Props

Well my heart skipped a beat when Jason said the first release will be about Midway. I love carrier battles. But what I really want is the Solomon Islands from Guadalcanal and the march up the Slot, as that gives us plenty of both carrier and land based air combat. My second choice would be the New Guinea campaign as that gives us lot's of interesting terrain and both IJN and IJA aircraft in the mix. I have seen a lot of folks here pushing for Burma and I think it too would be fun, but I can wait a while for that given that there are no carriers involved.

Pima Air museum is great! I lived in Tucson for a short while some years back and went there several times. It's a shame they don't get as much funding as they deserve because they have a really cool selection of aircraft.

I agree with you HerrMuff to some extent that we will want to see a mix of weather and no one likes to fly in really nasty stuff within a CFS. And real world weather, if it is based on modern weather patterns, like say today's current weather patterns in Pacific, would not be helpful or realistic to pursue by the devs. This isn't going to MSFS 2020. But I have to point out that aircrews in all theaters, especially the PTO flew in some really horrendous weather even carrier aircrews. I have spent a lot of time researching and reading about the air war in the SW PTO and there's plenty stories about it. The IJN leaders (those that survived) estimated that weather was the leading cause of lost aircraft and crews by far over operational and combat losses. The early '42 carrier raids by Fletcher and Halsey were smacked hard by weather and heavy seas, especially Fletchers TF but they were putting up CAPs and scouts all the same from pitching decks and in hard rains. I read one instance where a fighter pilot had a hard time seeing the deck officer on takeoff and could not see the end of the flight deck at all and wasn't sure where he was right after he left deck, on the water or in the air, as he couldn't see squat. New Guinea was particularly heinous. Crews from Port Moresby would take off at O-dark thirty to get over the Owen Stanley mountains early to beat the midday thunderstorms. A lot of planes flew into mountains, or just got lost and disappeared all due to weather. I don't think anyone here who flies CFS sims are going to want to see weather of that sort and a lot of it would definitely turn some folks off, but the occasional rainsquall, or thunderhead to skirt around would not bother me. To see a carrier slip into a rainsquall to hide, just like happened in the real battles, would be cool. It would just enhance the immersion for me as I prefer to fly as full real as possible immersing myself in the reality of what flying in WW2 was really like. Or at least as close as we can get in a computer generated facsimile of it.

Very happy with my current rig- it took a while and some dinero to get here! My Current PC: May 2023 Corsair 5000D Air Flow case, white XPG Core Reactor Modular PSU: 80 Plus Gold - ATX 850 watt ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero AMD AM4 X570S Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 AMD Ryzen™ 7 5800X3D 8-core, 16-Thread CPU Noctua NH-U12A, Premium CPU Cooler MSI Geforce RTX4080 Gaming X Trio Graphics card w/ 16 GB VRAM (runs smoothly at 2850 Mhz and 60 C temps! Won the silicon lottery on this one) TEAMGROUP T-Force Xtreem ARGB 3600MHz CL14 32GB (2x16GB) PC4-28800 Dual Channel DDR4 DRAM Seagate Firecuda 520 500GB Performance Internal Solid State Drive SSD PCIe Gen4 X4 NVMe 1.3 : Primary Windows Drive (Win 10) SABRENT 1TB Rocket Nvme PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 Internal SSD Maximum Performance Solid State Drive with Heatsink : D:/ drive Seagate BarraCuda 2TB Internal Hard Drive HDD – 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 7200 RPM ASUS ROG Swift PG329 1440p, 165 Mhz IPS 32" monitor Razer BlackWidow Lite TKL Tenkeyless Mechanical Keyboard Razer Viper Ultralight Ambidextrous Wired Gaming Mouse HyperX Cloud II - Gaming Headset TrackIr 5 Premium Head Tracking Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS Throttle Virpil VPC MongoosT-50CM2 Grip and VPC MongoosT-50CM2 Base MFG Crosswind Rudder pedals

These books may be useful Aircraft Carriers and Seaplane Carriers: Selected Photos from the Archives of the Kure Maritime Museum (The Japanese Naval Warship Photo Albums series)(available on Amazon) The Japanese Aircraft Carrier Akagi (Super Drawings in 3d) by Stefan Draminksi - If I remember correctly there is a series of these as well dedicated to IJN ships Soryu, Hiryu, and Unryu Class Aircraft Carriers in the Imperial Japanese Navy during WW2 by Lars Ahlberg (Author), Hans Lengerer (Author) There are more but this is a good start.

