JediMaster

See? They're a lot like us.

That's another thing--sure stealth isn't invincible, and it doesn't make you invisible, but to claim that it's worthless is totally sidestepping the fact that if an F-35 could be seen at X miles, an F-16 will be seen at 2X, 3X, 4X, or more! An F-15 would be seen at 4X, 5X, or more. There's no such thing as a radar that can reduce the stealth advantage that isn't ALSO more effective against unstealthy planes. The SA-2X series can reach for HUNDREDS of miles. The development of these super long-range SAMs is why stealth was implemented in the first place! An F-16 or Hornet would be seen and swatted down long before it could fire a weapon against the site. If an F-35 can close to a dozen before it's seen, that's GREAT! It's not a "fail" because it can't fly directly over the site without being seen. The prevailing anti-stealth argument seems to be "because of these advances in radars like X, Y, and Z, stealth only lets a plane close to within striking range of the enemy before it can be shot down. So let's instead buy more of the older cheaper planes that will be shot down LONG before they can get in striking range and hope they run out of missiles before all our planes are shot down!" If the F-35 is vulnerable, the F-16 is dead as soon as it's wheels up.

It's not in service. Who could write such a thing? Carnak the Magnificent? What's funny is how much the people who do not have stealth love to down play how important it is...as they desperately try and build their own. No B-2 has been shot down, and they've been used a lot. They're a LOT larger than an F-35 and far more vulnerable, being subsonic and heavy. However, the truth is people forget the classified stuff. Stealth isn't classified. Particular methods to achieve it are, but the idea is not. Yet the B-2 was NOT the "stealth bomber" according to the USAF. That's what the press called it. It was the ATB, the Advanced Technology Bomber, and stealth was just ONE of those techs. The F-35 likewise is not relying "just" on stealth. It's just the thing that can be talked about. So it's also easily refuted. Yet EVERY nation still uses camo. Why? It doesn't stop radar, or IR, or even the eye most of the time. Ergo it's a total waste of time, yet EVERYONE still does it. So stealth is just radar camo.

Oh, there's no doubt that a large percentage of those who oppose Obama are racists. After all, no racist would support him, would they? Therefore every racist is against him PLUS everyone who legitimately disagrees with him. It sickens me the number of times I've heard about what a great thing it would be if he was assassinated! I don't remember anyone talking about Clinton getting killed, no matter what they thought of his loose morals. The bottom line is that Congress is now down to blackmail. They outright lie about their motivations (which are easily exposed if you watch an old clip or read an old article, apparently politicians think our memories only extend back about a day) and see nothing wrong with bringing this country to its knees if they can spin it as the OTHER party's fault. What's most ridiculous is they colluded to gerrymander their districts so that a huge percentage of them never have to worry about re-election. Their district will always vote for one party no matter WHAT they do. "Killed a hobo? Well, I'd still rather have him in office than one of those OTHER people!" That's why in the national elections there is the focus on the few swing states like Ohio and Florida because the population can't be redistricted to give one or the other the easy win. The Democrats will never win Texas. The Republicans will never win California. The day of that is passed.

The problem is the Constitution isn't perfect. It never was, it never will be, which is why it was made to be flexible so it could be amended and made better. Yet on one side you have those who (supposedly) believe it's infallible like the Pope (aside from those areas it's not convenient to acknowledge of course) and on the other you have those who think it's really no longer relevant. Likewise all the amendments in the Bill of Rights have equal weight, yet apparently for one group only the 2nd is inviolable while for the other group it's the one to ignore. It needs to be updated, and then it needs to be followed. The world of the late 18th century is not the world of the early 21st. To suggest that because a bunch of old white guys who were fed up with being told what to do by people overseas they for some reason had outstanding intelligence and foresight that surpasses what we have today is ridiculous. I propose a new amendment allowing a public vote to dissolve Congress if the people feel it's not doing its job...like now. A simple vote of no confidence putting all 535 jobs up for grabs with NONE allowed to run again. If the people say "Congress is doing a bad job", they ALL must go and you get a new batch. They are barred for life from running again.

I once read a book which postulated they could load a ton of Slammers on a B-1B (because the Bone's radar is a derivative of the F-16's) and use it to launch a barrage of AAMs at incoming fighter waves. It was good for a laugh, but I can't see it working operationally.

I'm not a fan of touch interfaces in gaming for the simple reason that my hands are not transparent.

I think he was a smoker, but I'm not positive. So if it was lung-related I wouldn't be surprised at all. That said, the last really good book of his was The Bear and the Dragon. Red Rabbit was ok.

It's a great deal for the number of planes you get. Unless you're only interested in one of them, as some are, of course.

