Lexx_Luthor

Dave:: hehe did you see this the other day in the red blob thread...? In Soviet Russia, Lake Contaminates You I thought it was a humorous title.

Man that is so true. Thanks for the article.

I thought it was some Klingon Battle Blade - or something. Surprised he didn't stab his-self...or they didn't show that part hehe. Top comment...ever

UK:: Seek out more. You will see new angles on J.P. Morgan and other giant bankers of that time. Among the most visually captivating events to the curious eye is turn-of-the-century laboratory experiments dancing on the edge between classical and quantum physics. My fave physics labs were the ones reproducing these early tests of the atomic world. Never before nor since has physical science fascinated the general public so much -- witness the popular technology expo fairs, also in London, way back then.

Jedi, eraser, R5, well said. I wish I could write like that.

I used to love binoculars and scopes. I was doing an initial exploratory scouting for a super microscope and found this thread... Pictures of Various Optics During WW2, by Drew5233... ~> http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/nw-europe/16945-pictures-various-optics-during-ww2.html FAVE: The most modernistic art style pic is on page 2; a sharp relief image of the Egyptian soldier training under the desert (Heliopolis) yet icy clear cirrus sky

Interesting, a link poasted on the 2nd page there... WWII MILITARY RADIO TECHNOLOGY~> http://www.desyatnik.com/index.php , mostly German. Cool stuph.

Its getting near Halloween, folks panic on the internet. -- big EDIT ...me and my cynical "humour" again, rather than real discussion...sorry FC.

Baltik, this is good...near the bottom...very classy! Thanks for the link. Love it.

Brain:: Same thing here, with the hurricane Katrina flooding New Orleans. For decades the city was told the levees would fail. They failed. Granted, to be honest, its the wrong place to build a city.

ICBMs:: You generally can't put stuff beyond the map edge, and it may cause game crash problems putting them beyond the invisible map Border. The Border -- found in FlightEngine.ini under [WorldSettings] -- stops you from flying within visual range of the map edge as TK doesn't want you to see that. You can have alot of fun with terrain painting. Making high walls for air racing, like the trenches in the Death Star scene, but with sharp turns. However, basic terrain 16x16 hfd bmp files do the same, and much easier, on a much smaller scale, but you can't see effects very far unlike the method I use. Combining both methods together may be possible.

Indeed, this guy is on to something, and 15 years ago. I can't see this threatening a specific armed forces branch directly, but the larger national security angle is there. In Volume 4 Chapter 1 - Paths to Extinction: The US Air Force in 2025... Page 9:: It seems everybody's air force has been downsizing since the Cold War, some more than others, often depending on economic conditions -- Russia, Argentina maybe??

I dunno. It may have been worse than Chernobyl, although the local population may have been less.

Scary stuff. From the videos, everything hit gets painted red. Biggest toxic/radioactive fluff up yet may be Chelyabinsk plutonium factory in the Urals, back in the 1950s.

Yea, and that was 15 years ago. I'm waiting to see "...unpersoned aerial vehicle (UAV)..."

Don't know much about this. I will have to deal with this eventually for my campaign. When? One quick abstract idea: You need a "fake SAM" ICBM launcher high enough to see beyond all map terrain. Okay. Divide your ICBM launchers into two classes: (1) functioning missile launchers in very high artificial terrain placed well outside of played area, and (2) properly placed targets for Player and possibly AI aircraft. Why? The player dropping a bomb on an ICBM silo in Kodlosk USSR won't see warheads landing in Mississippie USA. You generally won't see the ICBM launch during your attack run. You can paint terrain.bmp to make very high artificial terrain bumps. I mark my north pole for now with the thing below. Its about 8km wide -- NO MAYBE 40KM WIDE, forgot measurement, its the ring seen at north pole in the Merry Christmas thread -- and about 12km tall. That's the maximum bump height I can make with my selected terrain elevation differential (45m). But 12km is higher than Mt. Everest, and given the flat world terrain in THE SF, a launcher at 12km will see any aircraft also flying at 12km any where on the map no matter how far, given enough detection range. View from about 34km altitude... View from near sea level... Now, an ICBM complex on top of this thing won't be targetable in a believable way. So you place the Player/AI silo targets in another location, far away. These terrain bumps holding the "real" working missile launchers should be placed in a non-played area on the map. They should be inside the invisible map "border" wall (long topic about that). -------- PS:: I landed an F-104A on top of that thing, then took off. Its very interesting landing and taking off at 12km altitude, with the high true air speed. I also taxied along the top of that thing, with contrail, until I tipped over the inside cliff and fell down inside, totally stalled at first but gaining airspeed as I fell. I landed on the sea (water=0) at the bottom of the inside -- high walls all around. Strange thing to see. Very fun stuff can be had with painting terrain.bmp. -------

