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Hacking F-117A
- holoduke 4y agoLooks like the game retaliator. Is this the same engine?
- netsharc 4y agoAh, I have a memory of waking up early on one 90's Saturday morning and loading up this game on my Pentium 100 to fly bombing missions...
- fer 4y agoI personally miss reading manuals (or at least skimming them if they're big) before playing games. I guess it feels too much like study/work for it to have a market nowadays; last physical games I've bought had basically the same info as in-game help. I recommend this site[0] for all those who want to go down memory lane. Just look at this[1] or that of TFA[2]. [0] https://www.gamesdatabase.org/all_manuals https://www.gamesdatabase.org/all_manuals [1] https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Commodore_64//Manual/formated/B-24_Combat_Simulator_-_1987_-_Strategic_Simulations.pdf https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Commodore_64//Man... [2] https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Microsoft_DOS//Manual/formated/F-117A_Nighthawk_Stealth_Fighter_2.0.pdf https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Microsoft_DOS//Ma...
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoOne of the spiritual successors to MicroProse is Eagle Dynamics, the developer of the DCS World system. If you like that manual, you'll love this one https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/upload/iblock/8e7/24m2drpoauh6mi8x84qklxvb4h2n4hpu/DCS-FA-18C_Early_Access_Guide_EN.pdf https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/upload/iblock/8e7/24m...
- trasz 4y agoAnd those ones: https://publicintelligence.net/u-s-navy-f-18-natops-flight-manuals/ https://publicintelligence.net/u-s-navy-f-18-natops-flight-m.... It's one of the rare cases of manuals for the real thing being applicable to a computer game.
- jamesy0ung 4y ago+1 for DCS, the F/A-18C is totally worth it, best simulation accessible to the civilian. I love every second of it.
- fer 4y agoWow, never heard of them, will check them out, thanks!
- jabl 4y agoCheck Growling Sidewinder for lots of DCS videos (a lot of them guns-only dogfights, but still): https://www.youtube.com/c/GrowlingSidewinder https://www.youtube.com/c/GrowlingSidewinder
- LichenStone 4y agoI've been looking at DCS recently, considering the AV-8B...
- CalRobert 4y agoWhen I was a kid my grandparents would sometimes get me a computer game when I visited. But they had no computer! This meant I could spend the weekend poring over the manual in anticipation. My favorite was SimEarth (200+ pages and spiral bound as I recall!) but TIE Fighter was great too, since the manual was in the form of a novella.
- secretsatan 4y agoI was able to identify most military vehicles for years thanks to the MicroProse copy protection, it used to spook my friends. I'd also go to the local library and look up the latest Jane's publications.
- lbeltrame 4y agoBack in the days I and others made an end of junior high school year project on military planes and we had a monitor playing clips of F-16 Falcon, F-29 Retaliator and Fighter Bomber. I did however use the F-19 Stealth Fighter game manual as an inspiration to write texts on the improvised stand we were using. We also had some model kits on display.
- prox 4y agoTutorials have also become much better, sometimes with incredible immersion, making manuals less necessary.
- detritus 4y agoOh! To have played this on a machine with a double digit clockspeed! I loved my Amiga 500, and spent many hours on F-19/F-117, but crikey 7.little MHz was not a lot to play with (although quite enough for the super-fast, fun but otherwise inscrutable ArmourGeddon...).
- thorin 4y agoI played that a lot too, but I always preferred f18 interceptor.
- throwaway4good 4y agoI thought it was going to be about this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown And how the Chinese reversed engineered it and the Americans bombed their embassy in revenge ...
- formerly_proven 4y agoThe US bombed the Chinese embassy for revenge of reverse engineering a plane shot down just a few weeks earlier by the Serbs? Wow, the Chinese are incredibly fast! And the US military so quick to act!
- throwaway4good 4y agoThe story would go like this: Chinese agents working out of the Belgrade embassy go and buy the pieces of the F177 and collect them at the embassy. The US bombs the embassy knowing that even though it is an act war against China, China is in no position to respond.
- throwaway4good 4y agoYeah. It is a persistent conspiracy theory about the embassy bombing that is still around until this day (in particular in China and Serbia, of course ...). Here is an article from AP written ten years later, essentially saying that the Chinese based their J-20 stealth fighter on the pieces of the F-117 laying on the ground in Serbia: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/23/china-stealth-fighter-us-technology https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/23/china-stealth-... Chinese stealth fighter jet may use US technology China may have bought parts of US F-117 Nighthawk shot down over Serbia in 1999, say experts
- p_l 4y agoConsidering that F-117 was based on thrown out Soviet paper (which was declared to be publishable in the open by Soviets), they migh have at most taken a look at materials used for coating, but the materials weren't that great as F-117 based itself on the shape not absorbing capability of materials...
