Royal_Flight

If I could choose a current AI aircraft to be made flyable I’d pick the Defiant. Could be a lot of fun with a human gunner. I’d love to see the Sunderland become flyable too, but that’s a lot of work and it possibly isn’t worth the effort to include it, at least not right now. There are a few new types that would be cool too but honestly, I can’t think of any real gaps that need to be filled.

Strongly disagree.

I’m not fussed if VR happens or not but I would like to see 5.0 released, so I’m glad development isn’t being held up just for that. If they add it later on that’s cool for those who are interested, but hopefully it doesn’t slow down progress towards any future releases. I’d rather have a functional, high-quality 2D flight sim with periodic updates and a future roadmap with an active playerbase, before anything extra like VR gets added.

I’ve been following the development of TF5.0 over the last couple of months with increasing interest, and I now can’t wait for the release. I was all set to take the Tomahawk up for a spin first, and it’s still probably the aircraft I’m most looking forward to flying. But the video reminded me how many cool things are on the way... the CR.42 and Gladiator combo look like great fun for a dogfight, and the Wellington is easily the most ambitious bomber in any modern flight sim and I’m dead keen to give it a go, especially if I can have other human crew in it. And I wasn’t expecting to fall for the D.520 quite so much either. Basically, the point is there’s a lot of great work represented in the video and I’m keen to get flying.

I think it was Ugra Media. And they have a bit of a track record of questionable performance so far. They were behind the notoriously poor Normandy map for DCS. They were also tasked to create the Po-2 model, which we were told was a test to see if they could work on new aircraft for release as collector planes to add more types between releases. The Po-2 took well over a year from announcement to delivery, and since its release we’ve seen no more Ugra-built collector planes which would suggest they didn’t pass the test. They then had FC vol.1 to work on, and took slightly more than 24 months to port updated 3D models from ten existing aircraft from RoF into the BoX engine, which would not involve any work on the FMs. At the time, it was implied that FCv1 shouldn’t take long to release as all the assets were present in RoF. It also seemed likely that FC would have a career mode. After two years there is no singleplayer content and the devs have been openly questioning the financial viability of a second volume. I’d assess that 1C had to do a lot more work than expected to FC to pick up the slack for Ugra, and as a result with limited resources were not able to work on career or anything else. We’ve had BoBo released and BoN announced, but no mention of an FC vol.2 despite vol.1 being declared complete. This might suggest that it’s not worth contracting Ugra to work on more RoF ports, as 1C likely don’t have the manpower to work on two separate projects but they’ll inevitably have to bail Ugra out partway through. Obviously, 1C are committed to releasing a project once it is announced. Tank Crew is being worked on by a different studio - it will be interesting to see if a follow-up to that is announced once it is completed. That might give an indication as to whether it is the subject matter or the studio that is unprofitable. If Ugra have been working on the BoBo map, they will have been being supervised by 1C. However, it covers a wide area. A large map is presumably more difficult to quality check which could easily result in the sloppy Ugra errors listed above not being discovered. It’s likely there are contractual factors involved which mean 1C cannot just drop Ugra straight off the bat. But, with the release of BoBo and a more limited FC than was seemingly initially envisioned, and the announcement of BoN; I would imagine 1C will be evaluating their relationship with Ugra going forward. We know 1C is a small team and resources are said to be scarce. I don’t imagine there’s much room for passengers. Just my observations.

Why make an La-7 when we could just reskin a 190D? That would save even more time.

Also, gunners can and do die. I’ve brought home enough dead gunners in my time to confirm that. And human players in the gunner position can be injured in the same way as pilots (red screen and blurred vision) so AI gunners likely can be injured too, although what effect this has on them I don’t know.

Cant decide if that’s beautiful or hideous.

I think this is why these discussions keep coming up. Everyone remembers the negatives. Fighter pilots all recall the three times they get shot down out of ten attacks on the Pe-2, and assume the gunners are OP. Then the bomber pilots remember the seven times out of ten they got shot down in a Pe-2, and assume the fighter pilots are being unreasonable. In practice it’s probably just about even. As a bomber pilot maybe I’m biased but it’s far from being a game-breaking issue.

Something like ARMA’s ACRE (Advanced Combat Radio Environment), suitably adjusted, would be a great addition. It uses different types of radios for different purposes as physical inventory items, that are limited by range and reception. That could be a creative way to simulate different types and quality of radios between aircraft - the P-39 isn’t the best fighter in game but has a better radio than a La-5, so there’s a historical benefit to using it. Maybe add an option to remove the radio gear to save weight, so if you know you’re going to be lone-wolfing it but it gives you an extra few miles per hour it would be worth doing.

There’s an unsubstantiated but likely story about the Tu-144, the thinly-veiled Soviet ripoff of Concorde, stating that the designers knew the Soviets were trying to steal blueprints to reverse-engineer the aircraft so they included deliberate mistakes. The Soviet designers replicated the errors which contributed to the notorious unreliability of the finished aircraft.

I would find it hugely entertaining. It wouldn’t take too much effort to create a fairly deep ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ simulation with existing assets, with merchant ships and escorts facing commerce raiders. Maybe U-boats. With a flyable Sunderland and Fw 200 there are quite a lot of options for gameplay - locate the convoy, attack/defend it, hunting submarines, engaging enemy aircraft; if the aircraft are multi-crewable then there are more options for people to navigate, observe or spot targets, maning gunner positions and aiming ordinance. All of which could make for a really deep and interesting way to fly, in both single- and multi-player. Add a few extra game mechanics as well, like torpedos, or the ability to launch Sea Hurricanes from Catapult Aircraft Merchantmen, and this would be a really unique experience that no other flight sim could offer.

Meanwhile the F-35 first flew nearly two decades ago and it’s still not finished...

Option 3 seems a no-brainer, but I doubt we’ll see it. The devs aren’t capable of making this work and the engine isn’t sophisticated enough to pull it off. Even if research could be done and there was a big enough potential customer base, having player-controlled, complex FM four-engined bombers with detailed crew positions and interiors is too much for the Great Battles series to manage, so it won’t ever happen. This isn’t even taking other considerations into account; whether flying for five hours on a constant heading at 30,000ft only to be hit by flak and die before reaching the target would make for compelling gameplay; what the impact of low-level divebombing B-17 gunships with AI gunners might do to multiplayer balance; or whether flying a single B-17 with a fully-human crew of eleven over the village in the Tank Crew map would set anyone’s processor on fire. It’s a shame as heavy bombers could be cool, but not now, and definitely not here.

This is the pushback, though. This is the carefully-worded, measured and considered pushback from people who don’t want to see the game fail, but are concerned about this particular serious issue which is holding the whole series back. If the devs were switched on they’d see this as honest feedback and act on it, especially as we’re still in early access. If if it gets left until after a final release then it’ll be too late; there will be a proper bit of pushback against it and that’ll result in negative coverage and lost sales, and then the people who don’t want any European theatres will claim it’s because the setting is unpopular and the series will be stuck in the east until it dies from inertia. I had had a brief skim of youtube and you’re right, most of the P-47 content isn’t recent. As for P-39... you seldom see people flying the Airacobra online and the only time it gets discussed on here is in the context of engine timers. Remember the pages and pages of enthusiastic discussion before it was released, and how eagerly anticipated it was? Hopefully this gets some attention before the serious pushback happens.