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Falcon 4.0 Plus - Part 2
By Bob "Groucho" MarksThe iBeta team, in an attempt to keep fully-laden A-10s from swooping about the sky like Patty Wagstaff on acid, created new aircraft performance limiters for RP2. With 17 newly-created limiter points, like the F-16 digital FCS has, iBeta has vastly improved how the AI aircraft fly. These limiting points are in the .dat files in the “acdata” directory.
While there are at my count 37 different fixed-wing aircraft in the F4 universe, these share from a pool of 24 different flight models. These are generally grouped to make sense: the KC-10 shares the B-52 flight model, for example. More FMs can be added, however, by using F4Browse.
Tom “Saint” Launder has an excellent site on Falcon flight models at http://www.jps.net/tomldr/fmodel.htm. On his site, Saint goes through the process of adding individual FMs step-by-step. He also analyses what some of those numbers in the easily editable .dat files mean and offers up some .dat files that more closely mirror their real-life counterparts. This is fascinating stuff, and an excellent reference for those interested in prying the lid off of the Falcon FMs.
A hog in Silkman’s skin.
I highly recommend you at least load up Tom’s A-10 model. The original is a lethargic pig of an airplane, barely able to get out of its own way. Tom’s model gives it some “ooomph” and models its AB thrust to match max Mil thrust, neatly sidestepping the fact that the Warthog doesn’t have afterburners.
With the throttle firewalled, you hear the AB lighting off, but your fuel flow remains at a reasonable rate. I still dispute this, and though it matches up with “real” numbers, I find it hard to believe that its real-life counterpart has to drive around WFO when carrying a large bomb load. As Saint says, however, this is more art than science, and more tweaking will surely be done to help these flight models along.
There are other problems, the lack of operable flaps is one of the major ones. The ‘Hog becomes a useful tool in your campaigns particularly on close-range OCA strikes and its forte’- BAI. And WOW what a cannon. Armored columns go up like Ford Pintos when hit with a flight of Hogs.
