JediMaster

Radar performance is dictated by dish size. Fact. The A-4's nose is even smaller than the F-16's. Fact. An A-4's A2A radar performance can not be as good as an F-16 as a result. Fact. Yet putting an AN/APG-66 radar in an A-4 would cost just as much as one in an F-16. Fact. As I said, it could be done, yes. If you're a fan of the Scooter and like how it looks, there's no reason in a sim not to make it...because a sim doesn't make you think about the economics, just the aerodynamics. You could make a fighter that costs $500m and it would be fine, just don't expect to see it built. It's just not economically feasible. Not when there are used F-16s out there that would give better performance for the money. Or you can spend as much money (or maybe more) redesigning the nose and aft section (which is more than an extended tailpipe...that cooled the exhaust to make IR missiles have more difficulty tracking it, not to prevent the tail from melting in full stage 5 burner) and then all the associated flight testing to make sure you didn't ruin anything you liked about the Scooter in the first place. So I answered Stratos' question by saying "No" if you're talking about real life. The sim is irrelevant. The costs are just prohibitive given what would have to be done...otherwise, don't you think we WOULD have seen this done? The RNZAF would've upgraded it's planes instead of deciding to buy F-16s...the political decision to scrap it all notwithstanding. This has NOTHING to do with your mod vs some other what-if mods vs the price of pie in Togo. I'm just talking about the possibility of ever seeing an A-4 like the one you modded actually in service anywhere. Besides, if you use his "60s" stipulation, you can't use the F404, you can't use the AN/APG-66, you have to use what was around at the time...and neither of those were, so it's even more "no." Most people don't ask if a given mod is something we'll ever see, they just go with it because it's cool. So I don't bother to point out why mod X would not happen because, well, it's just a mod. But, hey, if you want to take my declaration that it would never happen (which history has supported) as some sort of indictment of your mod, well, go ahead, I can't stop you. Feel free to misinterpret every thing I say for that matter. Doesn't really make a difference. Just know that if anyone would mod say an F-86 to have an F110 engine and a nose with an AESA AN/APG-79 radar that just dominates the skies, and someone asks if we could ever see something like that in reality, I will also say "no."

Reminds me of the modded EECH. Hopefully we'll get one for DCS not too far in the future.

Well, the weekly experiment didn't last long. I understand that perhaps things didn't move fast enough to warrant that, but I also think monthly seems too long...unless the pace of development is such that really it takes a month before anything significant happens, in which case more's the pity. Maybe twice monthly would've been a better idea. I will point out a scenario where monthly won't work that well...if for example the monthly newsletter comes out less than a week before a patch like 1.2.6, and then we have to wait almost a full month to hear any news on possible small patches for any issues that exist.

When you're only concerned with the plane and not the environment it's in you should have smaller development times. That said, the Mig-21 seems to have suffered some feature creep resulting in the redoing of a large part of the work. My guess is we could've had it long ago at a lower level of quality, so I only hope this wait is worth it.

I'm fairly certain the protocols used today differ quite a bit from those used in the late 19th century. I would venture that if you go out just 100 years from now they will differ again. My "best guess" would be working from an image made from a UAV, satellite, spec ops team, or other type of forward-observer that would derive GPS coords from that picture, and those coords being passed to the arty targeting computer electronically. You'd probably have verbal commands limited to "acquire target", "target acquired", "set fire X number of rounds in Y pattern (time between rounds perhaps, dispersion, etc)", and "fire." By then arty will likely be individually homing any way, by lidar or radar or some other sensor in the nose of the shell, pretty much guaranteeing anything on the surface that can be seen will be hit and likely destroyed. Only by hiding (either underground or by camo) will they avoid being seen and therefore being hit. Well, there will likely be anti-arty energy weapons that would attempt to detonate incoming shells at a non-lethal altitude. If you want to know what current arty commands sound like, Arma has them in there fairly authentic. But they're done verbally, and that's just not going to be how it's done 30 years from now let alone 300.

Looks good, but that mod is not feasible in reality. The truth is an afterburner-equipped engine is much larger than one without, and such an engine is far too big to fit in the Scooter. The entire aft fuselage would have to be redesigned and rebuilt. The cooling and CG considerations... The A-4's nose also has a TINY dish in it. Far too small to accommodate any decent AA radar, so to make it bigger means redesigning the nose quite a bit. After you've done all that work on the nose and tail, and possibly in the middle as well where the engine is actually mounted, you will arguably no longer have the same plane. Would it still have the flight handling of the original Scooter, or would it be compromised by the rebuilding?

The military...don't even try to make an uglier truck than we can!

Another problem is it doesn't matter if you're legally allowed to buy a gun if you have a friend or relative who is...and then gives you easy access to said gun. Doesn't matter if they willingly allow it or not, if you have a brother or neighbor who doesn't keep their weapons in a safe with a combo you do NOT know. The Sandy Hook tragedy was enabled by a woman who under no law should have been barred from getting a weapon...yet had a son that under any reasonable determination should not have been allowed one. Arguments about ownership or purchasing are largely irrelevant because IIRC most crimes committed with legally purchased and owned guns...are not committed by those who purchased or own them, but people who've taken them! Maybe we need a mandatory DNA lock like Bond had in Skyfall...so only the legally registered owner of the gun is capable of firing it.

