Nied

I've finnally goten a chance to go over the pictures I took (over 125Mb worth!), and right now I'm organizing and resizing them to post. The air show was good, but I'll leave the full review for my thread with the pictures.

To me it looks like the red on white paint schemes they use on current Navy trainers.

The F/A-18 speedbrake might be tough, I was under the impression that they had been wired shut with thier actuators removed to save weight. Don't they use oposite rudders for brakes now? 1st TFW F-15s arent' as likely as you might think, last time I was there the F-15 was an A modxel from the Massachusetts ANG. F-22 looks doable, according to the shows website it will be on static display. The Andrews show is normally a pretty good place to see aircraft that aren't yet in service. I remember as early as '96 or '97 they had a Super Hornet on display (complete with all the most advanced weaponry hanging off the wings JSOWs, AIM-9Xs, SLAM-ERs and JDAMs). There should also be a V-22 and JSF on the grounds (I'm guessing the X-35C sinc the A/B is sitting in the New Air and space meuseum with it's engine out. That and Pax river is just across the bay). I will of course get as many good tomcat photos as I can

I'm going home (to Maryland) next week to see the show at Andrews. From the looks of it, it's going to be a good one. I just hope the weather holds this time (the last couple of years I went the weather was low overcast so nothing could fly). Hopefully my mom will let me borrow her digital camera so I can get some good shots. Any requests?

Cool Flyable YF-19+Megascenery Southern California=very familiar image (just think how cool it'll look once it has textures):

Those look awesome! One of the things I forgott to mention is how much I love the Virtual Cockpit. You did an excelent job with the floor screens, it really feels open with them. I cna't wait till you get some gauges in there.

Yeah but would you notice it as it wizzed by dodging micro missiles?

New ones (they may only be for FS2k4) are 16-bit color 565, 555-1 and 444-4 I beileive those numbers refer to the actual size of the texture, and finnally there's the 32 bit 888-8 which of course looks the best. I think the SDK has better info.

The cockpit is so tough to make out from the exterior shots that I doubt they'd put much effort into getting a match. I didn't know they only had As in Japan, that might actually explain things. From the level of detail it looks like they got in there and crawled around in a real thing.

What format are you using for the skins? DXT3, or one of the new high res ones (565 or 888-8 etc)? Too bad about the mirrored textures, that actually kills a lot of my ideas (most of them are pretty text heavy). As for the flaps issue you might try going here, it has a full guide to the guts of FS2004.

Interesting theory but it doesn't explain how they got the cockpit so acurately wrong. What originally tipped me off about the Shin having an F-14A/B cockpit was the extremely accurate interior shots. It's obvious that they did some extensive research for those shots since you can make out pretty acurate representations of all the gauges in all the right places. They even have Edgar hit the right controlls to deploy the counter measures. I could see them making the mistake of putting the wrong cockpit in their 3-D model but I don't see why they then go through the trouble to give such an acurate inacurate cockpit for the interior shots.

You left out their history using the VF-0. I had always figured that in the macross timeline the VF-84 Jolly Rodgers squadron had met an untimely demise, and that the VF-1 Wolfpack had picked up the name and tail insignia to honor them (perhaps VF-84 went down defending whatever ship VF-1 was stationed on at the time). Later on when the Jolly Rodgers transfered over to the Spacy, the UN was a little squemish about the pirate connotations of the name (especially with the anti-UN making claims about stolen technology) and forced them to change it to Skull. edited for some spelling errors.

Been busy lately so I wasn't able to try it till now. Now I know how that plane killed so many people. It takes off like a rocket (made it to FL 100 in less than a minute), but trying to get it back on the ground is a bitch, especially since I can't get the flaps to deploy (I uninstalled FS2k2 a long time ago). You might want to work on the low speed handleing a bit, she'll stall at around 180kts which seems a bit high especially for an FSW plane (it's also why it's such a bitch to land, that and the twitchy throttle). I love the roll rate, multi-point rolls are increadibly eay once you get the hang of it, you just have to use small inputs. If you push the stick all the way to the stops she'll just keep rolling for a second or two after you've centered the stick. I'd love to do some skins for this, I've had a couple of ideas for VF-19 schemes that I've never been able to do since I never had a good blank for it.

I've always been of the opinion that the Seiran-99 was extensively redesigned to become the Sv-51. Their fighter modes are similar (different wings and different placement of the canards) and thier batroid modes are strikingly so.