- secretsatan 4y agoOh, I loved the microprose simulators
- hnhg 4y agoIs there anything quite like them now? I love this era of flight sims but the modern ones look a bit too much for me. I love F-19 and later ATAC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2pqS4fo8qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2pqS4fo8qA
- avereveard 4y ago"simplified model" dcs fighter planes can be learned in a evening, especially the f-15c. they do require a joystic tho.
- jabl 4y agoDoes that simplified model also include simplified avionics, radars, weapons and so forth? I've looked at some DCS vids on YouTube, and it looks cool but very complicated.
- avereveard 4y agoflight model is somewhat "low resolution", radar performances are on point, but feaures are undermodeled, like friend/foe detection is automatic, and you don't have to mess with cone width and scan columns, you have an average default set and that's it, weapons are the same that other platforms shoot. dcs may seem very complicate, because there' a ot of buttons to memorize, and it indeed is for more modern planes that can switch between ground/air mode, weapon targeting modes, datalink modes etc but simplified planes with non interactive cockpit just have a few step to memorize and once you're going, you're going. like, once you watch and execute the f-15 cold startup tutorial, it's always the same sequence in the same order and sets your plane exactly in the same mode ready for combat. (nav light management etc is there, but it's kinda optional and not required to learn from the start) then you get three button for radar mode you actually need (close combat, flood/boresight, beyond visual range), two button to switch weapon, and the rest is the slightly more complicate part, which is radar management you get a set of buttons to look up/down/left/right, a set of button to move the pip close/far/left/right, a button to toggle scan mode, and a button to lock/unlock a target - it's a lot to set up, but it's quite easy as it has immediate feedback on what you're doing the rest comes down to actually positon yourself in a way to maximize kill probability and defending from retailiation.
- nickdothutton 4y agoI was really hoping someone had found a the mission computer and some tapes on eBay.
- whalesalad 4y agoMe too. One of my favorite aircraft. The SR-71 gets all the love but I love the Nighthawk.
- HideousKojima 4y agoThe Nighthawk looks ugly as sin to most people, which is probably why it doesn't bet as much love. The B2 Spirit is what I imagine the Nighthawk looking like if it weren't so angular.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ajxs 4y agoI loved this game! Looking back, I'm surprised that I had the patience as an eight year old to master this game's control scheme. This definitely applies to other contemporary so-called 'sims', like Mechwarrior.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoAh, good ol Cheat Engine, I used this on F-19 back in the good ol DOS TSR[0] days on my 286. Froze the value of the address in memory that counted how many 500lb bombs I had, then held down Enter to drop my infinite bombs continuously and brought hell to Soviet Russia. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate-and-stay-resident_program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate-and-stay-resident_...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- perihelions 4y agoTangentially, did the F-117 Wikipedia page redact the story of the Amiriyah massacre? I'm almost certain it used to contain a section about it (?).
- melling 4y agoPerhaps the information was simply moved? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiriyah_shelter_bombing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiriyah_shelter_bombing
- perihelions 4y agoIt used to cite or transclude it though; the F-117 entry was where I learned about it from.
- formerly_proven 4y agoIf only Wikipedia had usable revision tools instead of their atrocious CVS clone.
- uuuooobbb 4y agoIt's linked from the GBU-27 bomb article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-27_Paveway_III https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-27_Paveway_III
- thrdbndndn 4y agoI mean.. OK? It honestly doesn't sound like a fitting content for article [[F-117]] to me. A link when talking about its missile capacity? Sure. But other than that it should go to its own article.
- throw__away7391 4y agoI learned not too long ago that the reason the F-117 looks so much like a low-poly model is because the computers available at the time that they used to design it could only handle radar profile calculations for low-poly models.
- praetor13 4y agoThere's a great book called "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich (head of the F-117 project) that goes into the development. It's amazing what they were able to accomplish with so little computing power.
- FredPret 4y agoI loved that book. They started off with nothing but slide rules and large brains. Incredible.
- SkyMarshal 4y ago/second that book, one of the best on advanced aviation and aerospace engineering.
- mysterydip 4y agoI thought it was because the stealth tech was based on faceting. This deflects the majority of radar energy directed at it so it doesn't return to the source to be detected.
