Bullethead

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics isn't a theory, it's an inescapable fact firmly established as one of the cornerstones of the workings of the entire universe. Everything from clusters of galaxies to bacteria must obey it. That's why we give it the honorific "law" in its name. If the "Gods of the Copybook Headings" have a physical manifestation, it's in this law. Simply put, the 2nd Law states that you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't quit the game. Sure, the 2nd Law doesn't directly affect human nature. Except for those poor engineering students who have to learn about it in college, most folks don't know this law exists and act like it doesn't. This is why folks waste their lives trying to invent perpetual motion machines. Maybe the average educated person has heard that perpetual motion is impossible, and perhaps accepts that, but he usually doesn't know why, and doesn't see that the same reason for that applies to everything else, even his own actions. But because of the 2nd Law, everything always falls apart or breaks down eventually, resources (even so-called renewable ones) always run out, and the cost of living keeps going up as a result. The best people can do is invent a way to stave off the inevitable collapse a bit longer, because nothing they do will ever come close to 100% efficiency in real, as opposed to short-term economic, terms. Optimists often confuse realism with pessimism and are often sadly disappointed. OTOH, pessimists often confuse realism with optimism and are often pleasantly surprised. I try hard to be a realist, steering the course where neither result happens to me. This positon has the advantage of being able to say, "I told you so", to both of the other parties in turn . I myself am quite fond of Sartre's "No Exit". I can think of no better vision of Hell than to be cooped up for all Eternity in a small room with people who are fundamentally opposed to your core values, whom no amount of cogent argument can persuade to find even a shred of common ground, and whose company you cannot escape. Humans are herd animals, so the inability to meld, at least on some level, with one's immediate acquaintances is anathema to us. Give me fire, brimstone, and angry demons with pitchforks instead! I could learn to cope with that eventually :yes: . So here we disagree on what existentialism means. In "No Exit", no thought or deed of anybody has any effect on any of the other characters. Everybody involved was completely set in their ways, and this was what made it Hell. But this Hell could have been found on Earth, at least for a time, if, for instance, the various characters had passed out drunk in some bar and awakened to discover themselves locked inside until opening time the next day. As I understand it, the whole basis of existentialism is the experience of the common man, and that includes being surrounded by people who don't share your views and whom you can't convince otherwise. Thus, I find it incompatible with existentialism that every thought and deed affects everybody else. In fact, most philosphers who have been labeled as existentialists (sometimes post mortem) have considered themselves and their followers as a small group, almost a cult. Nietzsche even called himself and his followers "Hyperboreans". They knew that they were a small group, unable to affect anything. Besides, most folks I've met who claim to be existentialists are the most depressed, fatalistic people you can imagine. Everything is pointless to them, most especially their own existence. I'd hate to see the world if their thoughts affected everybody else . And to you. We'll have to compare notes in the next world

