streakeagle

Spoken by a pilot whose "external tank" was a specialized version of a KC-135

Since this is a game and neither your life nor your wallet are at risk, do as you see fit. If you think you need the gas, keep them. If you get into trouble and need better performance, drop them. This game does penalize your drag and weight, but it does not seem to affect your structural integrity. Whereas, in real life, extra weight means reduced maximum g-load limits. For example, the F-16 may be a 9g dogfighter with only AIM-9s on the wings, but it is generally a 5g fighter with any useful load such as fuel tanks and bombs. I usually keep the tanks all the way to the merge. When I spot bandits, I accelerate with full a/b into a head on pass with AIM-7 Sparrows (flying F-4 Phantoms), punch the tanks as I go by them, then re-engage by pitching up into the vertical. But I can and have completed many air-to-air and air-to-ground missions without ever dropping the tanks. If I were you, I would do whichever is more fun for you rather than worry about what others think. If you are concerned about being realistic, you can still go either way since there are plenty of examples of pilots always dropping their tanks or trying not to drop their tanks as the situation required.

This is a cool package: it easy to get all the important mods into SF2V without any tweaking hassles.

Clients have to match the host. So, if you host with all your mods, it will only work if he installs the same mods. If he has an unmodded install and your files match his (other than things you have added) things will work fine. However, some of your mods may make it so that you can't match his. The safest way to play multiplayer is either have everyone use stock/patched installs or have everyone use the same mods. If I were you, I would make a separate stock/patched install for online play. Typically, when I install a Third Wire sim that supports multiplayer, I leave the default install unmodded, then copy the install and paste it to make a separate one for mods. There are some mods that can be made to a stock install that won't be detected. For instance, I can add cockpits to the MiGs without breaking anything as long as I don't change the data ini files. I released a MiG-21 mod for WoI specifically for this purpose: allowing someone to have MiG-21 cockpits without breaking compatibility with stock/patched installs. In my opinion, despite its limitations, there is no better way to play Third Wire sims than online. As good as the AI has gotten in SF2, it is no match in skill or creativity compared to real people. Certain online players are exceptionally gifted and can teach others much more about flying/dogfigting than can be learned playing against the AI. Unfortunately, the older versions that support multiplayer have other limitations while the otherwise much improved SF2 series does not support multiplayer at all :(

Older games have only two real functions: online multiplayer, YAP, and NATO fighters I bought all of YAP1 and have what has been released of YAP2, but uninstalled all of it. I don't have time for multiplayer right now, so all I have left of old games are those that haven't been released in SF2 format (FE and WOI) and NATO fighters. If YAP2 never gets updated to use SF2, I may never spend much time playing it. I have no tolerance for 083006 AI and other issues given how well SF2 series is working all patched up. I am also too lazy/short of time to convert YAP2 material to SF2 standards. I still want the 3d model for CVAN-65, so I will still be buying YAP releases.

Third Wire finally included a MiG-21bis model in SF2E:

Instead, they went out of business during/after the A-7... Chance Vought became LTV... where are they now? I have hated watching all the aircraft companies merge/go out of business. North American's last efforts under that name were the X-15, B-70 and F-108... then nothing more unless you count the Rockwell B-1 and space shuttle... and both of those date back to the 70s. I don't know of any aircraft by Chance Vought after the A-7. Northrop was an amazing company that always got snubbed with the F-18 pretty much being their F-17 stolen by McDonnell-Douglas, the F-20 being ignored, and the B-2 line shut down before a useful number of planes could be built. The General Dynamics F-16 is now the Lockheed F-16? How could you make the most successful fighter jet since the F-4 (in terms of customers and production numbers) and still be sold off to the competition? The McDonnell and Douglas merger wasn't too bad: both names stayed and both lines of designers continued to function... but now its Boeing? The DC-9 is now the Boeing 717? McDonnell-Douglas was making the F-15, F/A-18, and AV-8B: almost every tactical aircraft used by every service minus the F-14, F-16, and A-10... and still went out of business. I feel like I have been watching the death of the American aerospace industry. From WW2 to the early 1970s, American aircraft design and development was simply amazing, especially in the 1950s when we went from the F-86 and FH-1 to the F-4 and F-104 with what seemed like dozens and dozens of aircraft variants in both the USAF and USN.

