Recent air combat sim recommendations?

Just strap a cassette deck to your leg like in Iron Eagle.

I had forgotten that one. There are a lot of good movie dogfights to draw music from. Didn’t Iron Eagle have Queen in the soundtrack?

It sure did.

Dude how could I forget One Vision. Excellent tune.

I actually prefer this bit.

This bit is great though:

I’ll see what I can cook up. Fun to see y’all are interested.

Apropos of nothing, what I did for my 40th

That looks incredible fun! You held your lunch?

Yes! Half an hour flight in the back seat of a Spitfire Mk IX trainer. I even got to try my hands (very gingerly) on the controls. Let’s just say I’m never going to complain about how unrealistically small the dead zone is on a flight sim again.

(Also I muttered at the start about how tricky I found taking off on modern prop flight sims because of the rudder and the torque. The pilot agreed and said he could never get the hang of them either.)

That’s a pretty darned awesome 40th!

whoa, a spitfire! sweet. i sims we lack a very important sense in dealing with torque at takeoff. our inner ears are sitting still in a chair, so we do not feel the plane starting to drift. therefore we are always late in correcting and well… we suck at it. a real pilot in a real plane can feel the tiniest amount and correct accordingly making for very smooth ground handling indeed.

So awesome, @PreachyPreach!

Yeah, the rivet counters still don’t understand they’ve made sim planes harder to fly than the real things. Having some sim “helpers” that compensate for lack of real feedback is just balancing things out, but you’ll never convince the IL-2 grognards.

Also, I’ll bet the engine startup sequence was not on the top 5 things you cared about getting to do that! :)

Congrats and happy birthday! What a rare and awesome experience!

I did keep a little eye on the oil pressure, I’ll be honest. Being strapped into a parachute does focus the attention a bit.

This released yesterday. It’s Early access, so no weapons any smarter than a sidewinder (yet) but carrier landings are there and amazingly hard to do right.

It is the F/A-18C Hornet for DCS world. It’s a full-realism module which means every clickety switch, knob and thingamibob in the cockpit does something.

Lately news has leaked out that DCS will gain relaxed-realism versions of some of its modules, most likely the above pictured bug amongs others. The amount of systems realism they will be aiming at should be comparable to the current F-15C and Su-27 modules. So all of the flight model, but far less of the avionics and clickety switchology.

They are also hiring. A job opening was posted for a programmer/designer with experience in RTS design… This can mean only one thing: they are serious about building a game on top of their sim.

Sounds like an update for Combined Arms? Which I bet no-one in here plays… :)

(F/A-18C looks sexy though)

Well if you look closely at structures like warehouses in the mission editor, you see there are some hooks already in place for a strategic metagame. There has been talk of a dynamic campaign in the last few months in interviews etc with Wags, the big honcho at ED.

Good. Even with its current levels of jank, DCS with a dynamic campaign would be an all-time great.

That render of the Stennis looks mighty nice as well as some of the details on the outside of that Hornet.

is not a render, its an ingame screenie, that guy just caught a wire :)

I’ll believe it when I see it.