I always figured it was a combination of factors. The Serbs changed the arrangement of thier radars faster than the Air Force thought they would, thus the carefully ploted flight plan the USAF had drawn up around Serb radar installations actually sent it right through them. As soon as the Nighthawk's pilot saw a radar lock on his RWR he took evasive action, which included a dive. Unfortunetly the dive took him under the cloud deck, with the still shining city lights illuminating them the plane stood out like a sore thumb against the clouds. After that it was an easy matter for any AAA gunner to start blasting away. To make matters worse any bullet holes in the plane would have caused it's radar cross section to blossom, making it easey prey for any radar guided SAMs in the area.

Black is a poor color for any operations (except really high altitude like the Blackbird or U-2, or situations where you want to be seen like the RAF trainers). The lighter grey they're painting them now isn't ideal for night operations but it is superior to the current black. One of the contributing reasons why that F-117 got shot down over Kosovo was because it dived below the cloud layer and was spotted against the clouds by visually guided AAA which proceeded to shoot it full of holes. If it had been painted grey it probably could have made it back above the clouds before it was spotted.

A Nighthawk in Raptor's clothing Looks like the Air Force is starting to wise up. This was something that has always bugged me about the F-117. Black has to be one of the worst colors to paint an aircraft if you don't want to be seen (with the noteable exception of high altitude operations). In the vast majority of cases it makes your plane stick out like a sore thumb, so much so that the RAF now paints it's trainers black.

I doubt they are actual ARMD class ships, but the fact that they are so completely differnt from the rest of the Meagroad's hull sugests that they are seperate ships and not integral structures. I still haven't seen anyone come up with a convincing argument for why anyone would go through the trouble of making those parts look like seperate ships (complete with seperate bridges and reverse thrusters), instead of building them directly into the hull.

In DYRL it apears that the Macross's bridge is just an open area. In the TV series the bidge deck is fully enclosed, meaning that even if an attack breached the giant outer window, the bridge crew would still survive.

It seems that folds only bend the FTL rule, they don't break it.

Impossible. A ship can not simply be stationary, it can only be motionless in relation to it's surroundings. The Macross may have been stationary in relation to the surface of the Earth, but the Earth's surface was moving at about 1,000 mph (IIRC that is the rotational speed of the Earth), while the Earth moved rather rapidly around the sun, which itself was orbiting the center of the mily way, I could go on like this. The point is that a vessel can not simply be motionless, nothing can. It's one of the most basic tenets of reletivity.

Well those are insignia of the Zentradi Military not the Zentradi race. Considering that the main foe any VF-4 would face is the Zentradi Military, putting their insignia for kill marks makes sense (wether they're racially Zentradi or not).

The radiosity render looks good. Real good! It's still dirty but it's very subtle, which is what you'd get when a plane is in heavy use but well maintained. I like how the reflectivity of the paint changes subtly, it makes it look like the paint has oxidized in the sun a little. You might see if you can lighten the dirt up just one notch more, when you combine it with your dirt streak map it might get too dirty again.

What I did when I put kill markings on one of my color schemes (an alternate Sudnowners scheme actually) was to just use Zentradi military insignia. It follows with the old WWII tradition of putting the national flag of your kill on the side of the plane rather than a picture of a fighter.

This thread is outpacing my ability to post stuff on it so I'll try to sum up. The F-35 is not an F-16 or F/A-18, and it was not designed to do everything they are capable of doing. It was designed to do everything they are doing better than they do it now. Think of it this way: the vast majority of combat missions flown by both the F/A-18 and the F-16 are ground attack missions, generally thier loadout consists of 2 PGMs in the 2,000 lb class (normally either JDAMs or Paveways), 3 fuel tanks, 2 AMRAAMs, and 2 Sidewinders. A F-35 could carry all that minus the sidewinders, and carry it all internally, and thet does more than just affect stealth. As someone quoted earlier "I don't care what it was designed to do, I care what it can do," well a F-16 was designed to break mach 2 but it can only do that while carrying a pair of sidewinders, try hanging the loadout I just listed above on it and it would be hard pressed to break the sound barrier. A F-35 on the other hand might only be able to hit a top speed of Mach 1.5, but it will do it with an operational warload (note that if they added a pair of sidewinders on the wingtips it might kill stealth but it would also lower grag by breaking up wing tip vortices).