streakeagle

To the best of my knowledge, the AIM-7 is presently being phased out of service, but is not yet 100% gone. I am surprised that it is being phased out, that would require nearly 1 for 1 replacement of the entire stock with AIM-120s. Where did the budget come from to do that?

Offtopic Note: AIM-54C did not work for the better part of a decade after going into service. One the problems that plagued it during that period was a publicly identified flaw in it fuzing system that resulted in the missile detonating halfway to the target. The digital upgrade of the AIM-54C paralleled AMRAAM development, and both suffered from major teething troubles. Obviously, both of those missiles are absolutely amazing, but like the Sparrow and Sidewinder before them, they needed a decade or more to reach their full potential. Of course, the AIM-54C got retired, while the Sidewinder and Sparrow soldier on. Given AMRAAM's apparent success, 1 of 2 things will happen to the Sparrow: retired to save money on maintenance or upgraded to have similar guidance with longer flight range and bigger boom. As long as Eagles and Hornets built to carry the Sparrow continue flying in significant numbers, I see value in upgrading Sparrows. I wonder how the military feels about it? I know how Washington D.C. feels: do whatever is cheapest and will hurt us the most in a future conflict.

The Cougar could have marked the return of Thrustmaster (and for some it did). But IMHO, they missed the boat when they filled the fantastic outside stick shell with at best average crap. After paying all that money for your stick, you have to spend even more to mod it to the condition it should have been in when you first opened the box. Aside from that, the reason I never bothered with a Cougar even after they became really affordable is that I don't like F-16s and don't want in F-16 stick/throttle. If they had made a plug-in replacement for the stick that had the old B-8 stick up to milspec quality (like the real thrustmaster once made so well), I might have a fully modded Cougar on my desk right now. But if you look at all my other threads, you will see I have already spent more money trying to replicate the F-4's B-8 than I ever could have buying/modding a Cougar. I know what I want, no one else will provide it, so I am making my own :) Once I have my homebuilt stick working correctly, repairs/upgrades should be cheap: find any USB stick that can be used to replace whatever innards I settle on if and when they go bad or become obsolete due to operating system/interface changes. Until I get my homemade F-4 stick finished, my primary stick is the X-52 Pro, which I am very happy with. When I am flying newer aircraft that need more stick buttons, it will still be my primary stick. But if I am flying F-15A or older US aircraft, B-8 all the way on an actual F-4 stick assembly! How is that for realistic feel and travel limits? I am not sure yet if I am going to use any kind of pneumatic dampers/shocks to provide some force feedback. The forward/aft direction already has some resistance due to a rubber bellows attached down the center tube.

I can answer that easily: people like myself who enjoy combat flight sims for the purposes of testing out the differences between various aircraft using real world tactics and maneuvers find that there is nothing learned from the process if you can't reasonably replicate known results for known conditions. So, if the F-15 is supposed to be better in some cateogies (in some cases by a large margin), then Blasto certainly has a problem with his discovery that either the F-15 is undermodeled or the F-14 is overmodeled to such an extent that it is glaringly obvious during gameplay. Of course, it is nicer if someone posts universally accepted performance charts of each aircraft and a graph of where one or both aircraft are deviating from such performance rather than just quoting thrust to weight ratios and wing loading to justify their claim... there is a lot more to aerodynamics than just those two parameters. Having been involved with FM development in this sim for some time, I can say that most FMs out there are lucky if they are even within 10% of where they should be, so if one aircraft's FM is more than 10% better than it should be, the other aircraft is more than 10% worse than it should be, and the real aircraft have less than a 10% difference in performance... then you are going to encounter plenty so situations similar to this one. The effort it takes to get an FM within +/-10% over the entire Mach-Height range is tremendous, so if you don't like the FMs you are flying with, feel free to calibrate them and document the resulting performance so that you can distribute them as the less than 1% error flawless FM everyone should be flying ;)

