[X] My Assistant

[Mercer]

Well, now I feel like a jackass going back to talking about video games... but I'm used to it.

The most fun I've had playing a flight simulator was one that came out around '90, for a Soviet Fighter/Bomber called the SU-25 Frogfoot. It was a reasonably detailed flight simulator, but the most complicated part of it was the navigation which I never mastered. The only two missions I could do were blowing up a bridge (since I could find the river, and once I found the river I could follow it to the bridge), and defending the airstrip (since you took off and started getting attacked, so there was no navigating to be done).

The bridge mission was fun because I never could master the speed/distance/altitude calculation to tell me when to drop my bombs. I mean, the plane was supposed to be a few hundred feet up, going a few hundred miles an hour, and the bridge was 5 or 10 meters wide. (Approaching from the river meant my bombing run was always perpendicular to the river, if I broke off from the river and tried to come back around parallel to the bridge, I'd never find it again.) Even using the "retarded" bombs that had fins to slow their airspeed and make their fall more direct, I couldn't do it. The only way I could hit the bridge was to come in so low that I was practically scraping the streetlamps as I went by. An altitude of about 30' I could work with. (At that altitude, it didn't matter if you used retarded bombs or not.) On particular mission I remember because I came in too low; I was concentrating on lining up and I didn't notice until the last second that I was actually level with the bridge. I pulled up hard, nailed the spacebar (which dropped the bombs, I'm assuming the actual SU-25 Frogfoot used a different configuration, but maybe not) and dropped the bombs from about 5' up. I noticed that from that altitude, you could see the brickwork of the bridge clearly, which I thought was a nice touch on the part of the programmers. (I mean, the bridge was usually just a thin grey line intersecting a large blue line. This was early 90's graphics and given the amount of text the manual gave to calculating how to drop bombs, it didn't seem like they'd think many people would get that close.) I assume my plane didn't blow up only because the game wasn't programmed to accept planes being in range of their own bomb detonations. (I don't think the bombs actually did damage, I think it was just a "you hit or you didn't" type of thing.)

The airfield defense was a fun one, because it was just dogfighting. American planes were attacking, you scrambled, and they kept sending planes until you died. If there was a way to win (and the game said there wasn't), I never found it. One particular game, after I had mastered contact-range bombing runs, I was doing pretty well shooting down the US F-16's. You only had so many air-to-air missiles, but I had finally gotten the hang of leading enemy aircraft with my cannons. You had a radar screen, so there was a lot of lining up the dots and firing. And as I was coming in on the tail of a wounded F-16 to finish it off, another plane zipped by me going the other way, with nothing on the radar except the plane I was targeting. I only caught a glimpse of it, but I could see it was a solid black wedge, completely alien to the grey F-16's I had been dueling. I was in a dogfight with an unknown number of F-117 stealth fighters.

I fought the good fight, but since I had no way to track them, this meant flying in tight circles until I glimpsed something, trying to orientate on it and fire off a few shots before it broke contact, all the while I would get missile-locked or shot from nowhere. I got pretty well plastered, and by that point my little plane icon was lit up like a Christmas tree. (I'm assuming the actual SU-25 Frogfoot used a different system, but maybe not.) Having shot down all the F-16's (maybe 4 of them), and not being able to engage the F-117's at all (I think I have that name right), I decided to pack it in. I was still over my airfield, so I attempted an abbreviated landing. Lining up on the airstrip my heading and airspeed stabilized, and the stealth fighters shot the crap out of me. I touched down on the tarmac with one engine red and the other destroyed, and the rest of my plane either orange or red. Rolled to a stop, the level ended, and I decided it was time to welcome our new glorious capitalist masters.

Good times. That game came out about the same time as an old combat racing game called DeathTrack, if they gives you a frame of reference.

[Jhaiisiin]

Sounds like despite the roadblocks you ran into, you really enjoyed it. And I can just imagine getting freaked out as a F-117 (you were right on that, btw) streaked by. At that point, you're all wits and skill to survive those kind of fights, and they don't have to be close. Damned missiles can hit you from a decent range.

Though in reality, you would have had the tiniest radar blip anytime they opened their bays to fire missiles your way. Wouldn't have been much, but at least you'd have some warning of impending doom. Hooray for radar bounce.

