Flyby PC

My fondest memory of an aircraft was a Wessex helicopter I wasn't even in. After a cold and wet exercise 'sleeping' in CFO (that's bombs bullets and nothing but what you stand up in, no fluffy dos-bags, ponchos or cuddley toys). Having been 'tactical' up to our necks in rivers and bogs for two days we were all rather chilly, lined up in sticks waiting for our lift back to civilisation. Every time this Wessex came in for another stick of troops, we just happened to be in the location where all the hot exhaust fumes from the engine were being fanned, and all that warm air was a rather lovely feeling. I've often wondered since whether our NCOs, who certainly knew their stuff alright, picked our spot deliberately. (You can never be sure what's about to happen when Para NCO's are being nice to you). Fondest memory of a C130 was being first man to jump, and stood in the doorway for a few minutes before the drop zone. It was very early morning, and the scenery was like the biggest and best train set you could ever imagine, with the dispatcher pointing out 'countdown' landmarks, and the best pubs and restaurants for taking his girlfriend to. I didn't know his girlfriend, but it was nice to know where the pubs were all the same. I was transfixed by the view, and my concentration was miles away when the light went green, and I got a healthy thump in the arm for go! I've also parachuted out a Chinook which I didn't know you could do, but the funniest recollection of a Chinook was the first time I ever flew in one. We were out on exercise in the dark, getting picked up by Chinooks and moved to another location. The word came back down the patrol, "Watch out for the hole in the floor. Pass it on". Then five minutes later, "Don't forget the hole in the floor. Pass it on". Another five minutes, ""Remember the hole. Pass it on". We'd all got the message about the hole in the floor, and after a while it was getting a little tiresome. "There's a f!*%"g hole in the floor OK? Pass it on!". Anyway, we finally got to the Chinook, which was on the deck with the back door open, and lit with those red bulbs you see in submarine films. With one more "Don't forget the hole in the floor" for good luck, we all marched aboard. Through the gloom emerged this sodding great hole in the floor so big you could very nearly drive a train through it, which only left about a foot or so at the edge to walk around it. "Watch out for that fkn hole in the floor!" says me, only this time I really, really meant it.

I may have to get my act together and get a proper phone line. - Not for multiplayer, but just to keep looking at all this new stuff. Lovely jubbley. Quick question though, I appreciate it's a campaign thing, but if all your wingmen are now tracked, does this impact on multiplayer to stop you spawning into the 'open' seats? I ache to play multiplayer OFF again...

Finally got to see some of this. I'm still on mobile broadband, so it's taken a while to see this, but it was worth the wait. I'm speechless. Those aircraft illuminated by the burning Zeppelin? Wow. This looks as rich and 'deep' an environment for a flight sim as I've seen. Who cares about Christmas coming? I want this. Nice steady hand winding the handle on that Cine camera too Pol, first rate job!

Wow! I'd seen 2 or 3 of those, but lots of new stuff there to my eyes. One I had seen was the Mosquito, but there's also a second picture featuring another low flying Mossie with the Observer calmly looking out the window. I'm sure I have it somewhere...

Mmmmm. Steady on.... Isn't this just talk? We all know there are 'sensibilities' within certain cultures, and it's not going to help the cause of world peace if one culture spends it's R&R time squatting over someone elses culture and taking a dump on it for fun. You don't have to like a particular culture, but showing just a tiny tiny little bit of respect isn't going to kill you. I can see circumstances when intelligent rational conversation is a good idea. And before we go charging down the Muslim fundamentalist route, there's already evidence of this closer to hand. Crank up your vanilla CFS3 and count how many nazi swastikas you should see but actually don't. Don't get me wrong, I'm not taking sides at all, but this does seem like a discussion which 'somebody' is bound to have had sooner or later. As our computer games get better and better and more convincing, the potential for causing offence will get more and more explicit. We've already had outrage expressed at images of IRA terrorists shooting down helicopters. For some people, saying 'it's just a game' is not really going to cut much ice.