@FastCargo: Of course I was too smart to be a grunt. That's why I was in the artillery . @Ohlam: I don't think I was a waste in the artillery. I did some of my best work ever with them. Too bad the whole situation was so regrettable... IMHO, there's very limited scope for changing attitudes. Except for a few troublemakers, everybody in the world just wants to live in peace, raise their families in relative comfort and security, etc. It's that way now, even in the most violent parts of the world, and I daresay it's always been that way. In fact, I think it's safe to say that the more violent the area you live in, the stronger your desire for peace. Fighting isn't something to enter into lightly. You might not win, and you might get hurt badly even in victory, to the point that you still lose in the long run. This is something people have instinctively understood no doubt since the beginning of time, because almost every animal out there understands it as well. That's why so many of them just butt heads instead of really trying to kill each other when they fight. And that's why people have the whole spectrum of negotiation, argument, and saber-rattling prior to actual combat. But the problem is, raising families necessarily means making babies, and doing so in relative comfort and security necessarily means that more of them grow up to have families of their own, and they'll want the same things for their kids. As long as there are enough resources to go around, everybody's happy and peaceful. But eventually, the demand on the critical resources for that time and place (from food to petroleum) always exceeds the supply, either by using it up or by running out of space to produce renewable things. When that happens, conflict is inevitable. In this regard, humans are no better or worse than any other animal on the planet. This is a law of nature, ultimately stemming from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which we are powerless to change, so you can't hold this against us . What makes people worse than animals, however, is that we invent other causes for conflict. Maybe this is because we're products of such a long, long line of ancestors who had to fight constantly over resources that our genes expect us to have to fight over something periodically. Sometimes such causes are invented as tools to motivate the troops in a resource-driven survival conflict, but then live on the to trouble the world long after that conflict is resolved. But more often, or so it seems to me, such causes are invented by people far removed from the rigors of day-to-day survival. Such folks not only have the time for such pursuits, but lack an appreciation of the horrors of the conflicts they stir up, and as such are less averse to starting them. Or perhaps, they are otherwise insulated from it by some rationalization, such as, "you can't make an omellet without breaking eggs", or "the ends justify the means". Thus, we have everything from eco-terrorism to religious wars. And note that the more "civilized" a society is, the more such needless conflicts there are, and the worse they get. Here, perhaps, is where you can change attitudes. But note that this, too, will often be just another "civilized", invented source of conflict. People always get set in their ways, and often to a degree that is irrational when viewed objectively. People cling to their ancient customs, their traditional ways of doing things, their ancestral religious beliefs, etc., despite whatever objective evidence (assuming there really is any) you show them that doing things differently would be better for them. History is full of millions of ordinary people who died for their beliefs or whatever other concept they thought was worth fighting for. Thus, to change their attitudes, you will have to be the aggressor and impose your will on them, doubtless killing some number in the process and leaving the survivors feeling oppressed and desiring revenge. IOW, you sow the seeds for future conflicts while at the same time losing, through your aggression, whatever moral high ground you thought you had when you went in. The other option is to just leave things be, defending yourself if attacked but otherwise letting the other folks do as they please in their own part of the world. There are enough real things to fight over as it is without inventing new ones.

There really isn't much, if any, evidence to support the idea that people are peaceful when society's largest groupings are families/tribes/villages. On the contrary, there's plenty of evidence that such groups fought each other quite savagely on a nearly constant basis (and still do, in those areas where they still exist). For instance, look at the "iceman", Oetzi or whatever they call him. He had the blood of several other guys splashed on him, a number of wounds apparently caused by knives inflicted at different times over several days prior to his death, and a fatal arrow shot in the back. In short, the concept of the "peaceful savage" seems to be a myth created in the absence of evidence either way by late-1800s idealism. This myth became entrenched as the accepted wisdom for most of the 20th Century. Modern research, however, is showing it up. You might want to read stuff like War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, by Lawrence H. Keeley, or Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest, by Steven A. LeBlanc. The shocking thing about this research is that apparently about 25% of people back in the family/tribe/village days seem to have been killed in wars. These weren't wars like we have them today, which are highly organized, very intense, and of relatively short duration. Prehistoric wars were essentially perpetual and conducted by many small ambushes, raids, etc. It was this constant exposure to fighting over one's lifetime that resulted in the high rate overall rate of casualties. You could say, therefore, that one benefit of civilization is reducing the overall casualty rate. Even though modern wars kill far more people, and have the potential to exterminate the species, in general the bulk of the population is no longer "on the firing line". Today, those who have "seen the elephant" are a tiny minority. PTSD was probably the normal condition of everbody alive for most of humanity's existence, but is now seen as a rare disorder afflicting only those unfortunate enough to have been in bad situations. Anyway, I completely agree with you that wars are bad things and that it would be nice if they didn't exist. Unfortunately, it appears that people have always fought, and no doubt always will, regardless of the level of their civilization or lack thereof. It's just the way we are.

