Rick50

Right, but it's not the same organisation. Maybe with the later titles they reccovered their finacials. Maybe they needed outside investors to recover and/or start the new venture. GPL was celebrated once people could play it, but didn't make the company enough money for the investment. Just because the same people are inolved, doesn't mean that they had success the whole time (though for the most part I think they've done well). In the context that I presented, the game wouldn't run properly on the hardware of users at launch, and it hurt sales significantly. Similarly, Falcon 4.0 had a similar issue for many. You could see the poentetial, but....

I like recon flights! I remember loving them in Strike Fighters P1 campaigns! I'd plan the waypoints carefully. I'd try to keep weight to a reasonable minimum. Stores drag to ABSLUTE MINIMU<. Just enough fuel. And I'd begin the A-4 recon flight. It was all about building up speed, and then doing everything you could for energy management, keep that inertia up, keep drag to a minimum... very important to keep enemies from intercepting you, without running out of fuel from afterburners (helps in an A-4 since you just firewalled the throttle. Somehow, when the aim is to outrun the enemy, the mindset needed, makes this kind of mission interesting and exciting in it's own right!

Thank you my replicant friend! I will order that book right away

I agree that would be nice! And eventually maybe a full suite of Phantastic Phantom AI's to fill out flightlines and various airborne flights, carrier decks and so on!

Indeed that's a nice bird!! Thanks Mauser!

I was not aware of this gentleman warrior and had to look him up! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_James_Jr. ...and then I recalled reading of him a little from Robin's page!! And Thailand, and Bolo...

Well... I agree... but then, I was also fairly uncertain that the Phantom could even be brought to DCS in high fidellity, so it's nice to be pleasantly surprised! EW is definately quite classified, but that MIGHT not be a showstopper for a DCS full fidelity module. HeatBlur might be able to find a convincing workaround to the classified stuff and give a good experience for a Weasel after all. Not saying it's likely, but I think it might be possible!

Ah... two completely different ways of doing the same function for the same item, in the two different cockpits of the same plane... yep, no possible way that would ever confuse anyone! Kinda makes me wonder how often, or not, you had a WSO who was a pilot? Or were virtually all of them non-pilots?

There used to be a company that was well known for making the "only" simulations of car racing... Papyrus. They covered CART / Indycar, Nascar Winston Cup, Nascar Trucks and probably a few other genres I don't recall. Their last Nascar apparently still lives on today through mods, it's physics engine and car / suspension setup is second to none even today. But the company one day set out to make the best vintage racing simulator, or rather at that time, the ONLY vintage racing simulator, the subject being Formula 1 from 1967. They wrote all new code for the physics engine. The cars were a handful just to get rolling. But there was a massive problem for the company: when it was released, no one had a computer powerful enough to run it. If you turned all the graphics way down, and only rendered one or two cars in front, and only raced against say just 5 other cars, you MIGHT get an ok framerate... until another car came into view, then whoops, screen freeze and your car has now crashed. About 8 years after the sim was released, our average gaming hardware could do the sim justice, making a full proper race with all the cars, no stutters no frame drops, all the physics for all the cars not just your own, work properly. And it was SPECTACULAR!! Problem was, the company did not survive, largely, I think because their "magnum opus", their "David" just wouldn't work on the customer's machines upon launch, or even for years later. What SHOULD have been a stellar success that impressed everyone, crashed and burned in terms of sales. There was nothing wrong with the code... a decade later it worked brilliantly. It just required WAY more computing power than was available at retail for years after release. Truly a shame, as Grand Prix Legends later turned out to be the brilliant experience we suspected it might. The company did have success after GPL was released, but I believe that it hurt the company's financials signficantly, and I'm not certain that they managed to recover those losses. I tell this story because it's a cautionary one, where just hardware specs and availability conspired to ruin what otherwise ought to have been a great success, much like MiG21bisFishbedL mentioned about the action adventure FPS game Crysis, which suffered from the same issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_Design_Group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Olds What a career! I can only imagine what he was like as a leader, but you don't get to experience all that without learning some deep lessons on how to lead well ! Any book recomendations you guys have about him?

This guy gets it! Not to knock the '2000, or it's fancier missilz... but the Mirage III is iconic like a Sabrejet or Phantom, known around the world... it's got history. No MFD pages to memorize, it was about airmanship, fighter piloting skills, and an instinct to hunt enemy jets... no datalink pages, you had to know the situation mentally from the radio calls, and knowledge of your battle plan and enemy. There's something about using cannons to dogfight that you miss out on with effective BVR engagements.

Hehehe! Well, it's appropriate, considering the history! He looked to me to be the guy that could stop a barfight just by walking in the room...

