GwynO

I'd have said Fat Albert, in the lost episode of Coronation Street.. I would have been wrong

That's awesome, trust me to have been going around the houses with no need whatsoever, cheers for sharing!

I feel you CoopF4, I'm stuck with a laptop for the foreseeable future too. There are a few things that can ease your pain. If you're on Vista/Windows7 ditch the fancy DX10 stuff, force DX9 on via the game ini (can't remember which one, I'm sure someone round here can chip in on what it's called exactly), use the fake DX10 version via the .dll download linked to here somewhere (again forgot the name exactly as I'm borrowing someone elses lappy) It might seem strange, but the fake DX10 for DX9 ends up giving me better FPS than using DX10, maybe it will work for you too. Unfortunately the major thing with most of the best mods for me are the insanely huge skin resolutions. Even just one plane in there with 2048 or even higher skins pull my laptop down to a crawl even though it can handle everything else thrown at it from the bigger mod packs 99% of the time. It is a PITA but it is possible to go in and manually resize all the skins for all the aircraft to get them down to at least 1024 or less, that's when I notice a huge difference in playability from making a brew inbetween each frame to actually playing the game. Hope that helps.

nteresting article from Fortean Times about the military and the UFO phenomenon, I know, I know, yawn yawn been there before, but this one really is a refreshing breeze of sanity on an otherwise ever growing dung heap of BS fantasy written about UFOs. No cover ups of little green men needed to connect the dots here, just some very interesting and rational explanations of those oft cited "proof" cases of UFOs on radar. (Text from the Forten Times website)

One day!

Well not all clouds are bad news, but they do mark a difference in the consistency of the air, the relative humidity, temperature, air density and so on, which can add up to turbulence. Some clouds, no sane pilot would ever fly into if they had any alternative because the effects are so bad, like being picked up in an invisible fist and shook like a muscle shake. Have a look at this article for more detail on how and why aircraft use radar to avoid clouds

and plenty happy returns of the day!!

Aye,. it's going to be hot as hell down there, damp or dry depending on airflow, precious little fluid to wash the hands after wiping the behind into the latrine, not pleasant at all considering they have until Christmas to go until any realistic chance of rescue :/ I think I'd be pretty depressed too

Really Tasty Pics!! Like some kind of Avionic equivalent of a Teenage Russian Gymnast

With DX10 force disabled on my lametop integrated graphics POS running Vista Home 32bit, I find the Enb series .dll/ini combo invaluable! Running just the "Out of the Box" game then truth be told I think even with force DX9, my machine runs faster (FPS) without it but put anything remotely like the SF2Vietnam Ground And Air War Mod in and it runs like an asthmatic snail UNLESS said plug-in is enabled, in which case it runs like silk dripping from a spoon, not PERFECTLY smooth.. but SMOOTH enough!!

WoW!!! Hold on!!! So this thing *theoretically allows you to look around your virtual Cockpit/Sky and.. what does a simple tilt gesture of the head do>? Does it Zoom In or Out?? This could be revolutionary! If this is as Good as I Think it Is, then I need one! ,..... Waiting 'till someone with the mags to spare affords to try/review it here!

Huge Congratulations Man!! 2X as well Best wishes to Momma, Babies and Yourself Sakai! (edit) And be sure to update us every now and then as their hands grow ever more accustomed to the USB Fighter Stick control device of your family's choice!

Whatever you Guys find, please keep at it! One of the biggest realism detractors in this series thus far is.. we can float into a Dark, Thunderous looking CLOUD And"" Nothing! Not even a twitch! Hopefully, one day, we would be able to use the "Terrain Avoidance" radar as a kind of "Weather Radar".. looking out for clouds.. with some ACTUAL substance

Ahhhh! Man! I Love to see the Border (Welsh heheh) Collie appreciated for the out doors kind of spirits that they are! Awesome Pics WM!

Personally I have always had a sweet spot for the "spiritual" descendant of what my father always proclaimed to be the "kind of second fastest jet aircraft of all time common production!" I'm glad to see the MiG-31 in usable conditions for the Kazakhstan Air Force. How the Hell can they afford them though??? Well it isn't like the're pointing their search and acquire radars at US so it;s all gravy!

Amazing air force pics! Well done Kazakhstan!! Hopefully they won't be required to use their MiG-31s in the primary Interceptor role, i wonder if they'd have any use as high speed strike aircraft?

Ahhh! So Pretty! I wish my lametop could realistically handle O.F.F. (B.H.A.H.). I have, at last, managed to source a copy of CFS3 although given recent rumours it appears I may have been more productively disposed searching for my lost copy of Pacific Fighters. Whichever way the wind of Sims blows, I hope that on my next laptop I will be able to enjoy the O.F.F (B.HA.H.) Experience as even reading about it, or seeing screenshots and such show what a high quality product it is Carry on Guys and Gals, hopefully I may join you in the not too distant future!! (edited to remove drunken caps locks and so on)

A battle fought through the "tape reorders", and mores sophisticated, technology employed on the front. Less about flight geometry than about technology cadence one would suppose. Good Job Canucks! Clear Sxies!

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.