Frostiken

It's not the regular HOTAS that I'd be concerned about, but rather the actual hand controllers - dual TDCs would be nice. Also, this would require Thrustmaster to put a not-shit TDC in. The microstick on the TM Warthog is horrible to such a degree that it's unbelievable they'd put that in something that costs that much. I'm honestly considering a way to get the TDCs used in the F-15 and wring them in its place but I'd probably ruin the whole thing doing that (and I have my doubts that it would even work).

The one thing I did think was odd is that the F-15 there is the only small-frame aircraft displayed outside...

Well, Duxford IWM has an advantage over the US museums in that there's only one of them. The US has a staggering number of aircraft displays that are on the magnitude of being 'really effing huge' scattered across the country. The UK has a handful of air museums, but Duxford is the main one, which means most of the pieces end up there first. It's really just a concentration issue, the UK can focus on one, whereas in the US it's multiple museums all vying for a limited number of them. I really enjoyed the Smithsonian A&S museum in DC, but I was really disappointed that it was split in to two different sections, one of them absolutely nowhere near as accessible: going all the way out to Dulles was totally inconvenient and out-of-the-question, even if there were some great things there. To its credit, the NA&S museum was a lot more spacious than Duxford giving you more room to move around and look at the exhibits. It also featured a lot of really historic aircraft, like the Wright Flyer and the Bell X-1 - things like that just aren't available at Duxford.

I wouldn't hold my breath for AH-64. If they are going to do a two-seater, I only say F-15E being the best choice for a couple of reasons: 1) There's already a certain level of 'unclassified'ness about it, given that there's already been a pretty high-fidelity (for the time, at least) sim about it (Jane's F-15). Whereas most 'sims' back then took serious creative liberties with their material, the Janes simulation (being Janes) was fairly accurate and the sim team did get direct hands-on experience with the airframe and literature to make it. This already means that a huge obstacle has been overcome - it's a lot easier to ask for a second look than a first one. I did hear that Janes got in trouble for something they put in the sim, but couldn't get any more details about it. 2) There's an excellent level of front / back redundancy, which would greatly mitigate the challenge of making an AI that would, in other two-seaters, have to take over major tasks that simply are impossible to perform from the 'wrong' cockpit. An AH-64, for example, would require a smart AI gunner and a smart AI pilot to completely take over the cockpit you aren't in. In an F-15E, you can keep flying the jet like normal while using the pod in the backseat, so you won't have to 'fight' the AI. The AI would only have to automate the most basic tasks, and you could even control them to some degree - from the front seat, for example, you could order the AI to scan for targets with the pod. I'm not saying a two-seater wouldn't be a huge challenge, but I think it would see great results. The only real issue in my eyes would be which version of the E-model they'd get to make (I'm a little afraid we'd get a Suite 4E+ version at most, which means missing a few features I like), as well as HOTAS challenges. Hope you didn't put away your checkbook, Thrustmaster has a $400 pair of hand controllers to sell you! :)

Took a visit to Duxford IWM, finally. Got a handful of good photos (mostly because I usually forget to take photos), just thought I'd share a few: ---------------------------------------- The EE Lightning - always a crowd-pleaser. ---------------------------------------- :] ---------------------------------------- The Spitfire was being a little camera shy... ---------------------------------------- Oh god yes. ---------------------------------------- It's a B-52. 1) How did they fit this in there, and 2) How are we supposed to take a picture of it? ---------------------------------------- Always the classic around here :) ---------------------------------------- Father and son. ---------------------------------------- The next Flying Legend! And some more B-52! ---------------------------------------- Shameless advertising! ---------------------------------------- My favorite part was probably the workshop. ---------------------------------------- DCS: P-51 in-work. Looks like it's going to be a while. ---------------------------------------- Anyway, if any of you get the chance, it's very much worth a trip. Apparently in May there's going to be a huge airshow for the Diamond Jubilee so that'll be fun. The only real problem with the place is that there's just so much stuff packed into such a little space it makes it almost impossible to get good photos, because there's always something in the way or you can't get good angles. I was sort of disappointed in the U2 which is stuck way up high on the ceiling, literally all you see is the belly. It's great in person but don't expect awesome photos is all :P Didn't get any good photos of the tank museum, mostly because I forgot to take them until the very end and they didn't turn out very good.

Silly Russians would have to find their nukes first! (:D) Seriously though, I guess it does make more sense in that regard, I didn't know it was actually a 'regular' submarine-launched missile co-opted into a shipboard role.

That and it saves a lot of space - vertical launch systems are huge and dangerous. There's a lot that can go wrong with this launch method simply because there's more involved with it, but if something goes wrong it goes wrong somewhere besides on the boat.

I thought that was why the TPod is available on both screens by default though :)

It's an MFCD failure, not a CICU failure - there's no real reason why the displays couldn't be swapped as long as the CICU is intact. Honestly, I can't even understand why the ability to swap screens around would even exist if not to compensate for a screen that goes dead.

Did you check to see if there's a stuck MFD key?

Well, since high-AOA would result in uneven airflow into the pitot line, I can see how dive / climb maneuvers *could* cause a temporary false airspeed reading...

