Gunrunner

Capitaine, I was about to post along the same lines, also including the Quebec/Canada situation and positing that Switzerland works for two different reasons, the first historical as the various linguistic communities were drawn together naturally and not somewhat artificially and also because the economic disparities between linguistic communities are far less important in Switzerland than in Belgium (with a role reversal in the late 70's) or Canada.

I don't understand, weren't they supposed to be new models ? I must say, the Panther and Shooting Stars are a huge improvement.

Well, it can't be worse than France. While it's true that received pronunciation is supposedly the standard used for learning English in France, you also have to consider that most English teachers barely practiced it beyond their own studies, most of them haven't spent any significant amount of time in English speaking countries and many of these don't even have a clue how ridiculous that situation is, correcting bilingual/bi-national students (which would be fine if the student was wrong, but that usually isn't the case). I was raised in posh private schools, but still, very few competent foreign language teachers where available, the only decent ones we had were foreign nationals. There also is a problem in the teaching methodology consisting of making students constantly translate between the foreign language and French, making it that much harder to learn anything and increasing the syntactic and vocabulary interferences between both languages. Of course, with teachers far from fluent in the language they teach, it is a necessity but it is holding students back. You also have to understand that in France there was a perception* of a hierarchy of foreign languages learnt in school. *Hint: The description below doesn't represent what I think of these languages or the cultures, just how it was perceived and "sold" to us as we had to chose our foreign languages at school. The three main languages learnt in school were English, German and Spanish. You had to take two, one of which was English and you did start by the one deemed to hardest of the two, so you had the choice of taking German-English or English-Spanish. English was seen as a pragmatic, useful language, simple to learn, but a bit crass, boring, a language of commerce, not culture. Spanish was seen as the language for the lazy, the economic interests in learning Spanish are smaller, the cultural ones limited, only "poor" countries use it beside Spain, it was mostly here as a concession to children of the Spanish immigration, so they can get easy credits. German was the noblest choice, the hardest, the one good students would take and it represented our commitment to the European ideal and reconciliation with Germany. Nowadays, in regard to English the situation is getting better, with better access to non-translated books, non-dubbed movies and series and a better generation of English teachers who spent at least some time abroad, it also is far more common to have native speakers teaching. In my time, the only way to seriously learn a foreign language was to do it yourself, but the "exception culturelle" and our dub-culture limited the potential motivations to do so, until the advent of computing, leading to a whole generation of early geeks learning English by themselves. However, the situation in that particular case has worsened has computing resources are now also widely available in French, leading to a situation where geeks and engineers can get by without any serious grasp of the English language, leading to very nasty situations with code commented in French or French engineers barely able to participate in multinational projects because of it; it's somewhat pathetic.

Anything from the Strike Fighters Series 1 download section should work (unless it specifically needs Wings over whatever). A few older downloads for Strike Fighters 2 may also work, but most of the recent releases are incompatible.

What I also find funny with these "rape culture" people is that to them, it's not a romantic picture in any way because it lacks consent, thus a stolen kiss is tantamount to rape... Have they thought that the only alternative is that before engaging in any behaviour that can be construed as sexual or romantic in nature, both parties must first sign a contract in triplicate clearly defining what's going to happen, otherwise it could be interpreted as assault ? No, of course they don't, otherwise they'd have to admit how ridiculous their posturing is.

But who is thinking of those poor GIs being forcefully kissed by women from liberated European countries, I mean, I'm sure that must have been quite a traumatic experience to them... But hey, what do we know, as supposedly "entitled white males" our perspective's and arguments are by nature invalid (and no, the hypocrisy and nauseating implications of that kind of argument is lost on these people).

Well, what it is is obvious, it's one of MacDonnell F3H Demon proposed follow up, in a twin engine configuration, to address the issues with the original and that led to the Phantom, what the official designation if it ever got one though is beyond me...

