JMR
2003
Why didnāt that P-51 pilot just pull his ethernet cable?
spiffy
2005
Heh. Others have pointed out the P-51ās shouldāve dropped their tanks as they entered combat. True dat, I suppose. Would you drop your tanks if you knew you needed the extra gas to get to land, or does your immediate survival come first? Probably. Not sure what shot wouldāve best shown it, maybe I should have just left them off.
Yup.
WW2 drop tanks were plywood, resin, and paperāa flammable container holding flammable liquid linked to a reservoir containing a flammable liquid inside the plane. Combat damage was a nonstarter.
On top of that, there wasnāt any automatic selection. Generally, you drained one external tank, then drained the other when the engine started to cough, or switched back and forth every few minutes. With that much weight under the wing, potentially unbalanced on top of that, aerobatics with drop tanks is a risky proposition.
Well this is weird. Falcon, Falcon AT and Falcon 3 Gold just all hit Steam. At $6.99 each ($5.24 launch discount). Each. Itās so odd because you can get all of those games ALONG WITH Falcon 4.0 as a bonus for $9.99 on GOG.
Really weird pricing discrepancy, that.
Oh, Steam also has a Red Baron Pack as well for about $10.
Shame weāll never see WOFF on Steam. :/
OH wow, hahaha, Falcon 4.0 was apparently just thrown up there in the last few minutes, as well as this $9.99 pack, which wasnāt there before. Hilarious. Well, now at least itās essentially the same price as GOG.
So am I the only one around here that plays civilian flight sims as well as the military ones? Iāve been slowly configuring Prepar3d since November and finally have it where I want it, I think. Most of my addons work, even! Do we need a separate thread for this? :P
RichVR
2010
I have a version of X-Plane. Maybe an iteration or two ago. I miss shooting at stuff.
Brian, I was as surprised as you that Falcon 4.0 just appeared there. But cool anyway.
Donāt get me wrong, I love the military flight sims too! The A-10 sim that Dynamix put out in 1989 is one of my earliest PC gaming memories. But so is Microsoft Flight Simulator :) I tend to drift back and forth between the military stuff and civilian depending on my mood. Iāll get way into one for a few weeks, then give it a rest for a while and play an FPS or RTS or something, then one night get a craving to do a long haul 737 flight or something in FSX. Iām weird like that I guess :) I donāt think I can recall ever seeing any posts on QT3 about civ flight simming though, so I was just curious who else besides me has spent way too much money on hardware/addons/etc for FSX and other sims over the years :D
It still kinda blows me away how far weāve come since those early memories when I stop to think about it for a minute. I remember having to reserve 1 hour blocks of time at my local library a week in advance so I could take my 5 1/4" floppies with MS Flight Sim on them down there and try to figure out what the heck I was doing. It seemed so realistic at the time, since most of the other games Iād played up to that point werenāt really trying to simulate anything from real life, let alone something as complicated as aviation. I remember the 16 color, wire frame outline of Chicagoās skyline after taking off from Meigs field. I remember the game pausing fairly regularly to make you swap the floppy out for the one with the right bit of scenery on it. And now Iāve got photo realistic graphics, real world weather, live human beings doing air traffic control, a thing that tracks the movement of my head so I can look around, a throttle quadrant, holy crap! WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE. Thereās still a 12 year old boy inside me somewhere that gets some nerdy satisfaction from knowing what all the knobs and buttons in a 737 cockpit do ;)
Once Iāve got my setup completely figured out and ready to go Iām hoping to do some flight sim videos. I uploaded a little test flight I did earlier today just to see how it would render out on YouTube and such. Ugh, I think Iām having more trouble getting the video recording just right as I did getting every last fiddly addon to play nicely together in the sim itself. Hereās a link to the vid if anyone is curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tjd_GYAzHUE
RichVR
2012
Wanna talk come a long way? My first flight sim was subLOGICās Flight Simulator 2. On cassette tape for the C-64. 25 min load time. Here it is. There was also a painful WWI dogfighting verson on the cassette.
That actually looks pretty darn close to what I remember early MS Flight Sim being like. I never had to deal with cassettes though, not for data anyway. 25 min load time is hilarious :)
RichVR
2014
Hey, I played a lot of that game. I had two Atari joysticks, one taped to each arm of a directorās chair. The right one was the stick and the left was the throttle. Worked great. I particularly enjoyed the failure modes, pretty advanced for the time. It was like a modern flight trainer. Random things like fuel leaks or hydraulic failure. Restarting the engine in flight.
My wife (at the time) thought I was insane. Sitting there, staring at the TV with nothing obviously happening.
But I was flying!
vyshka
2015
I havenāt played fsx in a few years, but I used to play it quite often. I used fseconomy.com to give me something to do. One if these days Iāll go through the pain of getting it all set up again.
flyinj
2016
What is the deal with that incredible looking remake of AV8B Harrier/Combat Air Patrol?
Last I heard the dev said it was definitely out before the end of 2015?
The November 30 dev blog post says, āItās getting close, but we arenāt going to commit to anything.ā
It isnāt especially simmy, but Iāve been having a ton of fun in aeronautics sandbox SimplePlanes lately: I write some pulpy adventure fiction in a world inspired by/ripped off from Crimson Skies, and getting to mess with the various designs Iāve adopted from real-world aviation designers has been a ton of fun.
My favorite of the bunch is the Kestrel, for its speed and agility, and my second-favorite is the Albatross, for its sheer unlikeliness. (Blohm & Voss built similar planes for the Luftwaffe.)
The best part is, having built them to roughly the same spec as they have in my fictional world, Iāve developed a greater understanding for their quirks (the Kestrel wallows at low speed, the Falcon is slow to accelerate), and for how hitting a zeppelin aircraft carrier would work (have to catch the skyhook slowing down, right at the edge of the stall)āknowledge I can leverage when next I revisit it.
RichVR
2019
Oh yeah, Crimson Skies. My first real venture into online PVP angst. I was pretty good too. Flew with the Red Skulls on The Zone.
Tell us more about SimplePlanes please; I saw a Tim Stone blurb over at RPS and thatās about it. Can you create Crimson Skies-style acrobatics?
