Is there anything quite like them now? I love this era of flight sims but the modern ones look a bit too much for me. I love F-19 and later ATAC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2pqS4fo8qA
Not exactly like them, but Tiny Combat Arena recaptures some of the joy of flying these polygon-based, simplified flight model flightsims. It's still in alpha (so only one playable aircraft -- a Harrier -- and only one demo campaign), but fast approaching 1.0, and I recommend it.
If you want to fly a "modern" jet without needing to read a manual or learn very complex radar systems, this is the game for you.
Tiny Combat Arena's sole developer Why485 is very active on twitter & previously on their blog.
Both profiles are well worth a scroll through if you have any interest in sim-lite games. Really like the breakdowns on old school simlite games and what really made them fun (since it wasn't strictly a matter of realism = better).
Agreed it's definitely not a matter of realism = better! DCS looks gorgeous and very realistic, and I know it's simply not for me, because I don't want to actually work as a combat pilot.
MicroProse's F-19 is the flightsim I played and enjoyed the most, and it wasn't realistic.
DCS has some very advanced sims but some of the cheaper modules (planes) are intentionally less realistic/labor intensive.
If you download DCS World directly from the site instead of getting it through steam, you can get a 2 week trial of each module every 6 months.
Flaming Cliffs 3 is the name of the less realistic module. It comes with several planes or you can buy them individually. As I said before, you can try them all for free for 2 weeks each and it resets every 6 months.
I always loved the GraphSim F/A-18 Hornet sims. They were simple but still decently realistic. I still have mine on an old PowerMac tower! I should play that again.
Actually they have an iOS version, which isn't bad, except the lack of joystick support.
Falcon 3 and 4 are major milestones in "serious" flightsims, and I toyed with both of them (3 more than 4), but I cannot say I completed a single mission with either.
MicroProse F-19 hit that awesome spot of some realism (laughable today, but it wasn't meant to be an arcade game back then), with a really easy flight model and cool missions and scenarios you could really complete. And besides knowing the keyboard mappings, you really didn't need a manual. It was thrilling to play mission after mission, getting all those medals, and having your character be promoted in rank. I spent a lot of time with that game -- probably flew as many missions as an actual combat pilot!
The only other flightsim I found almost as engrossing was Gunship 2000, with its "dynamic" campaign system, but it was way more difficult.
I find Tiny Combat Arena captures some of this thrilling but simple gameplay, but it currently lacks content (more campaigns, more maps, more things to do).
If you have a VR headset, VTOL VR is amazing. All the controls you interact with by reaching out and flipping toggles. The graphics are good enough. You get three aircraft with the base game and there's a DLC available that adds an AH64 analogue.
The complexity of the game hits a sweet spot for me. To get into the air you have to go through some startup steps (maybe 8, most of which involve hitting "power" buttons). There is some light air traffic control simulation that you can interact with (or just take off yolo style). Mission design is diverse and there are a decent number of fan made missions.
The initial tutorial missions do a good job getting you up in the air, after that you benefit from watching some youtube tutorials because each weapon system and aircraft have their own unique features.
Another thumbs up for VTOL VR from me. There is something infinitely pleasing about reaching out and flicking those engine start switches, radio control dials, and MFD buttons to me, a scratch that isn't hit by the more complicated and in-depth DCS start up and control routines where I'm just clicking a bunch of buttons or hitting keyboard commands as I have been for decades.
Random fact - the artwork was by Tom Ashton - previously the guitarist for The March Violets, also performed with The Sisters of Mercy, and went on to Clan of Xymox.
Also, this was the project I worked on before BRender - covered in another thread here.
I really need to thank you for that game for me it was ... amazing. I still have the original box and I clearly remember been fascinating about how on earth it was possible to pack such a game in a couple of floppy disks. Thanks man.
