1 hour ago, Matchstick said:

(Just an idle thought but does the Marketplace version of the G91 come with the external app to do things like set the PHI system data ?)

I doubt it, Marketplace files are encrypted.

1 hour ago, Waldo Pepper said:

Anyone have their Fiat G.91 for FS20?   Wondering about what to expect from them,   as devs go.

Their Gina came out of nowhere and is a gem.  It's been updated regularly too. Sim Skunk Works and India Foxtrot Echo seem to have the military jets sown up at the moment. 

Do NOT get it from the MS store as it does not support the rather neat load out application.

 

Edited August 25, 20214 yr by DD_Arthur

6 hours ago, Chock said:

doesn't look right at all without something on the wingtips, so I hope they'll be adding the tip tanks to it. 

I thought the exact same. The one I saw in real life as well as in the old Janes games had the tip tanks. Cant say I have ever really looked at pictures of any that didn't. 

The G91 in MSFS is wonderful.

Not that I personally have much success landing it consistently - but that is a reflection of my total lack of skills managing energy in cold war sub sonic jets - nothing to do with the Flight Model  😄

Edited August 26, 20214 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

An iconic aircraft, nope, THE iconic aircraft of the cold war for good and bad reasons. 

I don’t care about the armement as the fun is not here in a Starfighter but I hope that the flight model will reflect her idiosyncrasies. This was a very special aircraft. And I can’t wait for the howling not of the engine (that too) but of the simmers complaining that she flies on rail, that she does not turn in a dime or that that they can't pitch her up without crashing 😃.

On a side note, a Mirage IV, would be welcome too.

Great, thanks for showing this, can't wait..

cheers 😉

4 hours ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

The G91 in MSFS is wonderful.

Not that I personally have much success landing it consistently - but that is a reflection of my total lack of skills managing energy in cold war sub sonic jets - nothing to do with the Flight Model  😄

I'm afraid if you think the G.91 is a handful (and I do as well) the (T)F-104 looks to be in an a whole new class - reading the manual you have can't let throttle drop below ~82% until your wheels are down otherwise the Boundary Layer Control system shuts off and you suddenly lose lift, so landing speeds are around 175kts.

Edited August 26, 20214 yr by Matchstick

Their G91 is very good, and I can confirm only the non-marketplace version has the loadout app for the weapons.  It works very well.

This will definitely be challenging to fly.  As iconic as it is, I think the Luftwaffe suffered quite badly from a high attrition rate with the F-104G.

There will be a lot of great repaint opportunities for this!  When I was a kid (probably still am) I used to buy plastic model kits of aircraft like this multiple times, and then get decals kits and paint them up in as many world air force liveries as I could - I really enjoyed it!  So you can imagine, with flight sim I love to do the same. 
I grab at any decent repaints for aircraft I own.  Sometimes I just like to look at them in the sim - weird I know!

Edited August 26, 20214 yr by bobcat999

The following article on F104 accident rates is stats heavy but interesting.  Among other things they highlight the J-79 engine as a major Achilles Heel for the aircraft causing up to half of losses in some periods studied.

 

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1218&context=jate

 

 

Edited August 26, 20214 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

This aircraft looks stunning, I hope the VC is done to the same level. Unlike that "toy" that was released.

3 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

I don’t care about the armement as the fun is not here in a Starfighter but I hope that the flight model will reflect her idiosyncrasies. This was a very special aircraft. And I can’t wait for the howling not of the engine (that too) but of the simmers complaining that she flies on rail, that she does not turn in a dime or that that they can't pitch her up without crashing 😃.

Nore me but I just want it to be right, wing tanks would be great.

1 hour ago, Matchstick said:

I'm afraid if you think the G.91 is a handful (and I do as well) the (T)F-104 looks to be in an a whole new class - reading the manual you have can't let throttle drop below ~82% until your wheels are down otherwise the Boundary Layer Control system shuts off and you suddenly lose lift, so landing speeds are around 175kts.

Never seen this little jet and it looks great, the VC looks stunning and boy it looks fun to land, it seems it really could do with a AOA "E" bracket for that back end. Not looked into this aircraft at all but it looked great!

1 hour ago, bobcat999 said:

Their G91 is very good, and I can confirm only the non-marketplace version has the loadout app for the weapons.  It works very well.

This will definitely be challenging to fly. 

Hopefully it will,  I never buy from the market place.

 

Anyway am 100% into DCS at the moment and if anyone wants to see what its all about, DCS 2.7 is stunning and Free, the Modules, all of them, are also Free to try for 2 weeks. Now its not a "game" and its a huge learning curve,  make anything in MSFS look like a 172 to learn. I would surgest trying as its all free for 2 weeks the SC (supper carrier) and the F-18C. Kiss good bye to 2 weeks......Joking aside the F-18 is "easy" to learn damm hard to learn above the basics, the F-16 is IMO the easyist. Love landing that at the right AOA and holding it off. The Hardest by a mile (for me)is the mind blowingly good HB F-14A-B. Its breath taking but to fly that well is very skillfull. Well not so much fly but SC land and even a proper airfield landing is hard work to do right and I do mean "right". The A10 is known as the harest to learn.

