streakeagle

Both look great, but I really like the T-6A.

Manually maneuvering the wings to lie about energy state would be bad. The original schedule was based on maximizing lift rather than minimizing drag. It was found to overstress the wing in dogfights. Wings out at high speeds while maneuvering hard = bent wings. Why would they risk damaging their wings? Doesn't make sense to me for F-14 pilots to do this on any regular basis. As for this particular incident, I think the footage shows the F-16s were able to swing their noses all around them. For that to be true, the speed should have been 350 knots or less, where the F-16s would absolutely own them in sustained performance. For a brief moment, the F-14s could turn with the F-16 (the wings out is actually very effective for turning until they lose too much speed), but they would bleed speed badly and/or have to ease off their turns at some point. Above 400 knots, the F-16 is limited by pilot and airframe to 9g, which the Tomcat can pull as well, so the fight would be a lot more fair in terms of turn rate and turn radius. This video shows the F-14s trying to spiral with F-16s, which just isn't smart at all. F-15s have no maneuvering flaps and fixed wings. They have to drop below 250 knots to use landing flaps... so they turn even worse than the F-14. But smart F-15 pilots stay above 400 knots and use their vertical performance in addition to good tactics to handle close in fights. A more interesting fight would be F/A-18A/C versus F-16A/C with equally skilled pilots. The YF-17 was very close to the YF-16 in maneuverability, but the thrust-to-weight advantage of the F-16 gave it better sustained turn performance. The F/A-18 ended up a bit heavier than the YF-17, but retained instantaneous performance over the F-16. Over time, the F-16 got heavier, but also got a much better engine. So, I would be curious to see which airframe could out maneuver the other for a guns kill. Could the F-18 yank its nose around and get a quick snapshot before its speed bled off? Are the aircraft close enough in performance that even the slightest difference in pilot skills and tactics would determine the outcome? Make no mistake, the F/A-18 has pitch authority comparable to the Su-27. So I would love to see both Hornets and Falcons in 1 vs 1 and 2 vs 2 gunfights pushed to their limits.

Wings out 100% = dead meat The wings being extended all the way out means that the Tomcat pilots got very slow. Despite the movie Top Gun and the beliefs of F-14 fantatics, it is not a dogfighter compared to the F-16. The Tomcat is somewhat more maneuverable than an F-4 and generally comparable to the F-15, but nowhere near the F-16. The way they should have tried to win was by keeping their speed up above 400 kts and using mutual support to cover each others tails (no different than the F4F vs the A6M). Well flown F4Fs smoked A6Ms: In 2 vs 2 or larger fights, good tactical decisions by the pilots generally cancel out the advantages conferred by speed and agility. In this case, the F-16s have the better pilots and the better dogfighter. Hopefully, the Tomcat pilots in this video learned some valuable lessons and got a chance to try a similar mission again. I bet if the instructor pilots had been in the Tomcats and the students had been in the F-16s that the results would have been the same. Now as always in air to air combat, the pilot is generally far more important than the crate he flies.

My first combat flight sim wasn't even a computer game, it was a strategic level board game from Avalon Hill called Luftwaffe (each counter represented 150 aircraft), which led me to the the much more tactically oriented Air Force/Dauntless WWII air combat game. Within 2 or 3 years, I collected nearly every air combat simulation game (board and/or miniatures) I could find ranging from WWI to the near future. But my first computer game was Digital Integration's Fighter Pilot, which was an F-15 sim for the Timex-Sinclair 2068, quickly followed by their Tomahawk game (an AH-64 simulator). Both used dual Atari style joysticks almost like a modern HOTAS setup.

I don't see co-ordinating air refueling hardly more difficult than carrier landing waypoints. Jane's USAF made air-to-air refueling both semi-realistic and fun: you had to fly very accurately into a specific position before it would trigger the auto refueling sequence. Such a system would be appropriate for TK's sim: not totally dumbed down and fully automated, but not too difficult either. Given the YAP work-around, I see no need for TK to implement this anytime soon. While I don't think I would turn down anything released by TK for the SF series, nor would I specifically want to pay more for refueling. There is a sizable list of things I would much rather see fixed/added first.

