Dragon1-1

Just finished the campaign, and man, what a ride. I have a suggestion for the M15: could we get a tanker at the end? The reason is, there's a dogfight involved. DCS AI, as we all know, can be unpredictable, and as such, you may end up spending quite some time in burner while chasing them. That's OK, but afterwards, you have to get back to the boat somehow. For me, that involved going to best conserve instead of keeping formation with Paco. Would that be a big issue to add an option to maybe hit the tanker before rejoining with him? IRL, I guess there would've been a recovery tanker over the boat itself, but that doesn't quite work in DCS, so we just need to bring enough gas back to come back safely.

Please add this. The magic turnaround is useless in SP and immersion breaking. At the very least, mission creators need to be able to toggle it on and off. Right now, the only way to avoid it is to stop short of the intended parking position.

They definitely need a running animation, right now they casually stroll around no matter what's happening. No urgency to be seen.

Note that there's already a free Su-25T, for those who want to enjoy a combat server. That said, while better armed, the T is too heavy and sluggish to be really fun to fly.

Which one will come first will depend on licensing shenanigans with Sukhoi and the Russian government. Su-33 is a navalized Su-27, with pretty much the same systems, but you never know, because some government drone might "think" along the lines of "Su-27 is OK, but not Su-33, because it's got a higher number".

Well, they're remaking the Su-25 and offering that (still FC3) as a free aircraft. Maybe something more will come out of it, and in any case, it's a better starter than Su-25T, which is a pig and not all that fun to fly because of that. You can throw the Su-25 around a little, and even shoot down other aircraft if they make a mistake of getting into a turning fight with you.

Also worth noting that in Vietnam, Mavs were nowhere near as good at attacking SAM radars as the Shrike. The A model had no zoom, and the B wasn't much better, so while the kinematic range might have been longer, the effective range was really short. There was basically no way to lock an A model Mav on a SAM site without entering its WEZ. Plus, there was no guarantee the Mav won't veer off at the last moment and hit a "tactical bush", this is not modeled in DCS, but was a serious problem with early contrast seekers. In modern-ish scenarios, Shrikes are effectively obsolete, but in its heyday, Mavericks were unusable for tangling with anything with more range than a ZPU. IRL, if you had modern Mavs, there'd be little to no reason to take Shrikes. You can see the site if it's in Shrike range, and if the radar is in a million pieces, it certainly counts as effectively suppressed. Shrikes are lighter (being basically a retuned Sparrow), but this only comes into play if you're planning on dogfighting with them.

Yeah, I know about it, but it's not quite DCS-level graphics, Diaspora was made a while ago. Plus, while there is a VR build of the engine they use, it's still somewhat experimental, and it's not nearly as immersive as Squadrons is (2D menus only, the engine its built upon sucks in that regard, not that DCS is any better here). It's a good entry for a freeware game, though.

It's very specific XML with a fixed syntax, and there's not enough material to train a dedicated AI for it. It's exactly what AI tends to be very bad at. I'd be careful with that story, too. It's too short to make a call on the actual story (other than the writing is excessively verbose), but I'm pretty sure you'd want a callsign that makes sense.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222730/STAR_WARS_Squadrons/ Amazing visuals, VR, HOTAS support, but flight physics from Star Wars. Pretty great characters and a cool singleplayer campaign, too. Sadly, it's made by EA, and it's out of active dev. We definitely need more of those on the market. In fact, if ED were to use DCS engine for a licensed BSG sim, using physics similar to FC3 and even simpler controls, I think it'd have some appeal.

Just a quick sanity check, are the J-7s in the campaign supposed to be equipped with flare pods? The dispensers we have are specific to MiG-21bis, and I can't find good info on whether the J-7s would have had anything similar in the 90s. As far as I can tell, on any MiG-21 other than the one we have, chaff/flares were only ever carried in a pod on the centerline pylon, and this would not have been carried on most types of missions.

The thing is, you need to get the taxi directors to acknowledge your salute (otherwise the crew won't hook you up to the cat), and the command doesn't always do that. I got it to work, it seems the mission doesn't break, it's just a little annoying. Now, if only those MiGs didn't gang up on me every damn time...

Except on those which only have one radio, of which we have a few. Then it'll work normally.

In the West it's usually called "Velocity search" or some such, and Pete Bonanni had some choice words to say about it ("a joke played on the Viper pilots by Westinghouse engineers"), so I guess this is a fairly universal sentiment.

Honestly, I think a more apt description of that behavior is "thinks he knows better than anyone else just because he builds rigs for money, and is being a jerk about it". It has nothing to do with the real woke movement, and the rightwing hijacking of the term essentially boils down "a thing that we don't like", which is not terribly useful (nor is the leftwing hijacking the term to include gender/class/sex equality struggle, the real deal is about black people always getting the shaft in the US). Myself, I just want to know how much the 5090 gains in VR, and without the BS frames, please. I've seen some reviews, and it does seem to outperform my 3090 (it had better!), but I haven't seen anything conclusive on just how much of a gain there is.

