streakeagle

One would have hoped the new SF2NA engine would have looked that good instead of looking worse than SF2I and making the sim run slower.

The best pilots don't even need bullets. They can maneuver in such a way as to evade enemy attacks and force the enemy to crash. In SF, it is actually very easy to get AI to hit the ground if you dogfight way down low. If you can keep a MiG chasing you in afterburner long enough, he won't make it home. But of course, that doesn't work in SF since the AI never crashes due to fuel shortages.

I am 100% in agreement with you. I hope DCS follows through and fills in the void where I thought SF2 was going. SF2 is now meant to be the modern kind of game where you won't die and you can easily engage and kill overwhelming odds. Of course, it is still great for making screenshots, too. If gameplay is so challenging that a bunch of newbies complain, just dumb it down a bit more to "make the game more accessible." Tic Tac Toe is very accessible, but I don't see it selling much on PCs DCS already has many key features. The main limitations of LOMAC/FC/DCS have been limited modding capability, limited flyable planeset, and lack of a dynamic campaign system. The new 3rd party mods may largely overcome the first two problems and I never really play campaigns, so the last part isn't a problem at all for me. I just want the planeset (and preferably matching terrains) to cover more of the Vietnam/Yom Kippur era. The future of DCS is much more promising based on where it is at and where it seems to be going. Whereas SF2 keeps moving not only away from where I wanted it to go but from where it already was. Even if you don't ever play SF2 again, I don't see any reason to go inactive on the CombatAce forums. Surely you will still participate in other games/sims that are covered by this site? If not, then farewell, Jeff!

At least the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds are real units and authentic skins. Dhimar? Show me where it is on the map and what the actual history is. Maybe in the SF universe, the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds were rushed into service to fight and their paint schemes were retained to intimidate the enemy. They are so good they don't need camouflage and in fact will put on a formation show complete with colored smoke while decimating the enemy!

The point of skin packs is to provide a variety of previously unavailable but popularly requested skins. VX-4 Black Bunny never flew in combat either, but every body wants it in either F-4 or F-14, right? Among the first Marc Fighters skins were the Blue Angels A-4s and F-4s, which I absolutely loved. If someone is skilled and has the templates, how much more effort is it to throw in Blue Angels skins? I have been very lazy about trying to make hi-res Thunderbirds skins. I am not that skilled and painting and don't have templates. So, I would greatly appreciate an unslatted F-4E DLC with Thunderbirds skins. Though I doubt TK would bother to provide all of the variants and crew blocks from initial factory paint to 1974. So, as long as TK is doing Blue Angels skins... what about the A-4s? If he has the rights to do the Thunderbirds, how about F-100C/D, F-105 (settle for a D given no B available), F-4E, and F-16?

We use Amazon for everything as well... but never for high end electronics (like LCD TVs or PCs). NewEgg has been great on both prices and reliability, so I hate to abandon them. But thanks to Amazon Prime, it was just the better way to go. NewEgg has an equivalent to Prime, but it wouldn't pay for itself compared to the frequency we use Amazon. At some point, I may regret not getting the nVidia GTX670 due to its superior performance... But I have everything working just the way I want it using my HD 6870 and don't want to gamble on driver issues. The main reason I am going with the 7870 instead of the much cheaper 6870 is the fact that its drivers allow enabling adaptive AA in DX10/11 sims that have in-game support for FSAA, which should fix the only issue I have with my current gpu setup. The main issue I found with the 7000 series with blurry textures was a driver issue that got fixed.

