streakeagle

Those helmets look too bulky/heavy. Fighter pilots always needed strong neck muscles, looks like they are going to be even stronger.

Outstanding landing. The award was nice, but I bet the aircrew and their families could care less about that. I am curious how bad the flexing was. If the longerons on the nose didn't fracture, I could see the airframe being made flyable again. At the very least, the aircrew not only saved their own lives, but kept quite a bit of the B-1 intact as spares for other B-1s if it wasn't repairable. I hope they were able to identify the cause of the failure and take some action to keep it from happening to someone else who might not be so lucky to put her down so well.

Getting a bigger monitor won't help out any unless it has a significantly higher resolution than the monitor you are complaining about. Otherwise, the pixels will just look bigger and uglier. I can say that sitting about 2 or 3 feet from a 46" 1080p LCD TV generally leaves my gauges looking full size and good resolution... very readable. Unless, I open my field of view out to something like 90 degrees. Typical 60-80 degree fields of view are quite readable if not perfect. Most of my problems stem from the lack of color range on LCD TVs compared to dedicated PC monitors (CRTs really excelled in this area). At the 46 inch scale with limited color range (typically 70% of the NTSC standard) antialiasing doesn't look as good no matter what multiplier you use from x4 to x16. A blue sky with a wide range of blue hues (almost every decent sim I know of) looks more like 16-bit color with its banding. I recently forced my DVI output to my LCD TV to use Adobe color scales (closer to 90% range of NTSC) since my specific model of Mitsubishi TV was famously known for having a much wider percentage of NTSC standard colore mapping. It may be a placebo effect, but the blue banding of the sky seems less obvious after having done so. What I want is a quad HD PC monitor in the 46" to 60" range with a full color spectrum usuable by the HDMI input of the TV and output of my card. In the interim, given the limitations of current gpus and HDMI ports, I might settle for a 2560x1600 30" monitor... The resolution increase sounds awesome, but having enjoyed the large field of view provided by a 46" monitor, I don't think I will downgrade my monitor size just to get slightly smoother gages and possibly better color shades. I have been running 1600x1200 since SFP1 was released on an old Radeon 8500 128MB. It is about time the market provide me with a decent resolution increase at an affordable price and fully usable by the PC hardware at decent quality settings.

Progress... yet delayed again. I wish they wouldn't even bother to post release dates until it is truly firm and won't change for any reason short of the internet going down or the end of the world. I kind of liked TK/Third Wire's way of doing things in the beginning: He stated long term goals in general terms and backed them with patches/service packs, then would surprise everyone with a new release like Wings Over Vietnam. The only time he overcommitted what he was going to do in those early Walmart fiasco days was stating there would be a free F-104C addon after the very popular free F-4J and A-4F addons. The loss of the F-104C was excusable, though, as the C-130A and F-104G were both removed from later SFP1 releases due to ongoing legal issues with Lockheed and its quest to license every one of its planes in the flight sim universe. Ultimately, so many years later, he made good with SF2 and DLC, even if he had lost the capital to make the F-104 a flyable aircraft and had to charge again for what was originally promised for free. I can't recall him ever promising anything that specific again until unveiling the SF2 North Atlantic game long before release, and even then he was careful to say as little as possible about what F-14 and ship functionality would be modeled. I do feel like the new terrain engine was somewhat overhyped, but not by TK. He said the extra detail people were screaming for was going to cost size and performance, and that was no lie. But everyone expected that TK would make creating and adding terrain as "easy" as the original terrain. Of course, TKs repsonse was a little cryptic and mostly useless: even without his support, everything you need to make new terrains is there, you just have to figure it out on your own since many of the key files in the new stock terrain were locked down. I can't way to see how the DCS : MiG-21bis turns out. I hope it meets or beats all the other extremely accurate DCS modules. I hope someone else follows it up with my favorite: the F-4 Phantom.

This problem can be solved: combine monitors to get the same pixel density around the instruments at wide angle that you have when you are zoomed in. Of course, you will need to run high end gpu's in SLI to even come close and have a reasonable frame rate. Going from a 1080p monitor to an ultra HD (quad HD) monitor is the same as using four 1080p monitors. That would double your resolution and make a noticeable improvement, but still wouldn't look as good as your zoomed in pic, would presently limit you to 30 fps due to the current HDMI connection available with first gen UHD TVs, and you would struggle to hit those 30 fps with 1 gpu. When the UHD monitors become available that have either display port or a higher spec HDMI capable of at least 60 fps and a single gpu can easily handle that many pixels with vsync enabled, that is the direction I am going. In the mean time, I have the zoom control mapped to an axis on my throttle if it isn't mapped to my Track IR so that I can easily trade between field of view and detail. P.S. A good 1920x1200 monitor is a good way to go unless you can afford a 2560x1600 monitor and some gpu power to drive it.

