streakeagle

There was a proposal (late 70s?) to try to make special refueling trucks that could go fast enough to refuel an aircraft from the ground while the aircraft flew inverted. The artist concept I saw showed an F-15 upside down over a tanker truck with a refueling boom between them. Obviously, it didn't go past the discussion stage as it was obvious that the truck would have to be very fast and have a very long level run to be able to keep up with a jet fighter. Meanwhile, the fighter would have to be at the edge of a stall while trying to maneuver for the boom while inverted! I don't know who proposed it, but it never should have even reached the artist concept phase!

Well, with high-end HOTAS, you pretty much get what you pay for (notwithstanding the Thrustmaster Cougar that orignally cost quite a bit AND needed aftermarket mods to fix its shortcomings raising the cost to the $800-$1000 level). I have had Saitek X-36 USB, X-45, and X-52 Pro. All of them are still operational, but the X-36 is not officially supported in Win 7. The insides of the X-52 Pro in terms of X and Y axis are much better than most until you get to the Warthog and Logitech G940. The G940 has far more problems than any Saitek stick I have had and costs a lot more, so I would not even consider that an option unless Force Feedback is really important. Given that I can't afford a Warthog right now, there are only two useful choices for a HOTAS: Saitek or CH Products. I don't like the F-16 style stick of the new Saitek. Doesn't interest me at all. So I have din't have a stick right now, the only two I would even consider are the X-52 Pro and the CH Products Fighter Stick. I could afford a CH Pro, but I much prefer the ergonomics of the Saitek sticks over the CH Pro, especially the throttles. So, from my perspective, there is only one stick I would buy: the X-52 Pro. There is a Thrustmaster that has advanced internal components, but I don't want a stick that isn't optimized for flight sims both in terms of appearance and functionality. Aside from the Cougar and the Warthog, Thrustmaster products seem to be about as good as common Logitech sticks. The Saitek products were progressively becoming worse as the X-45 and X-52 looked more and more like some kind of kid's space toy and used cheaper and cheaper components compared to the X-36 USB. If the X-52 Pro had not provided a "black" stick with high-end analog axis components, I would be flying with a Figther Stick right now.

I got my X-52 Pro for $100 (special sale at GoGamer when X-52 Pros were just hitting the shelves). It is far superior to the X-45. Haven't really had any problems with it, but the centering spring design makes small movements a little sloppy when the stick is close to center. But compared to the X-45, it is way smoother. Saitek progamming software has always been a little buggy (been using it since 2000 with an X-36 USB on Win98SE), but the current release is fairly stable and gets the job done. If you can get one for $150 or less, the price/performance ratio is pretty good. Mine works as well as it did the day I got it and I have used it quite a bit over the years. For $200, CH Products becomes a better option and for another $100 more you could gamble on a Logitech with force feedback. If I had money to blow, I would get a Thrustmaster Warthog :)

There is a really old (likely incompatible as it was released in 2003) Red Flag campaign at avsim.com, it is a mod of Dave's original Top Gun campaign to use F-4Es vs F-5s. http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=sfmup&DLID=41515

You can't download them. You must purchase WoE if you want the Third Wire LOD files for the AV-8A. TK is pretty open about what can be shared, but stock Third Wire 3d models are not on the list of things that can be legally uploaded and shared.

What wedding? Who's getting married? ;)

I recently had the same thing happen. The view control settings probably got reset to use the arrow keys instead of the mouse. You can go into the control settings, click on whatever is currently assigned for moving the view, then move your mouse to assign it to that role.

As it is, WoI was nearly up to SF2 standards and with only DX9 support, its performance showed it on my machine. Despite the slight degradation in performance, WoI looked so good and played so well that it was worth it! I even got some online multiplayer time with WoI. The AI improvement was the best part for me. For the first time AI would fly low and terrain masking would block and/or degrade radar and missiles. The F-4 lost its unrealistic ability to snipe with Sparrows unless the target was clear of ground clutter. This made flying F-4s far more challenging and historically accurate, especially if it was a variant without a gun. I had bought a new machine between WoV and WoE and it ran great even with mirrors and shadows. The only graphics setting I knocked down was Horizon to Near. With each release after WoV, my machine got slower and slower as increases in poly counts, texture sizes, pixel shaders, etc. took their toll. By the time WoI was released, I felt like I was playing on my old P3/Radeon 9800 Pro machine having to turn off mirrors and shadows to get good frame rates. The arrival of SF2 with DX10 support combined with an OS upgrade to Win 7 64-bit and a Radeon 4890 1GB brought mirrors and shadows back, though I still play with Horizon set to Near.