I looked at cost versus performance and considered long term viability as well given my tendency to keep a PC platform for 5 or more years. This is what I came up with: AMD's best processor is cheap,and there is a reason for that. After researching Sandy vs Sandy-E vs Ivy, I decided on Ivy. The i7 3770 series cost about 50% more (over $100) and did not significantly improve game performance, so I went with: Intel Core i5 3570K Processor 3.4 GHz 4 Core LGA 1155 - BX80637I53570K Choosing a motherboard was difficult for me. I didn't want to go cheap and even wanted to allow for the possibility of Crossfire/SLI in the future, but I didn't want to spend $300+ on features I will never use. I am used to spending about $100 on the motherboard, but ended up spending about $200 (eating up the $100 savings on the processor): ASUS Intel Z77 ATX DDR3 2400 LGA 1155 Motherboard P8Z77-V PRO Best balance of speed, stability, price, and availability I could find. Had I bought everything from NewEgg, I would have gone with G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series. But I ended up ordering everything from Amazon and went with what had the best price and Prime free 2-day shipping. Corsair Vengeance 16 GB (2x8 GB) 1600MHz CL9 DDR3 Memory Kit (CMZ16GX3M2A1600C9) My research told me that the way to go right now is the GTX670, but I really wanted to keep the GPU in the $300 or less ball park. I have studied the kinds of driver issues nVidia has been having in general and in particular to this card (especially with older games). While I always see plenty of posts about nVidia not having any problems, there have been several driver problems over the past couple of years. Some of those problems impact me as they usually involve issues with older games and figuring out which driver release to use depending on what games you play. I also studied the latest AMD driver issues and lumped that in with over a decade of Radeon driver experience. In the end, my success with using Win7 64-bit with a 6870 for excellent compatibility with old games and the lower price convinced me to stay with AMD. I could have saved another $100 by going with the 7850, but the 7870 is real close in performance to the 7950 yet great on power. Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHZ OC 2 GB DDR5 HDMI/DVI-I/Dual Mini DP PCI-Express Graphics Card 11199-03-20G I have had some bad experience with both Seagate and WD, but generally favor WD products. However, the price versus capacity forced the issue: Slightly lower price, twice the capacity, and within my target budget of <= $100. Seagate ST2000DM001 Barracuda 7200RPM 2 TB SATA 6 GB/s NCQ 64 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive I have learned the hard way how not to pick a power supply, still trying to find the right way. Studied a lot of reviews and settled on this one. Corsair HX Professional Series 750-Watt 80 Plus Certified Power Supply - CMPSU-750HX Don't know anything about Blu-ray burners. Glanced at the options and settled for this one. ASUS BW-12B1ST/BLK/G/AS 12X Blu-ray Internal Burner with Disc Encryption, Black I bought some good mid-range Antec aluminum cases last time around in 2005. To tell you the truth, I loved my old generic brand Pentium 3 cases more in almost every way except weight. Struggled studying various brands and price ranges, this seemed to be the best balance of budget/features. Corsair Carbide Series 500R White Mid Tower Gaming Case CC-9011013-WW I know Windows 8 is just around the corner, but this OS has served me well. I had Vista at work and hated it, so I had stuck with XP for a very long time. But I upgraded to Windows 7 somewhat quickly upon its release. It still has some annoying vestiges of Vista, but has been even better than XP. If I get this PC up and running well, I may wait awhile before upgrading to Win 8. Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64bit (Full) System Builder DVD 1 Pack The final total is $1,415 from Amazon with "free" Prime 2-day shipping versus the $1,500 price of my 2005 AMD Athlon 64 system currently still in use. NewEgg had the same build for about $1,455 and after various mail-in rebates, the price would have been very close if not a tiny bit cheaper. But shipping was not free on all items and rush processing with 2-day delivery cost even more. With Amazon: no mail-in rebates, no additional shipping charges, and everything should be here by Saturday. But I have never used Amazon for PC parts and NewEgg was a known good quantity. I may come to regret the $50 to $100 I saved by choosing Amazon over NewEgg. With this system, I should finally have the option to play all the latest sims I have been avoiding due to CPU limitations: DCS series Take On Helicopters I also can't wait to see how much better my existing games play: SF2 series Arma2 series I was looking forward to playing Rise of Flight, but their false accusation of image file theft against the Over Flanders Field developers irritated me enough that I don't think they will ever get a $1 from me. I don't spend that much time flying WWI anyway, so FE2 will have to do.

Reinstalling won't fix the fact that I have issues with the content of the patch itself

This is a fun and interesting airplane in SF2. I highly recommend it.

