Dragon1-1

That's true, which is why the exact mechanics of the RAM don't matter, you can just assume some percentage of inbound radiation is absorbed instead of reflected no matter what angle, and this translates to a straightforward multiplication by a ballpark estimation or RAM efficiency. The vast majority of stealth comes from shape, specifically from avoiding presenting a flat surface to the radar antenna. Radar waves reflect just like any other waves, angle of incidence equals angle of reflection. The tricky bit here is hiding the engines and making an intake that will not reflect waves straight back from its inner surfaces while still working well as an intake. This is also why the Viper is a surprisingly good stealth aircraft, despite not really being designed as such: it's physically dinky and its intake has a pronounced S-duct, so the turbine fan (a big honkin' radar reflector) is not directly in view from most angles. The F-35 is different from the Viper in that it also pays attention to reducing side and rear RCS, in addition to hiding the fan disk even better.

Eyelids will get in the way no matter what (that's their job), and while the eye can change shape, shape of the pupil is directly correlated with its optical properties. Yes, it's different per person, but this only means some way of adjusting the HMD to the specific wearer is necessary. You can try tracking the retina, but it's not the only way to tackle this problem. None of them require a major breakthrough, though. It's more of a matter of making the thing affordable for mass production, this tech is still in its early phase, and that means improvements are likely to come fairly quickly. If patent issues don't choke it off, we'll probably see it in a consumer HMD before the end of the decade.

There's actually public software that can be used to determine RCS of any given shape. The only thing that's classified here is how well the RAM coating actually works, and that would just multiply the RCS from shape by a certain factor. The physics behind radar wave propagation are not classified, nor even particularly complex (though heavy to calculate in real time).

Retinal projection is already a thing, however it seems to me that it's going to be more of an AR solution, unlikely to displace screens completely. It's already a commercial technology, though, with Retissa viewfinder using it. For what it's worth, to make a VR HMD you don't actually need to track the retina (which, after all, is inside the eye), you need to track the pupil. It is an interesting proposition, since unlike with the screen, you could potentially locate the emitter (and thus most of the weight) somewhere else than in front of the eyes, and use fiber optics to deliver the beam. Fiber optics don't like bending, so it'll probably still be on your head, but it could be somewhere more comfortable.

That may be because exact simulation of your vehicle's systems is not necessary when you're training in tactics. Tank tactics are similar enough regardless of whether you're playing WT, ArmA, or DCS:CA. The same concepts apply. There's actually professional software, that is VBS, which is developed by the same company ArmA was and which can be used to set up elaborate training scenarios with combined arms and highly accurate weapon performance. The reason to use WT is probably more prosaic: it's free to play. That means you don't have to deal with procurement. Those who ever tried to procure something via official channels in any big organization will appreciate how much of an advantage it is. If the soldiers are already WT players (and many will be, soldiers love those games), setting up a dedicated session for the platoon is as easy as ordering them all to boot up WT and join the server at a specified time. Procuring a VBS license is... less straightforward, even if you technically have the budget for that (itself not a given). Assuming that a given tanker even knows about VBS and that it's an option, everyone knows about WT, but actual training tools have a much smaller audience. Many of us use DCS to experience aircraft and situations which are simply no longer a thing IRL. The F-14 no longer flies in the US, and even Iran is phasing them out. The F-15 is still around, but in a very different form from what it was during the Gulf War. That means our standards are higher than required for many forms of training. Not for the sort of sim training that's meant to stand in for actually flying the jet, but rather for training in general tactics used (though its worth noting that games using realistic BVR and energy tactics are very scarce). The point there is to make you understand a tactic and its use cases, once you do, adapting it to different hardware and circumstances is much easier. I think this is very much underappreciated. In fact, it's the Israelis who are more comparable to the Soviet/Russian military, with their widespread use of conscription and certain parts of their mindset (in fact, US observers a while ago said more or less exactly that, contrary to their expectations). Content of the training programs are one thing, but culture, education level and the troops' mindset greatly influence any given military's effectiveness and level of professionalism. Many people in the West forget that between countries, people are neither born or raised equal, especially not to people with access to Western education and nutrition levels. This directly affects what a military can or cannot do, and modern battlefield in particular is extremely unforgiving to a poorly educated soldier.

It's more or less same deal as INS vs. EGI in the Viper. The specific Viper we have has the INS, but many jets in that time period had an EGI already. It would be nice to be able to remove Link-16 and JHMCS. GPS can be removed by setting your mission to an appropriate date, AIM-9X can be restricted in the loadout, while JHMCS can be swapped for NVGs by the player, but I don't think this can be forced.

I rather suspect they'll laugh at our clunky and heavy VR headsets, hooked by cable to a furnace with a USB ports. A screen on your face is basically the most space-efficient way to do a flight sim, though I suppose some sort of holographic display, or an implant talking directly to an optic nerve (unlikely to ever be the primary interface option) could give it a run for its money.

