JediMaster

Also, what good is a plane that can reach the target without refueling if it's shot down when it gets there? Unless you're planning on fighting unarmed opponents, that is. Or you're going to wait for other countries with the ability to fight ADA to take it out before you send your planes in, in effect not entering combat until they're unarmed. Sounds like Australia wanted a B-2, not a fighter.

Those panel lines are a lot more high contrast than I was expecting them to be.

The Hokum has that AP helping you out, so naturally it feels rock steady!

I still think it was because of all the unlicensed crap put out there. By suddenly changing the title, all the official stuff said "return" and the other was made junk.

I was going to say that right now the idea that we'd use an F-35 to strafe is pretty ridiculous. The F-35 is no less vulnerable to MANPADs than the F-16 is, it has no "thermal" or IR stealth, and its engine is 33% more powerful = big target. The idea now is to make precision weapons cheap enough that we don't need bullets anymore. Things like laser-guided rockets and other tiny munitions where one shot = one kill with far less vulnerability to the attacker than flying under 1k ft at a range of a mile.

Am I the only one who really hopes Belsimtek makes a Hind soon?

Well, the F-15E isn't just an F-15D with extra radar modes. The airframe was beefed up (read heavier) and the engines tuned for low level flight. It's happy in the weeds, but at high altitudes an F-15C will wipe it out with ease if it's a guns-only issue. True the missiles and radar capabilities are largely the same, but the E can weigh tons and tons more ingressing to target and pulling g will leave it in a perilously low E state that those 229's just won't recover from quickly. While the Charlie can still take the best of them out with ease, the Beagle is not what I want to be in facing MiGs and Su's if I can help it. I'd rather have a smaller plane with lower RCS like a Viper or Hornet, if not the Charlie or a Raptor. Missiles are missiles, but agility is agility and the Beagle is not as capable of avoiding an incoming missile as its brothers in arms.

The thing about "Tornado alley" isn't the frequency of the storms or anything, it's the power they hold. Florida gets I believe the 2nd most after OK (I found one database that has ~3450 twisters listed for OK and ~3100 for FL), but the power is far lower, with few ever reaching let alone breaking F2. When they hit here, a few homes suffer some damage and on occasion someone is killed, but our homes are built to hurricane standards (CBS is standard for single floor homes, not wood) since you can't have a basement here.

"Deep" = far behind front lines, way back in enemy territory. Also, I think saying the Beagle could "dogfight" its way in on a mission is overstating it. It can fire missiles, yes, but with a full fuel and bombload it's a truck that can't out maneuver a KC-135 let alone an enemy fighter. It was designed for interdiction, hitting targets that aren't near friendlies but are important, like rear HQs, staging areas, logistics targets, etc. It's since been used for CAS and pretty much anything on the ground aside perhaps from SEAD as I've never seen HARMs on one. I don't know if it can carry Harpoons either, I don't recall seeing any pics of that, plus I last flew it really in Jane's sim 15 years ago.

Wonder why they took out autothrust? I don't know who used it, but it's been there since the original LOMAC and all the iterations of FC till now.

He wrote and played the keyboards part of Weird Al's song "Craigslist", a Doors homage (not a strict parody) 3 years ago.

The F-size is an indicator of speed, not size. Many twisters have been a mile wide, but 2 is unheard of. Hurricane Andrew was a Cat 5 hurricane, but it was only a couple of counties wide. Then you have some that are as big as a state but never go above Cat 2.

New terrain is coming when new engine is complete. Right now, it's not. Don't expect it soon, they're still working heavily on it. I would've preferred new terrain years ago, but at this point it's silly to make a new terrain on an engine about to be replaced. If Nevada had come out with A-10C on the old engine, that would've been nicer, but since they had to start over and were well along with the new engine by then, they decided not to duplicate their efforts. Unfortunately, that means we've had to sit on the Black Sea alone for many more years. As for the Mi-8, only flown it in Arma, where it's not impressive to fly. However, I HAVE been on the receiving end of a rocket pass as infantry and vehicles and it's NASTY.

Pat Wilson's Campaign Generator is the only campaign mod. As for what you experienced, you oversped the engine. It's not just YOUR speed, it's how fast the prop is turning. Not every plane is vulnerable to it in ROF, but some are quite sensitive and at full throttle even a shallow dive can put your RPMs into the red and kill the engine in seconds. Always throttle back in a dive, even a shallow one, and in some planes I all but cut throttle to zero when doing it.

That's the kind of place EWR equipment is usually located. If a radar is looking straight on at you, that's the place that would notice it.

Check out Flaming Cliffs. The atmosphere isn't really any different from the DCS line, but the planes are a lot easier to learn.

Pretty amazing that the 35+ yr old birds aren't considered old compared to some of what else is flying. Those like the B-52, KC-135, Tu-95/142, P-3...literally generations have passed working on the same plane.

I don't think many of those questions have been publicly decided one way or another. My hope is many of the AI-only planes will be created by the modding community as free additions to give us more to fight with/against. Right now, every non-flyable seems to be ED's AOR. I can't imagine anyone paying for planes you can't fly, but they could be bundled in with flyables (as SF1/2 did it) to offset the cost of making them, and perhaps later on the work done on the 3d model and basic capabilities could be offset by making it into a flyable that could then be charged for. So perhaps we'll see an AI P-47 and then a year or two later get it as a flyable (either DCS or FC level, or even in-between as some have claimed to be doing).

I don't think we have a "wince" smiley...

How old are those 38s now? Are the P-8s to replace them, the 142s, or some of both?

I'm not saying this isn't a better system. I'm saying if you're going to call it a "drone" and then say "this is the first", that's wrong. We've had U-2s and C-130s fly off them, that was far more impressive!

I was thinking stone. Much more biblical. "Let my Huey go..."

Cruise control is welcome!

Well, publicly with this much fanfare. With all the stuff done over the years with drones, UAVs, and armed UAVs, starting in Vietnam, I think calling this "first" is hopelessly naive.

Is "ARK" the base tailcode then?