JediMaster

The lower plane had to move in because there's no way the upper plane could move its nose gear up and over the nose of the lower plane. The crushed radome on the lower plane also wouldn't have been touched by the upper plane if it had been moving. In the foreground of the bottom picture, and lying on the ground to the left in the upper one, is what appears to be the boarding ladders from the lower plane. No one taxis with boarding ladders.

While it may be hard to say with 100% certainty which plane was being towed (although I believe the fact the towbar is attached to the lower plane indicates that it is the one that was under tow), I think we can say neither plane was under power.

There appears to be an Su-27 behind the 2 UB's as well (notice the green-tipped fins in the upper picture and the open canopy to the left in the lower picture). This looks like it was parked next to the upper UB.

Ah! There is a wheel chock on the upper plane's right wheel I think, just visible in the lower picture next to the rear of the guy in the blue jacket, but none on the lower plane. Yeah, that plane was stationary. Maybe the lower plane wasn't towed at all, but rather had the towbar attached, chocks removed, and then rolled into the upper plane out of control? I mean, if it was towed, the tow vehicle had to pass UNDER the nose of the upper plane, and that should've damaged the nosewheel and/or ladders of the upper plane, but they're intact. Plus we see no sign of a tow vehicle, and I hardly think after this incident they would've pulled it out of there.

Where'd boopidoo go, anyway? I can't recall...

Just because it's on FB don't assume they used a PC. You can easily do it from most smartphones now, which many 12 yr olds have.

CYAC was released about 6 months before F3. The graphics weren't quite as good, especially the terrain but even the planes, but it did offer multiple eras. It was the only place I flew Korea-era and Nam-era jets for years.

While it looked better than SWOTL, there's no doubt SWOTL (which came out the same time) was the better game. The strategic-level campaign and sole focus on WWII aided that. It was also easily modded and was my first experience with game mods, followed by the original DOOM.

It was on this date in 1991, during my first semester in college, that Spectrum Holobyte released the first of the great study sims...Falcon 3.0. It cost $65 at Electronics Boutique, and you could get it in 5.25" or 3.5" disk versions. I bought the 5.25" one, got it home, and the install failed at disk 3 every time. Took it back, swapped it out, took it home, same problem. Said "screw this", took it back, swapped for the 3.5" version...ahhhh, it installs! Look at the awesome polygonal graphics, far superior to the bitmapped 2D objects-in-3D space look of SWOTL!

So began an intense decade of the Golden Age of Flight Sims where no joke every month it seemed a new sim came out from someone, albeit few were good. What era did you like? It didn't matter, someone made a sim for it! Granted Korea and Vietnam got the short stick with few releases, but they did happen. Modern jets and WWII were of course the magnets with WWI well represented. Some great ones came out before F3, including F-19, SWOTL, TFH: BoB, and the original Red Baron, but they didn't start in earnest until after F3 came out. It let you fly H2H, but more importantly it had coop campaigns you could fly over modem or null modem or LAN. It was the first I owned with that feature and it became one I wanted on every sim after and since. Ironically, 15 years after the release of their first sim, Flanker, ED has yet to release a sim that lets you play a campaign in MP!

Tron 2.0 was made by Monolith, makers of such excellent games as No One Lives Forever 1 & 2, AvP 2, and FEAR 1 and 2. It also had Bruce Boxleitner's voice as well as the woman from the original film (I forget her name). The interesting part was how close the story seems to parallel some of Legacy's story, except there the main character is Alan's son, not Flynn's, who was himself AWOL.

I know of at least one simmer who's passed on the SF2 generation because of lack of MP after buying and enjoying most of the 1st gen stuff (never got SFP1 itself). I don't care if it's a new title using the same planes and terrains as the past SF2 titles with MP simply tacked on with the ability to do both random (like the 1st gen MP) or scripted missions (the new editor makes that even more appealing, I was sad the 1st gen games didn't offer it) or a whole new title built from the ground up, I just like flying sims with a wide range of aircraft to use. DCS and F4 and their ilk are fine in smaller doses, but I don't want to fly more than 2 hrs of it before I'm ok for a good week. I will likely never dump Il-2 because it has so many planes.

However, I only do coop MP. I never fly H2H, just like I don't play ANY MP game against humans anymore. Not RTS games, not FPS, not sims. It's just too common to find yourself playing against someone who is either cheating or just put 200% more time into the game than you can afford to (short of being unemployed and/or obsessed) and quite frankly I get ZERO enjoyment out of getting pwned every 30 seconds or match or flight or however that game is setup. I cannot devote the time necessary to become "competitive" with those people, and I don't find getting trounced by them entertaining. Once or twice can be informative in a "learning new tricks" way, but I'm not going to subject myself to 20+ hrs of "school" before I can start to enjoy myself, if ever. Trying to find people who are exactly the same level as I am and that STAY at that level after several months of playing it is pretty much impossible. I quit racing MP at SimHQ because while 4 yrs ago when it was new I was competitive, after a couple of years the diehards spent EVERY minute on their PCs practicing the next tracks and tinkering in the garage and I was lucky to finish on the same lap as the 10th place finisher! The enjoyment was gone fighting to be top of the bottom 3 every week.

