streakeagle

For maximum dogfight capability, you want the greatest thrust, lowest weight, latted wings, and internal gun. Of the original production F-4 variants: F-4B/C/D/E/F/J/K/M, the F-4F would be that version. Later versions of the F-4E and F-4F may be better. F-4F ICE has great avionics, but I have no idea if its weight went higher, stayed the same, or thanks to technology, maybe got lighter? F-4E Kurnass 2000 I believe has a combat thrust enhancement, which may make it the better dogfighter for a few minutes until engine temps get too high. I don't know if any F-4E/F variants other than Israeli Kurnass ever got the combat thrust enhancement. In the game, using only stock aircraft, the F-4E is the way to go for maneuverability and use of the AIM-7E2 as a "dogfight" missile.

The problem with wireless connections is that you can't predict how good they are going to be. 1 minute you might have a connection that seems almost as good if not equal to being hard wired. The next minute, you might have no connection at all. In addition to the quality of your hardware, the environment really determines how well your connection will do. i.e., are there other devices nearby on similar frequencies? is someone using a microwave or blender that is causing broadband interference? I use wireless when I have no choice, but I use a hard wire connection whenever it is available. The only way for you to know for sure the answer to your own question is to try it. You should use some ping testing software that has repeatable results so that you can measure the difference between your hardwired results and wireless results. If you have a solid connection, there should be very little difference... but the question is how stable is that connection over time?

While I always upgrade when I have the time (sometimes I fall behind by a relase or two), it is not really necessary unless: 1) you have some glitch in 1 or more of your games and you think the new release might have fixed it. 2) the release claims to improve performance across the board by some useful % (typical with newly released cards). 3) there is some new feature that was previously disabled or broken (such as a new form of antialiasing that improves visual quality and/or reduces the hit for using anti-aliasing). While there are rarely any fixes for flight sims (maybe Microsoft FS at best), sometimes the problems with popular shooters and sports games are common to fligh sims too, so when they fix some major bug in other games, the flight sims get fixed too. I remember one case where I had a problem with Radeon 8500 series hardware T&L in Operation Flashpoint and when a release came out to fix a similar problem with an EA Games hockey game, suddenly my OFP problem was solved as well. Unfortunately, combat flight sims are pretty much small niche games, so the people who write the video card drivers generally ignore problems with them. In the case of the SFP1 series, TK actually had to change his graphic engine to accommodate problems with ATi hardware T&L way back when the 9700 Pro was a new card. I was able to manually disable the problem with the Radeon 8500 (using a third party driver tool), but people who bought the high end 9700 Pro were stuck and couldn't even get as good of framerates as I coudl get on my 8500 :) The problem with upgrading drivers is that there is a chance that something will get broken (typically a registry entry or a dll conflict). The ATi uninstall tool isn't as thorough as it could be (I almost always use it before installing the newest Cat and almost always have problems if I don't use it). Sometimes, I am forced to use a 3rd party tool driver cleaner to trouble shoot new problems. Somehow, my current PC has picked up a problem where my Catalyst Control panel settings are frequently ignored. I have to use the ATi tray tool (3rd party alternative to Cat control panel) to have positive control. No matter what I do, I can't get rid of the problem while my wife's nearly identical PC (same MB chipset, cpu, gpu) does not have the problem.

I have a 512MB x1800XT. I used to have a 256MB x800 XL. Depending on the way the game is written, the quantity and quality of the textures, and you choice of settings (resoultion, anti-aliasing, etc.), the extra memory can make a difference. If you actually intend to play games that benefit from more RAM, make your you get a card with at least a 256-bit memory interface to allow the card to use the memory fast enough and have something like AGP 8x or PCIE slot to permit the PC to transfer the data back and forth to the video card fast enough. The gpu's RAM also needs to be clocked fast enough for all of the other parameters to reach their full potential. Of course your PC CPU needs to be fast to send and fetch the data fast enough as well. It is easy to buy a video card and have it crippled by a bottleneck within its own design or in the PC you are installing it into. Some cards advertise large RAM, but one or more design parameters makes anything more the 128MB impractical (usually a 64-bit or 128-bit interface with older, slower RAM). The only game I have that uses all 512MB of RAM out of the box (or download in this case) is Aces High 2, and even then that is only is I download the hi-res textures and check the option to preload all of the textures before starting the game. The SFP1 series with hi-res textures (typical of current user mods such as Mirage Factory hi-def releases) sucks up gpu RAM, too. If several hi-res aircraft are loaded at the same time, you will easily benefit from large RAM video cards. To the best of my knowledge, I don't have any other games I play that use more than 256MB of RAM.

