There’s a growing collection of Cold War era jet aircraft being worked on by third party developers including Flying Iron Simulations who have just posted new updates on their developer blog. Much of the update is focused on three areas of progress including the 3D model, early texturing efforts, their flight model efforts, and a question to the community.

Visually coming along

One of the big updates is several more screenshots showing how their project is coming along. The 3D model looking more complete than in past efforts and we’re also seeing the first texture passes on areas including the cockpit and vertical stabilizer.

Here are some of the exterior detail shots.

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On the art side of things, their team has been making extensive use of photogrammetry scans to recreate the A-7 in high detail and that has their artists asking a key question. How should they represent their A-7? Factory fresh? A bit of wear and tear? Well used? I’m seeing a lot of comments in response suggesting that somewhere in between is probably the place to be and I agree. A worn but not too worn look is probably what I’d most like to see.

Let FlyingIron know your own thoughts on their Facebook page.

Flight model work

FlyingIron reports that their testbed phase 1 EFM has now been thrown out in favour of a much more detailed flight model that they will be working on while they aim to bring this aircraft to life in DCS World.

The devs report that they are using a mix of real world data tables that are extensive for the A-7 and suitable enough for simulation on their own together with their own investment into aerodynamics modeling. The CFD analysis that they mention stands for computational fluid dynamics and it can be used to generate detailed information on how an objective behaves in a fluid – including air. In short, they are using official performance tables and detailed analysis of the character of the aircraft together with a physics analysis to build a detailed model.

If all of that sounded a bit too technical, the short version is that Flying Iron is going the extra mile to ensure that the A-7 is an extremely detailed representation of how a real A-7 should fly. It’s the same kind of efforts that Eagle Dynamics has gone through to bring their aircraft to life as well (including the P-47 where original flight test data was destroyed and unavailable).

Good progress is being made but it will surely be some time yet before the A-7 comes to DCS World. For all of this and more, visit Flying Iron Simulations latest developer diary.