Looks good, but it’s no 14…
Still waiting on the Tornado GR.1 and Central Europe terrain.
Yeah. ‘14 is mean looking and those AIM-54’s were born in the heat of that backfire laden cold war we know and love.
But the F-16 was a break from tradition, a new look at what a fighter could be. She broke the mould back then. Fly by wire, force sensitive stick, best in class at air to air and pretty handy at air to ground. For durability she will be up there with the mig-21, in service in multiple nations for many decades.
As the cliche goes, there is no accounting for taste.
Oh god yes please.
@schurem are the mods in dcs any good? I’ve been looking through some of the Growling Sidewinder’s videos on youtube and there are a number of them that contain mod planes.
I hear MicroPose is back.
Anyone know much about the Advanced F-15 (or F-15EX)? I just stumbled across that online. Apparently the Air Force is buying some, so maybe the F-15C will get an upgrade in DCS.
I read that they’re looking for cheaper alternatives to the F-35, and upgrading the older 4th gen jets makes sense. You don’t get the same stealth as the F-35, but you get everything else. The stealth component of the 35 is controversial anyway. Those panels are a huge pain to maintain, and if you need a decent weapon load, you destroy the stealth profile anyway.
The idea is that in the past gen, the F-15s were the high-end and the F-16s were the low-end.
But the problem today, our high-end are the F-22s and F-35s, and they’re really expensive. And in the case of the F-22, they’re in small numbers that aren’t getting any larger short of restarting the production line.
Boeing wants to sell brand new F-15s to the Air Force as our new “low-end.”
Basically, you want all the stealth stuff in combat against a first-world foe. But if all you’re doing is bombing militants in the third-world, using stealth fighters is really a bad fit. If you don’t have to worry about a first-tier opponent, then you can use these F-15s.
Those high end stealth fighters are also going to be out of action with maintenance for most of the time in a battle scenario. Your workhorses are going to be the 4th gen planes.
With the limited numbers of F-22s do we even deploy any outside of the air defense duty in the US?
Yeah, which is one huge reason why they’re a bad fit.
It’s a pretty good idea. No expensive R&D needed, which is what often pushes the costs-per-unit to the stratosphere. Proven airframe, proven avionics, and the Air Force already has plenty of institutional knowledge, not to mention a supply pipeline in place.
We’d need new airframes because the existing F-15 C/D fleet is ancient and running out of hours on their airframes.
If you had told me back when I was spending a lot of my life on Falcon 4 that one day I could fly a sim like this F-16 sim, I would have thought you were insane.
This makes me want to build a computer just for this sim. Will it have a decent world and campaign engine at any time?
What is a world engine?
As for a campaign engine, if by that you mean anything like Falcon…no.
World engine kinda equals campaign engine: a living, dynamic world in which to fly and fight.
No, not really. DCS has never had that and probably never will. What it does often have, and what the F-16 will probably have, eventually, is some (by some accounts, anyway) pretty good scripted campaigns, often as payware add-ons.
DCS has unparalleled switchology, pretty graphics, and little else.
Hey now, they’re working on their dynamic campaign! I have no doubt they will have it done by 2028 or so :)
Ah, so it is an airplane simulator, not an air war simulator. OK, there’s a place for that. Might not be worth building a dedicated PC for me, but I’m sure for many it’s what they want.
The sim is the epitome of Pete Bonanni’s statement in the Falcon 4 manual: “You try building the perfect simulator, you just end up building the aircraft itself.” Or you get simulated aircraft with a random half of the features developed over a poor core.
Combined with small, insular development teams and poor project management all around.
But it does have VR.
Flying modern iron is a bit rough these days. You’ve got DCS and its overhyped/underdelivered expensive DLC, or you’ve got BMS, which is what happens when you put what could have been the be-all, end-all of wargame flight sims into the hands of the switchologists. I’d rather fly TK’s cast-offs than either of them.
(If you like house fans, well, you’re more in luck with IL2/ROF2 or WOFF. If you like big house fans then there is good WW2 stuff everywhere)