Does that simplified model also include simplified avionics, radars, weapons and so forth? I've looked at some DCS vids on YouTube, and it looks cool but very complicated.
flight model is somewhat "low resolution", radar performances are on point, but feaures are undermodeled, like friend/foe detection is automatic, and you don't have to mess with cone width and scan columns, you have an average default set and that's it, weapons are the same that other platforms shoot.
dcs may seem very complicate, because there' a ot of buttons to memorize, and it indeed is for more modern planes that can switch between ground/air mode, weapon targeting modes, datalink modes etc
but
simplified planes with non interactive cockpit just have a few step to memorize and once you're going, you're going.
like, once you watch and execute the f-15 cold startup tutorial, it's always the same sequence in the same order and sets your plane exactly in the same mode ready for combat.
(nav light management etc is there, but it's kinda optional and not required to learn from the start)
then you get three button for radar mode you actually need (close combat, flood/boresight, beyond visual range), two button to switch weapon, and the rest is the slightly more complicate part, which is radar management
you get a set of buttons to look up/down/left/right, a set of button to move the pip close/far/left/right, a button to toggle scan mode, and a button to lock/unlock a target - it's a lot to set up, but it's quite easy as it has immediate feedback on what you're doing
the rest comes down to actually positon yourself in a way to maximize kill probability and defending from retailiation.
This thread reminded me of 688 Attack Sub, which I always thought was a MicroProse sim. TIL that it was originally done by EA. I ordered it from the Special Reserve games club in the UK back in 1990.
Oh 688 AS thanks for the flash back to the golden era of gaming in my time. Reading magazines about new games. Going to local game shop and checking out the box (giant box compared to today). Rushing home and waiting for install of each floppy disk. The games, though limited in visuals, where really captivating.
I personally miss reading manuals (or at least skimming them if they're big) before playing games. I guess it feels too much like study/work for it to have a market nowadays; last physical games I've bought had basically the same info as in-game help.
I recommend this site[0] for all those who want to go down memory lane. Just look at this[1] or that of TFA[2].
When I was a kid my grandparents would sometimes get me a computer game when I visited. But they had no computer! This meant I could spend the weekend poring over the manual in anticipation.
My favorite was SimEarth (200+ pages and spiral bound as I recall!) but TIE Fighter was great too, since the manual was in the form of a novella.
Back in the days I and others made an end of junior high school year project on military planes and we had a monitor playing clips of F-16 Falcon, F-29 Retaliator and Fighter Bomber. I did however use the F-19 Stealth Fighter game manual as an inspiration to write texts on the improvised stand we were using. We also had some model kits on display.
Oh! To have played this on a machine with a double digit clockspeed!
I loved my Amiga 500, and spent many hours on F-19/F-117, but crikey 7.little MHz was not a lot to play with (although quite enough for the super-fast, fun but otherwise inscrutable ArmourGeddon...).
And (I don't see it elsewhere, but maybe it is) it was so difficult to fly that it was known as "the wobbling goblin".
Also, I remember seeing a model kit in the window of a model shop in North London, well before the plane was announced to the public. Must have been in the 80s.
Oh, and another memory has surfaced from the compost heap that passes for my brain these days - my then girlfriend bought me a little friction-drive toy of one of them - also 1980s.
Are you sure you're not thinking of the F-19 model that came out in the very late 80s? I was a bit of plane nerd at the time - by early adolescent standards, at least - and I remember all my books being blindsided by the F-117's ultimate form.
> Also, I remember seeing a model kit in the window of a model shop in North London, well before the plane was announced to the public. Must have been in the 80s.
Note "well before the plane was announced to the public"
Multiple model kits of the F-19 were released in the 80s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-19#Notable_appearances_in_me...) - they have a vague resemblance to the F-117, but I don't know of any releases of F-117 models before it was officially revealed.
> The shop in between Holborn and Tottenham Court road, by any chance?
Beatties, I think. I used to pop in there on my way home from Touche Ross, accountants, where I had a mangement gig - I used to think "If only I had back then compared to what I do now ..." - and had grand designs for an N-guage railway setup - girlfriend vetoed it. Never bought anything. Ooh, but wait, I do seem to remember buying my little nephew an R/C car there!