Legendary pilot, but nobody is perfect: http://azstarnet.com/news/local/top-gun-pilot-forgot-landing-gear/article_0e5210b2-8814-50fa-b8ba-03beaa5ab3ba.html A former Navy Top Gun with decades of flying experience forgot to put his plane's landing gear down during an air show practice run in Tucson in March, the Federal Aviation Administration found. Retired Capt. Dale "Snort" Snodgrass, a seasoned pro on the military air-show circuit, was piloting a Korean War-era F-86 Sabre that scraped to a stop and caught fire in the March 4 mishap at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Snodgrass, 57, was given counseling as "corrective action," according to the FAA report, obtained by the Arizona Daily Star under the Freedom of Information Act. The pilot was unhurt in the incident, which shut down air-show practice at D-M that day. The vintage warplane he was flying, owned by a California air museum, sustained minor damage when one of its wing fuel tanks ignited. The F-86 was one of dozens of warplanes in Tucson to practice formation flying for the 2006 air-show season. The event was not open to the general public. Snodgrass remains on the Air Force schedule this season. The service still has "total confidence in his abilities," according to a statement from the Air Combat Command. Snodgrass, a Florida resident, declined to comment on the FAA finding. Mike Abraham, a spokesman for CASE, LLC, the Virginia-based defense contractor that hired Snodgrass for the March 4 flight, said the pilot did not want to be interviewed. It is rare, but not unheard of, for pilots to land without putting their landing gear down, said Arvin Schultz, president of the Phoenix-based Arizona Pilots Association. "It's something that shouldn't happen, but when it does, the course of action the FAA takes is pretty standard," he said. If damage is minor and the incident is a simple oversight, discipline usually consists of giving the pilot a talking-to, Schultz said. The lecture would be "kind of demeaning" for a highly accomplished aviator, he said. Snodgrass, who retired from a 26-year Navy career in 1999, is renowned in the air-show world. He has 10,000 hours of flight time under his belt, half of them in the F-14 Tomcat, a Navy record for the jet. In 1985, Snodgrass was a Top Gun graduate and the Navy's Fighter Pilot of the Year. From 1994 to 1997, he was commander of all the Navy's F-14s. He flew the Tomcat in air shows for more than a decade, and is qualified on at least six other aircraft, including several vintage warplanes. Retired Air Force Maj. Jack Boileau of Tucson, a former F-86 pilot, said he can't fathom how someone with those credentials could forget such a basic rule of aviation. "It's hard to believe that a guy with all that experience would not put down his landing gear," said Boileau, adding that the F-86 has warning lights and a cockpit alarm to prevent such a mistake. The FAA report made no mention of the warning systems. It said the landing problem was "pilot induced." Because a fire resulted, the D-M mishap "could have been serious," Boileau said. "It's lucky that things ended as well as they did."

FA runs just fine on my Win7 64 PC. If the game runs at different speeds, you probably don't have the final patch applied. The color will be screwed up unless you run a special batch file to automatically toggle between normal WIn 7 and the state you need to play FA. FA was much more like a true ACM sim with the 714 libs. No aircraft turning like UFOs (apparently the default F-16 was a bit overmodeled).

A2A simulations has greatly disappointed me as well. I haven't bought any of their products despite being tempted many times. I just don't get as much fun tooling around in FSX as I do in air combat sims. Between Strike Fighters 2 and DCS, I almost never play FSX. But, years ago they announced plans to do an AccuSim F-4 Phantom. A well done F-4 Phantom would get my attention even without the combat capability. Of course the possibility of using TacPack to add on combat capability could really get the job done. A thread about the F-4 showing progress photos used to be stickied in their forums. Almost immediately, A2A decided they needed to do something simpler to ease their way into supersonic jets. They announced that the F-104 Starfighter would be done first. The F-104 would conveniently share engines with the F-4 the same way the Spitfire and Mustang did in their previous AccuSim releases. But recently, A2A admitted on the forums that even the F-104 was beyond their present capability. So, they are going to start with a T-33 to get a very basic jet fighter under their belt before even thinking about high performance supersonic jets. Of course, they are so busy working on their current "bread and butter" light planes, Cessnas and Pipers, I doubt the T-33 would ever be done any time soon... This decade? If the best of the FSX third party payware modders can't make a "DCS" level jet in any reasonable time, this does not bode well for most of the other ones who are trying to release DCS addons. Even Eagle Dynamics has yet to release a fully DCS level supersonic fighter jet. The F/A-18C should be their first, whenever it finally gets released. If and when the F-15C AFM for FC3 is released, it will represent a big hurdle having been overcome if it has been done correctly. But the star for me was going to be the MiG-21bis. Still no real news other than wait for the "big announcement".

