Please correct me if I'm wrong....

PM IL-2 1946 was the last release.I don't know if it was something new or just a compilation of all the previous games in the series,They have the Great Battles series now and I think Cliffs of Dover are all from 1C,,I'm unsure who produced what.

PM IL-2 1946 was the last release.I don't know if it was something new or just a compilation of all the previous games in the series,They have the Great Battles series now and I think Cliffs of Dover are all from 1C,,I'm unsure who produced what.

The current Stalingrad/Great Battles series has no Pacific theatre to date. Hopefully it will be included some time in the future.

I didn't understand you were just talking about Pacific Fighters.There are modded installs like BAT or VP's mod that are a step up from Pacific Fighters.I'm a big fan of the Pacific theater and love carrier ops in BAT

There don't seem to be any motivated North American flight sim developers and that is what it will probably take to make a new sim in this theater.

Great observation, makes perfect sense. Most developers seem to be in Europe, and Eastern Europe, so they focus there. And Chinese developers probably have no interest in making a sim about American airpower in their region, even from WWII.

Jason Williams of 777/1C Studios has stated several times he would love to do an updated Pacific Theater add on to the current Great Battles series, but they are greatly hampered by a lack of detailed data on the Japanese planes. There's a fair amount of info on the flight model of the Zero, but very little data on other planes of the Imperial Japanese navy and to dig into the archives to find what little there might be obviously requires a knowledge of Japanese. The short term solution was to simply skip that theater of the war and just keep putting out Eastern and Western front add ons until they, hopefully, got more info.

I don't buy the "no data" excuse as being insurmountable. With current technology it should not be a huge problem to extrapolate performance data given known aircraft dimensions, weight, power etc. At least good enough for a sim.

Besides, I'm not one of those who requires that every single thing about every facet of an aircraft has to be modeled to absolute perfection. This trend toward "if we don't have a 3 feet high stack of flight test / systems documentation we're just not going to make it" attitude is going to leave a bunch of HUGE gapping holes in the flight sim fleet.

I'd rather have a "close enough" representation of such aircraft than none at all. I seem to recall the relative flight performance (IE how the airspeed, turn rates etc compared relative to one another) of Wildcats, Hellcats, Corsairs, Zeroes, P-40's, Vals, Georges, Franks, Tonys, Kates, SBD's etc. to be pretty good back in the old "1942 Pacific Air War" days.

Besides, if they get the Kate's performance specs off by 5% who is going to know? It's not like there are a bunch of old Kate pilots around who are going to call them on it.

X-Plane differentiates itself from other simulators by implementing an aerodynamic model called blade element theory.[13] Traditionally, flight simulators emulate the real-world performance of an aircraft by using empirical data in predefined lookup tables to determine aerodynamic forces such as lift or drag, which vary with differing flight conditions. These simulators sufficiently simulate the flight characteristics of the aircraft, specifically those with known aerodynamic data, but are not useful in design work, and do not predict the performance of aircraft when the actual figures are not available.

Blade element theory improves on this type of simulation by modelling the forces and moments on an aircraft and individually evaluating the parts that constitute it. Blade-element theory and other computational aerodynamic models are often used to compute aerodynamic forces in real time or pre-compute aerodynamic forces of a new design for use in a simulator employing lookup tables.

With blade element theory, a surface (e.g. wing) may be made up of many sections (1 to 4 is typical), and each section is further divided into as many as 10 separate subsections. After that, the lift and drag of each section are calculated, and the resulting effect is applied to the whole aircraft. When this process is applied to each component, the simulated aircraft will fly similar to its real-life counterpart. This approach allows users to design aircraft quickly and easily, as the simulator engine immediately illustrates how an aircraft with a given design might perform in the real world. X-Plane can model fairly complex aircraft designs, including helicopters, rockets, rotorcraft, and tilt-rotor craft.