While you may not have time to think in the air when facing a situation live, you better have thought about it before you ever jumped into the cockpit. The point of playing board games (or attending Top Gun school) is to study the problem in depth before you encounter it so that you can get the results of in depth thinking reflexively. Better to get shot down on paper than learn the hard way :) Check Six! (later released as Flight Leader by Avalong Hill) was developed by a USAF pilot to provide a paper lab to teach pilots the basics of air combat tactics: mutual support/formations, yo-yo maneuvers, alt-speed-energy management, surprise, turn fighters versus energy fighters, etc. It is one of the simplest jet air combat games to learn and play and covers everything from Korea to the present. With all the optional rules and a few tweaks here and there, it can even be somewhat realistic. But it has very simple avionics/weapons modeling as the focus is on positioning your aircraft for optimum PK while denying the enemy any PK at all.

The new game will be the most detailed ever published. It is almost a PC flight sim simplified enough to resolve movement and energy state changes without using high level math. Even if the new game gets published and I get my copy, I am not sure I will ever get to fully learn the rules. Even if I learn the rules and play a few games by myself, odds are that I will never meet anyone else willing to play it. In this day and age, its hard to find someone willing to take the time and effort to learn a game like chess, much less study endless pages of rules and complicated air data charts to spend a few hours trying to recreate 30 to 90 seconds of close-in air combat. From the early pdf samples of this game I had years ago, I think this new game will accomplish what I was trying to do years ago with 1/144 models on wooden sticks: 3d flight sim with the most realistic physics possible without using calculators/computers to do the math. Of course, in most respects, PC flight sims such as the SFP1 series have surpassed this type of game in both realism and fun. But, there is a big difference that makes board games more popular with some people: You have time to think about your moves, i.e. the board games are about using your head to come up with the best solution rather than having good reflexes and thinking quickly. It is not a stick and rudder game at all, more of a super complex game of chess that requires log keeping and a vivid imagination.

For jet air combat purchase: SPi's Air War (re-released by TSR in the early 80's) GDW's Air Superiority (jet fighters from the 1980s)/Air Strike (attack fighters from the 1980s)/Desert Falcons (paper equivalent to WOI) by J.D. Webster Clash of Arms Speed of Heat (paper equivalent to WOV) by J.D. Webster Avalon Hill's Flight Leader (a commercial release of a USAF training game "Check Six!" designed by a USAF pilot) Read/study the volumes of rules associated with these games. Spend hours playing scenarios modeling mere minutes or even seconds of game time. Then you will come to understand a few things: 1) People were playing detailed, realistic jet combat flight sims using maps, paper, pencil, and dice long before PCs got beyond arcade versions. 2) The rules for the board games were as complex and error prone as PC sims (the errata for some of the rules were almost as extensive as the original rules). 3) People were modding these games to enchance the realism and expand the planeset by studying aerodynamics and real-world data on the aircraft and weapons. 4) TK was one of these board game modders whose work was published within the Air Superiority/Air Strike community. 5) SFP1 is a PC evolution of the board game mechanics with a similar balance between simple yet detailed modeling. PCs have almost killed board gaming altogether. If you think hardcore flight simmers are a small niche market, you haven't been a tactical board game wargamer. I became a wargamer when the market was at its peek: Avalon Hill, GDW, and a handful of other companies were competing to produce the best possible land, air, and sea simulations ranging from 1:1 unit scales with turns measured in seconds to global WW3 scales with turns measured in days or weeks. The arrival of PCs led to a slow collapse of the market and the big companies behind it. Sadly, the combat flight sim market is following the same path: sure you can still find new flight sims, but new releases are rare and are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Both single player and multiplayer combat flight sim fans who genuinely enjoy studying air combat can have a lot of fun and learn a lot about the subject by playing the old board games.