Even if you don't have Vista, the SF2 series is more than worth the money just for the cockpits and aircraft variants. For instance, the early F-4D is the correct slick nose (no chin pod like the F-4J) with no RWR (and no RWR display in the cockpit), while the later variants have the chin pod, RWR, and RWR display. The early F-4E is unslatted and has the early gun muzzle as well. So a lot of little details have been added, too many to list.

Since WoI, AI have benefitted from RWR info and reacted appropriately (i.e. evading RHMs when illuminated). Since WoI, AI have utilized low altitudes/terrain masking to render F-4E radar and RHMs (Sparrows) almost useless. So, I would expect that if you were flying low enough and/or using mountains to break radars while also leaving your radar turned off, that you could penetrate intense 1960s/1970s combat air patrols more effectively since they would have to get within visual range to detect your presence. What I don't know is how well AI communicates amongst each other. If you fly over a manned anti-aircraft gun, say a ZSU-23-4, do air assets get a "red crown" style callout the way the player does?

The AI has improved quite a bit since SFP1 Service Pack 2a. Additionally, the AI constraints can be customized for each aircraft, which wasn't true back then. I would bet that if I ever got around to finishing my new F-4B FM that it would work fairly well in SF2. Of course, for me, the main gain of having hyper-accurate FMs was permitting very realistic dissimilar air combat in multiplayer. In SF2 series, the single missions and campaigns have sufficient immersion out of the box (thanks to greatly refined AI and great looking cockpits), that I really don't feel driven to refine the FM any more... I would still kill for a true hard-core F-4 sim with all the button pushing glory of Falcon 4 (including full support for a 2nd playe to be the RIO/WSO) AND a full-fledged F-4 flight model. But I don't think TK's sims are ever going to get me there, they simply remain the closed available alternative. As my son gets older, maybe I will get the time to continue my own FM research and development. I not only have the info needed to refine the F-4, but have as much or more information on the XB-70, which would be a challenging aircraft to fly in its pre-fly-by-wire generation.

this is an old trick that requires editing the control ini file for the arrow keys. By default, they are configured to auto center and have a very reactive motion to allow you to pull hard turns. Set centering to 0 and play around with the sensitivity until you like it.

Well, after I exhausted every other path, I resorted to a System Restore. I went back far enough to circumvent a few new software installs and DirectX updates. After system restore, I had to re-install the video driver... then I got my anti-aliasing back at 1600x1200. I am not sure whether it was a Windows Update, a DirectX update, or some software I installed to support a remote controlled wireless R2D2 webcam... But I got it working right again, so I am happy.

I have seen other people on various forums posting similar problems and never thought much of it... But all of a sudden today, I lost the ability to force anti-aliasing at 1600x1200. If I knock the resolution down to 1280x960 or 1400x1050, everything works normally. I did not change my driver or its settings (though I have done a bunch of that today trying to find the problem). Anybody have any clue as to how or why this would suddenly happen? I am thinking it has to be related to a Windows update, like directX or something like that. But I am at a loss as to what to try/test next.

Funny that you don't want to shoot down bombers with tailguns using missiles... Sparrows and Sidewinders weren't developed to kill fighters, large formations of bombers were exactly what they were supposed to knock down. I like to save Sparrows for MiG-17s since they can be so difficult to kill with F-4s, but AIM-9Bs are almost useless against anything else, so I have no problems expending them on IL-28s. For game purposes, I faced Il-28s a lot while playing campaigns in WoI and to win the mission I had to kill them quickly before they could drop their ordnance. I generally popped off all of my sidewinders, then did high speed passes from almost beam angles and repeated them quickly by using the vertical. With just a bit of practice, I can kill an Il-28 in a single high speed pass with precision gunner. However, there is always a chance that I get too aggressive or the Il-28s get an angle on me first.