Considering how committed Heatblur is towards carrier aviation, with the Tomcats and Intruders, I've every faith that they will offer a USN Navy carrier capable variant, and probably ASAP after the E. Just a guess, but yea. After that, I dunno... but considering the beauty of a nice white elegant NAVY Phantom, I think we'll get one soon!

Yea, a lot of us want this map, for the history, alt history scenarios and such. Might be a little "hot potatoe" considering the nature of that history... but it's been done in the past games/sims. But then there is the technical. This isn't a desert, with a bit of hills, a few shrubs and a bit of bland textures. This would be TRILLIONS of palm trees over millions of square miles, WAY more building structures, tens of thousands of river-stilt hut houses. And all the other high density of objects that Vietnam would have compared to say most desert maps. Why does this matter? 1) maps typically seem to take 3 years to make. But this won't be typical due to the volume of objects to place with any plausibility. Might take TWICE as long for a map of 'Nam. 2) triangles and textures... too many and it chokes your PC, chokes your fancy 3D card. Doubling the triangles and textures is usually not much problem for a high end somewhat current gaming PC. But if it's 5 times as much, or 10 times as much... I imagine that a realistic looking 'Nam map might have 50 times as many objects within visual range, compared to say the NTTR map, or the Persian map. So we are left with a map that will take more resources and time to make, and then maybe not be able to get 2 frames per second with lowest settings... rendering the whole exercise null. At some point in future, it will most certainly be doable. Maybe some AI help to build the map in a reasonable time. And then some monster gaming PC hardware that makes a 3090Ti look like a calculator... then sure, it'll be awesome for certain. What's not certain is if it can be started today and work well say in 2026 when it would be ready... maybe it could be made to work well, maybe not.

Hmm. So yea... seems this missile's history with the Phantom is more murky than I thought, about as murky as the histories of some variants of Phantom! I didn't realise that the F-105 Thunderchief had carried this AGM-78 Standard ARM...

Ok... not trying to beat this topic to death, but I thought the Standard ARM was used during Vietnam, and ceased use in that role before the war's end... long before your manuals were published. I suspect that maybe the manuals you have, didn't include Standard because maybe by then there were no more in service, in storage, none available at all while a the Shrike and then-upcomming project that became HARM.... made any content about Standard ARM utterly useless and counterproductive to include? Part of the reason I ask, is that I thought the G Wild Weasel type was a post-Vietnam variant (am I wrong about that?), though I'm having trouble finding it's introduction date. Looking now, supposedly the G never carried a Standard ARM, instead being made for the 88 HARM and Maveric. Not certain about Shrike, but I don't think the Shrike really needed much fancy gear to use, just sort of a "I think I should fire it now, and forget it".... I mean they put them on early Skyhawks, not exactly the height of black box complexity! I never quite understood why the Standard ARM never got more development, I would have thought something that big would be useful for taking down a SAM site, but maybe I'm reading into it too much!

That mindset might have resulted from a lack of confidence that the computer would be working well, when it was really needed. Thus practice the manual mode, get good at it, at least that will still have a chance at working well enough each sortie. I mean, if it was broken that much of the time in a calm peacetime training, what faith would any experienced fighter pilot have, that the system would work rarely if ever, during wartime, when the maintenance crews are running around the clock, for weeks without a day off rest, when supply chains are strained, when the #$^Q technical manual is a bugger to read through at 02:30 in the graveyard... where at least if you've developed your manual delivery skills, you can be certain that it works "60% of the time, it works every time"... or rather, you might miss some, but you'll still be close, and your next pass will probably be "on". Soldiers using rifles have sometimes have similar concerns about their own sighting systems... so while they have either a fancy optic, or a red dot optic, the ones that regularly expect to get into firefights often mount a backup system, small "iron sights" that work like those of earlier eras, like WW2 or the Cold War rifles. Truth be told, these optics are much less likely to fail than this Phantom computer, but the flip up irons are carried by some even today. Batteries fail, an electrical circuit gets vibrated out of contact, the mount mechanism fails and the optic falls off... Murphy's Law: if it CAN go wrong, it will go wrong at the worst possible time! The military was very slow to adopt the fancy red dot sights out of concern for their failure in harsh conditions... the first "modern" red dots started to get to market in the mid-1980's, but did not start being carried in the military until the late 90's in special forces unit, and by 2002 were being issued across the board. But early products range back to the late 60's for one version, and there was even a battery-less version from... early 1950's.