So a F-18C and SC, learn from the training missions and have a blast....becasue if you have never tried it, you are missing out. Its free, nothing to lose. Anyone must try the F-14A-B out just to have your mind blown.

Edited August 26, 20214 yr by Nyxx

16 minutes ago, Nyxx said:

 

 t, wing tanks would be great.

 .

Hey, the G in F-104G was for Guzzler 😁, right ? 

19 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Hey, the G in F-104G was for Guzzler 😁, right ? 

Nope, it was probably for Ground Nail, one of the many unfortunate nicknames the thing ended up with owing to its appalling loss rate in accidents - particularly in West German use - along with other less than flattering names including the Aluminium Death Tube, the Flying Coffin, the Widowmaker and the Lawn Dart.

Eric Hartmann - who is of course famous for being the most successful fighter pilot ever, with 352 victories to his credit - deemed the F-104G unsuitable for service with the Luftwaffe when he was in command of a fighter wing, saying it had poor handling characteristics and was unsuitable for combat, which was probably true in the sense that whilst it was a good aeroplane for its original Cold War role of getting to a point where it could intercept an incoming Russian Nuclear bomber as soon as possible whilst typically departing in decent weather, it was considerably less well suited to operations in low visibility at low level and up at the sharp end of the Cold War's European front line border between East and West Germany, where it would have had no chance against anything more maneuverable than it (which was pretty much everything with wings which the Russians were fielding).

Johannes 'Macky' Steinhoff - another high-scoring Luftwaffe ace with 176 victories - was also critical of the F-104G when he too was serving in the post-war Luftwaffe, but unlike Hartmann's purely aerodynamic criticisms of the F-104G, Steinhoff went on to attribute some of the appalling losses the Luftwaffe experienced with the type to be the result of poor training of both crews and engineering personnel in the Luftwaffe with what at the time was a very technically advanced aeroplane, and you have to say that this too is probably true. Much of the decision for Germany to buy the F-104 was centred around the lucrative prospect of aircraft and their parts being license-built in Germany, and the skills this would put into the labour force in Germany, which had waned considerably at the point where the nation was still trying to claw its way out of the restrictive limitations which had been placed on it as a result of its surrender at the end of WW2.

At the time, there was a standing joke in the German press concerning the depressing regularity of F-104G crashes all over the country (almost a third of all Starfighters in German air force and navy service were lost in accidents ,with 116 German pilots being killed): 'What do you do if you want to get your hands on your very own Starfighter?' - 'Buy a field in Germany and wait'.

In hindsight it's easy to suggest that an aeroplane such as the F-104 was something which probably wouldn't be accepted into service these days, given that it featured such stupid things as a downward firing ejector seat and was not at all easy to fly which meant there was a quite high probability that a pilot might have to rely on that stupid seat design, but at the height of the Cold War and with all other contemporary considerations not overlooked, not least of which was the fact that the type actually did pretty well in the Vietnam War, we can see why it did actually end up with well over two and a half thousand of the things going into service.

It'll certainly be interesting to have one in MSFS if the difficulties of flying it are reasonably well-simulated, that's for sure.

11 hours ago, DD_Arthur said:

Their Gina came out of nowhere and is a gem.  It's been updated regularly too. Sim Skunk Works and India Foxtrot Echo seem to have the military jets sown up at the moment. 

Do NOT get it from the MS store as it does not support the rather neat load out application.

Thank you,   just what I wanted to hear!

 

The early BAC Lightnings were quite bad as well though, which was arguably the RAF's role equivalent at the time (twin jet though of course).
They had a lot of engine fires early on that would spread through the airframe.   I often heard a similar expression about the Lightning. 'Buy a farm in Norfolk and wait!'.

These types of aircraft were pushing the boundaries of material science and aerodynamics technology at the time, so I can't judge them too harshly.
I would have given them a go as long as they had a good ejector seat! 😆

Edited August 26, 20214 yr by bobcat999

5 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

The early BAC Lightnings were quite bad as well though, which was arguably the RAF's role equivalent at the time (twin jet though of course).
They had a lot of engine fires early on that would spread through the airframe.   I often heard a similar expression about the Lightning. 'Buy a farm in Norfolk and wait!'.

These types of aircraft were pushing the boundaries of material science and aerodynamics technology at the time, so I can't judge them too harshly.
I would have given them a go as long as they have a good ejector seat! 😆

I think (or at least hope) by the time of the F-104G airforces had given up up on the Lockheed downward ejector and put in a normal Martin Baker ?

Edited August 26, 20214 yr by Matchstick