Labels "bog down framerate"? And let me guess, high-ping players 'lag the server for everyone else' too :D

The best part of that video is that the URL itself is screaming.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=78502&highlight=random+switches

From what I remember yeah. Even with all manner of loadouts I've always, always had to trim LWD once I'm in the air.

I have a related question - why does the A-10 itself always need to be trimmed LWD? Even if I'm flying slick I always have to roll to the left to get stable flight. It's really nothing, just curious. The -1 should have the CG graph in it and offer some explanation. On another note, I'm going to try to convince our pilots to get me a copy of the 1F-15E-1 and maybe even the 1F-15E-34-1-1... it'd actually be very useful for my job, on top of simply being fun to have.

No, but here's the deal: SPJs (self protection jammers) are pretty delicate devices and a lot is demanded of them. They have extremely high power demands and run ridiculously hot. The AN/ALQ-135 ICMS system in the F-15 requires 90% of ECS cooling air to operate. As a result, these jammers tend to fail pretty often, and have short lives. Reasonably, you can expect your jammer to last through a few sorties, but after a dozen or so, something somewhere is going to fail. Odds are low that the whole jammer will die (though it still happens), what's more likely is that you'll have various degrades: one of the amplifiers may fail, and you're going to lose protection to the aft. The system may respond too weakly or slowly, or have some sort of fault in the ATUs to properly protect from pulse-doppler radars. The pods are packed with amps of varying use - you may lose the low frequency amps and you can't protect against older radars, or you lose the oscillator that handles J or Ku-band and you're going to lose protection against newer radars. None of this is modeled in the game though, but in reality running your jammer non-stop will almost certainly kill it. Someone was asking in another thread why you can't have it just run all the time, and the fact of the matter is that these things run so hot, the ram air and ECU in that pod cannot possibly sustain extended operations, and it's almost certain to overheat. If you're lucky, you can just reset it, but odds are you're going to break it.

Actually... ED did say that the next DCS aircraft would be a 'fixed-wing US aircraft'. The P-51 is a fixed-wing US aircraft, and is the next DCS product.

Regarding labels: Moving things are easier to see in real life for some visual reasons related to the movement of pixels, as well as relative movement of yourself and the world around you. There's no sun reflection / glare off of vehicles or glass. There's not really any visual cues for moving things. The smallest a vehicle can be is the size of your pixel pitch, which is, even on a 2560x1600 monitor, still much larger than the fine details your eye can see, resulting in misshapen, meaningless gray blobs. Things moving in real life are moving at infinite FPS - things moving in-game are all moving at the same rate the terrain behind them is moving: 60 times per second? Probably much less for most people. Humans are really good at seeing moving things in real life - in a game, it doesn't work quite as well. There's also plenty of simple visual hints that don't exist like track marks, smoke from a battle... you cannot even ask the guy on the radio things like "I see a church." "Yeah, it's 2000 feet due east of the church." Regarding zooming: Your 'effective' FOV is limited by the width of your monitors. Your in-game FOV thus must be unfairly squashed in order to let you see around the cockpit to some degree. When you look straight forward at the HUD in a default FOV, you see the hud, you see nearly all your instruments, you see both your screens. In order to effectively 'see' all that in real life you'd be sitting four feet away from everything in the cockpit. In reality, everything you look at consumes the visual region of your eye that has the highest acuity (the fovea). You aren't "seeing" both MFCDs at the same time. Additionally, how wide do you think the HUD appears from the seat in an A-10? Do you think it's the whopping 4 inches that it appears to be on my 30" screen? Zooming in so the HUD consumes most of your vision is actually much, much more realistic than *not*, in that sense. There's nothing wrong with using subdued labels, and certainly nothing wrong with zooming.

Still plenty of peeps who fly and work on F-4 Phantoms in Florida, even if the old girls don't always come back.

Even if the static port was *blocked*, it should be reading something besides zero feet. Even if we were to maintain the catastrophic failure, there's no reason for its behavior.

Why would all errors be the same when temperature varies greatly with altitude? Hell, it varies simply depending on where you are.

It's sort of bothered me for a while that whenever you lose your pitot probe, the altimeter slams to 0 feet. While the circumstances obviously would greatly vary, since altimeter is reading simple static pressure of a hose connected to the probe itself with no wizardry or anything else, shouldn't losing the wingtip with the pitot probe still give you a rough estimate of your altitude? Obviously if the tube is aimed into or away from the airstream, or pinched, or whatever, it would give you different readings, but 0 feet? Anyway, just a small request to change the damage from losing your pitot probe to perhaps applying a random percentage of inaccuracy to your altimeter. I would imagine ripping off the whole thing would leave the tubes open to the airstream and while airspeed would obviously be kaput, altitude should still return readings. <3

No you don't. The A-10 has temperature probes connected directly to the ADC for this reason. Did you think the OAT reading was just so the pilot can decide if it's nice enough outside to turn the jet into a convertible and let the wind through his hair? Things might change if you're using pure barometer on the analog instruments, but as far as typical flight goes, no, there's no arithmetic you have to do in your head.

There's things you can do that might mitigate it, but it's not really caused by anything realistic - there's a few bugs with high-speed on the ground, you'll hit a dodgy terrain block or something and there goes your nose. There's a few airfields that almost always cause it, I think Batumi is one of them.