Frostiken

Well it does mean being able to use the Black Sea region a bit more creatively, ie: being able to treat the entire area as hostile instead of inexplicably operating an entire AEF from a crappy Georgian airfield where panels shake themselves off every time you taxi.

Missing the point, why model a dedicated air to air aircraft when a multirole would work just fine without really missing anything? Especially since, theoretically, you could strip the conformal tanks off a certain multi-role fighter and have a turbocharged F-15 with a spectator :D 'Anyone'? It would stop a non-insignificant number of people, methinks. IL2 has done better commercially than Lock-On and I think that's in part because WW2 dogfighting has a decidedly different pacing and tone than a modern fire-ze-missilez air combat simulator. Air combat in WW2 planes is less removed, more visceral, more personal and in-your-face, and you can do the whole thing with swarms of planes without shattering reality. Generally speaking, those are all gameplay elements that work in all types of game that people enjoy and are commercially successful, moreso than 'wait for lock, push button, win' elements. I'm not sure what your point is, all I'm saying is that given the choice between an aircraft that can carry AIM-120s and 20mm and only engage aircraft and an aircraft that can carry AIM-120s, a 20mm, and GBU-38s, one is going to offer more opportunities and thus engage people's interest more. Since I think we can agree that the F-15C has zero military market potential, this means ED would be working on the module simply to make money from consumers, and that's my entire point here: there's no possible way whatsoever you could make as much money from a very role-limited aircraft like the F-15C as you could from any of the other offerings. As for MSFS... there's a fine line there between genuine psychosis and just playing around with flight, and I don't think you should seek credibility by using the market of people who fly real-time flights from Sydney to Los Angeles as some sort of litmus test of what is interesting for the average flight-simmer. Location opportunities aside, I don't see at all how naval ops (now that's a buzzword that's starting to grate on me...) constitute being as interesting as you all are making it out to be, such that you're even calling it a "dedicated naval game". It takes three seconds for you to launch off the catapult. It takes about as long to stop once you hit the deck. Taking off isn't the hard part, so effectively all naval ops is doing is adding an extremely difficult landing procedure to the game. This is hardly the gameplay revolution you all hype it up to be. I'm not saying that it's shit or anything, but making it sound like carrier takeoffs and landings are going to revolutionize the module despite the fact that they represent such a small aspect of the entire experience is like claiming a certain FPS is great simply because of an awesome quick-time event it had.

Two problems: 1) There's zero market whatsoever for a military product for the F-15C. Nobody is buying them anymore. They're getting very old, their role is fairly marginalized by other aircraft at this point, and their expiration date is rapidly approaching. The airframe is done and in twenty years probably will have been retired completely. 2) The simulation aspect of that would be niche at best, even with the market around here. "Not a pound for air to ground" means... what, flying around in circles, pickling off a few AMRAAMs, and flying home. Modern air engagements are not what you see in WW2 where you have two dozen planes swirling around and the combat lasts for a few minutes. It's short and brutal. You'd have to have players facing laughably implausible numbers of enemies to make any sortie interesting for most players, in the realm of air-quake. Any realistic scenario would have you spending more time waiting for INS to align than you would ever spend in a dogfight. Frankly, I think the F-15C works just fine as a Lock-On module simply because there just isn't very much that that aircraft does.

I can't speak for the Black Shark manual but as far as I can tell all of the real-life pictures of the A-10 manual are official government photos, ie: copyright free.

By the way, the only time you'd see guys standing around an aircraft with guns is if it's a PL1 and maybe a PL2 asset (AWACS, B-2 bombers, nuclear material, Air Force One...). Generally speaking, all the base defenders work better if they're standing on the perimeter... and if need be, us maintainers are given firearms (as scary as that is...). Non-nuclear equipped tactical aircraft like A-10s, F-16s, are all PL3 and don't get private guards :D

By the way, I went on Newegg and looked at the cost of RAM. 16GB is so cheap it's like 'why not'?

Close.

