streakeagle

I fly only on Hard settings, and per reality, my F-4Js don't carry gunpods, just centerline fuel tanks. Maneuverability also varies greatly with loaded weight. If you start a mission with 100% fuel, aircraft with high fuel capacities are at a major disadvantage. US aircraft are almost always not only larger in size, but carry lots of fuel. Aircraft with a low fuel fraction, like short range MiGs, don't gain as much performance as their fuel bleeds off. As for beating MiG-17s or MiG-21s with an F-4J in SF2, if you are doing so with turn performance, you are either flying against numerous aircraft and getting snapshot opportunities due to crowded skies, or the AI isn't as the higher difficulty levels. To see the F-4J outclassed by a MiG-21, the AI has to fly the MiG-21 almost at its best as it is only better than the F-4 by a small margin, especially down low. The guys flying multiplayer tried the SFP1/WoX Oct/Nov 2008 patch level and found with player vs player that the MiG flight models behaved like UFOs compared to the old 083006 patch level, so they refuse to play with the newer patch level. Also, to really get the feel of being outclassed by the MiG-21, you need to fly without using any views other than from inside the cockpit, preferably without any padlocking. If you can't see where he is or what he is doing aside from seeing a few glimpses in the rear view mirror, it is difficult to get your nose around on him, since you will waste degrees turning in a direction he may no longer be.

I would be pleased to meet you as well. While I have greatly enjoyed meeting so many people all over the world via the internet, there is still nothing quite like talking with someone face-to-face. With Operation Flashpoint, I was able to build a local group that came over to play quite often. I never did play with anyone else via the internet unless it was one of the regulars that couldn't show up in person (usually one of the married with children guys). The first guys might show up and start playing sometime between 4pm and 8pm on a Friday or Saturday afternoon. The last straggler would leave sometime between 3am and 6am. During the peak hours between 9pm and 12am, I had as many as 7 other people over eating pizza, drinking beer, and killing Commies. Whenever we had 6 or more, we would play team missions with 3vs3 or 4vs4. Otherwise we played co-op or deathmatches. My wife is going to Colombia for 2 weeks very soon and she is taking my son with her, so I may actually get to have an Operation Flashpoint night or two while she is gone If only I could have had an SFP1 group like that. The guys that showed up in Hyperlobby and Hamachi to play online were scattered all over the world and had widely varying schedules. It was difficult to get a significant number to show up at the same time on any given night. While we did have 12 guys logged in at the same time on a dogfight server one lucky night, that didn't last for very long and we didn't have time to set up a co-op team fight 6 vs 6. My dream was to have 8 vs 8 with no AI aircraft at all. Now, SF2 doesn't even have multiplayer

Just give me a little notice when you are coming so I can make sure I don't end up with a schedule conflict. I have hosted tons of my wifes friends and family visiting from Colombia. I am long overdue to have someone I know visit. We just had some friends from Miami stay with us last weekend because her husband, an Army Reserve special forces officer, had to be at MacDill on Saturday. If I actually get to see you, it will be the first time I have gotten to meet anyone from the SFP1 community face-to-face. I just can't seem to meet anyone that lives near me with quite my level of interest in PC flight simming and Third Wire sims in particular. I can get people to play Operation Flashpoint or Star Wars Battlefront 2, but people with the patience and determination to learn ACM are very rare. I just hooked my brother-in-law up with a joystick and installed Aces High 2 on a low-end laptop. It struggles to do 20 to 30 fps, but it is flyable and he is loving it. If his laptop will run SF2, I will buy him 1 or more of the SF2 games as well since he is more interested in jets than props. If he actually likes it over the long run and does well, I may actually have a local to play multiplayer. Too bad SF2 doesn't do multiplayer

If you are down my way, I would be more than happy to have you over for dinner. You coming to MacDill on USAF business or bringing the family to Orlando for a Disney vacation?

I am satisfied enough with the stock SF2 F-4 pits that I haven't even bothered trying to retrofit any photoreal textures to them. The only missing detail that is bothering me is the McDonnell nameplate that should be on the lower right and that is such a low priority to me that I haven't taken the 2 minutes it would take to resize it and paste it into the stock texture.

