Top Mach Studios: Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor

Thanks. We’ve been working hard at it.

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I can provide some context for the fuel burn figures. The official stats for the Raptor state a ferry range of about 1600 nm. Ferry range includes the use of the external fuel tanks (drop tanks) which add an additional 1200 gallons of fuel to the approx. 2700 gallons internal fuel the aircraft carries and is for range at an optimum altitude and airspeed. Best long range cruise performance for the military types is typically in the FL300 to FL500 feet range (I would guess FL400 is somewhere near the sweet spot once you’re not too fuel heavy right after takeoff) and at its long range cruise speed, which is almost certainly high subsonic (between M0.80 and M0.90). There are no published figures for the Raptor with respect to its specific fuel consumption (the mass of fuel burned for each pound of thrust, measured at sea level). However, the Lockheed F-35 uses in essence the same engine core and it’s not an unreasonable leap to assume the dry thrust fuel consumption rate is similar. This puts SFC at about 0.88 lbs fuel / lb of thrust. At sea level, this means, without afterburner, at full thrust (over 25,000 pounds of thrust per engine), the aircraft is burning about 22,250 pounds per hour PER ENGINE. This is a thirsty airplane . This means that if you were running full out, without the afterburner (afterburner more than doubles the SFC figure) at sea level, the plane would exhaust its entire fuel supply in about 35 minutes. Obviously this is not the ideal cruising altitude and you’d be moving around Mach 1 at sea level while doing this, which presents lots of problems for sustained cruising. So, as the aircraft climbs higher, the thrust decreases, but so does fuel consumption, and the aircraft becomes more efficient in thinner colder air at higher altitudes and therefore fuel efficiency will be best at higher altitudes (just like turbine powered commercial airliners). The raptor has a large wing area and a lot of body drag area - it’s not an inefficient aerodynamic design, but it is not optimized for maximum fuel efficiency - it’s optimized for maneuvering, speed, and survivability (stealth). This means that combined with those thirsty engines, it’s just not going to get a very good fuel economy. I’ve modeled the aircraft so that at cruise speeds of about M0.85 to M0.90 and at approx. 40,000 feet you’ll be able fly for about 3.5 hours or about 1700 nm give or take a couple hundred miles for takeoff fuel burn, winds aloft, etc… You’ll also be burning about 3500 to 4000 pounds per hour per engine. Compare that to your typical mid-sized business jet, burning 700 to 1000 pounds per hour per engine and you can see that the Raptor is just not a very cost effective airliner. But then, do we really care, when what we really want to do is get to the enemy very fast and throw missiles and bombs at him without getting shot down ourselves?

I’ve read a few reports about the range when in supercruise. It’s certainly better than flying with afterburners running, but it’s also not sipping fuel. I’d guess your reasonable range at M1.5 to M1.8 in supercruise, while leaving you enough fuel to get to the battle space and back to base (or refueling) is probably 300 to 400 nm at most - possibly less. If you run the engines at about 93% of N1 at altitude (35,000 feet and above) you’ll find you’re burning anywhere from 8000 to 15000 pounds per hour per engine to keep the aircraft moving at those speeds. There’s a reason F-22s enter the battle space at 50,000 feet and at Mach 1.5+ in supercruise. First the altitude gives the high ground, and second, that’s probably the best altitude for fuel consumption vs. speed vs. ability to respond to threats (maneuverability). This is far and away a higher performance than any 4th gen fighter and really any other fighter currently operating. But it comes at the cost of a high fuel bill.

As you’ve noted, the F-15C/E has a longer range. With all of its available fuel (somewhere north of 5000 gallons with all tanks filled) it can go almost 3000 nm during a ferry mission. The SFC figures are are a little better than for Raptor so the raw engine efficiency is a little bit better - it can also hang more fuel off of the wings and body than the Raptor. The greater efficiency is because these engines are optimized for subsonic performance, where Raptor is of course optimized for going supersonic without afterburner. Regardless, I doubt the model you’re flying in MSFS 2020 properly models fuel consumption anyway, so you’re probably getting something closer to airliner level fuel consumption and not jet fighter performance. I’ve had to incorporate some additional variables into the engine modeling to accomplish the goal of reproducing a reasonable engine performance and fuel consumption. I still don’t have a method of accurately representing the insanely high fuel consumption with afterburner. This Raptor model is in essence a supercruiser all the way into the Mach 2+ range of speeds.