[Kyoto Kid]

...speaking of Russian aircraft simulations, Several programmers are working on a Tupolev TU-114 mod (check out U-Tube). The TU-114 was a civilian airliner (well as much as you could call it "civilian" in the old Soviet days) that was designed off of the TU-97 bomber platform. Like the Bear, it employed four sets of counter rotating props on turboshafts with swept wings and tail surfaces. Until the 747 took to the air in the late 60s, the TU-114 had the distinction of being the largest airliner ever built (in overall size). It also boasted a speed that nearly matched the pure jet 707 and a range capable of flying Non Stop from Moscow to New York. Here is a very rare photo of this behemoth at old Idlewild (now JFK) when it was used by Nikita Khrushchev for his visit to the US in 1959.

TU-114 at Idlewild

(you'll have to scroll down a little)

The size is very apparent with the Pan Am service truck (which could literally be driven underneath) in the foreground and the tail of the Constellation at the right.

...pulling an Iron Eagle with this baby could very wall have started (in Major Kong's words from Dr. Strangelove) "all out nuclear confrontation toe to toe with the Russkies."

However, I'd still love to get at the controls of this beastie even if it is only through Flight Simulator

[/derail]

[X-Kalibur]

For my 2 nuyen's worth I always found IL-2 Sturmovik to be a really detailed (and yet fun) combat flight simulator. I have had the chance to play around in one of the real F-16 flight sims though and the whole time I was thinking to myself "I wish this was an F-15E". I couldn't stand the Fly-by-Wire system, and I will never give a character move-by-wire for that very reason, screw the essence cost.

[Kyoto Kid]

[Moon-Hawk]

[Jhaiisiin]

Correction: "The P-51 was like a race car with wings."

[Moon-Hawk]

[hyzmarca]

[Kyoto Kid]

...If you've flown in one I think you'd agree with my "literary faux pas". But, let's not get hung up on a semantics derail as I've seen happen to other threads.

As a matter of fact, before the advent of gas turbines in the 90s, the engines of choice for hydroplanes were the Rolls Royce/Packard Merlin V1650 and the Allison V1710 (which powered the P-38, P-39, & P-40). The P-51 also remains one of the more popular planes in Unlimited Air racing circles. Dago Red (a modified P-51) holds the all time piston engine speed record of 507.1 mph set at the Reno Nationals in 2006 (the P-51 I rode is was also modified for air racing as well). Yeah, in this case, "race car with wings" is appropriate... :grinbig:

[edit]

...oh and hyz, thanks....

[Moon-Hawk]

edit: screw it. I'm just being a jerk anyway, sorry about the derail.
edited: multiple times for language

[Kyoto Kid]

...no prob. I've become fairly vehement at times myself, as in my responses to the Momhammer and Orbital Movement threads.

[/derail]

[Mercer]

I remember a James Bond movie where they put wings on a car and flew it... Moonraker maybe. Nope, a quick check of Wikipedia says it was The Man with the Golden Gun and it was an AMC Matador. (I was thinking it was a Chevelle, but close enough.) Years ago I saw a special on the special effects of James Bond movies, and that one stands out because the corkscrew ramp was the first stunt to use computer modelling (and the stuntman nailed it on the first take, so the modelling must have been okay), and the flying car which was apparently real. I've heard the one used in the movie was a model, but it was based on a real design. (Apparently the real one they had could only fly about 500 meters, so a model had to be used.)

Looking that up, I came across The Mizar, a flying car built out of a Pinto of all things. Its almost hard to believe the creator died when it crashed.

Anyhoo, literally flying cars.

[Riley37]

James Bond was in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"? Wow.

[knasser]

[Kyoto Kid]

[Fortune]

I love Dumpshock! :D

Thanks KK.

[Kyoto Kid]

...my pleasure.

BTW, one of my favourite shows is Connections. :grinbig:

[Wounded Ronin]

[X-Kalibur]

[Kyoto Kid]

...back to the OP (and yes guilty as charged for all the [derail]s this thread). In the first run of my RiS campaign the PCs made off with an Antonov AN335 ( the largest plane in the awakened world - yep the Russkies still like makin' em big). With help from the team's decker, they basically pulled a "Clint" from Firefox taking out, then posing as the original crew for a flight to ferry an undisclosed cargo back to Moscow. Once out of Serbian airspace, they turned west landing in Brussels with a story that they were defectors flying Croatian refugees and liberated POWs to freedom. The act went as far as having buses and vans pull up to the planes to make it appear like they were shuttling people to a hangar.

...and, the real payload?

Two experimental drones with an exotic propulsion system that were stolen during trials in the Sahara and which ended up in Serbian/Russian hands.

...the only problem, now they had this huge and rather distinctive Russian cargo jet to dispose of.

[hyzmarca]

Dispose of!? They should take it to Cape Suzette and start an air freight business.

[kzt]

You just walk away. There is no good way to fence that. And no group of shadowrunners is gong to live to enjoy the money if they hang around it for long.