JediMaster

Which is why it's so dangerous for countries like N Korea and Iran to have them. They assume no one will ever nuke them (for the reasons you listed) but have no qualms about using them on those who oppose them, let alone giving them to unstable non-state entities. If Iran gets it, then Hezbollah and/or Hamas gets it. Then a nuke will go off right on the Israeli border, north or south, and Iran will claim Israel did it itself (you know, just like those peaceful militant Islamist groups that claim responsibility for attacks are just making it up), despite the fact that Israel has had 40 years to use one and hasn't, to try and get all of its neighbors to attack Israel while denying they were responsible. Sure, a few Muslims would die in that attack, but they would be holy martyrs for their part in the beginning of the final war against Israel!

BOLO? How can you miss him? I think they could find him with an old recon sat in bad weather...

Don't get between white trash and chicken nuggets!!

IIRC the range of the SA-10 is greater than the size of Georgia. So this SAM could literally fire on any plane inside Georgian airspace and their only cover is terrain masking, they can't fly away from it. The funny thing is that's not too dissimilar from the Russian complaints about a US ABM system in Poland (even though they well knew that no ABM system based there can intercept Russian ICBMs due to the laws of math).

While the MiG-35 makes sense from a logistical standpoint, as well as cost, I wouldn't count the others out yet. India may be eager to get a plane that's not from Russia for a change, since their last batch of Mirage 2000s.

Due to the weekly changing of requirements on US military contracts from the day they're awarded until they reach the field, not even WE know what it could or couldn't do!

Switchable is the dubious option to upgrade the GPU later, which means in effect you're buying a cheap video card now and then have to pay for the 2nd one later. It's cheaper overall (although more expensive up front) to just get the best GPU you can afford from the start.

I'm talking more about modern, higher yield nukes as opposed to the WWII-vintage ones which would now be considered tactical nukes I believe. Another reason you don't drop a nuke on Tokyo...who would surrender? The common mantra is "chop off the head and the body dies", but that's not how the Japanese military worked. They had their standing orders and if the top leadership was wiped out they would simply never surrender and fight till they won or died, like those forgotten on the islands in the Pacific and found years later. Chop off the head and the body would fight on and you'd need to kill every hand, foot, finger, elbow, and on and on. Only an order to stand down from their leaders would be honored, so those leaders needed to live.

You couldn't pay me enough to sit on a plane that long. I think 4 hrs is my limit and then I'd rather the plane crash than be subjected to any more time in the air.

How can you state a missile is immune to forms of interception that haven't been deployed yet and whose true operational nature are yet to be developed?

You're drawing an inaccurate conclusion from an accurate fact. Assuming everything in that quote is true, what makes you think they had the ability to DO anything about it? Case in point: in the US right now the Republicans were against the health care bill, against the auto bailouts, etc etc etc. They happened anyway. "Some elements" within a gov't is not equal to "those in control or about to take control." Remember also that Japan didn't want an unconditional surrender, which after years of war was what the Allies had determined was the only acceptable solution. The Japanese wanted an intermediary to negotiate? There was nothing to negotiate, they had to simply surrender which they didn't do until after the 2nd bomb. So, while you may have no qualms over risking the lives of hundred of thousands of American soldiers (and be extension Japanese soldiers and civilians) 65 years ago because a wealth of data examined decades later seems to indicate, in your opinion, that they might have surrendered anyway, the Allied leaders had no such luxuries during the war. I know the US didn't have another bomb ready, but Stalin had to know of the test in NM plus the 2 drops on Japan which meant the US had three working bombs. To gamble there wasn't a 4th or that some might fail after that track record was unwise. As for the moral question of the nuclear bomb, it really IMHO has only one, and that's that it will poison the land long after the war ends. Fire bombs, gas, conventional bombs, etc, have immediate but not long-lasting effects like radiation does.

I've never heard of a 2000 being that cheap. IIRC, India wanted more 2000s than it already had but declined because it was too expensive. Perhaps at the end Dassault increased the price to make the Rafale look good by comparison ie not much more? I don't remember seeing exact price comparisons in same-year dollars, but countries like Greece that have both gave the impression they'd have bought all 2000s if they could have afforded it, but got F-16s to make up the gap when they couldn't. The UAE has both the latest 2000 and F-16 variants as well, but I thought they only got the F-16 because the 2000 stopped production.

Did someone actually suggest the Mirage 2000 was cheaper than the F-16?

A country with nukes that won't use them isn't a threat. I think after the comments made by some politicians over the years there are many enemies that genuinely believe no nuke would ever be fired in retaliation.

F-16s are from Texas, F-22s from Georgia.

I've had that before. Do you have FSAA turned on? Try turning it off. Also, if you have your renderer set to HW and T+L switch it to HW only.

I recall a quote along the lines of "no one will cower from an assault by a superweapon until the first time you use it." Japan wouldn't have believed our threats of what the bomb could do, nor would the USSR. I suppose it could've been dropped in a less populated area, such as off the coast, but I don't know enough about their leaders' psyches at the time to know what line needed to be crossed to convince them. The 2nd bomb was important for several reasons. They all boil down to a single one, however, and that's that the US had more than 1 bomb. If 1 place had been bombed, you could conceivably think "well, that's the only one they had". By dropping a 2nd one mere days later it said "we have a bunch of these and we'll use them", which is why Japan sued for peace so quickly...they didn't want a 3rd dropped. It also sent a message to the USSR that we had an arsenal of these bombs and could and would use them.