We just had 5-guys at the mall tonight. They are very good. If we are going out for burgers and have time to find a 5-guys, that is where we go. But I cook burgers once a week and the beef we get at Publix is usually excellent, especially when seasoned with a mix of Montreal Steak seasoning and Adobo seasoning. When we get 5-guys at the mall, we usually have to wait 5 to 10 minutes. I can cook burgers on my gas grill in 10 to 15 minutes and get a comparable result. But I usually only provide cheese, tomatoes, and dill relish, whereas at 5-guys, I also get bacon, mushrooms, and lettuce and their "regular" size fries that is bigger than the biggest size at any other fast food place. In the end, I pretty much love all of the traditional American fast foods and will eat them from almost anywhere at any time whether cooked at home, bought at a fast food place, or served from a military chow line... but if you are going for burgers and 5-guys is within your time/distance constraints, it is one of the best places to go.

Ironically, the loser of the C-5 contract is still in production: the 747.

If TK made the campaign as historically accurate as possible, you would fly endless Escort missions with almost no MiGs at all. When the North Vietnamese first got there MiG-21s, they had about 16 of them. Operation Bolo shot down 7 of them in one engagement. There were several months of no air combat until new MiGs arrived and new tactics were developed. At various times throughout the war, there was almost no MiG activity at all. So, for air-to-air jocks like myself, a historically accurate campaign in Vietnam can be very boring. I prefer single missions which allow you to duplicate the situations that occurred when MiGs were encountered: F-105s bounced by MiG-17s, MiG-21s popping up out of nowhere behind the strike force at supersonic speeds, and events like Operation Bolo or the slaughter that took place on May 10, 1972 when the Vietnamese learned what the AIM-9G and Top Gun had done for the Navy as well as getting a taste of Combat Tree and the AIM-7E2 when they worked right. The most difficult missions are using hard wing USAF F-4C/Ds with AIM-4Ds and AIM-7Es while following visual ID ROE for Sparrow launches. The AIM-4Ds in the game work about as well against MiGs as they did in real life: almost never. The AIM-7Es are almost worthless within visual range. About the only thing the F-4s can do is stay fast and wait for the MiGs to run out of fuel and disengage, then setting up some AIM-7E shots or if you are feeling really lucky, trying to get an AIM-4D kill.

It is my understanding that the Soviets were shocked by the performance of the F-5E. It did to their MiG-21 what the MiG-21 did to the F-4. MiG-21 pilots were advised to keep their speed up and not to turn fight if faced with an F-5E. As lower speeds with combat flaps, the F-5E was flying rings around the MiG-21 in their tests. Aside from the lack of a bubble canopy, I think Chuck Yeager's belief in the F-20 was quite justified.

One little problem with using the SF series for modeling orbital flight: the game uses a flat square map with solid wall boundries. In other words, you can't orbit! If you enjoy orbital physics, I suggest you try the free sim, Orbiter. Besides the stock Space Shuttle, there are some great user made addons including Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and some sci-fi stuff like the Eagle from Space 1999.

There is a huge difference in turn performance between F-4s with the hard wing and the slatted F-4E, F-4F and F-4S, both in real life and in the game. Do some 1 vs 1 against a MiG-21 using the single mission provided by TK (you can change the F-4 to any type available for that date after you start the mission). A hard wing Phantom cannot get behind a well flown late model MiG-21 even using the vertical. The F-4 must either get a head-on kill or survive long enough for the MiG-21 to run out of fuel and disengage. The slatted F-4E can almost turn with the MiG-21 and has a fair chance of getting into a firing position. Make no mistake, the MiG-21 was an excellent fighter in a dogfight against the F-4 in terms of flight performance. The only reason F-4s did as well as they did against the MiG-21 due to a combination of factors: pilot skill, view from the cockpit (MiG-21 pilots were pretty much flying blind, even compared to the F-4), and weapons/avionics. With a decent bubble canopy and Western avionics/weapons, the MiG-21MF and MiG-21bis would have been very competitive against the F-16. In the game, AI flight tactics and possibly FMs have gotten much better with the release of SF2. I used to be able dust MiG-21s easily in any version of the F-4 without a gun and could even beat MiG-17s with some patience. Now, the unslatted F-4s are total dogs against AI MiG-21s and MiG-17s and the value of the F-4E with its internal gun and maneuvering slats can really be apprectiated, especially if the only IR missiles you have available are the AIM-9B/E/J series or AIM-4Ds. Now, if I fly fearlessly/carelessly trying to maximize my kills, a MiG-21 will sneak up behind me and get me with either an Atoll or guns. The last time I remember that happening with any frequency was the old SFP1 SP2a patch level, though WoI marked a big step in the right direction.

