MostlyHarmless

A gentleman by the name off Tom Weinel who went by the name Superheat on a number of model forums was an F-8 combat pilot with the navy and flew a number of the versions and gave quite a bit of information on their differences before he passed away a couple of years ago. The J had the boundary layer system that allowed for a slower (15ish knot) approach speed but at the cost of engine air being bypassed out to it instead of thrust out the tail pipe. Some reports say that it would be difficult to execute a wave off without having to go into afterburner to start to climb out. The solution was to use the more powerful engine but that still didn’t totally solve the problem. It also had a higher empty weight from the additional strengthening that the wing under went resulting in lower performance. The H apparently was also available with the same engine as the J allowing for a stripped down hot rod that, while it flew a faster approach speed didn’t need to go to burner to wave off. The J had a different ECM setup that some things I have read stated that it took additional space behind the cockpit reducing the ammunition capacity for the quad 20mm cannons. That said the guns have a history of jamming if they were used during hard maneuvers. So having the later ECM gives the advantage to the J if they would leave you stuck with ammo in the bins anyway. The other big change was the radar, the radar in the J was a bit rushed to make it to Southeast Asia for combat and often failed, stories of common practice were to have the lead plane on day missions to have the working radar while the wingman used the nonfunctional ones while for night and IFR the wingman would have the working radar to stay in formation with the lead while the lead watched visually and navigated. There is additional question of the increase in effectiveness of the additional range for the new radar even when working as some reports stated that you still needed vectoring to actually engage anything with it. All in all I think that it was an improvement over the H, but the H was reliable, and that goes a long way in combat.

The panels are too different to interchange, I bought mine through a seller on eBay, they also have A-7 series panels available. The price wasn't too bad and the seller went above and beyond in throwing in extras for me so if you are interested in either I highly recommend it. I also bought a landing gear control side panel so that I could confirm the scale before trying to use a router to start fabricating the backing panels and gauges. I'm cheating a little bit in that I'm building the pit as a mixed reality setup using VR for the visuals and just having all the switches and controls in their respective positions. While I will be finish the interior to an extent, I'm not worrying about putting monitors behind the gauges or anything like that so that between painting and then using the printed panel sections for inside the gauges I can get by.

I would say that I am a bit bummed at the news of the F-8J(junk) as opposed to the other -420 equipped F-8H(hotrod) as some of the pilots referred to them, but who am I kidding, I'm just thrilled that we will be getting one of the final versions of the F-8!! Glad to know which version it will be to continue to research it to build a sim pit. Mainly because I happened to have the shell of an MK-F7 seat ready to be restored in my office. If anyone has resources they can recommend on dimensions for the cockpit and forward fuselage please let me know. While I have a 1:1 cockpit panel to print out along with an original panel section to scale it from to scratch build the rest of the panels from, there are a lot of key dimensions that I don't have access to.

who said anything about civilian aircraft? ;)

Unless I totally missed something, Ron said harrier 5 posts above yours. The last word he gave on the Tucano was that it was still being worked on. I'm probably in the minority but, I'm far more interested in a turbo prop modeled to DCS quality than another jet. Granted the complexities with modeling the Harrier's vertical thrust has me interested just from the pure technical side. That alone is enough for me to preorder it, tho I do suspect that many of us will experience some humiliation in trying to master vertical take offs and landings. The technical complexity of modeling in a turboprop with beta and reverse is something that I think is more difficult than the jets in DCS and a big reason I'd like to see RAZBAM pull it off to encourage other developers to try aircraft outside of pure combat models. Flying turboprops for a living it would be nice to do things that I can't ordinarily do with passengers in the back. Also because they permanently removed the gun systems from my aircraft during a refit last year... :cry_2:

Just have to hope she doesn't take half your modules when she goes!! While I may not be married, I think my wallet might leave me after all these modules arrive.

After personally having so many issues with quality control on saitek products since the madcatz buyout I planned to never get one again, but now I might consider it if logitech can prove that they have improved the production quality. CH made the Force FX years ago, a some what cult following now with people taking the old game port based ffb controller boards out to swap in logitech ffb controllers to update them to usb compatibility.

Your setup has definitely been an inspiration for me to start looking at building one myself. Do you have a build page for your platform? I would love to see more details on it!

