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.

They use a standard prescription format for each eye, SPH, CYL, and AXS, they don't ask for prism correction or have an option for bifocal reading section (actually I wonder what would happen when you use vr if you were to need bifocals in day to day life) While I can fit my normal glasses in the rift with only the outside of the lenses hitting the black spandex in the headset, I'm going to be ordering a set of VR lenses this week. My hope is to be able to use the thin adapter from the kickstarter with the vr lenses to move my eyes closer in and gain a little more FoV.

From my rough measurements with a XL HGU-55/68/84 shell, the face opening is wide enough for a CV1 but you would have to remove the side mounts entirely, it unfortunately sits too high on your forehead so you would have to cut the helmet opening some vertically or play with the adapter some to fit. Not measured it against my primary Evo 252 to know if it would fit the Evo and MSA Gallet helmet shells but I'm fairly sure that it is just as bad if not worse for the vertical opening clearance. Wearing a helmet all day flying its a pain in hot and humid areas, I'm not supper excited at the idea of then putting on one when I get home to goof off flying.

I have to wear glasses for distance vision and with the Rift I also have to wear them. I'm not going to say that its exactly like real life for how far I can see without them, but it does have a similar distance of vision in the CV1. About two feet is as far out as I can read smaller text without my glasses if that helps you compare to your own vision, I don't have issues with reading up close with my glasses on so that may be a factor for you with gauges up close. Hopefully someone else can also weigh in on it. The Vive originally had me sold with the better features until I started looking at reading text and gauges in game. Since I really only planned to use VR for flight and driving sims, room scale, while really neat, wasn't the purpose for getting a headset. With running an msi laptop docked to a desktop gpu I knew that I would be suffering compared to a similar desktop so the rift's method of ATW was a deciding factor. I can't sacrifice any performance to start with in order to increase pixel density so the base CV1 advantage in text sealed the deal. Granted I found mine locally very lightly used and for the retail price without shipping or sales tax. That was less than a week before the Vive started shipping within two days, so at the time it seemed that if I ordered directly either one might take a month or more to arrive. The Vive has a strong selling point with being available right now and not taking a month or more like the CV1.

Very nice build!! I run the same damper on my collective and have found issues when flying in ARMA with the stiction, the breakaway force tends to cause over controlling at times. What setting are you running the valving on? I started full soft and would still like it a bit less resistance. When I tried different settings I found that it jumped around a little bit in the middle, not sure if it was air bubbles getting in the valving or if it is just a product of the quality control (or lack there of) that comes with getting the cheapest adjustable damper I could find. Have you thought about switching the hydraulic fluid to a less viscous one? Also did you consider orientation of the body when you built it or was it primarily just the orientation that afforded the best mounting method? Mine is inverted of yours and truthfully I did it only because it worked the best with the base I was using and I am wondering if reversing it might be better for any possible cavitation bubbles that it would see in use. While they are intended to be on their side normally I've not had any experience with the adjustable linear dampers as my race bike uses a rotary damper.

The wiring is not a terrible thing that I've found so far, I had to rewire my stick base after the wires were pinched when the previous owner had it fall off a desk and break the articulation sphere. The failure was not something that it would have ever seen in normal operations. That said I'm yet to see a manufacture who has perfect quality control so I can understand that thrustmaster might not have it all together either since I have had CH and Saitek wire problems in the past. As far as the switches on the throttle go I'm curious what you have as experience on it. Switch activation can be a very subjective thing to discuss as everyone has their preference on it and different way to describe the tactile experiance. I would describe the 3 position boat switch and the momentary 3 position hat switch on the right throttle as both needing less than half the force required by the actual switches on the A-10A throttle and the same model of switches used on the AH-64A collective. My take is that they need more snap force to properly replicate the real thing. The toggle switch on the left throttle is also requires less than half the force as the real one so we are in agreement there. I would describe the red pinkie switch on the left throttle as also requiring less force than the real one but it is a bit different how it actuates. The actual switch requires pressure to build with no movement then snaps down while the Thrustmaster switch is just mushy as it depresses slowly as pressure increases. The switches on the base generally all require more force than the corresponding thrustmaster switches save for the landing gear warning silence button that requires less effort on the real aircraft. All in all TM has it much closer to reality than CH ever has, I cringe when I think of the incredibly small amount of force required to use the buttons on my fighterstick. My biggest issue is that after rebuilding the broken warthog I bought with a new articulation sphere I had to go and rebuild it a second time with the original because it placed the magnet in the wrong place ever so slightly and wouldn't give full deflections. Even then I have the aft left and right corners that I loose stick back deflection as I go side to side. This along with the twisting play in my stick has me thinking the throttle is the best part and that is the part that I have an actual A-10 throttle to replace. Going to have to build up a new stick base to use the warthog grip with to really solve my issues with the joystick portion.

You can do the same by unplugging the usb to the rift, for those with usb ports on the front of the case and hdmi only on the video card it is the least annoying way to do it.

The only thing I've heard for the headset's odor is just to leave out of the box to air out. The smell coming from mine has greatly reduced over the last week. That said, it still is definitely there, at this point I'm starting to expect that there will always be a bit of it. Part of me wonders if wiping the exterior fabric parts with some febreze on a rag could help neutralize the smell. I don't dare do anything to the inside section after reading the warning that says not to use alcohol lens cloths to clean the lenses as they can damage the coatings. After I clean my normal corrective vision glasses I do wipe the face pad down with alcohol swabs as well as the head straps to try to prevent any oil buildup or smells while waiting for my vr covers to arrive. Another thing to consider is a small fan to blow air at you, some people use the air flow to help them with disorientation (much like a fresh air vent in a small aircraft can be a life saver). It would also serve the side benefit of blowing the headset's smell away as well as helping dissipate some of the heat it generates. Hoping it gets better for you, your VR control setups were a big inspiration for me to hack up old joysticks and start building controls for my eventual vr purchase. (my mistake was getting the headset before totally finishing the control stands and extended joystick, now I'm too busy in my free time wanting to fly in vr to get around to actually finishing them up!) :doh:

Go and fly, but take it easy as you get used to it! I had concerns starting out, actually scored a deal on my CV1 because the original owner had motion sickness issues. With DCS I started off with simple pattern work in the C-101, the suggestion for helicopters is also good. While people who are used to immersive sim environments such as surround and trackir are probably going to adapt faster, I suspect that people who have actual instrument flight time would have the least amount of issues. Learning to ignore differences in positional information between the inner ear and the instruments is a critical skill in instrument flying. Even now with close to a week of time flying with the CV1, I'm not trying aggressive dog fighting maneuvers just slowly still building up. While its likely that I would be fine at this point, I'd much rather avoid any unpleasantness any any negative mental associations that go along with it.

Serial: 10279 Location: Northern VA, USA