von Baur

Which begs a question that's been on my mind of late. FSX is three or four years old now. Anybody heard any rumors of FS 11? I held at 9 and I'm getting kind of antsy for a more modern civilian simulator but I don't want to spend money on one that will be supplanted before it gets old.

Thanx for the clarification, Jim. (How did I know it would be you or Lou who came up with the definitive answer? )

Ahh, Wikipedia, that paragon of reliable information. Don't get me wrong, I like Caudron. I'm just not sold on the G-3. Some further digging reveals (courtesy the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's website ): Gaston and René Caudron were among the earliest aircraft manufacturers in France. After building and testing a few original designs in 1909 and early in 1910, the brothers established a flight training school at Crotoy and an aircraft factory at Rue in 1910. The first factory-produced Caudron was the type A4, a 35-horsepower Anzani-powered tractor biplane in which the pilot sat completely exposed behind the rear spar of the lower wing. The next major Caudron design, the type B, was the first to feature the abbreviated fuselage/pilot nacelle, characteristic of many later Caudron aircraft. It was powered by a 70-horsepower Gnôme or 60-horsepower Anzani engine mounted in the front of the nacelle with the pilot immediately behind. Although a tractor, the tail unit of the type B was supported by booms extending from the trailing edge of the wings, an arrangement more commonly featured on pusher aircraft. Lateral control was accomplished with wing warping. The type B established the basic configuration of Caudron designs through the G.4 model. The first of the well-known Caudron G series aircraft appeared in 1912. Initially designed as a trainer, the type G was developed into the G.2 by the outbreak of the First World War, and saw limited military service in 1914 as single and two-seat versions. By that time the Caudron factory had been relocated to Lyon, where an improved version, designated the G.3, was being produced in significant numbers. Soon a second factory was opened at Issy-les-Moulineaux, near Paris, to meet military demand for the airplane. The G.3 was primarily a two-seat aircraft, but a few were converted to single-seat versions. They were powered variously by 80-horsepower Le Rhône or Gnôme rotary engines or a 90-horsepower Anzani radial. A total of 2,450 G.3s were built, including a small number built under license in Britain and Italy. I deliberately did not exclude the part about the G-3's having been built under license outside of the home plant (and country, for that matter), becuase that could explain the minor differences between the photos, including the engine, which in the Ball photo does not appear to have the heavy intake manifold that the museum photos show. But, given the B-series "...established the basic configuration of Caudron designs through the G.4..." it's possible it was a B being used as a trainer. Another possibility is an earlier version of the G-type, which was designed as a trainer. I wasn't able to find any images of either a B-type or the G-2 (and if a G-2 existed, what about a G-1?) so I have nothing against which I can compare the Ball photo. Does anyone have any or know of any links to some?

Not to be argumentative, but is there absolute historical confirmation on the G-3 (date of the photo and aircraft type flown by his or neighboring units at that time)? The Caudron's struts are clearly and noticeably thicker in the center than at the ends and that doesn't appear to be the case in the Ball photo. Clearly not the Avro, which had a full cowl, identical wingspans top and bottom, and straight trailing edges. Nor the N-11, which was the first sesqui-plane and a "V"-strutter. *edit* Also noticed the placement of the struts varies from the museum G-3. Ball photo has the diagonal struts going to the first or second spar from the wingtip and the vertical interplanes on the seventh or eighth. The museum photo is third, maybe fourth and ninth or tenth.

I was looking at, and thinking, the same thing, Flyby . I certainly hope the pilots who had that gun available weren't the excitable type who'd fire at something as soon as it crossed his path. Would make for a very uncomfortable time for the gunner, whatever position he was in.

So your sausage got smoked, but his fat was pulled out of the fire? Not the case. Open your pilot dossier and anywhere you see his name (near the top and again, twice, near the middle) substitute the new one and enjoy your new career. Or rather, your old career with a new name.

Back to the original topic, I have a few questions My computer is not far from a window and I turn the air conditioning off when the evening cools down to save money . Even went so far as to build shrouds for the two windows in which I have my fans so as to draw out air higer in the rooms, thus lowering the overall temps (and reducing the noise, slightly) . Problem is the bugs small enough to fit through my window screen seem to lo-o-o-ove this great big panel of light in front of me (any idea how annoying it is to chase that aircraft off in the distance only to have it fly right off the screen? ) and my warm body. Will spraying the screen with vanilla keep the pests from crawling through and pestering me? Or will it just attract even more of the little bug-gers? And what concentration of vanilla will make this work?

I bet he wouldn't have done that if they were Snipes.

The grass is always greener...

Oh, come on! Someone with some Photoshop skills has to rest a giant hand on top of and run a huge wire out behind that car to make it look like a mouse.