Faulting the F-15C for being optimized and having pilots trained explicitly for air-to-air while comparing it to the F-14 is ludicrous. The F-14 was built to do one thing: protect the fleet from Mach 3 high-altitude cruise missiles. The fact that it had better performance/maneuverability than the F-4 it replaced was an added bonus. It wasn't until the F-14 was modified that their pilots trained for anything other than Air-to-Air role. F-15s were modified too... they call them Strike Eagles, and like the F-14Ds, they are a little heavier but have the option for bigger engines. The F-14s advantages in endurance, cruising range, and low end turning/hi-aoa come at the cost of the weight of the variable geometry wings. Notice that not one fighter has been built VG since the 60s: cost/benefit ratio proved to be too low in practice: weight, complexity, monetary cost, maintenance, etc. As it is, despite the apparent advantages of having multi-role aircraft, the F-15C's dedication to air superiority guarantees that we get it quickly and keep it. Not being able to use them very effeciently as bomb trucks is a small price to pay. Of course, aside from training issues, F-15Cs can carry their fair share of dumb bombs, and I bet if they were really needed, that it wouldn't take too many modificiation to make them capable of delivering a much wider array of air-to-ground weapons seeing as how the F-15Cs were designed to work with FAST packs (Fuel and Sensor... i.e. air-to-ground night vision and laser designation packages). I don't know if F-15C's were fully wired to support it and probably don't have any software installed, but they were intended to be a dual-role airplane. The problem was that the USAF wanted a dedicated 2-seater to handle the work load, and hence went with the F-15E since the F-15D gave up some ECM to squeeze in the 2nd seat. Either aircraft can do the job, but unless you need carrier ops, the F-15 was the better deal overall. I am not sure why the Shah of Iran chose the Tomcat, but all of the other foreign countries with the cash to buy any aircraft they wanted chose the F-15 for air defense/air superiority. Those on a budget were forced to buy cheaper multi-role aircraft like the F-16 and F/A-18. In all honesty, I think German F-4F+ ICE aircraft are as good a platform as F-15s and F-14s for air superiority and almost as good as F-16/F/A-18s for ground attack. So what if it can't dogfight as well... when was the last time an F-15 got in a dogfight while using AMRAAM supported by AWACS?

These are not functional sticks. They are "display only" "buttons will break if pushed or pulled". But... I am thinking they could be modified to be functional. Of course the price is kind of high for a lump of resin that may not even be usuable. I may get the F-4 Throttles and find out. http://www.metalcraftbyblair.com/index.php...oducts_id=13223

Troops was awesome. I kept a permanent copy. I watched that sooo many times.

I don't have time to read all the links... but quite entertaining.

I just thought of something... if the stick shaker still works, I need to figure out if there is a way to get a force-feedback signal to it. Since the Saitek doesn't support force feedback, maybe I should get a stick that does? Cheap solution: get a new rumble pad and use it to build my joystick rather than cutting up my x-45. I just tried my wife's Saitek P2500... should do the trick :)

I got lucky, a guy on eBay is parting out his F-4 cockpit collection. I can't afford to get the instrument panel, but look what I got: It comes with everything but the stick grip, including the $100 metal connector lug that my stick grip doesn't have. It is costing me $545 including shipping, which means I have now spent over $1,000 on a stupid stick. I feel bad about spending so much money on something of such limited value. But I have never wasted any money on cigarettes. Very little money on alcohol (compared to most people I have known). The only other things I have wasted money on besides flight related hobbies is 1980 Corvettes/gas, guns/bullets. and music/video. Oh wait... that's actually quite a bit of money wasted and quite a bit more than the total money I have spent on PCs and flight sims. The difference is CDs were $10 or $15 here and there, where PC/fllight simming tends to be $500 or $1,000 here and there. Enough about the guilt I am feeling over blowing so much money on a hunk of metal... Once I get this assembly, I need to mount it to a sheet of wood (or maybe a frame). My X-45 is standing by to be mutilated to become the interface to the PC. Since the X-45 has more buttons than the B-8 stick, I figure I can used the spare buttons to make an aux panel with armament and/or radar controls which use real knobs and switches. Third Wire's weapon selection system of Next/Previous air-weapon doesn't match well with the F-4's missile station selector knob, but I could make a 2 position knob that would look like the F-4 panel, but really only activate Next Weapon and use the shift key to get previous weapon (rather than using 2 switches, so that I can have more functions). So, I guess my project is going to consist of: mounting the F-4 stick interfacing the F-4 stick as much as possible with the X-45 adding a simulated instrument panel interfacing left over switches from the x-45 stick and placing the throttle in the correct position on the left arm building a semi-scale replica of the F-4 ejection seat out of plywood I don't have a whole lot of free time right now, but that is going to get better within a year or two. I am changing jobs so that I don't have to travel so much, and once I move closer, won't have to waste as much time commuting. Until I move, I will be losing 2 hours a day to commuting... yuck! When I have been in town for my current job, home is only 25 or 30 minutes away, not 1 hour. Once I get settled into my new job and get moved into a new home... I can see a future filled with delusions of being an F-4 pilot complete with a helmet, O2 mask, g-suit, and flight suit :) Is there something wrong with me?

