"we can't just magically conjure missing sources into existence"

[343KKT_Kintaro]

To fellow pilot "Ram399", who stated "we can't just magically conjure missing sources into existence".

 

My answer as follows (and as copy-pasted from a thread that is locked at present):

 

Yes we can, it's called art, it's called creation. A principle that applies to film, litterature, theatre, painting... and PC-platform-intended combat flight simulation.

 

"Tora! Tora! Tora!" was released in theatres in 1970. In application of the principle that you defend, simply imagine, at some point during the second half of the 1960s, the producers' note that might have been intended to the directors of the film: "We have just learned that you intend to use T-6 Texan aircraft to represent Japanese Zero fighters. We are deeply sorry but for the sake of accuracy we cannot finance your film. Truely yours: 20th Century Fox, board of directors."

 

Now please see the following list of a few examples of combat flight sims, all of them set in the Pacific theatre of operations:

 

- Battlehawks 1942 (1988)
- Aces of the Pacific (1992)
- 1942: The Pacific Air War (1994)
- Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 2 (2000)
- IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 (2006)

 

What about their corresponding developers? Have they forbidden themselves to develop all of those simulators... for the sake of accuracy? No, they didn't. They created flight sims for PC platforms so that players around the world are allowed to reenact that specific conflict... and they did it at the state of the art of their time... AND at the state of the available knowledge of their time.

 

If a painter wants to paint a Pacific War scene (oil on canvas, for example) that includes an inner view of a rare Japanese aircraft's cockpit which paneling and instruments are gone forever... he'll do it, end of story. If asked about the documents his painting is based on, he'll refer to the necessary aspect of speculation in his art. What about flight sims? Same thing, flight simulation is an art, and developers are artists, not history professors who owe absolute precision and accuracy to the audience when providing a lecture at the university.

 

Further more, there is no accurate flight simulator on this earth: not even the PC flight sims in the IL-2 series, not even DCS, nor any other having existed or planned to exist. If accuracy would have been an imperiously necessary requirement for the development of a PC flight simulator... there would never had been PC flight simulators.

 

If everything happens as it should, in a world inhabited by flight simulation enthusiasts, and if technology and economy do not regress, there will be sooner or later a Pacific War flight simulator, a simulator worthy of the name, whether 1C Game Studios develops it or not.