A wise man once said, "The only difference between a Fairy Tale and a War Story is that the former begins 'Once upon a time...' and the latter begins 'No s**t, guys, this really happened...". The fact is that if a person will lie about anything he will lie about anything. And therefore anything he says must be suspect. While official records may have been destroyed memories would not have been. And even if it wasn't Jasta 5 someone somewhere would have remembered and told the story sometime about a lone British plane chewing up his airfield on or about that time. And amid all the controversy that person or his child or grandchild (or great-grandchild) likely would have stepped forward to share the fringes of that spotlight and claim his '15 minutes'. Thus is human nature. Jealousy may be the cause of a naysayer or two, but it will not put a majority of people against someone. And even jealousy or personal dislike will not cause people to belittle or doubt someone's abilities or accomplishments. Many people disliked Mohammed Ali and Mike Tyson, but none would deny what they could do in their respective primes. If so many of his squadmates, men who lived and ate and risked their lives with him, felt he was not to be taken at his word who are we to say they were just jealous. Lies (deliberate malicious fabrications),stories (innocent tales meant to entertain) and pranks (let's yank the new guy's chain) often times grow to be monsters that, if not corrected early, can become absolutely uncontrollable. A night of drunken "There I was..." at the bar overheard by some hero-worshipping newbie and followed by a rousing round of "My CO can beat up your CO" can turn into "Paul McCartney is dead, Hitler is alive, and there was a gunman on the grassy knoll" before you know it. And a chain of events can reach a point in which high-ranking people may feel their reputations or even careers are in jeopardy if the truth comes out. While I agree that the VC is not awarded lightly it must be pointed out that most of the people making and endorsing medal recommendations are not present for the action in question and rely on the word of others. If presented properly (single-handed attack deep behind enemy lines, just for an off-the-wall example) the circle of conspirators might be kept small enough to ensure its security. Thus, whether the whole thing was a deliberate hoax for purposes of morale or self-aggrandizement (or a combination of the two) or simply a story that got out of hand, it is possible for medals, even the highest ones, to be awarded when not deserved. For that matter, most medal-winners don't feel they deserved them, with the possible exception of wound medals. From what I've read (and JFM would likely be the best authority on the matter here) Brown did not officially claim von Richtofen and neither admitted nor denied shooting him down, only shooting at him. Nonetheless, the same British air service which confirmed Bishop's exploits awarded him the victory. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Just tried the demo again. Still can't get it to recogize Track IR.Anybody have any success with this and TIR3 Pro?

:rofl:

I don't know whether to feel relieved that I didn't miss it or sad that that means P5 is even farther off.

Standard survival equipment includes a signalling mirror not much bigger than a 3x5 card. The instructors said it could be seen for hundreds of miles. Given the light it's reflecting has already travelled 93,000,000 miles, what's a couple hundred more? Resolution is a major factor in simulator visibility, as is screen size. On my 19" 1280X1024 monitor it's difficult to see enemy aircraft for some time in a QC mission. But the same mission on my 32" 1080p TV and I can see them within a few seconds.

Awwwww, shucks. While I think SRC's suggestion of making 'my' labels standard for P5 (did I miss P4? ) is a bit over-much, he may be onto something. I wonder if a simpler interface could be conjured up for the labels. Maybe something that would allow the player to set the various colors and degrees of transparency in the workshop and without having to take night classes on computer code. Devs, waddya think?

The labels are there, Lewie; more easily seen against darker backgrounds. My goal was to have them almost invisible, making them useless in locating and identifying enemy aircraft, but allowing me to see which of my wingmen are still around.

Charlie's just playing, Shiloh. And that's the other potential danger here. Sometimes cats don't realize how much more tender our skin is and how much more fragile our bones. In playing, if Christian had forgotten that, he could have injured or killed one of them, and that could have been misinterpretted by his mate as an attack, which she would have assisted. When I was a boy our next-door neighbors, two spinster sisters, always had cats. Much of what I know about them was derived from my older brother and me capturing the kittens and teaching them that we were their friends (it made sense when I was six, trust me-and it worked). Kittens barely six or seven weeks old, their legs not much more than three inches long, would jump three or more feet straight up to clear the barriers we'd set. And it never ceases to amaze me how they jump to whatever they want to jump on and land nearly as softly as if they'd stepped down an inch. Cats are the second-best animals on the planet. Ferrets are first.

Being in tune with his aircraft, I would think a pilot would feel a bullet's impact (certainly with a substantial part of it like metal or wood, possibly fabric to a lesser extent) more quickly than hear it, particularly with the cacophany that would be involved in open-cockpit aerial combat. I'm sure you can all feel when your car, no matter how smoothly it rides, runs over something even as smal as a 1/4" to 1/2" twig. Machine gun fire, OTOH, is a sustained, regular sound, that would be picked up very quickly if you were alert at all. But the presence of machine gun fire does not necessarily indicate that you're taking damage. My thrust here is using the info lines to let me know that in lieu of any response through my force feedback joystick, as many other flight sims I've played has. T-Smoke: I felt the same way when I started looking at this issue. But once you understand it it's really quite simple and elegant. First, the 0X has no direct significance to the labels and I believe it identifies the number to come to the program as a color. The remaing eight digits can be thought of as four groups of 2-digit numbers referring to opacity, red value, green value, and blue value of the color it describes in that order. So what's with the letters? Well, normal two-digit numbers can only describe 100 variations (00-99). But by increasing the number of integers (if that's the correct term) from 10 to 16 two digits can encompass 256 variations. This is what computer geeks (no offense meant ) refer to as "hexi-decimal". So, if you start with the lowest integer as 0 and the highest as F, you count 00, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 0A, 0B, 0C, 0D, 0E, 0F for what you know as 0-15, and then the next number, which is 16, reads as 10. Following the logic, the number after 9F would be A0, then A1, A2, and so forth. The stock opacity setting is FF, which, is maximum or totally solid. Mine is 3F, which is probably about 20% or so. Olham's 6F would be somewhere around 40-45%. Personally, I don't believe that being able to translate the hexi-decimals into base ten is as important for customizing the labels as is getting a grasp on the sequence. I hope this helps.