I'd like to see that in-game :D

All things considered, I think the avionics modeling is probably the most nightmarish part of making these aircraft. You're basically programming a computer to work within a computer alongside other fake computers, inside a game. If you guys are doing the F-15E... may god have mercy on your souls.

First of all, an Apache, being a helicopter, is not what I would call 'all-weather' in any sense of the word. Secondly, I shudder to imagine the circumstances where nothing but a fuzzy radar image is good enough to trust a computer to properly assign target profiles to 'smart' weaponry with no other visual ID. The smoke clears and you have three destroyed tanks, six blown up civilian vehicles, and a red smashed-up pulp that used to be children that died when they sheltered in the school gym, after your missile automatically targeted the air conditioner on the roof. Regardless, there's almost no aircraft that can do 'anything'. The F-15E cannot carry HARMs even though it would probably do just fine in that role. That's why you have F-16s. The A-10A was truly for 'CLOSE air support' because it had literally nothing going for it except the pilot's eyeball. With the advent of the A-10C, it's no longer shoehorned into getting right into the enemy's teeth and can engage from quite a distance. Now, if you want to get up close and dirty, that's exactly what the much more flexible, maneuverable, and accurate AH-64s are for. It would be 'useful' if every aircraft flew as high as the U-2, as fast as the SR-71, was as maneuverable as a Su-37, carried as many munitions as a B-52, had a radar as powerful as an E-3, the EW suite of an EF-111, the stealth profile of a B-2, the durability of an A-10, and the laser targeting system of a C-130H ATL... but that's not exactly going to be practical :D

And I'm a maintainer with a very lowballed estimate of over 5,000 hours in/on/around F-15s. I can't count the number of times we've done something on the maintenance side with tacit MXG approval due to real-world demands. Before we blew the snot out of Gaddafi, we were literally told 'QA has been pulled from the line, get these aircraft ready now'. Do you seriously think your by-the-book 4-5 hour-long Level I Over-G inspection is going to not be mostly pencil-whipped when that jet is needed? I don't know if you're really a pilot or what you even fly, but 99.9% of pilots are unspeakably clueless about what happens after they get out of the seat. Unless you're the MXOO (and even then...), your personal experience in this regard is fairly meaningless. Additionally, I'm not really sure what your point even is. I suggested that, as part of a dynamic / extended campaign, the fundamentals of maintenance could be implemented as a sort of resourcing strategy game. Every aircraft would start the campaign basically as all aircraft do - a few quirks, but basically all solid (generally speaking, all aircraft are greened-up as much as possible before deployment). Randomize their MTBF stats across all systems, and then track them throughout the campaign. If you treat your jets like shit, they really are grounded for maintenance in some capacity, so you start the campaign with, say, 12 aircraft, and as you get shot up, the pool of good tails drains. Eventually as systems fail, maintenance gets spread thin, maybe that radio fail ended up being wiring so you have to go out with your UHF radio sounding like crap, since the coax line to the antenna has the conductor shorted to the shield causing lots of interference. Maybe you have $x,xxx,xxx available for munitions, and as you drop costly munitions you use that up (or the mission creator could specify what is available), so you can't just pickle off three-dozen Mavs each sortie and drop CBU-107s like it's chaff. Regardless, this was all idle speculation. I'm not really sure where you got the impression that anyone said having GAA/GAB/GACs was a good idea, since generally speaking that would just be an annoyance as it would mean you end the flight as soon as it started, which serves no purpose at all.

Some aircraft use Link-16 systems, some use SADL/EPLRS. http://articles.janes.com/articles/Janes-Military-Communications/Situation-Awareness-DataLink-SADL-United-States.html BFBC2 and SADL/EPLRS can talk together, but Link-16 (which is older) cannot, by default. The article suggests that interoperability and fleet-wide upgrades are very much a work-in-progress right now, but from what I understand, Link-16 is more a strategic-level network while SADL is more tactical. I'm sure eventually this will be more standardized but many aircraft are going through MSIP upgrades right now so things are fairly liquid.

Also offsets the weight difference a little.

Not going to matter, the whole helicopter is pretty toasty already... two 2,200 horsepower engines put out enough heat.