The Silent Eagle poses the same threat to the F-35/F-22 that the Super Phantom and F-4X posed to the F-15. No matter how cost effective, the improved F-4s were not what the USAF wanted and McDonnell also was more interested in selling new Eagles. McDonnell was the contractor for the F-4X Mach 3 Phantoms, and they quickly decided not the threaten their own sales by making an F-4 that was in some ways better than the F-15. Boeing was the contractor proposing the re-engined Super Phantoms, but everyone still wanting to operate F-4s was only willing to spend money on avionics updates knowing that no amount of thrust was going to make old airframes into modern dogfighters. As in the past, I would expect the USAF to do everything in its power to ensure the F-35 wins every contract rather than risk damaging its own plans/budgets for F-22/F-35 aircraft. A really cheap but effective "Silent Falcon" would absolutely destroy the F-35 market... since Lockheed makes both, you can be sure there won't be any chance of such an in-house F-16 variant unless the F-35 program fails to make sufficient sales. Given the present state of the world, we didn't really need the F-22 and could have gotten by with something like the Silent Eagle. But the development money has already been spent. We should buy as many F-22s as possible to drive down the unit cost and provide plenty of spares to operate them for 30+ years the way the Eagles have had to serve. Of course, the number of F-22s being ordered keeps going down and the unit price keeps going up. As long as the government is handing out billions of dollars to save industries, they should buy 1 F-22 for each Eagle the USAF has had and 1 F-35 for each F-16. That would keep a lot of people employed in good paying jobs and give us the USAF a strong fleet of young aircraft. In some ways, the end of the Cold War ultimately led the US to its current economic situation with massive decreases in spending on both arms and research and development. I can imagine a day when every US citizen has a college degree (just like high school diploma now), but seeing as how there will be few or no engineering and manufacturing jobs, all these people educated at government expense will be standing behind a cash register, flippling a burger, or greeting people at the entrance to Walmart... Instead, we could continue developing and building the world's best military tanks, artillery, ships, subs, and aircraft, employing millions of people to design, test, build, and operate all of this... Nahh, lets just tax the rich and give handouts to companies and individuals that can't balance their bank accounts.

While I agree with Lexx that having the 3d model provide the cockpit frame and view should be the better way to get the feeling of being inside the plane, I have some issues: 1) the low poly count of the cockpit frames as viewed from the inside in most 3d models is repulsive, especially when they are too thick. 2) the difference in the light and shadows creates a contrast that destroys the immersion this trick is supposed to provide. In the screenshot above, it looks like the instrument panel is real due to sharp colors and high polys while the canopy frame is projected onto a whitescreen due to washed out colors and different lighting/shadows. I think the ultimate solution will be for the cockpit and aircraft to be one single ultra-high poly model with the usual lower detailed lods for distant viewing by external observers and some kind of clipping rule to reduce the poly count for the in-cockpit view. I presume that the hardware currently available is more than strong enough to handle such an approach, but I haven't ever coded 3d programs nor built 3d models, so I am just venturing a guess based on what I have already seen in current sims.

However limited it may have been, multiplayer was always a feature of this sim. In SF2, it was completely deleted largely due the fact that it was based on DirectPlay which is no longer supported in the latest DirectX native to Vista (Dx10). I think it is only fair that this feature be restored at least to comparable functionality as soon as practical for the small but dedicated community that has supported this sim due to its combination of awesome flight modeling and solid multiplayer dogfighting. If multiplayer supported custom player-designed missions identical to single player missions, the number of people coming to this sim for multiplayer would increase exponentially. TK has numerous reasons for ignoring multiplayer and even finally deleting it. He is obviously happy with the single player and modder niches he is tapping into. But just like the online store with downloadable versions of the sim, I think TK would be surprised at how much more business he would get with solid multiplayer support in this line of sims. But alas, he is a lone programmer and has a successful business model, so he isn't going to risk investing so much time and money into a feature that currently is only demanded by a vocal but small group. Apparently, the current formula of adding a new terrain and about 4 flyables with a few gameplay enchancements is going to carry him for quite some time before he will ever look into restoring/improving multiplayer support.

Looks like wing and tailplanes are optimized more for subsonic lift rather than supersonic drag... admintting that the F-18's straighter wing was the better way to go rather than stressing Mach 2 performance.

