Dragon1-1

They're called "lawyers" for short.

The current one uses the "old" new tech (same as Nevada). The "new" new tech (same as Marianas) is what would be needed to expand the map to Crimea. This is not the first overhaul of the terrain engine that DCS had seen.

FYI, it's not actually unstable (negative static stability), but neutrally stable. Depending on configuration, it probably could fly without its FBW, though not well. The difference is, a negatively stable aircraft actively resists trying to fly nose-first, while the Viper merely doesn't care whether it does or not. F-35 doesn't, either, most notably, it's on record for pretty readily flying backwards in right conditions. That is a hallmark of a neutrally stable aircraft. Also worth noting, a "classic" deep stall is indeed exclusive to T-tailed aircraft, since the term originally specifically denoted a kind of stall that is made unrecoverable by turbulent air from wings blanketing the elevators. Very real problem on T-tails. The Viper's "deep stall" is a different phenomenon that got stuck with the same name, and refers to a state that is not unrecoverable (elevators still work if you hold the MPO switch), but which puts the aircraft in a somewhat aerodynamically stable configuration, falling more or less straight down belly first. Regaining control from that involves "simply" forcing the nose down so that normal flying configuration is restored. This is what affects other relaxed stability designs, as well.

Hard to get a connection in the middle of the Irish Sea.

I only wish it was a bit longer, I'll have a very narrow window to get it because I'll be gone for most of the month.

Since the date has been announced, can we have a Steam preorder?

DCS could get a lot of mileage out of a WWII Poland map. I'd extend it just a little bit east to include Berlin, as to cover the Soviet Eastern Front. Early and late WWII versions at least. If we could find someone to make early WWII Polish and German fighters, we could have the invasion of Poland, and the same German aircraft would fit late Spanish Civil War. I don't think either had ever been done in a flight sim, or any video game for that matter. Later on, it Zhukov's march to Berlin took place there, with many aircraft that went on to serve in Korea. Definitely not a near term concept, but a good idea for a WWII theater. Cold War, I don't think so. At best, a piece of Poland could be part of the Germany map. The plans for WWIII mostly boiled down to fighting in Germany, although of course the fight would eventually move one way or the other, if the nukes didn't fly first.

Right, it's been a while before I read that part. Isn't DL switch used for the IDM datalink? We don't have it in DCS yet, but we are eventually supposed to, according to the last time I asked.

DL switch definitely does have a function in DCS, it turns datalink on. Now, the Map switch does not have a function (I don't think it ever did on US jets), but presumably, pilots flip it on startup along with all the other switches on that panel to avoid having to think too hard about it.

Which isn't to say they should cheat too much. It's still worth reporting blatantly unrealistic performance, AI FM might be simplified, but it's not supposed to be completely detached from reality. Tracks=/=hits. A shot at 90 degrees off the nose is at a huge kinematic disadvantage. If you try fighting with AIM-9X you'll notice that particularly up close, you can easily get a lock in a situation where the missile has no way of actually hitting the target. If you take the shot the moment you hear the tone, most of them will miss. That's why nose authority is important, it allows you to improve kinematics of your shot, as the less the missile has to turn, the more energy it has for actually chasing the enemy. Also, harsh maneuvers are susceptible to countermaneuvers, especially up close. Minimum range is higher for HOBS shots than for when you've got the bandit on the nose. That's why I don't think guns are quite obsolete yet. HOBS missiles force the fight into a tight one circle contest, where both fighters attempt to keep themselves too close for a Fox 2 shot. It's in this environment where guns, with no minimum range and more or less total immunity to countermeasures, can really make the difference. If nothing else it gives you something to shoot at your enemy without risking opening the distance enough for a missile shot.

I think in 2017 there might have been some case when they started enforcing the rule, or clarified that it applied to games. That said, ArmA3 switched to Red Crystal before that. I'm not sure if that one is protected (it kind of makes more sense anyway, since it's more universal). IMO, they should update the rules so that historical depictions are not disallowed. HP pickups don't need to be marked like that, but WWII era medical tents did very much have the symbol on them, quite prominently so that the other side hopefully won't bomb them.