I'm not surprised. I'm a cat lover and have had dozens in the last 35 years. And any cat lover will tell you that the only difference between house cats and jungle cats is they're size. They all behave exactly the same way in everything they do. And any cat lover will also tell you that they are probably among the smartest animals around. Nor am I surprised at how well Christian's mate accepted his friends. Again, being an intelligent creature she understood that if he saw them as not food and not a threat then she should as well. I've often had stand-offish cats come to me, albeit cautiously, once I've managed to get one of their number to trust me, especially if the first is one considered a leader (prime member in the group or kittens following a mother's lead). *edit* All that said, FlybyPC has a very valid point. The results could have been tragically different.

Not being able to afford a dedicated gaming computer, mine must do double-duty. Obviously this means that something like Ruggbutt's set-up (MAJOR drool, btw) is out of the question. It used to be pretty simple to go from this to this But I recently purchased a G940 Flight Control system and putting the stick and the throttle on that keyboard tray was too confining, not to mention that the tray sags a bit when pulled all the way out and my legs constantly rub against it with my feet on the rudder pedals. Clearly something had to be done. But what? It had to provide support and clearance, place the controls at the proper position in relation to my body and be easily installed, removed and stored. Here's my . The stick sits on this which clips thusly onto the keyboard tray using the two metal pieces at the top and is kept from sliding around by the wooden piece about halfway down. It's shown pulled out, but for flying the tray is slid all the way in so it has support across its entire width and therefore is held up securely. The throttle posed a more interesting engineering challenge. It weighs a few pounds, so its support must be strong enough to hold that plus the weight of my arm resting on it. As you can see in the first picture, my left (throttle) side is almost even with the left edge of the desk. Placing it on a box might work (I in fact used a small folding TV dinner tray when the system first arrived) but it would either be way too big, making storage difficult, or very unstable. I needed to make something that would attach to the desk quickly and easily and yet provide strength and stability while basically floating in space. The solution: Removed it looks like this The two white pieces are simply inner sections of curtain rod that are held to the central support by the vertical zip-ties. The horizontal zip-tie prevents the rods from sliding as the mount is put in place and removed. The central support is screwed and glued to the top plate for maximum strength and is the same thickness as the side of the desk. The white pieces slide in and out of this and another on the inside of the desk. They are outer sections of the same curtain rod used on the mount's central support. The screw on the left prevents them from slipping during mounting and removal. There is a very small amount of wiggle to it right now, but I intend to notch the the front of the mount to fit over the side of the desk by an inch or so (a couple of cm, for our metric cousins ) which should remedy that situation. All of the wood used was left over from when I reduced the size of the hutch that originally sat on top of the desk, so it matches perfectly and the metal pieces on the joystick plate are the clips from the curtain rod reshaped to suit my needs. Final result: for the cost of a large curtain rod, a small bag of screws and a few zip-ties. Build time was about four to five hours, inluding allowing the glue to dry. Installation requires simply moving the keyboard to the top of the desk, sliding the throttle mount in and clipping the joystick plate on. Disassembly is just as easy and as can be seen in the lower left of the first picture it takes up less than 2"x9" (5cm x 23cm) floor space when not in use. I deliberately cut the pieces longer than I felt I would need, just in case, and intend to cut them down to exactly the right size, now that I'm sure of what that is. The Joystick plate is versatile, too, and can be placed at any point on the keyboard tray. That way I can put it between my legs for most planes or move it to the right side for newer fly-by-wire planes like the F-16 should I ever want to venture past 1918 ( ). And yes, that's a pillow on the chair. I'm old, dammit!! :yes:

No luck. I had selected my stick from their list the first time, too, Beard.Not giving me the 'feel' off force feedback, just stock retun to center. And Track IR is not working at all. Could it be that WoP just doesn't like my old TIR3? It workd fine for OFF and there's no way I'd shell out for a newer version just to play WoP.

I just downloaded the demo yesterday and can't get Track IR to work in it. Joystick (Sidewinder FF2) shows up in the menu but doesn't seem to work properly, either. Other than that it seems pretty good. May try the game.

Excellent news.

I was five miles or so from the epicenter of the Northridge earthquake in 1994. This was 50 to 100 times as strong and I've heard reports that the shaking went on for several minutes. That alone would have been terrifying enough, but the real devastation was the resultant tsunami. Aboslutely incredible.