There is nothing in the flight model that prevents modeling the lift/drag characteristics of the XB-70. Compression lift would simply be lumped in with the other co-efficients, no need for any specialized parameters. The game doesn't model the airflow, just the end result. I have complete NASA data for the end result that can be readily incorporated into the game's lift tables. What keeps me from finishing my work on the XB-70A flight model is time: I work full time, have a wife, and a 2-year-old boy. The only free time I get is after they go to sleep and I prefer to spend that time relaxing by browsing, posting on forums, and playing games. If I were still single, I would have the flight model done and still be waiting for the 3d model to be finished.

Video card alone does not a fast PC make... A computer is kind of like a car. The engine and transmission must be matched. Likewise, the cpu and gpu need to selected such that neither one bottlenecks the other. I upgraded my old P3 computer from a Voodoo 5500 to a Radeon 8500 to a Radeon 9800 Pro. The jump from the 5500 to the 8500 allowed me to play games at 1600x1200x32 versus 1024x768 while keeping the same or better fps. The jump from the 8500 to the 9800 Pro didn't buy me many fps, but I could run every game I owned at max quality settings. So while I never got to see my 9800 Pro run as fast as it could, I still got what I paid for: the best possible image quality at the highest possible frame rates for my P3 computers. In your case, I would forget the benchmarks and play some games. If you don't see a useful increase in image quality and/or frame rates, then you wasted your money. By the way, what are your pc specs? If you are counting on your pc being fast because it is a Core2Duo or a QuadCore, then you need to play games that use multiple cores. Most of the games I play do not support multiple cores and would not run much if any faster on multicore processors than they do on my single core Athlon 64.

This mod is nothing special... just got tired of doing this manually every time I reinstall the game after patching. I really could have used this back in the day for online play with WoV. I intended to make separate packages to suuport each sim: SFP1, WoV, WoE, etc., but got short on time. When all of the "2" series games are completed, I will see about making an integrated package for all of them. I would like equivalent mods for other MiGs and Sus, ideally one massive download that would make all Soviet fighters flyable with correct 3d pits yet still be compatible with stock installs. My approach resulted in some questionable compromises: 1. Can't customize anything in the data.ini file including engine sound. 2. Kept the radar performance (range scales, track strength, search strength, etc.) from the mods, which means the player has inferior capabilities compared to the unmodded data used by AI. 3. Only stock loadouts and weapon data are used... great for compatibility, bad for realism and detail. But, as someone who has spent quite a bit of time playing online, I like the end results: I can fly a MiG-21PFM and have all the indications and sensor capabilities I should rather than using the generic A-4 pit without forcing others I play with to use any mods at all.

Thanks to refinements in First Eagles and extended by Wings Over Israel, the current AI and FM modeling engines are way beyond where this series was with the 08.30.06 versions. I haven't spent much time pushing the limits with high fidelity FMs since these new patches came out... but the behavior of the stock aircraft in single missions and campaigns tell me a lot just from the seat of the pants feel. SF2 pushes the envelope even further. Why couldn't this sim existed in this form when I was still single and wasted a bunch of time trying to improve Jane's USAF? As far as receiving "help" goes, I see the FM modders as a very small understaffed community. The possibility of gaining individuals that have a knowledge and understanding comparable to those already making the best FMs is a great thing. Even if all they ever do is crank out WW2 aircraft, that happens to be an area that can benefit greatly from their presence, as I expect them to be more like the Mirage Factory: Quality before quantity. Welcome to those coming over from Microsoft titles. Hopefully you find the Third Wire sims to be as fun as I have all of these years.

View File Wings Over Israel MiG-21 Cockpits MiG-21 Cockpits for WOI ----------------------------------------- ORIGINALLY BY: MAGO aka PALADRIAN, BADGER the BAD, & FUBAR512 Modified for use with WoI and multiplayer by: streakeagle Released with permission from: PALADRIAN ---------------------------------------- Read the enclosed Read Me for more information. I have also included the original documents from the other cockpit releases. Submitter streakeagle Submitted 02/18/2009 Category Jet Cockpits  

It is about time TK's work be recognized for what it is: potentially the most realistic flight modeling possible in a consumer grade PC combat flight sim, despite being coded by a single programmer! So what if the stock flight models were bent a little to fit TK's fun sim lite approach and budgetary limits... the core engine is already solid and is still being refined. If you feed the flight model good information, you will get an outstanding simulation. The trick is getting or creating good information and having these guys join the relatively small group of FM gurus can't hurt.

