Shrike Simulations has released its F-86F Sabre for MSFS. It’s an upgrade of their excellent FSX/P3D model, but fully native and with lots of nice enhancements and a legit MSFS flight model.
Price is only $20. It’s not a study-level plane, but looks good and the flight model offers the real challenges of flying a 50’s jet, where slow-spooling engines caused way too many crashes. (Pro-tip: On landing, keep the engine power on and use the speedbrakes to manage your speed. That way if you need to go around, you can just retract the brakes to have immediate power, instead of screaming to your death waiting on the engine to spool back up.)
It’s coming to Marketplace and Xbox, but note that version won’t have working gun effects or weapons due to Marketplace rules.
Disclaimer: Was totally planning to buy this on release but I won a copy in Blackbird’s livestream this morning. But there was no obligation to post, etc, I’m just a huge F-86 fan, and have been since my dad got me the Monogram model when I was about 12.
I think I just found my next purchase, love the sabre well, the CAC version that is (Aussie) & this model & the cockpit texturing looks awesome. It will look fantastic in VR!
Well, first, from the very first post in this topic:
As for why some planes don’t end up there, I know many devs are still stuck waiting on MS to approve them as marketplace sellers. They’d like to sell there but approval can take a loooong time.
But in this case it’s just releasing now while it’s ready and it’ll apparently hit Marketplace when it makes it through their lengthy approval process.
Just got to do a couple brief flights and for $20 you can’t go wrong. Looks and flies great, but I did find it odd that I was able to go supersonic in level flight at 20k with roughly 98% power. From my understanding it could only go supersonic in a dive but I was able to get up to M1.3+ at higher altitudes.
Just bought it and took it for a flight. First impressions are that it’s absolutely gorgeous, inside and out.
I really enjoyed the handling of it around the Mach Loop but struggled a bit with speed/altitude when coming in to land. I couldn’t get it down to 170kts for the downwind leg without losing too much altitude and was struggling to get it trimmed before running out of back stick. Still, managed to get it down without damaging it!
I don’t think I would have gone for it at a higher price, but at the cost it is, it’s a bargain for a nice vintage fighter to just have fun in. Congrats to Shrike.
I was also able to get it to go up to M1.3-1.4ish in level flight at around FL350 with the engine RPM at the top of the green, which seems like it’s pushing through M1 a lot easier than I get the impression it should from a smattering of internet search results.
Only had time for a quick first flight yesterday but really liked what I saw. Will try to explore it more today.
A question - how is everybody handling flaps? Via LVARs? Or just drop full flaps on final as though it was a Spitfire? Interested to hear about the options. Flap control seems to be the one point of complexity (or hardcore authenticity, if you prefer) in an otherwise pretty accessible product.
Surprisingly using a flaps axis seems to map only to the topmost and bottommost positions, at least when I was testing yesterday. This wasn’t what I expected (I expected it to just map continuously across the range) but is probably related to how MSFS handles axis to position mapping internally.
If you’re looking for the .pdf you should know that the plane’s folder in the Community folder starts neither with shrike nor with blackbird, but with milviz.
Makes you wonder exactly how long they’ve been working on this.
I think that’s consistent with the system in the real aircraft, where up or down commands continuous travel and the way to stop it at an incremental point is to return the lever to neutral/“hold.” The problem is that it’s hard to be fast enough either with the mouse or with hardware to command a stop at an incremental point. The manual references a “hold” position for hardware, but it seems to be accessible only via an LVAR.
I’ve run into this flap system before on other aircraft - the A2A P-40 comes to mind. IIRC, that provided for a neutral setting, but the travel was so fast that for all practical purposes I just treated it flaps as an all-or-nothing affair. Might do the same here.
Or maybe it’ll be my first step down the slippery custom programming slope.
this is not the case for me. in the vc, i make sure the flaps lever is in the hold position and then my flaps axis on my hardware works the flaps to any position between 0 → full. initially i thought it was all or nothing but then i read the manual and after testing, i can confirm it’s working for me.
according to the manual, if you throw the flaps lever to open, the flaps will begin to deploy. you can then push it to hold and the flaps will hold in whatever position they were in during deployment. to simplify things, blackbird made it so that your flap axis control will move the flaps through their entire range just by leaving the lever in the hold position
Interesting. Just to make sure I understand correctly - you leave the VC handle at “hold,” then move the hardware flaps axis to extend or retract, right?
If you return your hardware axis to the center position, does that stop the flaps at partial deployment?