Hi-res template was delivered by Sundowner. Go to town with the "Thud"

This was a ground breaking revolutionary sim announced years ago. Every month there would be new screenshots and eventually some videos. If you wanted to help support the project and get the inside scoop, you could pay for access to the private "Area 51" section of the forums. It has become the Duke Nukem of combat flight sims. Big on promises with years of little to no progress. Of course, a Duke Nukem title was finally released. I seriously doubt Fighter Ops will ever be released. Even if by some miracle something is actually released, it would be so far behind current standards as to be pointless when products like FSX and DCS have already catering to its markets for years. Modding an existing sim is one thing. Creating a new one from the ground up with a complete featureset is completely different.

http://www.fighterops.com/forum/showthread.php?13-new-home&p=4076#post4076 Shouldn't that read, "...we stopped working years ago, we will never have anything to report, but please keep renewing your Area51 subscriptions to keep this web page online for another 10 years."

One step closer to victory. Yet also a calm before the storm. You are going to need a traditional British stiff upper lip. But I know you can get through this.

An LCD display should be adaptable. Plenty of guys already mapping DCS control panels to LCDs.

The Seffner Elementary school library that I attended from 3rd to 5th grade had these wonderful "Colby Books" that had photos and stats on airplanes. One of them was focused on bombers and showed an artist concept for the XB-70. A later book showed an actual photo of the prototype rollout. I fell in love with this plane. I sought out and found a model. These books also introduced me to the C-5A Galaxy concept art. These books were published throughout the 1960s. I was reading them in the late 70's. I was thrilled to see real C-5As flying overhead out of MacDill AFB and getting to tour them at the annual airshow. But was dismayed to find out that the XB-70 never made it into service. Years later, in 1997, I touched the prototype at Dayton, OH. Sadly, it was moved to a separate hangar that was closed during the sequestration, so my son did not get to see it when we visited earlier this year. But... I will be back!

Just another step toward victory! No luck required, you are going to succeed through sheer will power

Have fun! While I am sure the A2A Mustang is a joy to fly/operate, DCS Mustang has guns and a target to use on them. Hopefully the controls are all DirectX plug n play so they can easily be mapped into other games. If the instruments are functional, that would be much harder to adapt to DCS, though I bet it could be done by someone who knows DCS.

For all its flaws, the series is pretty amazing. I don't see anything coming along and replacing it any time soon, if ever. It is just a shame that after so many years of steady improvement, that patches started taking away the very modding related features that so many liked about it. While I am disappointed that development and even new content has come to a complete halt, it may have been a good thing. TK was considering making the game even more "lite" such as automating landing gear and flap functions to reduce the number of controls you needed to play. Perhaps the tablet version should have simply been a difficulty setting for the PC version: arcade. So much of the PC game obviously made it into the tablet versions. Oh well, as long as the mods remain available and better yet the modders remain active, there will be fans for this game.

Is it possible that the very last F-4C was withdrawn in April 1989 ? Several sources say 1979 (some offline/some online), but could that be a typo in the original source that was duplicated by everyone else reading it? This one says 1989: http://www.joebaugher.com/usaf_fighters/f4_49.html A couple of nice photos of a Spanish F-4C in 1979: http://flic.kr/p/68PTHz http://flic.kr/p/5MDqjx It looks "stock" with no dispensers.

First, despite tons of F-4 references, I have very little information on Spanish Phantoms. The best reference out of my collection for this purpose is "McDonnell F-4 PHANTOM Spirit in the Skies". Spain got their F-4Cs in 1971-2 and retired them by 1979. Given such a short operational lifespan, I doubt Spain spent much if any money upgrading them. I do not believe regular F-4Cs of any kind ever had decoy dispensers installed, but that is just a best guess. I say "regular" because Spain also operated RF-4Cs, which had flash cartridge dispensers mounted in the tail for shooting photos with flashes. They could and sometimes were used as decoy dispensers, particularly chaff. Another possibility is that Spanish pilots may have recognized the need for decoys to survive on the modern battlefield. So, they may have used an old trick: stuff the air brakes with chaff. Unfortunately, UFO stories are usually word of mouth rumors with sketchy if not wholly inaccurate "facts". It wouldn't surprise me if the original source of the story involved a completely different country or aircraft type.

