Cazzie, you got me inspired...

[Drzook]

After all this talk about the Grumman F3F I decided to bring out a plane that I haven't flown since my CFS2 days...Ivan Hsu's Hawk III (trainer version; note the exposed tailwheel framework and no arrestor hook; also doesn't have that round thing between the wheelwells). There was a panel update for it in FS2004 but it wasn't up to my liking (1930s fighters should not have a VOR in the panel). At this point the only panel mods involved swapping out the naval ASI for a Vega ASI in mph and sharpening up the pixel resolution in the VC. I have been tinkering with the FDE in both the CFG and AIR files to get it pretty close to what the real thing was capable of. Finally I put on the BF2C textures on it just to see what it would look like. There's still a few things left to do on it (ground handling is squirrelly to say the least, would like to put on matching instruments on the panel) but all in all not bad. I was surprised the two bladed prop textures from the BF2C version showed as well as they did on the three bladed version. Here are a few screenshots; thought I would share. That second-to-last shot I thought the AI plane was going the other way; man that was close.
One more thing, I used as a sound file 'Warbird Sound' by Mike Hambly (under wbird.zip at flightsim.com IIRC); it was actually modelled on a Wright Cyclone putting out 750hp (which incidentally is the same engine fitted to the Goshawk or Hawk III).

[Cazzie]

Sweetness! :applause:

Let us know when you have it done Doc, that is delicious fruit! :jump:

Caz

[Drzook]

Moving right along...
I actually went to using the model for the actual Model 67A Goshawk as opposed to the Model 68. Since this is a Navy bird I went back to the default ASI in Knots. I figured out the ground-handling issue (castoring tailwheel will do it to you every time) and set it to steerable. That said with the other mods to the contact points and fuselage drag this is coming along quite nicely. Not a big fan of the telescope for a gunsight on this one but it's not much different from the one gracing the F3F. I am having one slight hitch in my giddyap however...at low rpm's the propblur shows up quite nicely but at higher rpms it disappears. Any ideas how to fix this?
Addendum: swapped out propblur textures with the one from my Aeronca Champ. It shows up but it is extraordinarily faint. Still not sure what to do on it.

[Mick]

I painted that plane a few years ago, and I just re-uploaded the set of three paints today at the request of someone who discovered that the originals seem to have been lost in the server crash.

In a rare display of restraint, I only painted the three section leaders whose colors look good with the green tail, rather than all six like I usually do. I guess I must've been in a hurry...

I don't know what that round thingy between the gear legs is called, but I know what it was for. It was a not very successful attempt to smooth out the airflow disturbance caused by the changes made to the fuselage shape to accommodate the retractable gear.

[Drzook]

Mick you are the man. Looking forward to those repaints. I was initially drawn to the US navy paint because my 4-year old daughter thought the green tail looked good....and it had a 'horsie' on the side.:engel016:

Here are my mods for the BF2C-1 Goshawk. make the appropriate backups and place the .cfg and .air files in their normal places. Hope you like them.

I was just thinking it would be cool to have the XF11C prototype too with the silver fuselage and chrome yellow wings (I think that's how it was; hard to interpret black and white pics)

[Mick]

...I was just thinking it would be cool to have the XF11C prototype too with the silver fuselage and chrome yellow wings (I think that's how it was; hard to interpret black and white pics)

The XF11C-2 had gray lacquer on the metal parts and aluminized silver dope on the fabric areas. The production F11Cs were delivered in that scheme, but soon thereafter the Navy standards changed to aluminized silver lacquer on the metal parts. The production Goshawks acquired the new livery at time of their first overhaul, so they can be painted authentically in either livery. The prototype was retired before it came due for overhaul, so it never wore the all silver scheme (i.e., all but the top of the upper wing, which was yellow.)

I like the two-tone livery better, but I painted Eduardo's Goshawk in the all silver scheme because his original textures, depicting a Columbian Hawk II, was all silver. He put all the details in the textures rather than in the model, and if I were to change the color of the metal parts to gray I would've had to recreate all the details, and I'm not that skilled. So I settled for the all silver scheme.

I was thinking of painting the prototype for you until I looked at the existing textures and was reminded why I didn't paint the two-tone scheme back in the beginning.

It's not surprising that it's hard to tell from photos whether a plane's metal parts are gray or silver. The Navy chose that shade of gray because it looks so much like silver from any distance. Here's the story behind the colors.

