streakeagle

But I was primarily addressing your suspicion posted above as to what it was, regardless of what the "expert" said.

The lady didn't know what she was talking about, but she knew it was mounted on F-4s and knew it involved heat-seeking... which is pretty damn good for someone who otherwise has no idea what an AAA-4 or F4H-1F is.

It would be cool to have, but I wouldn't pay much for it just to throw it on a shelf or a desk. It would be much more interesting if they had the chin pod fairing to go with it.

She didn't claim it was the guidance system for the Sidewinder, she claimed it was installed in the F-4 to help guide sidewinders... The label on the device said:

Cradle Carrying

IR System

F4H-1 & F4H-1F

So what you have is the carrying cradle for an IRST from an F-4A or earlier with an actual F-4 IRST still in it.

The name plates were intact (looked like new from this footage), so everything could be precisely identified if so desired.

I think my 1.2GHz P3 with a Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB is a better rig than yours for playing just about anything as long as my gpu memory is enough ;)

The increase in texture sizes in SF2 could only hurt it as I used to resize addon textures down to SFP1 stock sizes to help out performance.

My rig is a dinosaur rig, but it has the 2 key components to make SF2 glide: a DX10 OS and a good DX10 card.

SF2 is playable on XP in DX9, but I was in the 20-30 fps range with some 15 fps drops, not even doing heavy Hanoi/SAM missions.

Switched to Win7 and HD4890, now play in the 30-50 fps range with some 20-25 fps drops even while doing heavy Hanoi/SAM missions.

If you have a Windows 7 PC with a decent DirectX 10 or 11 video card, don't hesitate to get into the SF2 series. Get SF2E to try it out. If you like it, get expansion pack 2 to get the built-in mission editor. If you are still happy, make sure to buy everything and then install them in the right order to get a hassle-free merged installation. There is really only one loss with the SF2 series: multiplayer, which is no loss at all for most SF fans. In all other ways, SF2 is noticably better: graphics, frame rates, RWR displays, aircraft variants, cockpit detail, AI, etc.

Because the sim has very few limits on addons, modders tend to make addons that push the limit of the current hardware, so it is difficult and expensive to try to future proof a PC you are buying now. The core game benefits from quad core and higher now, so if you have the cash/option, at least get a quad core. I am able to run the stock installations at 30-45 fps using my old 2005 AMD64 3800 / PC3200 2GB RAM / Radeon HD 4890 with nearly maxed out settings (limited horizon range and medium shadow quality), so any PC with a modern Core i5/i7 (or AMD equivalent) with the industry standard 4-12 GB RAM with at least a $200 GPU should keep up with a 60 Hz LCD display with vsync and maxed out card/game video settings. I would make sure any PC I build/buy has at least a decent 650 watt power supply to support maxed out single gpu card options. If you are the kind of person who insists on using multi-gpus, you need a much better power supply. But I don't think SF1 or SF2 support SLI or Crossfire, so if that is the main purpose of your PC, getting multiple gpus may be a waste.

There is not multiplayer in any SF2 games. Only SFP1, SFG, WoV, WoE, and WoI (as well as FE). If you want to try multiplayer in SFP1/WoX games, you need to make posts on all of the forums: Third Wire, SimHQ, CombatAce, etc. and/or hang out in either the sfp1 or WoV chat rooms in hyperlobby until you get lucky and have someone show up. I haven't seen anyone in hyperlobby for a long time, but I don't check that often anymore. Try staying logged in (and active) in HL from 8pm to 11pm EST for a week, and you might find someone if you are lucky.

I used to kill the text in the jet games... but it kills all messages. In the jet games, some status messages are things that you would easily know in real life, like what positions the flaps and speed brakes are in. Without such messages, it was a lot more difficult, i.e. accidently flying around with the speed brake deployed for awhile. But I can see in the WWI era, there are far less messages that you should have, if any at all. The file you seek is the huddata.ini which has to be extracted from the flightdata.cat file and put into the flight folder of FE, or create a flight folder in the mod folder for FE2. Among the things defined in that file is the location and font of the text. There are various ways to change that file to get what you want (my way was to move the text off screen, others had different and maybe better ways which I am sure can be found in the SFP1 knowledgebase somewhere). If you don't like the results, just delete the file to go back to system defaults.

Actually, the padlock helps you spot targets within visual range that you can't see because the monitor doesn't have enough resolution to render. Most games render long range targets larger than they should be so that you can see them or at least put a very visible black dot to help you see out to the range you could in real life. Third Wire sims don't render anything less than half a pixel in size (i.e. round down), so the only way you can spot out to the limits of human vision is to use the visual targeting keys. There is a visual spotting distance that determines whether you can "detect" and padlock visual targets, possibly a global one and/or per aircraft one. The ideal solution is to use a monitor with a large enough resolution to show 1 pixel at the limits of human vision. I don't know what resolution that is, but I know it is not 1600x1200. A work around is to not use targeting at all... don't hit the T key and don't padlock. Use track IR and zoom in to increase resolution. It is very difficult (unrealistically so), but does teach what real people doing visual searches have to do: focus at small distant areas and slowly scan the sky using patterns not unlike radar searches. But it does completely take away your peripheral vision.