It seems that the Eagle vs Flanker balance never makes anyone happy. Eagle pilots almost always complain that AMRAAM never works as advertised/demonstrated in the real world, and Flanker pilots always think AMRAAM is too good or the Flanker's missiles are too poor in comparison. In addition to any problems caused by multiple rapid changes to the missile coding, the AI is far from effective in air-to-air battles. As there is practically no available data on the effectiveness of modern missiles in an all-out war environment (i.e. first rate systems and pilots against first rate systems and pilots), it is hard to say what is truly correct. There is even less data available on the actual effectiveness of ECM/ECCM systems. So each developer gets to fill in the blanks to suit their own ideas and/or make their customers happy. Third Wire's Strike Fighters series at one point had fairly realistic modeling of the missile's reliability/effectiveness, but in later iterations constantly struggled with chaff/flare/ecm effectiveness. Even as the balance appeared to be mostly correct, a bunch of customers complained about the ineffectiveness of missiles. So years of tuning for complex/realistic missile behavior were thrown away in the name of "fun" for the "sim lite" crowd that just wants to blow things up. I hope DCS eventually reaches a very realistic representation that accurately reproduces the history of missile performance from the early AIM-9B Sidewinder all the way to the AMRAAM.

If anything the F-15 has temporarily gone backwards with the removal of the newly added brake pedal axes, but I didn't participate in the beta and have at least 25% more to download before I can find out. I suspect the lack of mentioning any kind of "ride height" fix means that the problem remains for another release. Perhaps when Belsimtek finished their AFM update, it will be fixed.

When I had my appendix taken out, I was given morphine while they were evaluating what the cause of my pain was. I had been in steadily increasing pain since around 9 or 10 PM the night before, got to the hospital by 2 or 3 AM, and finally got admitted and given morphine around 6:30 AM. That stuff was magic. I didn't feel high, it just deadened the pain so much that I could actually get some sleep in between tests/scans. I very much liked the numbness from the morphine. Falcon, are you always in pain? If so, are you getting medicine to control it?

Your situation makes my life seem far too easy. I am sure I cannot fully imagine the pain and stress you are facing. Hopefully the treatment will be effective from the start and minimize the time and pain it will take to overcome this obstacle. Hang tough! Keep your focus on everything/everyone you love and the end goal of continuing to enjoy the best aspects of your life. We are all rooting for you!

I am dismayed by the complete removal of the MiG-21 forum. When I originally paid into the MiG-21, I did so knowing the previous work that had been done for FC, that ED was backing it, and that it was fairly close to completion. Theoretically, the crowd funding was merely to pay for the licensing scheme on an otherwise nearly complete project. But even with all those assurances, I knew it was a gamble and that many if not most flight sim projects end with less than optimum results. I don't regret paying in at all. The chance of getting a DCS level MiG-21bis was more than worth the risk for such a low sum of money (I have lost far more on bad movies and overpriced popcorn/soda). What I don't get is how the project can go from an assured launch date by the end of March to cataclysmic failure. I never had very high confidence in March based on past performance (already over a year past original target and missed the Christmas window). But I was pretty certain that at some point the highest fidelity MiG-21bis ever released for a consumer combat flight sim would be residing on my hard drive. I hope this was just a bit of a "tiff" or just a "flesh wound" that will be quickly overcome. But when the guy who created this project says the plug is being pulled and then ED turns out the lights on the forum, it doesn't look good no matter what other team members may think. If I get a refund, I will be both pleasantly surprised and sorely disappointed. When I gave the money, I wrote if off whether I ever get a MiG-21 or not. I could care less about the money, but I really wanted that MiG-21. At least I have the P-51D and UH-1H that I love. Belsimtek has set the standard and I hope will make enough money to finish all of their announced projects and many more. I don't think many if any of the 3rd parties that are successful MS FSX developers really understood what they would have to do to make a proper DCS aircraft. As long as they can quickly/easisly (on a relative scale) crank out FSX material and sell it for prices comparable to DCS releases, how would it ever be profitable to make DCS aircraft with such a small niche market? More power to them if they succeed in releasing anything for DCS that is truly up to DCS standards. As for hard core purists killing the market -- the market provides what the consumers demand. If consumers wanted lite playable SF/LOMAC games, TK would have been rolling in money and been able to add anything anyone wanted and DCS would have never evolved. The market barely supports Ace Combat arcade games. It takes a company that truly loves combat flight sims and its audience to put anything out at all. And some of those (like TK) have finally given up on proper sims. Nothing I can do but wait and see.

I hate it when things are reduced to a "wait and see". I much prefer to have the option to take direct action to solve problems immediately. Maybe your favorite alcoholic beverage would be appropriate at this stage, as alcohol is useful for disinfection and many other medicinal purposes including taking care of the stress from "waiting"