Logan's Run got it right: Live a glorious 30 years with good health and all the fun you can stand, then go to "carousel" to be "re-incarnated" if instantaneous incineration by a laser can be considered re-incarnated. Within a few generations, no one will know any other way and unwittingly accept such a harsh means of population control, health regulation, and resource distribution. An absolute Utopia if you don't realize you can live way past 30 ;)

The OFF crowd has been an active and welcome addition to the CombatAce site. I don't post in this forum much, but I read it all the time. I am sorry that the glitch in CombatAce forced the "official forum" to move. Perhaps the "official forum" should be hosted by the developers themselves (like most "for profit" games rather than putting the wheel of destiny in someone's elses hands if they can't handle having problems beyond their control. SimHQ is hardly different than combatace and can go down at times without knowing when it will be returned to service. The Strike Fighters modding community was originally based at SimHq. It was the place to go for info, even for official news from Third Wire. Things changed and everyone that was a major contributor to SF mods left SimHq with most of them being present at both the official Third Wire forums and CombatAce. I suspect it won't be long before many people figure out why CombatAce became so important despite the existence of SimHq and the official Third Wire forums. It will be interesting to see what happens to the OFF "official forums" as well as they adjust to the environment at SimHQ. The CombatAce community has its flaws (nobody is perfect!), but it provides a great place where you can upload/download just about any mod for any major sim without any major hassle and get technical support on those mods that may not be available from "official forums". It is also a place where you can talk about anything with a minimum of censorship unless you can't respect warnings from the moderators when unnecessary friction/spam is being generated (I myself have made posts that have resulted in entire threads being deleted... oops, sorry!). I had hoped the OFF crowd would continue to be active here. I have not been disappointed. Keep posting about history, game experiences, technical questions, or just sharing a personal thought. I will keep on reading and enjoying those posts

They got the syntax wrong: "All you need, love is!"

It certainly doesn't hurt to ask if his previous incomplete work is in any condition to make it worthwhile to pass on to someone who is able and willing to complete it?

SAAB aircraft... simply excellent! The Draken still looks sleek compared to modern aircraft, and I like the Viggen just as much.

Most of my knowledge on the Su-24 predates the avalance of information that has become public. I have focused primarily on the MiG-21 and picked up quite a bit of information on the MiG-23. Since the Su-24 is functionally a strike bomber, it never held my attention the way the fighters have. I was aware of the intakes (not unlike how the B-1 was slowed down since it didn't make sense to pay for high alt performance when the mission was primarily on the "deck"). I don't know too many details about the Soviet jet engines aside from thrust levels and the progression of the MiG-21 engine variants. Since the Soviets almost always do a large scale/small scale version of any given aerodynamic layout, to me the Su-24 is the large scale version of the MiG-23. In fact, my "knowledge" is so dated that to me, it is the Su-19 Fencer rather than the Su-24 Properly equipped, the Su-24 could have been their "Tomcatski". But major Flagon upgrades were bypassed in that time frame in favor of the Su-27/MiG-29 development that was already on the drawing boards. Even if it was underdeveloped/underutilized, the Su-24 looks very nice.

Offtopic: the 2nd photo is a really nice pic of the Su-24! This is one aircraft that doesn't look very "Soviet". In other colors, its appearance fits the lines of any Western country. Of course, it looks a bit like an F-111 with F-4 intakes, but it definitely has its own unique appearance. I guess it is really a V-G Flagon with a more Western "cut" to the tail surfaces. If they fly and fight as good as they look, they are an awesome aircraft. They should have made a tandem cockpit interceptor version. Sukhoi may not be as well recognized as "MiG" (at least prior to the Flanker), but all of their aircraft are very interesting to me.

If one company's cards were always the best quality and price, the other company would have gone out of business. Right now, both brands seem to get the job done with the SF series. Get the best card you can at the best price you can. I have used ATi almost since SFP1 was originally released. Over the years, there have been a few driver issues with SF2 here and there, but either ATi or Third Wire quickly addressed the problem. nVidia has had its driver issues, too. If you read the tech support entries in recent history, you will generally find more problems reported by nVidia users... but that stems from the fact that it seems more of the SF2 users have nVidia cards. The only recent issue I have seen reported repeatedly regards a "split-screen" effect in laptops that have both an integral low end Intel gpu and a discrete gaming GPU. Most of the reports are from nVidia users but ATi users have had a similar experience. It isn't the brand of the gaming gpu causing the problem. It is the mix of two GPUs available, how Windows 7 wants to use them, and how SF2 is programmed to select which adapter to use. Another typical problem as of SF2NA involves white terrain with no textures, which isn't a brand issue either, more of a RAM limit being reached which can usually be addressed by lowering the in-game graphics settings a bit. I don't recall any recent issues that are tied to either nVidia or AMD hardware or drivers.

