Frostiken

The IFFCC preflight BIT flashes all the messages to center flight controls and test SAS / EAC and presumably checks the flight controls themselves, but it's all done for you and is merely cosmetic. Personally I wish they would enable its functionality because, well, I'm into the whole maintenance aspect of these things and think it would be a useful, interactive step in the startup procedures. Right now if you know what you're doing you can blow through the whole startup in like two minutes and sit there drumming your fingers waiting to align... making us do the preflight checks not only is extremely realistic (removing it seems sort of dumbed-down to me) but just makes the startup that much more interesting to me.

I just wish the series would go that extra mile on everything. It's like a great gemstone that just hasn't been cut and polished enough yet. Things like the crappy ATC are real immersion-killers, the awful infantry implementation, the not-so-great effects... still, what is there is awesome :D

Yeah, could be a rudder control problem, one of your potentiometers could be shot. An easy fix for that would be to rebind the rudder controls to your keyboard only and see if it still does it.

The Crew Chief will usually visually ID the control surfaces for anything abnormal. They're not exactly precision checks or anything but if your ailerons are sitting low someone will notice. I've actually GAB'd a jet as a B-man because the left stab on one of our jets wouldn't sit back to the neutral position (which is something like -4 degrees). Also, the IFFCC BIT that we cannot interact with at all right now checks the flight controls normally (I think...), and usually those systems are sensitive enough to notice something like trim not working. If I had the game working right now I'd check the IFFCC commands, but I know there's stuff on there for LAAP and the like.

What, you mean on the 3D model the wheel is shaking around?

The first video of the ZSU is hilarious, why did they even bother putting up a target? Like, one in twenty bullets even hit the thing. Watching the stream of lead is awesome, but the book excerpts... could they be any more melodramatic? That an F-15E would ever even be in any position to get hit by AAA seems incredulous in the first place, especially since we had so many countermeasures against the aging Soviet equipment by then that their radar was effectively filled with nothing but noise.

7.5G is cute, but what's the G-load for a Hornet with stuff on it? :) Once you start getting restricted lower, every little bit helps.

Unfortunately it can't take that much advantage of that. Poor G-loading means you can't take advantage of high-AOA at any significant speed, and engines that are barely more powerful than the A-10s means that if your enemy counters your loss of speed by throwing on the gas and climbing, the F/A-18 can't really do much to stop them.

Best part of that video is when the F-111 is hauling ass and the shockwave is visible on the ground.

Claiming 'casual simmers' would be 'incredibly' interested in the F/A-18 is a bold claim. The aircraft is as obscure, boring, and underwhelming as you can get. It's never broken any useful records and it's always sort of been a second-line unit in any conflict it's been in. In fact, the only thing you can actually claim about it that's noteworthy in a combat capacity is that it has at least attended most wars, and it's carrier-capable. You can like the F/A-18 all you want, but I'm utterly bewildered about where all this perception of massive fandom surrounding it is coming from, like it's the most well-known fighter in the world. Anything useful you can say about the F/A-18's combat history, according to the wikipedia page, basically ends the exact moment the Gulf War did. If you compared fighter aircraft to cars, the F/A-18 ain't exactly a Bugatti Veyron. Or a McLaren F1. Or even a supercar. It's more like a used BMW. Three seconds for the catapult to throw you off the front. Three seconds to stop once you hit the deck. I'm not seeing this as being the revolution that completely changes the game that people insist it will be. 99.9% of the game is still you flying around above some sort of planar surface you can't touch without exploding, dropping bombs on bad things or shooting missiles or bullets at other bad things. Simply being more air-capable than the A-10 adds significantly more than where you take off and land from does, and that's a fact.

99.9% of BSODs are caused by bad hardware. I think by default windows will reboot your system instantly, but you can turn that off (somewhere... google it is all I can say, I don't remember). You'll usually get a few things from the BSOD: 1) The .dll that caused the crash. If it's your video card failing (could also be a northbridge) you'll see something like nv4_disp.dll (for nvidia GPUs). ha20x22k.sys is a common Creative sound card failure. 2) A memory address that contained the fault. If you see a lot of crap like 0x00a74b000a you've probably got bad RAM (and you should have a BAD_POOL_HEADER or something with it). Wouldn't hurt to test your RAM or undo any RAM overclocks you have. You can also try removing sticks to isolate a bad one. 3) A fail type, which will help you narrow your search. IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is usually a driver or associated hardware. BAD_POOL_HEADER/CALLER or MEMORY_MANAGEMENT means look to your RAM. PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA can be caused by a few gremlins but from my experience is usually some sort of critical corruption of a windows system file. There exist various tools to help you with this, but I can't remember them... let me just tell you that google will help much more than we ever could - whatever your BSOD is, someone else has had it. Have fun :D

It works if you think of it as a metaphor for the Cold War.