People may dislike Madonna, but you can't argue she wasn't brilliant. She figured things out and built a mega empire around reading the public. Granted as she got older her relevance faded, but that's the world of pop stars...none burn bright forever. Still, look at the "2nd gen" Madonna-wannabes and where they are today. Christina and Britney and their ilk from the late 90s have faded just as much as Madonna, but they at best matched her (never surpassed) and did it for a far shorter period of time. In other words, Madonna flew around the world solo while they simply managed trans-Atlantic flights. Gen 3 like Miley "My Dad was Achey-Breaky 20 years ago" Cyrus will be lucky to get from NYC to LA solo, and they'll do it without the style. I predict by 2020 Miley will be gone farther than Britney or Christina are now.

He should have been disappeared. Vanished without a trace. Sentence: obscurity. Tell the victims' families what happened to him, but otherwise a total media blackout. He WANTS this. So his punishment shouldn't be what WE think is justice, it should simply be "100% opposite of what he wants." Then he can whither away and die in a black hole somewhere and no one will ever hear of it.

Well, the obvious immediate fix is ForceDX9=True in Options.ini, but I don't have that problem with my Win7/DX10/11 install. So I don't know why you are.

All that matters is money. The rest is just details.

I can't keep all the variants and subvariants straight anymore.

Editing isn't really the Achilles' heel here. It's getting the stuff that needs to be edited. If we have that, the rest will fall into place. If everyone who could would write just ONE thing, even if it took a month or two to do, we'd be in great shape. There are enough people here that we'd have enough stuff for months. And none of this "my writing would sink the site" crap, because that's what editors are for. Look at my Il-2:CloD review. That thing took me maybe 2 hours to write over a weekend including putting in the screenshots and prettying it up. The clincher was the amount of time I spent flying it to get it done, and as it wasn't something I was already devoting much time to (because of my disappointment), it took a long time until I was ready to write it. So write about what you know. If in addition to flying SF2 you play a lot of DCS, or Arma, or COH2, or ANYTHING that we have forums here for from air to ground to sea to racing, just do that. You may already have a well-informed opinion and all you need to do is grab a few screenshots and spend one night writing, or take a week and write a little each night. We don't necessarily need you to install something for the first time and do a piece on what it's like coming in blind. A review with dozens of hours of usage behind it trumps one that has just two. It doesn't even need to be a current game review per se. You could do a mod for SF2, or a campaign AAR for something, or a retro writeup on the joys of Jane's F-15 or F4 BMS or TAW.

They seem to have a serious disconnect between design and production. It doesn't matter how good a plane you can design if you can't get it built.

The USN recently made a comment about reinforcing the decks for the Marine ships the B will be operating off of for precisely that reason.

Old Yakov Smirnoff joke: In Russia we have saying, women are like buses. That's it, women are like buses.

PC

I say "irrelevant." If the idea is that the taxpayer has to pay for his conversion, then I say he can screw off. His discomfort with his own body is not something I should have to pay to fix. When he gets out in 35 years, or whenever he may parole, he's free to get a job to pay for it himself. I don't care.

My guess is the sealer reinforced the mattress to the extent that it was allowed to inflate to a previously unattainable psi. When it finally burst it was a catastrophic failure and the overpressure was intense. A simple patch designed for the repair would've failed much earlier, and just the mattress and possibly some nearby objects like lights or other fragile objects would've been damaged.

You can always tell the difference between low light and thermal...because exhaust glows! This also shows how the 35 takes off without a ski ramp or catapult.

We don't want people to feel like "ugh, if I say yes then I'm going to be stuck writing things on a regular schedule." That's not what we're looking for. We're looking for enough people so that when all of them are turning something in from time to time we get a steady stream. You don't need to be doing something twice a month, every month, and 3 times on holidays. We don't need to put out something every day. I think right now if we could get a couple or more per month published it would be a great start, and while a weekly feature would be awesome as an end goal, don't feel pressured that we need to get that result by the start of October or anything. Breaking that out for example means 52 per year, and if each person does something say every other month, that would only require 9 people. With 4 people we could average something every other week, or alternatively with 9 people only doing something once a quarter. And that's what we'd like to build towards, not what we want out of the gate. So if everyone who was interested did just one thing, and we spread it out biweekly we could get to the end of the year easily. Then next year you could submit another. As for what to write about, as long as there's no duplication of efforts we want to broaden our site's sights. Excited about Arma 3? Or rFactor 2? Or some hardware that enhances simming? Are you a modder that could write a brief how-to on building a plane for SF2? Even a commentary on the state of the flight sim industry, a guest editorial of sorts? I've been meaning to review both DCS World and the ATAG mod for Il-2:CloD, but I've had far too little time to devote to either so far to do them justice. In other words it's not the writing that's the problem, it's finding the time to use the products enough to write an informed review. So if there's something you use all the time, and you're so familiar with it you could give a dissertation in your sleep, think about writing something on it for the site. Those of us who haven't had the time may find your experience informative! This isn't for money, it's not a job, this is for the longevity of the hobby and the site. You give what you can for the benefit of all.

It's so real, you'll get heavily taxed on installation, when you use it, and when you're NOT using it. It's THAT realistic.

It shouldn't since the reason it fails in 64-bit is the program is in a different location. In 32-bit, it's already there.

I was unaware of the Gamefly launch, I only knew of Steam.