I highly recommend all most all of the previously mentioned books especially authors Franks, Lundstrom, Claringbould and the volumes by Ikuhiko Hata andYasuho Izawa. Eric Hammel's fine collection of oral histories from WW2 pilots as well. Here's a couple that deal exclusively with Japanese aircraft history that may be helpful for the devs: Wings of the Rising Sun by Jurgen P. Melzer Sunburst: The rise of Japanese Naval Air Power 1909 - 1941. As Far as informative videos go Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles on Youtube has some outstanding vids on WW2 aircraft including an set on the Ki-84 that's impressive. I would go so far as to recommend the devs reach out to him as he has many archived tech documents procured by him over the years that would probably prove very useful. Jim Parshall has done some great vids with the guys at Unauthorized History of the Pacific War as well. And hypohystericalhistory has some outstanding vids on the Australian efforts in New Guinea including a great one on the Battle of the Bismarck sea for you twin engine bomber pilots.

I've never been interested in being a Beta Tester before this, but I am now and would enjoy the opportunity till fill some of my retirement days with some more stick time. I spend sooo much time researching the Pacific Theater that I feel it's my duty! I await the call the call to serve

There's some pretty good recommendations in this thread. I have noticed that some of the best are things we appreciated in IL2 '46 like running away from the plane on a land ditching or coming back to the surface in your dinghy after a water ditching. Little things like that are cool. I remember flying a Ki46 Dinah near the US Fleet on a night mission (a QMB I put together and it was easier in IL2 '46 to get more variety out of it) and the AAA was downright scary and mesmerizing! It was also a stutter fest and I have always had a pretty highend PC for my simming! Same in daylight by the way. So I understand there may have to be some limitations to how many AA guns you have firing from a number of ships all at once and also the limitations we may have to accept on how many AI humans you can place on deck to keep the FPS at reasonable rates for the average user. Plus there would probably be no end to complaints if you even come close to the kind AA firepower the US put in the air during engagements i.e. The AA sucks man 'cause I can't even get within a mile of the carrier without dying every time! The laser snipers on the AAA Cruisers are to good, etc ad nauseum..... Would like to see a typical Task Force Group set of ships; 1 Fleet carrier in a travelling combat formation of Cruisers, Destroyers, maybe even a Fast Battleship. Speaking of Carriers- We Have Got to Have the Enterprise, but then The Yorktown was the same class and was at Midway so I figure that's a sure thing. I think a better AI pilot both friendly and enemy is a given as mentioned in this thread many times. Along with the aforementioned formations and actually reacting to orders as given by the element lead.

Yeah I'm with Kintaro on this topic. I despise Steam and have avoided it like the plague since it's inception. I have also noticed that every time any of the current quality flight sims have an update the Steam users are the ones that have all the problems updating or getting the sim to run properly. They're usually the first voices you see in the forums complaining about the update's quality or posting about their issues updating. Finally I'd rather give Combat Pilot (and the other sims) all my cash instead of seeing 30% sucked away by a middleman that is slow to provide meaningful support. And then to have pay for the "privilege" of using my flight sim at any given time is just heaping insult upon injury I know this sounds harsh, but I gotta speak my mind on this issue. To be fair I know that just about any publisher /development of PC sims and games really needs to have Steam presence to get noticed, it's the way of the world these days. And there are a lot of folks who use it, swear by it, and have no problems as mentioned above. But if I have to pay a subscription to fly my A6M2 I'd rather pay it straight to Combat Pilot for use of their server and to help support a flight sim specific server rather than the behemoth that is Steam.

The Unauthorized history of the pacific War is a great youtube channel and I have been watching a bunch of their stuff! Well worth checking out.

Thanks a mucho.

I know most forums have a limit on the size of the image one chooses for a forum avatar, but I can't seem to find that info for CP. Can you help me? Also I would imagine jpg is preferred?

I spent some time in Carlsbad area some years back and saw a Wildcat on approach on several occasions. Seems to me I looked that up and there was one based there, don't know if it still is, but it might be worth checking out.

I used to have an extensive collection of Japanese aircraft data culled from a ton of sources but I lost it all when my SSD went belly up. That being said I am now fired up to go out and seek as much data as I can to help you guys! I have often read, on other forums, that there is no useful technical info available on Japanese aircraft and this is just not true. You just have to dig for it. I believe you will be seeing me post here quite often in the future as anything I can do help this project along is worth the effort.

Holy crap Batman! I've been dreaming and waiting for this since my old Zekes and Wildcats days! And Jason is here to lead the way! So excited! My dinero is already burning a hole in my pocket for this one. OMG! Carriers! Finally!