There can be a lot more wrong with the jet than just what the avionics report. The CDU was the most important failure, but there's no avionics monitoring of the gun itself (there's a separate light / system for that). Your gun was probably damaged and no, there's nothing you can do about it. The guns are extremely sensitive. Any sort of damage to the nose of the aircraft is practically guaranteed to harm the feed system in some way. You have to understand just how balanced the whole thing is, and how much metal there is whirling around at incredible speeds. The entire system is open-air too which makes things much more complicated. A bit of FOD in the ammo feed can cause catastrophic gun damage and jam the entire thing - there's nothing you can do.

Then tell Wags to get cracking on DCS: F-15E and then get with me and you'll have so many realistic failures you head will explode :D

Well obviously it works, it's just that in order to get 'unlimited detail' without destroying performance and/or disk space you have to repeat the same thing over and over which is what all their demos are. They promise that 'huge landscape' but it's cubes of terrain stuck side-by-side with the same tree on every one. Their infinite detail structure is the same pile of bric-a-brac glued side-by-side like a prefabricated communist flat. Now, I think you could do things with this technology but I also don't understand exactly how this would integrate with other rendering systems. For purposes of extremely high detail on something that repeats a lot (like, well, trees) you could probably use it here and there, but as far as making a full game world out of it, forget it, it's simply not possible. Polygons are simply much easier to use and work with in every way.

DCS: P-51 might end up being much more detailed than you think for the simple fact that there's so much less to actually model compared to a modern aircraft... Use what, random failures? I use it all the time... heck I think there should be even MORE random failures. The ones we have now are pretty basic. I'd even like a virtual fighter squadron as part of campaigns / dynamic campaigns that tracks your aircraft and determines levels of wear, a basic supply system, and maintenance downtimes, so if you treat all your planes like crap you end up down a few tails as they have their landing gears reattached. It doesn't have to be hyper-realistic where they're removed for months, but as a previous poster said, the 'brand-spanking new jet' every time is a bit boring. The problem with MTBF is that, because it isn't logged, I've yet to see most failures because they don't ever pop up. Unlogged MTBFs means that the 'mean time' has nothing to do with it, you just basically turned it into a %-chance-to-fail-this-sortie. Everything will break eventually, but because it's not logged it means something that has an MTBF of 100 flight hours ends up with a 1% chance of breaking per sortie, which means you may very well never really see it.

I honestly think this has gone over the edge from being 'really into it' to actually being a mental illness. I mean... the dude is wearing a uniform.

Yeah this is pretty much the worst poll ever :D The Bundeswehr were skeptical about showing me the cockpit of a Eurofighter, but I traded them a tour of the F-15E for it :p

I don't think so - keep in mind Janes did an F-15E simulation twelve years ago which was, to be fair, pretty accurate. I mean give me a break, it *was* the 90s. And Janes had pretty good access to F-15E SMEs and manuals. I wouldn't imagine much has changed since then. I've met a few people who were actually at Mountain Home when the Janes crew were there working on things. All things considered, the Air Force is a lot less anal about classification than the Army and possibly even the Navy is. I think there's been a lot more simulations about the former for a reason. Although I did hear a rumor that Janes did get in trouble for something they put in the sim, but I never heard what it was.

If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. There's always a catch. Remember the 'unlimited detail' stuff? 00gAbgBu8R4

That's definitely impressive. Love the NVG implementation. Couldn't see much of their FLIR modeling though, but it just looks like some contrast changes and such...

P-51 - going full-out. A-10 - comfortable. F-15E - riding the envelope :D Well, not really, most every developer out there announces their upcoming works years in advance. Ubisoft and EA especially. Hell, EA announces exactly how many follow-on titles a franchise will get before the first one is even out.

Hey Eddie, can you clarify regarding what you're talking in relation to how it works in the sim vs. how it works in real life? It's hard to tell from what POV you're talking about. I can talk real-life EW theory all day (well, not really :)), but in the end it's only what the sim actually does that matters to most people. Even I'm getting a little confused here as to whether you're referring to just real-life, or if that's how the sim works.