The MiG-19 looked great on paper, especially compared to its rival, the F-100, but for many reasons, pilots hated it. With the exception of the Chinese, most Communist air forces went from MiG-17s to MiG-21s, buying/building as few MiG-19s as possible. There were numerous reliability/quality control issues that gave this plane a bad reputation. In SFP1, none of the real world problems are apparent and as originally modeled was an unstoppable UFO in online multiplayer mixing the power of the F-4 with the maneuverability of the MiG-17. By the 083006 patch series, the MiG-19 was a lot less dominant, the F-8E took over as the new unstoppable UFO. With multiplayer having been deleted in SF2, there is really no good way to evaluate the FMs on a comparitive basis. I need to fly against established human pilots that fly the aircraft to every limit to really know how the flight models compare to each other.

I love the looks of quite a few aircraft. Spitfires are true classics, but not far off are P-51Ds and F4U-1As. B-17s are clean and elegant despite their guns. A-5s are clean and sleek. Concorde certainly has lines as elegant as a Spitfire. Su-27s combine many of the best features of F-14s, F-15s, and F-18s (all of which are pretty nice looking too!). But if you press me to name one aircraft that is the "nicest looking", I would have to name an aircraft that is over 40 years old and still looks (and flies) faster than anything before or since: the A-12/SR-71. A close 2nd for me is the T-38A Talon with its big bubble canopies, coke-bottle waist, and sleek wings and tail surfaces... painted as a USAF Thunderbird even better yet.

TK has basically 2 types of aerodynamic co-efficients: simple constants and those that vary with some other parameter. In reality, a particular co-efficient may depend on many parameters, but to keep things simple, TK chooses only one that he considers most significant. The one exception I can think of is engine thrust, which varies with Mach and altitude. Most others vary with either Mach or Alpha (angle-of-attack). Lift, thrust, and drag calculations are not that difficult and are the ones that primarily determine performance such as max speed, ceiling, turn rate, climb rate, etc. So if you focus on these, you can quickly reach a point where you can tune existing flight models to be much more accurate. On the other hand, it is the stability and control variables that are the hardest to estimate or even tweak, yet are the most important in terms of the "feel" or character of the aircraft. As an example, I created a high fidelity F-4B flight model for the service pack 2a version of SFP1. I used a flight model editing tool I created to compare and tune TK's stock flight model to match the performance charts from the US Navy F-4B pilot's flight manual. My tool (AIDE) is focused on lift, drag, thrust, and weight under steady state conditions such as level flight, a sustained climb, or a steady turn. The results were very encouraging. Years later, I stumbled onto NASA documents that gave me very accurate tables for some of the co-efficients such as zero lift drag (CD0). It turned out that my estimate of CD0 was reasonably close, and the way the ingame performance of my flight model matched the Navy charts was somewhat impressive. But, I never tweaked TK's stability numbers, so despite demonstrating a lot of the flight performance to very accurate levels, the "feel" may or may not be correct depending on how well TK estimated those parameters. I got too busy with work and real life to fix the bugs that creeped into later versions of AIDE (causing crashes, especially if you open more than one FM at a time) as well as being overwhelmed by the rate at which TK changes the game's flight engine and stock FMs. So, don't be discouraged from tweaking FMs. Just be aware that it is a very complicated subject that can take quite a bit of time to learn and still take even more time after you feel like you know what your doing. The small group of die-hard FM modders for this sim will help as much as they can, but I have been mostly out of the loop since my son was born in Nov 2006. Good luck!

There is a summary of the basic meanings of the coefficients, but Third Wire sims essentially use real world linear approximations for aerodynamics. So the best way to learn is to actually study aerodynamics and then tinker with the flight models to grasp the concepts. At a minimum, you need to be good with trig and algebra, though it doesn't hurt to understand calculus and differential equations. So, to answer your question, there is no in depth FM tutorial unless you count the books available for learning to be an aerospace engineer. The book at this link: http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Combat-Aircra...e/dp/0870214268 is an outstanding primer, but as it was written by a German, some of the examples use different symbols/notation than mentioned in the text or compared with American/English equations as used in TK's sims. However, if you comprehend what is written, this book is like a bible to me, both for performance analysis and estimation of real world aircraft and for deriving flight models in TK's game engine. While the book is not enough to allow you to start writing FMs from scratch, it should give you the insights you need to delve deeper into the world of flight modeling.