Regarding the F177, the shop was in Southgate, North London, cannot remember the name, oposite tube station, but I am right :-)
An aside - was the F-19 basically a popular fiction based on sightings by the public of the YF-22 and YF-23 prototypes? Or did something like this really exist?
The F-19 was what people speculated the rumored "stealth fighter" would be named. There had been rumors for years, but the public didn't see it for the first time until 1988.
In Tom Clancy's book Red Storm Rising, about a hypothetical Third World War in Europe, he conceives of it as something like the F-35 ended up becoming -- a stealthy multirole aircraft (fighter-bomber). They called it the "F-19 Frisbee". The 19 comes from the fact that the previous fighter designation was for the F-18 Hornet.
I am fairly confident the f-19 was the f-117, fueled by aviation journalists wild imaginations, probably based on early speculative concepts.
Or if you are more conspiracy minded a deliberate misinformation campaign to further obscure what the nighthawk was and was not. this conspiracy is reinforced by the f-117 designation itself. They used a century-series number(this series of numbers had been phased out for quite some time at this point) and an F(fighter) designation for something that is effectively a light bomber.
That being said, I wonder what the actual f-19 was? The missing numbers always interest me. f-17? f-19? f-20(tigershark?) f-21? f-24:24? (i think I read somewhere the last gap was marketing sigh)
Ah, good ol Cheat Engine, I used this on F-19 back in the good ol DOS TSR[0] days on my 286. Froze the value of the address in memory that counted how many 500lb bombs I had, then held down Enter to drop my infinite bombs continuously and brought hell to Soviet Russia.
I loved this game! Looking back, I'm surprised that I had the patience as an eight year old to master this game's control scheme. This definitely applies to other contemporary so-called 'sims', like Mechwarrior.
The Nighthawk looks ugly as sin to most people, which is probably why it doesn't bet as much love. The B2 Spirit is what I imagine the Nighthawk looking like if it weren't so angular.
I mean.. OK? It honestly doesn't sound like a fitting content for article [[F-117]] to me. A link when talking about its missile capacity? Sure. But other than that it should go to its own article.
Why? It seems appropriate content. The F-117 is, by construction and design, a machine for killing people. It is natural to showcase its most "successful" mission.
Not to say that the shelter bombing isn't a tragedy, but it's nowhere near the scale.
> killed at least 408 civilians
vs
> The two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people
Maybe it's a sad state of affairs that 400 civilian deaths isn't that remarkable, but this is the world we live in. More than that died in the Mariupol theatre airstrike, but we don't need to link that from every airplane and munition article.
The a-bombing on Japan was a much impactful/influential event, and more importantly, for whatever reason, it was heavily associated with B-29 (probably THE reason why B-29 was famous in average people to begin with).
This is what makes the bombing event essential for B-29's article.
The Amiriyah bombing doesn't really have such connotation with the plane.
I learned not too long ago that the reason the F-117 looks so much like a low-poly model is because the computers available at the time that they used to design it could only handle radar profile calculations for low-poly models.
"Ufimtsev has shown us how to create computer software to accurately calculate the radar cross section of a given configuration, as long as it's in two dimensions," Denys told me. "We can break down an airplane into thousands of flat triangular shapes, add up their individual radar signatures, and get a precise total of the radar cross section."
Why only two dimensions and why only flat plates? Simply because, as Denys later noted, it was 1975 and computers weren't yet sufficiently powerful in storage and memory capacity to allow for three-dimensional designs, or rounded shapes, which demanded enormous numbers of additional calculations. The new gneeration of supercomputers, which can compute a billion bits of information in a second is the reason why the B-2 bomber, with it's rounded surfaces, was designed entirely by computer computations.