Absolutely outstanding! I love the T-38A in Thunderbirds scheme and with bump mapping it looks even better yet. Keep up the good work!

I just got around to installing BoB 2.10 + Battle of France (with new 3d models) on Windows 7. Again I can't praise this game enough. It is clearly one of the best sims you can get if you don't mind focusing on the Battle of Britain. Sometime this year there will be a version 2.11 patch with even more features and before that happens, there will be a Tiger Moth flight training addon.

Thanks! Grumble... Grumble... Grumble... The last "happy birthday" I had was when I turned 21. Since then it has been all down hill. 42 today. Yuck. If I died my hair and lost 25 lbs, I wouldn't look much different than I did at 32 years old.

That is certainly one reason why you can fly long range missions without refueling. Another reason is that the drag coefficients are usually too low allowing a much lower throttle setting (and lower fuel consumption) to maintain high subsonic speeds.

I didn't build the cockpits, I just made it so you could drop what was already available into the game without disturbing the existing flight models. The person who made the cockpits used his references to make the most accurate versions he could from the photos available. However, some cockpits were reused between similar types. At the same time, the stock 3d models of the MiGs are not necessarily 100% accurate since you weren't meant to fly them and should only see them from a distance while fighting them not as much time was spent detailing them. If want specific issues addressed with the cockpit details, you will have to contact the modders who created them. If you would like to see fixes to the exterior 3d models, go to the third wire forums and identify the faults to TK (with supporting documentation to support your claims). I don't see Third Wire making any stock flyable MiGs any time soon, if ever. Thankfully, some people fill in the gaps missed by TK FOR FREE!!!

As Andy Bush pointed out, the Germans were one of the few users of the F-104 that had problems with high loss rates. The problem was that they were trying to use a high altitude interceptor as a multirole low-altitude penetrator. Because of the major stability problems of its configuration (i.e. the t-tail), Lockheed added an automatic system to push the nose down if the angle of attack started getting too high. So, if you are flying a lot of low altitude terrain following missions and you pull back on the stick too hard trying to climb over a ridge or pull out of a bombing run, the system overrides the pilot stick and pushes the nose right back down... into the ground. The t-tailed F-101 Voodoo suffered from the same problem, was just as dangerous, and ended up being tasked with a low altitude strike role as well. These t-tailed fighters with short, high loaded wings were disasters. If these countries loved the F-104 so much, Lockheed would have gladly sold them new ones at a real good price to replace them. As I have posted previously, those countries that could afford to do so replaced their F-104s. The F-104 was produced in significant numbers and served quite a long time in quite a few countries. But it was never meant to be a multirole fighter, which was what the main production version, F-104G, was supposed to be. In many cases, the US was giving them away via the Military Aid Program (MAP). For some perspective, the F-4 was not given away to allies. It was the most complex and expensive fighter built in large numbers until the teen series fighters replaced it. Yet, nearly twice as many F-4s were built than F-104s. F-4s were still in demand and being produced in the USA until 1979! F-4s are still in service with several countries to this day. If the Luftwaffe, Japan, and Spain loved the F-104, they could have bought more. Instead, they bought F-4s. The F-104 was a historical achievement: the first Mach 2 fighter jet (at least in Western air forces) with great climb rate, etc. But it simply was not that useful operationally, which is why the USAF never bought or used very many. The English Electric Lightning was pretty much a contemporary to the F-104 and the F-4. It was even better than either one from a performance standpoint with tremendous climb rate and decent agility. Many claim it was superior to the F-15. But like the MiG-21, it lacked in avionics and armament. I am at a loss as to why the Lightning was not developed further and the British chose to buy F-4s rather than rely on their own awesome aerospace industry. The F-104 never even had a shot of getting a British contract. They were mainly bought by countries that couldn't afford anything better.