It would be hilarious if it turned out to be a bug in actual AWG-9 logic that you unwittingly reproduced. Those early computers had a lot of quirks of their own.

I think they did occasionally show this off at airshows, but this is not very practical as a combat move. Neither is the proper Cobra, TBH. Its main use is to move the control zone a little further out, which makes you harder to hit with a gun, and the second is a risky (but effective, if you time it right) way of exploiting the bandit's excessive closure to make him overshoot, Top Gun style. You probably could use the Draken's "super-stall" for that, but that'd be very risky, because if you bungle it, you'll end up in deep stall. The only way Cobra could come up in a missile engagement is if you found yourself needing to push the gimbal limits with a HOBS missile (and I wouldn't do that because kinematics of such a shot would be inevitably terrible). The J-35 does not have anything like that, and trying to point your nose during this kind of maneuver would likely end badly.

I want to add one more thing: the electronics in those early jets were not complex. If there's a 0.8s delay, that's because a bunch of things start to happen when the firing circuit closed. If it's opened during that time (button released), before they can finish, then they're no longer able to, and the missile dies on the rail. There's no complex safety logic or anything because it's all based on a handful of relays, and the firing switch is just that, it physically closes the firing circuit.

ED's engine is actually a lot newer, they didn't just develop the Flanker engine until it reached critical mass. I've been around ArmA, and let me tell you, RV was an interdependent mess of technical debt, not unusual for an engine written in 2001. One big deal that DCS has and RV does not is a modular architecture, ED can yank a chunk out of it, for instance the graphics system or AI (for modern jets and WWII separately, even!), and rewrite it separately from everything else. Try that with RV and the whole thing would collapse, because parts of the code reference each other with reckless abandon, and a fix to a bug in one system can create a bug in another, seemingly unrelated one. Other than triggers being ridiculously brittle, in DCS, if something breaks, it's usually related to work being done on the thing that broke. That's not to say there are no interdependencies, but they seem to be manageable. Of course, DCS as a whole is still not on the most modern paradigm, but it seems that the code remains in a maintainable state. So I wouldn't say this is a situation where they would have even needed to consider a "toss and replace" approach.

Remember that a JDAM is smart (not like an LGB, unless it's a Paveway III), and it starts out going fast. Those starkes do produce plenty of lift at high speeds. Since it's fairly low drag, it doesn't lose much speed as it flies, meaning it could, possibly, out-glide a wingsuit (which are typically rather lousy gliders and don't go very fast). However, accuracy will be degraded at the edge of the envelope. A gust of wind in the wrong direction could put it out of parameters, not to mention the parameters are never exact, anyway. Perhaps the zone could use a little tuning. Either way, it's always good to give the bombs some extra energy to work with.

It highly depends on what the bomb hits, exactly. The fireball it self will be quite small, with most of the "explosion effect" being smoke and dust raised by the blast. A bomb exploding on a asphalt surface will raise relatively little dust, and its own smoke won't be that great in volume, either. OTOH, one that buries itself deep in a bunker buried under a layer of sand, that one can be expected to raise a lot of dust, both from powdered concrete and sand. Importantly, fuze settings will matter, a delay fuze will, as a rule, make a bigger crater and a bigger dust cloud (since the shockwave propagates directly through the material being impacted), while an instant fuze will make a much smaller one, dealing damage via concussive force and fragmentation.

Was it a deliberate wheelie landing, or did you just miss the three-pointer? Also, nice going with the brakes at the end. But hey, at least it's not the Spit, which would've likely ground-looped at that point...

One thing that does help a lot is remembering where the horizon is when sitting on the ground. A perfect flare is one where you assume an attitude so that the view out of the window is the same as it was while you were sitting on the ground. Hold that attitude until you get it on the asphalt, and you're good. If doing that causes you to start flying up, you were way too fast. If you break the gear, you started the flare too early and/or pulled power too much. Taildraggers have precisely one angle at which they're supposed to hit the runway, and that angle is the one the aircraft naturally sits at. Easier in VR than on a screen, to be sure, but doable either way. Practice makes perfect.