Uh, it's a military SIM, and the reality is that planes break. All the time. Like, every sortie. As in, while you're flying. A lot. I'm utterly bewildered by how one could express interest in modeling to painstaking reality everything about an aircraft and then completely dismissing the fact that these aircraft are literally meant to be flown while shit is broken on them, and passing it off as some sort of gimmick from Need for Speed or something.

While technically possible, the latency and overhead on such a system would be immense.

Well for the most part many frequencies are always the same, and pilots all fly in the same AORs over and over so it becomes the other way around - easier to remember Channel 5 instead of 282.750 :p Also keep in mind real life pilots use a lot more frequencies than we do. Here at LN, channel 1 is usually the ops desk, channel 2 is ATC ground, channel 3 is ATC air. That's already as many as you typically use on any random mission. I've not figured / bothered to figure out the rest but I imagine they have divert airfields, their own flight... there's a lot of possibilities there. If they're flying out of the same airfield their diverts are probably usually the same... whereas here you fly one mission out of one base, and the next mission out of a totally different one, which changes everything. As for why it won't immediately show up, I honestly couldn't tell you. It's the same way in the F-15 too. You turn the channel knob and that's all good, and the frequency above it won't change (because it's your manual preset and you can switch between channel and manual selection), but if you have the radio page open, the frequency won't even show up there until you hit the radio page again and it updates. Just blame the engineers.

Still, the best of the best for 4x8Gb sticks with low latencies costs you a pretty penny... not exactly proportional to the price difference between 8 and 16, especially since around there you can be more choosey about what you're getting. I could get 32Gb (I think I have 6 DIMMs) but doubt I will until I spend an absurd amount on my next PC :D

I'm torn on this one. On one hand, it's not unrealistic to fly with mavs on the TER - it's still an approved configuration and while they may not want to due to tire wear, there hasn't exactly been an urgent-action TCTO to stop it. On the other hand, flying around with four dozen Mavs strapped to you just screams air-quake. They're pretty much the easiest to use weapon ever. What would be interesting would be something like a load calculator, but we would need (SUBTLE HINT TO ED) the ability to adjust our loadouts on-the-fly from the seat. So that way you could justify carrying 'EZ-mode' munitions like CBU-107s while maintaining a sense of plausibility over it. Like say each pilot gets x pounds of gear that can't exceed y dollars... if I want to slap three mavs on the left wing, that's cool, if it was balanced out with a few dumb bombs on the right side. CBU-107s are wickedly expensive so they'd eat into your weight budget a bit more. Obviously all this should be coordinated with whomever you're flying with, but while it's not exactly realistic to fly around with oodles of Mavs on your wings, it's also not terribly realistic to severely limit your loadouts for the sake of hardcore manliness. Battletech used a system involving values (calculated through witchcraft or something) to determine the 'worth' of a weapon and was used to balance asymmetrical forces on the field.

So you have someone running ATC, or you just talk it out amongst yourselves?

A guy at work did that and found out she was cheating on him. No really, there's an app that lets you cheat on 'Words with Friends'.

All those F/A-18s exploding - should've put them in my sig!

Yeah I've never cared for the fact that it's a really good infantry simulator, an 'okayish' vehicle simulator, and aircraft that might as well be from Ace Combat. I would love to see a battlefield simulator that looks as good as ArmA2 with the infantry aspect of Project Reality ArmA, aircraft of DCS, and vehicles of... uh... well you see what I mean. Need an M1A3 simulator :)

