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Falcon 4.0 Plus - Part 2
By Bob "Groucho" MarksChoose your Own Coffin- The Flyanyplane Patch
OK, enough of that swampy mess. All that talk of lawyers makes me feel so dirty. As part of the latest iBeta Realism Patch, a very cool feature called flyanyplane has been enabled. What this does is allow you, the human pilot, to fly any of the available fixed-wing aircraft in Falcon, be it Red or Blue.
I initially viewed this feature as a gimmick, something similar to the different “skins” you can put on other a/c in Jane’s USAF. Now that I’ve put some dissimilar aircraft time under my belt, however, I’m less skeptical. This has some real promise; something that has the potential to break F4 open like a piñata.
Now before you rub your hands together and slobber over the possibility of flying your highly detailed A-10 north of the FLOT, wipe your chin and take a moment to check out this excerpt of the iBeta RP2 ReadMe:
Cool, huh?
Although one could question whether-or-not having the ability to fly any aircraft in the F4 world as being “realistic”, we thought that it would be a fun option to add. We are not really changing any of the realism that is included in the F4 world; we are just adding the opportunity to fly additional airframes.
Modifying F4 to allow players to fly any of the aircraft in the F4 world involved placing wheels on the previously non-flyable aircraft as well as giving them radars. While we understand why a plane would need wheels, we are not sure why the MPS engineers required that flyable aircraft must have radar installed. Possibly this has to do with AI. What this means is that certain aircraft have been given radars to allow players to fly them, but they do not have a radar installed in real life. This is one accommodation to realism we thought it necessary to accommodate.
You will notice when flying other aircraft that you are limited by only having access to the F-16 cockpit. Externally the graphics are of the plane you chose, but obviously since there are no detailed graphics of each and every aircraft’s cockpit, we are currently stuck with the F-16’s cockpit.
You will note that you have access to all the weapons you loaded up through the SMS pages of the F-16’s MPD. For DPRK, Russian, and Chinese aircraft, you will also notice that you have access to their specific weapons – Archers, Atolls, etc. These weapons have the same performance characteristics as when the enemy shoots them, which may be quite different from their US counterparts.
The ReadMe goes on to explain how to fly these aircraft in TEs, but makes no mention of the ability to fly in a campaign. You can, and your pilot logs kills and flight time just as when you drive the Viper. Simply apply the flyanyplane patch, fire up iBeta RP2.1 F4, and select a squadron on the map in the initial Campaigns UI screen. Click the F-16 and wait for the tasking to begin!