Despite the advantages of the radial, which aircraft served in Korea? Not the P-47. Of course pilots flying the P-51 in Korea for ground attack missions suffered the consequences. But, "best performance" doesn't win contracts. Lowest bidder usually wins with the US government. Some aspect of P-51s made them more appealing to the USAF. Another factor is that from the very start, the USAF has a history of choosing the better looking plane over the better performing plane, especially when the differences are relatively small. But overall price (both production and long term maintenance) has a huge influence. The USAF would have gladly built a fleet of F-15s, but lacking the funding, were forced to do a hi-lo mix with F-16s under pressure from congress. It would be interesting to see the politics behind keeping the P-51 in service while retiring the P-38 and P-47. Technically, engine types aside, the P-38 killed more planes than any other US plane in the war. Of course, with two engines, it would also be the most expensive to buy and maintain. P-38s were the F-15, P-51s were the F-16, and P-47s were the F-4/F-105. If I WW2 wasn't ending in 1945 and I was a bomber escort/air superiority fighter, I would have wanted the P-51H. If the British are to be trusted, their ranking of turn performance shows the P-51 turn rate/radius to be worse than the Spitfire but better than any other plane used in their tests including Bf109s, Fw190s, P-38s, and P-47s. The P-51H would have had not only higher speed and climb, but more maneuverability due to weight reduction. If I was going to pound the ground and try to strafe anything that moved, clearly the P-47 and its radial engine was the way to go. While air cooled engines air much simpler and more reliable... most car engines are liquid cooled. A big corporation like GM is very careful to engineer things to be cheap and reliable. There must be some reason why they have chosen liquid cooling over air cooling.

I don't know what you are talking about. I have played fully patched WOE on a 1920x1200 laptop and a 1920x1080 46" LCD TV. If you didn't see a resolution higher than 1600x1200, it is because your monitor or video card didn't support it or communicate it to the game.

I have a ton of data compiled for the b-70 flight model. But it all needs to be translated into data ini files... Been traveling/working too hard at work all day to feel like doing it at night. On the weekends, I spend as much time as I can having fun with my wife and son. I just changed jobs and will have a normal 40-hour work week/go home every night lifestyle. So, I may get motivated to make progress on the flight model again.

While I can't say for certain, it is my impressions from beta testing that the changes to radar ecm/eccm are universally applied to AI and player. I can say for sure, AI flys low and behind hills while approaching targets and MiG-21s do maneuver to break F-15 locks. It is hard (almost impossible) to get a Sparrow kill against a target that is aware of your presence and able to counter your shot. The best way to get a Sparrow kill is to get in relatively close while the target is head on or tail on so that the time of flight is too short for the MiG to turn his beam to you.

I have been unable to get online with any other beta testers, but having created hosts and done solo testing, I see no changes in multiplayer gameplay. However, the "Updating Network List" process is remarkably faster than previous releases. I don't know if the speed is intentional due to a code change or accidental due to being broken. When I get a chance, I will try multiplayer on LAN, but last night when the gold release came out, I didn't have a 2nd PC available.

Your eye doesn't lie... this is a screenshot from the final release version and that is what you will see when you see a bis. But the texture is nice compared to original SFP1 MiG textures.

Here is a MiG-21bis Fishbed-L with stock textures:

There are improvements that screenshots won't show... such as radar ECM/ECCM. Radar doesn't work so well near the ground any more. Doppler radars like the F-15 don't work so well when targets put their beam to the line of sight. In short, radar missiles are a whole lot less effective than before if the target is low or turns 90 degrees to the direction the radar is moving. The terrain is especially impressive at medium to high altitudes over the mountains. WOI is what SFP1 should have been. There is always room for improvement, but WOI raises the bar in a lot of little areas besides the obvious terrain and planeset additions.

IMHO, blu-ray was the clear choice from the start... any features that HD had over it could be (and probably are) being added to it (i.e. interactive content). The whole point of HD is... HD, and blu-ray's higher potential capacity allows for uncompressed 1080p, HD-DVD did not. Now the question is: how long is blu-ray going to be around. VHS has been around forever and hasn't fully died yet. DVD is much younger and already on the way out. Should I even bother to get a blu-ray player? I have Netflix and I have a 1080p 46" LCD TV, so I guess I need one to finally realize the full benefit of my TV. But I wasn't buying until certain of which format to get... guess I need to start researching players.