Yea, I'm making mine specific to SAC vs PVO, LeMay vs Savitsky. And I can't tile. Try out the 3DEM. If ya'll fellas are interested, I can upload the working HFD I have with blank colour coded tiles. But we need to discuss the issues of gaps, tile size, possible terrain scalings, and redo the HFD accordingly. With large enough tile sizes, I can just get Taiwan and Florida Keys on the same north polar map. About 15,000 kilometers.

Surface skimming combat on ice moons. I was working toward that in my old Fortran space sim. It can work here in THE SF. In the real thing (not game), the low gravity allows lots of manuever time for a fuel load, and you can orbit just above the surface, and on these ice moons, orbit speed just above the surface is maybe a few hundred miles per hour. For the game, terrain height field .bmp can be painted with circles and they would show up 3D in the SF Sun. Set gee low. Take out aero effects. Use harrier type thrusters. Set day colour to black. at midnight the SF Sun

: : you'd have to have a Russia map : :

Don't recall. Whoever the fella was, he got a MiG or two doing this, or so I think I read.

lol FC okay. Naturally, like flame to a moth, I was first drawn straight into Volume 3 Chapter 4 - A Contrarian View of Strategic Aerospace Warfare. I got mothballed by the hi falutin' wording. It seems to have some neat ideas, but seeing the author retreat to the stock "Sun Tzu" and "OODO LOOP," using 24 times the word "contextual," and NEVER using the word "lemay," forced me to give up. Curious times three, I've not yet seen the word "lemay" anywhere there. I'll keep looking. Is LeMay being rubbed out, even 15 years back? Then it got better. Volume 3 Chapter 15 - Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025. I only took a peek yet, but its seems very fascinating indeed; cloud seeding, microwave transmitters, creating drought or floods, etc... One thing jumped off the page... Uninhabited. That's smooth. I'm almost through with Volume 4 Chapter 1 - Paths to Extinction: The US Air Force in 2025, but near the end it gets chatty and I'm getting stuck. Overall this is a decent read, and I got questions. Hold on to your headset. Back in the 50s, RAND rolled out an idea to clear weather locally: high yield nuc evaporates cloud layers near the blast. It's NOT as silly as I just made it sound. The idea was part of research into automated recon of post-strike ICBM targets, the recon camera re-entering about a minute behind the nuc warhead, photo-opping the target through the cloud hole, and transmatting the screenshots back home. That could make sense for immediate post blast target observation, no matter the pre-blast weather clear or soupy. I can stomach the style of the early RAND papers. Yea they were kinda nuts but from what I've seen, they sound less PC than our post-modern stuff. Thanks!! The Space 2020 page looks intriquing as well ~> http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/csat/2020/index.htm

Julhelm that's very interesting. I'd imagine advanced cammoflage ideas hope to use de-railed visual prediction to conceal or trick an observer for a very brief moment, and often a brief moment of confusion on the part of the observer is what deceptive cammo (image) needs to work. In a way, those bubbled girls are similar to deception jamming, but on an infinitely more complex level dealing with human eye and brain. Cool stuff thanks. Now, going further: I notice less deceptive image creation looking at the male Obama than the females. I'm a guy. So this could be a factor on my part. On the other hand, the bubbling may not work as effectively on the male because only one part is bubbled, and the bubble is large, larger than required, and obvious. Females require at least two bubbles, and more numerous bubbles can have relatively smaller sizes, fooling the brain more. Does this sound like Correct Thinking? lol Experiment: Find a pic of guys like the girls, and bubble them in two ways. Use just one required bubble per male, and then use extra bubbles assuming they are female. See if it makes a difference to at least male perception. Then maybe bubble up pics of non-humoid objects. Interesting stuff

That's like 1.5 miles. Just wow. I was reading about an F-86 pilot in Korea War that shot up MiGs at maybe 1 to 2 miles distance, in very high altitude fights. The other guys couldn't get a grip on this, but this one guy relied on the thin air -- roundabout 1/4 density than seal level maybe -- and took advantage of it.