This is unlikely to happen. F-16A would require a new FM, as the engine is different and the aerodynamics are, too, unless we're talking Block 15 with a big tail. Plus, it's much lighter. The new additions are the lowest hanging fruit there is. I could, perhaps, see the L-39, as its cockpit could use an art pass (that said, it's already so simple that an FC version would not have much appeal). I would also not expect aircraft that have been made by a 3rd party to have an FC version made, not by ED, at least.

You may just have a reliable internet connection. Some people, in rural areas, for example, have a flaky connection that drops bits all over the place. Not everyone has a gigabit-grade light pipe. Steam is remarkably robust as far as stopping and restarting downloads goes, ED's system might not be as good at it.

That actually depends on the country the devs are located in, and on the local IP laws (the Boeing lawsuit was in the US, for instance, but ED is incorporated in Switzerland). RB seems to be able to do both the Mirage 2000 and MiG-23 without involving their respective manufacturers, although, mind how the former was before AdA got involved with its development (that is, nothing like the real Mirage 2000). MiG-23 is supposedly being done with support from Angola or some other foreign operator. Some of ED's devs are Russian, so I'm not surprised they're not going to risk violating IP of a Russian company, especially since courts in Russia can be pretty arbitrary, and any high ups in those companies are connected up the wazoo. Also, do keep in mind that we're talking more than appearance or series of characters. We're talking aircraft where functionality is being recreated exactly. This might involve some parts that can be copyrighted.

Herein lies the rub. For those games, just like for DCS, the always online DRM can be patched, in a final update, to be disabled, in order to allow the servers to go offline without screwing the players out of their money. In fact, it turns out even HAWX 2 seems to work now, if you bought it before it was discontinued (you just need the right launcher version). The scenario you're worried about hasn't happened because it's literally illegal. If you paid for it, you're entitled to have it, end of the story. No EULA in the world can change that. Servers going down temporarily is not cause enough to break out the lawyer (unless it happens constantly), but if they went down permanently and the game was not patched, you'd have a good case to ask your money back, at least. I don't know about US, but EU has some pretty robust customer protection mechanisms.

I was speaking English, EULAs are written in legalese. A program is intellectual property, so if we owned it in legalese-sense, then we could do a bunch of things with it, including, for example, renting it or opening a sim room and charging for its use, which is obviously not allowed (not that it stops people from doing so on occasion). It's not a new concept, BTW. Any program that you might have bought from a brick and mortar store is also licensed, though you do own the physical CD, the case and the instruction manual. A vinyl copy of an album is actually a very relevant comparison - you're not allowed, for instance, to bring your copy of the album to a bar and play it on the jukebox. To do that, you'd need to license the contents of the album for public broadcasting. That doesn't mean the record label's goons can come to your house and take the disk away. Nor are they allowed to remotely brick it (I think there was a lawsuit with Sony about things like that). Also, besides that, EULAs are unenforceable, and they have been ruled so in court. Ignoring all the legalese, if you paid money for something, you have the right to keep using it, as it was when you bought it, and in EU at least, pretending to sign away this right by clicking a button does not actually remove it. Continued updates are not assured, neither are online services, but the product itself is not supposed to suddenly cease working, if the environment doesn't change at least (everything can be broken by Windows updates, of course). Services being sunset =/= games being taken away. In most cases I've seen, the game still works, even if the multiplayer doesn't. MMOs are an exception, but these tend to be subscription based anyway. Besides some Ubisoft back catalogue (HAWX 2 and I think a few other games from that period), I don't remember this being particularly common. Do you have any examples that aren't either freemium (microtransaction stuff is, AFAIK, much less protected) or subscription-based?

There's no such thing as a beautiful helicopter, they're all so ugly that the ground repels them. That said, I kind of like the Apache and the Huey.