The MILVIZ / Blackbird sub-range Shrike has announced their F=86 will release on 3oth March for US$19.95
Exclusive: Shrike Simulations F-86 Sabre Coming Soon, Trailer Released - FSElite
The MILVIZ / Blackbird sub-range Shrike has announced their F=86 will release on 3oth March for US$19.95
Exclusive: Shrike Simulations F-86 Sabre Coming Soon, Trailer Released - FSElite
I'm sure it will be a great airplane. Hopefully they will review and correct the provided paint jobs before release. Lots of errors visible even in the quick clips in the trailer.
August
We hope...it's a bargain price, which may be indicative of the target audience...but hopeful for this one.Followed by an update of corrections.
Have previous Shrike releases been updated?
Will be interesting to compare with Ryan's imported Sabre...
The Freeware one is very nice, if you don't mined un-clickable cockpit, which is not an issue for me:
Milviz F-86 Sabre - Full Aircraft (Native Conversion) for Microsoft Flight Simulator | MSFS
According to screenshots of the imported F-86 (don't have it myself) atleast the main- and various other panels and instrument bezels are black, which is what they are supposed to be. Not some more or less 'unindentified' brownish/greyish colour like can be seen in the Shrike F-86 promo video... What's up with that ??....
Modelingwise the cockpit looks fantastic but i have never seen a photo of an F-86 cockpit in 'brownish/greyish' colour. Did the Shrike painting department run out of black colour ??.... ( maybe it has to do with a paint technique that automatically adds some kind of 'weathering' to give it all a heavely used look...? If that's the case i'd fumble around with the slider a bit more... )
F-86 afficionados (like myself) know but this is what a common F-86 cockpit looks like :
Not anything like this :
Later lighter panels and surroundings appeared, very light greyish/blue or even white in Sabres still flying today but gauge bezels always are black.
Very nice to see Shrike going the extra mile by adding a period correct pilot figure. However not entirely correct ( why not.... it's not that difficult....) they have their dashing Sabre pilot wear a WWII oxygen mask ( USAAF A-14 developed by the Ohio Chemical Manufacturing Co.) which was quickly replaced after the war by the USAF MS-22001. Certainly THE O2 mask worn by Sabre drivers during the Korean conflict.
As a purist i say not a biggy but i won't be flying this F-86 if the cockpit remains in this very unusual brownish/greyish state... blehh
It appears to be a $20 offering. The freeware portover is currently fun to toss around the sky and actually has lovely textures given that it is an FSX port. Shrike's rivet bumps seem a bit exaggerated. I'll be waiting for the reviews on the Shrike model. Nothing about the sound set yet.
-d
Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.
I figure the colors can be tweaked by one of our wonderful community painters. Not sure if it's a gray or just the lighting in the screenshot.
Rivets, masks, coloring... Personally, I'm most concerned by "does it fly like an F-86?"
Well, re the VC i can imagine that remains to be seen....
Nah, not the lighting, Denny. Check out the AH and Turn-Coordinator on the screenie above. That's black. Rest is muddy brownish/grey..Not sure if it's a gray or just the lighting in the screenshot.
Well yes, who knows... Dudley Henriques knows, he flew mostly P-51 display shows but flew the F-86 as well. His assistance at creating the F-86 flight dynamics for our FS9 freeware F-86 was greatly appreciated by Rob Young. I know later on he worked with A2A but i have lost contact with Dudley.Rivets, masks, coloring... Personally, I'm most concerned by "does it fly like an F-86?"
One more thing about the flight dynamics of our freeware FS9 F-86. You might know that the pilot of an F-86 on take-off is required to lift the nosewheel up off the runway once a certain speed is reached and then have the aircraft take-off by itself. The same is true for the landing, keep the nose high after touch down, nosewheel off of the runway so as to have the plane work as a giant speedbrake. In fact the same is true for the B-25 which we (Maam-Sim with boss pilot Rush Strine to aid Rob Young creating the flightmodel) also did for FS9.
That both these particular take-off and landing techniques could be applied to our F-86 and B-25 models to the letter i have always found remarkable not to say magical.
Ok, just one aspect of the F-86 flight dynamics but certainly an important one if you ask me. If the Shrike F-86 will prove to be capable of performing these particular take-off and landing techniques i'll probabely take the muddy VC for granted.
Btw, a similar discussion was going on with the F-5 as subject. The same nose-high landing and take-off procedures apply to the F-5 as well. Non of the two F-5 models i tried (not the current SCD F-5E model) was able to perform these techniques.
Just to add to the conversation, the company Echo 19 Audio, which has done some great sound mods for DCS and is now doing sound sets for MSFS payware products, has announced that they did a whole new F-86 sound set to be included with the Blackbird/Shrike F-86 product. They state that the sounds have been recorded from Doug Matthews' F-86F "Beauteous Butch II".