No, you are insisting my assumptions can't be right, only because a few other products had tried and failed, ignoring those that tried and succeeded. That's exactly how you end up not making anything new or innovative. I never said my approach is guaranteed to work, and your "counterevidence" doesn't counter my evidence that it sometimes does. You seem to be trying to prove that a product that doesn't match or exceed the capabilities of what's already on the market can't possibly make a profit. How about that: a computer with a low res screen, wimpy CPU, a cheap knockoff OS, and the biggest innovation is its modular architecture, which doesn't really seem bring much to the table. There's no way that could sell, right? And yet, you're probably not typing this on an Amiga. My point being, a new technology that does not compare well to the cutting edge can still succeed, if the people making it have the right business idea. You're obviously unlikely to ever have such an idea, but that doesn't mean nobody else can.

It seems that after saluting by command, Paco started to taxi, I needed to put in some combination of radio menu salutes and requests for launch. The taxi directors then sent me on a somewhat convoluted path to the cat.

We need an option that gives us full sized diffuse maps and halves every other map. Text and small details are on the diffuse map, resolution of normals, speculars and glows is not critical.

No, but a single company outcompeting the others to such an extent is bad for both the market and the customers, in the long run. Especially if the product in question forms the basis of much of the national infrastructure. This is a very notable instance of free market not delivering a good result for everyone, but resulting in one company attaining a near-monopoly position. It may be "efficient", but it's an extremely brittle state, and the nature of the semiconductor industry means it's hard for a smaller competitor to get off the ground. Other countries have expertise, and efforts are being made to diversify and strengthen national chip manufacturing, due to how strategic it is (some leaned their lessons after the pandemic chip shortage), but they're slow and we've still got a long way to go. Right now, neither Nvidia nor TSMC have viable competitors, which led us to the situation we're in now.

Two problems here, which make it a bad example: 1). Quest is still a big purchase, too big for the average person. 2). Horizon Worlds sucks and nobody actually wants to use it. There's plenty of money in making the apps, as well as running a store, as Sony demonstrates with their consoles and games. The difference is, the games Sony makes are fun. Zuck's misbegotten metaverse is far from that. This sales tactic is not a guarantee of success, it's a tactic that has worked in the past. Do it with a cheaper headset (even technologically inferior to the cutting edge Quests), and make an app that people would actually want to use (this is the key part), you might get somewhere.

Marketing. It wasn't exactly green back then, either, but they wanted to attract settlers. There was a warm period at the time, but it wasn't quite that warm.

I didn't mean it's currently possible, just that it's one potential way to do it.

No, but you can make a mass market VR app and sell that, which is the scenario I mentioned before. Just like MS and Sony making a loss on selling consoles to make (a lot of) money on games for them. I probably should have used that as an analogy instead, the printers just came to mind first. And yes, it's abusive of both the customers and the market at large (because the competition either follows suit or is priced out). When did that ever stop anyone? No, the one where you don't outright ignore what I said to make a cheap shot at a subtly different statement. There's a clear difference between the razor and blades sales model and economics of scale, and I believe I made the distinction clear enough. Easy mass production enables both, but only one involves actually losing some money. Only because there's no easy way to restrict a car to driving on oil and gas from your company. As a matter of fact, Rockerfeller did hand out kerosene lamps to the Chinese for exactly this reason, but that was when his company was the only game in the country. Funnily enough, it turns out nuclear power of all things does work that way in commercial settings. They'll sell you the reactor at cost, and then bilk you for the fuel.

Neoliberal (and it is politically conservative, Reagan and Thatcher were its champions). If you can't even get that right, then you should really stop pretending you know anything about "basic economic reality" until you can at least recognize the basic terms. So was mine, and you failed to see that, too. Looks like I have to spell it out. What if there isn't anything more to accomplish? What if we're about to hit the plateau? These are the questions the investors are asking. We're still being promised the next great leap, but here comes a Chinese guy and says "how about efficiency instead?" That's got to get some people thinking, what if we make the leap and faceplant into a wall? What if progress, from here on, will mean doing slightly more cool things with fewer chips every time? Deep Seek runs on NVIDIA chips, but the investors aren't thinking about Deep Seek. They're thinking about is successor. Will you put money on it running on NVIDIA chips? Will you put money on it requiring more of them? A large amount of people just didn't. The fact that it's Chinese, not American, means that it will likely to be looking at using Chinese chips in the future, the international situation being what it is. ...you do realize you're actually mangling a quote from a socialist? Your version is just as wrong as the original one, BTW. Churchill was good at witty quotes, but I'm not sure if you're aware of what happened once he had to campaign on his policies. Both times.

Because it might be that one would need the one that loses money to use the one that makes money? Say, sell printers at a loss and then make money on selling ink for them (real example, believe it or not). If your margin on ink is high enough, and people use it up fast enough, you'll make up for the loss on printers, but nobody will buy an ink cartridge if they don't have a printer to put it into, no? That's why you need a strategy to make them want it. You also seem to willingly ignore that I'm not talking about selling at a loss here, I'm talking selling at a small margin. Stop arguing a strawman and stick to the point. A product that is usable, but merely not as good as the competition, can still sell if you can undercut the competition on price by a big enough margin. Mass production is what enables you to sell stuff at a margin of a few cents per unit and still come out ahead. Yeah, because chips were a was completely different tech from tubes. Small designs are cheaper to make, up to a point, that point being where you need to go into heavy duty nanotechnology in order to achieve densities that you want. The smaller design is, the more precise your manufacturing process has to be, and precision costs money. A chunk of silicon is cheap, a machine to make a chip out of it is not, and the denser the chip, the more expensive the machine becomes. Again, material costs in electronics are typically negligible unless you're doing something exotic.