SkippyBing

Ahh, BAE Systems, can build a rail gun, can't fit the same tech in a carrier to launch aircraft for less than £2 Billion....

The idiots who pulled off this little practical joke were obviously from the sticks, and thought all passenger RailRoad cars had operable windows. Have they never heard of air-conditioned passenger cars.

Well a) it's funny either way and b) watching the video there are definitely open windows on the first few carriages through and possibly an open door on one of the later ones. You'd be surprised how much of the world doesn't have air-conditioning.

Harry's still on the OCU as I understand it (I know someone on the same course). The 4 Apaches were already on Ocean for Op Cougar*, be interesting to see if they swap some of the other stuff on there for more Apaches.

*Op Cougar was/is an Amphib deployment by the RN that was planned months ago and had nothing to do with Libya.

The Mosquito Night fighter though only carried 4 20mm also if I remember rightly some of the production runs off the P-61 also only only carried 4 20mm as they had airflow issues with the turret.

That's pretty much what I thought, although the early Mosquito Night Fighter also had the 4 .303s the radar wasn't really up to much consisting mostly of some aerials stuck on the nose!

Thanks for clarifying the armament situation, I was/am kind of stumped as to why they thought the P-61 had the better armament and thought I might have missed something, as they temporarily locked the thread and deleted one of my posts I figured I should stop asking over there!

Interesting to hear about the German experience with the 30mm, do you know if the sight could compensate for that or was it basically done by eye?

Having probably come close to being banned at Sim-Outhouse over this I was wondering if anyone here could clear things up for me.

One of the Mods over there is working on a P-61 for FSX, which is coming along nicely, at some point they said the Mosquito wasn't a good night-fighter which I queried, because it seemed to do alright. One of the points they raised was that the Mosquito couldn't match the armament of the P-61 and said 'With the P-61s four canon alone its considered to be the most devastating aircraft of world war two. it could shred anything' and 'The Mossie didnt have that kind of firepower.'.

However as far as I can tell both aircraft had 4 x Hispano 20mm cannon, while some P-61s had four .50 cal in a turret I'm not sure they'd be making much of a difference once you'd been hit by all that 20mm anyway. So are they wrong to say the Mosquito didn't have that kind of firepower or did the P-61 have better 20mms?

Don't get me started on the radar side of things where apparently the P-61 had better equipment, despite the later Mosquitoes being fitted with the same model...

Ahh memories, I remember throwing 4.5" explosive bricks at that for an entire day back in 2001. Made it tricky trying to sleep during my six hours off mind...

PS ditto on the FA2

Regarding the "alluminum"

The thing most Brits don't notice is that Americans pronounce it the way they spell it, they're missing the second i.

There's actually a good reason for this, it's the original spelling as coined by the great Cornish scientist Humphry Davy (inventor of the Miners Lamp and various other things as well as being notable for spelling his name with two less Es than I would have), who was the first to refine it.

It was only some miserable English language imperialist who decided that the second i should be added to it to sound more classical (as in Latin) and tie in with all the other exciting new elements that were being discovered.

Personally I like saying aluminum to wind up people who seem to thing that that's the most important thing to be worrying about, and then claim my Cornish heritage as the reason.

God bless Matelots.

Incidentally I had the honour of receiving my wings from Henry Allingham one of the last two veterans living in the UK back in 2007, a very humbling experience.

The amusing thing about most of those renders/impressions is that they have the tail rotor down right (because that's the only thing anyone's actually seen) and the rest is a normal Blackhawk with aerials and all sort sticking out all over the place. If it's actually stealthy it's likely to be more like the side on profile drawing with as much as possible shielded/conformal.

Reference coming in under the radar, I think a stealthy helicopter would make it easier on the crew, <100 ft on goggles is hard work (although less hard than 200' bizarrely), if you can safely take it up to 500'+ then it's easier which means you're fresher for the actual insertion. A stealth/low observable helicopter should be able to travel further at a 'sensible' height, i.e. it'll blend in with the ground clutter at a higher altitude than a non stealth one.

Was in a comedy club last week and they asked if anyone was going to watch it - total silence

You weren't in Sherborne were you, same thing happened to me there!

Have you tried right clicking the installer and selecting 'Run as Administrator'?

The Program Files folders are protected from unauthorised users altering files in them, basically as a way of trying to stop malicious code being run. If you select 'Run as Admin' you're saying that it's alright for that program to make changes to those folders.

That's why TK made the Strike Fighters 2 series place the files you'd want to change somewhere else.

Although it's ironic that an MS product doesn't play well with another MS product they were produced by two separate divisions of MS. Also FSX was written around the same time as Vista so they didn't have access to all the detail as to how security was going to be implimented in the new OS.

You can lower the level of protection from the User Access Control or UAC panel, personally I have it one from the bottom setting which means I have to run things as Admin to let them change stuff but it cuts the warnings down to the minimum which is handy when you're doing dev stuff!

As I understand it's essentially an A330 with the wing from an A340, which handily means the plumbing is already there for the refuelling pods.

I'm guessing its max take-off weight is lower than a C-17s?

Interestingly the UK Tank commander at the start of Gulf War 1 is on record as saying the tanks days are numbered and that if it had been up to him he would have got rid of them in our recent defence review and kept other things.