WK, given the wide range of frequencies usable and the ability to deploy a large number of cheap receivers, using active radars as confirmation sources, with enough processing power, good algorithm and connection between the elements, even jamming and decoys may be of limited use, but we probably are far from that point yet. Nixou, it would only help for planes interconnected, because the active radar would illuminate a zone and the passive receivers on other planes or other parts of the network will not receive the expected echoes, therefore deducing the presence of something. So basically it's the active radars increasing the efficiency of the passive system, not the other way round.

Well, the groundwork for that dates back at least 20 years now, however it's only recently that we've reached the point where processing power and more efficient algorithm (and battlefield networks for military applications) may make this a practical real-time solution and not just an early warning system (also, we now have a larger number of emitters and over a wider spectrum to work from than before, making the system that much more efficient and less susceptible to failure or attack). Also, while it may render current stealth technology obsolete, it is still theoretically sensible to jamming.

We've had other heavy weights, however, given the download instability in certain conditions for some people, it might be a good idea to release it in multiple parts, because having to download a very large archive to have it failing at the last moment and having to restart all is a real pain... (btw, Erik, if you're around, is the fact that Range doesn't seem to work for download resume a configuration problem with CA's server ? I never had it working properly on CA and never bothered to check, also, having checksums for downloads would help).

Damned, foiled again !

Fine then... I hope it's not too easy

Nah, the Me-109Z had the other canopy faired (maybe adding a fuel tank, can't remember), here it's absent, and the engine are protruding a lot more than on other Me-109, besides, the canopy is wrong, looks a lot like an Il-2... Some kind of obscure captured russian prototype re-engined with german engines ??

That's weird... I could have sworn it was an italian design (Savoia-Marchetti 9? can't remember which) but I see it sports german markings... Now I'm confused.

Reminds me, didn't we have someone working on a Convai Kingfish ?

Well, because you know, while you may call the Israelis butchers and murderers, you know you risk very little with your flotilla stunt... do that with the Syrians and well... either something bad happens before you reach the shore, or nothing happens and you know even worse lies ahead, propaganda stunts are one thing, but putting your life on the line for a cause is another entirely.

The plane itself is a DAT production, and the skin is not released (yet ?).

That's one ugly toad from that angle... dare I say it's a Kalinin K-11 ? (not 100% sure on the number, but the one with the ridiculous orange/yellow feathers paint scheme)

Cocas, you may underestimate how painful it is to obtain permission for mods, especially when the original author is no longer active; it's very well for a few select groups, but not as a default licence. Having a TMF style licence by default would mean that large mods like NF5 would take even more time to release, much of the additional time consisting in clearing authorization or building around restrictions because the author wouldn't or couldn't give an express authorization.

So far the real problem seems only to be with newcomers either repackaging recent stuff with their minor tweaks or really old stuff (some of which should not be redistributed here, but usually that's filtered). A way to solve that would be not to allow members to upload mods before they either reached a certain level of activity on the boards (and we can hope, have learnt how we do things here) or have been explicitly tagged as modders by either a moderator or other known modders (that one is my favorite option as it forces newcomers to engage in conversation with old timers and limits the spam inherent to tying anything to board activity).

Erik, is there a possibility to have our download statistics and history somewhere in our profiles, to help non-subscribers to track how many files they already downloaded and subscribers to keep track of whether or not they already downloaded the latest version and when (and also keep track of how much of a burden they are).

Now that's a clever trick to make F-35 acquisition sound like a reasonable proposition.

Dave Slavens, Gallic Chieftain ? Is there anything the man can't be ?

Well, since there's no other taker for Slarti's bird, it was a Westland Pterodactyl I Fates, maybe a dedicated cartography/artillery spotting plane prototype, mid 30's to early 40's, no idea concerning the country of origin though...

Fine, next on the list is William... and about 5.874 people and I'm next in line, muwahahahahahaha. Damn, now I want to see Kind Hearts and Coronets...