Since you asked! DC Designs posted this on Facebook this morning:
FRIDAY NEWS UPDATE ( ALL IMAGES ARE WIP! )
Hi folks!
The Harriers were published by Just Flight earlier this week, and the Marketplace version has cleared testing and will be released there on Monday. Feedback so far is hugely positive, with lots of folks trying out the Harriers on moving ships of one kind or another. I’ll continue to refine the VTOL capabilities to make them as useable as possible, but as you might have seen in my recent video, it’s no easy feat to hover and land a Harrier on a moving aircraft carrier. There’s no “slew” function being used here like some other VTOL aircraft in the sim to approximate a hover – the Harrier’s hover is far more realistic, and all of the sim’s meteorology ( wind, turbulence etc ) affects the aircraft’s every move.
For the rest of this week, I have focused on the final DC Designs release, the P-61B Black Widow, primarily getting the new virtual cockpit into the model and setting things up there. Much to be done before this is properly integrated, but I thought it was time to share some images of the interior in flight in MSFS. I’ll continue with this work next week, fitting it in alongside Concorde’s update and the Stearman.
The P-61B is one of the most iconic, and yet least well-known of all the fighters of World War Two. Despite its size it could actually dogfight with Axis fighters, was one of the first aircraft capable of carrying an air-to-air radar, was one of the fastest night fighters ever built, and was very heavily armed with eight cannons. Exterior detailing on the model will start soon, as will texture work for liveries and weathering. The engines are done and in place, but I still have the flight modelling, engine data, fuel system and avionics to do, and Sim Acoustics will be doing the sounds for the big Double Wasp radial engines. Full steam ahead on the development now, but it will be a while before the launch, somewhere in the mid to late summer I’d imagine.
The next round of aircraft updates for MSFS2020 will likely be the last before moving on to MSFS2024 conversions. There is much to bring to all the aircraft in this next round of updates, too much to list here, but as always I’ll record progress weekly so you can see what’s coming.
That’s it for this week.
Happy Friday!!