Where SFP1 failed (besides the early release) was the fictional terrain/countries. The map and campaigns should have been historical: either Israel or Vietnam. TK could have limited the scope to USAF to avoid carriers for a Vietnam release or limited the time frame to 1973 to avoid F-15/F-16 aircraft for an Israel release. The F-104G should have been in a Europe release. If the community is going to build a sim, TK's experience should act as a guide: break the game into multiple releases that build up the game engine. Each release should add something significant, perhaps 1 aircraft per release including support for any unique avionics/weapon systems. The LOMAC people have figured this out, but I have zero interest in the first aircraft they are releasing, and only a passing interest in any of the aircraft planned over the immediate future. Targetware represents the best chance the community has ever had of creating their own combat flight sims. I haven't tried Targetware in a while, but I have never cared that much for the releases I have tried over the years. For me, it is a failure. I would rather pay $15 per month to fly Aces High than any other WW2 sim to date much less the free Target Tobruk. I also get much more enjoyment out of SFP1's Korean War mod or MiG Alley than I can from the Target Korea. Having a large number of us pool our money together to contract TK to enhance the SFP1 game engine to suit our needs is a great idea. But maybe, instead of gathering a huge lump sum and making a whole new sim, we should award smaller much more affordable contracts for specific enhancements. A specific enhancement would be made available for free to the original contractors and sold as an addon to everyone else. TK would need to set a price/schedule for each of the different additions desired, then the pledged money would have to hit the magic number before money was collected and work started. Whichever package hit the magic number first would be completed and released before the next package was charged/started. Packages would be divided up into categories similar to those listed here, i.e. detailed carrier ops, multiplayer expansion, more detailed campaigns, smarter/more realistic AI, individual high-fidelity aircraft cockpits (i.e having a Falcon 4.0 level clickable 3d pit for the F-4E would be one package, the F-4B would be a separate package), individual high-fidelity aircraft flgiht models (a good FM can take longer than building and entire 3d model with cockpit!), etc. Could such a model ever work? Would there ever be enough pledges to any one package to fund it? Would TK be able to sell the resulting work to anyone other than the original contractors and make a decent living?

It is the max altitude attainable in meters.

Historically (I have hosted SFP1 multiplayer for YEARS), if there is going to be any body online at all, the 8-10 PM eastern time frame mentioned above is the best time to hang out. Sometimes weekends were busy... such as Sunday nights. Usually Friday and Saturday nights are dead. Monday thru Thursday is pot luck: 0-12 (typically 2 or 3) people popping up between Hamachi (my streakserver1 network and some VFMA 531 networks), CombatAce Teamspeak, and Hyperlobby.

Thanks, but no thanks. I'm not having a birthday today or getting any older. I wear the same model shoes I have worn since 1980 (Nike Cortez). I drive the same car I have driven sinces 1991 (1980 Corvette). I listen to the 80's music I grew up with. So that makes me about 12 years old and not getting any older any time soon :) Where did all this gray hair come from? Why do I always have a pain in my right arm? Where did all these lines on my face come from? I am pretty sure most 12 year olds don't shave much less grow a full beard? Oh well, guess I should get back to playing with all my toys and listening to Pink Floyd and Blondie.

1. Detailed cockpit procedures (switchology) 2. Detailed carrier ops 3. Seat-switching in multi-seat aircraft 4. Detailed comms and ATC 5. High resolution graphics, terrain and effects 6. High moddability (like SF series) 7. Dynamic campaign (less story-driven) 8. Story-driven campaign (less dynamic) 9. Good performance on older systems If the game gives me most or all of what I want, I could care less about moddability... but it is never bad to have as much as possible exposed for modding other than anti-cheating for multiplayer. TK's current approach is more than open enough to allow the flexibility that most people want or need. But as a hardcore fan who needs to see several more features added to the sim to really satisfy my wants, there is never enough moddability. My top three choices are all equally important to me, very hard to rank them. It is important to maintain scalability. A great game will run on an old machine as be as fun/easy to play as SFP1 on EASY settings, yet given a modern PC and max settings look as good as LOMAC and be as detailed/realistic as Falcon 4.0.

F-4 MiG-21 Mirage Those 3 aircraft ARE the principal fighters from 1960 to 1980, and continue to serve to the present.