Still, they had it, and that's a fact that is rather difficult to dispute, unlike the true unicorn that the Eaglejet with air to ground weapons is. They might have been rare, but so was the 4xHARM loadout on the Viper. Given the status of the actual Mudhen, I wouldn't mind being able to turn the Charlie into an ersatz Mudhen at all. That said, CFTs do have their uses on very long range air to air missions. The size of the maps is increasing, we'd have plenty of places to use these. Never say no to more gas.

To be fair, China has plenty of people who might legitimately want a 4090 for gaming. This is a huge market, after all, and it's pretty easy to imagine sellers inside China buying up the stock and hoping to sell for outrageous prices once the ban drops.

I confess I haven't been up to date on the crypto scam. This was a concern with 40 series, I guess it isn't anymore. Then again, if it's not crypto, then it might be AI instead, though I don't know how many are actually buying GPUs for that, since the big players don't use PC hardware for this. Either way, it's certainly not the infinite moneymaker many thought crypto was. And that is the real problem, lack of competition. A monopoly is bad, and a duopoly isn't great, either. Nvidia can do whatever they want with artificial scarcity, price gouging, and so on, and people won't go anywhere else because they can't. A healthy market keeps the prices low and the margins reasonable. GPU market is far from healthy. Lowering the settings isn't the answer with UE5 games, BTW (dunno about others). It's not that it looks hideous, it's that it doesn't help. You're practically forced to have a high end GPU for those, or it just plain won't run. That's why Jedi Survivor, for instance, didn't do as well as it could have. It's an awesome game, but too heavy for many otherwise up to date rigs even on minimum settings. It seems some of that is UE5 itself, but I have a feeling every game dev is running a 4090 or something on their dev PC. It seems like every damn thing that comes out these days has performance problems. My 3090 means I'm mostly exempt from that, but it's not a good look for the studios.

Only when you disregard the entire rest of the crypto ecosystem. Crypto miners are making things worse by introducing additional demand, but this market could saturate as well, because it's limited to those who can access cheap power. Days of GPU racks stacked along the side of a house are long gone. Also, there's the fact that NVIDIA locked down its lower end GPUs to make them less attractive to crypto miners, in order to push them towards the top of the line offerings. So at best, your arguments would apply only to the top tier GPUs. Others are very much subject to market saturation, though obviously supply is currently so low (thanks to NVIDIA throttling it) that this is not a going concern. Mutuals aren't necessarily based around holding any given company's stock long term and collecting dividends. They can do this (some are even based around it), but they can also short them if the going gets though. There are ways of making money off stock that's taking a hit, and I'm under impression most investment funds prefer to trade stock than hold it anyway. Either way, mutuals are typically diversified, so you get the benefits if all companies are doing well, but if it's just one of them squeezing its customers, those with a large share of that particular company (typically rich investors) will be the only ones that'll notice, unless your fund manager had the foresight to go long on its stock, that is.

In the end, I see the F-35 as a way for ED to pay for core dev. Presumably, lowered standards will only apply to aircraft that they know will make them a ton of dough, but are too classified. Also, the F-35 shouldn't be very difficult to develop compared to a modern module, all its systems are hidden behind a touchscreen UI and all aerodynamics behind the elaborate FBW. Plus, it'll help develop the tech for other aircraft, maybe even an FF Stinkbug at some point down the line. https://store.steampowered.com/app/476530/Children_of_a_Dead_Earth/ It's pretty awesome, actually, far from boring. No fighters, though (there are gun drones), the ships are quite large. Very grounded in physics, too, though it has its limitations (and bugs). Interestingly, it turns out ranges are far from infinite, and in fact, a thousand kilometers is quite a long distance to begin a gun and laser engagement in space. The gameplay is supposedly completely emergent, and you can make your own ships and ship components. It's been out of active dev for quite some time, but what is there is really cool (it even has a campaign).

I'd very much like that, radars had been getting overhauls lately on the emitter/receiver side, we need an overhaul on the target side, as well. The Viper, for instance, can be surprisingly stealthy simply because its frontal cross section is so dinky. Meanwhile, if the F-35 goes into a steep bank and exposes its whole upper surface, it won't be very stealthy no matter what it's painted with. OTOH, the F-15 is pretty easy to lock from any angle. This is where DCS can gain a lot of realism.

Hardly "loads", especially when we're talking, say, the F-86D, which is long unclassified in every tiny detail.

Warthog pilots do train for air to air, though, and the systems for this are modeled in DCS. It's not an air superiority fighter, but neither is it an easy kill. It can also hunt helicopters and other slow movers, and is in fact better suited to it than the Eaglejet, for which helo hunting can be bit of a white knuckle affair. We get Sidewinders and the funnel gunsight, even including the training mode (check out the Iron Flag campaign to have some fun with it), so we should get bombs on the Eagle.

Only to a person who is so ignorant that he convinced himself that he is the one who understands economics. Dunning-Kruger is strong in that one. Honestly, it's one thing to not know about market saturation being a thing, and another thing entirely to openly deny it exists. Either that, or it's a massive cope because you happen to be on a DRIP (which, may I remind you, only cares how well your company is doing), and are imagining this applies to everyone.