Now you need to do a skin for the proposed F-15N ;)

But I was primarily addressing your suspicion posted above as to what it was, regardless of what the "expert" said. The lady didn't know what she was talking about, but she knew it was mounted on F-4s and knew it involved heat-seeking... which is pretty damn good for someone who otherwise has no idea what an AAA-4 or F4H-1F is. It would be cool to have, but I wouldn't pay much for it just to throw it on a shelf or a desk. It would be much more interesting if they had the chin pod fairing to go with it.

She didn't claim it was the guidance system for the Sidewinder, she claimed it was installed in the F-4 to help guide sidewinders... The label on the device said: Cradle Carrying IR System F4H-1 & F4H-1F So what you have is the carrying cradle for an IRST from an F-4A or earlier with an actual F-4 IRST still in it. The name plates were intact (looked like new from this footage), so everything could be precisely identified if so desired.

I think my 1.2GHz P3 with a Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB is a better rig than yours for playing just about anything as long as my gpu memory is enough ;) The increase in texture sizes in SF2 could only hurt it as I used to resize addon textures down to SFP1 stock sizes to help out performance.

My rig is a dinosaur rig, but it has the 2 key components to make SF2 glide: a DX10 OS and a good DX10 card. SF2 is playable on XP in DX9, but I was in the 20-30 fps range with some 15 fps drops, not even doing heavy Hanoi/SAM missions. Switched to Win7 and HD4890, now play in the 30-50 fps range with some 20-25 fps drops even while doing heavy Hanoi/SAM missions.

If you have a Windows 7 PC with a decent DirectX 10 or 11 video card, don't hesitate to get into the SF2 series. Get SF2E to try it out. If you like it, get expansion pack 2 to get the built-in mission editor. If you are still happy, make sure to buy everything and then install them in the right order to get a hassle-free merged installation. There is really only one loss with the SF2 series: multiplayer, which is no loss at all for most SF fans. In all other ways, SF2 is noticably better: graphics, frame rates, RWR displays, aircraft variants, cockpit detail, AI, etc.

Because the sim has very few limits on addons, modders tend to make addons that push the limit of the current hardware, so it is difficult and expensive to try to future proof a PC you are buying now. The core game benefits from quad core and higher now, so if you have the cash/option, at least get a quad core. I am able to run the stock installations at 30-45 fps using my old 2005 AMD64 3800 / PC3200 2GB RAM / Radeon HD 4890 with nearly maxed out settings (limited horizon range and medium shadow quality), so any PC with a modern Core i5/i7 (or AMD equivalent) with the industry standard 4-12 GB RAM with at least a $200 GPU should keep up with a 60 Hz LCD display with vsync and maxed out card/game video settings. I would make sure any PC I build/buy has at least a decent 650 watt power supply to support maxed out single gpu card options. If you are the kind of person who insists on using multi-gpus, you need a much better power supply. But I don't think SF1 or SF2 support SLI or Crossfire, so if that is the main purpose of your PC, getting multiple gpus may be a waste.

There is not multiplayer in any SF2 games. Only SFP1, SFG, WoV, WoE, and WoI (as well as FE). If you want to try multiplayer in SFP1/WoX games, you need to make posts on all of the forums: Third Wire, SimHQ, CombatAce, etc. and/or hang out in either the sfp1 or WoV chat rooms in hyperlobby until you get lucky and have someone show up. I haven't seen anyone in hyperlobby for a long time, but I don't check that often anymore. Try staying logged in (and active) in HL from 8pm to 11pm EST for a week, and you might find someone if you are lucky.

I used to kill the text in the jet games... but it kills all messages. In the jet games, some status messages are things that you would easily know in real life, like what positions the flaps and speed brakes are in. Without such messages, it was a lot more difficult, i.e. accidently flying around with the speed brake deployed for awhile. But I can see in the WWI era, there are far less messages that you should have, if any at all. The file you seek is the huddata.ini which has to be extracted from the flightdata.cat file and put into the flight folder of FE, or create a flight folder in the mod folder for FE2. Among the things defined in that file is the location and font of the text. There are various ways to change that file to get what you want (my way was to move the text off screen, others had different and maybe better ways which I am sure can be found in the SFP1 knowledgebase somewhere). If you don't like the results, just delete the file to go back to system defaults.

Actually, the padlock helps you spot targets within visual range that you can't see because the monitor doesn't have enough resolution to render. Most games render long range targets larger than they should be so that you can see them or at least put a very visible black dot to help you see out to the range you could in real life. Third Wire sims don't render anything less than half a pixel in size (i.e. round down), so the only way you can spot out to the limits of human vision is to use the visual targeting keys. There is a visual spotting distance that determines whether you can "detect" and padlock visual targets, possibly a global one and/or per aircraft one. The ideal solution is to use a monitor with a large enough resolution to show 1 pixel at the limits of human vision. I don't know what resolution that is, but I know it is not 1600x1200. A work around is to not use targeting at all... don't hit the T key and don't padlock. Use track IR and zoom in to increase resolution. It is very difficult (unrealistically so), but does teach what real people doing visual searches have to do: focus at small distant areas and slowly scan the sky using patterns not unlike radar searches. But it does completely take away your peripheral vision.

