Hacking F-117A

[secretsatan]

Oh, I loved the microprose simulators

[hnhg]

Is there anything quite like them now? I love this era of flight sims but the modern ones look a bit too much for me. I love F-19 and later ATAC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2pqS4fo8qA

[foobarian]

Time to go destroy the SAM radar at Bandar Abbas! And then a terrorist training camp on the way home.

[mobilio]

And you're not alone.

[shever73]

This thread reminded me of 688 Attack Sub, which I always thought was a MicroProse sim. TIL that it was originally done by EA. I ordered it from the Special Reserve games club in the UK back in 1990.

[cwillu]

Perhaps you were thinking of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Storm_Rising_(video_game... ?

The Los Angeles class was one of the playable subs

[thelittleone]

Oh 688 AS thanks for the flash back to the golden era of gaming in my time. Reading magazines about new games. Going to local game shop and checking out the box (giant box compared to today). Rushing home and waiting for install of each floppy disk. The games, though limited in visuals, where really captivating.

688 attack sub. LHX. MIG-29 Fulcrum. F15 Strike Eagle. Jetfighter 2 (included the YF-23).

[netsharc]

Ah, I have a memory of waking up early on one 90's Saturday morning and loading up this game on my Pentium 100 to fly bombing missions...

[fer]

I personally miss reading manuals (or at least skimming them if they're big) before playing games. I guess it feels too much like study/work for it to have a market nowadays; last physical games I've bought had basically the same info as in-game help.

I recommend this site[0] for all those who want to go down memory lane. Just look at this[1] or that of TFA[2].

[0] https://www.gamesdatabase.org/all_manuals

[1] https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Commodore_64//Man...

[2] https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Microsoft_DOS//Ma...

[detritus]

Oh! To have played this on a machine with a double digit clockspeed!

I loved my Amiga 500, and spent many hours on F-19/F-117, but crikey 7.little MHz was not a lot to play with (although quite enough for the super-fast, fun but otherwise inscrutable ArmourGeddon...).

[zabzonk]

And (I don't see it elsewhere, but maybe it is) it was so difficult to fly that it was known as "the wobbling goblin".

Also, I remember seeing a model kit in the window of a model shop in North London, well before the plane was announced to the public. Must have been in the 80s.

Oh, and another memory has surfaced from the compost heap that passes for my brain these days - my then girlfriend bought me a little friction-drive toy of one of them - also 1980s.

[detritus]

Are you sure you're not thinking of the F-19 model that came out in the very late 80s? I was a bit of plane nerd at the time - by early adolescent standards, at least - and I remember all my books being blindsided by the F-117's ultimate form.

[caycep]

An aside - was the F-19 basically a popular fiction based on sightings by the public of the YF-22 and YF-23 prototypes? Or did something like this really exist?

[jeffdn]

The F-19 was what people speculated the rumored "stealth fighter" would be named. There had been rumors for years, but the public didn't see it for the first time until 1988.

In Tom Clancy's book Red Storm Rising, about a hypothetical Third World War in Europe, he conceives of it as something like the F-35 ended up becoming -- a stealthy multirole aircraft (fighter-bomber). They called it the "F-19 Frisbee". The 19 comes from the fact that the previous fighter designation was for the F-18 Hornet.

[somat]

I am fairly confident the f-19 was the f-117, fueled by aviation journalists wild imaginations, probably based on early speculative concepts.

Or if you are more conspiracy minded a deliberate misinformation campaign to further obscure what the nighthawk was and was not. this conspiracy is reinforced by the f-117 designation itself. They used a century-series number(this series of numbers had been phased out for quite some time at this point) and an F(fighter) designation for something that is effectively a light bomber.

That being said, I wonder what the actual f-19 was? The missing numbers always interest me. f-17? f-19? f-20(tigershark?) f-21? f-24:24? (i think I read somewhere the last gap was marketing sigh)

[EdwardDiego]

Ah, good ol Cheat Engine, I used this on F-19 back in the good ol DOS TSR[0] days on my 286. Froze the value of the address in memory that counted how many 500lb bombs I had, then held down Enter to drop my infinite bombs continuously and brought hell to Soviet Russia.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate-and-stay-resident_...

[MrBuddyCasino]

This brings back memories of '90s flight sims, playing A-10 Cuba! on a P133. The physics and sense of speed was very impressive for its time.

[babbledabbler]

I loved this game growing up. (F-19 I never got F-117A). Thanks for bringing back memories.

[ajxs]

I loved this game! Looking back, I'm surprised that I had the patience as an eight year old to master this game's control scheme. This definitely applies to other contemporary so-called 'sims', like Mechwarrior.

[pjmlp]

It was one of my favourite MS-DOS games, I have spent endless hours playing it.

[holoduke]

Looks like the game retaliator. Is this the same engine?

[nickdothutton]

I was really hoping someone had found a the mission computer and some tapes on eBay.

[whalesalad]

Me too. One of my favorite aircraft. The SR-71 gets all the love but I love the Nighthawk.

[perihelions]

Tangentially, did the F-117 Wikipedia page redact the story of the Amiriyah massacre? I'm almost certain it used to contain a section about it (?).

[melling]

Perhaps the information was simply moved?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiriyah_shelter_bombing

[throw__away7391]

I learned not too long ago that the reason the F-117 looks so much like a low-poly model is because the computers available at the time that they used to design it could only handle radar profile calculations for low-poly models.

[dboshardy]

Not quite. From the incredible Skunk Works:

"Ufimtsev has shown us how to create computer software to accurately calculate the radar cross section of a given configuration, as long as it's in two dimensions," Denys told me. "We can break down an airplane into thousands of flat triangular shapes, add up their individual radar signatures, and get a precise total of the radar cross section."

Why only two dimensions and why only flat plates? Simply because, as Denys later noted, it was 1975 and computers weren't yet sufficiently powerful in storage and memory capacity to allow for three-dimensional designs, or rounded shapes, which demanded enormous numbers of additional calculations. The new gneeration of supercomputers, which can compute a billion bits of information in a second is the reason why the B-2 bomber, with it's rounded surfaces, was designed entirely by computer computations.

Denys's idea was to compute the radar cross section of an airplane by dividiing it into a series of flat triangles. Each triangle had three separate points and required individual calculations for each point by utilizing Ufimtsev's calculations. The result was called "faceting"--creating a three-dimensional airplane design out of a collection of flat sheets or panels, similar to cutting a diamond into sharp-edged slices.

[praetor13]

There's a great book called "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich (head of the F-117 project) that goes into the development. It's amazing what they were able to accomplish with so little computing power.

[mysterydip]

I thought it was because the stealth tech was based on faceting. This deflects the majority of radar energy directed at it so it doesn't return to the source to be detected.

[throwaway4good]

I thought it was going to be about this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown

And how the Chinese reversed engineered it and the Americans bombed their embassy in revenge ...

[formerly_proven]

The US bombed the Chinese embassy for revenge of reverse engineering a plane shot down just a few weeks earlier by the Serbs? Wow, the Chinese are incredibly fast! And the US military so quick to act!