The Mustang was a pet project that they decided to take the extra step to just try to get some cash out of, not really comparable. That said I'm unsure if I'll get Mustang (at least right away)... I still insist it would be better if they made a somewhat fictionalized version of it with some basic avionics and ability to carry a couple of modern weapons (hydra rockets, AIM-9s, maybe the odd JDAM) so it would have its own unique appeal (an EXTREMELY CAS aircraft... :D). As it is yet-another-WW2-aircraft doesn't offer anything that IL2 hasn't offered in 19 previous games... It's also a helicopter, it's Russian, nobody knows what the hell it is, it's damned hard to fly, it precursored DCS: A-10 so it hasn't (up until BS2) aged well, and they both had a military contract, which meant ED wasn't relying on the consumer market to make their money. You seem to have missed the first part of my post up there where I pointed out that there isn't a dedicated anti-air aircraft out there that has a market for a contract, because, if you haven't noticed, pure air/air fighters are going obsolete in every air force. Even the F-22, the replacement for F-15Cs, has a bomb bay. That point was made specifically in conjunction with the reduced appeal of an air/air only fighter, as ED wouldn't have fat wads of taxpayer cash to throw around and have to rely on consumer sales to recoup their costs. I also pointed out that the simplified version of the F-15C we already have in FC2 is 'good enough', because that aircraft simply doesn't need to do very much. All the basics are there, the flight model probably isn't the most accurate, and you have a functioning radar, CMD, RWR system... you even get your moving map and SIT display. What more do you need? What you should be asking yourself is after the FC3 release and compatibility, what demand would there be for the same aircraft a lot of people already own that just has a bit more polish on it?

The opportunities for ground combat are a lot more varied than for air combat. Everything that flies has to contend with other aircraft in an offensive or even defensive role. The reverse is not nearly as true. In an air superiority aircraft, what's happening on the ground below you is meaningless - tanks, BTRs, MANPADs, ZSUs, and maybe even SA-19s would be of significantly reduced consequence. There's a reason fighter aircraft are only equipped with RWR systems - in their typical threat environment, the only things that can reach them are radar-guided missiles fired from BVR, so a MWS is meaningless. In fact, due to the total lack of ground warfare capability, mission designers would have to ensure that a totally defenseless air superiority fighter wouldn't be shoved into situations where it was flying around SA-10 sites... you'd have to go with the old fallback of calling in the finger of god SEAD squadrons which fly through and blow up everything with a radar within 30 miles, and even in the A-10 we all agree that that's just too much. Actually, I disagree, the A-10 is an extremely unique aircraft with a role not even F-15Es can truly match. You're also discounting something else - the A-10 has an immense amount of 'sex appeal'. It's absolutely well-known by everyone, there's all kinds of stories circulating about it, everyone knows about what it does and what it can do. DCS: A-10 has definitely brought a lot of fresh faces in because it's such a flying celebrity. I would guess in terms of public-eye publicity based on how often they are seen, how famous they are, and how unique they are, you'd have the following order of a handful of planes I thought up: 1) F-14 (Top Gun / Final Countdown - the quintessential movie plane) 2) SR-71 (Utterly unmistakable, anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the USAF knows the Blackbird and any number of half-true things about it) 3) A-10 (Again, totally unmistakeable, and just like the SR-71, everyone knows something about it whether its true or not (firing the gun will cause so much recoil the plane will stall, etc.)) 4) F-22 (The Air Force has literally plastered it on everything, it's got lots of stories in the news (mostly for the worse)) 5) AV/8B (It's well-known because of how unique it is, a major air show attention-getter) 6) F-16 (Thunderbirds, been in plenty of movies, countless games and simulators, tons and tons of footage of it out there) 7) F-15 (Lots of footage of both varieties, lots of great facts make it a decently-publicized aircraft though far from being a spotlight whore like the F-16, though I would agree there is a bit of a large gap in knowledge compared to the F-16) 8) F/A-18 (Blue Angels, been in a couple of games, the only non-airshow time I can remember seeing it on TV was in "Behind Enemy Lines"). ... 893) Ka-50 (What?)

Well the problem there is that either you need a motherboard with an absurd number of DIMMs, or you end up buying extremely slow RAM.

Yeah I've noticed AIM-9s are particularly randomly ineffective against helicopters for some reason. I've hit some and there isn't even a bit of smoke, others and the whole tail falls off. I know helicopters are generally a tad bit more durable than aircraft, but I would imagine the expanding-rod warhead would bisect the rotors quite nicely at almost any plane of impact and sever or heavily damage them. I guess Dr. Strangelove has some words of advice on that, but still...