He also mentioned the "killer app". Basically, Il-2 was so good that the others mostly shrugged their shoulders and said "don't see how we can beat that" and did something else instead. While I agree that Il-2 seems to have kicked MS and others out of the WWII market (even though I felt there were some things CFS3 did better than Il-2, like the campaign, the UI, and the overall immersion), I don't think that Il-2 competed with LOMAC or any other jet sims. Yes they were flight sims, but if you were planning on making a Nam or modern era flight sim, and then saw Il-2 and said "oh, that's better than we can do" and moved on, you were an idiot. Props and jets are different enough in the sim world that you don't directly compete. Something I've said for a long time, and Ilya echoed here, was the scalability of sims disappeared. The older sims weren't capable of as much, so the distance from "easy" to "realistic" wasn't all that far. As tech got better, that distance grew and grew, and if the devs spent time on the realistic end there was little time for the easy end and ZERO time for the mid range. Even today, look at DCS. You have your uber-real Ka-50 and A-10C, you have your almost-as-good FC-level planes, or you can flip the switch to "game mode" and it flies with less realism than SF offers. No sim today offers you the ability to start at arcade/easy and work your way up through SF level to FC level to full DCS level. I'm sure that's purely because it's too expensive to devote people to all these intermediate levels. DCS in particular offers top-end or bottom-end but they leave the middle out. Yet that middle is what the market needs. If you like the easy stuff, frankly DCS can't compete with the visuals of games like War Thunder that spend all their effort on visuals since the rest is fluff. If you like more than that but not too much more, SF wins because of the simple lock-with-one-key setup and the fact that if you can work the radar on one plane you know it for most of them. Even in FC knowing the F-15C radar does nothing for learning the Flanker/Fulcrum radar. The learning curve needs to be flattened by providing intermediate stages. I also laughed when he basically crapped on the very training mechanism his own CloD used--flying through rings in the air! Now he's acknowledged he knows and understands the problem, but I'm not sure that most other devs don't know it too. They just haven't all made videos where they said so. But knowing what the problem is and actually making a product that doesn't have it are two different things. To say "the problem with most fast food burgers is cheap meat, we need to make a burger with good meat"...and then make a burger with cheap meat because of inadequate funding for the good stuff...doesn't help.

I think you could spend a year adding all the planes in Il-2 to the campaigns. It's amazing how many there are. Nowadays I just fly single missions though because if I fly a campaign I'm flying just one plane over and over and there are too many left unflown!

I think the major requirement would be the launching fighter would need to be between the AWACS and the target. IE: AWACS ----------> Fighter -------------> Missile ------------> Target If the missile is not launched with the AWACS behind it, and it's using reflected energy, it may not pick it up. Now command guidance is certainly a different matter, but then the problem is codes. If the AWACS doesn't have the proper link to the missile, it will just go wild. However, probably the major reason this isn't done is simply that AWACS need a HAVCAP, they aren't the tip of the spear. You want your AWACS in the rear, not close enough to the threat to send command data to a fired missile (which I'm guessing has less range than the radar itself, but I could be wrong). If the enemy has a longer range missile than you he could be firing on the AWACS before you get him.

Politicians are not held to the same high standards as a member of the military. Or a burger flipper at McD's.

I think that might have been part of the reason for the "multiple overkill" mentality. You fire off a dozen nukes and hope 4 detonate.

My grandmother worked on P-38s for Lockheed. She was a supervisor or something. I never got to ask her much about it, she died in 1981 and I never knew until years later what she did.

I take it you mean "compared to phones" and not "compared to a PC."

Honestly, no. It lasts a few minutes at most, how long did they have to travel to get there? Maybe it's just me, I have a fundamental aversion to spending more time to GET somewhere than I will spend AT the destination. I wouldn't drive 2 days each way to spend 1 day at Disney for instance. Then again, I do no understand spectator sports. I cannot fathom how people gain enjoyment from watching OTHER people play a game, either. I might want to play football, but I never want to watch it played. So since my brain isn't wired that way, I don't get this either.

Why all the spectators? If this happens every day, there's nothing special about it, so why the crush of the crowds? The military stuff I get, I don't get the civilians' presence on either side.

This December will be the 10th anniversary of MadJeff's "Welcome to the New Jet Thunder Forum" thread stickied above. Ten years.

Hard to believe Brazil launches conventional planes from a ship smaller than the USMC's Harrier carriers.

Their hope is obviously that the decision will be made to cut some of the other forces in favor of this. So for 10 F-35s you could get 100 of these or something. You can argue that will never happen, and you can argue it's bound to look good. Only the decision makers know what they'll think.

It is safe to say that Rush has as much to do with those films as it does Star Wars, Avatar, Sink the Bismarck, Tora Tora Tora, or Yojimbo.

The bomb that starts the nuclear bomb detonates, so that's the important part. Otherwise, it's just some uranium or plutonium that gets scattered.

What puzzles me is these "analysts" getting top billing in the article. "We don't know what they're doing!"...followed multiple sentences later by the company actually saying what they're doing. It's written in such a way as to cast doubt on the intelligence or at least business sense of the companies making it while making the "analysts" seem like brilliant authorities who know better. Because after all, if you really knew what was best, you'd be working for one of those companies and making them big bucks instead of working as some "analyst", wouldn't you?

$50k just to get the 262 cockpit done? The SF2 modders have been extremely generous doing cockpits for free I guess!