Aircraft and core would be different devs from terrains. I imagine some asset devs might be busy with "Heavy Metal" stuff for modern era, and of course it's not like terrain devs don't have a lot on their plate, as well, but it's unlikely specialized graphics coders working on Vulkan would be of any use to the team making WWII Marianas. Those are completely different skill sets, and people who can do both are very rare.

Of course they did, including the concept of "market saturation" which you apparently had never heard of. Demand exceeding supply is a common situation in a dynamic market, but hardly the rule, especially in more static markets. Case in a point, do you remember buying toilet paper after the pandemic (you know, after an enormous economic anomaly had passed)? You probably don't, because shortages of common household goods are rare unless you're in some backwater like the UK. Except those "millions of people" you refer to do not get significant money from dividends. If you have a handful of NVIDIA shares from Robinson, you don't earn money when the company does, you "earn" it when the stock price goes up, which is mostly caused by an expectation of the company earning money in the future. FYI, when people talk about shareholders, they think of the handful of super-rich guys who have enough shares to sit on the company board and collect significant dividends from them. They are the ones this economy works for, not you. It seems I'm not the one who needs to educate myself on how economy works. Go and try it, you'll be less ignorant, likely more upset, but realizing you're being screwed without lube typically does that.

Demand is very much not infinite, just in this case, it's just higher than supply in this particular case, and part of that is NVIDIA creating an artificial scarcity situation. They could easily make more chips, but without valid competition, they have no incentive to do so. Instead, they trickle them onto the market, so that they can advertise a low MSRP while in practice, the prices are vastly higher. You know where you can stick your "trickle down economics". The only ones who benefit from a company padding the margin on their product are the shareholders. Most people benefit from healthy competition that forces companies to keep prices down and quality high. This is not the situation we're currently in, AMD is getting better, but it still lags behind in some areas. Not "every market", this is pretty much restricted to tech and software. Most products do not work like that. A bag of chips or a lawn chair will set you back more or less the same amount no matter if it was introduced this year or five years ago. Tech markets are a pathological case for many reasons, including this one.

You mean crypto miners and scalpers? I don't care who they are targeting, I care about how things look from a gaming standpoint. The GPUs will be sold out on launch because of insufficient supply at that point in time, not because the prices are not outrageous. Once enough of them trickles into the market to clear the waiting lists, the prices should stabilize. It's a cynical ploy to squeeze as much dough from the market as possible, and I hope AMD can finally provide some viable competition at the top end, because they wouldn't be getting away with it if they didn't pretty much own that part of the GPU market.

Well, he had to start his business career somewhere. Perhaps it was sales.

There you go, a US Eaglejet with bombs strapped on. Even if it's just for show. If nothing else, it proves that it fits. Also shows how good the Eagle's air to ground systems are - those guys never trained for air to ground, and yet were able to do a reasonably good job at it. Not really, you can have AG radar without actually being able to select bombs in the loadout tab. I suspect that's all this "no air to ground" is supposed to amount to. Radar would be modeled, but you wouldn't have an option to pick bombs, and bombing modes such as CCIP wouldn't be modeled. I do hope they change their mind on this, especially after actually working on the radar and finding out how much it can do for air to ground.

What is getting worse is affordability, and this is not an opinion, but rather a hard economic fact. Things are getting more expensive all over, particularly necessities like housing, heating and power, and many peoples' wages are not quite keeping up. That is documented well enough. So even if GPU prices, when adjusted for inflation, were perfectly steady or even improving, per unit of performance, people just have proportionally less money to spend on those things. In effect, the performance of cards that they can afford is getting worse. The sales pitch may make some people feel better about dropping down a tier, but the way I see it, they're essentially being tricked into paying to downgrade their PC. Yeah, that'd serve them right. Could also make their GPUs affordable again in this economy...

It'll be something between FF and FC3, I guess. A sort of "mid-fidelity" aircraft, with systems guesstimated from known information, and FM done with CFD software. After all, we do have quite a bit of aerodynamic modeling tools and the modern aircraft insulate the pilot from most complex behavior at the edges of the envelope with their complex (and all-powerful, no "Top Gun switch" in the F-35 AFAIK) FBW limiters. It might also open the door to the F-22, which would actually be appropriate to DCS timeline. It's just about as classified, but it's older, and maybe there's some docs out there. Also, depending on development constraints, I hope the module will be expanded to include B and C. VTOL is cool (and our only VTOL jet so far was made by a company that's currently in hot water), and the C can do carrier traps.

Well, it'll be easy to build a cockpit for, at any rate. Especially for VR. Just stick a giant pane of acrylic onto the console, add the ten or so switches and buttons on the side consoles, the gear handle, and there you go. That said, it would be nice if there was actually a way to somehow bind an IRL touchscreen to the one in the F-35. It'll be the first touchscreen aircraft in DCS.