F-19 Stealth Air Combat

This is an important guide to playing Microprose's "F-19 Stealth Fighter". In F-19 you fly the famous-fictitious airplane in missions for uncle Sam through the (unfriendly) world. With a wide cache of smart weapons, and in theaters ranging from the Med, Southeast Asia, Northern Russia, Central Europe and the Persian Gulf, you are given a variety of missions involving targets either on the ground or airborne. With high tech, the F-19's designers have cut the enemy's capacity to detect your wonder jet using thermal imaging and radar. Now for the bad news - the F-19 handles like a pig, is slow, underpowered, leaden, and incapable of either snap-turns or sustained turns. To stay stealthy, your weapons are stored internally and "delivered" through a bomb bay door (Slim Pickens not included) which cuts into your range and payload. You can keep extra gas but that cuts further into payload. The biggest ace in your enemies' hand is stealthiness itself - or rather its limits. Stealth isn't an absolute - it merely offers less visibility than non-stealth planes, not complete invisibility. By altering your shape relative to radar - whether changing your direction by climbing or turning - or simply opening up your bomb-bay door increases your RCS (Radar Cross Section) makes it easier for bad guys to spot you. Also, you'll still have to fly at low altitudes where you have less maneuvering room against MiGs, are closer to ground-based guns, have more obstacles to maneuver around, and where the jet's behavior is at its worst. (I'm not sure if the designers were able to model the so-called low altitude "ground effect" in 1989, but this sim seems pretty convinced that they were). And, of course, you can be seen by the naked eye.Though the F-19 makes for an unappealing airplane, it makes for a great sim - the limits of your jet's performance and invisibility forces you to perpetually watch your back, constantly challenging you to choose between confronting threats (he'll be close enough to see me!) or evading it (if I lob a Maverick at him, I'll wake up every radar site in North Africa!). The sim even contains a suite of ELINT sensors that lets you know when you're approaching trouble by comparing the extent of your RCS against hostile radar signals both on the ground and in the air. Microprose further adds to the meat by having you fly in a target rich and fairly detailed (for 1989) environment with locations and and a host of weapons, all of which will be immediately recognizable to anybody who's read "Red Storm Rising" or any of the Dale Brown novels. (Flying over the Soviet's arctic naval Redoubt of Murmansk, and you'll catch exiting Typhoon-class missile subs, ala "Red October"). It's fun to read some of those techno-thrillers then come back and play the game. On the down side, the sim shows its age with weak AI, unrealistic and flat terrain, and a weak mission structure - the missions are random, but not interconnected, which cuts down on the