JediMaster

Well, EVERYTHING is better with a full orchestra and choir!

Could be because ED isn't calling it DCS: Boeing F/A-18C Hornet?

It will be a great disappointment if they fail to get EDGE out before year's end. They've only been talking about it since the A-10C was in beta...

I always figured this was one of those "only unexplained because enough evidence and forensic work hadn't been completed" deals. The fact that they found this piece in 1991 but only verified it in 2014 is pretty much all you need to know.

I wish THAT were our Nat'l anthem. That or America the Beautiful.

I'm sure at some point the 29K will get updated as well. Not like we're likely to see it in DCS World anytime soon (ED seems to have ignored the MiG-29s since the avionics got updated a bit for FC2), so SF2 is the only place to go for naval Fulcrum action!

Oooh! Richard Kiel in the cockpit!

They didn't need to do this. They shot themselves in the foot by asking for a license where none was needed. The BAe Hawk deal seemed to indicate they want to do commercial work for these companies as well, so they're not willing to do anything that might upset them (even though I guarantee that unless they brought it up no one at Boeing would notice a Skyhawk in DCS World). In simpler terms, the potential of a commercial contract with Boeing prevented them from doing something that WOULD make them money. This pattern is quite common--these developers are often good artists/modelers/coders, but rarely good businesspeople. Just look at Ilya and PF/CloD/DCS WWII.

The definition of "long service", and they did it well for Greece.

That's a loaded question. I'd probably say yes, because the Rebel ships are easier to get in and succeed with from a point of no experience. TIE Fighter has the better story line, but the first part of the campaign you're in TIE Fighters and TIE Bombers which have no shields, which means you can take 1 maybe 2 hits before you blow up! They're both worthy of playing. Oh, keep in mind for $10 each you get their expansions as well as the stock games, so what cost $80+ back in the 90s is now going to be $10. I've got WC3 on Origin (I got it for free) and I've barely touched it, but I do intend on playing that again as well.

Yes, but does the AI see through it??

Seems like every time he told them they were conducting exercises with the full knowledge of the Swedish military and gov't, all they could pounce on was that the population was apparently told they were always real Soviet subs and never an exercise? Ok, so that was dumb because there's zero chance the Russians will think the Swedes were going after a sub they knew wasn't there, however the exercises did prove that the USN was testing its subs while the Swedish navy was testing its counter sub capability even when the Russians weren't there, and the public statements would indicate to Russia that NATO and Sweden were working together more closely than they publically admitted, but Russia would never publicize this. It really seems to boil down to indignation that the Swedish gov't said it was always one thing when it was fully aware that sometimes it was a NATO exercise. So the Swedish military/gov't full well knew what was happening and had full control over what happened and when, but the population was just given a "bad Reds keep probing us!" narrative.

After the stunning success of the first Avengers film, I felt it a fait accompli that any sequel would fail to live up to the expectations put forth for a sequel. I might be wrong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmeOjFno6Do

The effort being expended to tie all these films and TV series together is stunning.

Of course, the Phoenix was designed to take out bombers and old-school cruise missiles that were the size of fighters but flew straight and level with no CM or avoidance. So if you have any success rate using them against a manned fighter, especially one with chaff or ECM, that was unintended by its designers. Fleet defense meant bomber intercept, not taking out a MiG at 90nm.

The arguments center on the campaign. Instead of just getting a score for your mission (as almost every sim including DCS does) and then increasing in rank, they call it XP and pilot level. In either case, getting more/higher allows you access to more stuff like unique skins and weapons mods that rookie pilots wouldn't get and are only offered to the impressive vets, but here it's called "unlocks." So it's mostly a case of people bristling at the terminology as the actual mechanism is the same, they just don't bother disguising it here and the "I don't play games, I play SIMS" crowd recoils in horror. The other half is your ability to use said skins and weapon mods in MP is tied to that same progression system, so if you ignore the SP campaign you can't use them in MP. I understand the anger from those who normally have no intention of playing SP at being either forced to play it or be excluded from their use, but it's not a deal-breaker for me. In the end, I think it's worth the $50 I paid in early access to get the game minus the 2 bonus planes which are currently $20 each or are included (for $40 more) in the deluxe version. A lot of people apparently bought in at $90 for the deluxe, a mistake you couldn't convince me to ever make, and are now up in arms over it. They should've paid the $50 like I did, which I did because I wanted to save $10 over the release price after I decided I was going to get it anyway. I'll wait for a sale or something before I get the other 2 planes, though, I have enough to do without those extras.