AIM-9Bs just aren't useful against human players that see the missile coming, chop their throttles, and turn into the shot. I only gets kills with an AIM-9B against people that are inexperienced and try to blindly extend in full afterburner. But I had one shot with an AIM-9B during online multiplayer dogfight that really stands out. We were probably 7 or 8 thousand feet up and my opponent dove for the deck. I chopped my throttle and pushed through with negative g's into a 70 or 80 degree dive. I pointed at his exhaust, unloaded the g, and fired the AIM-9 without regard for tone, his lack of afterburner, or the fact that the ground filled my entire field of view. The guy I was flying against was an online veteran. He knew that I always fired AIM-9Bs just to scare people into turning toward me (I am good at high deflection snapshots with guns). He knew that AIM-9Bs rarely hit with the afterburner off or when pointed at the ground. He was so sure that he wouldn't get hit that he completetly ignored my shot. His airplane disintegrated when the AIM-9B went up his tailpipe. I don't know if the missile tracked or not, maybe it was just a lucky collision, either way I hit and killed him. It was a miracle shot that I have never duplicated. Now AIM-9Ds are a lot more useful. And AIM-9Gs and AIM-9Hs are a lot more likely to get decent hits under adverse conditions, almost comparable to the AIM-9L. Unfortunately, my favorite ride, the F-4E, only carries USAF AIM-9B/E/J missiles. None of those are nearly as good as the Navy variants, though the J seems to be noticably better than the B and E.

You have to get the "loud" tone, which isn't so loud in the stock sound files. You can't be pulling hardly any g. More importantly, the target has to either be flying straight or in a very gentle turn. Targets with after burner on are much easier to hit, but with patience, a non-afterburning target dies just as easy as long as he isn't maneuvering and you have a solid tone on hm before firing. 50% is about right, though if you catch a strike flight of 4 flying straight and level you might get lucky and get 3 or 4 out of the 4. All of my info is based on full hard settings... I don't know how things work at any other level.

Loss of a dog is pretty hard. They are very affectionate and have colorful personalities that make them such wonderful pets/friends/family members. I find that the relatively short lifespans of dogs is the one real weakness in having them as a pet. You get so attached to them, then 10 or 15 years later, they are gone. Of course, unlike human relationships, if you get past grieving, you can easily find another dog that you will love as much as the last one. But do you want to get another one after feeling such painful loss? When I was about 7 or 8 years old, I had a parakeet that I loved. But he jumped off my finger and landed on the floor. I quickly discovered that our cat had hidden under the bed. She pounced on the bird and killed it with one bite to the chest. I never cried more for any other pet I have lost over the years. That day, my parents went out and got me another parakeet almost identical to the one that died. But it was never the same, and because I didn't really care for him, my mom gave him away to my Aunt. Of course about 5 years later, I missed having a pet bird. I was going to get another parakeet, but my dad chipped in to upgrade to a Cockatiel. Of course he just died a week ago after almost 27 years. While I loved that bird, he had a great personality, and I will never forget him, I have yet to shed a tear over his loss. Besides being hardened by the stresses of life, I think over time that I have learned to invert my emotions. Instead of grieving for his death, I am thankful for all the time I spent with him. I have simply accepted death as a part of life and appreciate the short precious time that others have spent with me over the years.

