saint aj

What the hell news are you watching? Al-Jazeera? I have never once heard the press in this country bad-mouthing our military. I turn on the news every night and the talking heads are lauding our soldiers, not cursing them; it's the political leadership that's being railed against. What part of reporting about aircraft going down is anti-military? I didn't see the article praising the insurgents, or calling our pilots evil or incompetent. The reporter didn't have his facts straight about the number of flight hours that are being flown---okay, fine, how does that make this an attack on the military? The article was about losing more aircraft due to combat stress and equipment failure. But, I suppose the facts hate America, don't they?

Shadow (AC-119), Spook (AC-47), Spectre (AC-130/YF-110), and Goblin (F-85) have all been used... How's about Ghost? Ghoul? Zombie? Oni? Revenant?

How about "Phantasm"?

man, I can't wait to get my hands on that Variable-Ugliness wing Phantom...

In keeping with the McDonnell tradition of naming their fighters after spooky things, I'd suggest like... Mithras or Wraith.

*aviationgasm* OMG, that is AWESOME!!!! A Phantom that doesn't suck... *ducks*

disappointment?

Caliber matters, because the sim calculates drag on bullets using the frontal area (based on caliber) and velocity, and I'm guessing there's a drag table in the G1.dat file, and that's what's causing his bullets to go backward since the acceleration force acting on the bullets after they leave the muzzle is based on (75^2 * pi * very large number) divided by (very small number).

I've tried it before using an engine slaved to a different key command from THROTTLE_CONTROL, but the sim doesn't seem to recognize alternate throttle commands :(

your bullets are creating an infinite deceleration due to drag. you need to set the caliber of the weapon to zero, and the projectile weight to 1 gram or so. also, I've noticed during my own laser weapon attempts that the AI doesn't aim very well if there is no tracer.

While working on a new FM, I started to wonder how the sim calculates the drag forces incurred by weapon pylons and speedbrakes. So to determine this, I modified the stock Thirdwire F-104G so that its center weapon pylon had a drag area of 0.000 sq meters. Testing the aircraft at 600 kts true airspeed and 20,000 feet (the design cruise environment for my current project, so I had those calculations handy), I found the aircraft generated a little over 6500 lbs of drag in level flight, in a clean configuration save for one Mk81 on the test pylon. Noting this, I then altered the FM file so the pylon had the same equivalent flat plate area as the aircraft I'm working on, 0.09 sq m. Testing the aircraft at the same altitude and airspeed, with one Mk81 on the centerline as before, the Starfighter produced a bit over 6900 lbs of drag. Now this last result I found somewhat confusing. The reason for this being that I had just calculated the drag for a flat plate of 0.09 sq m (0.97 sq ft) area at 20,000 feet and 600 kts TAS. According to NASA , the drag coefficient for a flat plate is 1.28. According to the standard drag equation, the drag should therefore be: D = Cd * 0.5 * p * V^2 * S 1.28 * 0.5 * 0.0012765104 * (1008 fps) * (1008 fps) * 0.96 sqft = 796 lbf So therefore, the pylon should have added just under 800 pounds of drag to the aircraft. Instead, it added about half this amount. My first thought was of course that maybe the sim uses the body section's drag coefficient for weapon pylons. So I tried plugging in the fuselage's drag coefficient of 0.0254. This came out to 15 lbf. Obviously not the 800 pounds I was expecting. In fact, the drag coefficient I'm coming up with is approximately 0.64 for weapon pylons, which is about half the NASA value for a flat plate. I thought this was pretty significant so I'm posting it here in the hopes that other designers will benefit when fine-tuning their projects. Also I'd be interested in hearing an explanation of how I might have screwed this one up...

thirdwire series armageddon? say it aint'so

No

Yeah, you can fine tune the CBU data to set the release altitude. I've been experimenting with a similar design for an anti-radiation missile, using the cluster bomblets to increase the chance of taking out the SAM installation in one go. A cluster dispenser opening up at mach 3 looks pretty badass. The bomblet distribution pattern is similar to a shotgun blast.

Hmm. Well I tried jacking the drag coefficient for the pylon up to the NASA spec for a flat plate, and it added a bit more drag, but not the expected amount. Well I'll have to keep tweaking, but I think I'm on the right track.

That works for weapon stations? I had no idea! I'll give it a go...

MiG-29A dressed in drag as a MiG-29K?

A few hours spent playing around with the groundobject format can drive a man to do evil things. If it pans out, maybe this will lead to something in the distant future...

Looks good! Been waiting to see a Vautour for this series. With regard to the panel lines, I usually do pretty well when making the panel lines as a highly transparent Hard Light or Multiply layer (I use GIMP 2). Generally to make them show up they only have to be around 15-30% opacity for a bare metal skin, and slightly stronger for a high contrast camouflage scheme. My advice would be to make the lines transparent enough that you can only just begin to see them, except in the case of panels that have really big, loose seams, which should be about 40-50% opaque. Another technique I find useful for panel lines is to make the panel line layer twice as large as the actual skin while you're making it, and then scale it down to the size of the skin once it's done (with a good resizing algorithm this will ensure the lines will be very fine and smooth). Anyway, that's just my $0.02

I highly doubt it. The model would need to have a canopy animation built in, and since the game doesn't have animated canopies by default, I doubt it would work. Best you could probably do would be to make the canopy into a control surface that actuated with speed, which has its own inherent set of problems (can pop open in midair if you stall the airplane, kind of illusion-breaking IMO).

with regard to the buggy nose gun paint, if it can't be fixed by painting the skin bitmap, why not make a small solid yellow decal and put that on the mesh which defines the gun fairing?

1.) To remove decals that are on the skin bitmap itself, you'll just have to paint over them with the skin color you want to use. 2.) You add decals to skins using a Decals.ini file that goes in the skin directory. For an example look at any of the skins for the stock Thirdwire aircraft. There should be some tutorials on how to do decals floating around this site. Please, PLEASE, don't paint your decals directly onto the skin bitmap. This makes it impossible to make the same skin appear in the markings of a different country, squadron, or specific aircraft, and in my opinion it just looks unprofessional. If you want to add additional decals that aren't provided with the game, you need to create a decal folder within the skin directory and place the new decals in it. 3.) Many decals are provided with the game. These include national insignia, squadron insignia, and aircraft numbers for various nations. There are some decal add-ons floating around CombatAce, too. And finally, you can make your own decals using the GIMP by creating a square .TGA image (make sure when saving it to uncheck both of the GIMP's TGA file options or it will be invisible).