I read this back in 1991, and my memory of the book was all about descriptions of dogfights and engagements over Vietnam, almost always in Phantoms.... the real world advantages and disadvantages of Phantoms Vs this Mig or that Mig, how to gain the upper hand, did the missile get wasted or did it connect. I think there was even a Sparrow BVR engagement that didn't go as well as they wanted, by the time it impacted they could see it hit. The official description focuses a lot on "Top Gun" school, and I'm sure that was in it, but decades later my memory was the real world dogfights VN in Phantoms! Scream of Eagles The Dramatic Account of the U.S. Navy's Top Gun Fighter Pilots and How They Took Back the Skies Over Vietnam By Robert K. Wilcox https://www.amazon.com/Scream-Eagles-Dramatic-Account-Fighter/dp/1476788413 https://www.simonandschuster.ca/books/Scream-of-Eagles/Robert-K-Wilcox/9781476788418 Edit: the edition I read was printed much earlier... I'm not sure, but I think mine was the first print run. I just know I read it in either late 1990 or 91.

I figure we'll get a Cobra. Eventually. Maybe 3 or 4 years from now. Maybe even a couple different Cobra variants, like a SuperCobra, an 80's US Army TOW Cobra, and maybe, if Vietnam eventually happens, an original early Cobra with minigun and 40mm chin turret. Maybe. But I think Vietnam is, well, it's a ways off.

It's POSSIBLE... not a guarantee on the first attempt (to build a global map for combat flight sims, that is). Civilian flight simulation has a lot of similarities and things exactly the same. Models are expected to look nice, look real, and have a reasonable amount of detail. The feeling of actually flying ought to approach the real experience of anyone who's actually flown the item represented. The aircraft systems ought to be represented and behave like the POH suggests. The world and terrain ought to be processed such that good framerates enable a successful landing in crosswind gusting winds, say around 30fps or better. Combat flight sims have to do all that and much more: radar behaviors, thermal signatures, threat warning pages, interaction between missile guidance and pilot datalink, calculate the trajectories of 100 20mm shells and then network ALL of those positions with precision accuracy over a network where players might be on different continents with different hardware, simulate combat damage and it's effects with some degree of accuracy, simulate high alpha dogfight maneuvers and possible departures and recoveries, Artificial Intelligence that works well and efficiently at enemy SAM systems and air defense pilot AI without straining resources. Then after all that, you need to process the entire world's map, render it so it looks good, keep it in memory and accessible at a moment's notice, with all the bandwidth needed for a future high res map.... while keeping the average framerate more like double that of civil sims, so more like 60fps. Not impossible... but it's a tall order. Eventually it will be possible, certainly. And MAYBE this first attempt will work out well.

high quality AI B-52's, specifically B-52D for the Vietnam and SAC 1960's era, and the modern H. Better model geometry, wing flex, better AI pilots. Mirage III for Middle East history, dogfighting over the sand. Black Hawk or some other "Hawk -60" variant. Announced projects that I want to buy: F-8 Crusader Bo-105 A-29 Super Tucano F4U Corsair

Well, ED says they are starting work to attempt to bring us the whole world. But it's a long ways off in future, don't hold your breath, and it seems they aren't totally sure. Might be 5 years, might be much longer. But they have run a few tests, and are sure it's worth the attempt. BUT... if it works well... this could be GLORIOUS!!

What's interesting about this situation, without the political aspect... ... is that ED is wanting/hoping to develop a global map. Meaning the whole world. Maybe not in super high details for all of it, the details have yet to be figured out and likely won't be made public for years. It's very early days for this, in something that might take 5 to 10 years. BUT... that island and the straight would presumably be included in such a global map. Maybe in that area of the world it won't be labled or "aligned" one way or the other...

BTW, I'm not suggesting that it's impossible for ED to accomplish something like the effect that MSFS2020 produces for it's land/terrain details... just pointing out that it seems to require a strong effort, strong backing, and probably quite a lot of innovative coding too. Then a shii-ton of testing internally and by external. And probably some significant time put into development, not a matter of months, but perhaps 4 to 10 years of total effort until it works well enough for a dogfighting guns-only mulitiplayer server without lag or frame drops. Things that could improve this, are that govt contracts would be IMO very interested in a global map, perhaps even more than we are. Similarly, satellite global mapping companies are probably all moving towards offering their products/content to more customers (say like ED) for less money, with more detail and less bandwidth per item (say using compression, alternating low detail with high detail textures like the new "texture stickers", and other methods). With the success and inspiration that came from MS's latest, I'd expect that competitors would be aiming for as many customers wanting unique applications, and so a new market could make this much easier cheaper and faster for future companies to lease/rent and simply "plug and play". Indeed, I'd expect that MS themselves may well position themselves to offer that product for companies like ED. I mean, civilian flight and combat flight sims are not exactly the same market really... and revenue is revenue, helps to crush those dev costs that were high up front!

Starfighters, Kfir's and Mirage III's ?!?!!? AWESOME!!