Keep it short and simple: www.MajorLee.com www.MajLee.com www.Aerodrome.com

He was having problems staying on his perch, falling off more and more frequently. He was having trouble eating his food. But some days he looked very healthy and happy. I got him in 1981, he wasn't newborn, but was very young (8-20 weeks? I don't know). He was very smart and learned to whistle many songs such as Jingle Bells, Taps, and Charge. He could not pronounce words very clearly, but he had a decent vocabulary. He refused to learn to whistle Dixie... which is strange since he picked up almost any other sound he heard, including the microwave oven humming then going ding when finished. The old Irish Spring commercials which had someone whistling a tune always got his attention and made him very happy. His cage was always in my room from 1981 until 1989 when I joined the Navy. My parents had him until I got out of the Navy in 1997. He got very depressed when I originally left, and would get depressed again if he saw me too much while I was home on leave. He would pull out his feathers to the point of bleeding a little while depressed. When I got married in 2003, my parents were stuck with him again off and on as my job has required much travel and my wife cannot handle animals. I was home 3 weeks in December/January and my mom thought he was getting very ill, so I took him back. He perked up while he was with me. He was happiest sitting on my shoulder. My 1 year old son loved to try to touch him. I had not done much more than give him food and water and say hello over the weekend. I left for work down in Miami early in the morning and didn't even think to check on him. My wife found him dead the afternoon. I have shed no tears. I feel the loss of my longest living pet, but my life has kept me focused on so many other things and I knew that he was very old and his health was failing. But whether or not I show or feel grief, I cannot forget this little bird that was a part of my family for so long. It is so strange seeing the empty cage. My parents buried him in their back yard behind the shed where my pet snake and guinea pig were buried so very long ago. Rest in peace Igor. I do not intend to get another bird. Birds do not belong in cages. Igor had lost the ability to fly for any extended period with any skill many years ago due to having had his wings clipped for so long and being afraid of flying. In recent years, he would just about have a heart attack if he fell from my shoulder and had to land on the floor. However, I want my son to grow up exposed to all sorts of animals the way I did. I will try to teach him to appreciate wild animals, animals at the zoo, and other people's pets. But if he ever really wants a bird, then I will build a very large cage (almost an aviary) and make sure there are enough birds for them to feel happy without being dependent on human affection. Hopefully, he will be happy with having dogs, cats, perhaps a snake, and/or guinea pig.

Tech support for hooking up the PCs is easy... I can get you there: 1. each PC has to have an ethernet port 2. each PC has to have a unique TCP/IP address on the same subnet with the same subnet mask, the simplest way to achieve this is with an off-the-shelf 4-port router which automatically configures the ethernet settings for any pc plugged into it. 3. If you are using only 4 pits, a 4-port router will do the job by itself since it can handle 4 pcs, if you are going to use more than 4, you have several options: a. use a wireless router and make sure the additional PCs support wireless ethernet b. get an 8-port switch and hook all of the pcs to the 8-port, then hook the 8-port switch to the 4-port router. c. get just the 8-port switch and manually configure the ip addresses/subnet masks. If you have internet, you may want to use the 4-port router so all pcs can share the internet connection. If you don't have internet, you can fearlessly drop all firewalls/anti-virus software while playing to make connecting easier and more reliable. So in short: You need either a router, a switch, or both and an ethernet cable for each pc to be hardwired to the router or switch, possible needing one more cable to connect a router to the switch if you choose to get both. I am against using wireless for this purpose since you want solid reliable fast comms for gaming. If you have some cash (since this will cost a lot more than 10/100 ethernet hardware), make sure each PC has a gigabit ethernet port and that you use a gigabit ethernet switch to join them all together. Most new PCs come with gigabit lan, so it is the switch that will cost a lot more. The in-game interface makes it very easy to connect once you have all the pcs on a LAN together (i.e. hardwired to the same switch). One person chooses to be host, the others refresh their list to find the host and join it. If you had 6 pcs... you could have more than one host so that several different groups could be flying in separate games. i.e. 1 guy could host a dogfight while another guy could host a coop, while the remaining people choose whichever host they want to play on.

If you can somehow link the canard braking position to the wheel-brake key, that would be the best way to model it... especially if the fact that wheel-brakes can't be applied in flight also prevents deployment of the canard in flight. Any other method I can think of would permit deployment in flight... which is unacceptable.

If you are going to hold up the Gripen until the FM and control surface movement can me modeled correctly, then it will be on hold indefinitely until TK decides to model complex fly-by-wire systems that mix control surface movements as required by the specific flight/load conditions. For a taste of what you are up against, go here: http://www.dtas2007.nl/userfiles/file/Pape...Ansell-Blom.pdf The canards normally move together and act together with the elevons to balance loads required to achieve desired pitch angles. So there is some kind of digital schedule that decides how much to move the canards and how much to move the elevons depending on the speed, alt, g-load, etc. In emergencies, the system will automatically move the canards independently as required to compensate for damage to other control surfaces. Some interesting tidbits can be found here: http://www.gripen.com/NR/rdonlyres/4894FED...ws_2000_02.pdff From what I have gathered at various websites/photos/writeups, etc: Inboard elevons are essentially used as elevators but in such a way to behave as flaps for certain configurations such as landing and takeoff. There is a very complex interaction between canards and elevons that depends on cg position, aoa, speed, alt, g-load, etc. Outboard elevons definitely perform aileron function, I am not sure if they are used as flaps... but based on the the complexity of the fly-by-wire system, I am sure every surface is used to the fullest extent to minimize drag and/or maximize lift. Here is a quote from a book on controls (Stability and Control of Conventional and Unconventional Aircraft Configurations A Generic Approach): "The SAAB JAS 39 Gripen control definition includes a movable canard surface in combination with four elevons, rudder, and leading-edge flaps. It is possible to obtain a choice of either max. L/D-ratio or max. lift, depending on what is needed at a specific flight condition, using the canard and the trailing-edge control surfaces in combination. At cruise and manouvre conditions, the canard and elevons are optimized for low trim drag. At low speed, high lift is desired for short field performance rather than low drag. The emphasis is then to carry a high load on the canard to provide a substantial lift increase by deflecting the wing elevon trailing-edge down for trim. Thus, to obtain a high trim load on the canard, good canard high-lift characteristics were important in the choice of the planform for the close-coupled canard layout." I have yet to find any references specifying max deflection angles, but assuming that the surfaces are at max deflection, photos such as these could get you in the ballpark: http://ipmsstockholm.org/magazine/2000/04/...l_gripen_07.htm