If you believe this statement: "Other points..... no other fighters used the wing design? Yeah? And......? That just means there were other goals in mind. Has nothing to do with the price of tea in China. Ditto the T-Tail." I can't have a rational argument with you. T-tails are an absolute disaster for combat aircraft since they become ineffective when pulling high angles of attack. No fighters use t-tails. Likewise, low aspect ratio wings with high loadings optimized purely for speed are an equally terrible design choice for combat aircraft. The F-104 was the only design to go to that extreme and that mistake was never made again by Lockheed or anyone else. That isn't heated rhetoric, its physics. Most of the early supersonic designs had poor handling qualities, but the X-3, F-104, and F-101 with similar wing/tail layouts were all poorly designed for high angles of attack. Many planes and pilots were lost because of this design. The F-104 looks cool and thanks to its engine, the J-79, was a world class technical achievement, but its combat record is less than stellar. It was only produced in significant numbers because Lockheed used dirty politics to force it on our allies seeking an affordable supersonic fighter. Those countries that flew the F-104 the longest were those that didn't have the budget to replace them. Some pilots did love the F-104 (Andy Bush at SimHQ is one of them), but most of those never flew the F-104 against MiG-21s and Hawker Hunters. I don't know what history you are reading, but the Luftwaffe hated the F-104. They kept upgrading their F-4s, though.

Looks like a compromise between the YF-23 and the Su-27. I would bet that it is a match if not better than the F-22 in terms of flight performance/agility, but the key to beating the F-22 is being just as stealthy while having a comparable radar capability. I have no idea how good the Russians are at making aircraft stealthy. But it sure does look nice.

For the most part, these are readily adaptable to the SF2 series, but the base bitmaps are the old 512x512 templates. Of course, most of the details are done with decals. So, if you don't mind less detailed panel lines, these skins still look pretty great. In some cases, you might be able to use the newer SF2 bitmaps. But on the one skind I converted (VF-92 1968), some of the unit colors are painted on the bitmaps. Also, some of the markings are on the decals and on the newer bitmaps, you have to edit the decals to mask out the stencils that have been duplicated (or paint over the duplicates on the bitmaps). I have gotten lazy, so I just used the orignal skins as is (with the bitmaps renamed as necessary to match the version of the F-4 they are being used on). I would like to see MyTai01, Sundowner, and Paul Nortess (Fist of the Fleet) combine their knowledge, attention to detail, and skills together to produce a single set of skins for all USN aircraft that would be near flawless.

