realtrance

Absolutely fantastic video: enjoy!

Wanted to take a moment to wish you all in Russia or parts of the former Soviet Union a very Happy Victory Day! What a long history of epic struggle, and survival! Never to be forgotten.

I had everything but CA installed (modules) and it was about 2.6GB download. EDGE sounds interesting but I hope it will have the terrain variety of the original territory, which is key to me, especially with the combination of fighters and helicopters. I'm sure it will make sense when it releases, though.

Thank you, that is an interesting read.

Yes, DCS is truly a masterpiece, and it keeps getting better! I am a customer for life. Thank You.

Why do fighter aircraft differ? Another factor that has become increasingly important, in a world where economic warfare is slowly superseding military warfare: marketing. Aircraft design now primarily has an eye on which parts of the world can be most surreptitiously destabilized by massive sales of military hardware into regions where competition for resources are most intense. Making aircraft that will sell well into such markets, without breaking the banks of the countries fooled into such acquisitions against their own real interests, is the primary consideration. Marketing your aircraft as "superior" is critical, but so is "cheap to maintain." Maintenance is the real profitability center, so a careful combination of planned obsolescence plus the need for barely manageable and maximally profitable maintenance costs is critical. I'm sure there's thorough economic modeling for optimization along such lines, in corporate industries hooked into massive, decades-long contracts with governments, both for development and service. This has been true of the US military since the 1970s, and no doubt will increasingly become true for the EU, Russia and the Chinese militaries as the global economic war for resources intensifies under the pressures of rapid and radical climate change.

So if someone's watch on the ground catches the sun the wrong way and creates a reflected flash of light, boom, they're dead? This should precipitate a whole new industry of matte-faced Rolexes. <g>

My Work I was just reading about the difficulties and excitement of being a maint eng the other day; thank you for doing such challenging and important work! http://www.shmoop.com/careers/aircraft-mechanic/

Getting bored with DCS I'm one who's known ED stuff since Flanker 1.0, along with FSX and a few other flight sims....... the key to enjoying any of them is really getting your teeth into the detail that is there, and that 99% of the time you don't even notice. The problem with combat sims is that they naturally push you towards being results- and achievement-driven, so that you get caught up in perfecting your turn performance and your kill rate, or whatever. Or you lose sight of the fun of studying and mastering, in full detail (my copy of Pete Bonnani's book on same from years ago is still around, there are others, I'm sure), all the different techniques present in air combat. And you get to the point of maybe mastering a few of them, the challenge is gone, you get bored. So you have to move on, to discovering things outside your usual habits and practices. Perfect something new, that doesn't "matter," and make your own game out of it. Try different ways of getting the Mi-8 through mountainous terrain without ever getting above 50m from the ground. Etc. Silly example, but at one point not long ago I made a game out of really nailing my control of Carenado's SR-22 in FSX, with a specific flight plan around KSEA. My end-game was calling ATC for GA parking upon landing at KSEA, and without turning the Progressive Taxi annotation on, taking the proper, memorized taxiway route back to a specific parking spot at KSEA, and without cheating/changing views, doing a perfect line-up on the parking spot yellow lines and boxes just using what I could see out of the front or side of the plane. There can be a gazillion kind of things like that you can develop real finesse with in any flight and combat sim, and it's up to you to get past your current habits and perhaps superficial mastery of a few things, and to make new goals and techniques the center of your attention. Don't wait on devs to entertain you with new content; make new content out of what is right in front of you. You haven't even begun to really explore, I'll warrant. :)

Ok that made me laugh! That is certainly the case! The F-35 is an unimaginable (to us mortals) engineering miracle, for sure. Even if in some ways it doesn't quite achieve its ambitions (hybrid capability at low cost), it certainly provides a benchmark to think about.

Just one last, hopefully not irritating comment, personal opinion, not truth: wouldn't it have made more sense (hindsight's always 20/20) to have kept F-22 production going, and to have phased in the extremely ambitious multi-service, international capabilities of the F-35? They are, ultimately, complementary aircraft and should have been developed, produced and funded as such, with ongoing F-22 production buffering the risks of the F-35's next-gen ambitions. Armies of quadrotors will render it all obsolete soon enough, though. :) Think of it as distributed dogfighting, like networked distributed computing. The manned aerial battle PCs of today will be left behind by the robotic iPhones of tomorrow, so to speak.

There are days when I think "they" might have been right. :). But I'm certainly no expert, I just think the F-15 is amazing.

Bit I think you are mainly trying to share your joy with R/C, which is a good thing. DCS is a different beast, and has its own, unassailable joys as well. Neither are going to prove to be physics-perfect science across the board, so it's best in both cases to marvel at what's there, and how it can evolve, instead of worrying whether a donkey or a mule is a better four-legged creature. :)

Agreed. There will always be different aspects of simulation that are strengths and weaknesses. However DCS (and ROF) pursue specifics related to being able to model with effective physics granularity the interactions in different flight regimes that give a wide variety of aircraft the distinctiveness in competition with each other needed to have a broad range of interesting and plausible A-A and A-G combat. Which nothing else out there comes anywhere near to providing. The work of these two teams is light-years ahead of anyone else. :)

So that implies the F-35 is probably dead in the water at this point. Not that any of it matters, except as historical interest. ;)

Actually, given technologies already present both in Russia and the US, any further waste of capital on "next-gen" manned fighter jets is mainly a boondoggle to keep the military contracting business (to the tune of $200 billion for development of the F-35, and over $1 trillion for maintenance the first decade of availability, for example) going. It's just a form of corporate welfare. :) Meanwhile, we can enjoy all these beautiful machines in simulation and fantasy, along with the upcoming WWII ones and the MiG-21, in an environment where the waste, politics and utility issues are utterly irrelevant, without having to argue uselessly about their mostly-absent real world merits.

Serial #: 25315 Location: USA

BS2 is absolutely stunning as a simulation, as is already the Mi-8MTV2 Open Beta.