Julhelm

I hope he considers a cockpit DLC for that F-104. I'd pay money for that.

There's quite a lot interesting here:

All the new ships now appear to have bump and specular textures.

Iceland terrain no longer desaturates when at low altitude. It also looks like it has some more variety in the splatting.

The missiles the F-4 carried performed very well in trials which is why they were accepted into service to begin with. It's ludicrous to take a fighter like the F-4 that's designed to shoot down Soviet bombers with missiles suited for that task and then call it failed because missiles designed to shoot down bombers doesn't fare as well dogfighting against fighters. Anyone who says things like that just doesn't understand the purpose of the 1960's military which was 100% all-out nuclear war against the Soviet Union. They even had to carry surplus WW2 munitions in Vietnam because they had so little conventional munitions the supplies ran out.

DAS is the gamechanger here. That russian radar is not going to do a lot of good against a VLO fighter that uses EO DAS + datalinked off-platform targeting data except light up the RWR on the F-35. Russians and the Chinese are where the US was 20 years ago with the YF-22.

Anyone who gets all hung up on the phrase 'gun pod' is a retard. It's not like on the F-4 where the gunpod was an afterthought - it's not like the the F-35 one isn't specifically designed to plug into the weapons bay while maintaining VLO or is going to be just as accurate as the podded guns on the Harrier (that noone ever complains about). Seriously, in a world with high off-boresight missiles that can pull 60g turns guns ARE an afterthought. F-35 vs Su-35 and the F-35 is going to win everytime courtesy of being able to see the SU before the SU sees it.

Besides, how can anyone possibly bring up the F-4 as an example of a lemon? It's one of the most successful fighters of all time.

There's a lot more to immersion than just generating other flights as what goes on outside the missions is a big factor as well. Devs understood this in the early 90s but today we get some crapass menu screens and cheap text briefings.

I think DCS is overrated. Sure it's fine for the hardcore folks but for those of us who don't care for clickable cockpits and ultra-sterile atmosphere it's not an alternative. The problem with all these other sims like JT and Fighter Ops is that they all set out to be super-duper accurate and hyper-realistic and as a result turn out too complicated to develop for any team that doesn't get their real money from military contracts.

Should be Vought F-16 since it would replace the GD design.

I built that as a Revell 1/32 kit once

Wasn't there some greek guy working on a new one?

No, I don't think there is such a thing as Exp.3

Operation Northwoods

Is it really domestic terrorism if they are islamists? I wouldn't have called the RAF domestic german terrorists since they were funded by the KGB.

I wouldn't touch anything on AboveTopSecret with a 10 foot pole. Too many conspiracy theorists and UFO nuts there. If you want accurate info, Secret Projects is the only good forum.

If you don't understand the concept, email Dr. Raymer (the designer) about it.

It's called RIVET for Reverse Installation Vectored Engine Thrust and is a concept developed by Dan Raymer while he was at Lockheed. The idea was to install the engine backwards to place the exhaust in a better position for single nozzle VTOL.

http://www.aircraftdesign.com/rivet3vw.jpg

Pretty sure that's a Boeing design. Go look for it on http://www.secretprojects.co.uk.

It's probably modelled into the pylon by default.

It's not an F-32 without the giant chin intake :(

Why not just model everything in max like normal people? I don't see why anyone would use industrial CAD for games.

What's with the Indycar-style rollbar?

An even easier way if you work from photo ref and have good photos from different angles is to just cut and paste the various surfaces that you need into a texture, and then as you model you can unwrap to your texture.

That's amazing.

North Koreans have had widespread access to satellite TV for the last decade. At this point we should really just offer $10 million or something to whoever caps fatty boy.

It is much easier to do it in the schematic view.

If you use the schematic view it's very easy to link parts together in a hierarchy. I'd use the Chassis as a base and then work from there. For a ground object like this you can probably get away with having it a single mesh if it doesn't require animations.