I believe the thinking is that against any decent opposition the tank is vulnerable to air attack and against a lower end opponent the tank is unnecessary. Similarly if you're going up against someone with tanks you use air power to take them out.

Out of interest, does anyone else think the rivers are generally too wide? Flying past the Isle of Wight it looked like the place was flooded, whereas in real life you can't really make out the streams on there from 1000' up. Similarly the mainland looks a bit waterlogged to me as well. Thoughts?

Well I installed the patch and err... nothing's really changed! Still at least it runs.

I think I'm going to make a conscious effort not to waste my weekend trying to get this to work when I could be out with the 3 dimensional people! I'm hoping if I leave it a few weeks they'll have the patch sorted properly and I can go back to figuring out why I'm such a bad shot...

I've just about got CloD running on my machine after discovering the anthropomorphic control setting was why I couldn't use my throttle, as the slightly erratic input from one of my trim dials meant the stupid thing thought I was using two hands already.

It's nice enough but as has been said on here it's not exactly the Battle of Britain when you've got all of one squadron per side in any given flight and the lack of dynamic campaign is a complete fail in this day and age. The after mission dialogue/story thing bears no relation to what I've just done, which admittedly is generally dead stick my Hurricane somewhere on the coast after I blow the engine up, and having to successfully complete a sortie before progressing to the next one is so late '90s!

I did at one stage brave the Ubi and 1C forums to see why I couldn't use my throttle and sweet Jesus are they hostile to anyone who doesn't praise the mighty Oleg for being able to beta test that which he has deigned to give us. Apparently if you have a problem with paying £30 for incomplete buggy software you're some sort of BF2 playing pirate who doesn't understand how complicated a flight sim is and should immediately go and spend £150 on a new graphics card before even thinking of complaining about frame rates.

Err... why would you boil water for your plants? What effect did filtering the water have? What was the control group, i.e. standard water?

On the other hand there have been a number of studies into people who claim to be hyper-sensitive to electro-magnetic fields, all of which have proven negative while following a rather more rigorous approach to the scientific method. The planet is after all bathed in electro-magnetic radiation naturally.

Reference using microwaves, I wanted to cook a baked potato once and checked online how to do one in the microwave (I don't do this sort of thing often, more a stir fry kind of guy. And pizza I do a great pizza) every page I found on how to microwave a potato was full of comments on how that wasn't the way to do it and that you should use an oven. Ignoring the fact that if I'm looking up how to cook a potato in a microwave I may in fact want my food now and not in the hour it'll take my cooker to warm up to temperature and then cook the *******g thing.

Concur, this thing wasn't ready for release. Currently on my rig it only seems to update the throttle position when it feels like it which makes any sort of finesse impossible and overheating engines a major headache.

I think a lot of my flying will be over the channel until they get it fixed to give double digit frame rates over the land.

Rum and Coke.

Also having recently realised beer has carbohydrates I've started substituting it for potatoes...

IanH, thanks for that, the fleets within fleets thing makes perfect sense, at one point pretty much every Lynx flight had a unique fit which made crew allocation a nightmare.

I shall now hunt down the individual who gave me the duff gen, although to be fair it was late, we had drunk a lot and the pizzas were late turning up...

Is the RAF the last operator, and will these birds find a new home?

The RAF is scheduled to use them until ~2020 I think, meanwhile the Italians, Germans and Saudis also operate the Tornado.

The actual aircraft taking part in OPERATION ELLAMY* are due to be retired soon as part of the UK defence cuts, this makes sense as it means you're putting extra hours on airframes that are going out of service rather than ones you're planning on keeping around for another decade.

*The UK name for operations in support of UN Resolution 1973, as opposed to Odyssey Dawn which is a bit of a stupid name to use when you realise the Odyssey was the story of one man's seemingly endless struggle to return home after a ten year war in the Middle East...

Just to clarify my position (sat down, near a computer etc.), technically a lot of what she says is true, however without understanding why, how or what she's talking about that's irrelevant. A lot of the effects of radiation exposure are only available as statistical results due to various factors such as most of the planet being radioactive to some extent, humans (and most lifeforms) evolving under these conditions, radiation being massively misunderstood by the lay person (in terms of types exposure levels etc.).

Yes, in some cases a higher than average exposure to radiation does appear to have a beneficial effect, but without understanding how or why that happens you can't categorically say that it's a good thing. i.e. As an oil well logging engineer I received a higher than average dose of radiation, however I also had a much better health care plan than the average person, which do you think had the greater effect on my life expectancy?

Epic fail - 'Some radiation may kill you as we saw at Nagaskai and Horishima' so not the massive f*** off fireballs then?

Unfortunately for the media the effects of radiation can't be summarised in one headline or 30 seconds of airtime, obviously this exceeds their intellectual capacity if not that of the rest of us.

For those of you with an attention span that can be measured in seconds something useful

Best of luck.

I was there for six months last year and it's possibly the safest I've been in the decade or so I've been serving. Mind you I wasn't flying for once so that may have helped!

I have always purchased and supported ONLY independent developers or small publishers that avoid Steam like behaviors.

You know Steam releases games by small and independent developers don't you?

Oh yeah, never had any problems with Steam either, certainly made my life easier at times.