JediMaster

It's not an easy thing to achieve. Many a sim has suffered from looking like a brisk train at low altitude to simply having almost no discernible detail making it feel more like "floating".

All I can say is...how in the world did the SF2 aircraft cost that much more than SFP1s?? Someone is making it and the cost is 100% labor. So are the planes taking THAT much more time to make, or do people just demand more money for their time now? When on the one hand it seems TK is the only coder, you have to wonder if he's overcharging himself or something???? Is he outsourcing these things to people who imagine he's pulling in tons of money? Looking at what modders do here for free how can these kinds of prices be justifiable? Naturally he's not going to tell us the source of all his costs, but it seems to me that if he's being totally honest with us he's getting screwed on his costs. So SF2NA cost far more to make than any previous title, which I can understand based on how long it was in development, as for programming costs = time X manpower. The problem is other than the few NA-specific skin DLCs he's not trying to recoup that investment with more lower-cost-development NA-related content. Look at houses like EA and Activision that nickel and dime their customers with a batch of 4 maps for $15! He also seems too risk-averse when it comes to marketing. Has anyone seen any mention of a TW sim ANYWHERE that wasn't a word-of-mouth post? He has an active FB page, but I'm not sure how often people "stumble" into it and how often they need to actively search it out. My wife has been doing some FB marketing and she's learned how to spend a few bucks here and there and you can target your ads pretty well to people who would be your consumer base. For grins, I did a google search for "F-14 sim". Top was an images link, where from what I can determine there are NO shots of NA or ANY TW sims. Next is a YouTube link to some guy using an F-14 is MSFS I think. Then comes a link to 7.5 yr old thread in Ubi's forums asking why there aren't any F-14 combat sims, and THEN a link to a SimHQ thread from 18 months ago asking when TK's sim is going to finally come out! What's the last link on page 1? Amazon's page for buying F-14 Fleet Defender from 20 years ago!!! In fact, search for F-14 Tomcat simulator and you'll get IRIS' F-14 they're doing for DCS in the middle of the page. Thirdwire? Not there at all. I was unable to find a single way to word "F-14" or "Tomcat" and "sim" with or without combat or flying to get to Thirdwire's site. Isn't this a MAJOR problem? No wonder his sales aren't good enough. TK needs to spend a few bucks for a marketing student (don't bother with the pros, they will do the same quality work for more money and try to convince him to go overboard) to SEO his site, get some videos on YT to rank, and get the word out on FB. Once people get NA, that can be the "gateway drug" to the rest of his series, but with the recent rerelease of Top Gun in 3D this is the best time for him to be trying to get the word out. I've been attending meetings at the unemployment office about starting your own business, and there are certain things that every business must do. You MUST target a niche, no matter big or small. TK did that. You MUST provide a product that appeals to that niche. TK did that, although I don't think he necessarily did market research or any of that banal stuff. You MUST have good customer service. TK has managed that by and large (no one's perfect). Finally, you MUST get sales, and that means getting the word out to your target audience that you EXIST. Without sales, the rest is irrelevant. Great product or bad, good service or crap, if no one buys it that stuff doesn't matter. Getting the word out = marketing and TW's marketing being 90% word of mouth has proven, once and for all, that it can no longer provide the sales needed to offset his recent cost increases. So he needs to market more. BTW, not having bothered to look at it with my phone, does SFA have any backlinks or other info that would lead its users back to TW's site and the PC versions? Beyond someone seeing "Thirdwire" and choosing to google it themselves that is?

That's the point. If it was made for SFA, then it doesn't have that better stuff. If it was made for Exp3 and ported to SFA, that's different. We don't know. Dan's comment that he is unaware if it will be in or not answers nothing.

Right, because a couple of months sitting in a cast and your arm is better. A couple of months sitting in a hangar and your plane is not.

Britain is the name of the island, isn't it? So England, Wales, and Scotland = Britain. The UK then is Britain + N Ireland. "Who are the Britons?" "We all are. All of us who live here." "And who are you then?" "I am your king." "I didn't vote for you."

It doesn't look PC-level. The mobile versions all have lower numbers of polys and lower-res textures to work on phones. So anything purpose-built for it will still need work to be good enough for the PC, it's not a simple port. In short, its appearance is neither a confirmation nor a denial of it showing up in SF2 later.

The UH-1 and MiG-21 should be out in the not-too-distant future. I'm not holding my breath on the Hornet. Of course, 1.2.3 will be out long before any of that.

I always heard it was a 10m rock, not 10 tons.

It's not a truly proven design, but it offers F-16-like abilities without the price and would probably be worth looking into.