During and right after WW1 the Navy painted all its planes gray, not for camouflage, but just because the Navy painted everything it owned gray. The shade was the same battleship gray it used on ships. Soon after the war ended the Navy conducted experiments to find a suitable camouflage scheme for its planes, and after many tests they determined that planes were most difficult to see under the widest variety of conditions if they were silver. They then (this was in the early twenties) adopted overall silver as their standard livery. (Note that this meant silver paint on metal parts; the corrosive salt air at sea precluded bare metal finishes.)

Almost immediately a problem arose. The silver lacquer of that time wouldn't stick to metal very well. After a few years the maintenance troops in the fleet got tired of constantly repainting the planes and they began to substitute gray paint on the metal parts. Bu the late twenties this practice was almost universal, and in 1930 BuAir finally went with the flow and made it official that metal parts should be painted gray. The shade of gray they specified was selected because it looked as much as possible like silver. That color has come down to us today as Light Gull Gray, FS36440 or 16440.

Navy planes wore the two-tone livery until 1935, when paint technology improved enough that aluminized silver lacquer with decent adherence qualities was available. BuAir then changed the specification again so that Navy planes were all silver (except, or course, for the top of the upper wing and any identification colors on the tails.) This remained the standard until the advent of camouflage on the eve of WW2. In view of those early post-WW1 tests, it's not surprising that the first camo scheme selected was overall Light Gull Gray, the shade that was selected back in 1930 because it looked so much like silver. The mystery is why they bothered painting all those planes in a gray that looked like silver when they were already silver! All they had to do was overpaint the colorful markings.

During the pre-camo era there were two exceptions to the silver paint rule. Transports operating from land bases and planes of any type that were assigned to Naval Air Station Anacostia were finished in polished natural metal.

Not only is it difficult to tell the difference in black & white photos between the silver & gray and the all silver liveries, it's also difficult to tell the difference between bare metal and aluminized silver lacquer. In both cases that's because the finishes were deliberately selected because they looked so much alike. The aluminized silver lacquer and aluminized silver dope used real powdered aluminum as their pigments, and they gleamed in the sun just like bare aluminum. Usually the giveaway for the lacquer is that it looks too uniform in tone to be bare metal.

Otherwise, you can tell which is has to be if you know that transports and panes assigned to Anacostia were bare metal, and planes that went to sea (or types were intended to go to sea, even if a particular plane stayed ashore) were painted.

In 1954 some dim bulb in NavAir decided to see what would happen if they sent bare metal planes to sea aboard the carriers. What happened is exactly what we'd expect - a lot of perfectly good airplanes were ruined.

[Mick]

Hey Brad,

Here's Jerry's FS9 flight files that he posted here.

I don't know if they're still in the library or if they were lost in the server crash.

[Z-claudius24]

Hi,

All this run good (additional textures and the modded files air, panel and CFG)
Still some probs (IMO) to fix .. but they are out of my expertise:
The propeller blurr
The brakes action (at very very low speed if brakes applied the tail go immediately up)

http://i34.tinypic.com/292qrua.jpg

[Cazzie]

Rather than look for my CD for the zip I have, I went ahead and downloaded it from FlightSim.

Get it here:

Combat Flight Simulator - CFS2 Aircraft CFS2/FS2004 Curtiss Hawk III Model 68C
[ Download (http://www.flightsim.com/kdl.php?fid=82203) | View (http://www.flightsim.com/zview.php?cm=list&fid=82203) ]
Name: hawk3v3.zip (http://www.flightsim.com/kdl.php?fid=82203) Size: 13,674,239 Date: 11-06-2004 Downloads: 2,557
http://www.flightsim.com/j/hawk3v3.gif CFS2/FS2004 Curtiss Hawk III Model 68C - CAF Aces 1937, v3.0. The Curtiss Hawk IIIs with six liveries: 1. Hawk III Model 68C "Colonel Kao Chi-Hang, CO of the 4th PG, CAF, Hangchow area, China, 14th August 1937"; 2. Hawk III Model 68C "Captain Liu Chui-Kang, Leader of the 24th PS, 5th PG, CAF, Shanghai, China, 23rd August 1937"; 3. Hawk III Model 68C "Lieutenant Le Yi-Chin, 22nd PS, 4th PG, CAF, Hangchow area, China, 15th August 1937"; 4. Hawk III Model 68C "Captain Lee Kuei-Tan, Leader of the 21st PS, 4th PG, CAF, Hangchow area, China, 15th August 1937"; 5. Hawk III Model 68C "Pilot unknown, Advanced trainer 35, CAF, China, 1944"; 6. Hawk III Model 68C "Pilot unknown, Advanced trainer 88, CAF, China, 1944". Includes Hawk III repaint kit. By Ivan Hsu.