The great question: "Why can't we all just get along?" The answer: because we're humans. We're the product of a millions of years of monkeys and apes who lacked dominating size, huge teeth, lethal claws, and whatnot, but who had a few smarts. Using those, they bit, clawed, clubbed, stabbed, burned, and eventually shot their way to the top of the foodchain. We are the result of this long process, the ultimate apex predator the Earth's various ecosystems have ever produced. We're just animals like any others, and we're the most deadly ones ever to evolve. T. rex ain't got nothing on us. So-called civilization only goes back a few thousand years. Our killer genes go back a few thousand times longer than that. How can anything "civilized" have any real effect on such deeply hard-wired programming? And anyway, it can be argued strongly that the primary product of "civilzation" is simply the ability to kill each other in a more organized and thorough manner, with each so-called advance in social organization creating merely a better way to destroy civilization itself. Were it not for civilization, I would never have had to fight people on the other side of the world. But my civilization made me go there, because it had a beef with the civilization in that place, and that distant civilization sent its people out to meet me. I had no personal argument with anybody on the other side, nor they with me. And both of us were about as far removed from our respective civilizations, or anything worthy of being called "civilization", as it's possible to be in this day and age. Under these conditions of literal and physical barbarity, in the midst of Hell on Earth, with civilization such a distant memory that it seems to be an hallucination from some long-ago binge, people can be people. They can see each other as fellow sufferers, kindred spirits, whatever you want to call it. Just as non-human predators arrange their territorial boundaries to avoid conflict, so can people under such situations, even though they know that their distant civilizations will eventually force them to resume the conflict. AFAIK, there is no other set of circumstances within the civilized portions of earth that allows this to happen. Believe me, I've tried hard to find such a thing, because "war is Hell". Ask anybody who's seen it. But as long as people are ensconced within their culture or civilization, peer pressure or the imperatives of duty (backed up by penalties for nonperformance) preclude any true mutual attempt to cross the divide. It might make the person who perceives himself to be from the superior situation feel better about himself, but the other guy will probably perceive it as condescension. Thus, to reach a real rapport with somebody, you have to be in a situation where the constraints of civilization are completely stripped away on both sides. And these days that's really only possible on the battlefield, and even then it has to be well away from prying eyes. So that's why I said people can't understand each other until they've tried to kill each other, because having orders to kill each other is the only reason why anybody would be in that situation. EDIT: I'm definitely not saying this is a good thing, I'm just reporting my observations.

I used to think I knew the answer to that, having witnessed and/or rescued the survivors from an uncountable number of FUBARs caused by highly elevated levels of stupidity. I was a fireman for many years, after all. But then I started looking at YouTube.....

To prevent this from turning into a locked thread, I will say this.... If the Arabs I met on the field of battle hadn't been stuck with the horrific export versions of already low-quality communist products, it would be them here today talking to you instead of me. And even with the above handicap, I still had to shoot most of them at least twice. They're tough, sneaky bastards and have my complete respect as warriors, whatever our differences on the so-called rules of war or other political issues. I just hope those who survived our fights remember me as a tough, sneaky bastard, too. As George C. Scott said when he was playing Patton, "I'll drink with [the Russian general], one SOB to another". Problem is, most Arabs don't drink, unless they trust their infidel drinking buddy not to snitch. Still, I've broken bread with some guys who'd killed some of my buddies, and they broke bread with me even though I'd killed some of their kinfolks, and we both knew the score. Those were real "Josie Wales and Ten Bears" moments. I think it says something about humanity in general that you can't really understand another culture, or at least co-exist with them, until you've tried to kill each other......

I NEVER do scramble missions. The whole concept of taking off while enemy scouts are strafing your field is not only suicide, it's historically way off base. Sure, a very few guys in real life (when compared to the total number of pilots available at all airfields ever attacked), who had more cajones than brains, tried this in real life, but only a very small fraction of that few lived to tell the tale. The majority of them ended up as crispy critters about 1/2way down the runway. Everybody with 1/2 a brain knew to sit in the bomb shelter or slit trench until the attack was over. A real life "scramble" mission, even in WW1, was a launch against enemy planes that had been spotted far away. The interceptors were launched when they had the time and horizontal separation to gain the necessary altitude to do any good. I've heard that some scramble missions are against high-altitude 2-seaters, except of course they're practically overhead to begin with so you have no real hope of stopping the bombing. That's better than trying to take off with 3 enemies on your tail before you even pull the chocks, but it's still pointless and unrealistic. But there's no real way to tell what's going on until you fly the mission, and if it's not 2-seaters, it's a vulchathon with you as the idiot dweeb. So the best bet is to abort the whole thing and hope to be dealt a better hand next time.