Ironically, CombatAce is the SF site that was offline, but SimHQ is the one that shut down its SF forums. So, if McDonalds' were closed for a week or two, would Burger King go bust? edit: SimHQ has reopened their Third Wire forum in "read only" mode... effectively and archive. Which, if you have some time to kill (as when CombatAce was down) reading the old SF forum archives is interesting. The types of posts and conversations have changed little despite 10 years of game development.

The US Army has a high school to flight school program for helo pilots. Of course, good people are good people regardless of whether they went to college or not. But the US Army still makes the pilots go to warrant officer school rather than have enlisted pilots. I am not sure why the military believes only officers are capable of operating aircraft. Generally, the number of pilots needed is very small compared to the overall force, so pilot selection is an "elite" filtering process and by establishing officer criteria, you are already filtering out a lot of candidates. But, if there are pilot shortages, why would you set the bar too high? Hence the Army high school to flight school program that can more rapidly fill helo pilot slots. Even then, they have trouble finding enough qualified candidates based on physical and mental aptitude tests.

They were made part of the 3d model for the purposes of skinning. A big step forward so you didn't have to make a separate tank for each skin or even have to pick different tanks for different skins.

I saw all of the EAW stuff that was uploaded... wondered why Geo was suddenly so active. The end of another great site from early SFP1 history.

Equally important: On that same day, Oyster flight scored two kills with BVR Sparrow shots, but Robert "Bob" Lodge was shot down and killed trying to score another and his WSO, Roger Locher, survived on the ground for a long time before he was finally recovered by SAR. Another pilot/wso team in Oyster flight got a kill at the same time: Steve Ritchie and Chuck DeBellevue, both future USAF aces. May 10, 1972: "the most active single day of air combat over North Vietnam". It is the "Tet Offensive" of the air. "338 missions were flown by U.S. aircraft over the North. Sixteen planes on both sides were shot down; U.S. forces lost only four." Inexplicably, the North Vietnamese threw everything into the air that day. There is an old book: http://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Long-War-Vietnam/dp/0394576225

Check out Yankee Air Pirate for a WoV version of the RF-8... but beware, if you tell Zero-Cinco you are just buying his products for the models, he'll get angry and say he doesn't want your money (after happily taking it). You can only use YAP products the way Zero-Cinco specifies and if you ever release a screenshot showing the products being used in "unauthorized" ways, be prepared for hellfire and brimstone to rain down upon you :)

Jane's USAF really loves Win98SE the most. Everything worked as well as it could aside from some longstanding AI and FM problems. I thoroughly enjoyed Jane's USAF until I got SFP1 at Walmart. Even in the flawed, limited press-release version sold at Walmart, SFP1 was clearly better than Jane's USAF in most ways. Of course, if you wanted to fly modern planes, use a built-in mission editor, have decent multiplayer, and inflight refueling, then Jane's USAF was still the way to go. TK has finally provided a mission editor and has provided modern planes up to the F-16, but rather than improve multiplayer, it was deleted and inflight refueling remains out of the question. So, if you can live with dated graphics, slow ballet flight, quirky flight models, and suicidal AI that bounce off of a magical barrier rather than crash into the ground, Jane's USAF is the perfect game for you. Always loved the Jane's USAF music, user interface, training missions, ramp starts, and the free Thunderbirds addon. Many fond memories!

Jane's USAF never liked Windows 2000 or its later WinXP derivative. It was in the transition from Win98 to 32bit WinNT based OSes that the menus became problematic. If you hang out at the Gulf Knight forums, you can get comprehensive support for Jane's USAF: http://www.gulfknight.net/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=238