Every country is on the same side, their own. If another country's survival is in its best interests, then it will care, but only then. The only reasons China supports North Korea is that it's communist, so it's about appearances, and because I honestly don't think they want to see a unified Korea, controlled by the current S Korean gov't, on their border. That's why they got involved in the Korean War. There's no partnership with NK that benefits them either economically or militarily. They don't care about Kim, they just want continuity of his gov't for as long as they can get it. I frankly don't know WHAT "nat'l interest" the US has in those stupid islands, but enough is enough already. We can't afford to stick our noses in every damn place people argue. Our only ally over there involved is Taiwan, and they really don't have any business getting involved with it because they're just not a significant military power unless they're counting on US, and I damn well don't want to get involved in some Taiwan-China conflict started because Taiwan thought it could get more because the US had to back it up no matter how stupid it acted. I also think this lame Asian obsession with appearances has to stop. It's a major shortcoming of their egos that what they or another can do is far less important than what it LOOKS like they can do. They also don't understand that the rest of the world is NOT that way...people say things in the rest of the world all the time that have no basis in reality, they don't all require an indignant response. Sometimes the best thing to do is just IGNORE a dumb comment, like that one from Clinton. Saber rattling is pointless, you don't GET anything from it.

Well, I suppose if your rudder is shout out you can use differential thrust.

Apparently the knowledge of what exactly was there burned up as well!

I always choose 2 which I'm pretty certain does chaff and flares. I also set it on semiauto. When a missile is fired on me, and only then, the jammer activates and chaff and flares pop. I know you have fewer flares than chaff because I've been in dense ADA and heard the "out" message for flares while the chaff still goes. Unfortunately, that's usually when an SA-7 or 13 flies up my tailpipe.

Well, which would you rather do in a PC game, race a car? Or control a guy in a game like The Sims that sits down at a PC to race a car? UAVs aren't flown like planes. Other than takeoff and landings when direct control might be assumed (although not always), the rest of the time a heading and course and altitude are fed into its autopilot and off it goes. In the case of an attack on a ground target I'm not sure how it's done, whether the coordinates are input and it flies out and back on its own or you have to manually create an IP waypoint and then a target waypoint, but in either case you're not in direct control. In other words, flying an F-16 in Falcon 4 is MORE like flying a fighter than a real SSGT in the USAF telling a Reaper to drop an LGB on a house in Waziristan, let alone playing a game where you're that SSGT. To then put another sim in the loop removes you x2 from the actual flying.

Quite simply, it's not illegal to claim you've won any other awards--Oscar, Tony, World's Best Dad, Georgia's Best Steakhouse of 2008. Impersonating with intent to defraud is different from what this law criminalizes. Things like libel and slander are civic offenses, subject to fines, but this is a criminal offense with jail involved. If you allow this law, you are saying "well, you can say this and this, but if you say THAT we're throwing you in jail." That's quite clearly a violation of the 1st Amendment. You can't let the fact that the guy is claiming a military award change the picture. He lied, and unless he's under oath in a court of law when he does so, it's reprenhensible but it can not be outlawed. You can't criminalize a lack of honor. Claiming it has any historical precedent in American society is also disingenuous. I don't think it was honorable to have children working in coal mines in the 19th century, was it? For every so-called "decline since the good-old days" you can easily find improvements to counter it. The famous Voltaire quote states "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," and his works were an influence to the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. How many Americans have died to defend the Constitution? To say it's ok to flout those laws, if it's someone who disrespected those soldiers, is in itself disrespecting them! If the laws don't apply to all, they don't matter, and the Bill of Rights is just a farce. If you can argue against the 1st Amendment, you can equally invalidate the 2nd, or the 4th or 6th. So you could have your personal guns stripped away and then have the police come barging in on a fake pretext looking for something to arrest you for, like an "unapproved Bible", and then convicted in a trial with no jury without being told what you were charged with. You don't have to like what they say, and you shouldn't, but you must allow it. That's what "free speech" means. Such a liar should be exposed and ridiculed by the community for their actions, but you can't throw them in jail.

IIRC, talking about the new AESA radars for the F-15C "Golden Eagles" an article mentioned it would effectively double the range at which they could detect (not track, that wasn't mentioned) fighter-sized targets. That longer range was quoted as about 80 miles, implying the standard F-15C radar can only see fighters out to about 40 miles. This makes a lot of sense as to why AWACS are needed, because if F-15s really could see out 200 miles all the time they'd need AWACS a lot less! They can see bombers farther out, of course, but really as the radar outranges its longest-range weapons (AMRAAM and Sparrow), how much farther does it need to see them anyway? The main benefit to the F-15's AESA upgrade (as well as the Super Hornet and standard on the F-22 and F-35) will be the ability to detect cruise missiles at low level at ranges that will allow them to run a good intercept. Against a theoretical stealthy opponent of course it would help as well, but only to a point. Seeing a target is the first step to destroying it, but it's only the first step. Tracking it is next and that's what stealthy planes have proven most difficult to do. Then even if you CAN track it, if the missiles can't maintain a lock until you get very close to the target, you risk the target knocking you down long before you can hit them, the old brought-a-gun-to-an-ICBM-fight problem. If the AMRAAM goes active too far away from a stealthy target to see it, can the launching aircraft continue to provide steering cues until it can, or is that no longer an option?

It was pretty lame not to have them. Odd that the one thing the guy says sounds cool is NOT. UAVs are hardly fun to fly, it's like flying a small airliner, big deal.