I drink to their shades :drinks_drunk:. While nearly every day I remember friends not present, today is really a day when the ghosts come to visit en masse, from every clime and place. And Camel Jockey's signature pic reminds me of 1 ghost in particular..... ... They battled up Iwo Jima's hill, Two hundred and fifty men But only twenty-seven lived To walk back down again And when the fight was over And Old Glory proudly raised Among the men who held her high Was the Indian, Ira Hayes ([CHORUS) Call him drunken Ira Hayes He won't answer anymore Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian Nor the Marine who went to war Ira returned a hero Celebrated through the land He was wined and speeched and honored Everybody shook his hand But he was just a Pima Indian No water, no crops, no chance At home nobody cared what Ira'd done When did the Indians did their dance (CHORUS) Then Ira started drinkin' hard; Jail was often his home They'd let him raise the flag and lower it Like you'd throw a dog a bone! He died drunk one mornin' Alone in the land he fought to save Two inches of water in a lonely ditch Was a grave for Ira Hayes [CHORUS:] Yeah, call him drunken Ira Hayes But his land is just as dry And his ghost is lyin' thirsty In the ditch where Ira died I drink to his shade especially, and I spill some for him, too :drinks_drunk:

I never flew P1 or P2. I never heard of OFF until shortly before the release of P3, when it was mentioned as OT over in the forum for my own game. I still live RB2/3D and flew the Hell outta it, including a bunch of mods for it. I flew MMO flightsims for 15 years. And some folks think I write fairly well.

When I was in grade schoo, I played trumpet. When I was in high school, I played trombone and 1-string bucket bass. When I was in college and for a while thereafter, I played harmonica and bagpipes. When I came back from the war to an empty house (The Bitch having left me shortly before I deployed), I took up the mighty Fender Stratocaster and played the blues. I built my own custom hardtail Strat out of Warmouth parts with hand-wound Van Zandt blues pickups, and hit the clubs. I played rhythm to a real guitarist, but once in every night I got a solo. Everybody should, at least once in their life, get the chance to play a long, slow blues solo on an electric guitar while walking along the top of a bar, carefully stepping over drinks and wet spots, in so much cigarette smoke that the blue spotlight hardly touches you, with helpful audience members holding up your guitar cord, and making all kinds of suggestive postures with the guitar to the girls all along the bar. I was fortunate enough to do that quite a few times. Next to being shot at and just barely missed, it's the best thing life has to offer.

I know the campaign's dynamic in the ways Winder said. What I'm curious about is whether the squadrons besides mine are dynamic. That is, I see my AI buddies get killed all the time, and new guys eventually transfer in, but usually my squadron is several pilots understrength at least. Does the same thing happen to AI squadrons? IOW, if I carve a bloody swath through Jasta 2's non-ace pilots, will they be understrength for a while, too? And also, if AI pilots become aces during play, do they become more formidable? Does the same thing happen to "no-name" pilots in AI squadrons?

Spoken like a true follower of the Gods of the Marketplace.... The "copybook headings" were almost all long-established truisms, derived from pure common sense as filtered through the bloody empirical experience of the ages. IOW, they were (mostly) the closest things to "universal truths" ever established by humanity. Sure, there were a few jingoistic things mixed in, but that was the culture of the times. Most of them were straight-out facts of life. Of course, such things are anathema in a politically correct climate of moral reletavism and left-wing politics. People can always be talked into "robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul", aka socialism and the welfare state, etc. But the poem's point (at least as I interpret it) is that humanity is always drawn to such climates, and never learns that they're not sustainable despite all the lessons of history. They always lead to a disastrous collapse, when the "Gods of the Copybook Headings limp up to explain it once more".

Thanks for the link. Here's a great collection of crashes http://www.flieger-album.de/fotoalben2/Fot...nzel/index.html

When I was young, I thought the same. But now I'm older, and in my life, 1 by 1 those things have all happened to me, many of them several times over. As these experiences accumulated, at first I'd remember this poem and grin and bear it. After a while I scowled and bore it. Then I cursed and bore it. Now I'm a gimpy, bitter, cynical old fart who drinks, curses, and still bears it because there's no other choice, but who looks back wishing that on those occasions when everybody else was losing their heads, I'd lost mine, too :angry2:

Welcome aboard! New guy buys the drinks Yes, you can sideslip in the game just as in real life. Here's how you do it... 1. Reduce power to however much you think is appropriate 2. Hold a fair amount of rudder to whichever side you prefer 3. Hold in enough aileron in the opposite direction to keep yourself level. 4. Use enough up elevator to keep the nose from getting too low. The control surface movements are all interrelated, in that the more rudder you use, the more aileron and elevator you need to maintain the wings level and nose not quite level. You also have to factor in the throttle enough to keep from stalling despite all these drag-inducing control deflections and yaw. The amount of all this you do depends on where you're trying to go in the airplane. As you note, the purpose of this is to lose height fairly rapidly without picking up speed, such as if you're making a landing approach and find yourself too high. As you come down, you've got both horizontal (forward progress) and vertical (down) components to your plane's movement. The downward part is pretty constant, but can be reduced by using more throttle. The horizontal part is controlled by the amount of rudder. The more rudder you use, the more sideways you get, so the more drag you have from the fuselage side. So say you're on fire and need to come down RIGHT NOW, but are over woods and the only clearing is pretty close to you, but you're too high. Then you use a lot of rudder to minimize your forward progress (plus it helps blow the flames out sideways away from you). OTOH, if you're just marginally too high on a normal landing approach, you use less. The other main reason to do sideslips is to see ahead on final approach. In some planes, you sit so far back, or the wings are in such a position, that you can't see straight ahead at all when you're at low speed and the nose is pitched up somewhat. So in planes like these, you use just a small amount of rudder on final approach to angle the nose just out of your way so you can see the runway coming. Then just before you touch down, you release the rudder so you hit the ground rolling straight.

Glad you liked it--it's my all-time favorite poem. I read next to zero poetry myself, and only like a fraction of that, but I like many of Kipling's. I got into them as a boy and liked them because so many were tales of blood and thunder. And as I've gotten older, I've come to like others of his poems, like this one, that I didn't understand back then, and have come to a greater appreciation of some of my old favorites after having experienced some of the same sorts of things. Kipling had a real gift for saying a lot with a few relatively simple words cleverly arranged. Some of my other favorites: Gunga Din The Ballad of East and West The Female of the Species The Ballad of the King's Mercy The Truce of the Bear Tommy The 'Eathen The Ballad of Boh Da Thone And, of course, there's a special place in my heart for The Betrothed

Well, you can cycle your TAC between "All" (the starting position", airplanes, ships, vehicles, buildings, and airfields (not necessaryily in that order). So put it on airplanes and that's all you'll be able to target.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man-- There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:-- That the Dog returns to his Vomit, and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire, And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins. As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! -Kipling, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings"

How about this? The flight still ends under the same circumstances as now, but with a different presentation. Such as, the action just pauses and cannot be restarted, and a message pops up saying you're dead. You can then close that message and you're left with full camera control, and absense of red or black obstructing your view, and the ability to take screenshots. After looking all around inside and out of your plane, taking your pics from various angles, you hit some key and are at the campaign screen where it says you're dead just like it does now.

"Ah, the sot has spoken. When I met you, you were so slobbering drunk you couldn't even buy brandy! And you! Hopeless, helplesss, brainless! Do you want to go back to where I found you, unemployed, in GREENLAND?!?!?!?!?"

In the same folder as "Hold my beer a sec..." And technically speaking as a redneck, it's "Hey y'all, watch this!" Geez, the number of people I've scraped up who had either or both of the above as their last words......

Yeah. there ya go. I had a great uncle in the Foriegn Legion back then, who got put in charge of some Senegalese troops. He said they were enthusiastic head-hunters, and that this form of schrecklicheit was rather admired and encouraged up the chain of command. So if your superiors give you trouble about the shrunken heads, just tell them that's where you acquired the habit, and that THEY WEREN'T THERE, MAN!

"Lovely, isn't it? It took me half a lifetime to invent it. I'm sure you've discovered my deep and abiding interest in pain. At present, I'm writing the definitive work on the subject. So I want you to be totally honest with me on how the Machine makes you feel. This being our first try, I'll use the lowest setting."

And the chocolate coating makes the miracle pill go down better. Geez, a "Princess Bride" reference. One of my favorite movies! And that's coming from a guy who's spent a lifetime developing an immunity to iocane powder