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NOTE ON DCS:F-35 - WE ARE NOT INVOLVED!
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After the surprise announcement of the DCS:F-35 we have received several messages asking if we were involved in the development.
The answer is NO: WE ARE NOT INVOLVED IN THIS PROJECT, although years ago we had discussed to port our MSFS F-35 to DCS.
Frankly, to make this a realistic F-35 simulation, it is totally understandable that ED decided to develop this on their own as "first party" official module, as there are a number of changes/improvements to the simulation core needed to make it work.
However, we have seen a lot of misinformed discussion about the potential "realism" that ED can achieve, as they declared it to be a "full fidelity" module and we'd like to clarify that we believe they can do an EXCELLENT job in terms of realism: contrary to popular belief, much of the required information on the F-35 air vehicle is publicly available (e.g. academic papers) and there are dozens of videos of cockpit simulators, showing the avionics and the pilot interface in great detail.
Moreover, a lot of the official aircraft documentation is APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE or UNCLASSIFIED (although some of the unclassfied bits, like pages of the flight manual, are actually part of RESTRICTED documents) and can be easily found online.
Long story short, the F-35 is actually better documented than most people think, and it IS better documented than the F-22, and even (to a much lesser extent) than the Eurofighter.
There are, however, some critical areas in the development, such as the actual performance of the radar and the sensors (that is CLASSIFIED) and the actual radar cross section (which can be, to some extent, simulated with commercially available tools such as HF-SS or CST).
Yes, there will be areas in which ED will have to guesstimate some things - so il will not be (OBVIOUSLY) 100% REAL.
But (spoiler) NO SIMULATION IS 100% REAL.
Can it break the game balance? YES - but that is like IRL.