Hi guys, tech querie. I recently moved a PC, which may or may not have caused the problem, but we've also had some power cuts here, which may or may not have caused the problem, or it might just have happened all by itself. What has happened is an existing PC setup has suddenly stopped recognising it's monitor. I've tried another monitor on that PC, same problem, and I've tried that monitor on another PC and it's fine. For some reaon, the PC is not recogising the monitor which it has used quite successfully for about 2 years. My gut instinct says it's developed a problem with the graphics card, but there's nothing obviously wrong, and all it's cables have been connected. (I've taken them out, I've tried the DVI option, and the VGA option with cables I know to work). Do I need a new graphics card or is there some backup setting I can revert to when it all worked fine. I get no dialogue at all, just "DVI No signal " before the monitor switches to standby, so I can't even access the PC setup. Anybody got any suggestions before I try a new graphics card? Hate to spend money and find I still have the problem....

£107.00, or 125 euros. For 2TB SATA I thought that was quite good, compared to around £80 for 400Gb IDE.

I've googled up a bit, and in my child-like understanding of how computers work, a Dynamic disk is kind of able to 'jump' a partiton when and if the need arises, and this is good, but the down side is that if you lose data, it can be harder to recover because the divide formed by partitions is not so permanent. The bottom line seems to be a dynamic disk is fine, but your unwise to have your operating system on a dynamic disk. That might be wrong, but that's what I've understood, and because I may see the need to put an operating system on this new hard drive, I've stopped the formatting, and reconfigured the formatting to a basic drive, not a dynamic one. I was 55% of the way through the formating of 2TB, and we're back to the start, but it's now a Basic disk. I thank you for your help and advice gents, good things are now happening to my PC, and I'm now a little wiser than I was before. :drinks:

Heart felt thanks fellas, formatting now... One question, - it's referring to the type of volume as 'Dynamic' whereas the other drive and the dvd are 'basic'. Is this a problem or something I can ignore?

Reolved my PSU issues, but I've also added a second hard drive to my PC but I'm having problems getting it to work. All I did was connect up the power and data, the PC recognises it as new hardware and installed a driver for it, but it has no volume allocated and it isn't initialised. I'm guessing that I need to format this drive, but how do I do this? It doesn't appear as a drive to simply format. My best guess is to disconnect the original drive, and restart the PC with the new drive only and a boot disk. Would this work? Help greatly appreciated....

Still here. Cut the red one. You'll be fine.

The PSU I had in mind was one from a previous PC, 450W but no SATA power output, but the 20 pin connector to the motherboard didn't fit either. I didn't count if there were more pins these days or the plug was simply smaller, but it wasn't going to fit. I don't actually mind so much now, I'll see how we go, and if I see or smell smoke, (and not a moment before lol), I know it's the PSU. If you don't hear from me for a while, CUT THE BLUE WIRE!!! WHATEVER YOU DO DONT CUT THE RED ONE!!! ITS THE BLUE ONE!!!

Aha! Some success!! I took off the PSU, and gave it a blast of air from the compressor to clear away all the crud. Wired it up again, and my monitor is back, but the fan in the PSU isn't working at all now. So it looks like I'm fixed for now, but living on borrowed time without a fan working in the PSU. Obviousy what's going to happen now is it's going to work perfectly until one minute past closing time on Christmas eve so I can't fly OFF throughout the Christmas period because can't get a new PSU until the new year. Old and wise me says get a new PSU anyway, but I also have the rebel in me who likes to live dangerously.

No, I'm not. I might be agreeing with you now. Initially I disconnected everything else from the PSU, all the dvd drives etc, and it made no difference, although all of these bits of equipment appeared to function normally. I tried to run these devices from an alternative PSU, but it made no difference. However, I couldn't just swap the PSU because it doesn't have a SATA type connection for the hard drive, but futhermore the connection to the motherboard is not compatible either. I suspect it could be the power supply, by a process of elimination, but I don't want to shell out on a new PSU without being sure it's not the motherboard itself. I have noticed however that the fan inside the PSU seems to be running rather slowly, so this does imply something could be wrong with the PSU. I've been OFF less for a month, and getting the DT's. My OFF install disk seems corrupted and hangs up on installing, and a straight copy of my existing install doesn't survive the hard copy from XP to Win 7. Sigh... (Don't worry guys, I'm not needing duplicates, I have a MAW and a CFS3 working on the work PC, but it's not so easy to hard copy an OFF). Is there a cheap way to fire up a SATA based PC with an ADI power supply? I've already ordered an adaptor to interchange SATA and ADI hard drives, but I've only just discovered the PSU's are different too. Sould I just bite the bullet and buy a new SATA PSU? I think I may have answered my own question. I haven't located the Cmos re-set yet either...And you know when you mention manuals,.... err how can I put it, we try to operate a paperless workplace if you know what I mean. Will my motherboard have a code I chack online?