And get the mods in this post, including the sound Doc advises.

Caz

[Drzook]

Here are some of the other variants, also from Flightsim.com:

Combat Flight Simulator - CFS2 Aircraft
CFS2 Curtiss BF2C-1 Goshawk
[ Download (http://www.flightsim.com/kdl.php?fid=81739) | View (http://www.flightsim.com/zview.php?cm=list&fid=81739) ]
Name: bf2c1v2.zip (http://www.flightsim.com/kdl.php?fid=81739) Size: 2,439,365 Date: 10-24-2004 Downloads: 1,047
http://www.flightsim.com/j/bf2c1v2.gif CFS2 Curtiss BF2C-1 Goshawk v2.0. The Curtiss BF2C-1 Goshawk painted as 1.BF2C-1 "Pilot unknown, Leader of VB-5B, USS Ranger (CV-5), March 1935". By Ivan Hsu.

Combat Flight Simulator - CFS2 Aircraft CFS2/FS2004 Curtiss Hawk III Model 68
[ Download (http://www.flightsim.com/kdl.php?fid=82170) | View (http://www.flightsim.com/zview.php?cm=list&fid=82170) ]
Name: hawk3ar2.zip (http://www.flightsim.com/kdl.php?fid=82170) Size: 2,415,705 Date: 11-06-2004 Downloads: 874
http://www.flightsim.com/j/hawk3ar2.gif CFS2/FS2004 Curtiss Hawk III Model 68, v2.0. The Curtiss Hawk IIIs with one livery: Hawk III model 68 "Black 5, Argentina Air Force, Argentina, 1936". By Ivan Hsu.

Combat Flight Simulator - CFS2 Aircraft CFS2/FS2004 Curtiss Hawk III Model 68B
[ Download (http://www.flightsim.com/kdl.php?fid=82171) | View (http://www.flightsim.com/zview.php?cm=list&fid=82171) ]
Name: hawk3rt2.zip (http://www.flightsim.com/kdl.php?fid=82171) Size: 2,786,581 Date: 11-06-2004 Downloads: 969
http://www.flightsim.com/j/hawk3rt2.gif CFS2/FS2004 Curtiss Hawk III Model 68B, v2.0. The Curtiss Hawk IIIs with one livery: Hawk III Model 68B "Pilot unknown, 71st PS, Royal Thai Air Force, Indochina, 1940". By Ivan Hsu.

My mods mainly concern the BF2C due to its 2-bladed prop. However if you want to replace the prop section for the 3-bladed prop (see attached zip; may need to rename some files as seen fit):

[Cazzie]

Thanks Doc, you just made my next week, :icon_lol:

Do you have any idea how much I like this era? Slurp

Caz

[Drzook]

Hi,

All this run good (additional textures and the modded files air, panel and CFG)
Still some probs (IMO) to fix .. but they are out of my expertise:
The propeller blurr
The brakes action (at very very low speed if brakes applied the tail go immediately up)

http://i34.tinypic.com/292qrua.jpg
The propblur is out of my league as well; sorry. The three-blader on the M68T seems to be OK however; might be a modelling issue. As for the brakes I think I can help. In your Aircraft.cfg file you will find a section titled [brakes]. There will be a line like this:
toe_brakes_scale = 0.5 //Brake scalar
All you need to do is to bring it down to .4 or .3 or so. The landing run will be a bit longer but at least you won't nose it over. Hope this helps.
BTW, nice screenshot. :ernae:

[Z-claudius24]

Hi,

Thank you for the reply

One my own ....some mod's I tested for the
[fltsim.0]
title=BF2C-1 "Pilot unknown, Leader of VB-5B, USS RANGER (CV-5), March 1935"
sim=BF2C1_Goshawk

For the brakes prob I modified this in the aircraft.cfg:

toe_brakes_scale=0.2
parking_brake=1 //Parking brake available
differential_braking_scale =0.5 //Delta on the amount of brake when the rudder pedals
deflected
[B]Note:
The modded CFG I downloaded here had two lines for the toe_brakes_scale=X
See under:

toe_brakes_scale=1.000000
parking_brake=1 //Parking brake available
toe_brakes_scale = 0.5 //Brake scalar
differential_braking_scale = 1.0 //Delta on the amount of brake when the rudder
pedals deflected

So I erased one !!