No, the C is the same. Just carries different stuff with a different cockpit. That said, I get frustrated with everything in the C revolving around the TGP flying around at 10k+ ft. Sometimes I just want to drop iron with CCIP, shoot guns and rockets, and fire Mavs using their built-in camera from 200 ft!

Another problem with the FB-17 was the gunners falling out when they made a sharp roll.

"You...shall not...get out of your seats when the 'Safety Belt' sign is lit!"

Name a sim where they do NOT argue about FMs. I don't think any in the last 15 years have escaped that.

Design aesthetic choices aside, ST had to be rebooted because it had crashed and burned. After First Contact the ST films' returns cratered, and Enterprise floundered and was shot, Paramount was in way shape or form going to spend another dollar backing the "old" ST anymore. To recast the old characters with new actors but try to somehow impersonate the old actors' characters was a losing proposition. There were two choices: 1. The ST reboot we got 2. Nothing The ideal that so many Trekkies professed to have preferred lost its audience after Insurrection and Voyager. Enterprise and Nemesis flopped, and any attempt to argue it was because they had changed things a bit the wrong way is so much ancient Greek to the honchos at a studio. ST was already losing its sheen, and the attempts to bring it back with those two sunk it further and they pulled the plug. Old ST died circa 2002 because the Trekkies themselves turned away. In an analogy, ST lost the swing voters and a great deal of its base. To say they needed to appeal to the base again, when the base was NEVER enough to carry it, isn't going to jive. Instead, the decision was made to go for the far larger swing audience. Now has it changed enough to where you shouldn't call it ST anymore? That's a debatable point but it's moot. What we have now is all we have now and we won't be getting the old stuff back. All those actors are old or gone now anyway, so if you're going to do a new cast you free them up. Ron Moore stated that in his opinion (as a writer and runner of multiple seasons of ST over the 90s) ST collapsed under the weight of its own canon. Every story idea or complication they could come up with had already been solved and overcome at some point in the past, so you then needed to waste precious time coming up with plausible reasons for them to NOT work so the story isn't just "crew runs into difficulty X, remembers solution Y from N years ago, and flips switch...spends the next half hour making jokes at the bar." People demanding they stick to what was established in the previous 28 YEARS of TV series and 10 films have never tried writing a good story series before--you might have one or two at most but then you'll be against a wall. ST needed to have the slate wiped clean, and what better way than to have a time travel story change the timeline, so we see Snow White and Prince Charming's daughter and Thor have a child on a doomed starship before you blow up one of the most famous non-Earth planets in the series.

In the Air Tonight is #1, Smuggler's Blues is #2. The episode with Phil Collins always made me laugh, especially the stinger with the shooting of the TV set.

Glad to hear you managed to find your way again and have some peace. It's not easy knowing you'll have to fight it every day for the rest of your life, but the alternative to fighting is surrender, and where's the honor in that?

That was for the fighter variant, the FB-17, that was cancelled when it was discovered the P-36 was better.

Well, they arbitrarily decided that this version is the one they're calling release. It's not much different from the version we got when the SP campaign was introduced a few weeks back, just a few fixes. Anyway, I've been flying it here and there for months now (only have maybe 5 hrs in it in the last year), and I like it well enough. There are a few things I wish they'd done differently, but while that reduces it from a "must have" it doesn't make it an "avoid unless you're a rabid WWII sim fan". Of course, ironically the rabid WWII sim fans are the ones that will protest the flaws loudest, so maybe I should say it's ideal for casual-to-serious WWII sim fans. Unlike DCS' WWII birds, it's a full world with a realized era and theater. The modeling isn't as exacting as DCS P-51, but it's still above what Il-2 46 offered. I'd put it at about the same level as the modded CloD, but with different strengths and flaws, so while both rate around a "B", they're not interchangeable.