I will buy this as I did the original YAP. But for me, playing at the 08.30.06 revision level is a huge step backwards. I am much happier with the Oct 2008 version of the game. I expect the WoV2 to be even better based on my experiences with SF2. Nearly every aspect of the game was improved between the Oct 2008 patches and SF2: graphics textures, 3d models, damage models, flight models, avionics, and most important: AI. Of course, I realize some aspects of the game were degraded or even deleted along the way and YAP may need some of those features to function 100% correctly. Hopefully, the YAP team and TK can work together to make YAP2 and WoV2 compatible. Vista users are just plain out of luck being forced to disable shaders with YAP2. Fortunately, I refused to jump on the Vista bandwagon.

Figures that I would be the oldest in the bunch... though MigHound is right up there with me.

The original release of SFGold on CD (unpatched) accidently included the option to fly MiG-17s for the red side in one of the campaigns. Of course later patches corrected this "mistake".

Photos just can't do it justice. There is nothing like being near and/or under a C-5 flying low and slow with gear down. After having such an experience as a kid, the C-5 became one of my favorite aircraft. It took me a couple of years to find a 1/144 scale model kit (models of it were not so common back then). Of course, having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, I much prefer the old MAC paint scheme of white over gray with a blue stripe in between. I will never understand the re-alignment of the USAF. SAC, TAC, and MAC forever!

The trick is being able to see the box from the cockpit. I don't care for the over-the-shoulder F5 view, I want to be in the cockpit. In the game, the angle of attack may be too high and/or the lack of seat height adjustment makes seeing over the nose during landings very difficult.

I would think that the best way to do a fully merged install is to start with WoV, then install WoE using the merged option, then apply the latest October 2008 patch for WOE. If you used the download versions from the Third Wire store, they start at the 08.30.06 patch revision and WoE comes with the F-104G installed. At that point, install SFP1/SFG, patch to October 2008. Merging SFP1/SFG into the WoV/WoE install is a fairly straightforward effort aside from any differences in squadrons and associated decals/paint jobs. Of course, if you have the original SFP1, you get the stock C-130A as well. The problem with bringing in WoI is the vast number of files that are completely different. So whether you merge from any other sim to WoI or WoI to any other sim, there are lots of things to copy/edit. There is enough work involved that I haven't bothered to do it, whereas the SFP1/WOV/WOE merged install can be accomplished very quickly. But with WoI merged in, the complete "Strike Fighters Anthology" install is quite impressive even before any addons. Throw in all the cockpit mods for stock MiGs/Sus and you get a lot more flyables for just a little more effort. Install the century series, Razbam series, Pasko series, Mirage Factory series, and a few other releases to have the most complete fighter jet combat sim every available... If that didn't take enough of your time, add all the WW2 stuff!

I might be wrong, but as far as I know, Third Wire sims only allow the wheel brakes to be mapped to buttons. I have Saitek Pro Rudder Pedals which has configuration software that allows me to map buttons to the positions of an axis. So, I mapped the default wheel brakes key, "B", to the toe brakes. Whenever I move either rudder pedal toe brake enough degrees, it presses the "B" key, which toggles the wheel brakes. I am not sure if CH Products allows the same type of programming.

you are probably seeing aliasing. At one point, TK made his games detect your card's capability and automatically enable anti-aliasing. But, people with low end hardware didn't want or need it automatically enabled. Instead of making an in-game checkbox, TK disabled in-game control of antialiasing (as it was when SFP1 was originally released). So now you have to enable it using the video card's driver settings.

There is an aspect of AI that I had never thought of until TK and I were chatting about it while answering someone elses post at the Third Wire forums: If you set the difficulty to HARD for AI, the enemy is smarter and your friendlies are dumber. I have always played on all HARD settings, so I was crippling my own forces! What it does is make enemy pilots more likely to be veterans and aces and make friendly pilots more likely to be novices and dead meat. Since the last patch, the enemy AI is much smarter and friendly AI, even dumbed down a bit by HARD settings, seem more likely to get their fair share of kills. But I bet if I use normal, my wingmen would do as well or better than enemy AI, especially since nationality also plays a part in pilot quality and the US generally has equal or better pilots than most nations it opposed.