Thanks for clearing up what each is used for, I had been wondering about that. After using trackIR for so long I had just assumed that the camera did everything and hadn't thought too much on what the accelerometers were being used for. This would make using a G-Seat more of benefit over using a motion platform to minimize the effect of unintended accelerometer signals caused by platform movement.

Recently I stumbled across Michal Hrabovcak's platform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6dtUjBhBX8 mounting the camera to the seat base makes sense to prevent unexpected head motion from being detected as the platform moves your body around. The setup is quite nice and more of the diy method that I'm looking for. My perfect setup would be a slightly upscaled base able to handle my weight along with the weight of a Bergison G-Seat. The G-Seat's ability to simulate positive and negative g forces combined with the greater ability to simulate rapid side loading and slips though a motion base would be about as perfect as we could realistically hope for. While I've not had the chance to experience VR on a full motion base or with a g-seat yet, it might be possible to get most of the appropriate sensations just through the g-seat and not require a motion base. After attending a course at the FAA aeromedical facility last year I was really impressed at how quickly and easily our inner ear can be tricked and become accustomed to prolonged motions. Extended periods of a motion can be normalized fairly quickly so that you loose the sensation of movement. My fear of just a motion platform is that while sudden forces would be simulated very well, longer term forces, especially negative g loading would be difficult to maintain due to the limited amount of travel available in the base. The Bergison G-Seat would help counter a good bit of this with the seat belt tension changes for longer duration negative g loads.

you all have corrupted me after nearly 300 pages of low flying Viggens, the first thing that came to mind watching the demo flight was, man that thing is flying kinda high...

Its really doubtful that any dev team would want to risk making a different version of an aircraft that another dev has already done unless the first one royally messed it up. People would forever be on the forums going back and forth over which version was better/more accurate. Bedsides Avio posted a shot of their F1 model's cockpit on facebook this morning, I'm sure they are busy applying the lessons they are learning on the C-101 development to the F1 at the same time.

When I bought s broken stick to rebuild I had to replace the 6 wire plug and wires for the joystick grip. They should be the same pin spacing and plug type just the 5 pin instead of the 6 pin. The plug and wire leads were listed on ebay as "Mini. JST 1.25 T-1 6-Pin Connector with Wire x 10 sets". If you are in the US and want to try swapping the pins and wires between a 6 pin a your 5 pin PM me and I can try to mail you one of the 9 plugs and wire sets that I have as spare.

As a background my warthog was purchased as a used unit that had fallen off a table. The articulation sphere had broken, the stick wires were crushed or torn, and the magnet and its mount had broken off the stick mount. After ordering a new articulation sphere, replacing the wires, and epoxying the magnet mount back on, I ended up with a stick that would not go more than ~86% aft on the y axis. This is probably a really rare issue with how many things had opportunity to shift slightly during the repair. After some searching I came across this thread and used the 1.13 calibration tool which gave me full deflection in every direction, along with a whole new issue. With using the TM calibration tool my stick would sit centered but give a 63% y axis value and a 53% x axis value. The final solution was to use the Logitech DXTweak2 that hakjar recommended in post 70 on the last page. After downloading the 64bit version of the program from Force Dynamics here I was able to manually enter the center and upper limit values in order to apply them. Once applied the joystick now shows the correct positions in DIView and in game. If you are fighting with calibrating a stick, don't give up hope, there might still be a solution to salvage it.

It is a bit confusing until you have flown under VR and see what is going on. In VR you have the option of either controling the cursor with your mouse like normal, or to have the cursor remain bound to the center of your view and move it by moving your head around. If you are doing the latter then I can totally understand the desire to have the left moue button bound to your hotas so you don't have to go reaching for the mouse while trying to keep your head looking exactly at the control you want to activate. At that point you might as well just be using the mouse to control the cursor again. With using a mouse for cursor control you can run into the issue of moving the mouse outside of the preview window and accidentally clicking on your desktop or another program's open window. This causes all sorts of annoyance as you try to peak under your device or use the headset camera to get back to having the game selected. This is fixed by using the alt-enter command mentioned above to make the preview window full screen and thus preventing you from being able to click outside of the game window. Personally I found that having to look directly at the switch while keeping my head steady was annoying so I picked up a small handheld trackball off amazon to use with my left hand for controlling the cursor. This way I never have to transition my hands in order to reach my mouse with my right hand and can keep a constant stick force applied. Hope this helps make it a bit more clear for you.