Work great.

[B]For the propeller blurr:
I borowed (and renamed as prop_Hawk3.bmp) the propeller texture (AHF3F_Prop.bmp) from the AH Grumman F3F
And I add this line in each texture txt in aircraft.cfg:
prop_anim_ratio=0.8
This give a visible blurr but a tiny one ....

[Drzook]

Thanks Doc, you just made my next week, :icon_lol:

Do you have any idea how much I like this era? Slurp

Caz
Who wouldn't like this era? It was an incredible time. They didn't call it the Golden Age of Aviation for nothing.:ernae:

[Z-claudius24]

Hi,

This is a small movie with the propeller mod applied:

http://s799.photobucket.com/albums/yy280/Dumo222/?action=view&current=Prop_TEST.flv

As I said .. tiny .. tiny but it's visible :)

[Z-AZ1USN]

I am trying to convert this to FS9 mode so...how or where do you
get the gauges? Thanks

[Z-claudius24]

Hi,


I am trying to convert this to FS9 mode so...how or where do you
get the gauges? Thanks

AFAIK the panel(s) use the FS2004 default gauges ....

[Z-AZ1USN]

Hi,



AFAIK the panel(s) use the FS2004 default gauges ....

Hate to ask a dumb question (AFAIK)?!

The panels are making a call on F6f gauges and other planes too.
Though having a gauges folder would of been nice to use for this
addon. So is IVAN's addon (CFS) the one I need to convert to FS9?
(Again no gauges there either) or just what do I need to do here.
Maybe somebody can provide me with the core files etc so that I can
make this work in FS9. Sorry for being a pain....

[Z-claudius24]

Hi,

Had you downloaded and installed the planes here ?

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showpost.php?p=270287&postcount=10

I have those planes and no panels problems.


The panels are making a call on F6f gauges and other planes too.

Plas check your FS2004 gauges folder and you will see it's already the necessary gauges there !

For the first i's added some lines in the aircraft.cfg for be FS2004 compliant (if I remember well .. :) see in the post here for the fix)

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showpost.php?p=269954&postcount=5

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showpost.php?p=270126&postcount=7

CFS2 Curtiss BF2C-1 Goshawk

[fltsim.0]
title=BF2C-1 "Pilot unknown, Leader of VB-5B, USS RANGER (CV-5), March 1935"
sim=BF2C1_Goshawk
model=
panel=
sound=
texture=USS_Ranger
atc_airline= air force
atc_id=89
ui_manufacturer=GOSHAWK
ui_type=Model 67A BF2C-1
ui_variation=Goshawk
checklists=Hawk3_M68T_Check

[Cazzie]

Fellows, I have been trying every propwash trick in the book I can think of, this thing must be keyed to the model file. No format with an Alpha works. No propwash appears, it is just vacant. The only reasonable facsimile I got was making my own disk and using the alpha showing in the default after applying a Gaussian blur. But it only works if saved in a DXT1 (no alpha) format! Go figure. There is no way to make the prop hub look steely metal either, it doesn't show on the texture maps, it remains that dark gray so readily seen when parts are keyed to the model file.

Caz

[Z-claudius24]

Hi,


Fellows, I have been trying every propwash trick in the book

That's sem's better than my attempt ... :)
Can you post somewhere your modification ?

[Cazzie]

Hi,



That's sem's better than my attempt ... :)
Can you post somewhere your modification ?

Let me keep trying claudius, my feeble DXT1 image is attached in a standard bitmap. Enlarge it, then right click on it and save it to a temp folder. To use it, you will need to open it in the MS Image Tool or DXTBitmap and convert it to DXT1 with no alpha. Use the default alpha shown with the default prop.

Caz

[Z-claudius24]

Hi,

Thank you very much.

[Z-AZ1USN]

Something is amiss here, No preview of the plane....hummmm.... what now?
http://i33.tinypic.com/ezhgnq.jpg

[Z-AZ1USN]

Would you pls do me a big favor...can you post your FS9 plane to a link so that I can
add it my FS9? I am at wits end here trying to make this plane a viable addon
in my FS9. So far no luck. Thanks

[Z-claudius24]

Hi,

Uploading now!
Check your PM later.
Edited:
PM sended!

[Drzook]

Cazzie,
Thanx for the modded propblur. As usual you rock! :ernae: