GwynO

Theoretically we did in a way! The UK public didn't vote prats like this Liam Fox in! The tragic unfolding of events after our last democratic election showed just how callous the *some* could be in ditching most of ALL their principles just in order to give these F&*(wits a chance in power! Ah! The tragedy! But never mind, plenty of fodder for the "Arena" I should think!

Likwise SiDdogg! Go get 'em, and keep your head on a swivel! Thanks for the awesome F-18 skins! You have contributed loads over the years and still no sign of slacking! Cheers matey! Don't know if I should say this... But I wasn't that much of a Hornet/Big fan until You, EricJ, and TK kind of changed the whole resonance of that plane for me! Cheers guys! She's a Ghost Faced Killllllerrrrrr!!!!! With HEavy MEtaL!!

Great to see you guys working on such an instrumental er.. instrument! The HSI is all but essential when flyying with "Alt D, D, D.." as in no Uber Hud, you know what I mean?

DCS is not cheap and it runs like a pig on my considerably outdated laptop, but from what little I have tinkered in it and seen from youtube, it's the dog's bollocks. If by guiding the bomb you mean search for, lock up and set a GBU to hit it, then I would say FF5.5 without a shadow of doubt, it runs smooth as silk on my lametop with middling sliders, and best of all it's free! No need for the Falcon 4 disc or anything like that so if you don't like it you haven't cost yourself anything to try it but a little time. There is Allied Force as well, that isn't free but neither is it expensive if you buy second hand from amazon. They say AF is more stable than FF but the development of FF5 to FF5.5 was mostly over stability issues which they seem to have fixed now (I rarely have any problems in single player running on Vista, I don't do MP yet so can't say on that front). There are a number of terrain and graphic overalls for both AF and FF as well as numerous on line squadrons for both.

Aye, the JSF takes multi role into the 21st century. 4th gen technology limited stealth aircraft to be either: extremely expensive, small, stealthy and limited to hitting one or two targets per mission ala F-117, so ridiculously expensive you may as well buy the country you're having problems with instead, huge, stealthy, and a bomb truck on a par if not better than a buff ala B-1, The Russian knock off, B2. Adding to the expense is that you'd still have to shell out for alternative air to air platforms. With 4.5 gen tech like the F-22 it's possible to have AA, AG and stealth, but at a cost more approaching buying the entire continent you're having problems with if you take design, manufacture, building, maintenance into account The JSF offers AA, AG and Stealth for what is still expensive, but not outright ridiculous considering what that's going to give you. If you had a Phantom and needed to send it to intercept a bear, you wouldn't make it carry a full load of bombs just to prove a point that it can, likewise with the JSF it doesn't negate that it can do AA, AG and stealth just because it doesn't do all three at once. For something like that they'd need a B-1R not that any country is going to be developing something like that for the next 50 years thanks to the financial situation For now, I can't see anything that even compares to the JSF on paper. Question is what are the longer term implications of starting the kind of diplomatic handcuffs with countries other than Israel in the Mid East that supplying JSF would entail? In the short run, the balance would certainly be one way with said nations perhaps thinking twice about their public statements, being perhaps a little more open and trusting, but in the longer run this balance could reverse when the losses that would come from losing the maintenance contracts are greater for the supplier than the cost of going it alone with what they've got for the regime in power at the time. Tomcats and Phantoms flying in Iran are a case in point, so for that reason it makes a lot of sense why there's so much opposition to others opening them up and fiddling with them. If they are to be supplied, it makes more sense to do so on a kind of long term loan basis with some wired in self destruct that renders them inoperable at the flick of a switch should things change as they did in Iran. The Mid East is such a volatile place to be sending JSF, I really think a few of the mooted choices should be re thought, it would be awful to see the loss of maintainable contracts being used as leverage in a future economic downturn, but that would be academic if they could just be switched off somehow like if they required online activation to start the avionics?

Could be Steve Jobs got a job at the DoD and just wants all the users to get the full I-plane experience. Radar contacts are updated via I-tunes apparently. On a serious note, the avionics might well form a key component of some needed stealth features, the difference being between active and passive stealth features such as the difference between a simple coat of paint and deceptive jamming. Deceptive jamming doesn't remove a radar signature however, only makes it harder to pinpoint accurately, but if (big if) there was some avionics gizmo in the fifth gen stuff that could, it might just be that to give any third party access to an airframe without the avionics would risk it appearing as a much less capable platform than with, not good for business really but not as bad for business as selling the unencrypted source of such avionics given that no other country has it yet.

Ravenclaw's recent snaps of the all time sexiest jet ever used by the Wafu, excluding the Phantom, the Blackburn Buccaneer. In fact make that THE sexiest imho, so granted the Phantom could do more in terms of multi role but what floats my boat has always been tales of flying mach snot under the radar, one pass haul ass and expedite back to the O bar quicker than the time it takes for the first punch to be thrown in a mixed group of bootnecks and pongos. If said O bar happens to be under a floating runway then all the better. I wait with the excitation of a twelve year old getting his hands on his first rifle, first thing will be a how low can you go bimble around the range, then to take it out for some sneaky low level bomb runs over Germany and see about luring a stoopid ass MiG on my tail only to get a face full of retard defence! Oh the mirth! And the screenshot opportunities! That all is within the realm of the possible so far, so on to the pure fantasy. This isn't just regards the Banana Jet, but just about all the jets ever to come out either boxed or as add ons for Strike Fighters, basically it's to have a taste, even a slight tip of the tongue, monosodium glutamate, barest hint of a taste of any of the really cool wizardry the crews had to get to grips with IRL, and saved them from the countless death followed by death, followed by yet more death to AAA that my sorry ass encounters trying to drop bombs the really old way. Here is a basic outline of the various ways the Banana Jet crews had to help them. I love the code names for the techy bits, Blue Parrot bombing computers, Red Beard nukes, sounds like a night out at a gay disco, soo Wafu! Banana Jet anti dying kit As mentioned, real life crews don't have the luxury of trial and error, re spawning to give it another go, and crews as well as aircraft are pretty expensive and not in unlimited supply so it makes sense to be as careful about saving them as possible, and that of course means finding ways to minimize the amount of time spent close to the target as well as maximising the distance at which the weapons can be dropped and still reasonably expect to hit, no surprise that even in WW1 the basics had been worked out, the problem that is of working out how to tell the pilot when he is at just the right point in time and space to drop his bombs when the following are known: distance to target, angle relative to target, speed relative to target, target's direction of travel (if applicable), wind direction and speed, ballistic properties of the weapon. Needless to say, the maths required for a human being to work all of that out at the pace required in the heat of battle was simply too much so various mechanical solutions where tried using cogs and wheels and optics, pretty basic but the the concept was good, the physics of what needed done was well known in WW1 it was just the technology that kept things back. Throughout WW2 the technology kept improving, valve computers and so on meant the optics, cogs and wheels could now be tied up via some exceedingly clever boffins to the actual flight controls, things like the Norden bombsight and the Rip off with better lenses that could actually take control of the plane and fly the damn thing to the right point in time and space to drop the bombs. Well they weren't perfect by any means, but the technology was definitely getting better, the wizards continued to work on keeping the pilot focused on staying alive rather than fighting the math, radar data meant the computers could work in the night, through bad weather, or from even longer distances and heights, admittedly not perfect, but as everything in nature or technology a work in progress. All through the Cold War era, all or certainly most of those jets we love so much from Strike Fighters employed various electro mechanical aids to bombing, so much so that direct bombing using the fixed mark on the combining glass became a "what to do if absolutely EVERYTHING else has gone tits up" method, but I don't like to think that absolutely everything has gone tits up every time I climb into my virtual favourite jet ever. There are sims out there that include a flavour, some quite a lot of flavour, of post 1940s bombing in jets, but all bar none of these focus on relatively recent platforms. There are sims of the Falcon, the Flanker, the Hornet and others, and there are more World War 2 sims than you can shake an angry fist at, but my love has always been for the glory days of jet bombers, the 1950s to the 1970s, the days when the "smart" part was the platform not the bomb and when attack run meant tearing away at mach snot, low enough to touch the tree tops, popping up at the last possible moment, trusting the technology with one hand and holding your life in the other keeping one eye out for tracers, one on the hud or the needles keeping it centred, staying with it.. and BOMBS AWAY! My ultimate flight sim/game fantasy is to have the subject matter and graphics of Strike fighters, but with the functionality of Falcon type sims, something in between that can give some suspension of disbelief when I'm bombing along feet off the ground, that for once, just for once, those white coats haven't botched it up, that the gadget is working, that just this once absolutely everything hasn't already gone tits up. I fear it's too much of a fantasy, the way things are going the people who still buy flight games in the future will never think they missed anything, they will only assume that aircraft went from dive bombing to smart bombs over night and so miss out the tastiest chapter of combat jet flying ever. Such a pity if that happens but cest la vie as they say in France.

Thankks for the links, had a brief glance as am away for a week now and a tiny screen isn't ideal for reading, will definitly be checking them out when back. Cheers, I know I get a bit obsessed at times, a Falcon level or DCS level sim for the 50s 70s jet bombers isn't going to happen unless I learn to code or win the lottery to pay someone to do it. Wish I had just one tenth of a percent of the awesome experinces you must have had! It was one of my childhood dreams to run away to the States and somehow get naturalised and join the AF to be an F-111 navigator. Anyhoos, am in Lonon at the mo and planning to get an all round aviation fix at the RAF museum in London. See ya'll in a week, cheers. G.

It's a mean way to feel when you're low enough to be thinking of it. Sadly many don't return from a moment too far, I know you'll be feeling all sorts over the coming months and even years and it won't be easy but try not to be too angry with the person, it is about the cruellest thing anyone can do to their friends and families but I can almost guarantee you that isn't the intention the vast majority of the time. In fact in a stupid way, the thoughts of what you're going to leave behind for your friends and family can get stuck in the loop of negative feelings about yourself, making you feel you're the lowest of the low and they would in some way be better off without you, I've been there and got the tee shirt and now grateful I never managed to do it properly because I can look back and want to kick myself in the f***ing face for having been so self pittying, so self concerned, so deaf dumb and blind to the fact that things could be made better with a bit of effort from me and communication... but I cannot forget just how low down a person genuinely feels when they are at that bridge, it's not something I'd wish on anyone other than a murderer or child molester, it's the worst kind of low feeling anyone could have. It's impossible to understand all of this, it's pointless continuing to try and explain this, I hope some of what I said makes some sense, dude If you need to talk about any of this I can call you any time or email. Look at the positives you still have in your life and make the most of the precious time we have on this planet, it doesn't work out for everyone all the time so even more important to appreciate even the small little things like taking a walk and breathing in the fresh air, having a chat about something, anything, just to connect with the people around you. I'd say now you deserve some good beers and even better company, hope things look better in the coming days.

Thanks for sharing that! Amazing what free beer can achieve as an incentive, maybe I would stop whining if I had some free beer as well I don't dispute any of that, I know the theory behind the physics and that this is still taught to this day, but just from what I have read it flies contrary to all of that to imagine that direct was the method of choice in practice when as you point out, today's levels of accuracy weren't even imagined. The gadgets were good enough for military purposes when it came to getting a stick of bombs onto a target that was preferably mapped to within feet from recon photographs, maps and all that, and if I'm hearing you right, s**t hot crews could do better than a computer suffering from a dose of GIGO which just highlights how awesome your breed of Cold War Warriors and aircraft were, absolute legends. I would just like the option though, the choice. My preference, and I wouldn't push it on anyone but it would be nice to have for those that want it and it could always be turned off by default. I know the arguments about time and money and staff, I know, that's why I say it's pure fantasy, but can't help thinking about it none the less, it must have been the hours spent avidly reading my dad's magazines (insert joke) when I was a kid where almost all the descriptions of bombing involved fire control computers and those stories never read less exciting as a result, proper nerve jangling stuff that required balls of steel. What you describe is even more amazing, balls of steel and the computational skills of Einstein, but if that's the way it was then that's the way it was. Just another reason why I would most likely suck at being a real pilot too! As far as the Buccaneer goes, I have one additional source of information as well. One of Dad's best friends grew up to be an actual real life Buccaneer pilot! Not only a pilot but later an instructor on them up at Lossiemouth, so if anyone knows better what they did with them and how it would be him! What are the chances he would have pictures of the pilot display (must call Dad..)

FC I know you did it for real, and at speeds that could make your eyeballs bleed, and I wish I could understand how anyone could have been relied on just to use mental arithmetic and bombing tables to get the drop right, please tell me you're joking? The release point being off by a microsecond means the difference between hit or miss, mission success, risk worth taking or mission failed, someone else has to go do it all over again, unacceptable. I understand there were times when direct would have been preferred on some, non pre briefed targets given the hit and miss nature of the technology itself, but the vast majority of stories I have read about pre briefed targets being bombed during those three decades of interest mentions fire control in some way or other to get the bombs off at the right microsecond, especially so I should hope in the kind of uber sex planes you flew

With the theme tune that reminds me of the old joke about John Wayne, he's hosting a party and some star makes a ballsy show off followed by another trying to out do the stunt, and on it goes through John Wayne's party, meanwhile he just stands there by the hearth, calm as anything, just silently poking the fire with his... Most hilarious thing I've seen in ages! I was waiting for some functions to show up that didn't make the final cut, like "beat wife" or "make execute"

Sorry about that Derk, I think I inadvertently pissed in his chips, or at least I think that's what he thinks he thinks, although I have reason to doubt I should even think he thinks that. Fascinating and heart warming story about your family connection with the Gorkhas, they are truly amazing people. My late great Uncle fought alongside them in Burma and had the greatest respect for them, so much so that two Gorkha knives took pride of place on his bedroom wall for many years afterwards. I wish I knew more of what he did out there with them but he never liked to get into details about the bloodier aspects of War, I do remember with great fondness his description of the jungle, the heat, the food.. and the great warrior regiment from what was then known as Northern India.

Cool those boots man! I never sniped you, my aim was to encourage you to come join in and share your views instead of just stating your perception that you are somehow disenfranchised without even trying to engage in some kind of discourse, maybe my encouragement was a little slap on the back too much with the man up but if you take offence so easily then you really do need to man up. Being all offended does not make you a victim of some perceived attack, I'm genuinely sorry to hear about your circumstances and you can see I obviously had no idea what happened to you so was never my intention to rake up any trauma or anything but I still don't get how exactly any of that makes it less clear for you to understand that any and all sides can be misrepresented, that it isn't just libs that get beat up on, it happens the other way round too and being in a wheelchair does not make any difference to that, I treat people fair and square equal so the point remains as far as I'm concerned, circumstances or not it is not just your viewpoint that is misrepresented in this world. You didn't castigate me, until you just did then with that rant about assuming I now hate all liberals well think what you like, but I can assure you I don't hate all liberals! In fact J.S. Mill was one of all time favourite reads, as for not wanting to hear your perspective... I'm the damn fool who encouraged you to share it in the first place! While this particular conversation between you and I is done, I bear no ill will towards you and still encourage you to engage in future discourse on these forums, rest assured there won't be any sniping from me and if there was I should hope I'd receive a kick in the backside from the mods. In short, think first, read and re read where necessary before you assume someone's having a go at you because just maybe, they were trying to give you a helping hand. As for your future purchases, that's between you and yours, none of my business.

The please do post more often, you can make a difference to that scenario if sides aren't talking it takes two sides to have a conversation, regardless of who started, what started, numerical numbers and so on, no one should feel unwelcome here so long as everyone respects the forum rules and keep it to discussing and not sniping which is 99.99999% of all the threads here for a long time now. About the term liberal being miss represented, it's not just true about that side of the spectrum. How many times have you heard terms like conservative, neo-con and so on bandied about as if they are the worst insults ever? I was castigated by my peers in the teaching profession for being, apparently, a "neo-con" and a "Zionist", which by their twisted definition meant that I hate anyone non Christian (except Jews in their warped fantasy) and wish for a New World Order dominated by the rich white middle class (which is the correct definition of those throwing the insults at me btw), that I supported race subordination tantamount to slavery and on and on with their ridiculous libels, all of it highly offensive and hurtful especially given that I was and still am on some issues, somewhat of a socialist, a fierce defender of individual freedoms irrespective of gender, race and so on. (Can you tell I'm still sore about this? ) My point is.. if your label of choice is getting misrepresented, don't take it too personally, man up, grow a thicker skin, and communicate! It's no good feeling ill about it if you don't try and show people what you're really about. Your rep, your responsibility. That's not meant too harsh btw just saying there's room for more than one perspective here, and libs aren't pariahs here, you even have a leader in the form of Eraser, maybe you both should come in the Arena more often and join in there, probably better for that sort of thing. Back on topic.. Raaaaaa! Good Job Gorkhas! The body parts were dead before they were removed so it was more of an amputation, they should be praised for the skill with which they removed the diseased tissue from the rest of the body, Taleb brains contain a highly contagious virus so the correct procedure would be incineration with extreme prejudice. This is nothing compared to the barbarous way the extremists behead "infidels" alive and fully conscious, it doesn't bear thinking about the hypocrisy here, absolutely scandalous.

Man! You're like a one man design bureau! If you have a Central American bank account of preference I would gladly donate for all the huge enhancements your terrains and other items have made, and continue to make for the SF series. Keep up the good work my friend, but take it easy and in you're own time, the end is worth the wait

Panama was relatively straight forward, Nicaragua took a bit longer, that was one of their roundels from 1936 to 1979 according to aeroflight. Does this mean your Panama terrain will be ready in "two weeks"?

Yep, marmite, you either love it or hate it http://www.marmite.com/

To both kinds asfaik, the weather is marmite.

I'm not saying the events in the video can't happen, but curious as to how the problem of laser energy diffusion, blooming and so on was solved, or has it been solved, regarding weather. Also, the high energy beams needed to be effective as weapons need the kind of reverse focusing I described above due to the problem of the beam heating the air ahead and around it into plasma which is several degrees worse in terms of dissipation or blooming of the beam than adverse weather, in any case the problems remain of overcharging the mirror from all that energy in a matter of minutes if not seconds in all but very long wave pulse modes. Not saying it's a cule de sac, just interested in the technical solutions to what are some enormous engineering challenges in manufacturing the reflecting surface and the focusing of the beam at the desired point for each given moment, the ability to counter at least the theoretical countermeasures is of much less importance as that would be more of a "software" solution as opposed to hardware.

In space, no one can hear you scream, and it's harder to counter a laser weapon when stuck in a relatively predictable geosynchronous orbit, less crap to diffuse the beam around too. Atmospheric based lasers aren't entirely useless though, imagine what a much lower power laser with cheap as chips gimbal tracking mechanisms could do if set to seek and track cockpit type material with extremely disturbing light wavelengths? I'd imagine one of those balls stuck on the tail end could be useful in a close in dogfight. Must get to patent office.. although by the look of it 20 years too late

It isn't the same turret. Although not stated, this system by its very size and appearance imply the mechanism relies on beam spreading. Remember the wandering beams the Ghostbusters had? That's the problem with really high energy concentrated laser beams, when the beam is focused so tiny that it has a helluvahlot of watts per centimetre, it heats the air around it to ridiculous temperatures creating plasma, this plasma breakdown means the energy is dissipated in wobbly hunks of plasma even sooner than it is through a rainstorm, the laser beam widens out and renders the whole thing pointless. To avoid this, the beam can be spread at the source across a concave mirror and sent out so that the beam stays wide nearest the source and narrows as it is focused into an effective point on the target, the technological problems with this however are immense. The mirrors are subject to enormous amounts of energy, have to be constructed with precision out of very pure materials, to suppose they would then be swung about their gimble limit at anything like the same rate as a normal seeker head is a leap too far into the unknown at the moment. I'd like to see the stats on this in terms of tracking manoeuvring targets at speed (and in adverse weather) but it is likely a good "two weeks" before anything like that comes out, and even longer before a useable laser beam weapon could be swung around the sky like Phalanx.

The problem is that laser energy although impressive enough at short range, doesn't really cut it at long range in Earth's atmosphere for two reasons. First a beam will spread out over distance, the larger the distance, the wider the laser dot will have spread out which spreads the energy over a larger surface area, however this is not half as much a problem as absorption. Absorption is what happens when the laser beam has to travel through several litres of water vapour in the form of mist, cloud, rain, sleet or snow in the atmosphere, indeed any small particles like dust, or even just gas molecules get in the way of the laser and gradually the energy is lost to these little collisions that even if they don't stop the photons, still serve to scatter them in all different directions. If this weapon is to be credible at long range to shoot down aircraft, it really will be dependant on the weather. Also, it isn't as if countermeasures haven't already been bashed out http://www.freepaten...om/4673250.html

How about that space age, light bending shizzle they're developing now to make Bird of Prey style cloaking surfaces? If the material could handle the throughput of however many mega watts remained of the laser after several thousand feet in distance and altitude through Navy weather.. come to think of it, how much would there be left to deflect anyway. These will probably be useful as a last line of defence to complement the Goalkeeper system in taking out the ordinance fired at a ship, but the distances and weather involved in taking out the aircraft firing them make it impractical. Chuck into the mix a particulate based chaff style countermeasure e.g. fine "water" vapour made to vibrate at a certain resonance on the skin of a slow enough moving platform for a cheap and cheerful alternative to Predator skin or Birds of Prey.

It's exactly as Jedi says. The first time I saw this I was very young and remember it as a great film, although I hardly remembered it I watched it many years later as a teen and decided it was an appalling hash of a film, another example of a poorly thought out, poorly executed sequel to cash in off the back of the original. It was with some trepidation then, that I gently placed the disc into my PS2 to watch it again as an almost thirty something and was astounded to find that I now actually prefer the sequel to the first, maybe it's the nostalgia of looking back at what people expected the future to be in the 90s, like Robocop, for years the very thought of those films have brought a little sick into my mouth but now I think I might actually enjoy them again. Give it a shot and see what you think, I can promise you it's nothing like Robocop! In fact I think they got the ambience of the late 90s bang on, except there weren't real predators around, or were there? AVP2 though.. well I just hope 10 years will be enough time to lessen that films ability to induce acid reflux, it's like some ritalin addled teenagers mindscape, really disappointing and totally unbelievable.. then again I thought that about Predator 2 once upon a time so time will tell.