The Harrier has been great for my formation flying skills, since it doesn’t hold your hand at all for air-to-air refueling, and you can’t see the probe when flying. (It’s directly to the left of your head.)
My flight sim time last night was the combat sim equivalent of a mug of hot chocolate: a short takeoff from USS Tarawa, refueling from an S-3, then a 220-nm cross-country flight to Tbilisi-Vaziani to get used to TACAN navigation followed by a vertical landing on the runway.
The Harrier is a ton of fun to fly, even if it isn’t as readily supersonic as the Viggen. Very nice nav/attack systems, and (probably because I’ve flown F-16s so much in Falcon 4) a nice, familiar, American HOTAS/MFD/HUD setup.
IL-2 Cliffs of Dover, Blitz Edition, just showed up on Steam. It’s an official, code-level rebuild of CloD by Team Fusion. It appears as a separate game in your list if you already have CloD.
Well they have given a deadline of sorts for the final merge and second coming of DCS, ie 2.5. By the end of Januari we should all be flying the same version of the sim again.
So I picked up Wings over Flanders Fields ultimate edition, which is on sale right now for $36.79.
I’m really dissapointed in this sim. Everyone says it’s great and has a really dynamic campaign and live battlefield, but I did a test flight dogfight and the flight model feels ridiculous. I flew a camel, and you can literally turn 90 degrees and pull back as hard as you want and you’ll just spin in circles without stalling. If you tried that in Rise of Flight you’d almost instantly lose control of your plane.
WoFF is all about the single-player experience. Unfortunately, despite the herculean efforts made by the dev team, the underlying engine is still CFS3, which means the flight model errs on the side of player friendliness.
So DCS Hornet is now available for preorder! This will finally be the impetus required to get my lazy ass up off the couch and get VR and my HOTAS setup sorted.
It’s the most excited I have been about simming in years. 2018 just got a whole lot brighter.
So Early Access is six months away. There’s not going to be any missions or campaign, is there? I notice these days they tend to sell them seperately, later. :(
Indeed. But at least they put it up for preorder. I was beginning to think this module had foundered in the Bermuda triangle. As a big fan of the F-18 I take what scraps I can get these days. Not much to be had since the halcyon days of Jane’s F-18…
I’m self-taught so far, and it’s not bad at all. If you’ve spent much cockpit time in Falcon 4 or the A-10, there’s not much you need to learn in terms of concepts. It’s just learning procedures.