My point is that the Naval Carrier aviation side of the FSX world has already been covered with the Hornet
Not really, the F/A-18 it's just the current fighter in use, but one can't possibly forget an airplane so famous as the Tomcat, even outside aviation circles.
And, I wouldn't say naval aviation is covered, without having proper representations of an A6, A4 and, why not, the SU-33
The Harrier and its flight characteristics are a little different than most jets and would give the customer a different flight experience
Since FSX doesn't support vectored thrust at all, it wouldn't be a different flight experience: it would be a wrong one. Doesn't make much sense spending 9 months creating an accurate instrumentation and system, without being able to have a proper flight model for it.
The Texan 2 would be VERY beneficial to all the Naval, Marine Corps, Airforce, and Coast Guard students,future students,"I wanna fly in the military when i grow up" students
I don't know...I always had the impression that people using a flight sim want to simply fly with the top birds (like F-16, F-15, F-14, F-18), and not really wanting go through all the intermediate training steps, like real cadets have do. That's an advantage of flight simulation: you can cut corners and pretend being a top gun, the moment you load the package.
However, we did a trainer, the MB339 for Cloud9. It was a reasonably good success but, 99% of the users wanted because of the "Frecce Tricolori", certainly not because it was designed as a trainer...
The Apache wouldn't be a bad idea, because is certainly very well known and satisfying. But the issue is, we don't have much experience with helicopters. Yes, we did the EH-101 gauges for Microsoft, but designing a whole aircraft from scratch is quite different, and I have no problem admitting there's nobody in our team who have the slightest idea about making a flight model for an Apache, or any other helo, for that matter.
The F-14 makes the most sense for us, because it reasonably similar to the F/A-18, so we can hopefully reuse some of the experience we made with it.
If you think "flight experience", the F-14 might allow for the most unique flight experience: shared cockpit, since it'a a two seater. That feature alone would make it an entirely different product comparing to the F/A-18.
Now, the usual disclaimer: this is not a product announcement. As I've said at the start of the thread, this project hasn't started yet, and it will not start until next year. Of course, we would really like to do it properly, and for the F-14 this means networked shared cockpit and FSX allows that. But this is just an idea right now, no promises, we'll need to make our tests, research, etc.