I'm definitely not an expect when it comes to flight models, but the Snipe is going to be a challenge. I believe the Snipe was very similar to the Camel in terms of performance, though easier to fly and less manouverable, but was much superior in delivering that performance at greater altitude, enable the Snipe to gain superiority over the DVII at altitudes the Camel couldn't contest. Thing is, I believe it is a glitch in the CFS3 flight models that you cannot bless an aircraft with correct performance at altitude without making it an unrealistic super fighter at lower altitudes. This is the reason aircraft with superchargers, like the Dh Mosquito, have a fraction of their true performance at altitude. Apparently there is no way to model the 'double standard' effect of a supercharger kicking above a certain altitude to deliver a boost in power. If you want the supercharged perfomance at altitude, you cannot do it while maintaining an accurate unsupercharged performance at lower levels. I may well be out of date on this, but this suggests we might see an artificially good Snipe at low level, or alternatively an inhibited Snipe at altitude. Of course, I don't know the first thing about flight models myself, but it'll be interesting to see how the Snipe and Camel compare... I stress, I'm not trying to be awkward, but apart from a faster rate of climb, maybe we shouldn't expect to see too much of a difference between the Snipe and the Camel.... And I believe that undersized rudders were a common feature in Sopwith designs. The Snipes were meant to be rigged for war with the larger rudders for stability, but were rushed to the front unmodified because the Allies needed them quickly to contain and dominate the DVII's at altitudes where the Camel was ineffective. I know that's only half an answer, but I cannot find any reason why Sopwiths commonly had undersized rudders.

To me the double bump on the tail has a very Art Deco signature to it. It's hardly surprising, given that aircraft were at the forefront of modernity just before the 1920's. I'm not saying I like the double bump, but I do like lots of the 1920's style for design.

What a difference a year makes. This time last year, we'd already been shut down with -16 degree temperatures which later became -19 in the same cold spell, with 3 ft of snow in December and Jan. We were effectively shut down for 6 months. I never thought I say I liked the mud, wind and rain, but this year, I'm loving it. Long may it continue. Hope I'm not tempting fate to say it, but don't think this will be a severe winter. Forget what the forecasts say, nature knows best. Where I live, this year I've noticed a distinct lack of berries on trees for wildlife. I know it's an old wives tale, but if we were in for another bad winter, nature would have provided more for it's critters. The berries typically remain bitter so the birds leave them alone. They sweeten up after the first frost and get scoffed up pretty quick. This year, there aren't many berries anywhere, so fill up your bird tables people, it might be a mild winter ahead but the poor little mites are going to be hungry.

Yes I think so. In fact, at the time, I think there were so many Desert Rats it seemed there was only me not doing anything, with everybody creating MAW just for me!!! Why thank you very much!!! At the time, OFF was breaking all sorts of new ground, and so was MAW, but what was exciting was it wasn't the same ground they were breaking. There were so many creative people everywhere you looked. I thought they were the perfect compliment to each other, and I always hoped the paths would merge again some day. I'm delighted OFF is not just alive and kicking, but remains as vital and alive as it was for P1. My regret is the MAW team didn't achieve the heights they were destined for in my judgement. Don't get me wrong, MAW was trully excellent, but I always felt it was just the beginning... You look back at OFF P1, and compare it to P3, never mind P4, and the progress is breathtaking. We only have MAW P1 to compare, and that's a pity I think, although I understand and completely respect the reasons behind it.

In the context of flight sims, I would have loved to see the often talked about release of MAW 2. I don't know if the progress would have kept up with OFF, but there was a lot of talent behind MAW, and it's such a pity the team couldn't hang together for a Part 2. I always get the feeling the team broke up way too early, and given the time, they'd had given us something to rival OFF but in a WW2 theatre. I remember the first flying at dusk in a Swordfish when these haunting yellow flares appeared, and the whole atmosphere was bathed in a golden glow, and just spectacular. I kind of hope P4 has exciting pyrotechnics for the darkness, with some flare activity over the trenches at night...... there we go, I'm drooling again. MAW 2 isn't going to happen, but I'd still like to say some of the excellence of OFF filtering forward in time to WW2, even if it's just the scenery and weather.

Ha Ha! Be funny if somebody googles the coordinates of a Nieuport shot down in WW1 and finds the reference in some obscure search page, and actually heads there with a shovel and a metal detector. That would be another first for OFF!

