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Comment by lagadu | Hacker News Reader

I recall this capability existing in the F117A Nighthawk simulator from Microprose in the 90s, you could carry sidewinders but they were close to useless because you needed to open the bay, which made you highly detectable and slower, and you needed to get close which made you detectable. It was more of a last resort thing.

I'm surprised a game that old was accurate about this at the time.

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One of my favorite games from the 90s. The fact that the missions were set at night was probably a huge help for the visuals given the graphics capabilities of the time :)

Now that you mention it, I'm sure this was no coincidence!

I had the predecessor game, F-19 Stealth Fighter. It came out before the F-117 was officially revealed. Those "assassination" style missions were always my favorite for the reason you cite. You had to sneak in and take out the target, but once you did you got lit up and had to evade the now very angry air defenses.

I'll never forget manually flying at 150 feet at 150kts for hours, using the keyboard only, trying to evade all the radars along the way, sneaking up just to the outer edge of your missile's range to the target, popping open the bay door, launching, slamming the bay door back shut and turning hard around, throttle to the firewall to get as far away from the scene of the attack as possible (still at 150 feet off the ground if you could manage it), then trying to sneak back out a different way than the way you came to evade all the aircraft the sim sent up looking for you.

Then you get back and have to land perfectly or else you just die and have to start your character all over again as a 2lt. You could, of course, hit ctrl-alt-del and reboot the machine so your character wouldn't die, because it didn't save anything until the very end of the mission.

I'll also never forget how amazingly better the game was when I got a color monitor and could see that the game had colors -- I couldn't see half the controls in black and white.

It was a surprisingly hard game, actually.

BTW, both f19 and f117 are available on steam. I still pull them up and fly them occasionally just for nostalgia.

I'm glad you posted this because when I saw the headline to this article my first reaction was, "Wait, this isn't news to me, I fired a ton of these things in that video game". Then I thought, "No, probably a false memory."

F15 Strike Eagle certainly helped me with my Eastern Bloc geography!

Middle East too. Still joke about destroying the SAM radar at Bandar Abbas, and terrorist camp at Baghdad.

Wow, did that dredge up a memory! I remember asking my parents for this game and was so excited to get it, except the box came without the disk. It took almost 7 months to finally get the disk because support kept asking my parents to send the defective disk back to be replaced, except there was no disk. :(

Bill Stealey (one of the Microprose founders) was a Pentagon planer before he ventured into games, I think I read somewhere that because of that, his games where vetted before release.

Bill Stealey was an instructor pilot in the Air Force, whence came the experience that enabled him to vet MicroProse's military flight sims for verisimilitude.

Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian has a long article [1] on the origins of MicroProse, including background on both founders, Stealey and Meier. It's a great story, and he tells it well - strong recommend, if you have any interest in the subject.

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2015/03/microproses-simulation-indust...

Technically that was still the easy mode ("Microprose Nighthawk") which gave you all the weapons and four weapon bays. The supposedly realistic ("Lockheed Nighthawk") mode took away the A/A weapons and left you with two bomb bays.

I bought the game off GOG a couple years back. Very rudimentary graphics, of course, but the missions were a lot of fun. Avoiding detection as you fly low and slow in the dark.

You only could carry sidewinders on the lower difficulty/realism level, on the higher one you could only carry "bomb-like things" and only two different types.

Why don't they make these kinds of flight sims anymore? I miss microprose!

Microprose is coming back soon. They are building a B-17 simulator for VR where a group of people work together in the bomber.

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