Here is my proposal. Pretend that I am selling shares of this company that is going to buy the F4 source and hire a development team to see this thing through. I have 500,000 shares to sale in this company with currently zero assets. I am selling the shares in this manner:

Option A: Buy as many shares as you want for $10 a share, not to exceed the number of shares available.

Option B: For $10 a month for 60 months. I will sale you 40 shares of this company. That's $15 a share. Hey, there has to be some reward for those who take Option A over Option B:

For every 100,000 shares I sell we'll have a somewhere between a million and a million of capital to do this.

i.e.

Send the money to:

Old Dino
555 Ocean Beach Front Road
Seaside, Arizona
90666

You need to start an S corporation, and issue stock. It is the only legal method to do this.

1. The corporation does not exist.
2. You can sell shares of a properly formed corporation (I am not a lawyer) without the corporation selling shares on the public market i.e. the stock exchange.
3. Of course, there would never ever ever be a "guaranteed return". It's an investment a.k.a. a calculated gamble.

What I wanted to see and to show if this community would seriously consider investing in such a risky enterprise. The answer seems to be a resounding "NO". Which goes to show that maybe you all agree with HASBRO -- it's a bad investment. I would be willing to invest a couple thousand in such a company. Of course, I wouldn't just lay the money down without knowing who I was dealing with etc. but barring any bad information about the intentions of said company I'd be willing to risk the money because I'd really like to see the fruition of the electronic battlefield.

I think that could be profitable because folks that just like first person shoot em ups could be ground troops or tanks. Strategists and tacticians type gamers could be generals in charge of ATO and ground orders. And, of course, high fidelity flight sim fans would be the air forces. That's off the top of my head. You see the point I am trying to make is that such a multi-genre virtual war game would appeal to a much broader class of gamers than just high fidelity flight sim fans. That just might be profitable, especially if the servers charged a $1 an hour to play (after 10 hours of free time with your original purchase)?

Anyway, I wanted to get the dialog going on a serious attempt to put into place the mechanisms that could bring this about. For example, PERHAPS we could raise $250,000 in investment money, and put that into a third party escrow account. That money comes back to the investors if the thing does not reach that level.

Once it reaches that level a corporation could be formed (according to the premises that the investors agree upon). I'd think, a one or two employee company that just kept getting investors by selling half of the business off (that way the first group of investors would never relinquish primary control of the company) until the coffers we're full enough to START buying the code and hiring the developers.

Most of all I think people are just skeptical of sending money to a person they don't know. If it was already a company it would be different. I'm interested to know how this'll all turn out though, it could be a good thing. Good luck

But even if it wasn't, the "community" doesn't need to buy the code and develop F15. It only needs to buy a Linux-like open source right.

There seem to be a fair amount of folks around who will do the coding in what must be some pretty remarkable "spare time," (thanks for skins, cockpits, and hex stuff -- whatever that is) and the open source model is pretty powerful.

The only problem is, if we all go on Priceline.com or something and start up a bid for open source, they'll start thinking they've make a mistake . . .

. . . and the more valuable the bid gets, the more Hasbro'll hang onto the code.

Alas, they won't see it a valuable ENOUGH to hire the team again.

Still, open source would be a nice way to go. No Corp. required to hold the code, no investment risk, etc. And if former developers wanted to fool around with low-key add ons and such, and if they commericalize'em or sell'em as shareware, well fine. And if other existing Companies wanted to do add-ons like the ones for MS Flight Sim, well . . .

Nah, its too good to be true. Gotta be.

Besides, the big problem down the road for Falcon is the need to redo the T&L engine back to DX7 so the GeForce kind of card can give it back some kick on the performance end. Apparently a big job. Who'll do that?
Maybe what we really need is a Falcon white knight corporation -- somebody who thinks that they can take the thing over from Hasbro and make money. Within the Sim market the Falcon "franchise" is right up there . . .