The Ad-Hoc Flight Simulator
Flying in games which are not designed from the bottom up as flight sims will inherently be cartoony. I've previously wondered why Battlefield and ARMA didn't make an effort to make the flying portions of their game at least replicate the feeling of flying in a more realistic way, often assuming it was a conscious decision to not implement rigorous physics.
The reason they don't is quite simple: their maps sizes are way too small to allow for anything close to realism. The diagonal distance across a typical Battlefield 2: Project Reality map will be something like 5.7 km (4 km width & height), and the for the Limnos island in ARMA 3 is something like 35 km (25 km width & height). For infantry and land-based warfare, these numbers really aren't bad and are on the order of what you'd expect the scale of a conflict would be at (though tanks actually also fight each other over several kilometers), but here is a minimal argument for why planes cannot work at these distances.
Let's say that the stall speed of an f-16 jet is about 120 knots. In other words at the lowest speed an aircraft needs to generate lift it will traverse about 3.7 km of map in one minute. This tells us that the time taken to diagonally traverse the map at the take-off speed for a fighter jet for BF2 is about a minute and a half, and for ARMA 3 about 10 minutes. Considering that actual aircraft will be operating at anything up to three times or more quickly than these speeds, even when turning and dogfighting, we can see why the map sizes in these games are nowhere near large enough to operate with anything resembling realistic flight. This doesn't even consider the vertical heights that a lot of aircraft will operate at, perhaps at 10's of kilometers above the ground, and how this defines quite large 3-d battlefield.
So what can be done to make these games more interesting for frequent fliers? One idea I've had (which I am sure isn't original) is to extend the map outwards which would then let us use the more interesting flight dynamics. ARMA already does this in a way, as you can see in the video below, and actually if you play the Operation Flashpoint tech demo from 1997 you'll find that it was always designed with flight sim possibilities in mind!
You could then place an airfield at whatever distance North of Chernarus you wanted, then say that the ground combat area of interest was near the detailed map. Most people who play flight simulators who would be interested in the complexity the ground scenario in ARMA or Project Reality brings probably wouldn't mind having to deal with a slightly uglier, or even repetitious, map to fly over before getting to the target area of interest. The journey could even be made more interesting by having ground targets like SAM sites giving you a hard time between getting back and forth between the airfield. You could also have targets like tank columns which would be travelling into the scenario area and would give your allied ground forces a hard time if they made it there, giving the pilots extra objectives to complete. Finally, air-to-air dogfights would be more interesting and would bring in all the complexity of real life modern air combat. The only great loss is that if you eject over a portion of the map which isn't over the ground forces area, there would be nothing for miles. There could be modified rules where an ejected pilot would warp into the battlefield, making the game more interesting again.
Of course this relies on the pilots turning off and ignoring that they are flying over truly ugly bits of terrain, but it's probably one of the easier solutions outside of scaling down the speeds of aircraft (and so their battlefield space) which is what's practised already and makes aircraft combat seem so cartoony. It's also obvious that this depends on hard engine limitations, but if modders are able to get past these air combat could be made a lot more interesting in these infantry-type sim games where airplanes feel like more of an afterthought.
The reason they don't is quite simple: their maps sizes are way too small to allow for anything close to realism. The diagonal distance across a typical Battlefield 2: Project Reality map will be something like 5.7 km (4 km width & height), and the for the Limnos island in ARMA 3 is something like 35 km (25 km width & height). For infantry and land-based warfare, these numbers really aren't bad and are on the order of what you'd expect the scale of a conflict would be at (though tanks actually also fight each other over several kilometers), but here is a minimal argument for why planes cannot work at these distances.
Let's say that the stall speed of an f-16 jet is about 120 knots. In other words at the lowest speed an aircraft needs to generate lift it will traverse about 3.7 km of map in one minute. This tells us that the time taken to diagonally traverse the map at the take-off speed for a fighter jet for BF2 is about a minute and a half, and for ARMA 3 about 10 minutes. Considering that actual aircraft will be operating at anything up to three times or more quickly than these speeds, even when turning and dogfighting, we can see why the map sizes in these games are nowhere near large enough to operate with anything resembling realistic flight. This doesn't even consider the vertical heights that a lot of aircraft will operate at, perhaps at 10's of kilometers above the ground, and how this defines quite large 3-d battlefield.
So what can be done to make these games more interesting for frequent fliers? One idea I've had (which I am sure isn't original) is to extend the map outwards which would then let us use the more interesting flight dynamics. ARMA already does this in a way, as you can see in the video below, and actually if you play the Operation Flashpoint tech demo from 1997 you'll find that it was always designed with flight sim possibilities in mind!
You could then place an airfield at whatever distance North of Chernarus you wanted, then say that the ground combat area of interest was near the detailed map. Most people who play flight simulators who would be interested in the complexity the ground scenario in ARMA or Project Reality brings probably wouldn't mind having to deal with a slightly uglier, or even repetitious, map to fly over before getting to the target area of interest. The journey could even be made more interesting by having ground targets like SAM sites giving you a hard time between getting back and forth between the airfield. You could also have targets like tank columns which would be travelling into the scenario area and would give your allied ground forces a hard time if they made it there, giving the pilots extra objectives to complete. Finally, air-to-air dogfights would be more interesting and would bring in all the complexity of real life modern air combat. The only great loss is that if you eject over a portion of the map which isn't over the ground forces area, there would be nothing for miles. There could be modified rules where an ejected pilot would warp into the battlefield, making the game more interesting again.
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