Interesting that the aircraft involved is named as a MiG-19, but every aspect of the conversation indicates that it was a MiG-17. In particular, the Have Drill program named was the evaluation of the MiG-17. Also the F-86 is named as being the closest thing in US servcie to the MiG for evaluations against F-100 and F-105. None of the described info really fits the MiG-19, but the low roll rate and high turn rate easily describe the MiG-17. An F-86 is nothing like a MiG-19, but is a lot like the MiG-15/MiG-17 family. So, I believe it was a major typo (the whole article has tons of mistakes as typed onto the web).

C-5s are amazing aircraft to see flying low in take-off/landing configurations. Seeing something so large flying so slow. I miss the original MAC colors (white over gray with a blue stripe between the two). I know the C-5s have been overhauled quite a bit, but they have also done quite a few years/miles of flying. I wonder how long they can keep going? Obviously, this one's time ran out. Can anyone say "spare parts"?

You are preaching to the choir on this subject. Since the game was released, the gunsight pipper has wandered all over the place without regard for the sight glass. At one point, the pipper stopped wandering down into the instrument panel, but TK discovered that "bug" and "fixed" it back to the way he meant it to be: able to go anywhere. I think his intent is to help those who play with no cockpit. In which case, why can't he make a checkbox option for sight glass clippling so that people who want some sort of realistic immersion are supported, too? I just don't get his stubbornness on this issue at all. I can't think of any other sim, lite or hard core, that handles this so poorly. Oh, well, no sim ever has every feature I want, why should this one be any different?

I really like the look and feel of Space Shuttle Mission 2007 based on screenshots, reviews, and the free demo. As I am about to buy it, I notice that they have a recommended product: 3 spare activations. I immediately abandoned my order, as I like to "own" the games I buy. In general, I think I should be able to store the game on semi-permanent media, such as a DVD and reinstall it at will without having to buy any extra activations. I have had to rebuild many a PC in the past, and won't pay a hostage fee for re-installing/activating a game I already purchased. I don't mind copy protection that is based on some sort of license key (unless it can only be activated via the web). However, I don't want to lose the ability to install the game because the web activation is no longer available or I have used up my activations, etc. Other flight sim companies practicing the same type of policy have lost/will continue to lose my business as well. Star Force didn't stop me from buying Flaming Cliffs. Fortunately, it didn't appear to have a noticable impact on my home gaming PC. However, my wife installed another UbiSoft game with Star Force, Prince of Persia 3, on her work laptop and it broke her Windows so bad that she had to use Ghost to restore a previous image (system restore was not adequate). So, I am not going to risk buying/installing any more games with Star Force now that I have had first hand experience comparable to reports I have seen on the web (at least there was no hardware damage). On the other hand, Third Wire has the business model that works best for me: 1. Once purchased, download at will any time. 2. Copy to any desired media at will. 3. Reinstall at will. 4. No form of copy protection whatsoever, thereby foregoing the need to wait for a no-cd crack so I don't have to swap discs every time I want to play a different game. I have bought every sim ever released by Third Wire, some of them more than once.

It would be really nice if somehow DCS Black Shark and Flaming Cliffs coudl interface in multiplayer until the DCS series is more rounded out. Of course, jet getting a new patch is way better than nothing if it fixes/adds more things than it breaks

Based on my experience with the Radeon 8500 and 9800 Pro on P3 PCs, I would say that while framerates my not improve much, I was able to run the 9800 Pro on max quality settings no matter what the game was, so sometimes buying an overmatched gpu can be convenient. I consider the price difference between the 4850, 4870, and 4890 insignificant: I can get an OC (900 MHz) 4890 with 1GB of RAM from NewEgg for about $250 after MIR, a stock 4850 with 1GB of RAM is about $140... difference is about 2 hours of overtime pay (trivial since I just racked up 22 hours last pay period and will get about 5 hours a week guaranteed for a couple of more weeks). I am willing to bet there would be differences, even with my CPU being so slow, depending on the level of FSAA selected and I always play all of my games at 1600x1200 or 1920x1080. If I wasn't about to move, I would just go get another PC.

Actually, given the current prices ($230 to $250), why not get a 4890?