Loading screens are specified in each aircraft's folder.

You put the sreen image in the folder and put a line in the aircraft's ini specifying the loading screen.

Stock screens are hidden in .cat files.

For example, in SF2, my MiG-23MLD.ini file has this line:

LoadingScreen=MiG-23MLD_Loading.jpg

Given the kind of mod community this game has attracted, if a third party mission recorder was plausible, it would already be done.

The game developer went in depth in a forum a long time ago about why his sim didn't and wouldn't ever have a mission recorder. Now if you could build a program that could run his game in a shell and knew where to find all of the necessary variables, and record them at the same rate they were being generated, then you could do it. Most other flight sims are deterministic, meaning that the exact same inputs produce the exact same outputs, so all you have to do is record some key inputs to a mission file and the rest can be reconstructed real time in the "mission viewer". TK's game is non-deterministic and he went in depth about how that made a mission recorder completely impractical. Too many variables to track and the bottleneck of writing files to a hard drive would grind the game to a stop. He had to reduce settings and object counts for multiplayer just to keep the frame rates playable with low lag. But if you think you are smarter than the guy who made the game, knock yourself out and make a mission recorder, which will also require making a tool to play it back without game developer support.

What I could see being done if someone had the patience to reverse engineer the game's memory mapping while running, would be to record the x, y, and z co-ordinates of every aircraft and missile at 1 fps to produce simple plots for post mission analysis. If that didn't slow down the game, then you could go for pitch, roll, and heading as well. If that didn't slow down things too much, then you could try logging ground units, etc. But without game developer support to expose these variables to outside programs, you would have to be very determined to reverse engineer the game. I would love to see someone succeed at this, but I don't think anyone has the time or skills to do it in a reasonable amount of time and therefore will never do it.

it is impossible to have a mission recorder for the SF series. The best you can do is record the flight using third party solutions such as FRAPS.

To form a multiplayer group, everyone needs an install with the same mods to assure both compatibility and fairness.

However, the game does not notice cockpit mods when doing file checks, so a player could mod any aircraft cockpit and should still be able to join or host and otherwise identical install. I always had separate installs for multiplayer. If you have a fixed group, then it is fairly easy to get everyone to have identical installs regardless of how many mods are used. However, if you are trying to draw in newcomers, a pure stock install is the way to go. When first getting a group together, there will most likely be some connectivity issues as you sort out how to get through firewalls, routers and even ISPs. During that time frame, I would stick to stock installs to keep things simple. Once everyone is able to play and/or host, then carefully add mods to eveyrone's installs. Once everything is set up correctly, it works fairly well. Be prepared to use Hamachi to get everyone connected. Once everyone is able to join a Hamachi network, connectivity is very easy. However, Hyperlobby is publicly visible, which increases your chances of finding more people to play. So, I used to host in parallel via Hamachi and Hyperlobby.

Good luck on finding others to play. It is hard to get people with the same interest and schedule. The most successful time slot I found while hosting was 8-11 pm EST with peak flying around 9-10 pm EST. In the years that I hosted, it was not uncommon to have 2-4 people flying Mon-Thu, with some peaks of 6-10 on rare nights. Friday and Saturday are almost always dead as people are out doing stuff. Sunday nights were 50/50. Sometimes, everyone showed up, other times, no one showed up.

Mission generation in multiplayer is hard coded. The smaller numbers were meant to help out with server communications. When the game was written, most people were still using 56K dialup. Terrain textures and other parameters are also automatically reduced the help out with frame rates and make sure the hosting server has plenty of cpu for handling comms. The nice part about all of that is that my old Pentium 3 machine that could barely run the later patches/releases of the SFP1 series could still act as a multiplayer host and have playable frame rates. I used to leave it up 24-7 as a dogfight host via Hamachi and/or Hyplerlobby. So, the only way for multiplayer missions to be really challenging and enjoyable is to have LOTS OF PLAYERS! 4 vs 4 was fun, but 8 vs 8 would have been the holy grail if enough people would have ever showed up.

I should get air pistols and rifles as I do not have the time or money to my real guns.

If I could set up a small range in my back yard with a metal trap, I could should all the time :)

When I was in the Navy and in San Diego, I spent $400 a month on ammo shooting both 0.223 Remington with my Colt Sporter HBar and 0.45 ACP with my Springfield Armory M1911A1. Those were good times :)

If they combine Wings of Prey's graphics with Aces High's realism and view system, they might have a winner. Those who have played Aces High for over a decade are not going to downgrade the flight and damage modeling for eye candy. Good graphics and some sort of system to make the game easy enough to appeal to newbies could attract a bigger crowd than very difficult with uglier graphics Aces High. But even if they do everything right, is there a market for another WW2 online air combat sim as that market has been shrinking very fast? Realistic = steep learning curve and high workloads that repel most people.

