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saint aj

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Posts posted by saint aj

  1. Posted

    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?

  8. Posted · Edited by saint aj

    Caliber shouldn't be an issue should it? I figured it's the multiplication of weight per round x fire rate...? In any event, that was my problem.

     

    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).

  13. Posted · Edited by saint aj

    A while ago a made a crude, although reasonably effective SOD from a Harpoon ASM fitted with CBU style warhead. The concept worked in princible but it could easily be made better. Once fault in particular was that the would directly impact the target and then spray the area with the submunitions. I don't recall, but is there an entry somewhere in the CBU data that allows for the submunitions to be released at a certain height or distance from the target? And if so, can this then be applied to a missile type platform? I'm reasonably certain it can but since I don't have the weap editors nor a weaps pack at my work station, I can't find out.

     

     

    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.

  16. Posted

    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. :blink:

     

    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... :biggrin:

  18. Posted

    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

  19. Posted

    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).

  21. Posted

    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).

  25. Posted · Edited by saint aj

    CH Pro Pedals work brilliantly for me. I'm so fond of them I started using them to control my character's movement in Oblivion instead of the WASD keys, lol. I do enjoy using Saitek's sticks though better than any I've tried. Current setup is Saitek ST290pro + CH Pro Pedals USB, and I've never had a problem.

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