I don't know, I think it might be better to just go with some good SAMs and AAA. As mentioned, good fighters are expensive. Cheap fighters are vulnerable. Plus you have that whole deconfliction thing to make sure your SAMs don't fire at your fighters in friendly territory. If you don't have any fighters, your SAMs and AAA can let loose. Croatia's security situation doesn't make a new fighter an imperative, and the last thing it needs is to start some sort of local arms race which it can't afford. Of course, there are possibilities like old Gripen A's (getting mothballed in Sweden) or Typhoon Tranche 1's (getting retired vs upgraded or kept in the UK) so you could get a good deal on a less-capable version of a current plane.

Yes, because it doesn't matter WHAT the event, conspiracy theorists will start to expect not one, not two, but hundreds of pieces of concrete evidence and the absence of even one or two is "evidence" of it being ANYTHING but what it really was. If these things hit every week, we'd all know exactly what happens. However, these things are rare.

Shouldn't it be Aerosmith's "Don't Want To Miss A Thing"? It worked for Bay...

This incident was the driving force behind changing the bombs carried on carriers so they would NOT explode when on fire.

Imagine if that was NYC, or Moscow, or Mexico City, or any of 100 other more heavily populated areas.

Considering this is a less than 2 yr-old initiative aimed at HS and 2-yr college students, I doubt too many around here have taken it. It seems like a "pre-MCP" level. Not sure exactly what it will be useful for.

Because the best product rarely wins.

The fundamental issue is people don't remember where they came from. Whether they were born into it, or pulled themselves up from nothing, people who get to the top always seem to at best disregard or ignore and at worst revel in the plight of those below them. Even if they had a lot, lost it and saw it for themselves, and then climbed up again, once back at the top few have any sympathy for those who aren't. Since the earliest days of humanity, survival often required defeating others in one way or another, from simple stratification to all-out subjugation or even killing. While many on the left like to think humanity has grown beyond this stage, and many on the right seem to think they were already created beyond that stage just a few millennia ago, the truth is even recent history has demonstrated the lie of that. People WANT to be better than other people. If there is no real basis for that superiority, then they invent it, and you get racism and xenophobia and other things that are based on whatever differences exist. Here's the irony that gets me: left-wingers believe in evolution in nature, but people are now evolved and we should all be equal and have the same stuff to many extents, no matter how hard you worked and the other guy just squeaked by. Right-wingers believe in creation from above, making all humans in that image, but that in socioeconomic matters it's pure Darwinism "survival of the fittest" and businesses should be allowed to do whatever they want and if you make billions on the suffering of others, that's just because you deserved to. They believe the same things, but reverse where the ideologies are applied! Same thing with legal death...left says abortion is fine, but never kill a criminal no matter what they do because they can be redeemed, not even in self-defense because if you let the criminal have what they want no one needs to die, and more broadly applies that to wars as well, because war is always wrong. Right says abortion is immoral, but extreme sinners must be put to death, and killing in self-defense should be allowed under very broad circumstances, including where the criminal is unarmed but could be (ie they're not naked so "there's no way to know") and applies that to nations and wars ("just" wars and all that) as well. Yet all profess to believe in the sanctity of life!

The only universal rule is the Golden Rule...he who has the money makes the rules. Those rules will help out people of various classes and races to the detriment of others, but in every situation the rulers live better than the people, even the ones that ostensibly are all about 100% equality. Now power is money and money is power, so while there's some blurring of the lines between rich and powerful people (not all powerful are rich, not all rich are powerful) but as a bloc the rich and powerful are the same. You can have one party, two parties, multiple parties, or none and a single absolute ruler with rich sycophants supporting them, espousing any number of ideologies, but in the end those without will always outnumber those who have.

Touche.

When was the last time you saw Americans burning an Iranian flag? When was the last time people chanted "death to Iran" in a public rally? Americans haven't been told about some great Iranian threat to make us forget about our problems at home. Instead, we are focused very MUCH on our problems at home, and all the politicians who insist it's not THEIR fault, but the other party's, because they won't listen to THEM. American politicians are pretty much the definition of "a joke", so making fun of them is almost too easy. We don't limit ourselves to making fun of our own politicians, however, as we realize that no matter the country men are created equal and politicians are created equally poorly. Those who claim that one god or another is on their side get extra points of ridicule for trying the "if you disagree with me, you disagree with GOD!" stupidity. Since last I heard no one has spoken with any god lately, all we have is the word of other men...and we know men can't be trusted.

I heard that something broke in the helo, hence it started a turn and then sort of stopped and flew itself into the ground. No g-loc in an AH-1!

They also have short range and limited payload capacity. They were great tech for their day, but frankly should've been replaced in the 90s with newer tech.

Looking at that 2nd picture made me think of Team America: World Police.

Yes, and it was created with more attention to details than TK usually gives. His version would likely offer avionics updates that would make it better in those aspects, but he'd have far fewer planes and a LOT less flyables.

I like the quote about how now that they're nuclear, no one can irritate them. Uh, we've had them since 1945...I guess no one has ever done anything contrary to our interests, eh?