CA-27 Simpit using a real CA-27 aircraft

[Xpendable]

I was mentioning last night to a few of you that I have a friend in Australia who is currently building an F-86 Sabre sim pit, and that he recently (just in the last few weeks) acquired a real CA-27 aircraft that was once part of the Royal Australian Airforce. He got the aircraft fuselage, wings, and tail (minus the engine) from a guy who had it on his property for many, many years. This particular airframe (A94-965) is apparently a combat veteran of the Malayan Emergency 1958-1960 and in 1962 was redeployed to Ubon Thailand, flying combat missions alongside the Royal Thai Air Force.

For those of you who don't know, the CA-27 is an adaptation of the F-86 Sabre Jet, but it was not made by North American. These were made in Canada by a different company, authorized by the United States, but they are actually different. They look very similar to a F-86, but they have a bigger engine with 50% more power and a 25% larger intake nose. And the armament is different... Twin 30mm Aden cannons made by the British.

My friend spent the previous year acquiring ALL of the instruments, ejection seat, canopy, parachute, etc. that he could get his hands on, with the goal of fabricating anything he couldn't acquire or wasn't in good enough shape to use. Anyway, I was going to post a few of his pictures that he shared recently on his Discord server for MVP, but I found his 6 page simpit thread on the Eagle Dynamics forums which is much more detailed. Here's a link to page 5 where things start getting really interesting (fuselage!). Feel free to look at some of the other pages, too. There's a lot of stuff there. I've actually helped him with a few things, including fixing a bug in DCS-BIOS so that the bomb angle switch would work properly.

https://forum.dcs.world/topic/247916-mv ... og/page/5/

If you want even more detail, search out the MVP server on Discord and look for the #f86-build-blog channel.

This link will only work for the next 7 days:
https://discord.gg/w95hDBfh

[Trichome]

That is some wild dedication.... its going to be so cool

[Grifter]

Really cool project. He has a ton of work to do given the erosion. The front canopy near the HUD looks crooked or warped, and the glass needs to be either cleaned with something heavy duty or replaced. Looks awesome though what he's planning to do.

[Xpendable]

He has a complete canopy that is in good condition, which he bought last year.

[Xpendable]

Update on my friend's F-86 / CA27 cockpit build. They lifted the fuselage up and were able to get the nose wheel down. It hasn't been extended in probably 40+ years. Most of the linkages were missing, so the gear didn't rotate 90 degrees when it came down like it should. They've bolted on a custom made rear axel that uses what I think are real F86 hubs and wheels.

The guy holding the camera is my friend Ben who owns this. The guy kicking the door down is Nathan, one of his friends / coworkers.

[Xpendable]

My friend and his team have made a ton of progress on the CA-27, and I am getting to contribute something to the build that I am giddy about. I am designing and building a pneumatic recoil system to simulate the vibration from firing the twin 30mm Aden cannons on the CA-27. The following video is my work in progress proof of concept. There will be a piston hidden in the cannon compartments on each side of the fuselage. This is going to be fun! And yes, I already have this working with DCS. When you squeeze the trigger on whatever joystick you have assigned to the cannons, this thing fires, and when you release the trigger, this stops.

[Xpendable]

My Australian friend who was building this CA27/F-86 simpit using a real fuselage sold the entire project. Some dude offered him a lot of money and he accepted it. I am amazed. They spent thousands of hours (I can only assume) working on this thing with lots of volunteer help.

I think he has soured on DCS. He once ran 12 DCS servers and used to organize and put on huge virtual airshows. That community has died off and now he only runs 4 servers, and they are empty most of the time. Player base for DCS in general has contracted a lot, especially post covid. It is weird, but Covid era were the best years.

[Hammer]

It would be interesting to know what people are moving to instead of DCS? Or just too busy now?

[Xpendable]

There's not much to move to. You have MSFS2024, but that's non-combat. You have BMS which is basically Falcon 4.0 with some improvements. There is a Falcon 5.0 in the works, but not sure how close we are to that being released - I think that's far off. I won't even mention War Thunder, because that's an entirely different kind of game. In the case of my Australian friend and the other core people still around just play FPS's these days, like "The Hunt", which seems pretty cool, but obviously not flying related.

[Hammer]

War Thunder is not *too* awful bad, at least it wasn't. I did like playing the tanks in it, but that was way before expansion into modern, etc. They used to have private coop and pvp modes, not sure if that still exists.

If the folks you know want a hard core sim, point them towards Steel Beasts Pro PE. Several modes of play, and all can be mixed in the same game session: commanding a tank and/or taking positions in the tank, commanding a unit in which you can take pretty much any position in the vehicles, larger unit or whole side command in which you are in command of the entire side during a battle (usually using the map). It seems exepnsive until you look at the price of all the modules you have purchased for DCS...