How time flies. Phase 1 was great, but for me, Phase 2 was a bigger step up. I flew a lot of multiplayer with the Boys of 60 squadron, and MAW multiplayer too. Due to work changing activities, and getting my dog, I suddenly couldn't find the time to commit to a regular multiplayer slot. That same dog will be 4 this Christmas!!! Where has all the time gone? You've all seen this before... Happy days...

Lucky or jinxed? Falls from altitude are rarely survived, but once you've fallen a certain distance, you reach a terminal velocity and don't fall any faster. It doesn't make a big difference from 1000ft or 20,000ft, you'll hit the ground at the same speed. We were told a story when Para training that if your parachute and reserve both fail, even if you do survive the first 'bounce', you break lots of bones, and when you hit the second bounce, the shards of bone tear your organs to bits. Charming. If I remember correctly, this was the lurid and juicy story you got while training, when you were standing in the basket of the barrage balloon slowly being winched to 1000 ft for your first ever jump. After that, you were pointed towards local landmarks.... the local Hospital, and how long it took to get there if something went wrong, and the local cemetry, and how long you'd be staying there if things went really wrong. Green on, Go! We were also told that from height of an operational jump, 750 ft, if your chute failed, you'd pile in after just 7 seconds. Not very much time to s!*"t yourself AND sort out your reserve.So don't s!*"t yourself.

It's 600mm thick, but that's the same as traditional stonework. You're looking at roughly 1 ton of stone per metre. We're currently making so little money developing this, (this is our own unit we're building as a prototype) I defy the Government to collect some tax of us too. The hard work is mostly done. All we need is one believer with a house plot ... What impeccable timing to have such a severe property recession. Nevermind, the day will come. Patience.... Patience...

This is what we we're trying to get into. We can put up a preliminary structure of aerated cellular blocks which deliver part of our insulation, and being pre-keyed to accept plaster, we don't need any lathe or dry lining. For services, you simply cut a chase in the block and run your services in the void and plaster in the gap. The cable may burn, but it's contained in a non combustible void. The block is loadbearing, so can support the floors and roof and let internal trades get going. Next we have high performance insulation. 60mm is all we require for current standards but we could easily upgrade to 100mm. Outside of that we have 400mm traditional stonework as built for the last 1000 years. The complication is the gap I've highlighted red. We want to ventilate this. We don't need to ventilate this, there is no need to, and condensation risk is minimal, and confined to extreme cold, and in materials which do not decay through dampness. We still want the ventilation because we can air out the fabric if the need ever arises either through extreme cold or perhaps the failure of a downpipe saturating the stonework. This ventilation is our sticking point. It occurs internally on the warm side of our insulation, and thus renders void the contribution the insulation makes to the overall U-value. Our argument is that by using vents we can open or close, by opening or closing the vents we don't necessarily have a ventilated air space. Close the vents, and we have full on U-value performance, open them and we can cool the house or ventilate any residual dampness. Our air space is contained inside a cellular non-combustible duct, which also allows us to recover the air circulating through it, and pumping it through a heat recover unit prior to discharge. This is currently a moot option. If we're ventilating the air space, it would only be periodically, and at times when we we're not looking to optimise thermal performance, so heat recovery would not be an on-going activity. Our floors are simply the common precast beam with block infill. Everything is concrete. If ducts or services pass through it, where separation is required we would use intumescent collars. The big motivation for us is to get 'proper' stonework back on the agenda. Modern stonework is typically cladding, and grossly inferior to traditional stonework. There is no demand or opportunity for a skilled tradesman to flourish, and the general standard of craftsman is now in freefall. Typically, when a new house gets built, IF it has stone cladding, we might see 3 or 4% of the contract total, but we'd have to compete with unskilled persons to build it. With our method, we might expect to see 60 to 70% of the contract total, and deliver a vastly superior and durable product for the customer while promoting the craftsmanship and demand for craftsmanship which proper stonework represents. I'm sorry if this sounds like a sales pitch, but the point we're trying to make is much bigger than just one company. As rich and civilised societies, we could be building the best properties we have ever built, but instead we build complete rubbish and generation after generation we squander the skills of creative and talented people.

QED. I'm not defending brick, but I presume those brick houses would also be timber frame. Modern brickwork on a timber frame is just cladding. Think of it as external wallpaper. The structural component is the timber frame and it burns whether that's something you consider to be right or wrong. In my opinion, there are better options. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11354755