In the previews, I did notice straight away the lazy use of easily-identifiable fonts for all of the large lettering throughout the various paint schemes, which in some cases is quite wildly inaccurate (especially all of the USAF-related markings/lettering). It would have been nice if they took the professional step of just spending a few more hours to vector-draw those markings/lettering to match the real paint schemes. And there are other issues with various other elements of the markings too, such as the USAF stars & bars insignias. When seeing things like that, I'm always concerned that such lack of care isn't only limited to the textures.
At $20, I don't expect it to be an impressively-accurate F-86 addon, as much as I would want it to. In my view, it looks like it's geared to the average consumer, not discerning F-86 aficionados. Everyone who has flown a real F-86 just falls in love with it and its wonderful flying qualities, so hopefully it will have similar flying qualities in the sim (the freeware semi-native portover of the same model flies beautifully in MSFS).
Well, i gotta say, this DCS port-over F-86 is a total sweetheart !
I even think it's the best ever jetfighter flightdynamics-wise i have ever come across in MSFS. Absolutely amazing !
The VC looks fantastic as well as of course does the external model. I watched a recent review of the original DCS F-86 and the reviewer thought that atleast the VC textures look quite a bit outdated, compared to f.i. the IFE/Heatblur F-14. Yeah, right, that thing is in a league of its own ! Nothing compares to that work of art.
I do notice that the VC textures of the orginal DCS F-86 are very different to that of the MSFS port-over Sabre but i think they look waaaay better than that muddy like VC of the Shrike F-86 pre-view screenies. (sjeeezz, it looks like the whole cockpit is made out of rusty steel !.. )
IMHO the flightmodel certainly is one of the best in MSFS and i really hope we'll see exactly the same for the soon to be released Shrike F-86 edition. It feels like a lot of work and dedicated attention went into developing the flight dynamics which can already be observed during take-off with which the "nosewheel-up/wait for lift-off" technique can be very easily executed at first try. Truly fantastic!
First time i have tried this port-over F-86 because i hate unclickable cockpits but in anticipation of the release of the Shrike F-86 (F-86 fan thru thick and thin, rust and render..;-) i thought sort of a pre-view would be worthwhile. And it sure proved to be ! What a success !
This was what I was referencing above, it really jumped out at me in the preview vid. The Canadian national insignia and lettering are equally as bad, as is the Norwegian. What's wild is that some of these paints are the same aircraft represented in the old Milviz, but the insignia and fonts are now far worse! It's as if they re-mastered the old skins but substituted lower quality assets for these items. What is the logic? It's like, "Hey, let's re-master an old Led Zeppelin record but this time with autotune!"
The USAF lettering for the Sabre is a bit unique in style and would have to be done "by hand," or at least by tracing a good model kit decal sheet. For the Canadian and Euro schemes, I put out a set of fonts TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO now that are all over the web and would have been at least a starting point for the Canada and Norway lettering. You can't research the topic for 10 minutes without finding these resources. That's why I expressed the hope that these are placeholders in the trailer, and we'll get cleaned up skins on release. Failing that, I hope the old Milviz skins still fit this model, because I have put some time into converting and improving a couple of them for the port-over (which Jan, I agree is lovely to fly) and making the skins shown in the trailer accurate would be far more work.
August
Wouldn't be surprised if there is no connection between the old milviz sabre and this new shrike one...
Shrike is an offshoot of Milviz/Blackbird, and their products are all former Milviz FSX/P3D products. This "Shrike F-86" is clearly the same model, inside and out, with much the same textures (though modified in areas, externally an internally, and unfortunately not for the better) that was the original Milviz FSX product.
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Ok, beer for everyone. Time for another
Sure, i ment the FSX Milviz F-86 import by Ryan, again Sorry, big ol' brain farth and i can't promise it won't happen again. I positively and undisputedly however still think that this import is a total sweetheart !
It's because i had watched a DCS F-86 review and downloaded/installed/flew the Milviz portover about at the same time. I'll get my goat now..
Just to be clear, I'm not expecting the new to be better than the old, or even as good as...Wouldn't be surprised if there is no connection between the old milviz sabre and this new shrike one...
Windows 11 23H2 Enterprise Edition
Intel i9 13900KF @ 5.8 GHz
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Samsung 1TB 980 EVO PCIe M.2 C: drive
Samsung 2TB 980 EVO PCIe M.2 Data drive
be quiet! Straight Power CM1000W PSU
I don't care, I'll be buying it. The F-86 is perhaps my favorite jet of all, blame "The Hunters". I do hope somewhere along the way there is a Paint Kit. I have about every military Font out there for US and foreign services. As you folks recall I did very many repaints for FS2004 and FSX. I can do them for MSFS, but for some reason, I have only had two to take. My ignorance is doing something wrong, I'm old, but I'm determined. If there is a twig on the ground in a forest that wants to be a tree, that twig would be me.
Cazzie
heads up on a demo / review for those that watch this type of social media output
First look at the Shrike Simulations F-86 Sabre in Microsoft Flight Simulator (youtube.com)
Looking very good and a buy for me.
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