Edit: The Asobo default turbine engine model wrt fuel consumption is, for lack of a better term, wrong. The jet airliners and business jets, unmodified, will get better cruise fuel consumption performance at lower altitude then they do at the real world best cruise altitudes. It’s so far off as to be laughable. Any mod or add-on that relies on this underlying model is not going to replicate fuel consumption accurately. This is one of a number of deficiencies in Asobo’s flight physics modeling efforts. My Longitude mod and this F-22 will much more faithfully replicate the fuel burn figures for a turbine engine at low and high altitudes. My Longitude mod gets within 1% to 2% of the Cessna test data for fuel consumption (or better) at all certified operating altitudes. The F-22 modeling, without test data to refer to, is a bit of a guess, but I made the effort to align fuel consumption with stated range performance and estimates for engine fuel consumption and performance at various altitudes and speeds as reported in the media.

Enjoy the flying!

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Is F22 raptor freeware?

Yes it is - enjoy

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This is what we have ingame at the moment, we didint flood the forums with more pics from substance, we just concentrated on getting it ingame. Kudos to Evan and Dakfly for making it possible.


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Thank you for that thorough response.

Hi! Would you mind making also the .blend files for the F-22 available on GitHub? Would be good to have as an example of how to do things right when constructing an own aircraft model for MSFS using Blender.

Just wrote a reply to you on the megathread. I no longer use blender for the models because it started to feel too limited for what I was trying to achieve. I don’t plan on releasing the 3d model online as I’ve put too much work into it, and it’d make it very easy for someone to copy that work. I hope you understand my reasoning.

If you’re running into issues with your model, or need some guidance, feel free to send me a DM, and I can try to answer your questions for you.

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OK, I fully understand your concerns. Are you using the “real thing” now, 3ds Max? Could you please list some of the limitations that Blender imposes, and what kind of things one should not use in one’s 3d model?

Yes, I’m using 3ds Max. There were a few things that I couldn’t get to work right in blender. The first to come to mind is draw order. When multiple transparent meshes are rendered the order would always seem reversed no matter what numbers I placed there. So there’s be issues with the HUD glass rendering on top of the canopy in exterior view.
I also find animations much easier to work with in Max. You can create animation groups allowing you to combine animations. If that’s doable in blender, I have no idea how, and everything I read said it’s not possible.
And finally, the blender2msfs plugin always seemed to mess up on me. I’m sure I messed something up, but every time I did, I’d have to set the fs material type to disabled, go to the shader tab, delete everything and start over. It was just a huge time suck that I don’t have to worry about now.

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I use Blender mate, it’s fine but it does take some fiddling to get things to work. Combined animations are done via Non-Linear-Animations - animate as normal, then “push-down” each animation into an NLA and name it appropriately - c_gear, c_tire etc, so they all work together in the normal way.

For transparencies, in typical sim fashion, they’re backwards - high number for closest, lower for further away.

MSFS2Blender works fine as far as I know, but if you ever head back to Blender for any reason give me a shout, I can walk you through it. 3DS Max is a great bit of kit, but it does cost some whereas Blender is of course free.

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Thanks Dean! It’s definitely a steep learning curve no matter which modeling program I decide to use. Plus max is super buggy, I get at least one CTD per day, so learned to save regularly the hard way. I do enjoy how max’s workflow is organized, but I miss the uvw tools blender has. I’ll probably stick with max as long as I have a means to access it. I’ll definitely reach out if I do decide to switch back. Thanks again!

And about our previous conversation, we did get the canopy to render on the interior model, so the new cockpit is much more immersive. Still a lot of work before it’s ready for release, though.

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Cockpit looks nice. I’ll take one.

What would be interesting to be “fixed” would be decoupling ailerons from the nose wheel steering. All other planes typically only use the rudder controls, the F-22 also reacts to ailerons, which makes taking off once a while trickier, say if you’re starting from the ramp and need to line up manually instead of letting the game do it for you.

Latest update broke the plane I guess. The left, right and bottom displays don’t show anything, and FBW seems disabled or at least impaired. I guess it’s related to this WASM hotfix.

I’m going to re-download the version I posted on github and test it out. I’ll report back when I get something figured out.

Seems to be working fine for me. Maybe there’s a conflicting mod in your community folder? You could try removing them all and adding them back a few at a time to diagnose.

This is probably gonna take a very long while. On a hunch I let Steam verify my files, which led it to nuke the game data downloads. I’m not sure why it even did that, considering they were stored in a custom folder, but downloading 173GB on a measly 16MBit is gonna take a while (and TBH I don’t really feel like it).

I had to go through that a week or so ago when they broke the developer stuff. Got impatient waiting for the update and had steam verify files. Learned my lesson…

I could confrm this issue , 3 big screens except MFD are empty black
EDIT: after restarting the flight (go back to menu and start it again) everything is OK

A few teasers for some of the exterior work I’ve been doing.

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