JediMaster

I guess it's the fault of the parents who had children in the late 80s/early 90s. They allowed their kids to be spoiled brats and now if the military wants to keep recruitment up they need to make allowances for the new generation of wussy narcissists. They can lower their standards, or they can have a force that shrinks by attrition and doesn't regenerate. I guess they chose the former.

Stupid DoD proxy filters are a blight upon the face of humanity. As for our land combat area, I wish we had more too. Unfortunately, you can't force people to show! I don't think enough of our TK fans are into the ground stuff, and the ones that are must visit other sites.

I think so. Some of the mods over there know me well and apparently stood up for me as I was being seriously misunderstood. I never saw all of what happened because it was apparently edited out, but you'd think I'd expressed the opinion that Hitler was actually a pretty good guy or something. Apparently my association with this site colored some opinions as well, which is ridiculous because while I'm aware of the feelings some here have to SimHQ I've never been a party to them. You have your opinions, I have mine, none are to be belittled, but that's that. I was never a mod there, but I've been there for almost 10 years. I've seen a lot of people have serious disagreements over that time, it happens. My irritation at the time probably led me to type more than was necessary and ramble a bit, but it boiled down to: I like Black Shark, I'm getting A-10C because I know I will like that, but I've just had my faith in ED shaken by their statements about the future of DCS and the apparent abandonment of whatever was supposed to follow A-10C (because 2 yrs ago it was said the 3rd DCS module would be out in 18 months, and you CAN'T think of a timetable like that without having something in the pipeline half-done already). Then I read that they said whatever comes next will depend on getting a military sim contract for it and I lost it. Almost no other sim devs have needed a military contract to make a sim, including ED itself just a few years ago, so I don't understand that at ALL. I support sims by buying them, not playing sycophant to the developer. As someone who buys them, I then feel I have a voice in the future plans of the company as opposed to being the guy in the corner saying "I won't buy it until they put plane X in theater Y in" plus I'm feeding funds back into the company for said development. The whole "you should be thankful they make anything for you to buy, and you should pay 2x as much and be happy about it!!" attitude doesn't fly with me. If I think a company I've supported for 15 years with my money is losing their vision, I'm going to speak up and say so, regardless of whether they or anyone else agrees that they are. I don't think they "owe" me any more than I "owe" them loyalty, but any intelligently run company is going to want to hear their customers' feedback even if they decide not to factor it into their path. Remember, if you build it, they will come (unless they get this bizarre hatred of the Caucasus and won't buy a plane they like because it's NOT set in Europe). But if ED doesn't build it, no one else will either. The study sim market has contracted beyond the minimum.

Israel exists because of Western guilt over the Holocaust, plain and simple. If that hadn't happened, the West wouldn't have been so sanguine about it. But it did happen and they did nothing to stop it until it was far too late, so it was felt, consciously or unconsciously, that they needed a place of their own, why not let them keep the place they already took themselves? It's far easier for nations to FAIL to act than to act, so letting Israel form was far simpler than preventing it and engineering some other solution, which would have meant DOING something.

They're just cargo planes. Would it be better to deny them planes with a proven record of assisting in domestic disaster recovery and increase the enmity the newer generation of PLA officers feel towards the US over Taiwan just to let them know "who's boss"? Before 1988 we were helping them develop WARPLANES for crying out loud. They're not worse now than they were then, and quite frankly we don't need a new superpower enemy. We're holding ourselves at arms' length. As for buying China, that's going to be tough with them holding billions in our debt that no realistic number of C-130s will be able to offset. Frankly, if we can give them a huge fleet of cargo airplanes in return for reducing the financial stranglehold we've allowed them to get on us, that's great! There's also no dispute with the US over any territory because we don't have any adjoining territory. Some of their neighbors do, some of which are our allies, but strictly speaking that is NOT our affair. Let China and Vietnam and S Korea and Japan and the Phillippines bicker over a bunch of islands, that's THEIR business, not ours. Frankly, whether or not Taiwan stays under its own gov't or gets absorbed again is immaterial. China is no longer the backwards-hick wannabe-superpower it once was. Now that Russia is no longer any threat but a nuclear one, why MUST we paint China as our "big bad enemy"? They're not our enemy or our friend, but they don't have to be one or the other! Politics isn't binary.

I read an article today about how the failure to react from 2 different administrations emboldened Al Qaeda and started the path to 9/11. When you're attacked, you can't do NOTHING, you just invite more vicious attacks.

Right, they must be installed in release order, THEN patches applied. Beyond that, I presume you are running with no mods as you didn't list any. If you are, they can ruin things if they're not installed properly. Another thing, the install directory is not the only place the game puts files. In addition to Program Files/Thirdwire, check your documents/saved games folder and delete those folders (one for each one installed, in your case SF2 and SF2I) as well. There's also a thirdwire folder placed under appdata, the hidden folder in your user profile. If you turn on hidden folders, you'll be able to find that and delete it as well. The registry stuff is immaterial for SF, it's not needed to run the game. If you've got a bad file in one of those locations, uninstalling may not fix it.

The A-10s gun ripped thru everything but MBT's with ease in FC2, and even MBTs it usually only took 2-3 passes to get them to catch fire. I'm surprised they dialed it back that much.

I dub thee unforgiven!! Not getting a shot of the Buff pilot is a capital crime here!!

GA has made the best films with ED's sims over the years, all top notch.

This seems premature. One success after a string of failures and they're talking like the thing is ready for prime time, even though they quietly add "oh, and we need 2 more successes first". Anyway, treaties like START are always about restrictions on total capabilities and numbers. Replacing 100 crappy missiles with 50 great ones is a 50% reduction in number while also being an even greater increase in capability. It's like turning in your fleet of hundreds of F-4's for a couple dozen F-22s. Look, we've reduced how many fighters we have!

Better than falling on a driving car or people walking.

Uh, ok, I thought Israel was getting them anyway. Painting this as some sort of "carrot" for playing ball on the settlement issue seems bizarre.

The facts are very interesting, the conclusions are not. So, the Su-35S can defeat F-35s 10:1? Uh, ok, "independent analysis" my tailbone. Seeing as both planes are in the development stage, this boils down to a "who would win between the USS Enterprise and a Star Destroyer" argument. Sure on paper you can prove or disprove a dozen things, but it's not until you know how things work operationally, like whether or not that conformal AESA on the wings ever works right let alone is funded for production, before you can start saying "this thing will kick everyone out of the air!" There's no way a 4.5 gen fighter can beat a 5th gen fighter with those kind of ratios. Tell me the F-35 would knock Flankers down at 10:1, ok, I can buy that. Tell me the PAK-FA will knock F-16s and F-15s out of the sky at 10:1, ok, I can see that POV. Tell me an F-15 is going to knock PAK-FAs out of the sky left and right because it's got bigger engines and an AESA (which some F-15s do)? Really? The part left out is that it's carrying the same missiles as the older models, so even if it can get closer and track, if the target spoofs the missile what good is it? Is this guy a paid marketing director for Sukhoi?

AFAIK the AIM-54 was the only AAM that cost over $1m, which is one reason why it was so good and also why it was not made in massive numbers.

Cool. It might be nice to include which sim/terrain or mods you used at the end or start as well.

There have been rare instances of "bad drivers" in the past that either disabled the onboard fan or made it run too slow or conversely made the chip work far harder than it should. Those have been pulled from distribution AFAIK, so you should be safe with the latest WHQL nvidia drivers or whatever HP has for DL.

It's your video card, no doubt. The 9600 GT was never a powerful card, it was a "good enough for the masses" card. Oh, whoops, I just noticed you have a laptop. Your laptop is remarkably similar to mine, except i have the 8600GT in my Dell XPS. That's good enough for older sims, but I'm afraid RoF is newer and needs more from the video card. I don't think you can upgrade it, unfortunately, few laptops allow it. You can always check with HP, though.

I know, and I'm very impatient for it to come out already!

I wonder how often there will be beta updates, and how long until they reach final. BTW, which shots in particular represent the "tooling"?

My guess is they stopped looking at Russia's because they know when it happens years from now that Russia's missiles won't be in good enough shape to actually launch, just sit there rusting. Anyway, while the grandfather paradox, first introduced in HG Wells' Time Machine AFAIK, does seem to preclude that possibility, it's also possible we are constrained by our outdated modes of thinking and hundreds of years from now they'll figure out a way around that. Perhaps it's as simple as burying the tech in the past, perhaps it means that while they'll try to stop it, they'll only succeed in mitigating it, ensuring that they will still try to stop it later.

It's quite possible disabling was a side effect of their investigation. Likewise I've heard stories of deactivated ones going active during such an encounter, so it works both ways. However, consider this possiblity: what if they're not aliens, just people...from the future? If in 50 years the planet is devastated by a nuclear war, it's conceivable that hundreds of years later man could develop the ability to travel thru time and start making trips to see what they might to do avert that disaster aka the Terminator premise or the 4400. If they know the day a nuclear war happens, they could arrive the day before and disable them all and prevent the disaster. Coming from a post-holocaust future they've lost lots of the records from the era, especially the classified military stuff that would give them details on how the nukes work, requiring that they first visit numerous military bases looking for the nukes and then run tests to see how their arming/disarming works. For all we know they've been in contact with the upper echelons where they've told their story to disbelieving generals and presidents. Sounds SF? Sure it does, but telling someone during the Civil War that man would walk on the moon while under a President from Texas while the whole world watches it lives on TV would be even more farfetched, and that was just 100 years.

You don't kill him, you take all his money (since that's obviously what he'll care about more) and then force him to live in the mud.

I don't know how it will go for the A-10, but I personally found that only 2 levels of flight modeling for the Ka-50 was overly restrictive. The full-real mode has a VERY steep learning curve, but the easy was too easy to handle. My main issue with it was you could point the nose 90 degrees down or up and the altitude wouldn't change at all, the collective would set an altitude that no maneuvering would change. While it made it easy not to crash, it was so counterintuitive I couldn't take it! I wished there was an "intermediate" option. In the end, I just committed to learning the full real mode. Avoiding vortex ring state is tough at times and I've lost a few helos to it! The A-10 being fixed wing the easy FM might work better.

I watched the first 3/4 or so of MWC's run, it was one of my favorite sitcoms because it broke all the conventions of the time. It paved the way for many later shows, because prior to that you generally got "sappy" sitcoms and only a few could pull that off without being lame. I will say, though, that Fawlty Towers did it 15 yrs earlier but simply failed to break those conventions.