- kataklasm 4y agoYou've got cause and effect flipped. The method of faceting or scattering from even, panelled surfaces is an effect of the root cause, namely the computer's inability to compute more complex radar profiles. You can read more about this in Ben Rich's book 'Skunk Works', the story about his time as the director of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Projects, informally called Skunk Works. Great read!
- 4y ago
- shever73 4y agoThis thread reminded me of 688 Attack Sub, which I always thought was a MicroProse sim. TIL that it was originally done by EA. I ordered it from the Special Reserve games club in the UK back in 1990.
- thelittleone 4y agoOh 688 AS thanks for the flash back to the golden era of gaming in my time. Reading magazines about new games. Going to local game shop and checking out the box (giant box compared to today). Rushing home and waiting for install of each floppy disk. The games, though limited in visuals, where really captivating. 688 attack sub. LHX. MIG-29 Fulcrum. F15 Strike Eagle. Jetfighter 2 (included the YF-23).
- kingcharles 4y agoI think of Strike Commander as the pinnacle of this era. I had to erase my entire hard drive to install it each time I wanted to play. It was 32MB!
- stouset 4y agoPretty sure I had this game on 5-1/4" floppies back in the day though I was too young to understand how to play. I played a TON of F-117A though!
- cwillu 4y agoPerhaps you were thinking of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Storm_Rising_(video_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Storm_Rising_(video_game... ? The Los Angeles class was one of the playable subs
- zabzonk 4y agoAnd (I don't see it elsewhere, but maybe it is) it was so difficult to fly that it was known as "the wobbling goblin". Also, I remember seeing a model kit in the window of a model shop in North London, well before the plane was announced to the public. Must have been in the 80s. Oh, and another memory has surfaced from the compost heap that passes for my brain these days - my then girlfriend bought me a little friction-drive toy of one of them - also 1980s.
- detritus 4y agoAre you sure you're not thinking of the F-19 model that came out in the very late 80s? I was a bit of plane nerd at the time - by early adolescent standards, at least - and I remember all my books being blindsided by the F-117's ultimate form.
- zabzonk 4y agoNope, I don't think so - but given the state of my brain at present, who knows? Wikipedia: "First flight June 18, 1981; 40 years ago"
- detritus 4y agoWe didn't get to see it for nearly another decade or so, though. "The existence of the aircraft was officially acknowledged in 1988" – https://www.britannica.com/technology/F-117 https://www.britannica.com/technology/F-117 Certainly, the precursor to the above game, F-19, was released in 1988, with the assumption that the plane looked something alike that on the box-art.
- zabzonk 4y agoMe: > Also, I remember seeing a model kit in the window of a model shop in North London, well before the plane was announced to the public. Must have been in the 80s. Note "well before the plane was announced to the public" This would have been far before 1988.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoThis brings back memories of '90s flight sims, playing A-10 Cuba! on a P133. The physics and sense of speed was very impressive for its time.
- babbledabbler 4y agoI loved this game growing up. (F-19 I never got F-117A). Thanks for bringing back memories.
- caycep 4y agoAn aside - was the F-19 basically a popular fiction based on sightings by the public of the YF-22 and YF-23 prototypes? Or did something like this really exist?
- somat 4y agoI am fairly confident the f-19 was the f-117, fueled by aviation journalists wild imaginations, probably based on early speculative concepts. Or if you are more conspiracy minded a deliberate misinformation campaign to further obscure what the nighthawk was and was not. this conspiracy is reinforced by the f-117 designation itself. They used a century-series number(this series of numbers had been phased out for quite some time at this point) and an F(fighter) designation for something that is effectively a light bomber. That being said, I wonder what the actual f-19 was? The missing numbers always interest me. f-17? f-19? f-20(tigershark?) f-21? f-24:24? (i think I read somewhere the last gap was marketing sigh)
- jeffdn 4y agoThe F-19 was what people speculated the rumored "stealth fighter" would be named. There had been rumors for years, but the public didn't see it for the first time until 1988. In Tom Clancy's book Red Storm Rising, about a hypothetical Third World War in Europe, he conceives of it as something like the F-35 ended up becoming -- a stealthy multirole aircraft (fighter-bomber). They called it the "F-19 Frisbee". The 19 comes from the fact that the previous fighter designation was for the F-18 Hornet.
- pjmlp 4y agoIt was one of my favourite MS-DOS games, I have spent endless hours playing it.