The Many Generations of Air Warrior

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/5900/aw.htm

This is it. You've found the mother of all Air Warrior sites! There's a lot here, so you'd best sit down. In addition to an introduction to Air Warrior for beginners, this site records my escapades in the virtual skies of the Internet, using Kesmai's wonderful "Air Warrior" software. I use these www pages as a kind of a glorified flight log, recording some of my most memorable events. If you are interested in Lockheed's P38 "Lightning" fighter, you will find a lot of useful stuff in the "Other resources" section. A lot of folks are using my offline missions and guncamera films to study the P38. Welcome!

I've always wanted to climb into the cockpit of a powerful, noisy, dangerous old World War II fighter plane and point it skyward, looping and climbing and diving in wild, delirious mirth. I've wanted to hear the roar and feel the thrum of those 2,000 horsepower engines screaming for speed, and to listen to the wind whistling past my cockpit canopy in response to the motions of my arm straining on the control stick.

Fig. 1: A Lockheed overcast! The newest version of Air Warrior, called "Air Warrior 3", can simulate mammoth missions with 50 or more aircraft, if you've got the CPU muscle to dedicate to the task.

Unfortunately, only a few of these old warbirds are still flying, and the day when anyone dare dream of flying one will soon be gone forever.

But, in my own way, I have flown over forty of these wonderful warbirds. Over and over again, I've entered live international competition and thrilled to dogfights against the best pilots in the world. It wasn't real, but it was the next best thing. I've done it in computer-based flight simulators. I own more than 50 different flight simulators. My favorite is Air Warrior, by Kesmai Corporation. This www page describes the many versions of Air Warrior that have been available during the past dozen years. Most versions are still available on the Internet free of charge, and in the paragraphs that follow you'll find a summary of each, and a description of the computer equipment needed to support them. Air Warrior software is one of the world's truly great freebies. The developers have always been very generous about making cut-down versions available free of charge in order to stimulate the marketplace for their more advanced versions, and for their online services. By helping friends and newcomers find free copies of Air Warrior, I've introduced a lot of people to flight simulators. Some of these friends have had modern, powerful PCs and have been able to use the latest and greatest versions of Air Warrior. Other friends have tired old PCs, but I've still been able to find a version of Air Warrior that's a good fit for their equipment. If you've ever wanted to dabble in computer flight simulators and have access to an IBM PC-compatible computer that's been built during the past 6 years, you might find exactly what you're looking for right here.

What is Air Warrior?

Air Warrior is a commercial air combat simulator that has been available for over 12 years now, in various versions whose prices range from free to about USA $60.00. It allows 1 to 250 simultaneous participants to operate a variety of different historic aircraft in thrilling, mortal combat.

Tens of thousands of people fly Air Warrior online. There are thousands of "regulars" that you'll run into over and over again if you fly a lot. You'll meet all kinds of people there. Some outrageous personalities emerge from the crowd, both good and bad. In my experience, the vast majority of Air Warrior fliers are nice folks. This is especially true of those that continue flying long-term. Some hilarious episodes have been preserved for posterity, too.

Most users fly World War II-vintage fighters such as the P51 Mustang, Supermarine Spitfire, Messerschmitt 109, Mitsubishi Zero, or Lockheed Lightning, but it also simulates WWII bombers, and fighters from World War I and from the Korean war. It runs on 486 and Pentium-class IBM PCs under the MSDOS operating system, under Windows 3.1, under Windows 95, or in a DOS Box under Windows. (It also runs on Macintosh computers, but those versions are not discussed here.)

Fig. 2: My Son Adam shoots me down. This image is from "Air Warrior Classic", the DOS version, which reached the peak of it's popularity from about 1992 through about 1995. (This image is displayed at about half normal size, and has been compressed to minimize download times. In real use, this old version of Air Warrior produced images that were a little better than this, with the colors blending more smoothly, etc.)

I like Air Warrior a lot, and I have learned how to use it to do battle against other people across the Internet. I fly as "Peabody" and my schedule permits me to fly for an hour or so on one or two weeknights each week. If you'd like to join me and the other Air Warrior fanatics in cyberspace, read on!

Fig. 3: Scratch one German Fighter!!. This is a view from the cockpit of my Lockheed P38J Lightning just before I shot down the plane you see centered in my gunsights. This image was taken using Air Warrior III in June of 1998, using hardware-accelerated graphics via Microsoft's "Direct3d" facility from Windows 95. The combat took place in an offline mission which I wrote myself. During this combat segment, my computer room was roaring with the sound of the twin, 1400 HP Allison engines and the hammering crack of my machine guns. My hand shook from my vibrating joystick as I fired my guns, and when the target exploded, my ears rung with a deafening concussion as I flew through the resulting, ominous debris field. (Image is reduced down from 24 million colors to just 256, and compressed to minimize download times. The actual software produces a nicer image than this, with much sharper focus and better blending of colors.)

Online, combat takes place in one of several different "arenas" each of which can be configured by service providers and scenario designers to simulate different kinds of battles. In some of these arenas, the geography is simple and not intended to represent any specific area. Other arenas represent identifyable areas where historic battles were fought, but all have been modified to better facilitate game play.

You can also fly some versions of Air Warrior offline, against computer-controlled enemy pilots. Although these computer-controlled drones aren't as skilled as a practiced, motivated, real-live human being, they are pretty good compared with the lackluster droids thrown at you by most combat flight simulators, and you can learn a lot by practicing against them. Over the years, these computer-controlled "drone" opponents have gotten better and better. (They'll never be as good as a skilled, motivated, real-life opponent, but as of this writing in 1998, they are better than many of the living pilots I've met on the Internet.)