Denys's idea was to compute the radar cross section of an airplane by dividiing it into a series of flat triangles. Each triangle had three separate points and required individual calculations for each point by utilizing Ufimtsev's calculations. The result was called "faceting"--creating a three-dimensional airplane design out of a collection of flat sheets or panels, similar to cutting a diamond into sharp-edged slices.
There's a great book called "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich (head of the F-117 project) that goes into the development. It's amazing what they were able to accomplish with so little computing power.
I thought it was because the stealth tech was based on faceting. This deflects the majority of radar energy directed at it so it doesn't return to the source to be detected.
You've got cause and effect flipped. The method of faceting or scattering from even, panelled surfaces is an effect of the root cause, namely the computer's inability to compute more complex radar profiles. You can read more about this in Ben Rich's book 'Skunk Works', the story about his time as the director of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Projects, informally called Skunk Works. Great read!
A flat surface is less likely to reflect to the source. Think of shining a flashlight at a polished metal object. If the object is smoothly curved and convex, there will always be some point on the surface at just the right angle to reflect the light beam into your eyes.
On the other hand consider a flat mirror (at a long distance) or a faceted object with a small number of facets and sharp edges: it's unlikely that any of the facets is correctly aligned to reflect the light to your eyes.
A shape with fewer angles ("low-poly") has a lower probability of giving a visible reflection.
Modern stealth appears to work the same way: surfaces and edges are aligned along a minimal number of angles to reduce the effective number of "facets". See the shape of the B-2 for example, the leading and trailing edges are at the same angles.
Round surfaces scatter in all directions, flat surface scatter only in 1 direction of your choosing. For low RCS (Radar Cross Section) paneled surfaces are infinitely better, regardless of computer simulation capabilities.
Of course it's true. Modern stealth aircraft have curves a plenty. This is an extremely confident reply given that's it's to somebody who's referencing the book by the guy who built the thing.
> Round surfaces scatter in all directions, flat surface scatter only in 1 direction of your choosing.
But with the low-poly approach you end up with sharp edges which diffract the waves in all direction…
The fact that no more recent stealth plane have the same shape should be a good indication that this was in fact due to the technical limitation of the time (And btw, who are you to contradict the actual designer of the plane on that topic ?!)
It was based on faceting because that's all the computers at the time could handle.
It's like saying that 3d graphics lighting can only be done by rasterized rendering. Of course, now that we have enough GPU processing power, we can also use ray tracing.
In time, all light calculations/shadow calculations will be done with ray tracing, but for now, that's unimaginable because ray tracing runs slowly on current hardware.
The US bombed the Chinese embassy for revenge of reverse engineering a plane shot down just a few weeks earlier by the Serbs? Wow, the Chinese are incredibly fast! And the US military so quick to act!
Yeah. It is a persistent conspiracy theory about the embassy bombing that is still around until this day (in particular in China and Serbia, of course ...).
Here is an article from AP written ten years later, essentially saying that the Chinese based their J-20 stealth fighter on the pieces of the F-117 laying on the ground in Serbia:
Considering that F-117 was based on thrown out Soviet paper (which was declared to be publishable in the open by Soviets), they migh have at most taken a look at materials used for coating, but the materials weren't that great as F-117 based itself on the shape not absorbing capability of materials...
Additional data point: the US made no attempt at salvaging or destroying the wreckage... but then bombed an embassy to make a point?
Oh and it's not like that was the only time poor recon resulted in bombs dropped in another place during the intervention. The execution of it is certainly not a high in NATO's history.
The paper is mentioned also in the book "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed". The Skunk Works' design team used the equations published by Soviet physicist and mathematician Petr Ufimtsev on electromagnetic wave reflection to create the plane.
There's a claim out there from a former Delta operator that an Intelligence Support Activity / Task Force Orange guy put the laser designator on the wrong building. I have no way of knowing if it's true or not.
The story would go like this: Chinese agents working out of the Belgrade embassy go and buy the pieces of the F177 and collect them at the embassy. The US bombs the embassy knowing that even though it is an act war against China, China is in no position to respond.
