Tech: Jane's Combat Simulations

Most of us will never get the chance to pilot aircraft like an AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopter (unit price - more than $50 million each, including weapons and support), so military flight simulators are a staple of the PC gaming market. Back in the heyday of the flight sims, store shelves were filled with games that offered phonebook-sized manuals and meticulous attention to flight envelopes. One of the biggest flight sim series was "Jane's Combat Simulations."

Considering the state of PC performance around the mid-'90s, the Jane's sims are shockingly realistic. The best-known of the lot, "Longbow," was developed by Origin Systems, and it featured everything from a neat forward-looking infrared camera view to the unique fire-and-forget Hellfire missile system. Somehow knocking out a tank column is much more satisfying when you have to fiddle with a dozen controls in order to do it:



My favorite parts of these games, though, are the instruction manuals. They're always fun to read because they don't just consist of bland directions on how to work the game; instead, there are descriptions of nap-of-the-earth flying, helo vs. helo combat, and ground-level aerodynamics. It must be pretty difficult to grok all these flight concepts while people are shooting at you, but the men and women of the U.S. military certainly make it look easy.