by Guest Writer Chris “BeachAV8R” Frishmuth
The evolution of Falcon 4 continues. In the past few weeks the F4 community has been graced with yet another modification to add to the collection of user created add-ons. The long awaited F4 Unified Team SuperPak 4 (SP4) has arrived. As is the case with pretty much any piece of computer coding these days, SP4 has its share of problems. The SP4 team is working very hard to identify and correct those problems and no doubt several “hot-fixes” will be coming down the pipeline in the coming weeks and months. As such, this is not an exhaustive review of the plusses and minuses of SP4. I’ll give you my conclusions (and opinions) at the end of the mission report!
My install for this report follows:
I did not install Twaelti’s brilliant high-tiles for the simple reason that the order of operations for installing add-ons eluded me and after several bungled attempts I felt that the above install was sufficient to provide a worthy mission report. A basic install of F4+1.08+SP4 will work but a high resolution cockpit and BMS graphical effects add immensely to the Falcon experience and I highly recommend both.
After installing SP4 I fired up a campaign and was immediately impressed by the volume of operations that the Air Tasking Order generated. While SP3 was no slouch, it does appear that further tweaking of the campaign engine has occurred with SP4 and the number and variety of missions was pretty impressive. I selected a squadron to fly with out of Osan and selected an Offensive Counter-Air (OCA) mission to fly. Our 4-ship flight would be part of a larger package, all F-16C-52s, including a 2-ship Suppression of Enemy Air Defense flight (SEAD) and a Combat Air Patrol (CAP) flight consisting of 2 more F-16s to keep enemy aircraft off our back during the strike. Our flight was tasked to destroy the highway airstrip and associated buildings at Nuch’on-ni, approximately 30 miles north of the (former) DMZ.
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The intel module gives us a close look at our target area from any angle and zoom level as well as giving us the current damage to the target. As you can see, there are 4 primary targets at the site: the runway, radar, control tower, and radio tower.
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Selecting a load-out appropriate to the mission I load 6 runway cratering Durandals on my aircraft and forego external fuel tanks and hang 2 Mk-84 2000 lb. bombs to take out the airfield structures. Since the mission is only a mere 30 miles deep into enemy territory internal fuel should suffice for the mission.
If this were going to be a deep-strike mission up the heart of the peninsula I would take extra fuel and fly a low-level terrain following profile to avoid detection. With this mission being so near to friendly lines and assets we will fly a medium altitude ingress to avoid small arms before dropping down to low level for the airfield attack.