Given that you don't have the time or interest in doing both front and back seats... My interest is in having the T-38A as flown by the Thunderbirds, so my vote is for the front seat.

With all the issues people have had with hard drive failures, I would think most SFP1 modders should use RAID 1. Using 2 drives to do the job of 1 is costly in terms of power, noise, initial purchase cost, and 1 more potential point of failure. But the benefit of being able to run your PC even if 1 drive completely fails and to be able to rebuild the 1 that failed automatically is worth it. Plus, you can read files from the drive faster since RAID 1 permits reading from both drives at the same time. Both my wife and I have RAID 1 and furthermore we mirror our personal photos/videos and other important documents between our pcs. So 4 hard drives have to fail for me to lose important files. I have considered using RAID 0+1, but I can't bring myself to use 4 drives just to get a slight speed gain in writing. Drives will fail with time... of course the hope would be that the drives would outlast the life of the PC given about a 3 to 5 year replacement cycle.

The main reason the US has not lost many aircraft to SAMs in recent wars is that the US takes out the SAMs on the first day of combat :) But even an F-117 has been lost to SAM shots... when an opportunity presents itself, an unexpected good ole IRM can be devastating. US SAMs haven't gotten much of an opportunity against aircraft, since F-15s take out enemy fighters right after the enemy SAMs have been wiped out :) Israelis haven't forgotten how effective SAMs can be, but haven't had to face serious numbers of them for quite some time either.

Jed Eckert: How did you get shot down, Colonel? Col. Andy Tanner: It was five to one. I got four.

Is it any surprise to anyone who knows me that I love the F-4 (inside and out)? RAZBAM's F2H is a pleasure to fly as much as their Skyraider is. I wish RAZBAM could do more, I like his 3d work quite a bit.

This error can happen if you plug the joystick into a different USB port and haven't re-installed the driver since doing so. This just happend to me when I moved my PC to another room and moved by rudder pedals from a front usb port to one at the rear of my pc case. Try leaving the stick plugged in to the current USB port and re-install the driver (you may have to reboot), then you should be able to program the profile.

The place to fly this sim online is Hyperlobby. There are very few people who come online at any given time. If you want to find someone, you need to go to the Wings Over Vietnam chat room in Hyperlobby every night between 8pm and 11pm eastern standard time. If you wait around a few nights, someone will show up. Look for doghouse or the 531ghost squadron. While the WOV Hyperlobby is not specifically set up to work with WOE, it can be made to work, but first you have to find someone else with WOE willing to play online to make it worth the effort to get it working right. SFP1, WOV, and WOE are all the same when it comes to playing online, so directions on how to get one working right generally apply to the others. Getting these sims to play well online can be challenging for some people depending on their internet connection/router/firewall setup and general ability with computers/Windows. What little online community there is can be very helpful. They know how to get it set up and working. However, if you are rude and/or impatient, you will be ignored. If you have Windows XP, I suggest you learn about Hamachi and download/install it since it is used by almost everyone who flies online. It is a virtual private network that allows people to play online without wasting so much time trying to fight routers and firewalls. Go here to learn more and/or get it: https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/vpn.asp?lang=en Please read the information found here: http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB/viewtopic.p...65f82e34bd3c8c6 Everything said there about Wings Over Vietnam applies to Wings Over Europe. If you have already installed and patched your game correctly, reading and understanding the info in the above post will make it easier for others to help you.