The bare minimum should be just about every other decent sim prior to SFP1: Jane's Fighters Anthology and Jane's USAF have far superior mission editing/multiplayer setups The IL-2 series is the benchmark for box sim multiplayer support/popularity: it is the only box/single player combat flight sim that has HUNDREDS playing every night on Hyperlobby, possibly THOUSANDS counting other server networks such as UBISoft, etc. for FREE. The Aces High approach with massive multiplayer requires servers/bandwidth that leads to monthly fees. I pay those fees, but would there be many besides me flying F-4s versus MiGs in an Aces High type game for a monthly fee? WW2 has the massive multiplayer sim market pretty much cornered. I don't know if the market is truly big enough to support separate eras such as WWI, Korea, and/or Vietnam. A truly successful game isn't going to target one small niche... but seek to get people playing together globally. But then, hard core jet combat flight sim jocks interested in 50's/60's70's era jets are about as small a niche as you can aim for. The only niches I know of that are smaller are hard core naval and armor combat sims (think Dangerous Waters and Steel Beasts, which definitely come to life with multiplayer!). That reminds me, I never got around to getting the latest Steel Beasts...

IMHO, the best place is Third Wire's online store found here: https://store.thirdwire.com/store.htm These come already patched to the current revision, which is nice. The only downside to buying SF Gold compared to the original SFP1 is the lack of the F-104G and C-130. Third Wire released an F-104G addon that allows SF Gold owners to have the F-104G, but the file is no longer hosted at Third Wire (at least the link is no longer posted). I can't remember, but maybe the latest version includes the F-104G? Of course other websites like CombatAce.com keep the original addon available for those who need it. But there is no other way to get the stock C-130 other than to get the original SFP1 CD-ROM (or the later $5 re-release version that is now out of print as well). It can be difficult to find a used copy of the original because there are a lot of copies of the infamous "Walmart" release still floating out there that cannot be patched and are woefully incomplete/buggy compared to the current version. So, I still say for both WOV and SF Gold, the online store downloads are the way to go.

I was dissecting the various joysticks around the house looking for the best solution to making my F-4 stick functional. The rumble pad was the least suitable due to the way the sticks are made: little self-contained cubes with the joystick stubs sticking up. To use these, I would have to make a mechanism to convert the turning of the roll tube into left/right motion and mix it with the back/forth motion of the pitch tube to move the joystick stub. While I am sure someone knows how to do that very well, anything I could dream up would be too complicated, imprecise, etc. The Saitek sticks (X-36 and X-45) are a pain in the butt to take apart, so I decided to leave them alone unless I had no other choice. The Microsoft Sidewinder Precision 2 was easy to take apart and had the simplest possible mechanism: two separate pots for pitch and roll that were easily detached from the joystick gimble. To make the F-4 stick, I need a pitch axis, roll axis, trigger switch, top thumb button, left thumb button, pinky button, 4-way hat, and autopilot disengage lever (on the stick shaker box just below the stick grip). So that is 2 analog axis inputs, 1 pov hat and 5 discrete button inputs. The Sidewinder easily meets this criteria. After analyzing the wire leads coming from the B-8 stick grip and comparing them to the switches on the Sidewinder circuit boards, I realized that I am going to need some interposing relays to isolate the switches from the B-8 so that they can be wired into the Sidewinder correctly (i.e. the trim switch on the B-8 has 4 contact leads and 1 common, but the Sidewinder needs a dedicated pair of leads for each switch for them to work properly). The hardest part is making the axis inputs work. I have an idea from my long past days of building radio control airplanes. I am going to use bell crank principles to link the two types of motion from the F-4 stick to the separate potentiometers of the Sidewinder. For example, the roll tube will have a ball-joint stem coming out of the top that will be linked to a ball-joint tipped arm coming off the roll potentiometer. If the lengths from the rotation axis centers to the links is identical, the angular motion will be identical, which is exactly what I want. Alternatively, I can attach a wheel to the pot and place it adjacent to the roll tube so that the wheel turns with no slip whenever the roll tube turns. It might be hard to keep good contact with no slip, but the big advantage would be the ability to amplify the angular motion in a precise linear manner by simply using a wheel with a smaller diameter than the roll tube. This could be useful since the stick only swings 10 degrees to either side. The Sidewinder stick moved 20 degrees to either side. Attempting to do the same with the linked lever arms by using a shorter link arm on the pot will result in a non-linear response (i.e. the angular movement of the pot will not be directly proportional to the angular movement of the roll tube). The pitch axis will have to use the linked lever arm approach. Since the F-4 stick only moves forward 13 degrees and backwards 18 degrees, it may be necessary to use lever arms scaled to amplify the range of movement.