Aspect ratio heavily influences lift/drag ratio and lift induced drag. The F-104 style wing was only used on a few aircraft: X-3, F-104, and X-15. The only use for that wing is low zero-lift drag, which is good for maximizing top speed if you have enough engine power to go fast enough to make enough lift without using much AoA. This wing is OK if you want to point your nose up, climb to 50,000 feet, level off, and go supersonic. It is worthless for just about anything else. With such a small wing, any external payload hung on pylons will quickly kill the low drag advantage by significantly increasing the zero-lift drag AND requiring a higher AoA to maintain level flight. The deltas and very similar swept trapezoidals (basically deltas with clipped tips) live with a higher zero-lift drag, but have advantages as transonic and supersonic speeds are approached. They are also much better than the short, straight F-104 wings at low speeds since they can generate quite a bit of lift at high AoAs if you have the power to compensate for the drag. The ultimate proof in the flaw of the F-104's wing design was the fact that virtually no other fighter aircraft used it in the 50+ years since it was originally designed. Modern high T/W fighters with LERX wings can go as fast or faster than the F-104 AND turn AND land at half the speed. The F-4's wing was already superior to the F-104 overall, but the F-104 had high-speed maneuvering flaps that made it a bit more competitive at lower speeds. Once the F-4E got slats that were equivalent, it performed much better than the F-104. The only other fighter in service with a wing similar to the F-104 was the F-5, but the F-5 wing was not designed with Mach 2.0 in mind, has a higher aspect ratio, and a lower wing loading. Once the F-5E arrived with a few refinements, it became one of the most agile fighters in the world at low speeds. The F-5's limitation was thrust-weight ratio, which was fixed two different ways: they heavily redesigned YF-17 and the very similar F-5G/F-20. The key upgrade Lockheed made to try to make the F-104 competitive with modern lightweight fighters was change the wing and tail (the t-tail was a huge problem as well... look how many modern fighters use those). But bad politics and a bad reputation kept the Lancer from ever seeing the light of day no matter how competitive it would have been. The F-104 was a response to Korean War F-86 pilots tired of having MiG-15s able to climb above them to safety and attack or retreat at will: boom-n-zoom energy fighters. But given the same data, look what the Soviet response was to the Korean war: upengine the MiG-15 and add a good gunsight, double the engines to make the MiG-19, but sweep the wing a bit more to get a higher speed. Neither were as fast as the F-104, but F-104s would have a very hard time consistently beating either one using guns or the AIM-9B. But the MiG-19 was the contemporary of the F-100, the Soviet match for the F-104 was the MiG-21, which was as fast as the F-104 AND could turn better than any other Mach 2 fighter. The price the MiG-21 paid for its advantages were short range/low endurance and very little payload. In daylight conditions with ground controlled intercept and well trained pilots on short range intercept missions, the MiG-21 was clearly the most effective fighter of its generation (think Vietnam). But, mess with any one or more of those variables, and the big F-4 style fighter dominates (think Israeli wars). Many Arab MiG-21s were lost to empty fuel tanks that didn't get counted towards the Israeli's arleady superior kill ratio. The Fang would have been the US equivalent to the MiG-21: no range or payload, but a hell of a fast, agile aircraft. The F-5 was more or less a more marketable derivative of the same development path using smaller, cheaper engines and not trying to optimize the design for top speed. I think if the Fang had been built and served in Vietnam instead of the F-104, the US would have gotten a better measure of exactly what type of fighter its next generation needed to be. The Fang would have done a great job as an air superiority type used for CAP and sweeps, especially if it had a refueling probe. The MiG-17 would been much less of a threat. The MiG-21 would have been dominated. The US might have built a fighter more like the F-16 or F-18 instead of the F-15 instead of waiting for budget cuts and political pressure to force them to build/buy lightweight fighters. As it was, as soon as the cold war budget expanded with Reagan's election, the military was back to making huge fighters. The F-22 is huge. Only advances in materials, engines, controls, and aerodynamics allow it to be more agile than smaller F-16s despite being larger than F-15s. But once again, the budget cuts have come, and the F-22s have been canceled. The US will be lucky to get a useful number of F-35s. The F/A-18Es may be less than impressive aircraft compared to the F-22 and F-35, but the Navy actually got away with buying them. After all this time, the optimum size for a multirole supersonic fighter jet in terms of dimensions and weight is still the size of an F-4 (compare the numbers with a Super Hornet, they are darn near identical if you don't look at the actual shape/layout). The F-16 size is much cheaper, but can't carry the payload and avionics you can cram into a fighter 50% larger.

The carrier model has to be built with aircraft on the deck. I believe the latest betas of Digital Overload's Nimitz class is availble for free with F/A-18 Hornets on the deck.

This is a thread about posting screenshots. I took some screenshots and posted them. End of story. If someone isn't happy with the content, then maybe they shouldn't have sold their soul to the devil... I mean done business with 05.

The successes of the F-105 against the MiG-17 is what helped seal the deal to make the gun armed F-4E. The F-105 was far less maneuverable than the F-4 and its pilots were only tasked and trained for strike missions, yet it was getting a good number of kills. After adding the gun, quite a few more MiGs were killed by F-4s than there would have been if no gun or gun pod was ever carried. I wonder how many opportunities the Navy missed because they almost never carried guns in Vietnam? Of course, the majority of kills were still scored with missiles, but the threat of the gun makes the enemy a little more cautious, especially with head-on passes.

CVAN-65 USS Enterprise circa 1968 with VF-92: By streakeagle at 2010-01-24 By streakeagle at 2010-01-24 By streakeagle at 2010-01-24 By streakeagle at 2010-01-24 By streakeagle at 2010-01-24 Notice in these photos as in my screenshots that 215 is an F-4B (67) with the RWR tail cap and chin pod, whereas 214 is an early F-4B with the slick tail and chin pod. TK's attention to detail on the F-4 variants (both inside and out) make the SF2 series well worth the money even if you are happy with the SF1 series. By streakeagle, shot with HP pstc7200 at 2010-01-24 By streakeagle, shot with HP pstc7200 at 2010-01-24