quality thing. Capun's team produced a whole lot of assets that still aren't available any other way. So it was a nice balance: let the pros take their time and produce a few really good planes (think Mirage Factory) while exploiting the less polished but usually still useful material from Capun's Skunk Works. My son has a ton of little die cast metal planes and I used SF mixed with any and all available addons to make most if not all of his toy planes flyable in SF. Could not have done that without Capun's vast library. As an example, the Lockheed Constellation is available from Capun in exactly the same paint/markings as my son's toy and as such my son loved seeing and flying it in SF. Of course, this was also an example of sloppy work as one of the control surface animations was wrong (one of the elevators? been awhile). I still have access and Capun even helped me when I forgot my password. I can remember flying with Capun online beta testing WOE one night along with several other well known old guard SFP1 characters. I have no ill will toward Capun, I just never fully understood his position on several issues. Of course, who am I speak as Column5 banned me from his personal forum for supporting DigitalOverload's right to request proper ejection sequences and the ability to shoot 'chutes on the Third Wire forums? Capun's private SF mod site reminds me of Gulf Knight's private Jane's USAF mod site. I refused to pay Gulf Knight for access to his forum to download mods that he somehow managed to secure exclusively. At least Capun doesn't have a mandatory annual fee. Of course, if SFP1 had not come along, I might still be playing Jane's USAF and probably would have followed its fanbase to Gulf Knight's forum. Jane's USAF is still the next best sim for Vietnam era air combat with stock flyable F-105D and F-4E. Aside from its flawed AI, flight modeling, and the slow crazy aerial ballet resulting from the mix of the two, Jane's USAF was an impressive survey sim.

I never imagined it was so hard to get info on an F-4 variant. I have piles of F-4 books. Some of them have several photos of F-4EJ, but none of them have very much useful technical info on them. Finding photos of armed F-4EJs is like finding photos of armed Israeli aircraft. I don't know if Japan rarely flies armed or if they censor photos the way Israel does. While I never cared much before, the lack of information makes me want more! I want a good book on the F-4EJ in English. Not just a paint scheme book for modeling, but an excellent technical and photo history.

The photos at this website are interesting and dated: http://nabe3saviation.web.fc2.com/aF41j.html This one from 22May81 shows an AIM-7 Sparrow being carried:

I guess I am so far out of the SF community that I have no idea what you are talking about. It seems almost anyone who downloads anything eventually gets banned from Capun's site. As rarely as I go there, I got a download limit warning from Capun once. Long ago, you made it clear who you are, what you have done in your past, etc. As such, I would never question your character without hardcore evidence to the contrary -- unless your name was zerocinco ;)

Recovery operations are always painful, and with the size and scope of this one, I am amazed that you were able to recover so much. Good job!

I have been on Steam with Arma2 from the start. Steam has not always been the fastest about updates/patches/beta patches, etc. I love the idea of Steam and it mostly works great for me, but I haven't really had any problems with ED's direct way of doing business using torrents to get all the big files. The updater sure can be slow, but I have always gotten the entire update the night I it was released, so it's not that bad. At this point, I prefer to wait a week or two before getting updates anyway -- to many major bugs in initial releases. If and when Steam does something better than my standalone, then I will consider migrating if it is allowed. But for the time being I have everything installed and working and have been easily staying up to date.