JediMaster

Excellent. Our first catch of the day.

Call me the odd man out, but I want an A+ nee' B. I have no love for the TF30s, gimme some nice GE's to stand on my tail with! The D's radar upgrades are nice, but I've never really had experience with like I did the A's setup, so the B is the best of both worlds.

The one that can use it most is Combined Arms. Driving tanks and other ground units around that terrain will be 100x more satisfying than the current Black Sea, and I'm actually more interested in driving around NTTR than flying it!

IIRC the dev team was Spanish, so it was like a US team making a T-38. I also am not interested in trainers, never flown them in SF2 either, but I'm willing to look at whatever combat airplane they make.

Yeah, this looks so great, I'm just worn out now waiting for it.

No, that's the engine. It's from 1995, they still used sprites then. Not until Quake the following year did they switch to polys. Now someone could take a game like Quake or Unreal and do a DF TC for it, recreating all the maps and such, but no one has to my knowledge.

Not in the West, no.

I replayed the original about a year ago. Graphics are VERY rough by modern standards, sprites and all at low res, it's basically Doom with Star Wars sounds and enemies. But, I did largely look past it to play the whole game and enjoy it.

When they get the mk2 with the F414 it will be truly formidable. With the F404...eh.

Wrong figures. Flyaway cost of the final F-22 built was $140m, it was in the public defense budget that year, and if they'd kept building them they likely would've kept a similar price range. Unless of course they are using costs of R&D, EMD, lifecycle etc, and then dividing by units produced, which is no longer flyaway cost. The F-35 is still in LRIP, so full production flyaway costs aren't yet finalized. Some of those planes ended production literally decades ago, the F-15A and F-16A prices are irrelevant. When the F-15C ended production in 1987 or so there was no way we were paying $126m each when B-1Bs were around that price! NO fighters cost over $200m flyaway right now, not one. I despise "creative accounting" for political purposes, and that site is just perpetuating bad numbers.

*shrug* They make what they make. I'm in no particular rush for anything specific, if I get the bug to fly plane X I just fire up SF2. The 21 is a great bird, I doubt I'll ever use half of the stuff they modeled in there.

I've heard the missions are pretty good.

Some great shots there.

While China's stealth abilities are unknown and unproven, the rest of their stuff is basically 4th gen with the notable exception of the engines. They've struggled for decades to get a modern jet engine in production. India has had issues as well, their engines producing less thrust than they wanted (and needed) so they need to import them for high-power needs. Brazil, Russia, and the rest of the West has been designing and building them far longer and that shows. Granted Russian engines have had reliability and maintainability issues, but when they're working they work great.

Colbert ended his run as well. End of an era for two shows at once.

I can't believe I missed it, I thought the previous week was the final ep of the year.

Makes you wonder what gov't screw-ups have prevented it from being exported already. Every previous Dassault jet has been sold to numerous countries. The Rafale has "won" a couple of times but has yet to actually be bought. Meanwhile, SAAB has Gripens all over after the utter failure to export Viggens.

What's more interesting is that the loadouts are clearly not wartime, but training and/or "show the flag". The Foxhound has only AA-9s...a poor choice if a fighter gets within 10 miles of you. The Tu-22M, well, it could be configured like that for a long-range mission.

It always looked to me like the sim was having texture rendering problems when the screenshot was taken.

My understanding is "coordination" would be "We're going to attack target A and time B, what time are you attacking target C at?" Deconfliction is more "I see Iranian jets over target A, let's go to our secondary target B instead so we're not too close." In other words, we're staying out of each other's way because the enemy of my enemy doesn't have to be my friend if I don't want it to be...and neither side wants to be.

They're burning off the excess propellant. The time between fueling and launch is usually long enough for quite a bit of the propellant to boil off. Instead of leaving it in the tanks where the pressure and volatility could get too dangerous, the excess is bled off and burned a safe distance away. The DIV itself jets a lot of excess propellant on ignition which burns off all around the vehicle. They've mitigated it somewhat in recent years, but even here as you can see at the :25 mark in the first video there's a lot as flames go most of the way up. The DIV inaugural flight it almost looked like it was going to burn up on the pad it was so bright.

Obviously in case any Russian birds came in, not separatists.

Shortly after takeoff? Sounds like a malfunction in the bird that he tried to bring home. Would've been better to punch out and let it go.

Can you be killed not dead?

The EU post-ROTJ has been thrown away as far as we know. Books and other things taking place prior to ROTJ should still count--unless any of the standalone films coming between Eps 7-9 take place then. Not to mention the new Rebels cartoon which I believe takes place 15 years after Ep III and 5 yrs before Ep IV according to the show.