Loading screens are specified in each aircraft's folder. You put the sreen image in the folder and put a line in the aircraft's ini specifying the loading screen. Stock screens are hidden in .cat files. For example, in SF2, my MiG-23MLD.ini file has this line: LoadingScreen=MiG-23MLD_Loading.jpg

Given the kind of mod community this game has attracted, if a third party mission recorder was plausible, it would already be done.

The game developer went in depth in a forum a long time ago about why his sim didn't and wouldn't ever have a mission recorder. Now if you could build a program that could run his game in a shell and knew where to find all of the necessary variables, and record them at the same rate they were being generated, then you could do it. Most other flight sims are deterministic, meaning that the exact same inputs produce the exact same outputs, so all you have to do is record some key inputs to a mission file and the rest can be reconstructed real time in the "mission viewer". TK's game is non-deterministic and he went in depth about how that made a mission recorder completely impractical. Too many variables to track and the bottleneck of writing files to a hard drive would grind the game to a stop. He had to reduce settings and object counts for multiplayer just to keep the frame rates playable with low lag. But if you think you are smarter than the guy who made the game, knock yourself out and make a mission recorder, which will also require making a tool to play it back without game developer support. What I could see being done if someone had the patience to reverse engineer the game's memory mapping while running, would be to record the x, y, and z co-ordinates of every aircraft and missile at 1 fps to produce simple plots for post mission analysis. If that didn't slow down the game, then you could go for pitch, roll, and heading as well. If that didn't slow down things too much, then you could try logging ground units, etc. But without game developer support to expose these variables to outside programs, you would have to be very determined to reverse engineer the game. I would love to see someone succeed at this, but I don't think anyone has the time or skills to do it in a reasonable amount of time and therefore will never do it.

it is impossible to have a mission recorder for the SF series. The best you can do is record the flight using third party solutions such as FRAPS.

To form a multiplayer group, everyone needs an install with the same mods to assure both compatibility and fairness. However, the game does not notice cockpit mods when doing file checks, so a player could mod any aircraft cockpit and should still be able to join or host and otherwise identical install. I always had separate installs for multiplayer. If you have a fixed group, then it is fairly easy to get everyone to have identical installs regardless of how many mods are used. However, if you are trying to draw in newcomers, a pure stock install is the way to go. When first getting a group together, there will most likely be some connectivity issues as you sort out how to get through firewalls, routers and even ISPs. During that time frame, I would stick to stock installs to keep things simple. Once everyone is able to play and/or host, then carefully add mods to eveyrone's installs. Once everything is set up correctly, it works fairly well. Be prepared to use Hamachi to get everyone connected. Once everyone is able to join a Hamachi network, connectivity is very easy. However, Hyperlobby is publicly visible, which increases your chances of finding more people to play. So, I used to host in parallel via Hamachi and Hyperlobby. Good luck on finding others to play. It is hard to get people with the same interest and schedule. The most successful time slot I found while hosting was 8-11 pm EST with peak flying around 9-10 pm EST. In the years that I hosted, it was not uncommon to have 2-4 people flying Mon-Thu, with some peaks of 6-10 on rare nights. Friday and Saturday are almost always dead as people are out doing stuff. Sunday nights were 50/50. Sometimes, everyone showed up, other times, no one showed up.

Mission generation in multiplayer is hard coded. The smaller numbers were meant to help out with server communications. When the game was written, most people were still using 56K dialup. Terrain textures and other parameters are also automatically reduced the help out with frame rates and make sure the hosting server has plenty of cpu for handling comms. The nice part about all of that is that my old Pentium 3 machine that could barely run the later patches/releases of the SFP1 series could still act as a multiplayer host and have playable frame rates. I used to leave it up 24-7 as a dogfight host via Hamachi and/or Hyplerlobby. So, the only way for multiplayer missions to be really challenging and enjoyable is to have LOTS OF PLAYERS! 4 vs 4 was fun, but 8 vs 8 would have been the holy grail if enough people would have ever showed up.

I should get air pistols and rifles as I do not have the time or money to my real guns. If I could set up a small range in my back yard with a metal trap, I could should all the time :) When I was in the Navy and in San Diego, I spent $400 a month on ammo shooting both 0.223 Remington with my Colt Sporter HBar and 0.45 ACP with my Springfield Armory M1911A1. Those were good times :)