I loved coop FPS MP games, like Serious Sam, Quake, Doom, OFP/Arma. Me and other humans pitted against vast numbers of AI is where it's at. I want to relax when I play these games. Adversarial MP I do NOT find relaxing.

Oh I had that, but the terrain .ini files weren't done right. I found it worked in Desert and Germany but not Israel and Vietnam.

So to be clear, on an unmodded stock install, you need to edit the options.ini AND each terrain's .ini (after extracting) to get the era out of early 80s.

I never got this when it came out, but I borrowed a copy from a friend several years later and played it, maybe in 2005? Anyway, I thought it was quite good and a fine successor (and unfortunately end) to the line of ST capital ship games. The lamest was probably Starfleet Academy. The hardest was the TNG one Spectrum Holobyte made in the mid-90s...the starship combat was almost impossible to follow, but the stuff with the characters on the surface and all was fine.

My favorite was Klingon Academy, the pinacle of FMV space games in the Wing Cmdr 3/4/5 tradition, with both Christopher Plummer and David Warner reprising their ST6 roles in this prequel to the film. It had its issues with combat, but was still great in terms of story, acting, and ambience.

Bridge Commander perfected the combat, but didn't quite live up to the rest of KA's lineage. Still, for a game to be modded years on down the road, that was more important, and dumping FMV made the game more timeless.

I'm getting tired of the half-assed support for SP experiences in these "big" shooters.

I recently bought on sale on Steam all the CoD games up to 4. Well, not 3, that was console only. The expansion for the first CoD was longer than CoD4! Sure it was fun, but it was stupidly short and the CoD series already had a history of being short. I think I finished the original CoD in 7 hrs, its expansion took 5 hrs, and CoD4 took, like its name suggests, just 4!

It's akin to going to see a new Star Trek film and it totally rocking and then ending after 35 mins!

I've been playing FPS games since Wolf 3D. I've not played them all, that would have been difficult and expensive, but I've played pretty much all the good ones and the big ones. There's no doubt that these "hash em out for a quick buck" CoD games are a spit in the face for us loyal FPS SP gamers.

What's he going to do? Show me where I turned left when I should have turned right? Damn it, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!

Hmmm. The end year lock thing seems to be hitting me no matter what I do, even on my Jun-patch level NF4 install! I'm picking later planes and getting stuck with a single year (ie 2003 only) when picking a plane in single mission, whether that end year = 0 or any real year.

Edit: Ah, now I see the problem. My NF4 only has the edits for the GermanyCE terrain. I'm using a merged install there (for the extra planes) and I see if I choose Israel or Vietnam then I hit the range, but if I use Germany it's fine. Time for some ini editing! Sigh...

From head-on this plane looks a startled nerd with a huge nose saying "!!!!!!!"

I would like to live in Montana. I will have a fat American wife. I will go hunting for rabbits and she will cook them for me. Then I will look out the window and BOZHE MOI!!!!!

Crytek said Far Cry was an FPS set in a horror B-movie and Crysis was sci-fi B-movie. You're not supposed to be wowed by the story, just the gameplay.

Geez, go on a little maiden voyage of the (currently) largest cruise ship in the world and you miss THIS!

Good part for me is I get it after the hotfix. The filename I DL'd ends with dec2010-B.exe, so I'm guessing that means hotfix is included.

Morbius! What is the id??!?!

I don't know where I'll be then, doc, but I bet I won't smell too good...

A sad day. I have Forbidden Planet, Airplane, all the Naked Gun and Police Squad stuff on DVD. He had absolute perfect timing.

I see the chance of Russia involving itself in this beyond a diplomatic level as virtually nil. As said, this isn't 1950. Russia cares about its own borders, they don't care about Kim and his family or Korea anymore. China cares a great deal, as also said, but likewise doesn't want anything beyond an improvement of the status quo.

That's not the biggest problem. The biggest one is how many of the currently serving crewmembers will still be around in 10 years to lend their experience? And how out of date will that experience be by then anyway?

The consequence of the larger size of the QE class has already been felt, they're buying the USN version now instead of the USMC version. That will of course hurt the USMC because it means the price for their planes will be higher thanks to a smaller buy.

Maybe Spain and Italy will buy some for their carriers at some point.

The F-101A did little in its brief career. They were pretty much gone well before 1960, though a couple dozen became RF-101Gs.

The C was almost the same model, it was basically the refined A model. While it and the B were in service during that time, they seem to have been based in Europe and other areas of the US well away from FL. Only the RF-101As and Cs seem to have been the only models to be temporarily relocated to FL during that time.

I've seen the theory bandied about that the sanctions are really taking their toll and this is NK's stupid way of trying to get the US and others back to the negotiating table to give them concessions on supplies and trade.

Sort of a "give me what I want or I'll start a war!!" type of tantrum.

Ironic that F4:AF had a Korea 2010 campaign.

I don't know, I never saw the ones on Buck Rogers do more than 3 maneuvers!

Because their bodies are there?