Had an in-flight emergency when the airspeed/mach indicators went u/s! Landed successfully. On reviewing the cockpit cam I saw that the airspeed HAD come back online during final approach, but I was so fixated on the picture, relating it to past landings in order to guess the speed, that I hadn't even noticed!
From engine start, sorry, I meant TWO engine starts, you knew this was a new kind of flight sim experience.
"Taxiing quickened the pulse as the Eurofighter bobbed and bounced on its suspension. Sunlight glinted through the canopy, wheel brakes on, engine spooled up and the beast was straining at the leash.
Brakes off and the tyres rumbled... 120 knots and the dragon leapt into the air."
MiGMan, 1998
One of the crowning achievements in the Golden Decade of flight sims which presaged the fluidity and detail we would take for granted in the years ahead.
Fun in the Hurricane.
--/o\-- Finally managed a reasonable take-off --/o\-- To formate or not to formate, that is the question!
--/o\-- Tally Ho!
--/o\-- The cliffs of Dover
--/o\-- St. Margaret's Cathedral
--/o\-- Landing... they can buff that out!
Dam Busters opened the bomb bay door to a new experience in Microsoft Combat Flight Sim 2 - that of the bomber pilot. You need a different mindset than when flying the fighters - accurate station keeping is everything on the final bomb run.
Breaking every rule in the book I fly under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, through a football stadium, and frighten the diners 60 floors up in Centrepoint Tower's revolving restaurant! Oh, and it's at night in a Vought Corsair, which Microsoft thoughtfully provided for us in every copy of Flight Sim 2004.
And then I land at Sydney International Airport... probably in the wrong direction...
One of my wobbly test flights!
In the default Bell 205B helicopter, taking a sedate flight over the strip in Vegas. Landmark areas of scenery such as this received particular attention by the developers and they pushed the software and hardware of the day to the limits to achieve this amount of detail. Compare this to the same flight in FS2002
F-86 Sabre extended dogfight in MiG Alley by Rowan (1999)
One of MiGMan's wobbly test flights! This video is more for the enthusiast, consisting as it does of 3 minutes dogfight footage of the F-86 Sabre in this classic sim.
One of MiGMan's wobbly test flights! This video is more for the enthusiast, consisting as it does of 3 minutes dogfight footage of the F-86 Sabre in this classic sim.
This was tough... they shot at me (with live ordnance) ... I thought it was supposed to be a training sortie... ; -(
Check out the next video where I (hopefully) PASS this mission.
This was tough... they shot at me (with live ordnance) ... I thought it was supposed to be a training sortie... ; -(
Check out the next video where I (hopefully) PASS this mission.
Voice Control in MiG-29 Fulcrum Mission 05: Dogs of War: PASS
I did escort the fighters successfully. My wingman did most of the work as I directed him via voice command.
And then I took out the enemy AWACS (scratch one MiG-29...).
This is the first video I've made with voice control, using Voice Attack.
I make so much more use of the wingman when I can simply talk to him rather than hunt around in the dark for keys!
Flight testing my ridgy-didge state-of-the-art hotas voice-controlled Fulcrum!
1. Pan view working and mapped to the HOTAS. Not TrackIR but pretty good for a 20 year old sim that doesn't support mouse look.
2. Voice control for control surfaces (flaps, gear, chute), wingman.
3. Draw distance? Can anyone help? I doubled the draw distance in the MIG29.INI file, but every time you enter the sim it overwrites it back to 26.
4. Low speed, high alpha
5. and... I didn't take the situation at the threshold seriously enough...
Night flying! - - - Dangerous - - - Exciting! - - - Even more so when you're being shot at...
Actually the graphics in MiG-29 Fulcrum look stunning at night, and of course draw distance becomes irrelevant.
Enjoy this one!
Second attempt at this bombing mission. The bombing is very forgiving in this sim... but then we ran into the most 'Top Gun' helo pilot of all time!
Then I shot him down. Eventually I shot him down.
I found the explanation for the 'Top Gun' helo pilot in the documentation for the mission editor. Flight models and aircraft models are independent... and the manual warns not to assign an F-16 flight model to a chopper... which is exactly what some wag at Novalogic did here!
A flight of Japanese a/c overflew Haleiwa as I climbed into the P-40. It took a few minutes to catch up with them, by which time I was over the harbour and all hell was breaking loose! Smoke trails were everywhere as FLAK and cannon took their toll.
11 kills on this mission! Woo hoo ! That has to be a personal best! Mind you - I did use over 8,000 rounds of ammunition (using unlimited ammo) and I only had a 4 % hit rate.
It was a 90 mile flight to Pearl and an ideal opportunity to practise a bit of formation flying. The SBD's held a nice steady box formation at 1500 feet.
A scramble in the F-4F and my first move was to crash head on! Tried again and my wingtip was shot off on the first pass. Next time up friendly FLAK damamged my control surfaces os I limped back to land on the Enterprise, Meanwhie all hell was breaking loose and some unlucky pilot collided with me as I turned to finals.
Several attempts later and I managed to stay in one piece and apparently help to drive off most of the Japanese Dive Bombers... satisfied but weary I landed on the carrier.... only just !
Very heavy FLAK in this mission - each time my plane sustained grievous damage.
Needless to say I didn't hit the carrier once either.
Definitely a challenge!
What a magnificent flight model, so fluid! Lots of things to learn on this aircraft - as evidenced by me flying the first 10 minutes with the airbrake extended!
I'd spent some hours mapping my HOTAS and Voice Attack computer, and saw no arrestor hook command on the official list. Must be automated, I thought, wrongly. After the second bolter I whipped out my future-phone (it was 1979) and searched the inter-web with Alta-Vista. Aha! H = hook. Kind of important to know that.
Su-27 Flanker was designed by a team of Russian programmers to run on 386 and low end 486 machines. The project was taken on by SSI and revised to SVGA graphics resolution. The Russian designers didn't have access to the faster PC's, and as a result their code was very efficient and it ran very smoothly despite being state of the art! The" sim recreateds the Crimean peninsula in great detail and pits you, in the Su-27 Flanker, against the latest Russian and NATO aircraft, armour, ships and SAMs. All control surfaces move during flight and the attention to detail is extraordinary!"
On an unusually grey Sydney afternoon in October 2006 MiGMan was a guest of Microsoft at the launch of their new flagship product - Microsoft Flight Simulator X.
The creme-de-la-creme of Australia's gaming journalists gathered at Kingsford Smith Airport, Sydney, and embarked on a champagne flight over Sydney Harbour in a C-47, the military transport version of the Douglas DC-3.