I love model rocketry. Never got past building D-engined birds, but I converted the Estes Commanche 3 stage kit to be all D engines and had a blast :)

http://archive.rocketreviews.com/reviews/all/est_comanche3.shtml

Can't wait until my son is ready to build his first rocket.

As a kid, my first rocktet was this one:

http://www.rocketreviews.com/reviews/all/oop_est_obital_transport.shtml

The hobby shop owner said I was too young to build it myself, especially since it was my first one (I was in the 3rd grade).

I brought it back a week later fully built and not too bad for a 3rd grader.

My favorite one based on looks and flight excitement was a boost-glider, the Sky Dart: http://www.rocketreviews.com/reviews/all/oop_est_skydart.shtml

Mine flew very well and looked as good as the kit photo (was in 6th grade by that time).

Although I truly loved and flew the X-Ray more than any of them: http://www.spacemodeling.org/jimz/k-18.htm

I also had a molded Estes RTF X-15 that was great for low altitude easy recovery in small launch areas.

http://www.ninfinger.org/rockets/nostalgia/77estcov.html

My brother made a beautiful Mosquito, but we used the biggest engine for the first flight (A10-3T same as for my X-15) and we never saw it again.

In the Navy, beside the Commanche, I made my own all-aluminum folding fin, spin stabilized, shoulder launched rockets.

Go here for some photos: http://sites.google.com/site/streakeagle68/hobbies/rockets

There is a pick of me with my Commanche as well as some cardboard prototypes before design failures forced me to go all-aluminum.

The photo that of the black field is a charred black field... big fire resulting from the erratic flight of the last cardboard prototype. Fortunately, the Fire Department put it out before it threatened any homes and they didn't charge or fine any of us.

the job of the HUD pitch bars is to show the angle. If 10 degrees is above the 3dmodels's hud glass, then that is where it would want to draw it...

But in the HUD configuration, you set the boundaries for drawing the HUD so that anything outside of the glass gets clipped. If you look over the HUD parameters, I am sure you can find the variables that limit the drawing area for the HUD.

W is weight not mass W = m * g, so W/g = m = mass in kg.

I bet that will change your numbers a bit :)

Already refuted. Less substantial evidence than the last time. Apparently, the guy making the claim is not a Ph.D. nor did he specialize in biology, just your run of the mill astrophysics type propped up by a media business needing a flashy story to generate income. Good thing I didn't get my hopes up too high.

Falcon 4.0 is still one of the best hard core sims ever released. In the Allied Force flavor, most of the original bugs are squashed and some of the graphics have been improved plus many other little feature upgrades. As long as you enjoy flying the F-16 and don't mind dated graphics, this could be the best flight sim you ever buy.

I don't know anything about Apache Air Assault. I already have more quality sims than I can play and my PC is very old, so I am not getting any more sims until I can afford an upgrade AND have the time to play them. If I had a decent machine and time, I would already be playing the DCS A-10/Black Shark series and Rise Of Flight.

I am wondering it it was a bug... or if TK modeled pilot wounds, and yours was fatally wounded?

Upon further review of your logs... clearly a bug since it declared you were shot down.

I could be curious to know which direction the bug went:

You should have been killed/shot down, but it let you keep flying,

or you were not shot down, but it erroneously declared you to be shot down.

Regardless of theory and probabilities, nothing in science is 100% accepted until you have rock solid proof... in this case, literally. I am skeptical myself, because similar claims have been made before and refuted. But if it is confirmed, it will mark a turning point in history. If life is absolutely known to exist elsewhere, it isn't too big of a reach to accept that there will be intelligent life comparable or superior to us elsewhere. If micro lifeforms can arrive by meteor, it also raises questions about the origins of life on Earth.

We need the ability to "jump" to other solar systems and find other Earth-like planets suitable for replacing our own, or the ability to terraform Mars or another body in our solar system to ensure the human race lives a bit longer than the limits of our own planet permit. But we can't even afford to replace the space shuttle, much less go to the Moon to build a stepping stone to Mars exploration. If it had not been for the Cold War arms race for ICBMs, we might not even have satellites or have ever put people into space. Given that politics then were little different than they are now, it is incomprehensible that the US government was able to fund the Apollo program. To this day there are significant numbers of US citizens angry that the government wasted so much money on the space program... as they text someone on their high tech touch screen phone that can reach anywhere in the world via satellite for just tens of dollars per month.

But I'm not bitter ;)

Huge significance... and I hear nothing about it on the radio or TV. Perhaps if it is confirmed by the 100 experts it will take the media by storm.