Hadwell

When buying a new videocard, ignore how much memory it has, look at memory SPEED, and GPU SPEED, they gimic you in to buying a card with 4TB of memory(exaggeration), but that memory is useless because the actual SPEED of the card is not enough to make use of it. the next better card to the 770 would be the 970, from there, the 290x, 390x, 980, fury x, and 980ti respectively. I use a 780OC (roughly the same speed as a 970), the 21 runs more than fine with it.

bigger coolers are mostly for peace of mind, they probly won't give you much higher clocks, but they will keep your cpu cooler and/or are quieter. I use a corsair H80, very nice cooler, fits in my antec 900 no problem.

The problem I always had with the clipped is their fuel mix settings, in dcs it's a lot of low flying, even in high altitude planes like the 51/109/190, they keep it pretty low, so I don't think it should be a problem, but I didn't really like flying spits all that much in 1946 cause I had to choose a low alt or high alt variant... LF or HF kinda thing...

Well, my opinion is... yeah, the X55 isn't the best quality in the world, but I've used both the warthog and the x55 now, and i'd feel like someone cut off a limb if i had to use a hotas with less buttons than the x55 now... function over form... it really comes down to 2 things when you compare the warthog to the x55... price, and functionality, since it's already apparent the warthog is built better. the x55 is a lot cheaper, and you get more, functionally, than you do with the warthog. the warthog is expensive, has way less buttons, less rotaries, you can just do less with it, but it is built like a tank...

It requires no theme song, it's mere presence is enough, and any prejudices people have against certain genres of music just subtract from the awesomeness that is the F-14...

Yeah I have a universal profile for the x55, all planes have the same general systems, so I put all like buttons next to each other, once your gear and flaps are up, all but the a10c and ka50 can be controlled with thumbs alone and no modifiers, I designed it so I only needed to learn one set of controls to fly everything I can post them if you really want

epic dogfight, most fun fight I've had in a long time.

FINALLY killed an f-15 with a grom...

Crazy manuver to dodge that R-3R and seriously didn't see me there? pay attention to the sound, when I throttle back and when I use airbrakes.

The gyro is used for unguided rockets and the gun, the asp is supposed to use the radar for range finding apparently but that function doesn't seem to be working so you need to manually set the range and wingspan to use the pipper to shoot, more convinient to use the fixed net X and just lead the target like in the 109

it is a normal keyboard, just upside down....

my 2nd one of these, their fun to make. hope you enjoy it as much as I.

I don't really advise using airbrakes unless you're behind or above someone.... like... you're going 1200kph, 5km behind some guy going 800kph... you gotta slow down somehow... if you merge, fly underneath, slam on the airbrakes, because the plane turns better at 800 kph than 1100kph and do an immelman turn in behind the guy, pop him before he gets outta missile range...

Try the batumi race track on the Virtual aerobatics server, try to get around 125-140 seconds on it, if you can figure out how to use the throttle and some interesting half barrel roll style turns(high yo-yo) to accomplish this, then you can use the same techniques to get behind enemy fighters quicker.... other than that... as i've said before.... do the single player target practice missions easy and medium at least.... over and over with different weapon loadouts till you can't beat your own time for downing all the targets with each loadout... and then go on 104th and die lots.... well anyway that's how I did it... 3 months of saying " I !!!WILL!!! get a fighter kill" and not getting one... before that fateful day lol... you need to build up your mental map of where enemy fighters are, and where valleys and major mountains are, and things like that... no real way to do that without actually getting out there and doing it, and you can't do that fighting against AI, that have nowhere near the play style of human beings. when it comes to using AI to train for servers like the 104th... they make good drones for target practice, but other than that, most of the time, a human will do something different.

Here's 8 more... (might still be processing)

http://navyflightmanuals.tpub.com/P-1222/index.htm the airspeeds and AOA it suggests are for a different plane, but everything else is pretty sound, if you actually read it and not just look at the pretty pictures...

On the second fight i manage to get him locked up in beam mode, it works! some good (or at least fun) fights

more like... if you're in an F-15, then any other fighter is an enemy, and if you're in any russian fighter, then only the F-15 is an enemy.

I know a couple people that'll let me be bad at being a RIO, but I'm a fairly quick learner, it would be nice to have people that already know what their doing to help us newbies out. I hope there's a way to be a RIO in single player to practice...

I've got a keyboard layout that has all the keys you need for combat in just A-Z and 1 to - it took me all of 10 minutes to assign the keys, while retaining rearming and chat and keys like those some people are so lazy... no modifiers at all, when i have the keyboard layout picture done i'll post it in the mig-21 forums, here it is so far... just to give you an idea... blue is gear, flaps, autopilot and trim and airbrakes, green is ir/sarh select, yellow is rato jettison/flare release, red is the 3 main radar controls (lock, iff, and continuous) purple is the rest of the important radar controls, pink is chute, gold is airshow smoke (i play on the va server a lot) and dark blue is obvious... it's not finished yet, there's more controls i have mapped... again, without using ctrl, alt, or shift...

As i was saying, if you use autostart, or clickable cockpit functionality for all the startup stuff, and stuff you'll rarely, if ever use in combat, the keyboard has more than enough buttons for everything you'll need once your airborne, without modifiers(shift,ctrl,alt)... assuming your joystick has a hat switch and a half a dozen buttons, and then, how is that bad?

well the problem with mouse click is... in real life, you don't need to look down to flip a switch, you don't need to drag the switches (left mouse button) around a mousepad in order to select a function for that switch, see... mouse click is a lot more unrealistic than hotas, even in a plane like the mig-21... but for switches that you never touch while you're flying, it's fine, don't even need them mapped... just map a key to auto start, it saves a lot of frustration, from having to restart the thing again when you die. once you've manually started the mig-21 a few thousand times it does get repetitive... and if you're going to go so far as to cheat what would be 3 physical actions into 1, you might as well go all the way and just make all the switches for startup into 1... like for me, it's bad enough that all my radar controls are so close together and on my hotas when their in a pretty unergonomical place in the actual pit... mouse click is too slow, and takes an unrealistic amount of attention, hotas is too fast, all the buttons are too close together... hotas is more realistic that way, since mouse click isn't just slow, but requires more attention than in the real plane. and keep in mind... "more realistic" "realistic" and "real" are different things...